(all things great and small)

One of my favorite things about living in the Pacific Northwest, is that I am constantly reminded about how very small we actually are, just by opening my eyes and looking skyward.

Becca was here visiting over the weekend, and we went out to West Seattle Sunday afternoon, and got a chance to spin over to the other side of the water and take a nice walk in Lincoln Park (which seems strange, being natively from Chicago, where Lincoln Park = yuppie lunacy, not water and earth). On the drive home, we were both chatting about simply not understanding the mindset of most mountain climbers, who seem to look at a giant range and think “Conquer it!” while we just find ourselves in an appreciative awe, glad to let her have her power, to diminish us bny nothing but perspective and history, to pose those gentle reminders that the world is very, very big and we are very, very small, and that Very Big is made of the Very Small, besides.

There are other places to get this sort of thing, of course, but I just love being somewhere where there are trees right here, in my own yard, I couldn’t hug with a circle of four people locking hands, they’re so wide, so massive and so old. When I left Chicago in ‘99, I had many reasons for doing so, but one was that I had gotten to a point where while the urban was familiar, and I never had any problems being urban, I need plenty of green mixed into my city. Minneapolis did me right on that score, and Seattle does a fine job, too.

But as more time passes, I think that ultimately, my life is perhaps leading me to a place where maybe twenty or thirty years from now, it’s rural or village life I’ll crave. The mere fact that every couple of years, I feel a strong urge to reread Pilgrim at Tinker Creek sends that message loud and clear, and the fact that however much I love my cities, I feel more at home, in the most basic way, in the quiet and the green, in the dirt under my fingernails and the scuffs on my knees.

* * *
I just got a phone call from my sister today, wishing me a happy birthday a day in advance.

That perhaps seems mundane, unless you bear in mind that I get calls from my sister maybe once every five years. I suspect that besides her earnestly wanting to wish me a happy birthday, the call may have come because our mother has been ill. We think she’ll pull through, but we’ve had a big scare and a big shock lately, and since my sister has never had a relationship with my father, our mother is really our only tie, and that may loom larger just now.

We never got on growing up — we’re just incredibly different, and our parents also treated us very differently — and when I left home to get out of the hell I was in, it cemented a distance we’d had already, and which would only grow wider as the years went by. The fact that she was yet one more person in my mother’s family who met me with dissaproval and disbelief from day one, no matter what I did has never helped, and neither has the fact that years back, I just plain gave up trying to fill her in on all that happened to me she didn’t know about: she didn’t want to know, and while it’s possibly crappy of me to not have tried again in a decade or more, I just got tired and worn too thin trying so hard to get that branch of the family to hear me and understand or accept all I’d been through.

I struggle often with the fact that all in all, I have been a great big sister to so many women, but a really shitty one to my own flesh and blood, and it’s so hard to rectify or know how to fix, especially with someone so different than me, who in so many ways dislikes who I am and what I do with my life, and whose emotional/psychosocial makeup is so foreign to me. My sister is like my mother in that regard: very guarded, very nervous, very uncomfortable even hugging, and very, very freaked out by anything that even remotely rings of conforntation, so even in the moments when we connect and might almost get along, it’s like we’re two people who speak two entirely different languages which share no roots.

* * *
The book cover FINALLY went up at Amazon, far late in the game, but I can’t figure out why the image looks so mushy. Stupid Amazon.

But bonus: Jane and I are going to the Olympus for my birthday tomorrow, and Ben and I — whose birthdays are within a day of each other, and who both have sweetie-less birthdays this year as our partners both got stuck with commitments they couldn’t get out of — are having some sort of to-do Friday. Plus, there is a very big present covered in Muppet wrapping paper sitting on my office floor from Mark.

Old as any of us get, the gargantuan allure of the Very Big Present remains.

(It doesn’t make noise when I shake it. I tried. It’s just heavy. Hmmm. Big. Present.)

* * *
Yesterday at Scarleteen, a 19-year-old user made a post about a friend’s mother, just older than me, who had, since this girl was 14, treated her all BFF and gained her trust and loyalty… then wound her way into a lesbian relationship with her. She essentially appears to have done this to spice up her existing live-in relationship, by doing things like sending sexed-up emails to this girl, then forwarding them to her partner to get some good jealousy going, and having sex with this girl one afternoon, then shoving her out the bedroom door to let the primary partner in for their turn, knowing this poor kid was standing right in the other room listening and clueless.

And of course, this girl is torn as hell, feeling she owes this older woman “willing” to be her friend for so long all this loyalty; feeling used and wanting out, but not knowing how to do it without somehow being a bad person in her mind, and also putting her relationship with her best friend, the woman’s son, in a pickle.

Christ, people are goddamn awful sometimes — what the FUCK is wrong with people like this? — and some days, there just aren’t words and it just overwhelms completely. There are days when I really love my job, but there are days when I just really, really don’t, solely because the crap people pull with young people, and the shit so many of them have to wade through needlessly, that what little we can do to help out just feels silly.

* * *
I have a meeting this afternoon with the owener of the Belltown martini bar where we’ll most likely be having the Seattle version of the book release party, emails to get out for more book promo, including to the owner of the space which will hopefully be up to hosting the Minneapolis release party, workworkwork coming out of my ears, and a bedroom floor so overflowing with laundry that we couldn’t find the bed last night under all of it.

And unless I’m going to go to this meeting in my pajamas — which sounds wonderful to me, but likely won’t be recieved that way — it’d be sage for me to actually do some of it right now. Bummer.

filed under Heather Corinna | Scarleteen | home | family
posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 9:53 am

follow responses to this entry through the rss 2.0 feed
you can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.