Hear What They See

Thursday, July 31, 2003

last day

I start a new job tomorrow. Total state of flux. We had a birthday/going-away party all day today. Mom & Haili's birthday is today, which coincidentally was also my last day. I just got the last of the crap off of my desk. Egads. I will have to come back, though, I know, and finish up some loose ends. My desk doesn't look like I'm really gone. All of my knicky-knack things are still here. If I'm only going to be at the new office for a month or so before hopefully moving on to the other job in September, I don't want to get all cozy. And no one has been hired to take my place. So. No need to clear my desk completely. Not until I have a real job that's a sure thing.

Crazy feeling, that. Risky, too. Not sure. Will I stay or I go, now? ~shabowwwng~

Hopefully I'll know soon. About the other new job that may begin in September. The management job. The on where I'll work a million hours per day and ask myself why I ever wanted the job in the first place. The time drags and goes too fast, all at the same time. It's like standing on the nervy edge of a tectonic plate system. San Andreas Fault. Watch out, Alice, or it's down the Hole for you.

Family's a mess right now. Grandma in these wheezy, stroked, numb, blind last days of hers is holding on as tenaciously as possible to the threads of life she's still got stitched into herself. She says she wants to die, but really what it's all about is not wanting to live in her crippled, crooked body. She doesn't want to die. She wants to live and she pissed as all shit that she doesn't have a say in the matter. Every time the opportunity to actually die gets too close to her, she tears off in the other direction as fast as her non-working limbs will take her. Mom and my Auntie Bethy and EVERYBODY are just at their wit's end. Grandma made mom cry last night and mom never cries. She got hysterical and started screaming at Grandma and my sister walked in the door while all this was happening and grabbed the phone and screamed at Grandma too. Funny how the protectiveness shifts from family member to family member as the tension rises. I have steered somewhat clear. I have tried not to get embroiled in the family politics. My Grandma is a pismire and she always has been. I guess that's why I adore her so much. She can drive you batty with her discrepencies and sudden bouts of selfish emotionalism (isn't emotionalism about being selfish?), but she is so genuine in her verve you have to just forgive her for everything. When she dies, no one is really going to remember all this crap. They are mostly going to remember how much she made everything around her so much more fun.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 10:05 PM

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

DNR

I'd heard that acronym before, but I never really knew what it meant. I went to the hospital today after my annual check-up at my doc's because Grandma was admitted early this a.m. when she couldn't breathe. I was there for a few hours while my mom, my aunt Bethy. The nurse Peggy, and the Hospice nurse Mara talked about Grandma's fate. I got the whole scoop on how Hsopice works. Apparently once you've taken on the benefits of Hospice, you are NOT supposed to call 911 anymore. Your chart, at that point, say DNR - Do Not Resuscitate. Grandma had her Fijian caretaker Ron call 911 last night because she couldn't breathe. The strokes she's had have knocked out her ability to breathe and swallow. For as much as she says she doesn't want to be here any longer, she hangs on tenaciously and when it comes right down to it, does not want to die, especially if she has to suffer while doing so. She wants to die only if she can be unaware of her death, so long as she doesn't have to feel any pain or suffering. I guess we all want to die that way. I don't know.

Mom, Bethy, Mara and Peggy all thought the best place for Grandma will be a SNF, or Skilled Nursing Facility. They got her admitted to one this afternoon. The intent was to have her stay there until she dies because no one is able to care for her properly at home. But she called about an hour ago, furious for having been left there. She says it's too noisy. I don't blame her. And I don't know what my family is supposed to do either. None of her 6 children want to leave her there, feeling abandoned and unloved. But none of knows how to take care of her, no one has the strength to take care of her because she is totally immobile, and no one is sure how long the financial resources will last. God only knows how much longer grandpa can live with no brain but a fully functioning body. He may need care for another 10 years for all we know. God. This is really awful.

I got to work at about 11:00 today. I spent all day feeling discombobulated and distracted. I interviewed another person to potentially take my place at the office. I found out yeterday that the management position could be mine on September 1 if everything goes well. But like I've said before, until they actually say, "The job is yours, Anea" I'm not going to believe it. And I don't know if mom wants to even bother replacing me right now. She may not be able to deal with it right now.

I start work in the other agent's office this Friday. I am so numb right now that the reality of a new (if perhaps only interim) job has not hit me yet.

Life always dumps the full heaping & steaming load on you at the same damned time, doesn't it?

