sandpiper912

I pride myself on being reasonable. I work very hard to understand where other people are coming from, so that I am kind rather than demanding, self aware rather than self absorbed.

Lately this has gotten me exactly...nothing and nowhere. Or, at least it feels that way.

So I decided I would try to be unreasonable, demanding and self absorbed.

Epic Fail. I've forgotten how to do that.

Which really sucks. :(

My son's father's sister has pancreatic cancer, stage 4. Which means there is nothing doctors can do other than make her comfortable until her death. They suggested chemotherapy, but they didn't press the subject.

Having a death goddess as a deity of choice means death is not frightful to me. So I forget that other people are frightened by that final passage.

I sat in the hospital room after her surgery, with some of her friends and other relatives, when the doctors were telling her what she has and what they could do to help. I watched as all the people fell into denial. I listened to the chatter after the doctors left. There was talk of a clinical trial cures over in one corner, the power of positive thinking in another corner, the miracle of prayer in a third.

A social worker came in to talk to her about advanced directives, living wills and DNRs, and she was shooed out by all the "well meaning" friends and relatives.

I was so frustrated by level of fear and delusional thinking, I left the room. And I took a deep breath and another. And I walked back in and I held my tongue and I was gently supportive. Because I want what's best for this gentle, compassionate, independent woman.

Don't get me wrong, I don't discount the possibility of a miracle. But none of us make it out alive, and there are some practical things that need to be done. And done soon.

I haven't been getting enough sleep lately.

I have a conflicted relationship with sleep.

I get excited about life and projects and relationships and I don't want to go to sleep.

Or I go through horrific nightmare cycles when sleeping is my enemy rather than my friend.

Or I am called to do a lot of work in dream time by my deities of choice, ancestors or local wights.

All of these things have been in play in the last month. And despite my inhuman constitution, my lack of rest is catching up to me.

So, I must get more sleep.

So, the first promising start of a relationship I've had with a woman went down in flames this week.

It seems that she's fallen madly in love with a "straight but exploring" girl who happens to be dating her live-in boyfriend. And she's decided she only has room for one FF relationship right now.

I always try to look at the positive, so I'm glad this situation came up now rather than farther in when I more attached. But darn it to heck, I really liked this one.

I have to say, my self-esteem has taken a hit on this one. I think I'm going to be a bit less cheerful for awhile.

I don't usually have a plan, I have a way.

I'm a "Well, lets see how things go, and what happens and adjust from there" sort of person. I call it open to the moment. My more organized friends and relatives are inclined to call that something else. (shrug)

I have so many bits of my awareness in other realities other than my mundane one, that planning becomes an annoyance of ignoring one thing to do another.

However, I have planned out an entire year of lessons for my energy workshop group. I have a syllabus and a reading list and worksheets. It's a bit scary how organized I am for this.

I was singing with my sister, "One" by Three Dog Night.

When I was a little girl, my mother was the choir director for our church. We were compelled to sing at the drop of a hat to prove how good my mother was at her passion. Unfortunately, while my voice is pleasant enough, I do not have the range, timing or skill to match my mother's compulsive need to prove she had talent. Or to match my sister's amazing talent.

After every impromptu performance, I would get a beating, for performing poorly on purpose so that my mother would look bad. I don't think it ever crossed her mind I just wasn't that talented. The number of impromptu performances increased during the holiday season.


At least today I woke up before the beating part. And the first nightmare waited until after Thanksgiving. So good thing there.

The sad/sick part? I miss singing with my sister.

Some of my friends have gotten more fitness conscious lately. This is a good thing, and good for their health, and I wish them all the success necessary for them to feel good about themselves.

But dieting and exercise are both very painful subjects for me. They bring up a welter of judgement and pain that have nothing to do with real time conversations or my friends, who are great people.

My mother was a diet freak.
She was on every diet known to Western civilization. And if she was on a diet, we were on a diet too. This encouraged me to binge eat when at my grandmother's, who, I sometimes think, didn't know the meaning of diet. She knew the meaning of exercise, exercise was work. She worked at physically demanding tasks that in all my years of cleaning houses I never matched.

When I turned 13, my mother put me on a starvation diet cause I was "too fat". From 13 to 17, I was eating crackers, grapefruit and carrots at home, and running 7-10 miles a day. I was in cross country,track, volleyball and basketball. With all of that, I still never got under 160 lbs. And by the standards of the day(before widespread use of the BMI) I was still overweight.

I looked like a skeleton. Because I'm big. 5'9" with 9" wrists. No matter how much I dieted or exercised, I wasn't going to look like Kate Moss. I wasn't going to look like a thin person. And the irony is, my mother, who shares my same size and build, was never going to look like one either.

