Month: July 2002

I’ve been reading some of the blogging on anger lately, that started with burning bird’s post on the subject, and continued through the (fairly intense) discussion – plus what Dave Rogers had to say, and some of Dorothea’s thoughts (as usual, stavros borders on the truly absurd). and I’ve been trying to put my own thoughts together….

C and I are essentially two sides of the coin when it comes to anger. anger, or at least its expression, come pretty easily to him – he gets riled up by the world: politics, society, the idiot in the other car, while I tend to be pretty fatalistic. more than that – anger and its emotional neighbor conflict make me deeply, deeply anxious. much of what Dorothea said resonated with me, not just the entry linked above, but also this entry on “the deprecatory self”. The last piece of the puzzle is my desperate fear of interpersonal conflict. yeah, what she said.

but being angry has only rarely jounced me out of intolerable situations, and I’ve been in a few. no matter how mad I got when I was at UWPC, I never had the strength of character, or faith in myself, or whatever, to follow through on that emotion, to express how f*ed up that scene was (or the museum before that, or various other situations). I’ve also seen people who were angry, who expressed a lot of anger, flail around in those situations and not get anywhere – storm out, sometimes getting what they wanted, sometimes not.

ugh. I’m totally incoherent talking about anger – it seem essential to me that one pull apart anger as the desire to rectify a bad situation, anger as rage, fear, frustration, anger in its expression(s), anger turned inward (now, self-loathing I can talk about!), etc., etc. those emotions I can express much better with poetry than with prose.

and I remember showing Kat the portfolio that I put together at the end of my advanced poetry course, and she read it, and said “I never knew you felt that way about ….” I think K said the same thing. that’s really the difficult thing for me, in social settings – I have these emotions that make me uncomfortable: anger, hurt, embarrassment, despair, hate – and I don’t express them, except in poetic modes. (and not even there so much lately – it’s been a bad year for writing, except in this venue.)

the rational woman speaks
in her dictionary-precise
all-dressed-up-for-company voice

I still remember the day that voice split open
and the words poured out
shattered on the rocks of my
idon’tknowwhy

you said you wanted to understand
I heard you ask me to speak
in textbook-perfect language
to dissect my own insides
draw the diagram and say
this is my treachery:
just below the pancreas
formed by an absence
of vitamin R

your fists screamed the language
of fists and tears and all I wanted to
say was – now you are learning
my mother tongue

(summer 1996)

“your rating is 98.29% Sorry, you lost 1 point because you are using a Windows machine.”

also, http://www.disinfo.com/

excellent essay on the music biz & the ‘net
chess in 5k
ideas for weblog forms – I’d love to try my hand at the dialog, perhaps for part of book 2?
Olympia Poly Intimacy Network

family & name history stuff:
distribution of names in US census data (limited searches!)
FamilySearch
Behind the Name

– sexy css layout

from metafilter: “O/T: my all time favourite sexually suggestive billboard.“

and yesterday I got a phone call about something that might add to the coming chaos: my maternal grandmother is in the hospital with pneumonia. she’s almost 91 years old and has late stage parkinson’s disease; my aunt has been taking care of her for about a year, before that, she was in a facility (not a nursing home – that is a long story). I don’t know a whole lot, because mom and aunt Jane don’t communicate very well; she may be doing fine, relatively speaking, or she could die any minute.

grandma dillon is the last of my grandparents, and the one that I had the most contact with. if my scanner were hooked up, I’d post a picture. my mother’s parents lived fairly close to us (they lived in Arcadia, we lived in Altadena), as opposed to my dad’s parents, who lived in Arizona, and grandma took care of us on many occassions when I was a kid. Edith & I were left with grandma when Elizabeth was born, and grandma was watching us when mom came from the hospital to tell us that dad had died. she took us to the LA County Art Museum, helping to foster my love of art (and museums – she also came with us when we went to the Natural History Museum). I think I still have the orange & blue hat that she wore as a volunteer at Santa Anita Racetrack for the 1984 Olympics (it’s probably packed in with a box of books).

for many years, Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners were held at their house, which I can still see in my mind as clear as day…many hours spent sitting at the kitchen table, listening to her & mom talk, staring up at the corkboard covered with coupons and notes in her precise handwriting. the glass jug of water in the fridge. the metal tin of cookies. the huge old white stove. the white sofa with the plastic covering. the fishpond in the backyard, and the prickly st. augustine grass. the freeway, practially across the street – it wasn’t there when they moved in, back in the 1940s.

not that she was a sweetness & light grandmother, either. she had a slightly sarcastic sense of humor, hated flowery greeting cards, and could be quite firm with us girls, about our manners or cleaning up after ourselves. I gather that she was even more so with my mother and her siblings. she knew about 5 words of german from her mother, who died when grandma was a child, and while I don’t remember the actual word, I remember that one of them amounted to “sit the hell down.” 🙂 mom says that when the nuns at mom’s elementary school gave grandma a hard time – because uncle Sean had been sick a lot – she chewed them out.

