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Monday, October 6th, 2008
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8:33 pm - Same Time, Next Fall
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These fucking dreams. Goddamn the dreams, why won't they just stop? It's been ten years, shouldn't I be done with dreams by now? Shouldn't I be able to just sleep in the early fall? I'm so tired of the dreams.
It's better than it used to be. I keep telling myself that, for all the good it does. I got through the spring with only a couple of bad nights, I thought maybe it was over. But here comes October and the dreams again with it, every time my eyes close he's right there.
Every night awake a little later, push back sleep a little longer. Every morning up a little earlier, waking up with my eyes swollen and gritty, get under a hot, hot shower and melt away the sweat and tear-crust and that nasty yeasty smell of panicked sweat.
And it fucks with my perceptions, my reactions. Like perpetually living in the day before your period. Everything makes me cry, sometimes nothing at all makes me cry. Kneading bread dough at the kitchen counter and tears splashing on my wrists, I'm so sick of this.
I can't even call up his face any more, not when I'm awake. Dark hair, coarse and too long for his haircut, flakes of dandruff along the hairline. He was wearing a kelly green polo shirt, that rough texture of cheap doubleknit, I remember it rasping across my inner wrist when I went to shove him away. The smell of beer and whiskey and too many days without a shower, that sour/musty smell of unwashed male.
But his face is gone, I can't remember it even when I try. Only when I'm asleep, and maybe my subconscious doesn't remember it right after all. Maybe the face I see then is just a composite, a placeholder. I'd almost like to believe that, it would help.
The other details stay, though. I was wearing my blue sundress with the daisies, my favorite. High heels, my hair was bright red that year, and fell past my waist. I felt so pretty that morning when I left the house. The burn of that flat afternoon light flashing off the cars, the sound of my head hitting the roof of my Camry. I remember all that just fine, awake or asleep.
I'm so tired. I'm so fucking tired. All the other terror and stress and bullshit of my life right now, and now I've lost sleep. Macbeth has murdered sleep, but I've just misplaced it somewhere. It will wander back when the weather breaks, when autumn chill takes on the colder, wetter feel of winter. Until then, I'll just keep slogging through the world with that haze over everything, eyes slow to focus, air moving too actively over my skin. Claiming allergies I don't have. Thinking and rethinking and re-rethinking every decision because none of my reactions are valid.
Ten autumns I've done this. I can survive one more
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| Wednesday, June 8th, 2005
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3:50 pm - A Quiet Announcement
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Moira Drew Sweeney
born June 5, 2005 at 8:27 PM
Six pounds, five ounces
Nineteen and one half inches long
Three weeks ahead of schedule, early like her mother never is.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, October 20th, 2004
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2:43 am - Dreams come true and hydroponic death boobies
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For the very few of you out there who aren't already aware of this, I discovered this past weekend that I am finally, finally, finally pregnant. Right now about all we know is that the due date is somewhere around June 25, 2005. More information will, of course, follow as it becomes available.
The odd thing is that already I'm finding that nothing is like I expected it would be. I had assumed that I would be very introspective at this point in things, that I would spend a lot of time wanting to write about what I was thinking and feeling and what I wanted to be sure and remember. But that isn't the case. Instead I find that I've become very external, focusing on the things that need to be done rather than what I feel.
In some ways I think my friend P. is more excited about this pregnancy than I am. She can't wait to go shopping for maternity clothes, see a fuzzy ultrasound picture, throw a baby shower. I'm more interested in how I'm going to clear out the storage unit to make room for all the things I need to move out of the nursery-to-be and whether I'm going to have to rearrange the furniture in the master bedroom to make room for a bassinet. She's talking about eyelet bedding and those microphones that you push up against your belly to hear the baby's heartbeat, I'm thinking about disposable vs. service and whether I can afford to buy a Medela pump or will have to rent.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I expected this stage of pregnancy to be sort of floaty and emotional, to be dwelling on thoughts about the magic of reproduction and crying at long distance commercials. Instead I'm making lists and weighing decisions.
Maybe it's just that I've been waiting for this for so long. Six years trying for a baby, of false starts and not getting my hopes up. Maybe I've just gotten so good at not getting my hopes up that I can't let them rise even when they're justified.
