friday fiver

...on the same friday, no less! i have clearwaste, the best application of ALL TIME, to thank. oh and thanks wen. :-)

Five games you played as a kid.
Hide and seek. You know, you count, close your eyes, and then run around for a half hour chasing each other.

mad libs. have spent oodles of time playing it in the car. i still looooooooove this game. and i am sure it taught me, at least in part, my love of all things wordy. favorite moment is when our family actually made up a star trek mad lib story and a character was ordered to "lower your shields or we'll squat on your sheep".

checkers. because i always won, duh. being the older sister has its advantages.

backwards! man, i just remembered this after thinking, what else did i play? my sister and i, for obvious reasons, called it "sdrawkcab". excellent for budding word nerds.

can't stop. i had so much fun remembering the last one that i thought some more, and remembered this. it looks dumb but for some reason was strangely compelling. i mean, we couldn't. stop.


Five people you know (or knew) and the food you associate with them.
mom. i'll go with coffee cake, but since she's my mom, there are so many potential foods. she makes the best damn coffee cake ever.

min. lasagna. and this is the delectable, 30-cheese lasagna that she made for me during our first year. ain't ever gonna live that one down.

liz. i'm going to pick toffee crack, since she was such a demon for introducing it to me.

my sis. macNcheese, because we shared it so often while watching perry mason and andy griffith

my dad. potato scrambles. he makes super ones with lots of veggies and spices.


Five things you don't own/have on hand that most people probably do.
a real credit card. only got a debit card (and that's enough, thanks).

sleeping bag. want to get one tho. i also want:

a tent. i want to go camping again sometime.

gym membership. i mean, if you're not going to go, why bother?

i don't know, makeup? at least for girls and drag queens this is common i'd imagine.


Five pet peeves.
spelling errors. can i have that count more than once?

grammar errors. but i'm willing to let some things slide because, well, i like to play with words.

inefficiency.

stupidity. too bad i'm good at that. :-p

republican presidents. ok i was running out of peeves, but that's a good one, no?


Five people who taught you important things (you need not know them).
parents. again stealing from wen, but that's too good, especially since it counts for 2.

grandma m.

min.

the instructor of my bible history class at belmont. sorry i don't remember your name, guy, but i remember your dog's name was erasmus! kind of hard to forget that.


And 5 people (or a higher multiple of 5) that you're tagging for this meme:
That assumes I have 5 readers…hmmm…
Monk/Cheddah
Snowflake
Dork/Amberger Hamburger
Princess (and that counts for two)

it's a good thing

i have this ritual of getting up each morning (at least weekdays) and getting on here to ye olde internet. reading my mail, blogs. because i'll tell you what, it gives me perspective. it lets me know i am not alone in my desperation, that there really is more to this world than My Little World, and if nothing else, helps me shake off my dreamtime.

lately the dreamtime has not been so good to me. it has been full of disturbing images both grotesque and lovely.

oh and if i am lucky, i get a few funny emails too, to give me a giggle.

anyway the dreams - so i get up thinking i should blog about the annoying/beautiful/whatever tricks my mind has played on me during the night, and by the end of my Internet browsing, most of that has been pushed aside. and in my judgment, this is all for the best. methinks i muse too much, sometimes.

hello out there

yes i am still alive and breathing. some of the breathing has been a bit labored lately because i've been fighting off a bizarre throat infection/flu, the treatment of which has induced extreme dizziness and (as mentioned previously) occasional difficulty in breathing. woo. but today is the last day for Stupid Medication. has made it really fun trying to finish a complicated work project i've had. what? file doesn't validate with tons of garbage characters in it? the nerve!

in other news things have been really difficult at home the last few weeks. they are a bit better now, but that's as random as anything else. which is to say:

• min has been pretty ill (more than normal) the last month or so
  
• because of that she's taken more meds, including some we agreed she wouldn't take anymore because they made her too wacky
  
