The Lisa Chronicles – Page 6 – A Most Unreliable Narrator

Le mie passioni, parte I: European dream

(Le Mie passioni, Italian translation of “my passions,” is a an occasional series of things I really, really love.)

I have been working on the Conversations about Mother cycle these past few weeks, only to find that I am emotionally drowning. The entries are all over the place, heavily bloated and I’m finding it difficult to make cuts and edits where there should desperately be cuts and edits.
I should have made an outline. The whole purpose of this exercise is to get rid of the pent up energy that prevails about my family, it is a “them vs me” moment, and yet this time the “them” is the words themselves. In addition, someone very important to me stepped back into my life after some time which pushed my heart beyond capacity. But that is another story for another time. Many of you may already know that I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder in 2003-4ish.¹ One of the techniques for managing BPD is Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, and one of my favorite DBT tricks, as it were, is self-soothing. The idea is to create an environment, a safe haven, of things that feel, taste, smell and are visually pleasing to me. I’ve decided to step that up a notch and create a visceral list of things that soothe me. To remember, to remind, to help whenever I feel like I’m in crisis. Additionally, I decided that it may be time to infuse a little frivolity into my writing and this blog, to take the pressure off the Conversations about Mother cycle and the heavier stuff. I’m not writing because I’m mopey about the cycle and when I’m mopey about a cycle, I’d rather discover 15 new ways to reinvent the wheel then write. I also realized, after wandering around the blogosphere as of late, that sometimes the very best writing comes when we’re not taking ourselves so seriously. And if there is anything I have learned about myself in these last few years, sometimes the stick is wedged up my arse a tad too snugly.
Forthcoming is a list of things that are capturing my heart at the moment, one per blog entry to keep it on the lighter side. In no particular order, things that I’m passionate about as of late:

Castello Nel Borgo, Terni, Umbria, Italy

castellonelborgo — Castello Nel Borgo, Terni, Umbria, Italy

.EU Vacation Home
If you’ve been paying attention (and I know you have), the headers that rotate throughout my site are all images taken by me from trips across the pond. Paris, Rome, Edinburgh to name a few cities, I’ve been to eight countries in the .uk and .eu since 2004, with TheHusband and I planning on visiting more in the future. While TheHusband and I do not typically agree on a lot of things (music, books, film), we do agree on lifestyle choices. We’re both desperate to shed our American lifestyles and head across the pond, permanently. Our goal is to accelerate payments on Throbbing Manor (payoff in under 15 years), fast pass student loans (payments currently set so the final payment is to be made in 2021) and continue to save money in our villa fund. The ultimate goal, if all goes to plan, is within a decade we’ll BOTH be debt free and have a good chunk to put towards our vacation/European home.
But where to move to? My desires to live in various places is always dependent on the moment: When watching Doc Martin, I was desperate to move to Cornwall and open up a B&B. Then I’m reading P.G. Wodehouse and M.C. Beaton and I want to be in the Cotswolds, in a thatched little cottage while creating merriment and havoc around the countryside, while hilarity ensues. Again, while running a B&B or a used bookshop. Or I want to be in the Highlands, own a sheep farm while spinning my own wool. I’ve got dreams! TheHusband is much simpler, he just wants land, fruit trees, and a bubbling brook. In seriousness, we’re looking at places in Italy for our future dream/vacation home. Why? We love the culture, the food and the people. Italy is essentially the Detroit of Europe, therefore real estate is cheap. We’ve been to the south (me in Rome) and the north (TheHusband in Milan and Florence).
It’s fairly centrally located to most of mainland Europe. I have a huge art history boner for Baroque, specifically Caravaggio and want to see all of his works in person, at least once. Italian is a romance language and my sketchy French would help me tremendously to learn it, and it would be wise for me to have another language proficiently under my belt before we moved. While I could be happy just about anywhere across the pond, and so thus would the TheHusband, right now Italy calls to our soul. After we settled on Throbbing Manor, we started looking at Italian real estate. Right now, it’s Umbria. Other days, it’s Abruzzo. Who knows where the wind (or in this case, the olive oil) may take us?
1. Part of the hiccup with writing the Conversations about Mother cycle is that I need to delve into BPD and discuss it. It’s one of the most misunderstood mental illnesses and I should be bringing a voice to it – problem is, sometimes my heart breaks and I just do not feel strong enough to do it. But I have to and, I will.

