Three and a half things.
It is not a good morning.
I got an email from my mom at 3.08am. The notification sound on my phone pierced my consciousness and woke me up. Before my brain caught up and figured out what the sound was, I already had the phone in my hand and the email coming up. The anger was really quick to rise, but I forced it aside so that I could go back to sleep.
With that in mind, my dreams were... sad. I was at what looked like a very large arcade. It was filled with content cats corralled into little rectangular pens. The cats could've easily escaped, now that I think about it, but they all seemed very happy to just laze where they were, to be on display and petted by whoever happened by. A huge majority of them, at least in the section I was in, looked like Phantom and, more importantly, felt like Phantom, in that short-hair/long-hair hybrid way. They all seemed like fine cats, big and furry like my baby, but their markings were all just a little off, which made me start to doubt that I even really remembered what Phantom looked like. I couldn't picture him clearly. I was obviously shopping for a replacement Phantom as if I believed I could actually find him there, alive and well. I was heartbroken when I realized he just wouldn't be there. When I woke up, I swore I saw him as I was getting ready for work, out of the corner of my eye as always, but it was just the clothes in a laundry basket, a white tee shirt smashed up against black pants. It happens a lot, even now. It hurts every time, and I feel like an idiot for having that little part inside of me which actually thinks he's there, which expects to see him when I look over. This time last year was the worst of his sickness. I just really miss him.
Then NPR played a piece on Facebook in which the guy talking, someone presumably intelligent and college educated, was talking about internet privacy like a moron, as if picking the appropriate radio button and clicking 'Save Changes' were the most arcane process in the entire fucking world. It really, really pisses me off when people bitch about privacy on the internet. If you don't want it out there, don't put it out there. If you don't want the general public to see it, set your preferences so that they don't. It's not difficult. Don't blame this website or that for allowing other people access to information you put on a website made specifically for sharing information. You have control. Exercise it for fuck's sake! (Yes, I do realize there are some complexities and nuances, a few issues about browsing preferences, targeted marketing and user expectations, but that wasn't what they were talking about. It was the same moronic crap I see all the time, people bitching about how the privacy controls are 'too complex' in an attempt to pass the blame for their own choices off onto someone else. I don't need any website to police my actions for me. I find the prospect of passing on the responsibility of my net identity to, oh, anyone who isn't me fairly fucking scary, but that sounds like what people want. Just... why?) And, for what it's worth, it ticks me off twice as much to hear this sort of negative meme--don't you remember the 'paste this generic bitching in protest to FB's changes to their privacy settings to your status to prove that you didn't actually read up on them and figure out how to point and click' bullshit?--being spewed by a presumably educated individual on a program meant to help educate us on actual issues. At least if some twat were griping like that on an internet forum, I could've posted a reply pointing out how easy it is to fix his perceived problem and thus educate others who were reading that crap.
So, maybe now, while I'm both heartbroken over the Phantom dream and pissed off about internet privacy crap, is not the best time to be thinking about how to address this mess with mom, but it's almost all I can think about. It started a couple weeks ago when I'd sent her an email which said, essentially, that I love her and miss her and that I'm sorry for how everything came out on Thanksgiving. She replied a few days later telling me that she loves me, but asking what I want from her. So, I offered an honest and fairly fucking diplomatic reply, explaining that I want love and respect, maybe a good whap upside the head every now and then, and that I think she, Eric and I need to talk... possibly in a family therapy setting. It's been, again, a few days. Almost a week, actually.
Her reply states plainly that she expects an apology from me and will not be giving one in return. She says that calling her selfish couldn't be farther from the truth. She also says, "I am finally going to my sister's for Christmas eve. Something you and Eric are too good to do."