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 9:20 PM

Sunday, July 27, 2003

quote of the day

The notion that I am me, feels like a pebble in my shoe. -nobodyhere.com

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 5:03 PM

the wheelbarrow

This is my latest project. The one I am now going to merge with my film project. I haven't quite figured out why I think I can do all of this.

Yesterday I got in a screaming match with my husband because I accused him of not being sensitive enough to my sadness & stress right now.
Scream.
Scream.
Scream.
We had a pissing match over suffering. Whose suffering is more insufferable. I felt like a wreck and indignant and a self-righteous boob all at the same time.
Up.
Down.
Up.
Down.
Up.
Down.
^ that would be the status of my emotional state. I can't seem to help it. Heap atop that the fact that my period started yesterday. No flippin' wonder. Screaming is so much more fun when you can blame it on your "female cycle." We kissed and made up. Such is life.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 4:59 PM

Friday, July 25, 2003

4 more

That's all the workdays til I don't work here any longer.
Yay.
My new job will be doing exactly the same thing for exactly the same pay and exactly the same benefits.
Only I won't be working for mom.
Yay.
Which means I also won't be working til all hours of the night.
Yay.
Or Saturdays.
Yay.
The trade-off is a 40-minute commute in the morning & eve.
I can handle that, thanks.

It's only supposed to be for a month.
Then the Co. wants to hire me into a management position with a company car & an expense account.
Fun.
I know of no other way to get myself out of this R-U-T than to continue working in the insurance biz.
Make the move.
Get out of the grooves of the track I'm on.

Then maybe we can move to Humboldt and buy a home in the redwoods.
Tucked behind a hill where the deer and the antelope play.
I don't know how we'll ever be able to afford anything in this town.
In this county.
So one must consider a move.

We shall see. Nothing is set in stone and I don't even care because if I don't get the management shmooze, who cares. I've made the move. Out of the rut. Out of these grooves. I will no longer be umbilicaled to my mother in this office. Still at home, but not in the office. If the corporate job is a go, then grand. But the motions have been filed. I'm all about kicking my butt out of stasis.

What, after all, have I got to lose?

Nada.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 8:25 PM

Wednesday, July 23, 2003

prunes & pecans

Dave & I went to Grandma's after I left work. I'd talked to her in the afternoon and asked her if I could film her for a video I'm making called Why I Write (I think that's what it'll be called, anyway). A group of us got together last night at Murphys to put together a whacky film festival (we all have an affinity for Murphy's since most of us had Larry Murphy as a teacher in high school). It's the brainchild of a gal with whom my sister went to school forever, a project for a class she's finishing. She decided she was going to create a project around a film festival. But since she doesn't know anything about making films and since no one she knows knows anything about films, she decided it had to be an amateur festival. But not just even amateur, but NOT EVEN amateur. We decided last night it'll be called the Less Than Amateur Film Festival. I volunteered to make the posters. My idea is a grainy b&w photo developed with the sprockets showing of a person holding a camcorder to their eye with the lens cap on. White arrow pointing to lens cap that reads "lens cap" above it with another white arrow pointing to the person with "amateur" written above with an "=" sign and "The Less-Than-Amateur Film Festival." That's just the idea today. Who knows; by the time I have to have the posters set up it'll have changed about 80 times, I'm sure.

OK, anyway, my point in even bringing this up is that I decided on my film because I am so desperate to hang on to any vestige of grandma that I can. I decided I want to interview her before she dies and have her tell me on video why she wrote. The film festival has really become my excuse to get grandma on film while I still can.

So we went over there tonight because grandma wanted to go for a walk. Well, we were going to walk and push her in her wheelchair. She can no longer walk. Her right side is gone, pretty much. Her arm and leg and everything. And that includes everything on the inside, too. Like her bowels and her throat and probably her lung and kidney and everything else. So we got there, and she was asleep. But my mom & dad were both there. And then my aunt Bethy showed up 20 minutes later. It was a real family do. So we ate Chinese and laughed and grandpa wandered around, snapping his thumb and forefinger against his jeans, telling anyone who would listen that he was frightened. Which is a mantra of sorts for him. He always says he's frightened and when you ask him why, it's always about the finances. I think it's because he knows grandma's going, her right foot out the door, the left soon to follow. She's going to go and die & leave him all alone. He can't stand it but can't talk about it either, so he chooses the one thing he can talk about which is finances.

