first, there is the houseguest from hell. I’ll include her little conversation with me here:
i also changed her username to “houseguestfromhell”. Yes it’s long but it gives you a jist of what she’s like. The good stuff is at the bottom.
[23:03] houseguesfromhell: you there?
[23:04] modgirllisa: hey there
[23:04] houseguesfromhell: are you upset with me?
[23:04] modgirllisa: no why?
[23:04] houseguesfromhell: you haven’t returned any of my calls
[23:04] modgirllisa: i never got any of your calls
[23:04] houseguesfromhell: you haven’t been answering my im’s
[23:04] modgirllisa: um, the last IM i got from you was when we talked last week
[23:05] houseguesfromhell: not like i sent a lot but i think i sent 2
[23:05] modgirllisa: no, never got them
[23:05] modgirllisa: huh
[23:05] modgirllisa: now the phone thing i can understand because i got the software updated and it’s not taking vm’s now
[23:05] houseguesfromhell: i left you messages on you home and cell voicemails
[23:05] modgirllisa: um
[23:05] modgirllisa: my home vm is showing 0
[23:05] houseguesfromhell: i left you a message on your home phone saying htat I thought something was wrong with you cell phone voicemail
[23:05] modgirllisa: when?
[23:05] houseguesfromhell: let me think for a minute
[23:06] houseguesfromhell: i was calling to ask you a question that only you would know and if I could remember what I was trying to ask you than I could remember what day it was
[23:06] houseguesfromhell: last week sometime
[23:06] houseguesfromhell: like maybe thursday or friday
[23:07] houseguesfromhell: and i called yesterday but got no answer on cell phone with no vm and didn’t leave a mesage at home cause i thought you might be mad at me
[23:07] modgirllisa: no, i’m not.
[23:07] modgirllisa: i called my mom yesterday because i had to do some paperwork for her apartment rental stuff
[23:07] modgirllisa: and she said dhs had called and left me a vm over the weekend on my cell phone
[23:08] modgirllisa: and it wasn’t there
[23:08] houseguesfromhell: i think katie misses the girls
[23:08] houseguesfromhell: she has been acting very weird and lonely sort of.. Not that im trying to by pass what you are saying.. she is just up in my face crying
[23:09] modgirllisa: wow
[23:09] modgirllisa: that’s weird
[23:09] houseguesfromhell: did you go to your last class yet?
[23:09] modgirllisa: for creative writing?
[23:09] modgirllisa: nope that is august 9
[23:09] houseguesfromhell: yeah… thats the one you have every 3 weeks
[23:09] modgirllisa: yep
[23:09] modgirllisa: i finish up literacy trianing this week
[23:10] modgirllisa: and finish working on the web project for the tattoo shop and do homework for the august 9 class too
[23:10] houseguesfromhell: how is jeffie doing?
[23:10] modgirllisa: phone got disconnected
[23:10] houseguesfromhell: his?
[23:10] modgirllisa: so i don’t know
[23:10] modgirllisa: yah his
[23:10] houseguesfromhell: awww.. cell or home?
[23:10] modgirllisa: apparently jeremy is telling him he paid the bil
[23:10] modgirllisa: home
[23:10] houseguesfromhell: does his cell phone still work?
[23:11] modgirllisa: barely
[23:11] modgirllisa: he needs to get it replaced by sprint
[23:11] modgirllisa: and we’ve been trying to work that out but he’s working afternoons still
[23:11] modgirllisa: so i never see him
[23:11] houseguesfromhell: awww
[23:12] houseguesfromhell: so I have a situation that I am dealing with and I could use your advise
[23:12] houseguesfromhell: do you have time?
[23:13] modgirllisa: sure
[23:13] modgirllisa: go for it baby!
[23:13] houseguesfromhell: ok.. so there was this guy that we worked with at ASI named Tyrone Lockridge. Black guy.. very femine.. do you remember him?
[23:13] modgirllisa: um, nope.
[23:14] houseguesfromhell: ok.. well..
[23:14] houseguesfromhell: he and I became pretty close friends. We went to Chicago one day together and we used to hang out a lot…..
[23:14] modgirllisa: k
[23:14] houseguesfromhell: he says he had a crush on me.. I was very comfortable with him cause I thought he was gay and just didn’t know it yet.
[23:15] houseguesfromhell: so.. one of the movies we saw together was Mo’ Better Blues..
[23:15] modgirllisa: wait he says he has a crush on you NOW?
