Rub a Dub Dub

I have been challenged to write the book that I always wanted to write. Reflecting upon this challenge I've decided that I just need to get into the habit of writing. So I am going to write stories from my life in a serial fashion (though I might jump around a bit).

When I was very young, a toddler, I remember doing a few quirky little things. I remember the smell of food coming from the kitchen, the awareness of my mother being in there. I remember climbing over the edge of the crib I shared with my older brother (who kicked).

One memory in particular stands out. Rub a dub dub, 3 men in a tub.

There was a tile missing on the wall, someone had tried to glue it back on but it didn't stick. The glue was bumpy, it swirled around like railroad tracks. The wall behind it was black, like a tunnel that something could come out of at any moment. We were all sitting in the bath covered in bubbles. I piled some on top of my head and Daniel laughed. A thought came to mind of a nursery rhyme I had heard, "Rub a Dub, Dub, 3 Men in a tub." "That's us!" I thought (Daniel, Jono and I) and inspired by the poem I thought that if I could find a boat to float in then that would be even better. So I climbed over the slippery ledge of the tub and snuck into the kitchen, there was a bucket under the sink in there that I knew I would be able to float in. I grabbed it and furtively snuck back to the bathroom. I placed the bucket into the tub, it was floating! Encouraged by this I tried to hop in, and it wiggled around so much I couldn't do it. So I filled it with a bit of water and tried again. This time I was successful! I was so proud of myself, 3 men in a tub and I in my bucket. Of course my Dad had to get a picture of it. I had the biggest smile on my face. :)

~Annie

Some thoughts on my relationships

All of my relationships have been quite different from each other, yet some similar themes have played out in all of them. Passion and betrayal. Attraction and disgust. On the one hand my heart has been full of the joy of discovering another person, my eyes have gazed beyond the ordinary and seen through to the soul of my lovers. At least I fancied that I could see into the depths of their souls. I love this image that I build up of my lovers and when in-congruence occurs between my belief and reality it is painful. There are aspects of all those who I have loved that I still love.

I think who I have loved reveals a lot about me. I love the flawed hero. I've never been into jocks, they think way too much of themselves and I always knew that they wouldn't really be able to relate to me. I was trapped in a way by my first-husband because I was so naive and lonely. Yes I admired his strength, but ultimately I felt alienated and alone when we were together because we had so little in common. I remember once he whisked us (me and the kids) off on a spontaneous family fishing trip. For some reason the feeling of alienation had been growing and I felt loneliness seeping into my heart and despair as I thought of the incongruity between how I felt and how I thought I ought to feel at being whisked away to spend time together as a family. I was, in a way, justified in my anxiety. I have trouble with spontaneity, especially when it involves the kids. I like to feel that I am prepared to take care of their hunger and their thirst. I was a bit angry and sullen, and forlorn. He had taken the kids down to the lakeside, the day was darkening. I sat in the Yukon with a book contemplating my feelings, contemplating the scene, I didn't understand at that time what made me feel as I did, I do now.

Sometimes I worry that I will never find the love that I am really hoping for. Only time will tell...

SG

Some thoughts on writing

It seems that thoughts filter through the mind and leave like the wind, so it can be very difficult to capture the bits and pieces that are floating in and out of the conscious mind. It is interesting how much information is easily at our fingertips about the process of writing and yet it is still a somewhat elusive topic.

I'm going to force myself to write something now. :)

Belief or the truth?

It looks like the trend these days is an open, honest dialogue about one's shortcomings, the "truth" about one's life.  My thoughts "Great! I can do that! I've got lots of shortcomings." Then I start thinking about how morose I can start to sound when I get down to listing my true thoughts and feelings.

There's a lot of truthful tidbits that I could go into; like how I examine every picture of myself closely to try and reconcile that printed picture with the image that I see staring out from the other side. I scrutinize my face, my expression, my body, my hair and most of the time I want to toss away the picture because it seems to so perfectly display all that I dislike about myself.

