16 days ago  5 comments

good news for people who love bad news

i feel like that has been my fall.

on the upside its not my family, on the downside one of the kindest awesomest people i know has serious cancer.

i found him on facebook yesterday and was excited cause we had fallen out of touch over the last couple of years... but after he friended me and i saw his profile, i saw that it said he had cancer. we im'ed later and its not an uplooking situation. he has been battling it for over a year and soon will be undergoing one last treatment. if that doesn't work it is sort of the end of the line.

i'm really sad today.

34 days ago  4 comments

woe is me.

this morning, over coffee, S asked if it was ok to talk to his good friend about the stuff that has been going on in my family. and it stopped me. i instantly felt defensive. this friend of S's, lets call him D, is also a friend of mine. in some ways i feel like, of all of our friends, D comes closest to having a similiar background as me- complicated, poor and white. but, in the abstract, i think of our friends as having middle or upper class intelligentsia-style backgrounds.

and i have a class problem.

growing up in a mostly white town and being the poor, but brainy, kid has made me pretty defensive. i have often talked about my "crazy", "white-trash", "alcoholic", "living down a dirt road", "dropping their g's" family, i put them down to distance myself from them, i have worked hard to be able to "pass" and to fit in to middle and upper class american society. my sister and i have often talked about how hard it is to find people who can hear our stories of growing up, or about our family now, and have them relate in a non-pitying or "helpful" manner. and that somethings that seemed fairly normal to us, really aren't.

i guess what i am really saying is that i am ashamed of my family, and feel guilty of that shame, and dissappointed in myself for worrying about how my friends (or S's family) might judge me for my family. i know i am not special and that there are lot's of people who have had experiences or families as disfunctional as mine, i just haven't been running into them lately.

/self pitying monologue

34 days ago  6 comments

an unsent letter

dear little sis,

um, just so you know, beating the shit out of your step-sister, over laundry, ranks pretty low as far as sympathy ploys go. you know, something to keep in mind.

love,

sissy lil

ps- i am, sorta, glad you didn't actually break your arm in the course of beating her up.

34 days ago  4 comments

oh crap.

just when i thought things had calmed down with my crazy family...

i talked to my little, 14 yr old, sister this morning and she is potentially dropping out of highschool because her nearly 18 yr old (wtf!?) ex-boyfriend has been threatening her and my mom. also lot's of other sketchy stuff in that situation that i don't think i can share with the internet. but, man, i have no idea what to think or do about it all.

----

updated to add: she is not dropping out of the ninth grade, so that is good. umm, yea.

34 days ago  2 comments

stay at home dad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmWp-rI6vSw

courtesy of my buddy maynard, a soon to be stay at home dad.

34 days ago  3 comments

rambling

next week the tinyness and i (and eventually S) are going to visit my dad. i'm excited and a little worried. excited because my dad is a crazy old pirate that is a lot of fun to hang out with and i know that he and the tinyness will have a ball. because he has many health problems and i haven't seen him in nearly a year, i am afraid that he is going to look a lot older, though. and worrying about my dad always makes me think about my mom, too, which is not fun either. i haven't talked to her since mother's day, i haven't tried calling her and she hasn't called me. when i was younger i was a total mama's girl- and now i sometimes am resentful that my dad is the one with serious health problems and probably not so many years left. i think that is part of why her suicide attempt made me so angry- that she would throw her life away like, even though she is fairly young and in reasonable health. but then i feel crazy guilty for thinking those things. ack.

to circle back around to excited let me also say that i am going camping with my sister in august, just the two of us, and i am already anxious (in a good way).