[23:15] houseguesfromhell: no
[23:15] modgirllisa: kay
[23:15] houseguesfromhell: so that movies was on the other night and it made me think of him …
[23:15] houseguesfromhell: so I looked him up.
[23:15] houseguesfromhell: I found him
[23:15] houseguesfromhell: he is gay.. but in denial
[23:16] houseguesfromhell: like he says “Im not gay…” and then a couple of sentences later “When I was with Tracy (a guy) for 7 years…”… and he is trying to say that he was with Tracy and will never be with another man.. Ok .. Whatever dude.
[23:16] houseguesfromhell: …
[23:16] modgirllisa: Paul was like that.
[23:16] houseguesfromhell: Ok.. so he was going through some stuff at home.. and I wanted to see him.. so I invtied him to come down here and visit….
[23:17] houseguesfromhell: so he is here
[23:17] houseguesfromhell: and we are not getting along
[23:17] houseguesfromhell: like way worse than you and me in June kind of not getting along
[23:17] modgirllisa: woah
[23:17] houseguesfromhell: he is supposed to be here until sunday
[23:17] houseguesfromhell: today is only tuesday.
[23:17] houseguesfromhell: he is driving me crazy…
[23:17] houseguesfromhell: so let me tell you some of the stuff that is getting me
[23:18] houseguesfromhell: so.. he is the guy who is messing with that author that I told you about… (and yet he is not gay).. and he told lynn that he would not be with him unless he was well compensated financially (whore).. so he is basically just trying to whore his way through life..
[23:19] houseguesfromhell: but you aren’t supoosed to do that with friends!!
[23:19] houseguesfromhell: not with people you are not trying to sleep with!!
[23:19] houseguesfromhell: he came down here with $5
[23:19] houseguesfromhell: five dollars
[23:19] modgirllisa: you’re kidding
[23:19] houseguesfromhell: for a week long trip
[23:19] modgirllisa: how did he get down there?
[23:19] houseguesfromhell: I bought his bus ticket cause it was cheap
[23:20] houseguesfromhell: and its not so much that I am paying for everything.. cause you know me with paying.. but its like he came down here expecting that and he is trying to get us to do all this stuff that he doesn’t have to pay for cause he is expecting me to pay for it!!
[23:20] modgirllisa: Why don’t you buy his bus ticket back home?
[23:21] modgirllisa: i mean, this is unlike you
[23:21] modgirllisa: really.
[23:21] houseguesfromhell: and he is approaching it like I am a gay guy he is trying to sleep with like “take me here” and “take me there” kind of thing
[23:21] houseguesfromhell: ok.. here is why.. and this is a preliminary reason.. not a final reason
[23:22] houseguesfromhell: we had a blow up tonight.. and I will tell you about.. but because of what he did afterward.. that I kind of feel like I partially want to “torture” him by keeping him here and not knowing when he is going home.. and.. if I send him home before he asks to be sent home than he is goign to view that he won and he got the best of me
[23:23] houseguesfromhell: now.. listen to what happened
[23:23] houseguesfromhell: I plugged in my cell phone cause it was dead
[23:23] houseguesfromhell: about an hour or so later he said “Is your phone done charging?”
[23:23] houseguesfromhell: I said “I don’t know”
[23:24] houseguesfromhell: He went over to the phone.. unplugged it and carried it over to the sofa..
[23:24] houseguesfromhell: I said.. “did you have to unplug it? It messes up the battery life if you don’t let it charge completely. You can make a call with it plugged in.”
[23:24] houseguesfromhell: that is when he flipped..
[23:25] houseguesfromhell: he said “You knew I wanted to use the phone. Why didn’t you tell me that when I asked you if I could use the phone?”
[23:25] houseguesfromhell: I said.. you didn’t ask me if you could use the phone.. you asked if it was done charging.
[23:27] modgirllisa: How long has it been since you’ve seen him?
[23:27] houseguesfromhell: ok.. hold on
[23:34] modgirllisa: shell?
[23:34] houseguesfromhell: hold on im on the phone with jeff
[23:34] modgirllisa: my brother?
[23:34] houseguesfromhell: yes
[23:39] houseguesfromhell: ok.. im back
[23:40] houseguesfromhell: so anyway.. that is when he flipped.. he was like.. why are you being so literal? Why is everything that I said examined word for word and analyzed?