Morris Street Project: May 14, 2011

Morris Street Project, Week 9
Nothing earth shattering to report in the world of our gardens this week other than everything is blooming within an inch of its life after the recent rains, including all the fucking ivy and creepers that keep coming back though I seem to spend a gazillion hours pulling, chopping and murdering anyway I can. We’ve also planted some of the vegetables and began plotting what to do with the rest of our lot as either the former owners or the flippers laid out and landscaped the plot to an inch of its life but did not do any upkeep in the interim until we bought it. This means that various ivys, nettles and creepers have taken over controlled areas and we may end up tilling most of our front and back yards back to soil and starting anew for next year. TheHusband grumbles that our city lot is much harder to tame then if we had bought the damned 22 acres in Ada with the bubbling brook simply because we could have just let everything gone wild. His consolation is that our dream of buying a ruin villa in Italy for our vacation home means that he can get his goddamned bubbling brook with olive trees aplenty. That is until we both see something of a modern condo layout in which, all plans are pulled from the table on the goddamned bubbling brook.
But I digress. In other news, the excavation company has not been working on our street all week, so what you see below has not changed since the image was taken. The talks from the crew that our street will be “finished” by the end of June seems to be a lot further away then they make it seem. I’d just like to point out that since we moved here in January, there has not been a week a port-a-potty has not been installed somewhere on our block. I’d like to think that with this being a historical neighborhood, that is not necessarily “period.”
Morris Street view.
Throbbing Manor view.
Drainage ditch across the street from our house.

Morris Street Project: May 7, 2011

Morris Street Project, Week 8
At first I was going to comment that I wish I had some torrid or interesting tale to tell to accompany this entry when I realised that I already forgotten about Conversations With My Mother (part i), which events occurred over the weekend. Forgotten is probably not a good word, “choosing to ignore” is probably better.
Mother’s Day weekend was almost too beastly hot in addition to the blinding sun which meant TheHusband and I spent most of the weekend in the gardens. I shot loads of images from around the gardens, which are far more interesting then the same street view and Throbbing Manor view I’ve been shooting almost religiously with my iPad2, but I still need to process them and I’m feeling lazy.
The images taken below have a washed out look to them, which I attribute to too much sunlight and I was not able to really color correct. I kind of dig the washed out look, so I’m okay with that. This weekend is such a contrast to last (blindingly sunny and hot, droopy with rain and cold) that the images taken from today (May 14) are looking much more lush.
I have been uploading all the images to a Flickr set and the transformation of our street is much more remarkable when you run it through a slideshow rather than the weekly installments I’ve been dishing out.
Street view.
Throbbing Manor view.
Ciao,x0x0x