I had to help Bethy get grandma to her commode. We got her there and propped on the seat and she immediately let loose with a gaseous fit. She listed to her right since she can't hold herself up, her feet dangled from the commode because someone had raised it too high. I kept wanting to leave, but Bethy needed help. Bethy's a nurse but she can't lift grandma because her own back is shot. So I lifted Grandma so Bethy could wipe. I wanted to cry. I almost did. Then we pulled off her housecoat and Bethy sponge-bathed her and I looked at my grandma. She was so smooth. Not wrinkly and pruny like you'd expect for an 85-almost-86 year old to be. Her skin was smooth all over. Except for all of the scars. So many operations, she's a patchwork quilt. There is scar, a smooth silver swath of skin, where her left breast used to be. I stared at it, glad that her eyes are mostly-blind and she couldn't tell how I stared and stared. She's tan, like a pecan, from all the swimming she was getting in up until about 1 & half weeks ago when the small continuous nightly strokes knocked her right side out completely. Her hands feel like soft dumplings, uncreased. I lifted her up, holding her beneath her armpits while she held on as best she could around my neck. I could smell her sweat, I can still smell it on the material of the sweatshirt I'm wearing. I picked out a pink flowered housecoat for her, a clean one that wasn't soaked from her urine that she cannot control. Bethy got her into it while I held on. David had to come in and lift her completely off the commode and onto her bed; Grandma refused to let me do it because she said I'd put my back out. But she doesn't weight much. She is roundy & soft, but she doesn't weight much at all. Not to me.

I will not be able to do what I did tonight for my mother or my father. It will probably kill me. I say that now, but I don't think I can do it. I keep harping on them about the need for long-term care insurance, that they HAVE to get it, I don't care how expensive it is at their age. If I have it on myself already at age 33, they had very damned well get it on themselves. Mom is an insurance agent for crying out loud.

I didn't go to writing class tonight.
I couldn't leave Grandma's.
But I know Linny will understand.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 11:25 PM

Monday, July 21, 2003

short list

Dave's home from LA.
I spent all weekend creating addendums to this blog
I wrote grandma a good-bye letter
My aunt Beth read it to her
Grandma had Bethy write me a letter back
I haven't read it yet
I'm still @ the office
I have too much work to get done before I leave
I start a new job 1 aug
I will have to commute
Mom called Hospice today
Mom called a meeting with her brothers & sisters
I don't think Grandma will see her next birthday on 13 aug
I burst into tears at my desk today while my sister & I were talking about Grandma
I haven't been sleeping much lately
I feel like eating rice pilaf
I am retaining water
I hired a new girl on Friday as an admin assistant for mom's office
I started training her today
Training is kind of draining
I have 10 rolls of undeveloped 35mm film
I don't want to spend the money to devlop them
I think Dave qualified for unemployment benefits, thank God
I didn't go to church on Sunday
I wish I was thin
I am paying more attention to what people say to me when they talk about things that are important to them
I am going to miss my grandma

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 9:56 PM

Saturday, July 19, 2003

I'm finding myself not wanting to write or talk about Grandma in the past tense.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 1:37 PM

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 12:53 PM

Hallmarking the Anti-Hallmark Moment

Hot and sticky, even at 6:30 when we left for Santa Rosa. Mom had the A/C in her car cranked, I sat in the back, closing my eyes and pleading with any ambush-happy woozy humours to please leave me alone & away from car sickness. Grandma, propped in the front seat, appeared smaller than I'd ever seen her. She has a new hair cut. Mom tells me it's difficult to wash Grandma's hair because she has some sort of scalp condition and needs special shampoo. Now that Grandma can't see, Mom decided a shorter do would make things a little easier. The doctor wants Grandma to have an MRI so maybe he can tell why she's having so many strokes. Or TSIs, I guess. She deteriorates a little more every day. On Monday she was in the pool. Today she can barely walk. The right side of her face droops, like warmed clay that has been pushed down by a careless thumb. She speaks and it sounds as though she has been to the dentist, like Novacaine numbs her mouth and she has to force the words out over her uncooperative tongue.

I am heartbroken.
I can barely type but if I do not...
I'm afraid there will be no time...
...for me to think the thoughts...
...and feel the feelings...
...that need to be thought...
...that need to be felt...
Before she is dead.
It is just a matter of time.
It is for all of us, I know.
But her time is wearing a stopwatch.

I have been lucky. I am 33 and I have never had to deal with the death of a person I love and adore. Mom was something of a close call when she got breast cancer, but a close call is still no dice. This is the real deal. This is the one that will leave behind the necessary scar tissue.