[23:40] houseguesfromhell: before I could come out of my mouth with a question on what he was talking about he continues to go off about how uncomfortable I have made him since he showed up and how he is out of his element and that I am taking advantage of him
[23:40] houseguesfromhell: 12 years
[23:42] modgirllisa: So let me get this straight, you haven’t seen him in 12 years let alone talk to him and you invited him down to see you in Cincy with you paying the bus fare. He shows up with five bucks and a: you are surprised that he wants to take advantage of you and b: you want to keep him there because you want to torture him?
[23:43] modgirllisa: If that is all true, are you fucking insane?
[23:44] houseguesfromhell: so.. he went outside like he was going to smoke a cigarette. but didn’t have any as he was trying to quite smoking.. and was out there just talking shit about me.. right on my own porch.. like.. “Oh no you are not making me uncomfortable all these miles away from home. You do not appreciate the fact that I am here. You are talking to me like a 10 year old child and you take everyting so literally. This is ridiculous and I have never experienced anything so horrible in my entire life.”
[23:45] houseguesfromhell: well.. your paraphrasing makes it sound a little different than how I said it…
[23:45] houseguesfromhell: but you are right
[23:45] modgirllisa: get off the computer
[23:46] modgirllisa: tell his ungrateful ass he is going back on the first bus back tomororw
[23:46] houseguesfromhell: huh?
[23:46] houseguesfromhell: jeff said.. stop calling him he is goign to call you on your cell phone
[23:46] houseguesfromhell: ok?
[23:46] modgirllisa: um
[23:46] modgirllisa: i’m not calling him
[23:46] modgirllisa: and my cell phone is dead
[23:47] houseguesfromhell: is your house phone buys?
[23:47] modgirllisa: nope
[23:47] houseguesfromhell: busy*?
[23:47] modgirllisa: i just turned the phone on and off
[23:47] houseguesfromhell: he is trying to call you on your house phone and said its a busy signal
[23:47] modgirllisa: see above
[23:47] houseguesfromhell: why did you tell me to get off the computer?
[23:48] houseguesfromhell: the bus schedule is not convenient for me tomorrow.. its 545 am and 1010 am
[23:49] modgirllisa: it’s not convient with you
[23:49] modgirllisa: you know, you really take the cake
[23:50] houseguesfromhell: why shouldl I wake up at 330 in the morning or leave work to take his ass?
[23:50] modgirllisa: gee
[23:50] modgirllisa: i wonder
[23:50] modgirllisa: so he’s not around to further irriate you and take advantage of you?
[23:53] houseguesfromhell: i need to think about the best way to solve this
[23:53] houseguesfromhell: Im gonna head off to bed
[23:53] houseguesfromhell: I have to work at 8 tomrrow
[23:54] houseguesfromhell: ok?
[23:54] modgirllisa: sorry
[23:54] modgirllisa: trillian got caught up
[23:54] modgirllisa: fine.
[23:55] houseguesfromhell: ok.. i will talk to you tomorrow
So then my brother calls me back finally (on his cell) and because his house phone got disco’d (the roommate not paying on it you see) and he wants me to pay one of his bills for him online. Because he is dyslexic, he can’t tell the difference between a few letters and gets pissed at ME because he can’t fucking read. I get into the site and pay his fucking bill for him (out of his pocket not mine) and I tell him of an opportunity that grahamwest was interested in with him for some future work. ANYWAY, i said “Um, Jeff, they don’t shut the phone off after a single month of not paying the bill, and if he paid it a week ago they got he money already. Why don’t you get on Jeremy’s ass about why he isn’t paying the bills as you two share an apartment.” ANd he said “Jeremy is a grown ass man and can take care of himself.” I’m like WTF? HELLO! ANd he starts ranting and raging about my bill paying with my ex paul, um, our phone was never dico’s honey and we made over six figures combined. I got so pissed i slammed down the phone.
Now i’m angrily chewing on a straw.
Tag: Brother
at the airport
One of the great things about being a geek is the capability of having technology with you on the go. However if I was more of a geek, I’d be sitting here on wireless dialup account instead of, well, not.
The Grand Rapids International airport (GRR) is strange in many ways. First off, the security measures here surpass those of even Dulles (IAD) in Washington. My brother had said to me when he was flying out of GRR to IAD to come visit me last summer about the trials and tribulations he had to go through with security when he was waiting for his flight. I didn’t believe him. How could I? For a metro area of several hundred thousand people, many don’t seem to leave, and it would seem difficult to comprehend the idea that the security at GRR would surpass that of IAD.
