I just got off the phone with my Pop.

I’m appreciating so much that over the last two years he’s been able to be in the SRO where I can actually be able to be in contact with him, know where he is, and that there’s a phone so we’re able to talk with some frequency and for decent periods of time.

When all the work crap went down a few weeks ago, and we were talking, we got into a conversation where he was asking why I was dedicated to activism the way I was, and I interrupted myself in the midst of explaining to tell him that I thought it was pretty damn silly for him to be asking why I was pretty much exactly the way he taught me to be. He took a pause, and he asked if that made me suffer. I answered that while it certainly doesn’t make for an easy life, it’s so rewarding and such a huge part of who I am that I don’t even know who I’d be otherwise: that what he gave me in that regard was a massive gift. And then he cried big, happy tears (this after crying sad tears about something else he’s been dealing with, so that was good).

My father has always been very hypercritical about being as good a parent to me as he could have been, despite the fact that given the whole of our situation, the whole of my childhood and adolescence and his life, and all of the things he has done for me — including, quite literally, saving my life and my sanity in my teens — I think he was a great Dad. I feel very blessed. I have a parent who has always been 100% supportive of me in everything I have done, who has always been my dearest friend. While his disabilities and his issues certainly have often been very hard for me, and having to provide care for him sometimes (being his only person in the world is certainly a burden), have him be on street sometimes, all of that, has by no stretch been easy for me and has often been acutely painful, I’ve also always been aware that neither he nor I can control much of that. When it all comes down to it, I have such a unique relationship with my father: one I see other people have very rarely, and without that….well, I just don’t know what on earth would have become of me in many, many ways. Really, I think I do know, and I do not think it would have been at all good. I don’t even know if I’d be alive or intact, honestly.

Those rare moments like that, where he actually experiences and feels the value he’s had, feels proud of the way that he parented, is able to have his self-critique and self-loathing fall away when it comes to me: it’s so awesome, and I’m so glad.

I probably won’t be able to see him again for another handful of months. Our plan at the moment is to fly him out here for the elections. We figure if it’s a good result, we all get to celebrate together, and if the worst happens yet again, we’ll at least have good company for a solid three-day bender of epic proportions.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, family, simple joys | permalink | comments (1) »

Mark finally came home yesterday, and it’s really nice to have him back.

When we travel apart, I don’t forget about the good stuff, but when we come back together, I’m usually reminded how good the good stuff really is; how much I value it as a very unique and individual expression of who we are together.

Because of what I do, I see a lot of people, daily, who are impatient for that stuff between each other to grow, and motivation for sex can in part be from a desire to make that stuff — very individual, unique expressions of who you are together — happen sooner than it might otherwise. I don’t think it’s a terrible motivation for sex, mind: it’s not like it’s destructive or unsafe. But if it’s the only motivation (especially when sexual pleasure isn’t part of that for one party), or if that’s the only place anyone’s relationship has or is nurturing this stuff, that’s not so wonderful.

Anyway, I love the way that via cooking together, Mark has grown to love cooking, not just be proficient at it. When we met, it was about him learning how, but it’s developed to the point where he is in love with it. It’s been an interesting process, especially with him often asking why a given alchemy happens the way it happens and wanting this in-depth chemistry of the thing, and me being all Italian and goony about it and pleading, cajoling with him, while pouring a glass of wine and handing it over, to just enjoy the alchemy and emotionally connect with the flavors and smells.

He came home yesterday toting a box of hot sauces and spices he’d gotten while away he was all geeked out about, and last night, using some of what he brought back, we each cooked together making our two separate pots of chili (Mr. Price is a massive carnivore), and he was hopping around the kitchen like a gleeful mad scientist, rubbing his hands together. He also did that thing he does a few times while cooking, where when he’s thinking deeply, he’ll stick his tongue out of his mouth a little, not realizing he’s doing it.

I love that we often spontaneously dance in the dining room. In fact, having decided that we wanted to do NYE at home this year, we may even go the extra mile tonight and dress up to dance in the dining room. Probably to the Journey box set I got for Mark, no less.

I love that when he gets a new piece of clothing he likes, he has to catwalk back and forth a few times; he is that delighted with his own dapperdom.