We are a species that edits the truth. We edit what we see in the mirror, our thoughts, emotions, the story that we tell ourselves and the story that we tell others.

I'm sorry but that is the truth. It is quite socially acceptable to do all of this editing, in fact we've been taught to do it. It's something like editing a paper for school to present a clear picture of what we want to say, but something happens to us somewhere in all of that editing.

The truth gets lost, it gets obscured, and it becomes difficult to say what is the truth and what is not.

So back to today's theme of truth telling. I've been going to therapy with my husband, this is supposed to be a good thing, I'm hoping it will be, but the past couple of Friday mornings (bright and early at 7:30 A.M.) my illusions about my relationship are being tested. First of all is the illusion that I'm not doing anything wrong. Apparently I am. I have an Ex-Husband, he was abusive in many ways one of the most destructive was the way he would interfere with my relationships with other men. He did this work in a very subtle way, you see I thought that my interactions with him were about our kids. But really what was happening was that he made other men feel less important to me. How? Well, I didn't want to hide anything from my sweetheart so when he called I would talk to him. I was cringing inside, trying to be civil and trying to get off of the phone as quickly as possible. Somehow though what was conveyed was that I wanted to talk to my Ex.

Well, I did and I didn't. I wanted to talk about our kids. It's hard to have a conversation with your new love about the children you had with your old love. They haven't had the same kind of experience with your kids and they know them differently than you do. So, I missed being able to laugh at my kids idiosyncrasies with my Ex. But that was about it, he drove me crazy (I say this in the past tense because he currently resides in jail). He was manipulative, made me think of myself as a bad mother, made me question my choices. He was always trying to get me to feel sorry for him (I have been more annoyed about this than anything for a long time). He threatened me and my new husband, indirectly he threatened to do things that would make the kids sad.

Yet from all of this I thought I was handling things pretty well, that is until my husband packed up and left me. How did things come to that? Poor communication I suppose, but also I think my husband was seeing a different version of the truth than I was.

Well, I'm out of time for now, I will write more on this later. For now, I just want to say that your truth is different from other peoples truths.

I don't believe in the truth. I believe in belief.

SG

Hopeless Hopes

I'm always a bit intimidated by the top of this blog screen, so open for interpretation, blank. Sometimes I feel that my mind is like that, devoid of meaningful thought. I guess that I just don't know what to want out of this life. I wanted a house with a yard, a little garden, perhaps a stream, I wanted an "eternal family", I wanted a priesthood holder. I thought these are the things that will bring happiness, church and family. I am stuck in a kind of miasma, I had to go look up that word to see if it fit... I guess it sort of does "bad air causing disease... or a specious cause of chronic disease." Well if not thriving in these conditions then yes, I suppose the word does fit. I suppose part of the problem is that I've hoped for too much, I've felt that if I worked hard enough then I could have what I wanted. I felt that my asks were small, yet now it seems as if I asked too much.

SG

To the person who I call a friend...

To the undeniable, undefinable person who is my friend.

I know that I abandoned you, tried to maintain some tentative connection only to cut that off because it's too hard for me to try and explain why I wanted to keep in touch.

I'm trying to gather up the pieces of my integrity that I've broken off by making compromises.

How can I on the one hand say that I feel no guilt about staying in touch with you and yet on the other hand say that I have nothing to feel guilty about, when I am asked.

I'm trying to prove that I am not the one hiding things in my relationship. That I've been open and honest (and I have been) telling all... but not sure of what that means.

Every single day I feel the support that you gave me, it's hard not to compare your friendship with others.

I think that I will still recall all that you've done for me when I am old and grey. Or if I am alone again despite trying as hard as I can... because relationships are hard and things don't always work out.

Don't think I will ever forget you... my undeniable, undefinable friend.

SG

Inspiration from the poem "Failing and Flying" By Jack Gilbert

Icarus

Soared upon wax wings
towards immortality,
towards the sun.