I feel more and more out of place when I talk about my travels when in my own mind, I do not do more than go where I want. In my own eyes, the world is so large and I’ve seen so little, it’s hard to distinguish from what is “well traveled” to what is not. I guess it does sound a bit exotic to say I’ve lived in San Francisco, Washington DC, and Toronto and then come back here to good old GRap as the locals call it. Why would I want to come back?
There was a girl I had worked with at the cawfee shop who had said that her world consisted of Kent County and that was it. She had no desire to travel beyond her “bubble” as she called it. She wanted to get married, have babies, and be a mommy. She was all of 18. She had no desire to see the world or explore outside of her bubble. There are those I know who have traveled outside their boundaries physically and could not comprehend what they saw. I mean that here they are, traveling around the state, country or internationally, and disliked it.
Personally, I don’t know what it is. Is it the restlessness that I feel? Which I automatically think that is really screaming of my own lack of commitment. Can I feel comfortable to one day settle down in one place and be happy or even just content? It is difficult for me to say. The Geography of Michigan class that I’m taking currently shows just how diverse Michigan is, at least from a geographical point of view. There is so much to see and do here (as shocking as that may be when taking into heart my thoughts on Michigan and the Midwest in general), that I feel overwhelmed. I haven’t even been any farther than Traverse City and have yet been to the Upper Peninsula, and for being a “local,” to me that is disgraceful.
Because my trip plans for Europe have fallen through, I had been thinking of renting a cottage up in the UP for a week. Just me. The dogs. My laptop and pray-fully, no internet connection. I have found that the more I live alone, the more I like it. I’m more of private person and now I wonder if I will ever really be happy being with someone in a relationship. I think about that part quite a bit, that my own happiness is coming from within, but yet even at that stage, I would never feel comfortable being with someone else. Things like having a family do equate into this, but I do not ever really see someone else as being by side. I’ve honestly thought that if I was not married or in a committed relationship by the time, I was 35, I would end up having IVF kids. Keth and I joke about that now, but the more I look at it, the more I realize just how much of the truth it may be. I’m not scared of this idea, I guess I’ve always thought that it would be better to raise a child alone than in a relationship where it was abusive, and the issue is that it’s becoming clear with my own relationship choices that abuse is all I know. That is not to say that all the relationships I’ve been were abusive, but it all goes back to Alan and when I had for a brief moment in time the “perfect” relationship in my eyes only to have it blown up in my face – all because he had cheated on me.
Danny says I carry extra guilt left over from my Catholic upbringing, and I’m not quite sure that is true. I can see why he would think that but I’m tired of feeling like I have these rigid set of morals and ideas only to find the world shifts too much into the grey pattern area. Most of it conflicting. Like I do consider emotional cheating to be cheating. I cannot abide by the fact that if you are in a relationship that you would have the audacity of wanting to be with someone else. Oh, I know it’s human relations to look and admire attractive people, that’s fine, but when it becomes something else and ends up being more than a fantasy, then it becomes dangerous. Why get married or be with someone if you don’t, truthfully, want to be with them? That’s never made sense to me and those who know me the best would know the agony I went through prior the separation with Paul. It made me numb. I felt nothing other than I did not want to be here and I had to leave and I could never communicate to those just how difficult it was TO leave. The one thing I did resent was the common ideology that if you are not happy, then just leave, that I could pick up and go and no one seemed to take into account that they only knew my side of the story or even better, they knew only what I would tell them. They did not walk in my shoes and they did not seem to understand when I tried to make the situation clear.
I have this sinking suspicion I’ll always be a solitary person, and that discovery has hurt more than anything else. Not that being solitary is bad, but simply that not having someone by my side would hurt. I’ve dreamed of being with someone, this ‘being’ if you will, that would compliment me as I would compliment them. True wuv. So now, I wonder if I feel disillusioned simply because of past experiences or what the deal is. Hope is there, it’s a small flame, and it’s becoming smaller. In the end, I’m tired of a society that is cruel and malicious and I just wish people were nicer to each other, but that wish doesn’t seem to want to work out.
Keth says, maybe I’m looking too hard? She said to me when I was lamenting about this to her fairly recently and I can see why she would say that. If you’ve searched for “something” for over 30 years, it’s very easy to get discouraged but it’s difficult to keep up hope. It’s difficult to feel that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I know there are many difficulties that I have sustained in my life that have bucked the system. I’ve left high school and went back and got my GED. I went to college, only to leave and come back many years later. Things that professionals say are the hardest to do, I’ve done. Yet I feel no satisfaction from these accomplishments.