I love (even if sometimes it’s a bit frustrating) how sometimes, we’ll go upstairs with an eye towards having sex, and one or both of us will get so silly about something, and keep the goofy rolling for so long that we wind up feeling utterly unable to have sex because things have just gotten too damn silly. Of course, it’s also very nice when that does not happen and the original plan delivers.

I love that our major time to regroup and reconnect always happens sitting together in the bathtub, and that if I brush my teeth afterwards, I have to try and look away from Mark because otherwise, he giggles at me the whole time since I tend to move my eyeballs in tandem with the way I’m moving my toothbrush.

I LOVE sleeping together. Which is always very weird, since previous to dating Mark, I can count on two digits the other people, including friends, I have not only enjoyed sleeping with, but have not done bodily harm to during the night because my subconscious self was SO annoyed and frustrated with having to share my bed.

And I love the fact that I’m the natural early riser here and that at times like these, when he’s still sleeping, I can creep back into bed after my morning coffee, find him all naked and warm, and wake him up.

posted in Heather Corinna, Mr. Price, home, my fine romance, family | permalink | comments (2) »

It’s really a pity when you have a really nice weekend with friends (Mark and I drove down to Portland with Ben and Joriel yesterday), a great treatment from your acupuncturist (even better when she’s just a doll and treats you gratis), several phenomenal vegan meals, and then a mellow night back home and end it all with a night full of troubling dreams.

All night last night I had a series of what were clearly anxiety dreams about this job interview tomorrow. Most were based around perceptions of me as not likeable, which has got to be about the interview, because I pretty much stopped caring overmuch if people liked me in high school. There was also a lost-on-the-bus dream, which I know is also about this, as I’m having to take four busses to get to the location they want to interview me at and potentially have me work at. (I know four busses would suck, but again, I really want this gig quite specifically, and I really need a second job, so.) Then I had a revisitation dream about the very ill-fated second job I tried to have in Minneapolis in 2002, where I was doing home-care for a developmentally disabled woman who physically attacked me, including ripping a handful of my hair out in her hand, on the first (and thereafter, only) weekend I was there for an overnight. Joy.

It’s been a while since I had a bonafide job interview, and a while since I had a second out-of-the-home job. Since 2002, actually, with that disastrous homecare gig (if I don’t count co-teaching kickboxing, which I would save that it was a barter-work situation, rather than something I was paid for with the green stuff). This is something I very much want, work that I think is critically important with aspects I have been wanting to learn to do for some time, so that’s part of why this is clearly very loaded for me. Too, I think the anxiety is piling up because while my conscious mind can work out how I can do most of what I already do full-time and an additional job, out of my own office and at a considerable distance, my subconscious mind is all “SAY WHAT?!? We want a vacation, dammit, not more work!”

I’m also a bit nervous, since they decided to interview me at a different clinic than I initially applied to — the first was for a part-time spot — that at this one, the position may be full-time, and if they offer me a full-time spot, I’m not sure what I would do. While I can figure how I could work something else part-time and still run Scarleteen and keep up to some degree with my art and other writing, I don’t know how I would do two full-time jobs and everything else. Horse before the cart, chickens being hatched before eggs…I know. I’m just sorting my crap out, okay? I stopped teaching in ‘98, and even just substitute-teaching in ‘99 because it wasn’t workable to do that and everything else at the time, and that was when there was far LESS work involved, and when I was almost ten years younger than I am now, and when I needed a lot less sleep. My kingdom to have all that energy back, man: if I remember back ten or twenty years when I could work 18 hours or more in a day, grab three hours of sleep and be a bit low-energy, but otherwise fine, and bounce right back to normal in a day, I find I am stewing with jealousy towards the me I once was.

I think I’m also worried I’ll find myself having to make a hard choice again between two things I very much want to do, and it’s making me nervous for no good reason, since I don’t even know if that’s a realistic possibility at this point.

Gah. Just need to get to tomorrow, I guess. For all I know, I may be being just plain silly. Even though he’s worse at babbling for hours than I am, so a call would eat up a good amount of my day, I should probably call my Dad for some support: it’d make me feel better.