To Read: Discworld Project

When TheEx and I split in the spring of 2008, I moved in with the family for a few months until I could save up a bit more cash before I moved to Detroit to finish my MLIS. This arrangement meant all my worldly goods were stored in their basement instead of having to hire a storage locker in the city, with the idea that I would be saving money in the long run for the move.
The winter of 2008-09 was particularly bad. When packing up my things to move to Detroit in January 2009, we discovered that out of close to 50 odd boxes of books (and some household items) that were stored in the basement, roughly 15-20 boxes were destroyed by water damage and flooding from all the goddamned snow. You see, one thing neither my ‘rents nor I figured into this storage plan was while their basement was not a Michigan basement, it suffered from severe leak problems which they never knew about since the winters were not as ferocious the first few years they owned the home.
With that being said, neither their insurance nor mine would cover the loss as the flooding of the basement was not due to burst water mains, hot water heater, or an act of god. The flooding was due to poor sealing of the basement foundation coupled with the house built at the end of a low hill. I.e.: Sorry, but you’re out of fucking luck.
I lost thousands of dollars in books and irreplaceable paper items such as letters, photos and journals.
It makes people cringe when I talk about the loss and my own heart aches when I think about it. Thankfully, with the help of my mother, I was able to catalog the damaged books and paper goods and have a decent idea of what books I’m now missing. Many, if not most, I will not replace as they are either out of print, given and inscribed as gifts or I no longer have any interest in the subject matter.
The exception to this rule is that I lost a good chunk of my Terry Pratchett collection, which I started collecting in the late ’90s and early ’00s. I was introduced to Pratchett by numerous people and became a huge fan (though to be fair, I started in the middle of the series at the time and didn’t care for it, so it took a bit more convincing to get me to start the continue on reading). Like the pedantic that I am, I eventually started at the beginning of the series, The Color of Magic, and pushed on. At some point, I caught up with the series and switched from buying paperbacks to hardcover (hc) books. Pratchett is one of the few authors that as soon as a book is announced for pre-order, I’m on that like white on rice.
A number of friends of mine who live across the pond, upon hearing about my Pratchett loss, asked me to compile a list of the destroyed books to help with replacement. While I did start purchasing Pratchett’s books in hardcover instead of paperback sometime in the mid-00s (when I caught up with the series), I’m not picky in which form I find the book (though I would prefer getting the British cover over the American one). Ultimately, I just want to get my collection close to completion again.
I compiled a list of Discworld books I DO have over at LibraryThing, which also includes materials about Pratchett and not necessairly by him. If anyone is able to help me out, that would be fantastic. I know a lot of Pratchett fans tend to have multiple copies of his work (differing covers, editions, etc) and if anyone has any extras they would like to donate to complete my Pratchett library collection again, that would be fantastic. Comment here or email me if we can work something out.
Destroyed:
The Color of Magic
The Light Fantastic
Mort
Sorcery
Wyrd Sisters
Guards! Guards!
Eric
Moving Pictures
Reaper Man
The Fifth Elephant
The Last Hero
The Wee Free Men
Hat Full of Sky (hc)
Thud! (hc)
Wintersmith (hc)
Missing:
(Books I’ve been unable to obtain in the .us or were unable to find easily)
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead
Johnny and the Bomb
The Bromeliad Trilogy: TRUCKERS
The Bromeliad Trilogy: DIGGERS
The Bromeliad Trilogy: WINGS
Where’s My Cow?
The Discworld Graphic Novel

Conversations About Mother (part i)

