I haven't been blogging. There are several reasons for this, none of them very earth shattering to anyone who knows me at all. It seems that, first of all, there is no such thing as "private" or "anonymous" on the web. Which is fine, but does not inspire me overly to want to blog much. It seems that most of the time when I want to communicate with people it is about fairly private stuff, and since this format doesn't seem to generate much in the way of group discussion anyway I am probably better off just having those conversations with people one on one. It's a little disappointing, but not really a big deal. It mostly serves to point out to me that I don't actually have much to talk about that isn't personal, which is really sad. I used to.

Beyond that, I have just been otherwise occupied. Busy. I am trying to teach my children how to resolve conflicts without using physical violence and how to feel without losing control. These are things I remember teaching them around ages 3-5, but apparently they have unlearned those skills in the last few years. I feel huge amounts of guilt for exposing them to the influence of such narcissistic men. It is especially apparent in the behavior of my younger son, and I worry about his personality development constantly. I think it is possible to be molded as a child by the forces of narcissism and still be able to come back around to a balanced personality, but I am certain that it is not easy, and that one has to be highly motivated by their inner nature to do so successfully. I am still fighting this battle for myself, and I am incredibly sad that my kids are having to fight it, too.

Otherwise, things continue as usual. The two year old is charming as ever and expecting a sister soon. His parents have cleverly named her after one of the trains in the Thomas series, (ok, she's not named after the train, it's a coincidence...) so I think he is expecting a baby train to arrive any day. I predict disappointment of monumental proportions. The man-friend is sweet and lovely and feeds me blueberry/peach waffles and tries to convince me to play music with him. Maybe. We'll see. It's been...15 months now, so I might trust him with music at some point soon.

Oh, and, I need a new hairstyle. Suggestions?

Hey guess what? It turns out Bruce has been lurking my blog and now he and his slimy attorney are trying to use my silly rantings against me in our custody case. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic and predictable.

I had to force the kids to go back to his house tonight. They both cried when I told them, and Caleb started to shut down and go back into his "tough guy" mode that I was just starting to soften him out of this last week. I got him to come over and sit with me, though, and I let them cry and hugged them and told them that they were going to get their chance to speak up and be heard very soon, and that they could call me whenever they wanted, all night if they wanted, and we would still spend christmas together. after a while they calmed down and Caleb started his usual revenge plotting, and Senna peppered in his usual silly comments. If Caleb were a couple years older I'd be WAAAAAAY more worried about Bruce's safety than anyone else's in this situation, to be perfectly honest. He's taught Caleb many lessons, among them, scorekeeping. Caleb isn't forgetting to keep tally for later when he has the ability to cash in his chips. How many metaphors did I just mix? whew. I better stop writing I feel like my sentences are getting blenderized.

It is amazing how much better holidays are without extended family. WOW. Thanksgiving was almost entirely mellow, aside from Caleb's vigilance about boardgame scoring and my continued fragility due to a meltdown over coffee spillage the night before. We made faux beef veggie pot pie, pull apart rolls, squash-ginger soup, cranberry relish, green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy, and of course pumpkin pie. It was all super amazingly yummy. The boys helped out quite a lot with the cooking, which was awesome. Mark had made this AMAZING spreadsheet with all our tasks and color codes and yowza it was something, but somehow we managed to lose it the night before while we were doing our shopping. VERY sad. That was pretty much the worst thing that happened all day, though, which is waaaaaaay better than I can say for most holidays spent with extended family. We watched some James Bond (way more fun than football) and fell asleep on the couch.

I feel like I've done enough holidays my own way on my own turf to feel pretty at peace with them. Mark is still pretty uneasy with the whole holiday thing, and trying to find what works for him. I felt like yesterday was nice, and I was glad he spent it with us, but it might have been too much "family time" for him. I understand. You can't ask someone to share something they don't even have ownership of; I know what the holidays are like for me and my family so it's easy for me to bring someone else into that, but for someone like Mark who hasn't established his own traditions yet it's like asking a toddler to share their toy monkey when they haven't yet gotten to experience having the toy monkey be all their own.

Ha. Toy Monkey Day.