• apparently she also took them because she was so depressed about us and just wanted to sleep and not feel as much emotional OR physical pain

in other words it was psuedo-suicide (albeit temporary, and i got to deal with the side effects, which i will not elaborate on here for (hah) brevity). min would probably not like i'm saying all this, but it's the truth and she told me before to be brutally honest in here. this actually is not brutal truth, but it is sharing more than before. anyway, i am very happy to report she is seeing her own therapist today. hopefully that goes well.

but the rest... i don't know what to do about all this. i'm stuck. i'm still pissed that she took these meds, particularly since this was the 4th time to do so (post-promise of never taking them again).

also i hate that she felt things were going so badly that she felt the need to do this. i had been under the impression that things were going alright. we were working on things, communicating a bit better. i don't know if she was just despairing that we would never be able to go back to a "happily" monogamous relationship or if it was more than that. i do know that topic causes her great despair. to which i can only say/have said: maybe we can get there. it's a goal we're working toward, because i love you and you come first in my life.

but apparently that is not enough to keep her from doing stuff like this. if anyone has ideas on how to deal with this situation, lay it on me. i want to be loving and supportive but also not get walked all over. things have been better the last week (she stopped those meds about a week ago) but to be honest i don't trust this won't happen again.

in other drama, sunday i saw AG. i'm going to leave it at that for details but let's just say that it threw me for a loop in a way i did not expect. even now i'm getting teary just thinking about it. sheesh! pathetic. anyway, i didn't think i was over her...god no. but, maybe 75% over? so sunday's intense reaction stunned me.

there was some additional AG heartwrenching a few weeks ago, at which point (several days later) i realized that tho excruiciating, this was good because it was helping me move on. so, la de da, i'm being good and not talking to her, time passes... i'm good, yeah?

yeah no. seeing her sunday completely fucked me up again. i've been blown away by how much she's gotten under my skin. but hopefully a difference this time is: i really REALLY believe we are through, that we are under no circumstances ever going to happen. even if min and i go all kinds of crazy polywhatever, i'm never hooking up with AG. that's just the way it is.

not that she doesn't find me charming in a way, but *we* are just not in the stars. and i hate it. but i'm trying to move on.

oh and meantime be a good wife to the woman who DOES love me dearly. bet you can guess how i'm doing on that.

so much for not whining. wen, you should've never encouraged me. ;-p but you can see why i've needed to take a break for a bit.

it's (almost) all greek to me

i had an unexpected but quite pleasant thing happen this afternoon. i sat down preparing to do some freelance work - writing even! - and got my monthly popup reminder to check my website stats. usually i ignore that but today being a lazy - or if i want to feel writerly, languid - day, i went ahead.

one thing the webstats show is how people got to my site. lo and behold one of the referrer entries was for a greek page on lesbian writers, run by the greek sapphites.

it seems especially trippy because for the most part, i don't think of myself as a Lesbian Writer, or even a writer. in the past, maybe. which i guess is apropos since the actual Lesbian Writing i did was in 1998.

but still...apparently even the lesbian *internet* is small. wow.

the confluence of love

means that you can get a 99% and still not pass the test. because that 1%, when woven in at compilation time, means the difference between bliss and agony.

at least this is how it seems to me.

on a related note: i am going to try to stop whining so much (internally and externally). i don't get to have what i want. so what? most people don't. it sucks but that's just the way it is. i'm hoping that, with work at improving what i can, eventually i can not give a * about the rest, and be content with what i have. the hunger for the impossible is killing me, and there's just no point in that.

and in completely different news: our neighbor penny seems to have gone a smidge bananas. lots of yelling and irrationality yesterday. since we share the same (large) lot, we have to see her all the time and things are tense now...yuck. i hope today she woke up a little saner.

not concentrating & what to do about it

so i can't talk about issue A. maybe someday. technically it has nothing to do with me, but it's still killing me inside.