Also possible, I suppose, that this lack of mooning and cooing is caused by the fact that I haven't had a cigarette in...gods help me...46 hours. The physical cravings only last the first 48 hours, right? Or is it 72? Anyway, after that it's all merely psychological withdrawls. Yay.
On a somewhat related note, I am now six weeks and one day pregnant and sometime in the last twenty-four hours the Boob Fairy came and paid me a call. I have gone up a minimum of one and a half cup sizes in the last day. I'm not even kidding. They are huge mutant hydroponic deathboobies. If you want to know what this feels like, it's something like this. Just in case you were wondering.
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| Monday, August 30th, 2004
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11:00 pm - When I die...
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| Tuesday, August 17th, 2004
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7:30 pm - Holy Crap
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Have you guys seen this? That's so...creepy and weird and wrong. I mean, leaving aside the rest of it, how do you even find a parrot's heart?
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| Monday, August 2nd, 2004
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12:08 am - Adoration
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I do not have the knack of being adored. I know I promised that the next entry would be the second half of the Vegas trip, but fuck that because I just finished reading Sock and right now I have to talk about this so you'll have to wait for Vegas.
I do not have the knack of being adored. I'm married and someone could make a good argument for my husband adoring me, and maybe that's even true but if he does I am bad at it. At being adored. I get funny and shy and angry when he tries, and maybe the simplest answer as to why is because I don't think I deserve it and maybe (Occam suggests) the simplest answer is correct. But just because I'm bad at it doesn't mean I don't want it. I want to be adored. I think all women do, or most of them at any rate. Probably all. I want men (women too, really) to watch me with hungry eyes and to crave my presence. I want to enter a room and gain the focused attention of those who know me.
But like I say, I'm bad at it. Bad at gaining adoration and bad at dealing with it once I've got it. I know people, mostly women but a few men, who have the knack of it. Who gain would-be Galahads and reverent Griseldas at every turn. How do they do it? More to the point, what is it that I don't do?
Is it something simple, like listening--really listening, not that waiting-to-talk crap that's far more common--to people? I don't think it's that, because I listen too. If we focus down the question to cover only the psychosexual, which I don't want to do but at least it's a starting place, I can point to more things that I don't do that these folks who have the trick of it do. Like flirting. Not that I don't flirt, I flirt shamelessly and effortlessly and at almost every opportunity. But it's that almost that gets me. Because with few exceptions when I meet someone who really interests me, someone who intrigues me and makes me want to know them I drop the flirtation almost at once. I'm not even sure why, I just know that the minute I meet someone that I want to learn I go all hail-fellow-well-met and asexual. Mostly because the sex seems to get in the way when you're learning somebody, it demands obfuscations that I don't want to allow. (I think this is how J. and Cyrs got by my defenses, they didn't really interest me at first in that way. So we flirted and giggled and playing pushmepullyou sexual games for a while before I figured out how interesting they actually are.)
Much as I might like to believe that it's a simple question of appearance I'm honest enough to know that's not it. I know a good handful of people less objectively attractive than me who have the...the knack. Skill. Whatever it is.
What is it I'm missing? What is it I haven't got? I'm doubting it's one thing, one magic trick that if I could only learn I could skip blithely through the world, accepting adoration as no more than my due. Still I wish I could figure it out.
There are two people in this world who I am absolutely sure adore me. And like I said, I'm as bad at being adored as I am at inspiring adoration. It makes me squirm and shy away, and being told that someone wants to be 'just like' me gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. After all, who knows better than I how flawed I am, how fucked up and insecure and uncertain?
But that doesn't stop me wanting it. I bet everyone wants it, to one extent or another. I'm a woman, and there's a line I heard somewhere about what all women secretly want is to be 'all things to all men.' That stuck with me, it had the ring of truth to it. I don't know any woman who doesn't secretly or not-so-secretly speculate on what it would be like to be loved by men other than their husbands/boyfriends/girlfriends/what-have-you. I don't know any woman who hasn't fantasized from time to time on having some wonderful man fall desperately in love with her, and sometimes the fantasy's the sweeter for ending it by virtuously sending her dream-worshiper away.