My brother and I are not on cordial enough speaking terms to the effect that we do not meet up, speak/text or are even Facebook BFFs. Our only connection is in regards to our mother, and even then contact is either brief moments filled with monosyllabic conversations or heated arguments that result in a lot of shameless threats thrown from both sides.
TheHusband, who finds my brother to be a gigantic asshole and refuses to allow him to step foot into our home until my brother apologizes for several unsavory things he’s said to me, did agree that any kind of “family” gathering should be done in a neutral location to keep the drama to low murmur. This is done to appease mother who continually harps and makes noises on “Why can’t you all just be civil to one another?” whenever my brother and I begin to bicker. Mother, however, seemingly and innocently forgets that much of my brother’s and I intolerance of each other has been started by her in some way and additionally while complaining about our sibling behavior, chooses to ignore the fact that she’s not spoken to half of her own brethren (she is the eldest of seven) in nearly five years for various infractions only known to her (and of which she can never explain when asked). Regardless of historical nods, my frustration levels skyrocket whenever a tentative olive branch is swung out to greet him, my brother will consistently denounce any kind of gathering, neutral or otherwise and effectively cock blocks any kind of civility I attempt to share when planning “family time,” regardless of how desperate my mother is to have it.
Therefore to save my sanity and have less dealings with my brother, family celebrations are now split in half for mother, who spends half her time with me and the remaining with my brother.
It is no surprise for this past Mother’s Day, I told mother that she should make plans with my brother first and then we would do our plans around those plans with my brother were made concrete. A day or two later, she tells me that she and my brother were having a mid-day meal at the retirement villa and that after, she’d like to come to our place to hang out while TheHusband and I gardened, followed by meal and game playing (Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit). Because it was her day, I also told her to pick the meal which to her meant giving me the breakdown of a four course (but very simple) meal, which TheHusband and I shopped and prepped for the day before. As mother no longer drives due to neuropathy in her feet caused by diabetes, additional timing is taken into consideration when scheduling events with her. I made it very clear to her that due to my work schedule the following day, it would need to be an early night and that since dinner would take about 1.5 to 2 hours from prep time to table, we would like to eat in the later afternoon with her tucked up back home at a fairly reasonable hour. She agreed.
With surface history of the dealings with my brother mentioned, I was not surprised upon receiving a call from my mother an hour before I was to pick her telling me that my brother could not make it to the mid-day meal (of course) and that instead, he was picking her up in the mid-afternoon to go to a party that was being held in his honor (his birthday was last week). With no thought to our feelings, plans, or prep for the meal she informs me that she’s going to this party. I asked her to call me if she was going to be arriving later then 5pm so we could plan accordingly. She in fact didn’t call until 6pm and was terribly surprised to find out that no, I was not picking her up and no, we were not having dinner as planned and in short, no, we’re not celebrating Mother’s Day with her. I made mention to dropping off some items of hers at her house the following day and hung up.
The following day, I kept to my promise and dropped some goods off at her apartment that I had ordered for mother from Amazon. Mother looked emotionally beaten and was clearly visibly upset. While I sat ramrod straight in a chair, pissed at how rude she behaved the day before, she proceeds to tell me with fat tears running down her cheeks that my brother spent the most of their time together the day before berating her for her behavior. Why was she not fast enough with her cane? Why is she so slow? Why is she not doing a million things at once like she used to do? My brother then apparently bragged that the people who were throwing him the party considered him as a second son (their own son died in a car accident in October 2010 and he and my brother were quite close) and that he wanted to be adopted by them. My brother is 32. On Mother’s Day, my brother used his time with her to talk about her failings, her missed actions and how horrible she was as a mother and did absolutely nothing else.
I struggled with two things that day: One how best to approach mother diplomatically in regards to her own fairly atrocious behavior and secondly, to not get caught up in the mother/brother drama that has pervaded me for nearly my entire life. I succeeded in the first but failed in the second.
This is a gloss over the day to day workings of my immediate family, which accounts for the partial disjointedness of the writing when attempting to explain in the shortest amount of time possible a second in a dysfunction that has been ongoing for decades. Much like that day when I sat ramrod straight in the chair, upset and angry for her behavior towards me, I could feel the undertow pull of her laying down the guilt no matter how much I fought against it. The unspoken listing of her wants and needs, rejecting the possibility that she’s ever done anything wrong is strong. How dare I criticize her when clearly my brother offended her the most with his behavior? Obviously, she should not want to live if we both think she’s the most horrible mother in the world!
I realised then I had two options: Instead of writing short stories where the mother is always violently killed, I would end up murdering my own OR I could start writing publicly about my family to get the tale out into the open. At the very least, it will keep me out of prison. At the very most, it will serve to help articulate years of feeling inadequacy for being born and save me thousands in future therapists bills.

Rough Sketch

Proof that Wednesday can turn anything into a bed.

Some long needed admin stuff:
I’m still toying with domain name/branding/etc bullshit, which I’ve been mulling over since I published A blog with an identity crisis. Some concrete decisions: I’m letting modgirl.net expire, I will be consolidating and creating eBooks of the back entries, volumized by year (I’ve not gotten this plotted out as of yet) and that is as far as I’ve gotten on that project. Thanks to everyone who commented on the entry, it helped clarify some ideas I’ve been bouncing around in my brain.
The April 30th edition of the Morris Street Project published prematurely and without content in the entry. I’ve corrected and updated the entry so it is no longer empty, so make sure to check out this past week’s photos!
There has been so much going on, but I have a terrible habit of starting drafts and then not finishing them. I’m leary about creating new content until the drafts folder is better sorted so I decided to clean up my entry drafts, over 30 of them in the next few weeks. Do not be, then, terribly surprised to see a plethora of content being pushed over the next few weeks. My goal is to do two drafts pushed to published before a new entry is written.
We’ve been doing loads of gardening since the weather has gotten infinitely better around these parts. I’ve been taking a gazillion photographs in and around our gardens so there will be a lot of heavy image content upcoming as well.
Last, but not least, I’ve been doing some writing for The Rapidian, a hyper-local indie paper. I’ve included a widget on the sidebar that has the RSS feed for all of my work, which will be updated automatically. I’m planning on stepping up my game for them to publish a minimum of once per month.
Cheers,
x0x0x,
Lisa