issue B - turned out for the most part to be a misunderstanding, thankfully. not that that made the actual argument any easier. let's just say that min and i realized that if we're starting to fight on IM, to stop. and wait to finish until we can talk on phone or in person. it's just too easy to misunderstand.

rocket science eh? i know.

issue C is my parents. in short, things are going absolutely horribly for them up in oregon. they are probably going move back to arizona, but that in itself will take a lot of finagling. i can't help them anymore (since we don't have min's disability income), which depending on how you look at it, could be good or bad. i have a history of helping them too much. as do many other peoples. they sure raised me to be a good little codependent.

in any case, all i can do is fret. i am trying not to, but they ARE my parents. so it sucks.

so what to do about A/B/C? the answer is obvious: distract yourself. i already had plans to go roller skating tonight, and the timing couldn't have been better. i skated for almost two hours straight (barring a couple water stops, and 2 falling-down stops). thus, it is only now, 2 hours later, that i'm finally not feeling like jello.

it felt really good to be out there. i hadn't skated since i was oh, 13? but i used to skate like a bandit. it took me a while to feel comfortable enough to do crossovers. and they still sucked, but i was happy i got that far. i was enjoying the music so much that even though i knew i needed to stop, when def leppard came on, i just couldn't leave the floor. 3/4 thru the song tho, i had to give up. pouring tons of sugar on me would not have helped one iota, but it was fun to have the flasback.

i hope that today(!) is better than yesterday, emotionally and learning-wise (class was soooo boring, but taught by this guy's cousin so i was periodically amused). ok, off to sleep.

i can't concentrate

because i'm really just having the best day ever. crying in the bathroom over issue A? arguing over IM about issue B? fretting about issue C?

love. it.

another weekend update

believe it or not, we went out TWO, count 'em, TWO days in a row this weekend. and that second day of adventuring took us once again to san leandro and to another yard sale we heard about on ba-s.

sunday's, i have to say, was incredibly lame compared to saturday. for the record, there were very few cheap deals overall, an embarrasing amount of baseball cards, the "SEALED BUNDLE" of pride parade programs was not sealed (and sitting on the grass), and finally, the "MUCH, MUCH MORE!", i believe, consisted of 2 of the dykes yelling randomly at the top of their lungs.

that said, we did get a billion printer-friendly cd labels (and bonus cassette and 3.5 floppy labels!) and certificates for a good price. also min got a couple pieces of queer jewelry including some adorable earrings. i used to be tempted by cute/cool jewelry but oh, 7 or 8 years ago i realized it was a waste of money. because i just don't remember to put it on! i have a ring, a watch, and i only remember to put on the watch 75% of the time. technically i still have hordes of jewelry, it's just all collecting dust...

anyway, after that we went to lunch to a new (to us) place in berkeley, bette's diner. not being horribly familiar with berkeley, i had no idea it was located in the midst of the yuppie mecca that is the 4th street shopping district. suffice to say it didn't take us long to spend some money on a variety of home goods. but first we ate, and i have to say, even tho i had a simple ham sandwich, it was awfully damn tasty. and the dessert (cheesecake brownie) min ordered was aMAZing. we will definitely be going there again.

most of this week i'm spending in training. today is ClearWaste (for unix, instead of windows) and i have to say, it's living up to its name quite nicely. i wouldn't have bothered with more training but i've come to realize there's some environment setup changes (webdev vs content) that i really need. tho today has been mostly boring, it's nice to get out of a bunch of meetings and be free of potential manager hoverees. which is why i can bring you this post today. ;-)

note to self

sometimes you really do let your mind run away with itself too too much. analyzing everything to death, and with a penchant toward assuming the worst in relation to what people think about you, means that time and time again, you come to the wrong conclusion.

good thing you rarely voice those conclusions. you just fret, then when you realize everything's ok, breathe an internal sigh of relief.