That involves doing an awful lot today, including prepping some artwork for an anthology, trying one last time to get a written piece done for the same anthology. I tried several times to write Friday and yesterday, only to find that when it comes to the topic at hand, I’m all style and little substance right now. It’s all fine, well and good to write beautiful sentences and gorgeous phrases, but one doesn’t want to go all Macbeth and be full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, especially when you’re talking about the future of feminism. One more try this morning, and if the writing just doesn’t happen, I accept that I do, indeed, have limitations and not only cannot always be brilliant, but can often enough not be anything even within the same zip code.

Also on the agenda, finishing a batch of photos I did of Robert and Carol a couple years ago, a phone meeting with the c-chair of the western region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality about them flying me in to do a talk for their conference in April, sending out a pile of books, meeting Cheryl for our Monday early evening cocktail hour, ringing up Northwest to try and work out transferring my miles to Bri so that she and The Baby Liam (who is not really a baby anymore, but who is likely stuck with that nickname from me well into adulthood) can be here for a bit in December, doing some laundry, and evaluating my cupboards.

The one unfortunate part of seeing my acupuncturist — who moved from Minneapolis to Portland — is that she suggested that she thinks it’s a strong possibility that I have developed a gluten allergy. I’m used to making dietary changes, so it wouldn’t normally be that huge of a deal, save that at this point, I eliminate so much for health and/or ethical reasons (and out of habit and necessity: even if I was suddenly okay with eating meat, the last time I ate it was in ‘81, and I ate it pretty infreqiently even before that, so it’d likely make me sick as a dog), that if you also pull wheat, rye and barely out, I’m not left with very much. For someone who routinely forgets to eat, the less available food there is, the harder it gets when I DO remember TO eat. Not good. On the other hand, if getting rid of gluten even makes a dent in some of the health issues I’ve been having, it’d be well worth the loss.

Lately, too, I’ve been having some not-so-great reactions to soy, which is a pretty intense vegan conundrum, to the point that I’ve figured I may soon have to add back fish or eggs on a quasi-regular basis, because without any soy, I’ll find myself with a pretty huge protein problem, especially when I can’t eat at home. Regardless, for the next two weeks, we’ve agreed I’ll go gluten-free to see what happens and how I feel.

Oh, how I will miss you, sweet, beautiful cupcakes: I loved you well. Here’s hoping that either Jelena is wrong, or that you’ll be able to make some adaptations yourself and accept some other kinds of flour through which to express yourself.

posted in Heather Corinna, family, subconscious life, body/mind, workworkwork | permalink | comments (6) »

Strange as it may sound, I asked my mother today if she’d write me a reference for a part-time job I very much want.

This would be beyond a dream job for me. I’ve been looking for work for a while because it’s just not doable anymore to try and make Scarleteen pay me a living wage for the hours I put in, even as lean as I live. I have busted my ass this year trying everything I could think of to make ends meet with it, but it’s just not going to happen per anything I can actually do myself at this point.

The ideal, of course, has been to find something where I still am doing the kind of work that is direly important to me and my life’s work, but which will also not wear me out (or bum me out) so much that I still can’t put in close to full-time hours with the site. There are a couple options, but when this one floated across my email box today, I very nearly leapt into the air, it’s so much of something I have been wanting to do for some time now.
While it would normally be odd to have a reference from your Mom in the pile, understand that given the fact that this is in healthcare, it’s quite appropriate in this case.

The fact that my mother and I have had an incredibly strained relationship for most of my life isn’t news to anyone who has been reading here for a while. It’s been VERY slow going for us to…well, not repair it, really, we’ve just had to try and make a whole new one. The old one wasn’t reparable. But when it comes to work, that’s turned out to be one of the lone ways my mother seems to understand me, and one of the easiest ways for us to connect.

She sent me something back within the hour, I read it, and I just felt really floored.

Really, I wasn’t sure what she’d say: I simply asked her because my mother is quite literally a healthcare/infectious disease goddess in Chicago, she knows this stuff like nobody’s business, takes it very seriously, and is also critical as hell when need be, so I knew she wasn’t likely to just be nice. My mother takes her work and healthcare so seriously, I know she’d never fib, even for one of her kids, to help get us work in any given arena of it if she wasn’t damn sure we could do it and do it well. She is equally admired and intimidating as hell in her field, as I understand it and have seen for myself now and then. Once in one hospital she worked in, when I was having some health issues, she got me in, and some poor nurse was so nervous in her presence, she managed to stick herself with the same needle she’d stuck me with, and was then so doubly freaked that I had to lean over and whisper, “It’s okay: she scares the hell out of me, too.”