($Deity save me from ignorant people. Please. A girl in my Geography of Michigan class asked if we had to know the bedrock type. Hello. Geography. Pay ATTENTION! Another woman compared the term ‘outwash’ (the left over silt from glacier movement) to the leftover drippings of Guinness. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.)
in between
Danny and i once got into a playful argument in the middle of Blockbuster a few years back over the color of my eyes. It went along the lines that I said my eyes were brown and he called me out and said they were not, they were hazel. A quick pull to a mirrored post showed that yes, compared to his eyes which were deep chocolate brown, mine
were looking pretty hazel.
But for all sense and purposes, my eyes are brown to me and when I cry, the ring around the irises turn a dark blue and get rather thick, almost as if someone drew a magic marker around the iris itself. there are tiny flecks of green/gold but they are minute and can only be seen when nose to nose. My eyes are not a beautiful hazel like shelly’s but they are, for all sense and purposes closer to a hazel then a brown if you want to get pedantic.
My eyes are like my hair, my life: my hair is neither straight nor curly. Because of it’s texture I have to use ethnic products occasionally to keep it in check. It is apparently soft as people keep wanting to touch it. My hair is also neither brown nor black, it’s closer to auburn if by judging by younger pictures of me were so (and the roots coming in). My eyebrows are black, but I’m the retarded redhead- pale skin, smattering of freckles but not enough OOMPH to make it follow through.
Christmas was weird.
I bought my brother a bottle of Le Male by Jean Paul Gaultier and he was driving my car. Paul was bathed in Obsession and sitting in the back. I was stuck in the passenger seat, head hanging out of the window like a dog panting for fresh air because I was being overwhelmed by the sickly sweetness of the scents. I couldn’t even smell myself (Chance by Chanel). Both of them threatened to cut farts, if that would make me feel better. This is what it has been like for a week. I feel like I’ve been stuck in some sort of retarded boys club between the two of them — they are like night and day. We took Jeff to an Indian restaurant and Jeff decided that the food “got a check at the no box” for while he ate his lamb vindaloo, he didn’t quite care for it. We drove into DC and saw the tree at the White House. I scanned the skies for bombs and missiles.
Merry Christmas.
While I will have a kickass entertainment system I will most likely not have a couch. I have flashes of insight of me sitting in front of the patio doors in my Ikea Poang chair watching the snow fall. The living room, will of course, be empty save for my computers and the occasional animal toy. The entertainment center will be in the bedroom. Guests will be resigned to automatically sleep with me to have a place to sit. Just kidding.
I have laughed so loud today, that Paul threatened to walk out of the restaurant, and so deeply my ribs ached and I started to hyperventilate. I sat on the toilet not even two hours earlier crying so hard my chest hurt. My brother pulled me up and told me to get sweats on. We took a walk around the complex and I had put on my UUNet hoodie, which I had bought for Paul many moons ago and it had shrunk in the washer and now i coveted. I had put a jaunty scarf around my neck as we walked around the complex freezing out asses off, talking about the future. It had snowed a few inches during the night and we were having a real White Christmas, but the wind was killer and cut
through to our skin. We double timed back to the apartment, all the while my brother reassuring me that I had to just play it out and shut the fuck up.
Some things happened that I don’t think Jeff expected to see, namely Paul’s anger. Paul smashed his fists down so hard on the desk my cold cup of coffee went flying all around the desk itself and seeped into everything. A few weeks back, we went out to dinner with Rob and Paul asked me if i was taking the vacuum (or not) and before I could answer, Paul said “doesn’t matter, I’m getting a bagless one” wherein Rob looked Paul and said “why are you being a dick?” A few nights ago, my brother and I sat on the floor sorting cables. cat5 in one box, miscellany cables in a third, spare parts in the second. I took a few unopened packages of cat5 and two power strips. I begged Paul to come and look at the computer closet because I was NOT going to receive a call from him in the future begging for XYZ back. He came in after we had packed that room and we were working on the bathroom and bedroom. “Why do you need two power strips?” “Did you check the other box.” “No.” “If you checked the other box, you would have seen
that I left you two power strips along with the strips for all the other equipment that is currently plugged in.” “Why do you need cat5?” And so it began. He started nickle and diming everything. He who would take no notice of what was being packed (“You are the one whose moving!”), now wants a piece of everything.