And what, you may well ask, does all this have to do with a novel about murder and sock monkeys? It's because the protagonist was a man with the knack for adoring, easily and honestly. And as I read about this good, smart, funny, truthful man I wished that I could meet him and talk with him and be adored by him. But sitting there in Denny's turning pages I knew that even if he were real and even if we met he wouldn't adore me. No matter how good he was at it, I am not the kind of woman who inspires adoration.
And that's a bitter thing to know.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, July 31st, 2004
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1:29 am - Sin City, Part One
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| Sunday, July 18th, 2004
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11:13 pm - That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French
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I suppose there's a remote chance that some of you haven't seen the article about the mythology that sprung up among the homeless children in Miami--the Blue Lady, Bloody Mary, the angels eating neon light and so on. If so, read it here before continuing?
So earlier today I'm talking to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) gotr_groupie's four year old son G., who (for them as don't know) is mildly autistic and has lived his whole life in California and Nevada. We were playing make-believe and after declaring himself as the cop who locked me in jail G. informed me that I was going to be set free but first I had several tasks to complete.
The first thing I had to do was to sink several boats using a big gun. I obligingly did so, with appropriate bangs and whooshes and gurgles. He seemed pleased with my work.
Then I was informed that God was dead and it was my job to save him. I'm thinking Four years old and a nihilist already?, but set off to run to save God. No no, I was told. I must save him using my water magic. This is when that article first came to mind.
Using my mighty water powers I built a column of swirling sea water that raised all the way to heaven, then bore God down on it and woke him from his deathlike sleep. This was good, I was informed, but now I'd made the devils angry and was going to be trapped in a mirror and could only come out when the cop (G. again) called me by splashing water on the mirror, and even then I had to wear a blue mask.
Rather seriously creeped out now, I became the masked lady in the mirror and answered several questions for the cop, enabling him to go out and save children who were in danger. After that, the game changed to something about ninjas and superheroes, but man...maybe there's something to that idea of a collective conciousness after all.
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| Friday, July 16th, 2004
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1:17 pm - I usually refrain...
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| Thursday, June 3rd, 2004
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3:38 am - Drownin'
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I ain’t waving babe, I’m drowning
Going down in a cold lonely sea
I ain’t waving babe, I’m drowning
So babe quit waving at me
I ain’t waving babe, I’m crying
I’m crying, oh why can’t you see?
I ain’t fooling babe, I ain’t fooling
So babe quit fooling with me
This ain’t singing babe, it’s screaming
I’m screaming that I’m going down
And you’re smiling babe, and you’re waving
Just like you don’t hear a sound
I ain’t waving babe, I’m drowning
Going down right here in front of you
And you’re waving babe, you keep waving
Hey babe, are you drowning too?
Oh.
Hoolie, are you out there? It's been a long time and I've been being a really bad friend but I need you. Hoolie, I'm sorry. Honey, I'm drowning. Please email me.
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| Friday, May 28th, 2004
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4:42 am - And Now for something Completely Different
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Anyone who thinks that pornography should be banned is missing out on a whole lot of the fun in life. Do you have any idea how funny porn (especially softcore) is? Case in point, a conversation I had on a MOO while watching that great classic of the genre, ‘Lord of the G-strings.’ Reproduced here for those who find bad Tolkein/porn puns funny, and because reading this log still makes me giggle.
( Cut-tagged for containing offensive terms like ‘nudie’ and ‘Whorespank’. )
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3:23 am - Either you know or you don't
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Not a big linkblogger, but sometimes you have to make exceptions. Either this means something to you or it doesn't, but it means a hell of a lot to me. Thanks to Loren at Civilization Calls for the heads-up.
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, May 26th, 2004
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7:56 am - Addendum
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Sitting here, feeling like Tommy.See me, feel me, touch me, heal me. And if that's who I am, why do I work so hard to hide?
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(comment on this)
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5:20 am - Sick of You
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How bad? How bad would it have to be to justify how much it hurts? Worse than this, and well you know it. Worse than it was, worse than a few minutes on a suburban street and a few chilly hospital hours, worse than the blandly formal courtroom with everyone being so very civil, no real trial even, just the D.A. and a public defender talking to the judge for a few minutes and you being asked, "Is this what you want?" and nodding, yes sir, feeling like a child in a costume of a suit and heels, pretending to be a grownup.