We get to the imaging office at 7:30. They tell us they can't do the MRI because a doctor needs to be present for the kind of MRI she needs. She needs to be injected with a colorant of some kind so they can have a better look at her brain. Apparently this can only be done if a doctor is present. The doc goes home at 3:00. Whatever. It is totally inconvenient, but it doesn't surprise me terribly. The drive to Santa Rosa takes about 45 minutes. So. We the drive all the way here for what? Well...DINNER, that's what. We end up taking Grandma out to dinner at a Thai place. Same place we had an impromptu wedding dinner after Dave & I did the secret tying of the knot at the courthouse last year. Watching mom with Grandma is truly touching. Not in that barfy Hallmark way because Hallmark fails to mention how your Grandma's blue & white gingham shorts creep up one leg and how the hair on the left side of her head is pressed flat from resting her head against the car window or how dark is the small patch of sweat in the middle of your mother's back from the heat of a mid-July evening. Hallmark doesn't tell you about the rolling fume of diesel from the passing semi or the scrape of crickets in the pots of yellow marigolds in front of the restaurant. Hallmark doesn't speak of the bruises you notice all over your Grandma's shins from her insistent & stubborn diligence to climb the pool ladder on her own steam on Monday afternoon to get herself out of the pool, legs bumping & scuffing against each rung with every lift of her leg. Hallmark wouldn't mention these things to you, and yet without them, the tenderness you see passed between your mother to her mother wouldn't have the same poignancy.

Mom seems resigned to her mother's imminent death. No one can handle grandpa's incessent repetative questions and accusations and worries and orneriness. In fact, the tendency is to silently blame him for Grandma's decline. He's got the health and a failing mind. She's got the brain and the failing health. But when Grandma dies, then will begin the guilt feelings over grandpa, especially when he begins to ask over and over, "Where is Jeanne? Where is Jeanne? What have you done with her?" But for now, everyone's worried most about Grandma. As I watch mom with her, how solicituous she is, I want to cry every two minutes. Grandma is mostly blind now since the first big stroke in May took her sight. As Mom walks alongside her, she describes everything around us, the colors, the people, the table & chairs. I order and Mom details every dish. Grandma mostly eats with her fingers. She gropes around her plate for the spring roll, the stuffed tapioca, the lettuce. Bits of shaved cabbage and cilantro hang from her bottom lip on the right side where she can't feel. Mom pulls most of it away without being overly obvious. Grandma eats her soup with her spoon, sipping the broth from the cup. Mom goes to the car and gets a blanket to put over Grandma's shoulders because she's too cold. Mom sits down and they talks about the jasamine tea, how frangrant, how good. "It's like drinking flowers," Grandma says. Mom whispers a picture to Grandma of the couples at the tables beside us, how romantic they are, how they hold hands. Grandma smiles and tilts her head with every word, hung upon them, stringing them together like a diamond tennis bracelet.

Before her sight was obliterated, she was an avid reader. She was finishing writing her book about Belize. It runs in the genes. It skipped a generation to me. I realize, watching Mom describe our setting to Grandma, that for Grandma it is like reading a book. It dawns on me with a whoosh how diminshed her world is now. Not only sightless, but wordless as well. The books that she's always had to fill all the empty spaces, gone. She listens to the conversations going on around us at the tables in the crowded restaurant. She listens to mom. A cilantro leaf hanging from her lip. Sound, now, the only thing she has to rely on to stimulate her mind, to brighten the spaces.

Dave called me from LA while we were sitting there. I went outside and listened for a few minutes, but I began to get impatient. He could tell in my voice. He was excited, trying to tell me about the break-throughs he'd had in his writing while he'd been down visiting his family. "You're getting that official sound in your voice."

"I know sweetie. I'm outside the restaurant talking and we've finished eating and I think we're about ready to leave. I don't want to leave them waiting."

"OK, well, I guess I'll let you go."

"I love you, Dave."

I didn't realize til just now that the reason I got so impatient on the phone is that I didn't want to miss any more time with Mom & Grandma than I had to. I didn't want to miss anything I might never be able to see or hear again.

I snapped a picture of her sitting in the backseat with the digital as we drove home. She is a small bundle, a papoosed grandmother, wrapped in a pink blanket, headlights shining behind her. Even though she is blind, she looks right at you in the picture. She looks right into the lens as if she knows she has got to make a last attempt to be seen. To look into the camera and be captured before she is gone.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 2:55 AM

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Today I gave 2 weeks notice & quit my job.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 5:57 PM

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

prologue

The WOW Doritos.
Oh my God.
Never eat Olestra.
Never subsitute quantity for quality.
Me, Queen of Snotty Food and Airs of Ingestion.
Eating WOW Doritos because of a strange hankering.
If you enjoy 8 trips to the toilet in as many hours and tsunami cramps that wash you awayyyyy---GO FOR IT!