(Tangentially, when that happens, you of course then have to be tested for every bloodborne anything to be sure your healthcare worker wasn’t endangered. When I got a copy of all those test results for myself, I noticed I was tested for pregnancy. Ummm…okay. Though I gotta say, it sure would have been something if I not only could have gotten some girl pregnant, but done so through the sheer power of my blood alone.)
Anyway, to read my mother assessing my professional skills so objectively, and from the vantage point of knowing way more than her share about these skillset, and to see that she thinks *I* am a goddess with this stuff myself is just…..dayum. My mother seriously thinks I am hardcore hot shit these days.
She made me weep today, and in the best way possible. This actually makes this the second time or so this year that I earnestly felt both my parents’ pride in me — and both demonstrated it clearly — very viscerally, and it’s just the most incredible thing.

posted in Heather Corinna, family | permalink | comments (2) »

So, up to ten miles round-trip now: I spent an hour yesterday afternoon sitting under a highway bridge at my mid-point near UW.

This is goodness. My hamstrings and quads currently disagree, but what the hell do they know?

It’s really good for me to do my daily sitting out of doors, rather than indoors, and attaching it to movement in some way. It always has been, really. In fact, at the first meditiation community I ever went to in Chicago, I had someone next to me complain once that my bouncing on my feet was bothering them. I resisted the urge to tell them that I knew I wasn’t moving the floor, that they weren’t supposed to have their eyes open anyway, so there, and that meditation is supposed to be all about working to tune out outside static and get in harmony with your surroundings, so they should consider me their special helper then, shouldn’t they? SNAP!

I resisted that urge because any of those comments and most certainly the snap would have been even less appropriate than the initial complaint, but also because I didn’t want to be the snappity-snip in the middle of a giant group meditation, which has absolutely zip to do with my spiritual growth and absolutely everything to do with preferring someone else be caught holding the asshole bag, by the by.

I’ve generally done better with walking meditation than seated. I’m not looking forward to the couple of months here where biking isn’t going to be an option often, but hey: it’s at least a shorter period of time to be away from it than it was in the midwest.

I realize, too, that my best meditating in this new ritual happens twice. It happens once when I take my sitting break at a mid-point — especially with things for my eyes to take in and associate, I’m such a visual learner — and the happy lasts the rest of the ride home, but even more so, it happens the first few minutes I get on my bike. I’m not thinking about the challenge of the hills, I’m not thinking about if it rains, I’m not thinking about where I’m going to go, and I’m not worried yet about being hit by a car: I’m just flying down the street feeling the breath in my lungs, the strong force of my body, and the wind on my face. I feel freed. I’m not thinking about anything but those moments for long enough that I can’t determine when they start or they end.

I think doing this is also me making a certain peace with Seattle that’s been slow to grow. I don’t dislike it here, not at all, but it very much doesn’t feel like Home. I’m not sure it ever will, not completely, and that’s okay — the landscape is just so different than the one that registers as home in my head (which is odd, because I feel very at home in Mexico, even without that registry). It’s beautiful all the same, and it’s certainly home for now. Given how slow everything often seems to be to warm here, perhaps that’s as it should be; that I should be as slow to warm to it and it seems to be to me.

(I’m keeping a photo journal of sorts of some of these sessions here for me to have a handful of visual koans for myself — my bike is being my self-portrait stand-in, it seems.)

* * *
So, for the first time I know of as of yet, I missed out on a big opportunity because I’m not someone’s mother. A production company for a big TV studio contacted me about needing a teen expert and wanting me, but that the gig required said expert being a Mom.

I walked out of my office after this brief conversation and into the kitchen, where Mark was hanging out. I very calmly, but with great resignation, voiced that I’d apparently passed the age where I was going to get penalized for BEING someone’s mother, and entered into the one where I was going to get penalized for NOT being someone’s mother.