so, note to self: stop assuming the worst. stop overanalyzing every minute detail and rehashing it ten million times in your brain. because i assure you, nobody else cares that much. everybody else is caught up in their own life. that's why things are never as bad as you imagine.

but don't think this means you have license to fuck up. play nice, yo.

hopeful

a couple of days ago min and i saw our therapist, B. i think this is a good time to point out that B is fucking awesome. because for the first time in a LONG time, i feel hopeful. hopeful that min and i really WILL be able to work out some kind of arrangement, whereby i can be with her and other women. hopeful that maybe i really am not a complete and utter fuckup for having these desires, for not being able to rid myself of them. that it means i'm simply someone with a lot of love and high interaction quotient. someone obviously struggling with a way to deal with it, but still. that doesn't make me evil.

and oh, i have felt evil the last few months.

anyway, it was a great session, full of many oh!s and ah!s. afterwards we went to this great pasta place, valencia pizza that we last went to, oh, 2 years ago? anyway the food was still stellar, cheap, and massive in portion size. min and i split some basil cream fettucini with scrumptious shrimp and still took home leftovers.

yesterday we went up to one of the weekend's many dyke yard sales, in san leandro. got a bunch of awesome retro paper (wrapping, but could double as artwork) uber-cheap. then went to our old standby, fat apple's - the el cerrito one - for lunch, and then on to the point isabel dog park. what a great park! it was foggy but so so beautiful, right by the water. and pearl had the best time checking out all the other woofers.

i don't really have a lot else to share right now, except to say, i hope i can be patient. i know it is going to take min and i some time to sort through what kind of a relationship we are going to have in the future. *i've* been waiting so long to change things, i know it makes me feel impatient. but min's only known about this for a little over two months. we've made a lot of progress in the way we interact with each other, and hopefully we'll get even better as we go. whether we're ultimately monogamous or not, it's all still, to me, encouraging.

since i'm getting blogger love

i'll post something i realized, after pirates came up while talking with my sister, that i really must share this with the rest of the world.

so there is a really fabulous magazine called mental floss that is power snack food for your brain. i get min a subscription to it, and several happy issues are sitting in the magazine rack in our powder room. i was in there yesterday (omg!), looked down and saw what looked like tshirt designs. i pick it up…sure nuf, some great punny wear. and now for the pirate wisdom: when life gives you scurvy, make lemonade!

yarrr!

happiness is

toffee crack brought to your door, and its goodness zooming through your veins.

i mean, my god. i forgot how good this was. it may be better than a dq-licious blizzard.

and now, the weekend report

warning: this is really long.

i would like to thank our current implementation of ClearWaste for the time to bring you this update. i hear that soon we will be getting some time-saving enhancements, and i'm glad about that, although i will miss these bonus times.

this was an interesting weekend - mostly good. saturday we got going relatively early for my eye doctor appointment at cupertino family eye care, which i believe liz referred me to a billion years ago. at any rate, they were excellent - incredibly helpful, friendly and had pretty good prices. MUCH better than the place we've been going to at valley fair.

oh and had way too many frames to choose from, which made us almost late for seeing our therapist up in SF, since we had to get lunch first. i'd seen that there was a quiznos near there, but couldn't find it so we went to a bagel place across from one of the Apple buildings. very tasty bagels.

so, up up and away...we're less than a mile from B's place and she calls on the phone. oops, she said, forgot that you bring pearl, and one of my dogs is (better but) still contagious after its hospital stay. ack. so we rescheduled to thursday. but, what to do now?

we'd already talked about maybe going to good vibes, so might as well go now! it'd been years since either of us had been to a shop like that, so we had tons of fun browsing and giggling. finally got around to the book section and i found two books i'd been interested in getting: redefining our relationships and the ethical slut. while min checked out a VERY hot photography book, i tried to pick one of the two relationship ones. i was leaning toward the ethical slut when min said, 'i think our relationship is worth paying for both.' good point.