Deleted post occurred when I was trying to erase myself.
Not to mention the embarrassment of admitting I ate DORITOS.
But I'm not such a food snob as that, am I.
Nope.
Cheating the calories was the name of the game.
Game's up.
Joke's on the wiseass who thought Olestra didn't count.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 11:59 PM

Meanwhile, I have this suspicion, flagrant is sitting at her computer, bashing her head against the screen screaming to the LCD, "I DIDN'T MEAN ANYTHING BY IT, YOU ASSHOLES!

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 11:59 PM

Not One But Two

Levels deeper, because now, I have just discovered, the specific becomes universal to more than just One but to Two.

AMAZING!

It proves my point. It proves my point and because my point is proven and it matters to no one but myself, I am sounding assinine, I'm sure, but listen to me for just a moment (which you can't right now anyway because my blog is not publishing properly).

One post! One post drew in the fervor of two readers. Ok, so, it seems paltry and so-whatish and not very surprising because people have tendency to be drawn to like. But what I find astounding is that the two reactions were so similar and both were with the reflex that the post seemed so, must have been so, absolutely had to be so POINTED at ME even though it couldn't have been and there's no reason for it to be so therefore it's NOT, but why then does it rankle so beneath the skin and why am I sitting here feeling like utter shit?

People who feel, who emote (and I ain't talkin' emoticons), who sense and suffer and sympathize and rage, these people want to find meaning in a world that can largely seem bereft of anything resembling significance. I am one of these people. Recognizing that, I also have to realize that my quest for meaning, that Holy Grail-like search, will take other people's words and gild them in my own definitions. Definitions in which I play a lead role. Not everyone treats their world in this manner. But for those of us who do, the journey is lifelong.

It seems like it's easy to be inspired to have feelings about abstractions, about politics or religion or career or even George Bush or Hillary Clinton (they are too big to be individuals to us; they become conceptualized at the point that the media portrays them beyond discriminating lines and they become, instead, simulations of whatever their individual selves may have been at one time). The feelings can be big, sometimes unspecific feelings, but feelings nonetheless. The feelings can then prompt us to respond with high emotion, maybe lots of words. Reacting strongly to abstractions is borne of the tendency to want or need to personalize the abstract. But what do you call it when something specific, something that is a personal occurrence for one person, is translated into personalized reaction for another totally unrelated person? Because then it's not personalizing an abstraction, it's personalizing someone else's personal. Is that thievery?

A post is written.
The post has specific significance for the writer.
Two readers read.
The post has no significance intended by the writer for the readers.
The readers react strongly to words never meant for them.
The post, in those moments, leaves the specificity given to it by its writer & takes on the specificity imposed by its readers.

No, it's not thievery, I don't think it is. We personalize abstractions out of necessity, a need to make them less inconsequential. But when we take already significant words that someone else has written and imbue them with our own meanings, it is then when something that may have only had meaning for one individual can achieve a sort of universal consciousness. And that is so flipping rocks my world.

I read Michael's entries and am tugged just as emotionally to him as to her. I am tugged in ways that are not ties of love nor job nor family. I am tugged into reaction & feelings. I am tugged and I am tied because he says, "Perhaps it was because I read too much as a child. I don't know why. I do know that I always found (or wondered about) signs that I felt told me I was chosen. I kept thinking "God has a purpose for me. That's why I was able to serve perfectly for a whole game in fifth-grade gym volleyball." [That is actually a true thought.] I watch the faces on the street waiting for one of them to be an angel, an angel with an assignment for me. "Save the world," he will say. "God is counting on you."

I am tugged because I recognize in his voice, in the voice that I cannot hear but can only read, the same ferocious attempt to salvage some dignity, to agree and yet still hate having to admit that defeat. That someone else has written our lives in 4 paragraphs or less and didn't even know she was doing it. To have to admit that someone else has recognized our lives, out loud, in spaces we have feared to tread.

I am tied because even in the anger that spills, in the self-loathing, in the marginalization within which I, too, am a subscriber, even in the shield of all that, I still see him there, behind it. But my seeing him is of a different quality. My seeing him is of a quality he may fear is to akin to his own, too similar thus possibly tainted. Like bloodlines. Like kissing cousins. I am of water not air. Water, though different, still laps along the shores of earth. Air remains high above the rest, high above it all, never quite touching down in the same manner.