So stop it already, because it wasn't that bad. Not bad enough for this, not bad enough to still be doing this to yourself, night after night. Not bad enough for the nightmares and the flashing panic that comes on like being hit full in the face with a spotlight and you just freeze and forget how to breathe while you tell yourself that it was a long time ago and that it wasn't even that bad.
It gets way worse, you damned well know it. Some women have it way worse, and they don't do this. Or if they do they have the sense and courtesy to keep their damned mouths shut about it. So shut up already, shut up and stop crying over a few stupid dreams, the occasional little anxiety flare. It could have been worse, and you fucking know it. Bound, gagged, beaten, stabbed, buried, cut, taken, hidden, kept and killed. It happens, happens all the time. It's happened to people you know. And you, ten minutes in a driveway and you go all trembling and big-eyed because you can't sleep.
You don't get that, you didn't earn it. Your time is up, your statute of limitations has run out. It's time to be over it now, time to move on, let it go, knock it off, get the hell over yourself and go back to being normal again. Sleep at night, smile during the day, act like the adult you're supposed to be. No more sitting shivering on the couch at three in the morning, no more flinching at 4:09 when the rain begins. No more stumbling into bed at seven-thirty and crying until the pillow smells like wet feathers because you're afraid of the dreams.
They're just dreams anyway. Who cares about the smell of sweat and beer and tequila and drugstore cologne? Who cares about the texture of a blue dress, the sting of a thumbnail digging into your shoulder? So what if you can hear the sound of your skull against the roof of the car, so what if you wake with the feel of that trail of blood-warm fluid trickling down your thigh? Get over it, you've used up your share of white nights and gritty-eyed dawns.
No more, not for you. No more staring at the laptop screen and hating your friends because they have the sense to sleep and aren't around to keep you company. No more musicals on DVD, the ones you don't even watch but only set to playing because they sound like courage. No more lying to your husband and brother about how badly you're doing and then resenting them because they don't guess. No more games of Freecell, no more sitting and brushing your hair over and over, stroke after stroke until your clean hair goes greasy from it just to have something to do with your hands.
You don't get to grieve any more. You are not entitled. You have not earned it. Pain this large must be bought and you have not paid the price. You are stealing grief from those who earned it. No more.
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| Saturday, May 22nd, 2004
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3:53 pm - Things I Must Remember
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Several times these last few weeks I've thought of something I wanted to write a journal entry about, and then for some reason or another never gotten around to it. So (for my benefit not yours) a quick list of things I want to remember to journal about.- Taking pictures and having pictures taken
- Searching for a wavelength
- Talent vs. Skill
- Heroes
- Alpha, Beta, and Omega
- Softcore porn
- Afrikola
Sorry about turning this into a scratch pad, but if I don't remind myself, these entries will never get written.
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| Monday, May 17th, 2004
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2:30 pm - Really quick
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If there are any of you out there who read this but don't read lakos, check this out? Sometimes these little bits of research make me so very, very happy.
That is all.
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| Tuesday, May 11th, 2004
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1:02 am - Road Trip Report, part 2
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| Friday, May 7th, 2004
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11:23 pm - Road Trip Report, part 1
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Time for the first of what will probably be a two-part series (can it be a series with only two parts?) of entries describing my road trip to San Diego. While I'm making an attempt to explain things and make these entries moderately entertaining (or at least comprehensible) to others, they're really for my benefit and so will probably contain all sorts of odd but unnecessary details meant more to jog my memory later than to educate or elucidate any readers. You have been warned.
( Cut-tagged to prevent spamming of the uninterested. )
More to come as more occurs...
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| Saturday, April 24th, 2004
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1:28 am
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I want to write about it tonight. And, inevitably, I don't want to. I've written and written about it, and each time it bled off a little bit of poison but there's not much left to say. Details I could fill in, I suppose. A few little vignettes that might help explain what it was like. The four yards of dark green velvet that started it all. The time I ran into SS in the Safeway parking lot eight months later. Maybe the night at S.'s house when I finally told him about it and then he drove me fifty miles in the middle of the night so that I could tell B. about it too.
But none of that will really help me any, and pretending that it could help anyone else understand a damn thing is pretty much asinine.
