A brief interlude to send a few more thanks for folks blogging about and helping out with Scarleteen fundraising efforts — in no particular order: edwarddain wrote this GORGEOUS entry here, we’ve got Miz Daisy Cutter here, Kythryne and Amy did an awesome thing over here, Amanda wrote a zinger of an entry, and also thanks to Figleaf (who I’ve started reading off and on lately, I dig his style), Pescana, faymar, Naamah and Cecily. More thanks to everyone: right now, we’re just over half of our fundraising goal for this push, which is awesome, and all thanks to people spreading the word this way.
I’m hoping for a fairly mellow weekend. I just spent the last 36 hours or so fending off a rabid pro-lifer across two of my sites (must be that time of the month), and am bitter and exhausted, but glad to see that (knock on wood) she appears to have become quickly bored, or perhaps, with the weekend here and her working spouse around, needed to actually take care of her precious children, rather than harass myself and a couple of someone else’s children at Scarleteen. I do have most of the posts filed away for a later date, however, for what will make a fine study in the 24-hour life cycle of an anti-choice escalation.
On the upside, no telling if it’ll pan out or not, but the last time I flew my Dad up here, we got him an application for low-income housing up here. Given they sometimes have waiting lists as long as two years, we weren’t all that hopeful for an immediate answer, but lo, an opening in one came up yesterday, and I’m going to check it out for him Monday morning.
The Low Income Housing Institute here is a very, very cool thing. I particularly appreciate them trying to build in nice neighborhoods: all to often, people underestimate or just don’t understand the effect living in a ghetto has on a person. It’s hard enough to barely get by, and to live more-than-leanly, but to have to do it in a neighborhood where you get mugged all the time, where your safety is a 24/7 concern, where it’s just as dangerous to walk during the day as it is at night, where street prostitutes are getting beat on my their pimps right out your window every night is just beyond, especially as years go by. My father has now been mugged nine times in his life. He has all of about four teeth left in his head.
I can’t live like that again, myself, and I didn’t deal with it even half as long as my father has. I actually had to ask Mark (Seattle is the only city he’s lived in: he grew up in suburban Ohio) to stop talking, even casually, about moving to L/A. or New York on a whim, in part because we just bloody moved. But mostly it’s because when I moved from Chicago to Minneapolis/St. Paul, I got used to not having to worry every night when I went to bed about break-ins, not having to step over drunks in my lobby in the morning, not finding human waste literally steaming on my doorstep, not having cats to deal with mice and rats, or having to walk from the el or my car with my keys splayed through my fingers in one hand, mace in the other, in a constant state of on-the-alert. When I left Chicago, I was living in a tiny basement barely-apartment with a concrete floor, one radiator on the ceiling which didn’t provide me any heat at all, a stalker, no security, and with my van getting broken into about once a month. All this for a rent that was not dirt-cheap, and only because the oweners of the house were doing me a very big favor in letting me live there to keep me from winding up on the street after an eviction from another place before, a place I lived through the previous winter in without electricity and gas, and where I ate maybe once every two days, for a period of several months.
Had I stayed living in and like that, I wouldn’t have known the difference in any tangible way, but since I didn’t, and close to ten years now have passed since I did, I just can’t go back. I don’t want to, and I don’t want anyone else I care about to have to live that way, either.
My Dad loves to walk: walking has always been his solace, and that he can’t even do that to find peace is grotesque. The place I’m seeing on Monday is on the top of Queen Anne Hill: it is in a gorgeous, safe neighborhood, and this particular building is only open to seniors and the disabled, so I’m hopeful. It’s a much-sooner opening than we expected — April — and unfortunately, that possibility had my Dad a bit panicked. Living in crap really sucks, but it’s also familiar at this point, and you know how it goes, especially as it gets earlier: sometimes the hell you know feels safer than the heaven you don’t. Plus, we’ve always had these issues with his pride and my caring for him. Way back when when I ran the school and I was taking care of him, it hurt his pride, especially when I had to foot all the bills, which I get, but at the same time I feel like there must be some middle ground between his pride and self-worth and his safety and my sanity.
We shall see: he may not even get this one this time around anyway, but there being an opening this soon makes it at least feel really possible that sometime in the near future, both of us will have to worry a lot less, and things can potentially be a lot better for my Dad.
February 24th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I hope the dad thing works out soon and well. And I’m really glad the insane lady seems to have spent her wad - I keep taking peeks at the boards and I really don’t know how you do it.
I have now spent two days pretty much doing nothing, and I almost feel like myself again. (Just in time for my parents to come back for five days…)
I saw the earrings - one of my friends bought them. I was hoping they’d made several pairs since I really liked those, but no. Ah well.
February 25th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Actually, fish, we made 19 pairs — they just sold out fast.
February 25th, 2007 at 9:51 am
Damn! I’m glad they sold out, but sorry I missed them.