But there is no exclusivity.
Even in the loneliness and the terror.
Even in the dark before the light is shone within.
There is no exclusivity.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 11:51 PM

authors & bloggers, the prophets of our technoed time

I finished Franzen's book of essays last night. God. He is such an exceptional mind. Writers like him are the reason I have shelves cluttered with books, a nightstand piled with books, a desk with books in disarray. I refuse to write in my books, unlike my husband who sees books as an extension of his highlighter & pencil & pen. My books, instead, are tabbed with yellow post-it notes, scraps of receipts, torn corners from magazines. Places and pages I mark to remember the words that have been written. That were not written for me, but which have, by no fault but sometimes, perhaps, by intent of the author, spoken to me in ways wherein the verbal word often fails.

Franzen's 1996 essay "Why Bother?" was widely publicized after the success of his last novel "The Corrections." I remember reading about the essay, but I never actually read it. It's included in his newest book of all essays "How To Be Alone." It is ripely awash with all sorts of personal insights as well as studies around the idea of technology versus novels, the novelist, and a novelist's bread & butter - readers. Franzen cites a study by linguist anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath (a study in which he also participated) that is fascinating (so much so, I keep telling myself I'm going to do some looking-into about her, but I haven't yet). Heath's study talks about why people become dedicated and lifelong readers. This provoked a good, healthy dose of interest from me since my love for reading, which has been with me since my time immemorial, has been a tad inexplicable. There are readers who become readers because their parents read and encouraged reading for varying reasons.

But Heath says that just having parents who have read & encouraged reading is not enough to make a person a lifelong reader. The second part of her study showed that young readers also needed to find other people with whom they could share their interest in reading. "A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," she said. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them. Finding a peer can take place as late as college. In high school, especially, there's a social penalty to be paid for being a reader. Lots of kids who have been lone readers get to college and suddenly discover, 'Oh my God, there are other people here who read.'"

Franzen states at about this point in his essay after considering what Heath had told him, "I was also considering that for me, today, there is nothing sexier than a reader." Yowzah. Ya. I'd have to agree. When people tell me what they are reading, that they even bother to READ at all, there is something so titillating about it. It's provoking & sensual. Especially men. It's a total turn-on. Let's face it, that's why my husband was so delectable when we were courting (isn't that a quaint word?). He knew more about the classics than I did. In my defense, however, my grasp of contemporary authors was much better, so the two of us had a lot to offer one another. It was readerly and nerdy bliss at its best.

Franzen goes on, "But then it occurred to me that I didn't even meet Heath's first precondition. I told her I didn't remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.

Without missing a beat Heath replied: "Yes, but there's a second kind of reader. There's the social isolate---the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don't like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can't share with the people around you---because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community."

How this hit home. How reading those words hit right home. A memory flooded me with those words, a memory so visceral I could taste the plum pit on which I had been sucking the summer I was 10, roosting in the old plum tree that used to shade the backyard before my parents relandscaped. I was reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan. I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever read. I didn't know exactly what this earth in fast thick pants meant, but I imagined it was akin to how it felt to be in Tahoe for Christmas break, on the slopes at the top of the chairlift in 15 layers of long underwear and skipants and ski boots and skis and really having to pee. And the word dulcimer was the sweetest word I'd ever read in the whole entire wide world even though I didn't know what it meant either. It was the same summer an aunt had given me an old tome of Poe and I read the poem Annabel Lee over and over until I had memorized the whole thing. It was the saddest story EVER and I thought if that kind of love was to be had from someone in the world who wanted to give it to me, then I wouldn't care if I died young. It'd be worth it.

Looking back now to my 10-year old self while I sit here aged 33, is it any wonder I never told my other 10-year old friends about Kubla Khan and Annabel Lee? They would have looked at me as though I'd sprouted a pig's snout and fairy wings and laughed me out of the school yard. I read books like most kids watched television. Don't get me wrong, I liked TV a lot too. I can still sing the Spiderman theme song and recite the opening script to the 6 Million Dollar Man. But books were my refuge in a world where words like dulcimer could be repeated over and over til I was nearly dizzy with the sound.

In writing class, Linny always asks us why we write. We make lists and most of the time I try to come up with new metaphors that sound clever and new but which usually just sound prosaic. But I realized, last night after finishing Franzen's book and then writing in this blog after reading another blog, that writing is and has been the logical extension of having been a lifelong reader. That my love and desire and need to write is second only to my love and desire and need to read. When one has spent one's life reading, making a decision to read works by such authors as Marcel Proust is not an act of elitist snobbery but is an act of survival. Writing is the easy part, to a certain extent; making the effort to read the words that someone has poured their life's blood into is quite another thing entirely.