What..? Maybe I shouldn't be latching onto such an insignificant detail as that quoted bit above, but that part really demonstrates just how fucking detached from reality she is. The reason we haven't been going to her sisters' for the past few years? She had a stick up her ass about them not coming to visit her years back. Remember my singular attempt to host the holiday? It was the Christmas immediately thereafter, and she spent the entire time bitching about them. The entire time. Well, except for the few times she was complaining about her allergies because of Phantom's shedding and our real tree. That's why I haven't tried to host again. She was a fucking miserable cunt the entire day, and I decided it just wasn't worth the effort. She chose not to go down. We supported her in her decision. And now that she feels abandoned by us, she's decided to blame us for her decisions? Uhm... no. I can't abide by that.
I want so desperately to correct her on that. And a lot of other shit she's got wrong over the years, her memory selectively altering and omitting things she doesn't want to deal with. All the shit I've been holding back and letting slide for so long. You'd think I'd know better. I have no problem calling other people on their bullshit, but I've let mom get away with it for a long time, and this is the end result. I know I shouldn't take the blame for her behavior, but I can surely claim some responsibility given my own inaction.
I'm not sure how polite I can be from this point out. I'm not sure my inner diplomat is feeling very diplomatic anymore. I'm in razing mode. I want to clear cut this shit and watch it burn. The Tower has always been my card, hasn't it? It's not enough to destroy, though. Need to also clean. If I do go into this with the intention of wrecking shit, I need to also be prepared to pick up the pieces afterward. My natural inclination is to walk away.
I don't like this. I don't like wanting to wield honesty like so wicked a weapon, particularly against someone I genuinely love. I don't like having two options which I could easily define as 'right' and being made to choose between them. I don't like seeing so little compromise where I can express both humility and honesty. I don't at all like the idea of holding my tongue for the sake of keeping a fairly fucking nonexistent peace, for fear of cutting what tenuous threads still hold us together. I've always been of the mind that sometimes you have to break shit, sweep up and start again. I'm sure some of you have noticed that this is, in fact, how I've lived much of my life. That method's far more in step with my personal philosophy. That doesn't make it better. That doesn't mean it's more right, despite how it feeds into my self-righteousness.
I offered my olive branch. She's refused it, told me it wasn't big enough. Do I give her the whole fucking tree or start flashing my sword? Makes me want to watch Hero again.
"In the first state, man and sword become one and each other. Here, even a blade of grass can be used as a lethal weapon. In the next stage, the sword resides not in the hand but in the heart. Even without a weapon, the warrior can slay his enemy from a hundred paces. But the ultimate ideal is when the sword disappears altogether. The warrior embraces all around him. The desire to kill no longer exists. Only peace remains."
Getting to that third state is hard. I don't feel anywhere near it today. I am full of righteous rage, ready to ruin someone precious over some disparity in perception, over some truths which are too subjective to fit the concept thereof. It's more honesty than truth. I think there's an important distinction. Truth should be nearer to objectivity. Honesty's about being true to yourself, to what you know and believe. It's something I struggled with a lot years ago, when I was first reprogramming my head. Plenty of what I said to myself was true enough, but very little of it was actually honest. I feel like I'm on the other side of that now. I can be perfectly honest about how things look from my side, but that doesn't make any of it true. It doesn't take her perspective into consideration. Clearly, I don't at all understand where she's coming from anymore. Does that make her wrong?
Fuck. I just can't get this shit right in my head. There's so much of it and so very many ways to look at all of it. I just don't know what to do with it all. I don't know where I want to go from here or what I'm willing to sacrifice to get there.
In the end, it leaves me feeling a bit like Scrooge, thinking about the past, present and future. Add to that the fact that I've opted out of the official holiday this year and, yeah... it's really fitting. Looks like we'll be cooking brunch for Eric and Carrie on Sunday, which makes me happy, but I just don't think I can muster the energy to socialize with people I hardly know (awesome though they may be) and participate in other people's rituals when mine just aren't possible this year, when I'm catching up with Eric on the mourning.
On the bright side, my husband knows me wonderfully well and sent me this. Whether he meant, intentionally, to cheer me up or not, it surely helped. He's fairly fucking awesome.
So, Merry Christmas and all that. And a bah humbug to you.