What I don't want to write about is my disgust with myself, how sickening I find it that this still affects me so much. Six and a half years later and still not over it. Shouldn't there be a statute of limitations? I mean, it's such a small story, really. I've heard the horror stories other women tell, how much worse it could have been. It wasn't. As rapes go, it was practically inoffensive. Against the spectrum of could-have-been I mean. The whole thing was over in less than twenty minutes, no pregnancy, no marks that lasted longer than it took for a few bruises to fade. He wasn't my boyfriend, my father, my husband, my friend. Just some asshole who had once dated a friend of mine. (Aside: They're married now. Can you believe that? She married him.)
I want this to be over. I want to be finished with it, to be able to set it behind me where it belongs and no longer view so many aspects of my life through the prism of one twenty-minute tragedy. I want to be healed from this.
How much of my life is altered by this? The tight nervousness in my chest when I walk across a parking lot at night, that was never there before. And the way that sometimes the smell of beer and sweat will hit me like a wall and make me dizzy and panicky, even when I know perfectly well that whoever it is wouldn't hurt a fly. The dreams and attendant insomnia, obviously.
But worse than that, much worse, how much of my life isn't altered by this but I think it is? How many perfectly normal small hurts do I view through the lens of that afternoon and magnify into something worse than they ought to be? I know I do it, blame the rape for overreactions and little fits of pain that really have nothing at all to do with it.
One tiny tragedy in my past and I still can't let it go. It's so small in the grander scheme of things. There are so many good things that ought to tip the scale firmly the other direction. Why should this one thing bear so much more weight? Can't I just let go?
I had a bad thought today. I was driving to pick up P.'s kids from the babysitter, talking vaguely to J. about all this and it crossed my mind that it's like an addiction. A crutch, a lazy way to move through life without taking responsibility for my own actions. Can't sleep? It's not my fault, I was raped. Can't trust other people to see me weak? Nope, rape's fault again. Lie about when I'm upset or angry or hurting? Blame the rape, not me.
Do I do that? The hell of it is that I can't tell. Right now I'm so muddled and sick with it all that I have no objectivity, I cannot see myself from the outside. I hope I don't but dearly fear that I do.
I don't know what to do next.
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| Thursday, April 22nd, 2004
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8:25 pm
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A stupid accident. Kid playing with a soccer goalpost manages to pull it down on top of his head and kills himself. Sort of story that wouldn't even be a blip on my radar, most days. Tiny tragedy, one of those small losses that surround everybody all the time.
Except this kid was a student at my mom's school. One of her favorites. He played double seconds in her steel pan band. He was pretty good at it, too. Wanted to move to six bass, but Mom wasn't sure she wanted to let him because it's easy to find someone who can handle the basses but a good double second player is rare.
And my mom called, I could hear the shaking in her voice and she just said "I need somebody. I need somebody to come down here and be here." And so I sent E., feeling guilty because I didn't go myself but knowing he'd do better than I would, he'd be there more fully than I can be right now. Right now I'm barely managing to be there for J. while his father scares the hell out of us by being so sick, I couldn't be there wholly for Mom right now, not the way she needs.
E.'s friend's grandmother is dying. J.'s grandmother died earlier in the month. J.'s dad isn't dying, he's not, but he's scaring the hell out of all of us. And now this kid who I barely knew, whose name my mom had to tell me but as soon as she did I remembered gold-rimmed glasses and baby-fine black hair spiked up with absurd quantities of gel and the faintest imaginable fuzz on his top lip as he grinned.
And me good for nothing in all of it. Not able to comfort J., or E. and his friend, or even my own mother. Barely able to stand, let alone prop anybody else up for a little while. Failing them. If I can't even be the one who holds everyone else upright, what else am I?Note: I'm not fond of the tone and tenor of these past couple of entries. I'm aware that they are whining, and self-involved, and just the kind of angsty masturbatory writing that generally I try to avoid reading, let alone writing. But I've got to find some way to dig myself out of this hole, and maybe this will work. Or, y'know, not. Second Note: Despite a long tradition of swearing that I'm never going to use my LJ account for anything, I'm going to give a shot at double-posting entries for a while, once in my LiveJournal and once in my Diary-X. Not sure how long this will last, but we'll see how it goes. As of now, I'm not moving over my archives to LiveJournal, because who wants to repost four years worth of entries?
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