Being made to feel emotion---to actually sit at my desk in my chair and sob because someone has written a specific truth that has nothing to do with me but that needles me to the bone thus rendering that specific truth universal---being within the province where my emotion comes to the fore with such potency, I am so bleedingly thankful. I am fearful, at times, that people will give up on the written word. I am fearful that chat rooms and XBOX and blogs about hormones & thong underpants & someone's boyfriend's infidelity with his big dick will be more significant and engrossing than anything Proust said, Franzen says, or I may one day have to say. So I am thankful, then, as I read and then weep. Thankful that there are still people who write words that make my heart stop and shine a light into my world where mostly I, alone, reside.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 3:13 PM

Monday, July 14, 2003

belly of a whale

I read and I never cease to be amazed at the tidal emotion that concusses me when I do. Which is why I wonder why I read. Except the whirl of feeling when I read is the most honest place I know. Even more than writing, I think. It can be so effortless to cheat when I write. No trouble at all to yield to the need to make myself feel better by writing words that only speak in half truths. No, reading is definitely more forthright. That swell of feeling, the gut reaction, is unadulterated. Unpretended, unfeigned, undesigned. It has to be, it must be accounted for, not evaded. If I default, if I waver in the conviction I have that the sting of a stranger's words is vital, is necessary to remember that this is the only place I know that makes living brilliant and colossal, then I cease to remain true to the only thing that has ever remained true to me. Passion and sensation. Sensitivity and zeal. Melancholy and rage. My familiars. Always.

i look at other bloggers who now realize after what has been years that their lives are in terrible spots. they can't get up and go anywhere fantastic tomorrow or freely spend tens of thousands of dollars, and it's nothing to do with the greed conflict, rather it's because they were too safe all along and forgot to feed the lonely pig. they admit to overfeeding themselves and yet they complain about being overstuffed...

tonight i made a mistake... i know where not to read. looking at situations like theirs, i know to value my nervousness. sitting in the netherworld for a decade and only counting carpet fibers, i at least knew that there might come a time i would want out and when that day arrived, why should i make myself wait any longer than i had been? i knew enough to have the map hidden and tucked into my shoe the day i locked the door, squeezed my nose and dove down. you should always carry the map- even to the mailbox. i see adults, secured and comfortable, in their parent's home, unable to find the front door in the daylight or the back door during the silent of the night.

they should have enormous bank accounts by now if they opted for or put up with that break... reduced rents, reduced lives... they should be able to take their toothbrush and go.

.
.

basically, this post is just the mentally ill laughing that they blew their chances. i wasted ten years. they wasted the same if not more because they are no further along than me, plus on top of that blow to the esteem, they are overweight, and that has got to hurt.

That is me. That is me. And whether or not that is me is moot and unimportant. What is conspicuous as I read those words is that I am swallowed up in their truth. Jonah in the belly of a whale who is no whale but the anti-whale. Ironies abound! The whale, perhaps instead, within Jonah? "Those who cling to worthless idols
forfeit the grace that could be theirs." This the hymn that Jonah sang within the belly of a whale. Oh how! Oh how, truly. Oh how these words we least expect do find us when we are most blind.

I was given everything. I have been given everything. I have worked hard at nothing in this life except not letting go. Proffered hands have been easy to grasp, within accomodating reach. And I have grabbed them every time even when telling myself I wasn't. I always took the easy way out even when it never appeared to be. I have stayed, at every turn, at every cost, because it was always the least costly, easier than having to say no, easier then stepping away because stepping away means there is no more softness and the hard corners of the world will bruise overly soft & atrophied me. And that has got to hurt. Right?

It already does. It already does! So what difference, really, does it make? A reduced life is less than what it could have been, less than what it should be.

One should be able to take their toothbrush and go.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 11:36 PM

[post deleted since it was truly meant for email, but the email was returned "no reply"]

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 11:05 PM

Saturday, July 12, 2003

Reversal

There has been a decided lack in my motivation to write. Here or in my journal or for class. Life in all of its rich pageantry. Isn't that an REM album? I am at the office. It is Saturday. Dave is in LA visiting the fam and I am in the office writing on my blog. My life is generally in a state of flux at the mo but isn't it always?

Grandma is dying.
Mom is a space case.
I hate my job.