I had to wonder if at any point there is an age for women where it’s neither considered too early nor too late for to be mothers when it comes to our careers and our market value.

I’m thinking not.

* * *

I talked to my father on the phone yesterday, who I didn’t know had climbed on a group bus to from Chicago to go protest for the Jena 6 two days ago: he’d just gotten home when I called. Not only am I supremely impressed he was able to battle his worsening agoraphobia to do that, it also makes me really happy.

I know, I know, activism is always supposed to be primarily about whatever cause or group or person you’re being active for, and I agree. But in my father’s case, especially since he feels so useless so much of the time, him being able to essentially do something that was like the civil rights movement work he once did, something he feels so strongly about, and something that made him feel so useful, is a really big deal. Him giving up the $50 that’s very little to others, but a big lot of money for him, to go is important. And it was a great experience for him, being able to go and step up, and also just being able to talk to other people on the bus there and back to whom it all matters. He sounded so happy, so energized.

We have had strange conversations about racism, my father and I. Not so strange, all things considered, but they’re sometimes not what one’d expect from a guy who once took fire hoses in the face to combat racism, and who ditched what easily could have been his best romantic relationship to do that work. He’s very anti-affirmative action, for instance, primarily because he feels like it’s asking my generation to “pay” for something that other generations did. I disagree with him on this point, I always have. For starters, I don’t feel like we’re paying for anything, that there is any sort of price I pay for affirmative action at all: while I don’t have a lot of privilege, I am visibly white, and even with things like affirmative action, privileges are and have been extended to me that are not and have not been to those of color. I don’t see anyone of color taking anything away from me with it, and I also feel like any band-aid we can have while the still wide-oepn wound of racism remains fresh and bloody is important. Really, I could care less about it from my vantage-point: it doesn’t hurt me in any way at all, and even if it did, I’m aware enough of the privilege I do have that when my privilege increases someone else’s burden, I want to do what I can to bring that in better balance. I’ve learned this from a lot of people and places in my life, but it’s odd to be pointing this out to a man who may well have been the first person to teach me to do that. Let’s even say that somehow, policies like affirmative action actually made it so that we whiteys were on the bottom of the olde race hierarchy for a time (yeah, I’m laughing, too): we’ll freaking well live. Everyone else has for a damn long time, after all.

Besides, it’s not like people of my generation are not still doing exactly the things that make affirmative action needed. Oh, if only.

My Pop is often of the mind that the playing field is somehow already level.

Mind, the neighborhood he lives in, the one we used to live in together, is over 80% of color. It’s also exceptionally dangerous, being one of the biggest gang neighborhoods in Chicago, and also THE place for metric arseloads of dealing and prostitution (yes, you’d think he’d realize that that alone should be a big, neon sign that the playing field when it comes to race is hardly level, but alas). White people TIPTOE through that neighborhood unless they’re cops, and no one with half a brain is going to be spouting racist bullshit on a regular basis over there, but only because of a fear of being directly hurt for doing so. He VERY infrequently leaves that neighborhood.

By virtue of barely being off-street, my father also looks that part. In other words, many of the same kinds of biases racist people have against people of color come into play with homeless people, so. I was trying to explain to him on the phone that when I find myself in spaces and situations where no one knows who I am, what my background or beliefs are; when all they can see is what sex I am and what color, I hear this crap a’plenty. When Briana and I were at the State fair in MN during my last visit, we got a serious doozy, as an example.

We saw a bathroom where the line wasn’t too bad, and while neither of us had to go, I figured it was best to go in advance so that when I was about to wet my pants, I wasn’t going to have to stand in one of those lines. So, in line we went. In a few minutes, two or three pre-teen black girls stepped out of the line for a minute, and walked past us, pretty clearly to go see what was taking so long and how bad the wait really was. When they turned around, they appeared to be doing that little bob one does when one has to pee like a racehorse. I asked if they had to go pretty bad, and got given the “ohmygodohmygodI’mgoingtopeeonthefloor” look we all get when we’ve hit that point, and so just said they could just take my place in line, since I really didn’t have to go, anyway, and certainly not that bad.

Behind Bri was a perfect blond woman with her perfect blond children in her perfectly shiny stroller and her perfectly shiny clothes, and the moment I did that, I heard her say, quite audibly, “What is this, affirmative action?”