Wings dripping away
he fell

The implication is of his foolishness
and yet he flew.

Inspiration from the poem "Failing and Flying" By Jack Gilbert

"Do you have the courage to bring forth this work, the treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes." ~Jack Gilbert related by Elizabeth Gilbert

No Title, Just a few Frustrations

I see a picture, a small note, on my husbands FB wall from his trip to Mexico and suddenly it hits me. The frustration over being left behind, the jealousy, confusion over what that means. Why couldn't he wait for 1 month until I was out of school? We would have gone together, those would be our memories. Instead I feel the exclusion, it's another piece of his life that he didn't want to share with me. I'm trying really hard to be understanding, I said I was OK with him going... but the fact remains that he left me again and I don't know why.

SG

My American Dream

My American dream is to have a beautiful little home, where I can be the Mom and you can be the Dad. We have kids and they are happy, we tell them what to do and they might complain but they listen because I am the Mom and you are the Dad and we know what we are talking about because we are the parents.

We go to work, do our job then come home to our loving little family in our beautiful little home. We have our hobbies, we take vacations, and everyone has a good time. We have babies together, there is so much love.

There's no room for uncertainty here. It's all laid out like a nice pattern. There's this wholesomeness, idealness about this vision and it doesn't seem unreasonable. I wanted my family to be like this when I was growing up. I wanted everything to be clean and tidy and everyone to fill their respective roles, help Mom out with the cleaning, help Dad out with the yard work. Keep things tidy. That's the American dream, a nice tidy well run family. That is what I have been trying to create for so, so long.

It's not working. Dad goes to work, putters about the garden or sits at the computer or TV and gets all worked up about politics. Mom does her job, she does all of her jobs, but she looks exhausted. She's got too much on her plate. I've not done my part to alleviate her burdens, I went back to school and let my kids spend endless hours at Grandmas playing video games. It's all a mess, our family home, our relationships. I tell my kids, clean your room, help me out, and it's not an easy thing to get them to do it.

Everything is not neat and tidy. It's messy. Life is messy. Everything is not certain.

It's just this little picturesque dream in my mind. This pesky dream. I see other families, I know they aren't perfect, but tell that to my little envious heart.

I know it's silly but I want more of my American dream and a lot less of the uncertainty.

SG

Thoughts on Politics

When I learned about the history of Hitler and his rise to power, I asked the question "why didn't the German people stop him?" 

We've heard that he was charismatic, that the German people had gone through hard times. He came into power with this Anti-Semitic rhetoric and that was a focus for all of the frustration that people had felt. 

I said to myself, I would not be one of those people standing in the streets with my hand raised to the sky praising Hitler. 

Now, I'm not saying that I can predict how I might have acted if I had grown up in the circumstances that the German people did. All I can say is that now, right now I can choose to not follow along the party line. I know all about the futility of voting for a third party candidate, that doing so might take votes away from the lesser of two evils, but in this election there is no lesser of two evils. Both of the candidates are what I consider to be the vilest of scum that was dragged up from the bottoms of pond. 

So I am voting for a third party canidate, Gary Johnson. Who is this guy, you know what I don't know a whole ton about him, but from what I have seen on the internet about him he is a decent guy, that is who I want in the White House.

SG

Learning to Deal with Loneliness

Hello Internet Diary,

Let's talk for a moment about fallibility, the mistakes that we make throughout life and sometimes continue to make even when we know the consequences and dislike the consequences.

For instance, I know that milk is devilish to my intestines (still not positive about raw milk but that's for a future exploratory post). Even though I know it's bad for me I sometimes get to a point where I figure that enough time has passed that things will be different if I eat products with milk in them or drink products with milk in them. Especially yogurt, it just sounds so wholesome and wonderful that I feel like I should be OK consuming milk products that have been fermented. So I start small, a bit of cheese, then a bit more, some yogurt... granted it does seem to be OK in small doses but when I fully embrace milk products again at some point in the consumption of them I've crossed the line and they mess with me. It's not good.