among other things we also got this game and finally tried it out last night. didn't make it to the end - she got too sleepy after all the massage i had to give her as part of the game - but nonetheless could tell it was a very good investment. :-D

ok back to saturday. after GV we just wandered down valencia enjoying the day, people and little shops. m started to want a snack but we weren't seeing anywhere good to go. we found this place i want to say was called little osmo...cute shirts, notebooks, handmade cards...very cool. we asked for a snack rec and got pointed to tartine a few blocks away. busy but yummmy to me (min wasn't that crazy bout it). and passed the women's building on the way, which has amazing murals.

anyway afterwards we started back towards the car, since min now felt she needed some real food, we'd look for somewhere for dinner. on the way we saw a hat store with entirely too many adorable hats. after much sampling she finally settled on a cute white one with blue/green dots. she's wearing it today, so adorable!

in the interests of not meandering too much for dinner, we wanted to go to eliza's, where we'd been before. very affordable, very tasty, and adorable decor. well all that was true saturday, but they were also extremely rude regarding pearl.

in addition to being adorable, pearl's also an assistance dog now so legally businesses are required to let her come in. most places, even if they have an issue at first, once min explains the law/gives them a handout, they shut up and are very nice. but not this place. i mean, they could have been worse, but they were very snotty the whole time. anyway we went home from there and min was pretty beat so we went to bed shortly after around 10. i was not sleepy so i started reading the ethical slut.

i guess you can't put a good slut down, because i made it 1/3 of the way thru its 270+ pages that night. i highlighted away until i realized my lines were getting too wobbly, so i gave up and went to sleep.

sunday we had no plans. i realized after i woke up that this was a good thing, because i'm learning that if min has a good day with lots of running around, the next day she has to rest. pretty much all day. i read my email, ate breakfast and thought...you know what i really want to do? finish reading that slut.

so that's what i did. read, highlighted, re-read, mused, then kept reading until i finished around 2pm. i have to say, at least for me it was a really good book. and not just about being a slut. i think this book is good for anyone either in a relationship, or who wants to be in one. it makes you think about what kind of things you want - for yourself, for your partner(s) - not only sexually but emotionally. what kind of relationship do you want to have? what things could make your relationship healthier? and my favorite - how to have more constructive fights.

fights, i am coming to realize, are a necessary evil. that doesn't mean i like them one little bit, but i do think that both of us are starting to handle them better.

good thing too because as i finished the book, min woke up. she asked me what i thought of it. i said it was good, but wanted a little more time to let it sink in. she said ok, and that she wanted to read it too - today. i thought that was great and handed it over. i was getting up to get her a different pen for making notes/highlights and she said, 'i want us to get a book about monogamy too. i don't want to think we can just read this book and assume with this we can make everything just fine.'

sure, sounds good to me, i said. let's be balanced about it. but what i thought was, great. where is this going?

sure enough the next several hours involved a lot of crying (both), talking, processing, not talking, and more crying. at one point she gave me this article about gay marriage she'd printed from The Nation. i read it while she was doing something else. later i came back into the living room and she was reading it. as she finished i said, that was a good article, thanks for showing it to me.

she said, 'see, this is what marriage is about. it's about wanting to spend the rest of your life with someone. being with them through everything, growing old together. it's not just about sex.'

i said, that's what i want too. i want to spend the rest of my life with you. i love that when you and i saw that there was a 4400 marathon on today, we both wanted to watch it. i want to be married to you. i think, it's just that you and i have different definitions about what that marriage could look like.

sounds rational eh? yeah whatever. what matters is, emotionally i'm saying that she alone is not enough for me. and - in a different way than she meant - it's not completely about sex. it's about there being different parts of me that don't really go well with her, and i have ALWAYS needed to either suppress or save for my friends.

the example i brought up is my extremely dry, mock-happy, sarcastic sense of humor. she does not appreciate this (she feels it's too harsh, and i get that), but unforunately is a rather critical component to my personality. since early on in our relationship, when we set this boundary, i've either had to keep that to myself or (as i can now thank NUTS for) sometimes share it with like-minded friends.