I got an email from my mom at 3.08am. The notification sound on my phone pierced my consciousness and woke me up. Before my brain caught up and figured out what the sound was, I already had the phone in my hand and the email coming up. The anger was really quick to rise, but I forced it aside so that I could go back to sleep.
With that in mind, my dreams were... sad. I was at what looked like a very large arcade. It was filled with content cats corralled into little rectangular pens. The cats could've easily escaped, now that I think about it, but they all seemed very happy to just laze where they were, to be on display and petted by whoever happened by. A huge majority of them, at least in the section I was in, looked like Phantom and, more importantly, felt like Phantom, in that short-hair/long-hair hybrid way. They all seemed like fine cats, big and furry like my baby, but their markings were all just a little off, which made me start to doubt that I even really remembered what Phantom looked like. I couldn't picture him clearly. I was obviously shopping for a replacement Phantom as if I believed I could actually find him there, alive and well. I was heartbroken when I realized he just wouldn't be there. When I woke up, I swore I saw him as I was getting ready for work, out of the corner of my eye as always, but it was just the clothes in a laundry basket, a white tee shirt smashed up against black pants. It happens a lot, even now. It hurts every time, and I feel like an idiot for having that little part inside of me which actually thinks he's there, which expects to see him when I look over. This time last year was the worst of his sickness. I just really miss him.
Then NPR played a piece on Facebook in which the guy talking, someone presumably intelligent and college educated, was talking about internet privacy like a moron, as if picking the appropriate radio button and clicking 'Save Changes' were the most arcane process in the entire fucking world. It really, really pisses me off when people bitch about privacy on the internet. If you don't want it out there, don't put it out there. If you don't want the general public to see it, set your preferences so that they don't. It's not difficult. Don't blame this website or that for allowing other people access to information you put on a website made specifically for sharing information. You have control. Exercise it for fuck's sake! (Yes, I do realize there are some complexities and nuances, a few issues about browsing preferences, targeted marketing and user expectations, but that wasn't what they were talking about. It was the same moronic crap I see all the time, people bitching about how the privacy controls are 'too complex' in an attempt to pass the blame for their own choices off onto someone else. I don't need any website to police my actions for me. I find the prospect of passing on the responsibility of my net identity to, oh, anyone who isn't me fairly fucking scary, but that sounds like what people want. Just... why?) And, for what it's worth, it ticks me off twice as much to hear this sort of negative meme--don't you remember the 'paste this generic bitching in protest to FB's changes to their privacy settings to your status to prove that you didn't actually read up on them and figure out how to point and click' bullshit?--being spewed by a presumably educated individual on a program meant to help educate us on actual issues. At least if some twat were griping like that on an internet forum, I could've posted a reply pointing out how easy it is to fix his perceived problem and thus educate others who were reading that crap.
So, maybe now, while I'm both heartbroken over the Phantom dream and pissed off about internet privacy crap, is not the best time to be thinking about how to address this mess with mom, but it's almost all I can think about. It started a couple weeks ago when I'd sent her an email which said, essentially, that I love her and miss her and that I'm sorry for how everything came out on Thanksgiving. She replied a few days later telling me that she loves me, but asking what I want from her. So, I offered an honest and fairly fucking diplomatic reply, explaining that I want love and respect, maybe a good whap upside the head every now and then, and that I think she, Eric and I need to talk... possibly in a family therapy setting. It's been, again, a few days. Almost a week, actually.
Her reply states plainly that she expects an apology from me and will not be giving one in return. She says that calling her selfish couldn't be farther from the truth. She also says, "I am finally going to my sister's for Christmas eve. Something you and Eric are too good to do."
