I'm reading Freud again for the first time since my undergraduate career--Studies in Hysteria. I'm always interested in cutting back to Freud's own work, as opposed to some of the more strained interpretive leaps his followers have made. Freud tends to get a lot of flack from critics because he was wrong about so many things, and, more often, ( Read more... )

Suddenly, in the middle of Powells, weighted down by the books in my basket, everything re-aligned itself and I was left to marvel at how much stress can make you forget yourself. Most the reading I'd been doing in the previous months, since the upheaval and uprooting and reschooling, had served the absolutely linked functions of survival and ( Read more... )

Of the 360 warm/hot days of the Texan year, I picked the nastiest, wettest, coldest one to get locked out of my house. It wasn't even my fault; my key didn't work in the back door lock, which I didn't know, since I never really use the back door. But now that the doggerson is back there, I managed at 10 AM to get myself stuck outside with no cell ( Read more... )

...is that I now have a playlist entitled "Anthems" on my iTunes.

As much as I complained about it at the time, I'm currently really missing Kaiser Permanente's habit of passing out anti-anxiety meds like so much candy. Easy-to-get klonapin sounds like it'd hit the spot right about now.

I will say, I feel absolved of all the vague guilt I've ever felt about my previous forays into mental unhealth. At Reed my ( Read more... )

When I was very small, I used to love to look at my father's tattoos. They were the grubby blue of a bic pen, a record of time spent in a California jailhouse for crimes never specified. Dad himself had been drunk, and the very large man who insisted upon tattooing him had also been very drunk, and so a number of the tattoos were illegible ( Read more... )

1. Move is slowly coming together. Cats need health certificates, and I'm slowly trying to acclimate Jack to the car (he's terrified of it and yowls frantically every time it starts moving. Meanwhile, Bodhi's just like "Hey this is cool, but can I have a phone book to sit on? I can't see out the windows.") 
( Read more... )

The two women that live to the left of me are sisters. The house they live in is the house they were born in. They are middle-aged, one fat and one bone-thin with a long grey braid down her back. The thin one with the braid works every day. She drives a pick-up truck and exudes that brusque competency that middle-aged pickup-diving women tend to. ( Read more... )

People in my family don't talk about my Uncle Donnie. He was the youngest of all Grandpa's brothers. He served in Vietnam. Then he came back, possibly shot a bunch of people (the story is fuzzy here), and killed himself in his garage (the story is decidedly less fuzzy on this point). My dad was about six.

When I was younger, the only way my dad ( Read more... )