My father came for Christmas the winter I was 17(my parents divorced when I was 9), and asked me WTH I thought I was trying to do to myself, and WTH my mother, who was supposed to be caring for me, didn't notice I looked like death on toast.(That's a story for another time).

My father put me in therapy. Then the day I turned 18, February 4th, 1985, I moved out of my mother's house.

In my process of getting healthy and comfortable in my own skin, I have tried every diet known to the Western world. I have been in weight loss studies, behavior modification studies, and eating disorder therapy.
Despite all of that, my weight hasn't changed that much. I weigh between 250 and 275. Which by modern standards is morbidly obese.

So I try to eat healthy without feeling deprived of the things I really enjoy. I do yoga every day and since I don't have a driver's license, walk at least a mile every day. I press on through the world like the wider culture's fixation on body image doesn't matter. I press on through the world like the assumption that if you don't look a certain way you must be lazy or stupid or uncaring, some stereotypical couch potato that eats bon-bons and watches soap operas, isn't me and doesn't affect me.

But sometimes that level of personal pain and societal scorn is hard for me to ignore.

So if I'm not as excited by your excitement about meeting your fitness goals, or I get really quiet during the conversation, it's not you. It's me. Once my reality check has finished processing, I will be excited for you.

Okay, okay, okay, so I've been waiting to see this movie since I heard about it last year.

I am a major fan of zombie movies,evil Nazi movies and Scandinavian horror movies, and this was all of those!

When I heard about it, I thought it would be a spoof, you know "What lurks in the mountains? Skiing Nazi zombies!"
But it was actually a pretty serious film.

It has the typical slasher movie setup, a group of attractive young people(medical students in this case, which becomes important later) go to some secluded place to drink and have sex. Along the way, they hear the story of the local bogeyman(in this case delivered by the weirdest and most obnoxious bit character) and then mayhem ensues. Pretty typical up to this point.
However, then it diverges from the formula in a couple of significant ways.

The gore factor is VERY high. It makes all those Friday the 13ths and Nightmare on Elm Streets look like G rated movies. Lots of blood with realistic blood spatter, as well as several shots of ripping and eating, including intestinal ripping and eating, with one bit where a character's insides get stuck on a tree and unwind in a disturbing fashion.

The medical students are amazingly tough.
One of my biggest complaints about slasher movies in general is that the victims are extremely fragile.
Not these kids. There is one scene where one of the students gets bitten badly(with much blood gushing) in the neck, and he sews it up himself with a fishhook. And that's just one example in an example rich environment.

This is a good film. Better than a lot of American zombie movies. I think I love Scandinavian horror movies more and more all the time.

Viewing suggestion:DVD(only because that's the only way I know of to see it)

So I went to go see the Crazies last night.
Cons
It wasn't successful as a horror movie, they let the cat out of the bag very early in the film, so I spent the rest waiting to see when the main characters would die.
There were some good startle/jump moments, but most of the best ones were "friendly fire" startles.
Pros
There were some great jokes, not the kind of one liners you could pull out and say over and over again until you annoyed your friends into homicide, but they were laugh out loud funny.
Also a couple of bizarre romantic moments, I thought only Gothic poets could put love and death in the same sentence and make it romantic, but they did in this movie.
I've liked Timothy Olyphant since Deadwood and Radha Mitchell since Pitch Black, so I was pleased with the main characters. George Romero was the executive producer, and while I had never heard of the writers or the director, the story was a solid entry in the Cloverfield genre of horror.
And while they let what was going on in Ogden Marsh be explained relatively quickly, they did have some story surprises in the later parts of the film. And the characters(along with the audience) didn't understand every thing about the mechanism that drove the town crazy, which was cool.

All in all, not too bad
Viewing suggestion: DVD or matinee

My sister has been hectoring me on the phone about not staying in touch with her. It's been a running theme since before Yule.
So I come back with, "Well, it's not like you call me or email me or write me, except to tell me what a deficent communicator I am."
And she says, "I email you all the time!"
No, she doesn't, at least not to my mind.
My sister is queen of the Fwd:
Every message/electronic chain letter about friendship, or love or God(in the monetheistic sense) or stupid jokes that have been circulating on the internet like a rotten turds in the toilet bowl, these are the emails she emails me "all the time".
And she doesn't email me anything else. No weekly updates on how things are going with her and her children. Not even a line at the beginning ot the Fwd:  to say, "Hey, I thought this was funny/moving/touching/beautiful and wanted to share it with you"

To be clear,I don't hate Fwd: from my friends. Because my friends know
A)what I think is funny/moving/touching/beautiful/ important
B) how to communicate/write/call/Pony Frigging Express without Fwd: someone else's thoughts and feelings.

Electronic chain letters are not communication. Not all by themselves.