What..? Maybe I shouldn't be latching onto such an insignificant detail as that quoted bit above, but that part really demonstrates just how fucking detached from reality she is. The reason we haven't been going to her sisters' for the past few years? She had a stick up her ass about them not coming to visit her years back. Remember my singular attempt to host the holiday? It was the Christmas immediately thereafter, and she spent the entire time bitching about them. The entire time. Well, except for the few times she was complaining about her allergies because of Phantom's shedding and our real tree. That's why I haven't tried to host again. She was a fucking miserable cunt the entire day, and I decided it just wasn't worth the effort. She chose not to go down. We supported her in her decision. And now that she feels abandoned by us, she's decided to blame us for her decisions? Uhm... no. I can't abide by that.
I want so desperately to correct her on that. And a lot of other shit she's got wrong over the years, her memory selectively altering and omitting things she doesn't want to deal with. All the shit I've been holding back and letting slide for so long. You'd think I'd know better. I have no problem calling other people on their bullshit, but I've let mom get away with it for a long time, and this is the end result. I know I shouldn't take the blame for her behavior, but I can surely claim some responsibility given my own inaction.
I'm not sure how polite I can be from this point out. I'm not sure my inner diplomat is feeling very diplomatic anymore. I'm in razing mode. I want to clear cut this shit and watch it burn. The Tower has always been my card, hasn't it? It's not enough to destroy, though. Need to also clean. If I do go into this with the intention of wrecking shit, I need to also be prepared to pick up the pieces afterward. My natural inclination is to walk away.
I don't like this. I don't like wanting to wield honesty like so wicked a weapon, particularly against someone I genuinely love. I don't like having two options which I could easily define as 'right' and being made to choose between them. I don't like seeing so little compromise where I can express both humility and honesty. I don't at all like the idea of holding my tongue for the sake of keeping a fairly fucking nonexistent peace, for fear of cutting what tenuous threads still hold us together. I've always been of the mind that sometimes you have to break shit, sweep up and start again. I'm sure some of you have noticed that this is, in fact, how I've lived much of my life. That method's far more in step with my personal philosophy. That doesn't make it better. That doesn't mean it's more right, despite how it feeds into my self-righteousness.
I offered my olive branch. She's refused it, told me it wasn't big enough. Do I give her the whole fucking tree or start flashing my sword? Makes me want to watch Hero again.
"In the first state, man and sword become one and each other. Here, even a blade of grass can be used as a lethal weapon. In the next stage, the sword resides not in the hand but in the heart. Even without a weapon, the warrior can slay his enemy from a hundred paces. But the ultimate ideal is when the sword disappears altogether. The warrior embraces all around him. The desire to kill no longer exists. Only peace remains."
Getting to that third state is hard. I don't feel anywhere near it today. I am full of righteous rage, ready to ruin someone precious over some disparity in perception, over some truths which are too subjective to fit the concept thereof. It's more honesty than truth. I think there's an important distinction. Truth should be nearer to objectivity. Honesty's about being true to yourself, to what you know and believe. It's something I struggled with a lot years ago, when I was first reprogramming my head. Plenty of what I said to myself was true enough, but very little of it was actually honest. I feel like I'm on the other side of that now. I can be perfectly honest about how things look from my side, but that doesn't make any of it true. It doesn't take her perspective into consideration. Clearly, I don't at all understand where she's coming from anymore. Does that make her wrong?
Fuck. I just can't get this shit right in my head. There's so much of it and so very many ways to look at all of it. I just don't know what to do with it all. I don't know where I want to go from here or what I'm willing to sacrifice to get there.
In the end, it leaves me feeling a bit like Scrooge, thinking about the past, present and future. Add to that the fact that I've opted out of the official holiday this year and, yeah... it's really fitting. Looks like we'll be cooking brunch for Eric and Carrie on Sunday, which makes me happy, but I just don't think I can muster the energy to socialize with people I hardly know (awesome though they may be) and participate in other people's rituals when mine just aren't possible this year, when I'm catching up with Eric on the mourning.
On the bright side, my husband knows me wonderfully well and sent me this. Whether he meant, intentionally, to cheer me up or not, it surely helped. He's fairly fucking awesome.
So, Merry Christmas and all that. And a bah humbug to you.