I made a point not to turn around, because I just did not know what would have come out of my mouth if I did. Bri did turn, and shot her a look, because she then said (not at all apologetically), “I’m sorry, I’m a redneck.” Because that justifies everything, you know. Without the look, she likely wouldn’t have said anything at all, and part of saying what she did was based on her presumption that everyone around her was also racist, because most of the people around her were also white. So comfortable is someone like that in that, that they WILL say something like that, loudly, nearly anywhere because they’ve no reason at all to fear that they’ll be unsupported in their sentiments or be harmed in any way for them.

So, I’m telling my Dad this as an example, and explaining that of COURSE she would not have said anything like that if the girls I let go ahead of me were white. Or her kids. She likely wouldn’t have said anything at all, really. I told my Dad about the time Mark and I were at that B&B in Whiterock, right after Katrina, and how the older Canadian woman who owned it with her husband literally asked me, in absolute seriousness, why “those” people ever “chose” to live in that area way back when in the first place. And how I sat there, floored, trying to drop clues about the history of slavery and the legacy of poverty and the boon of being with one’s family in the hopes that with one, two, maybe even three, she’d realize what freaking stupid things she was saying sooner rather than later. I dropped a lot of clues, and some not so hinty-direct statements. She never got it. We excused ourselves from breakfast early and got the hell out of there.

Oh, I have stories, we all have these stories. But I don’t want to sit recounting them: they’re just too maddening, even to me.

My father just kept saying to me, the other day, that he just could not, would not, believe things were still like this in 2007. He finally at least said that he just didn’t want to. I tried to explain that my impression with this generation in particular (high school and college-age right now), was that I’m seeing a lot of hardcore resentment amoung plenty of youth when it comes to racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ableism, the works. Plenty seems to feel like and express that asking them to take stock of their privilege and consider it when dealing with others is something they are entitled NOT to do (yes, I know, it’s such an obvious symptom of the thing that it’s not even ironic: it’s plain old literal), that they should not HAVE to do (because it’s such a strain on them to act and speak with compassion), and that I’m a big old asshole for even suggesting they do. So much of the ugly history of racism isn’t something many even know or care to know, and for those who do, it often seems very far away, when it’s really only-yesterday stuff, and in many ways, still-today stuff. I could go on about this for a solid year, really, it’s one of the toughest parts for me of working with young people right now, but the point is, his awareness of this isn’t so great.

My Dad is also all about everything really boiling down to class issues: I got my first socialism from him, to be sure. In some respect, I agree with him, but in others, I really don’t. (And we’ve had similar discussions about sexism.) Mostly, I don’t think we can untangle all of these things so easily, especially given the ways they intersect, and for whom they intersect most. But perhaps more to the point, I don’t find that most people are sophisticated enough, or maybe more accurately have the desire or the interest in deconstructing and examining all of this enough — because when you do, of course, you have to take more personal responsibility for certain things — to be able to even make those distinctions. Plus, it can be about class all it wants, but we still have to acknowledge that not only are more women and more people of color lower-class, but that the impact of classism is greater when you’re dealing with compounded minority.

I also have to remember, though, that my father was and has been exceptionally depressed that all the activist work he did was for naught in many ways, and that that’s a big driver in these discussions and feelings. The civil rights movement absolutely did some good, but it didn’t erase racism: the friends he had who lost lives or health in doing that didn’t lose them for nothing, but they also didn’t lose them for what they’d hoped for. The anti-war movement with Vietnam was important as hell, and made some difference, but here the hell we basically are again, all that history forgotten or dismissed. He didn’t change the world, and he really, really wanted to: he sacrificed a lot trying. It’s very hard for my father to have to deal with the fact that, for instance, racism is still alive and well and not just living in Lousiana and Alabama but also in Maine, New York and Seattle. It’s hard because of what it means about the world, but it’s also hard because of how it makes him feel about himself.

* * *
I’m finally putting up a few new photo sets today, and making more headway in my backlog. The sets going up later today include a set of photos of a transgender friend currently IDing as genderqueer: I’ve been dying to do some transition photos of someone for a long time.