Now. Do I hate my job because Grandma is dying thus mom is a space case thus making my life @ work a suck magnet? No. It'd be nice to be able to make all those pieces fall neatly into place. No such luck. I just generally hate my job. But it did happen to hit me pretty squarely between the earballs as to why. All this Meyers-Briggs Personality stuff that Dave & happen to find so fascinating comes in quite handy when you're trying to figure out what line of work you should be in to make your life not feel quite so unfulfilling. My job now in the insurance biz entails sitting behind a desk all day answering the phone and talking to clients, helping them solve their insurance needs. Mostly that just means I sit and listen sympathetically while they bitch to me about how much their rates have gone up and how much they hate insurance. I have started, though, lately to smile sweetly, nod my head and say, "You are SOOOooo right! And because of everything you just said and because I listen to it day in and day out, I hate my job so much, I think daily of quitting!" Then I laugh blithely and roll my eyes and shrug, fold my hands upon my desk and wait for their next volley. They pretty much just laugh nervously, like I might have a handgun in my desk drawer and will take out my frustrations on them. Maybe "going postal" will soon be obsolete when everyone in the insurance biz starts "going insural." Ideally, as an ENFJ, the glove-fit kind of work for me would be a projects-based employment module. Something structured with room for negotiation within the structure, if that makes any sense.

Since I started working with the business coach back in March, a few things have made themselves evident. First (major duh on my part here, but bear with me) Never borrow money from family. Second (another major duh, but like I say...) Never work for family. . And three (ya, you guessed it, duh to the power of three) Never move back home as an adult. So I have broken the three big rules of business & finance & family. So sue me.

What I am realizing is that I stay here out of sense of extreme obligation, thinking there is no way out. If I leave, I am leaving her high and dry in her time of need after she has done nothing but take care of me. It is always about my mother, by the way. It is never about my father. It is only ever about my sense of duty to my mother. You'd think with the way I write about my family, my parents are divorced and I only live & work with my mother. Not the case at all. Daddy is there all right. But with him it's never about duty and obligation. It's just about being a family and one does what needs to be done. He's your tried & true Hawaiian-laid-back-kama'aina. Maybe that makes things easier for him. I don't know. But where my mother is concerned, my sense of failing as a daughter ribbons my skin into bloody shreds. I am Loser Incarnate. And to be perfectly honest with you, I am sick of it.

She and I got into it right before the 4th of July. How appropos. Fireworks inside and out. Whee. She went so far as to point the Boss Finger at me and lay the blame at my door as for why her business, her agency, is doing so poorly fisically right now. Nothing to do with a war in Iraq a few months back or crappy economy or failing California State Budget. Let alone getting into all the family crap going on with Grandma & Grandpa. We shan't go there. Noper. Tis ME, Loser Incarnate, who has set the stage as for why she is not doing so well. I was the torn daughter, wanting to drop at her feet and beg for her foregiveness while the Edward Hyde in me wanted to scratch her eyes out and spit in their sockets. When you work for family, the unfair advantage is that they know the precise buttons to push when it is time to let the fur fly. I wouldn't speak to her the rest of the day. The next when she called another meeting, I was barely civil. And finally, when I'd had quite enough, I got out the proverbial mirror and held it up for her to look into.

I told her, "I cannot soft-shoe with you any more, Jill. I can't do it. I have been doing it because you are my mother and I love you to bits and I am heart-broken watching grandma and grandpa and watching you have to deal with it all, with watching your parents die. But you are also my boss and I am your office manager and no one else is going to say it to you. Everything that happens in this office is a direct reflection of you and what you do and how you do it. Everything that everyone else does or says or produces is a direct result of YOU. No one else. And what you have been doing and saying and being in this office for the past 3 months has not been conducive to business or to this office or to your employees. Your business is capable of running without you, it always has been. but you often get in the way of your own business. I have been trying to tell you this in every way except the direct way for 2 months now, and you will not listen to me. I have asked you again and again to stay home so you can take care of yourself and your family and your parents, so you can deal with what needs to be dealt with. I have asked this more than once. And every time you have replied that it was easier to just be in the office than it was to be at home. And every time you said that, I knew it was going to be one more day or week or month of chaos in the office. Mom, what you are going through is not easy and there is nothing that is going to make it so. But by bringing it to the office, you have effectively turned your entire office upside down as we have gone about the business of trying to take care of you rather than taking care of business. If any employee brought as many personal problems to the office that you do, they would have been fired by now."

When I finished, it looked like I had slapped her across the face. I felt awful. But I also knew I wasn't wrong. I thought she was going to cry, but she didn't. She sat across her desk from me, staring at me and just said, "You're right."

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 7:37 PM