she said something about that not being the point and i said, actually it is. the point is, i've never been able to get all of my needs met with solely you. it's unrealistic and probably unhealthy to expect that to be the case. and so, thinking that i might need other people in my life, in order to get certain needs met, is reasonable.

there's that word again. reason. emotional well-being does not necessarily have anything to do with reason. just like my feeling like i never should have said anything in the first place (in april), but also realizing i couldn't keep it in anymore. and so, there was more crying. and agreeing to not talk anymore about this until we see B on thursday.

ok fair enough. the rest of the day was pretty quiet, with us both reminding each other that we loved each other and were going to keep working on this. then later, like i said we went to bed early and had fun with our new game.

since min was sleeping, i almost came out afterwards and started blogging the weekend, but crashed since i knew i had to get up early today - presentation at work! by yours truly! and i'm very happy to say it went fine, no problems, i didn't even get horribly nervous (i hate presenting). answered a billion questions and we all went on our merry little way afterwards.

unbelievably, ClearWaste is not done yet. wow! but, i am. get up, give your eyes a rest if you made it this far. thanks for playing.

update: it wasn't little osmo, it's little otsu. their main site led me to some other awesome online shops including some sexy, knotty work at buy olympia. i am SO going to be shopping there soon.

it's not just me

sometimes work is really complicated. i have a spec that involves quite a bit of css changes and was advised to go to the local guru for prototyping. that all went fine and has been very educational. then when i went to insert that into the rest of our code… didn't work quite right.

so being the self-motivated, independent (aka stubborn) person that i am, i tried to fix it myself. and i got it working (yay me!) but not without a lot of changes. so, page 1 down. then i went to page 2. fuck. i could only get 75% of it working. so i called in the guru. and damn if he wasn't just as puzzled as me and has spent several hours with me (over 2 days) trying to make things right.

he got things 95% working but not without removing a lot of the existing code… which i will have to put back. so i'm not done solving this, but at least i know it's not just me being dumb. score one for non-incompetency! a good sentiment for ending a very annoying workweek.

update: i figured out the problem. all. by. myself. GO ME.

another record-breaker

2+ weeks i went without daydreaming about AG. and with as oddly as this jaunt started, i have to wonder if it's all really about her, or me being in love with the idea of being with her. with the idea of being a free agent.

because in the end, i know i don't want to be free. i want to be tethered. to feel that connection to another person...to know the whole of them. and i want them connected to me. sure, i can be hard to get to know (deeply) and anyone reading this blog knows me better than most. but really, i crave that intimacy more than almost anything. my mind, my skin aches for it. and apparently, with more than one person.

which i guess makes it hard when, for various reasons, that deep and abiding, playful and light, utterly rapturous connection to another soul is somehow diminished. diminished by choice, by inaction, by accident...whatever the reason, it's still no small act of torture to witness your emotional states forming a human pretzel. then again i always did love gymnastics.

i could be in a worse way. but today, i'm hating the fact that i'm so easy to push around. i'm hating my need. i'm hating the fact that just thinking about AG has me all a dither. hating that really - and with good reason - i don't think i matter that much to her. why should i? i'm not really in her life.

i'm hating the fact that things are still so difficult with min at times. hating that she's so sick that it takes all her strength to keep it together. hating what that's done and will continue to do to our relationship on so many levels.

and i guess finally, i'm hating that i'm not smart enough to figure all this shit out without fucking up my life. our lives. oh sure, a wise person would say, it's about the journey, growth can only come from struggle. yes that's true. i didn't say i wasn't smart. i'm just not always wise.

good thing we see the therapist on saturday. i need shirley mcclaine, or someone, to help me channel this stupid angst into something more productive. please.

for the record

jukebox hero is not a good song to try to fall asleep to. even if you're only listening to it in your head.