So now having established that I sometimes do a bit of self delusion this is what is really on my mind. Doing S#*t that we know is wrong but think it will be OK this time around. I think we all know when we're starting down that road, for me it starts from some trigger... my biggest trigger is loneliness. I know that I have put off developing close friendships because I have been focusing on school (something I've been focusing on for most of my life and higher Ed for almost 2 decades!)

23 years from 1983 - 2006 '83 (Head Start), '84 - '90 Elementary, '90 - '93 Jr. High, '93 - '97 High School '96 - '06 College (off and on)

8 Year break from May 2006 - July 2014

1 year 11 months 21 days from 8/1/2014 (I started my MBA in August 2014) to now.

That means that I have been in school for roughly 25 of my 37 years.

I guess I need to learn how to make friends, even when I am busy.

Problem is that I really need to discuss things with people to form deep relationships, that's my preference, and modern life really doesn't accommodate that.

My closest relationships are with my family and even then I've distanced myself from them to study. The absolute closest relationships that I have formed have been with the men that I've loved. I tend to want to hang on to those relationships, I value them. Unfortunately moving on and forming a strong relationship with a new man means that I need to give up those prior relationships. Let all of those close relationships go.

So, if my current relationship is difficult and I don't feel the closeness that I need I tend to feel alone. I've made mistakes in past relationships and I have learned from them. I should have learned from all of the life that I've lived, right!? I have. But learning to stay with the feelings of lonesomeness and sadness without acting out in negative ways has been trying. I tend to stay up too late, not sleep well and wake up late w/o feeling refreshed. I tend to try and distract myself by watching too much TV (instead of studying or exercising like I should) and my mind circles around in frustration.

I guess it's a part of life, learning to deal with loneliness, but I sure hate it.

~SG

Weird Interests

On my way to work I noticed a swarm of birds on the side of one of the buildings in our condo complex. The type of birds that build mud dobber nests, whatever they might be. It was so strange to see them all hanging on to the side of the building like that. I stopped to take a picture but they all flew away before I could.

There are weird little things like that going on all the time. Like the potato bug infestation in the parking lot of Adobe, why are they there? All crawling around, blending into the blacktop. They are in the building on the ground floor as well.

Have you ever built a Rube Goldberg machine? I think they are so much fun to design and build, so time consuming but so satisfying. I used to build things like that, I created a gumball machine out of cardboard and car tracks, a magic box out of a refrigerator box, I created a pulley system between my window and the neighbor and we used to pass things back and forth in a basket. So interesting, you can learn a lot about people by what they share.

I have some books at my desk at work, SQL, Deep Nutrition, Investing for Beginners, an Archie Comic book and the book "Women Who Run With the Wolves." 

What do those books say about me?

I shall leave it to you to sort that out... ;)

Little Lovely Thoughts

My lovely friends Mandi and Sorina stopped by to give me a birthday present today, I am so glad that they still work here at Adobe because even with working in the same building I hardly see them. What a sad state of things, that work and school have so much more draw on my time than building lasting friendships.

I want to be connected with other people, through thought and speech and time. But I am building up these skills for work and that doesn't seem to leave me time for what I want.

There are so many interesting things to think about, to talk about. I think that's why I loved my English and Philosophy classes when I was doing my undergrad. At least I've got some things planned for after I graduate, I'm going to hang out with my cousin tomorrow then perhaps take my daughter to the movies. Graduation on August 13th, then lunch with my friends the Tuesday after. Then we have planned a graduation party, nothing too wild. ;)