Usually I don't do this, but...ohmygod I fucking despise Jenny Lewis. I didn't think I could ever hate a musician more than I loathe Rilo Kiley, but there you have it. Fuck. If I turn on the Current one more time and here "Happy" I swear I will smash something. Alternatively, I will get on a plane, fly to LA and personally shove a sock in her little girl voiced, "oh I'm so jaded but yet so naive somehow" lyric spewing mouth. Please, Jenny, just go to fucking therapy and spare us your personal fucking pain.

This old journal reading project of mine got super stalled out (mostly because it got too scary)...here is an interesting tidbit. During my senior year at the arts high I was allowed to have a double arts area in both music and literary arts. That was probably a bad idea and I think they stopped letting kids do that pretty much after that year. Anyway, in my lit class what we did was spend pretty much 2 hours a day free writing on a variety of random topics and then reading aloud to eachother what we had written. For the last 3 months of my senior year I wrote exclusively about sex. Let me be clear. I wrote about strange, sad, dark, unhappy, scary, often vague sexual situations involving coercion, seduction, violence, torture, rape, drugs, and small children. For this, it turns out, I recieved a final grade of 100% in this class, according to my high school transcript. It would be tempting to think that my teachers were pedophiles and sadists, but they were not. They were extremely kind, extremely intelligent human beings. Perhaps I was being graded on bravery?

So now I have TMJ or some crap. Senna said "Mom, I think you are sickness-prone." Um, yeah, but only in the last year. My self-care project seems to be backfiring tremendously. It seems like the more I try to take care of myself the worse things get for me. I suppose the answer is to stop trying and just do it, but that hasn't seemed to work either. Sadly, the only times in my past that I have seemed to succeed at this seem to have been when I have recently extricated myself from a really bad relationship. This is not a pattern I am interested in continuing, so I am going to have to come up with a different plan.

October 7th.

MLT plays their 2nd show ever.
TLW is in town for the first time in 2 years.

Hey, I have an idea...why doesn't someone in Mpls. book Fluffers real quick for that date as well?

Seriously, I haven't been paying enough attention. Also, I am having a hard time deciding which ballot to vote on, Independent or DFL. But I think that the Governor's race is going to decide that for me. I would really like to see Becky Lourey beat out Mike Hatch. I deeply dislike Hatch, and actually like Lourey pretty well. I also think it is going to be a tough call in my district for the house between DFL candidates, and although I think Ostrow is pretty much ok I much prefer Ellison. The other guys I am not fond of. In the general I am likely to actually vote about 1/2 Independent, provided they get the right people on the ballot...I'm a little worried about that, but I think the DFL primary has more at stake this time, because I'm also concerned about the sheriff race and Attorney General, to a lesser extent. NOT a fan of Lori Swanson OR Bill Luther.

Politics schmolitics.

So, my car is broken. Conveniently, it broke down just a few blocks from where I work. Not so conveniently, it had to be towed to a mechanic who won't be able to look at it until tomorrow and my life does not really function without a car. I suppose that as long as it is repairable for an uninsane amount of money I will survive the next few days or whatever without it and life will go on, but it sure will not be a very awesome next few days.

Mark had his first taste of Jamie in crisis mode and, although he far from enjoyed it, he handled it well. Predictably, he responded exactly the way I would have if the roles had been reversed, which is a whole lot nicer than the ways I am used to having people respond to me when I am trying to deal with a crisis (Typically by reinforcing the idea that I am hysterical, incompetent, and irrational, and almost certainly can't handle the situation on my own. Sometimes by outright taking control, but more often just by making sure I know that I need someone else to handle the whole thing, because I obviously can't.)

Anyway, that was my day. Pretty bitchin.

This always semms like a good time to start new things to me. I think that must be partly because of the way we do school in this country; it is just ingrained in me that new things begin in Autumn. But it is also by far the most pleasant season in Minnesota. We are heading into our Indian Summer, which is that time in September and October, after we got a little taste of cool and rainy at the end of August to let us know that fall was coming, when it is crisp and cool in the mornings and evenings but sunny and 85 during the day. Perfect.

Last year I certainly made a pretty dramatic shift around this time. I don't know what is next, and that is making me a little nervous. I seem to still be doing quite a bit of housecleaning, and I have a lot of fears about running out of time before I finish the job. I am used to having the rug ripped out from under me, having to adapt quickly to chaotic situations, other people's demands. Survival. I can't really imagine a life that is different from that. Right now life is calm, but that doesn't feel at all stable to me. In fact, the better it feels the more scared I get. The higher you get the harder you
fall and all of that.