Morris Street Project: April 30, 2011

Morris Street Project, Week 7
My mother-in-law and her sister came to visit us this last weekend of April to get the garden kicked into gear (because ultimately, TheHusband and I are lazy sumbitches). Of the photos I’ve been releasing onto the world of Throbbing Manor, you may have noticed we have no goddamned grass anywhere and that our plot was landscaped to death initially by the last owners of the house and furthered along by the flippers.
With the construction still ongoing, we’ve have started to lose most of the easement in front of the house which means the bushes, trees and any vegetation you can pick out in the photos in that area will be gone within the next few weeks. The city will replace the trees, but not the bushes or flowers. I spent hours truffling for tulip, daffodil and narcissus bulbs, eventually unearthing between 100-150 bulbs that will be replanted somewhere on our property, exchanged or given away.
While she was here, my mother-in-law’s identified most of the perennials, shrubbery and trees in the yards (front, side and back); which has been a tremendous help with knowing what we have and don’t have on our grounds.
In conjunction with all the outdoor gardening we’ve been doing, we’re also repotting a number of plants given or bought, including an indoor herb garden that is currently blooming in the solarium and will be replacing the outdoor herb garden the flippers marked off in the urban garden area in our backyard (aka the patch of land with chain-link fence around it, complete with beds constructed out of untreated wood (which are now rotting)). The solarium is going to become a poor man’s greenhouse, with the hopes that we can keep the temperatures in the fall and winter times warm enough to continue growing vegetables all year round as well as growing fruit trees.

We refer to this as the landing strip and TheHusband pulled out two wild rose bushes, dug up annuals that were left for dead and replanted some of the truffled bulbs. In addition to a hybrid rose bush growing at the back of the strip (near the brick of the house), we also have tulips, fairy pants, crocuses, daffodils and hostas.

One of two containers with my truffled bulbs. Currently we have shifted dirt on top of the bulbs to keep them happy until we replant.

Morris Street Project: April 17, 2011

Morris Street Project, Week 5
Construction is still running rampant on our street, with it slated to be done with our phase by end of June and the entire neighborhood by end of October. The changes to the landscape are so minute, when comparing it to a month ago, it looks like nothing has really changed in the last 30 days; when indeed flowers have started to bloom, buds have started to unfurl on the trees and the smell of fresh cut grass is everywhere.

May the Fourth Be With You

None of the information on the card is real.

Today TheHusband and I celebrate one year of wedded bliss!
As tradition dictates the first anniversary is the paper anniversary, I decided to update my Capital One card with a picture from our wedding. Because really, who carries around paper money anymore?
We’re planning a low key night of dinner made at home (steaks, asparagus, mashed potatoes and TheHusband’s infamous trifle) and exchanging presents – to him, a stack of art books he’s been coveting. From him, a Pride and Prejudice poster. What’s vaguely funny is that neither of us knew that the first anniversary was the paper one when we started dropping hints for our gifts.
This last year has been fraught with so many life changing events (graduation, marriage, two moves(!), buying a house, obtaining a job) that I could not imagine sharing my life with anyone else. Happy anniversary pookie snookums! Here’s to many more years of pain and suffering!

Morris Street Project: April 09, 2011

Morris Street Project, Week 4
The purpose of the Morris Street project was to catalog the coming of spring and if continued, the changing of the seasons. Instead it seems its going to be chronicling the construction taking place in our neighborhood. A week before these photos were taken, the neighborhood was given notice that there would be no parking available on the streets from 7am-7pm. That\’s it. No commentary in regards to driveway parking. What they (meaning the construction crew and/or the city) failed to say or even warn was that access to our homes would be incredibly limited and no provision for parking was indicated (if our driveways were being ripped apart). A few days before the photos below were taken, there was a 15′ deep x 10′ wide trench in front of the house. Our driveway remains the only inaccessible driveway on the block, with other houses at least having dirt laid down to allow occupants access.
The purpose of the city’s project was install new water and sewer mains. According to one of the contractors, they should be done with our block sometime “soon,” which soon literally means June. I shall expect loads of the upcoming weeks to be filled with construction process and hopefully, a new bud or two blooming in the background. Yay for spring in Michigan.
Construction season (also known as spring), has started in GRap.
We lost a driveway due to the pillaging.