SG

Searching for happiness... Body issues

So... I have been thinking about body issues. I guess because my damn body seems to get fat or skinny of it's own accord. A couple of months ago (before I started taking Lialda to control my Ulcerative colitis) I had dropped down to near 145 which is a pretty good weight for me. Then I started the medicine, my hormones went out of whack (I don't know if it's correlated) and I started gaining weight. Doctor said that's a good thing, right? Means my gut is healing and I'm absorbing my nutrients. Yes... Good is no more bleeding, no not good that I'm gaining weight. So bleh, suddenly I am back in my chubby jeans. Then again... It's not like I'm really fat. I'm a bit chubby. You know what? My body reminds me of paintings of the ideal pre-modern woman. I'm not even going to pretend to know what century Michelangelo painted in. But yeah... Paintings from his time. I saw a picture of a bunch of ladies standing naked before the RNC holding up mirrors in a symbolic gesture. Set up by a photographer. Every one of those ladies bodies were different. Even skinny bodies didn't look like they were "supposed to". So... Why can't I just live, self confident... Happy? I try... But sometimes I hate on myself.

Which brings me to think about what the f I am doing with my life. I want to know how to do so many things... Dirty little secret... It's because I want to feel competent. I want respect.

Don't get me wrong. I recognize these body issues, I recognize why I want to know things and what is motivating me... I'm proud of myself for working so hard on improving my life.

But if I could do anything I wanted. I would read, paint... Dance. I would have a house to build stuff in. A studio to sing my heart out. I would cook.  I'm trying to do that kind of stuff anyway... I will do more of it after school is finished. And I will get in shape.

But for now I am limping along (literally, my knees hurt) and I will keep searching for happiness.

SG

Almost Done! Almost done!

I have something like 45 days left of school! Hallelujah!

It is going to be a big relief. For some reason though I've always found myself feeling ambivalent when I've finished these types of long schooling adventures. I wonder if I learned enough, I worry that I will be expected to know a lot more than I do.

In this case... I've been so much behind through the whole thing that I feel quite a bit of ambivalence.

No matter, it's almost over!

At the moment I've got a migraine. I dropped by Sprouts after work and bought chocolate. I feel it's a valid solution. The store was packed (never shop at Sprouts on a Thursday... They give a student discount so it's always packed on Thursday)

It doesn't help that I had weird dreams last night.

Well that is it for this exciting update. More later. TTYL

Strawberry Girl 

Vivid Lion Dream

So last night I had an incredibly vivid dream about lions. First a female lion was chasing me and I was climbing up through some building to try and get away from her. Then I realized that her partner was out there too. I was with other people and I felt like I needed to keep them safe. We pass through this dark hallway and encounter the female lion on the other side. At first I am sure we were dead, but then she lays down and seems to not be a threat anymore. But she warns us that the male is still out there. It was so vivid. I told Panda about it and he told me I was murmuring in my sleep. Then I get to work and load up K's videos, 2 lions, 1 licking his paws after a bloody meal, the other a female stalking from side to side.

Growing Up

Growing up

As a society we fear in a way the grown-up world. It is a place of responsibility, sometimes a place of drudgery and pain. We live in denial thinking that childhood, naivety and ignorance is the ideal state.

Yet childhood is often not what we make it out to be, even in this age where we idealize childhood there are children who suffer from set-backs, a loss of home and family, and a loss of trust.

What then is the ideal state? I think that it is facing reality head on. Recognizing that life isn't all sunshine and lolly pops. I think the ideal state takes into account our failings as well as the failings of others and accepts them as a part of life. I think it's ideal when we recognize the need to take care of ourselves and others. That even when you've failed or when others have failed you, that there are opportunities for good in that failure.

Sometimes discretion is better than openness. Sometimes anger is a good thing, especially when not showing anger makes you seem indecisive and/or weak.

That's a revelation that has been hard for me to learn, that anger can be a good thing. So often I've subverted my anger and tried to admit faults when I've been confronted. This recently has made me seem dishonest when I was trying to be completely honest. This is where discretion should come in and make us think about what the impact of our words will be and to decide what is really relevant to the current situation.

Adulthood, I think, should be a time when we are mastering the intricacies of human behavior, basically learning wisdom. That is something that the world needs a bit more of.

~SG