My tolerance for other people's bullshit has gotten pretty low, and I am approaching a point where my policy with people is "one strike and you're out". Which in many cases is really that particular person's 70 billionth strike and so it's really not inappropriate, but in some other cases it really is the first strike, and I really am not confident in my ability to distinguish at this point.

One thing I know for sure. When I was 17 I fucking had it made. I was doing what I loved, I was on a path to a successful career doing something I loved, I had friends, I had fans, I had mentors. I had exactly the amount of responsibility I wanted and needed to have, I had structure, I had guidance, I had freedom to explore. But all was not little happy elves and dancing pixies handing out magic golden fruit. Not that it should have been, that would be disgusting, but what I am saying is that despite all the things that were good, something was terribly wrong, or I would not have fallen so far down into such a very deep dark pit of despair for so very long.

For a really long time I have been assuming that the thing that was wrong was something that was wrong with me. After all, that is what everyone told me. In fact, no one was really ever willing to listen to anything else, not even the merest suggestion of it. Any hint of "I think that the reason I did what I did was because someone else did something" was always met with "That's bullshit! You need to take responsibility for your own life and your own choices!" And I am a good girl and I take responsibility for my (and everyone else's) problems. So I did. I have.

But let's just say, for a minute, that I'm actually NOT crazy. That even though I've been told my whole life that every single independent thought or feeling I have is totally invalid, there is a possibility that that is actually not the case. That, perhaps, my thoughts and feelings are every bit as valid as, say, my father's. Just as a random example. What do you suppose would happen to this story then? How do you suppose it might turn out differently?

And on a bigger picture level, if a parent continually undermines a child's sense of self, and her ability to distinguish reality from unreality, who is responsible for that child's seemingly crazy behavior when she is 17 and 18 years old? The child? The parent? Some combination thereof? At what point does parental culpability really end? I could point to some pretty compelling brain research that says it shouldn't end completely until age 24 or 25. Obviously there are always exceptions, but phsyiologically we are just not mature until then.

Now, before y'all jump down my throat with a bunch of totally irrelevant crap about "The Real World", let me remind you that I don't give a shit. I am just asking the questions I think need to be asked, both for me and for all the other kids in the world being held responsible for their parents' utter ineptitude (I'm being generous here) as parents.

People should need licenses to have children. They should have to pass tests. Rigorous ones. No, I don't think random prolific breeding strengthens or diversifies the gene pool in any meaningful way that couldn't be accomplished just as well through other means. No, I don't think it's "God's Plan". It's certainly not necessary for survival of our species at this point, in fact it's probably going to be it's undoing. I'm tired of this. I want to be a Veangeful God.

If crazy people are telling me I'm crazy does that mean I'm extra crazy? Or does it mean that I'm actually sane?

The wood for the trees ***
Valid during many months: This can be a time of difficulties in communicating with others and of problems arising from a serious conflict of viewpoints. During this time your ideas and opinions, as well as your ways of communicating with people, will be seriously challenged by others. Disagreements may lead you to sever relationships or at least to consider doing so. You may feel gloomy, depressed and worried because people do not seem to share your ideas. This makes you feel alone, and at the same time you may withdraw from communicating with others. Therefore this is usually a poor time to make any decisions unless you have to. In your present frame of mind you are incapable of seeing the whole picture upon which any decision must be based. Also your tendency toward pessimism makes you underestimate the real possibilities.

Instead of withdrawing from intellectual conflict with others, you should try to recognize the sources of conflict and help everyone clarify the problems. The differences between you and others are real. Your ideas are fixed and clear enough that others may feel called upon to challenge them. You are in the position of having to defend and justify to others what you believe and think.

It may be that your thinking has become too rigid over the last several years. Challenges by other people can force you to examine your ideas and opinions to see whether they are broad enough to encompass your experience. If you discover that they are not, this should be a time of radical mental reconstruction. If you do not succeed in incorporating other people's challenges into your idea structure and instead just ignore them, you will undergo a much more serious period of mental confusion and readjustment in about seven years.