It was her idea to do a series in which she was in her clothing of choice, nude, and then in old boy-clothes. I thought it was a brilliant idea, and I’m pleased as hell with the results. But I’m very glad she suggested it, because it’s not something I’d have felt at all comfortable in suggesting to her myself, much in the same way that I wouldn’t for a minute feel comfortable suggesting that a cisgendered woman pose in stiletto-heels and corsetry and makeup, even if I had some brilliant creative intent, if dressing that way would make that woman feel terribly uncomfortable and put in a drag she didn’t like (and as far as I’m concerned, it’s drag no matter who’s got it on — some folks just happen to like being in drag). As it was, seeing how Amy looked, mood-wise, in the boy clothes, I was RACING to take those shots: it was earnestly painful for me to watch her face kind of fall.

Per the final results, I hate to talk over artwork, but I think the images are incredibly telling. I did almost wish that I had had an assigned-sex woman who doesn’t dig girl-drag to do a sort of mirror of them — one in her regular clothes, another nude, and another in say, hardcore Victorian garb or, say, head-to-toe fetish latex blah-de-bah. But another day (and again, she’d probably have to volunteer to do it herself: I’d just feel so ooky asking someone to stand around like that who didn’t want to).

Next up, finishing Becca’s pregnancy shots as well as my first shots of baby Odin, who is — of course he is — cute as the freaking dickens.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, home, family, photography & art | permalink | comments (0) »

The good news is that I have come home to a much improved little pug.

The day I left, I had Mark go back to the vet with Sofia, who in taking a next step, put her on some Cortizone tabs. One to cover all of the bases, I let Mark know to keep an eye peeled for sleep disturbances, appetite changes and the like.

But I must confess, I was a little concerned about my wee dog being on the ‘roids. It’s always the innocent looking ones you’ve got to watch out for, after all. I should know: I live with two such creatures, one furry, the other, not so much.

So, I was also sure to tell him to be on the lookout for breast growth, facial shape changes, weight gain, irritability and serious mood swings, hyper-aggression about her lack of treats and desire to eat the cat food, sexual harassment, outright assault (I suggested her perhaps just sleep alone for a bit: I love him too much to see him psychologically scarred by a snorty dog jumping him while calling him Sally) looting, and above all else, made him swear that no matter how aggro she got or what kind of puppy eyes she gave him, he was absolutely not to cave in when she insisted on the purschase of weight training equipment.

But lo, all it has resulted in is the dog finally ceasing the infernal itching and Mark finally getting to sleep through the night, unmolested and all.

Unfortunately, Sofi is currently the only one experiencing any relief from her allergies right now. I got whacked with a full-force attack in Minneapolis, which went from bad to worse with an evening spent in a friend’s house with two male cats.

On the flight back home yesterday afternoon, in a Benadryl-induced haze already, my ears completely plugged up during the last hour of the flight, to the point where I was literally unable to hear anything. Given there were not one but two exceptionally unhappy infants on the plane who didn’t stop screaming for a millisecond, this was something of a blessing, but it’s also pretty disturbing as a normally hearing person to see a wide open screaming face and not hear a sound. I could hear a bit better slowly through the evening, but my ears only finally popped for real this morning. Yeowch.

It was a trip mostly full of babies — Becca’s new son, who is cute as the dickens, and looks like someone put a shrink-ray gun on Becca to make him, and The Baby Liam, who is less baby than certified little big boy at this point. I educated him this time in the fine art of fort-building, living room dance parties, slide-climbing, sidewalk-chalking and other very important survival skills. Then he broke my heart the day I left by being intensely unhappy I was going.

Really, I don’t want to be back in Minneapolis — especially given that my neighborhood there has continued to change so much that I couldn’t afford to live there anymore — but I would very much like it if some of the people I cared about most were not so very far away. Missing my closest friends’ kids every little stage really just freaking sucks: I take my gig as Auntie Extraordinare incredibly seriously, after all, and I’ve made a family of my friends. However, Elise and I made a barter which involves my going back in June. I had initially thought it might be a good year and a half or so until I went out that way again — I am just so wiped from all this travel — but alas, it’ll be a bit sooner.