I read in someone’s journal recently they do not remember having been loved so selflessly before by someone or at least in recent memory, as in someone who was being attentive to them rather than the other way around. Alisha also said something to me in that same effect when we were hanging out before she left for her holidays about the difference between her current beau and her past beau’s was that she had pursued them and here he had pursued her. It was such a pleasant switch, it knocked her on her ass for a second. I know I need to pull back and regroup, which is fine, but there hasn’t been a single straight thought in my head in the last 6 months and I don’t expect I’ll find it now. Just so that you know.
But I will tell you I’m terrified.
It’s a quandary I debate with myself on as I have hope for the future that one day I will be happy and hopefully that will include a partner of some kind. I’m not so much bitter as much as feeling like the dog whose been kicked around a lot and will now bite at any attempts to befriend it.
My brother remarked last night, as we were watching “Powerpuff Girls: the Movie”, that we were both wearing grey tshirts and red sweat shorts. The other interesting thing is that after many years of proclaiming a few designers worthy to be on my backside, he’s now decided they are cool and has been giving me links to their websites.
There was more important stuff but I need to sleep.
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pictures galore
This summer has been pretty busy, with my mom attempting to commit suicide, Paul and I calling off the wedding, and me getting inked/pierced galore. Plus include my obsession with Power Girls, my puppies and getting acrylic on my nails, it has been strange. To keep you interested until I get the website up and moving again, here are pics taken with the new digital camera I got for my birthday, indexed per subject.
Enjoy.
Tattoos/Piercings:
left calf tattoo done 8/11/2001
eyebrow pierced 8/11/2001, nose pierced 3/1993
10g barbell put in 7/1999, pierced 1996
mom’s name ‘marietta’, two different variations
picture taken summer of 99
tongue pierced, 7/1997
Paul’s dragon, left upper arm
Paul’s right wrist
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Lisa
go braves!
The picture to your left is that of my brother (#5) after tonight’s pounding on Illinois State, 73-66.
the braves have had a long hard road in the past few months and I’ve been eagerly listening to their games via wmbd radio that has been broadcasting their games live every night. tonight was the only game I’ve sorta missed since we started listening since i had forgotten the game was starting at 5pm EST and not the usual 7-8pm EST.
But we caught the last four minutes of the game and I wooped loudly when i heard that they won. My own brother contributed 12-points, four blocks and seven rebounds. Jeff also has 76 blocks for the single season games, beating the old record at Bradley of 72.
Tomorrow night the braves go up against Indiana U. and will be broadcast on ESPN at 9pm EST.
I also emailed ESPN to correct them of their “error” that they show that my brother did not play tonight — he so did 😉
Congratulations jeff!
Links:
Bradley U.
Braves Mens Basketball
Braves Standings @ ESPN
Jeff’s standings via ESPN
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lisa
twilight as seen by me
the last few weeks have been a surreal experience. suddenly i’m seeing myself in positions and places and acting in this strange netherworld that i didn’t think belonged to me.
i’m in this very strange place and it’s called being 28.
the rock and the hard place — the times i told paul i was leaving and today i come home and he prepares a bath for me, makes me a screwdriver (75% oj, 25% absolut), and lets me soak away the stress with harry potter (cause for divorce? she reads harry potter your honour). exes swinging back into your life and everything else in between.
brian’s leaving here in a few weeks. both paul and brian have been bugging me for “what do you want” as their mom wants to buy me something for taking care of brian and of course of pauly. taking care of someone is second nature to me. it feels that way. its like all those times i never asked for help and now i’m giving it and asking for it.
jeff and i have been going through some rather intense conversations lately on the status of my mother. the other day he and i spent an hour on the phone while i flipped around my sparc at work doing stuff. it was so much easier with a headset on to work and to talk. and my mom. at 58 she’s struggling with things i’m going through now and i want to reach to her and say it’s okay because i’ve been there. and she says to me “i cannot ask for help.” and before when she did ask for help, i ignored her because it was what i did best. and i kept coming home from work this week thinking about her and calling my brother. she’s broke. her job screwed her over. and i said JEFF! i buried one parent this year, I can’t go through another one. I just can’t.
sometimes i want to be free. i’ve always felt like a bird. relationships were temporary, measured by months and years invested and shuffled away to another spot where i couldn’t access them. and i think about all of them all the time. alan. danny. justin. and i wonder what they are doing right now at this very point in time and i wonder if they are happy? and i wonder why i care so much.