The interpretation above is for your transit selected for today:
Saturn Square MercurySaturnSquareMercury exact at 12:20
activity period from 25 August 2006 until end of May 2007.

It's all my fault. Yup, everything. If you would like details on this, you can talk to my father. I'm sure he would be happy to fill you in.

I am in the middle of nowhere for the weekend. If y'all want to talk to me you will have to utilize computerized methods of communication because el telefono no work so good out here on the prairie. Thanks.

It's been a week of revelations, most of them not entirely painless. Actually, the revelations are more accurately integrations of revelations which came a long time ago. Some of them a VERY long time ago. I will attempt to articulate a small portion of one of them, more for my own benefit than anyone else's, but of course feedback is welcome if anyone is reading this.

It has been 4 years since I moved back to Minneapolis from Texas. When I look back 4 years to how I felt about being here, it is difficult for me to believe that I have managed to come to any sort of peace with my existence here, that my heartbreak has eased, that I have accepted my loss and found happiness in other things. It has not been an easy road, nor do I suppose that it is over, but I have learned a few things, and I suspect that some things, at least, may get easier from here.

When I first moved back to Minneapolis four years ago I was talking to someone about how unhappy I was, and all the various things going on in my life at the time and he said to me "You KNOW romance. You've DONE romance. What you need is FRIENDSHIP." and then he proceeded to give me a definition of friendship that came back to me this weekend as I was thinking about the last year of my life, and the people who have become most important to me. He said "Friendship is a connection in affection that is not so intense that it dislodges people from their common sense." There is more to it than that, of course, but boiled down to one pithy phrase, I think that does quite well.

I took this person's advice seriously, to the best of my ability at the time. I tried very hard to build friendships with the people who came into my life. The problem was, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I didn't know a damn thing about warm, stable connections built with kindness and respect over time. I didn't know thing one about affection lacking the intensity to dislodge people form their common sense. I had one speed and it was full throttle. I tried very hard to ride the brakes with people, but that only resulted in spin-outs and giant ruts and rollovers and multi-vehicle pile-ups, depending on the terrain. I have to admit, 3 of the last 4 years have been disastrous on a personal level. I can only think of a handful of instances in which my efforts to build friendships were successful, and in every one of those cases I think the credit belongs to the other party's extremely well developed sense of loyalty and compassion.

The truth is, friendship is a lot more work than romance. It requires a great deal of integrity and openness and strength. Romance is fast and furious and bedazzling; it is a magic trick where friendship is true alchemy. Friendship is also much more sustaining than romance. Even in a "romantic" relationship, friendship is the most important factor. There are no happily married couples who will tell you that the basis of their marriage is romance, because romance is a perk, a sideshow, in any relationship; it's not a base for anything. I know this. Intuitively I have always known this, and my conscious mind has been grappling with it for a long time. When I was 17 I would have happily delivered a lecture on the topic of romance and why it was complete garbage. I was into Jung at that time, so I had some good ideas, but I had yet to really connect them to anything in myself. That didn't come until much later.

Regardless of whether or not I thought romance was complete garbage, it seemed to be what people wanted from me. Time after time after time, no matter what I offered, no matter how hard I worked to give people something else, what they seemed to want was fiery, passionate, intense, out of control lovemaking followed by a heartrending separation. And I was good at it. I knew it instinctively, inside and out. I could play that game effortlessly; it was like breathing. In retrospect, it is difficult to say how much of that was really what people were asking for and how much of it was just that it was all I was really willing to give, despite my longing on a deeper level for something more. In any case, it was my perception that I was offering much more than that and it was being refused, and this increased my already severe lack of trust and respect for humanity in general exponentially. Furthermore, it was my belief that I had no choice but to go along with what I perceived to be other people's desires, in order to have any sort of connection with other people at all.

At this point I realize that I have created a self-perpetuating system of interaction with people that brings about exactly the results I am trying to escape. But, I feel as though a bit of fog has lifted and I can finally see the top of this particular mountain clearly for the first time. I don't think I'm anywhere near it. But at least I can see it.

I keep coming back to Emerson's essay, Friendship, and finding new gems. Here is one:

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance with my brother's soul, is the nut itself, whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law!