I always wanted to sit down with her and get stories, but she was reticent, and then I moved away, and (as my email friends already know) was a lousy correspondent. she did meet Chad once, at Elizabeth’s high school graduation, and he was wonderfully gentle with her, and she was quite gracious with him, though she was even then not in terribly good health.

and while I shared a birthday with my other grandmother – and look more like her – I was named after grandma dillon (full name: Helen Madera Gillen Dillon), Elaine being a variant of Helen, and she was a huge part of our day-to-day life growing up.

I hope that she dies peacefully, when it’s that time, that my aunt lets everybody know what’s going on, and that maybe my mother and her siblings begin to communicate again. (not that I’m one to talk. I should drop Edith an email.)

the sad thing for me right now is that I’m realizing that I don’t even have any pictures of her, except in the album that Aunt Susie put together…and those are from my parent’s wedding!

right to left: Grandpa Dillon (died 1995), Mom, Dad (died 1983), Grandma Dillon. taken at the reception, May 1973, in grandma & grandpa’s backyard. yes, those are avocado trees in the background.

I am still half-asleep, still half-dressed, in the middle of the day. midday tv is still much as it has been since I was a kid, though with more court & talk shows. commercials are still aimed at the injured, elderly, and unemployed. finally turned it off, though. drinking lots of juice, napping.

sometimes it’s almost nice to have your body just shut down for a few days and force you to rest. the next few weeks are going to be pretty crazy, and it’ll do me good to get caught up on sleep.

I’m also coming down with a cold…the same one that’s had C coughing like mad the last few nights. ergo: I am tired.

write about: coming out (David’s entry), trying to explain blogging to Kat, communicating with someone I don’t know. also, recent entries by burning bird, Dorothea, and stavros. yes, and sleep at some point.

some rough thoughts to smooth out later….

yesterday was gorgeous, gorgeous weather. the first people turned up at 8:20, while we were still pulling stuff out of the garage. we never did get everything priced – there was lots of “how much is this?” “hon, how much?” “um, I don’t know? is a dollar good?” 😛

but we did insane business, sold a ton of stuff…which means that we also have way less to move! Jennifer C. came up from Oly with her little girl to sell some clothes and odds & ends, and the four of us spent most of the afternoon hanging out in the front yard & enjoying the sun. (a bit o’ burn for me & Jen.)

today: rain, rain, rain. I even heard a thunderclap not long ago. an older guy (70s) who’d bought some computer parts came back & bought some more. he said he’d been working with computers since the 50s: army, air force, post office. has been retired since the early 80s, lots of heart problems. you could tell that he’s a real hobby-enthusiast, and that he really wanted to talk to somebody. 🙁 also got an interesting story, yesterday, from a guy who’d been in the military & stationed in Tripoli in the 50s, about rioting over the dispute over the suez canal, and also that he’d had a one-handed (right hand chopped off as punishment!) caddy named Quaddafi. that story came from looking at Jen’s old world map, that still had the USSR on it.

got ripped off for $8 from a pleasant-looking couple who were going to pay $40 for 2 tables, but only had $32 and would come back. um, yeah. that never happened. should’ve told ’em to go down to Albertsons.

made an incredibly tasty mish-mash asian dish last night: reheated rice with a bit of spiced oil, steamed broccoli, fried zucchini with a bit of pepper & garlic, chicken breast with lemon & chinese pepper mix, fried tofu marinated in soy sauce & lemon juice, all topped with Jen’s peanut curry sauce (with sweetened condensed milk instead of coconut milk, because I spaced it at the grocery store). which I mention only because the lemon/soy tofu came through the rich peanut sauce really, really well.

that was also about all I had to eat yesterday (except for a pbj sandwich and a mocha)….

I am so freaking tired.