andrew said to me tonight ‘it always amazes when people think it’s so hard to find me.” and i said “get over it, i’m in my happy place” someone remind me, if i ever meet him, to bring him a box of crayolas.
love is blind.
love is good.
i had always envisioned that when *I* got married and had kids, i would have a family i never had. i wouldn’t have the bs and the bullcrap i had gone through. and i would create this stable environment where they could feel like they could belong. when i’m trapped i keep giving myself this out. jeff told me to set up seperate bank account and start saving money and if paul pissed me off, i would have enough to leave. and i’m thinking “yanno, it can’t be like that. we are in a relationship and yah things can get horrid but that is normal” but i run run run run run run when things get horrid and here i am.
declined
actual statement from a bank on declining me for a credit card:
“we’ve determined that you have sufficient balances on existing revolving credit lines.”
does this make sense to anyone else?
i don’t see how a company can determine that a household with over 6 figure income feel that 1500 credit balance is “sufficient.”
i just find that to be incredibly funny.
last night, while i was beating my laptop for being such a piece of shit, paul decided to go ahead and pull up my credit report. It seems that equifax will for a low price of 8 dollars give you access to your most recent report. Checking i found that everything in the last two years was pretty darn spotless (no late 30,60 or 120 day reports, no judgements, no nothing). It was the stuff in the early 90s that’s killing me. But what was also interesting is that equifax has the wrong address, wrong birthdate, and a bunch of wrong information about me.
we had had a big discussion with friends about this on Saturday night when we were all sitting around watching kung fu madness. it seems incredulous to me (and paul and derrick and everyone else) just how hard it was to get credit these days. in the early 90s, when i was in my late teens, early 20s; you could walk into any department store and get a credit card and you were virtually on your way. Now, we are discovering with Paul, with /no credit/ file is just as bad as having bad credit. We can’t get him anything: not a gas card, department store card, hell not even a best buy card. he gets declined more often than I do. I told him what we needed to do, and what we are doing, is to get him on on the cards I have that is unsecured but has a high interest rate. he can use this card for all of his spontaneous shopping purposes (as well as finally send me flowers at work 🙂 without having to bug me about it.
i’m pretty happy with my current credit file save for the older and mis-information on it. I’ve worked my ass off to make sure that everything was set up correctly for it so that I wouldn’t have issues matters and concerns about the credit reports when i wanted something (a new car, new house, new body, whatever). my project this week is calling companies that show that i owe money and make a deal: you send me a letter stating that you will remove my bad credit statement from my record and you’ll get your money. sounds good to you? sounds good to me.
brotherly love
my brother, all 7’4 of him, will be flying into DC this upcoming it was an impromptu flight as we had been talking about him coming here for spring break, but it was all dependant if his basketball team won their last game before the playoffs. he wins, he’s got tourneyments to play in. he loses, he is coming to DC. since it was such a late date at getting him a ticket, the price was sorta high (and my brother has the misfortune to live in bfe Illinois where he’s too far to get a plane out of a major city) but well worth it in the end.
i haven’t seen him in nearly two years. i can’t wait.
this magic moment
we had a dozen people over at our house this past Saturday night for “Kung Fu Madness” in which we sat around eating Chinese food and watched bad kung fun movies. since we had stipulated that everyone be gone by 3am, we then carried the party out to denny’s where we sat talking about geeky stuff, while i read the USA Today from that weekend and party goers for Mardi Gras were stumbling in at all hours. As we got dropped off by our friends Lenny and Sunni in front of our apartment complex, paul had asked me if we had checked the mail for Saturday since we hadn’t we started walking towards the clubhouse to get said mail. Paul suddenly called out “sweetie” and as I turned around he jumped up in the air, literally clicked his heels and started singing “chim chimney” from Mary Poppins. It was then that I confirmed what I always knew: I’m going to marry this man.
I had related this to Paul last night when I was sitting here waiting for my windows laptop to stop being pissy (spent nearly 3 hours fixing various problems to get it working — don’t say a word). he looked at me like i had told him that i was insane as if that one defining moment was strangely the reason why i would marry him — and not any other particular moment. what can i say? it’s the little things that mean a lot.
this morning i woke up with him making me breakfast (which we shared while sitting in bed) and singing an elton john song as he brought it in. i giggled as he did this and look over to my left as he sits on the couch working on his laptop (his and her laptops — how wrong is that?). i love paul. i’m in love with paul. those defining moments which last mere seconds is what defines it for me.
x0x0x0x0x0x
moi
home is where the heart is
My birthday is in four days.