Ralph Waldo Emerson, From "Friendship"

Yeah, ok, so, I'm not cursed with perfect pitch like my son, but even so the off key whistling along to John Fogarty tunes of the dude who has been hired to paint the trim of the condos where I am currently working is likely to drive me to some type of violence soon. Very soon.

So I was going to Target to pick up ... whatever, and I pulled my car into a parking space, and as I was doing so I noticed the bumper sticker on the big green truck in the spot next to me. It said What Would Xena Do? I used to have this bumper sticker on my car...and I purchased the same bumper sticker for my dear friend Rick who I haven't seen in years who... put it on his ... monstrous green truck...

I got out of my car, went around to the driver's side of the truck, and sure enough there was my friend Rick, sitting in the driver's seat. I banged on the window, and he turned and looked at me, and then got out of the truck and said hello, really quite as though he had just seen me last Tuesday, and as though running into one another in the Target parking lot in Edina were a normal sort of thing to have happen and not the completely and utterly bizarre occurrence that it actually was.

We had a brief conversation in which he explained to me that he is here visiting his daughter, who recently bought a house in south Minneapolis and is pregnant with twins and gave me his blog info. Rick is a friend of mine from the Wisconsin days, and he still lives in Highbridge, WI, which is part of what makes it so odd to run into him here. I am not sure why we lost touch with eachother, exactly. I think he just fell victim to my lack of moderate communication skills; and perhaps his own as well. I have a tendency to lose track of anyone I don't talk to on a daily basis, and then it becomes a matter of just however often we happen to end up in the same place at the same time. It is really unfortunate because there are really a lot of people that I would probably like to be in contact with on a somewhat less than daily and somewhat more than once every 3 years basis. Like Rick.

In any case, that was the most magical moment I expect to ever have in a Target parking lot.

I keep having dreams about being pregnant, and/or other people being pregnant and needing me to help them deliver their babies. This is not so terrifically strange. After all, my best friend is pregnant, and I did spend some time training with a midwife in my youth...but I suspect that that my subconscious has more metaphorical things in mind.

I have no fear of pregnancy and childbirth -- I have given birth twice at home in pre-industrialization type circumstances. I have an absolute faith in evolutionary biology and the body's ability to just get the job done if you get out of it's way and let it. In these dreams I am being called on to facilitate that process for people who don't quite get that concept, which makes sense to me, or I am about to give birth myself, which is fine and dandy and not at all scary. The only thing that is scary in any of these dreams is when I am first finding out that I am pregnant; that is the only time that I have doubts, when I am afraid that I can't do it, when I think "but my body can't handle this right now". Interesting.

Also, I have been having some intensely erotic dreams. That is pretty unusual for me. Especially the last several years. They are kindof blowing my mind.

I have never been that huge a fan of the Drive-By Truckers. It is possible that is because I have only ever seen them play with Centro-matic, who I consider to be the best rock band currently playing music, and there is just no way they could compete with that. But they have really hit the nail on the old head this time. Easy On Yourself is my new personal anthem. I spent the day learning how to play it, which I'm sure drove my kids crazy, but it's not as though they weren't driving me crazy (secondary lesson of the day: People Are More Important Than Video Games ...um, yeah.)

Rearranging the voices in my head seems to be the thing du'jour these days, so I'm glad the DBT were kind enough to write a southern rock anthem about it for me, to give me that extra kick in the pants when I start to get cranky about it. "Don't be so easy on yourself" Jason belts out, seemingly just for me "'cause this one might be all that you have left" ambiguity is the masterful songwriter's best friend...this one what? Well, whatever you happen to be scared might be your last one of, see? Brilliant. "rearrange the voices in your head, and remember what they said" ooooooh, see, now that is really hitting home. There really is a warning here, we are not playing around. And then back to the tagline "don't be so easy on yourself" which is apparently what the rearranged voices in my head are telling me, as well as my good friend singing the song here. Beautiful.

The rest of the song, if you pay too much attention and know anything about anything, is a story about rural small town drug culture, which thank god has nothing to do with me (anymore). But, if you ignore those details (which I find pretty easy to do), even the verses have some universal gems in them. And the turn-around line is also very applicable to lots of situations: "Calling out to everyone who tried to run; you tried to run" and then "Ten years down the line you find you're left behind; you're left behind."

Yup. That is a well-written song. And so apropos.