Gifts of luv, money, new life, geeky men can be sent here.
home is where the heart is
My friend Jenni from back home, sent me an email with this in it:
you need to come home before it goes…….
for old time sake, we could have a sleep over and I can snap your bra into the ceiling fan.
My mother, it seems is going through the toughest parts of her life. My step-father Robert is finally filing for divorce after being married for nearly 8 years (they have only lived together for aproximently 2 of those 8 years) and my mother has decided to file for bankruptcy. Along the lines of bankruptcy, she’s giving up the house on Paris Ave in Grand Rapids along with all the furniture inside of it.
Danny is making arrangements to have my mothers four poster cherrywood bed, cherry wood desk, my grandmothers rocking chair and the living room couch put in storage for me.
my brother Jeff got accepted to Bradley University, my mother is moving into a mansion outside of Grand Rapids with friends and I’m in SF. Any resemblance of family is now gone.
I remember back in early days, when I was a child growing up in Port Huron, MI, the big family get togethers held for every holiday. My mother is the oldest of seven children, I’m the third oldest grandchild. Now, everything is gone. My older cousins are married with kids of their own. My younger cousins Kevin, Shelly, Chris, and Paul are god knows where. My aunts are all retreated into some sort of weird lifestyle that makes them forever unmarriageable (three of my mothers sisters never did get married and all hang out together in some sort of weird lesbianism way. but they aren’t lesbians. maybe just crotchety old aunts?). My grandmother died in 1972, my grandfather passed away in 1996. My fathers side I have never had any contact with to begin with – and my father is now 72 and holed up in a nursing home in Toronto.
I am, completely alone.
And it’s been coming for years. When my mother in 1985 got the killer job offer in Grand Rapids and moved our little family of three there, all the family get togethers died. Even living just 2.25 hours away from them, I never saw them for months if not years at a time. The last time I made any effort to see my family was back in 1996 when my grandfather passed away, and I stood like an outsider at my grandfathers funeral. I knew nothing of these people anymore. My older cousins Doug and Denise who used to torture me when i was a kid had nothing to say to me. My younger cousins Kevin and Shelly were grown up — and I stood there feeling lonely than ever because I never had what I have always dreamed about: family. And I remember crying on my way back to my apartment that I shared with Danny then, because I had nothing. My relationship with my mother had been lukewarm at best, my father I never lived with save one year when I went to school in toronto, and my cousins never made an effort to contact me.
I remember sitting at my computer the day after I got back from his funeral, drinking down a fifth of absolute and paging my brother to get a bag of pot so that I didn’t have to think. No one could quite understand what was wrong with me. I never drank at home and Lisa buy pot? Oh yeah right — hell must have frozen over. I drove to the funeral on Christmas Eve, came back the day after Christmas and drunk myself into a stupor between the 26th and New Years Day.
Many people don’t understand why I feel so damn down about this — primarily because I’ve always regarded myself as an orphan in all aspects. My mother even said it herself that when I moved to SF that I had cut off all ties to family and never called, wrote or even came home. I tried going back home and making things right last Christmas, but things between me and my mom never changed and while I was happy to be back at my old stomping grounds I found that nothing was the same — and that any life for me in GR was over. I tried telling myself that I wanted to go back — and I still do — but it’s not the same. Everything has changed and I am no longer that scared little girl any more that used to sit in her bedroom crying anymore.
it’s several hours since i wrote the above, and I’m at work now. i hate when i break up a chronicle like this: writing half at home and the other half somewhere else. i lose my train of thought — and the somberness i had earlier this morning isn’t as prevalent as it is now. A good shower, shaving my legs, lots of cawfee, talking to cartoon boy, I can’t feel depressed right now.
But then again, maybe i don’t want to think about it.
it always ends up this way.
issues, matters and concerns
Bryan is/was having issues with his server -again-. So for most part of the weekend, it has been down (meaning low hits for me, boohoo). Anyway, since Shelly is still in town, please peruse the back issues:
November
October
September
August
July
Writings
An Ode to My Brother
I love my brother.
And since he has complained that there wasn’t enough pictures of him on the webpage, I have complied with his request. Enjoy 🙂
happiness, more or less
I was talking to my brother on the phone and cleaning out my hard drive at the same time, when I came across the words to The Verve’s song “Lucky Man”.