Mark picked me up last night and, elated about the spices I brought back from him, cooked me up a scrumptious supper, peppered me with wine and bourbon and we then engaged in some very enthusiastic interpretive dance in the dining room as a welcome-home. Since the food, booze and wild gesticulating wore us right out, I had to wait until this morning to jump his bones. There’s always something particularly nice about telling someone you’re so terribly sorry you made them a bit late for work but not truly being sorry for it in the slightest.

So, I’m back in the saddle as of tomorrow, and got a little head start today.

On that note, from now through September 16th, we have an arrangement with the popular Broadway play My First Time for ticket vouchers for Scarleteen donors. I’m doing it blind-auction style, so they’ll go to the 18 donors who give the most, and can be used through the end of October. More details are here for those interested in donating or circulating the information, particularly to New Yorkers and other nearby east-coasters. I’d love it if readers could circulate that info: it remains a bad year for us, and this is a nice opportunity for us and donors. Thanks!

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, family, puggy business | permalink | comments (4) »

I don’t want to deal with the bad parts of the trip just yet. I still feel a little shellshocked about it, to the degree that when telling my Dad just about the car accident on the phone today, and he started talking about lawyers and all that, I completely snapped at him, which is something I very, very rarely do. Yesterday, today and likely for the next couple of days, I just want to enjoy the bliss that is being back in my own place, in my own bed, with my own dog, and with the ability to almost completely control who I see and deal with in a given day without any wild cards. For the most part, I’m curling up under the covers like a kicked puppy.

I also don’t want to talk about the shite because there were some really good things amidst all the yuck.

Like, for instance, getting to spend the day with one of my favorite living contemporary artists, including a lot of walking, touring her around the Art Institute, a lovely dinner at Reza’s, and hours and hours of nonstop conversation and mutual admiration. We also planted a tiny seed for a possibly great idea in the not-at-all-near future, and not only is it a good seed, it’s plain old wonderful to be planning something with someone as overextended as myself who completely gets that saying you want to do something a year or two down the road with them is not only not unreasonable, but ideal. Laurie is so very many kinds of brilliant and glorious, and if I hadn’t have started that first full day of the trip with her, I may well have lost my mind before it was over.

The Early to Bed event was absolutely fantastic. We had parents, sisters, a clergy student, an adolescent public health administrator, teachers and friends of teens, all clearly there because they all gave that much of a shit. One thing I’ve been coming to realize a lot lately in terms of the struggles I’m having with Scarleteen is that it isn’t problematic just because I work with sexuality. It’s also — and perhaps just as much — because I work with a population that, for the most part, no one, sparing companies wanting to gather teenage cash, could care less about. If I did the kind of work I do for small children with cancer, rather than with teenagers with pregnancies or STIs or body image or gender dysphoria or sexual trauma or just plain agony, I’d be in a very different place. So, when I find myself in a room full of people all dedicated to doing what they can to be supportive of teens and do what they can to help them out, it’s very feel-good for me. That event ended up tackling some serious topics, but also being more stand-up comedy/put-people-at-ease Heather than the WCF event later in the week (and I’ll get to that event at a later date).

The winner of the best exchange for the evening was a mother asking if she needed to be concerned about giving her 12-year-old too much information. To give an example, she described hearing her and a friend getting into a giant argument in the basement, and had gone downstarirs to see what the fracas was about. When she got downstairs, her daughter, in a huff, said, “Mom, is it ANAL sex or ABLE sex?” My response (before I addressed the larger issue of TMI and why it’s really not something to worry about in this regard), was that it likely depended on who was having it, really.

Extra bonus? My Aunt Ginny showed up. I told a few people there that night about the fabulousness that is my Aunt Ginny, but for y’all in the cheap seats, I have loved this woman since the first time I met her when I was around seven years old.

She’s an aunt by marriage, in my mother’s side of the family. Understand that my mother’s family — especially my now deceased grandparents — was incredibly traditional and insanely stifling, on top of being abusive. Even at that young age, it had already been made very clear to me that I did NOT belong. In fact, in looking through family photos with Mark at my mother’s house last week, I found a photo of me at around 2 or 3, on the farm, with my mother seeming to introduce me to a black sheep. If that photo had had a word blurb, it would have said, “Heather, meet the black sheep. Black sheep, meet Heather. I think you’ll get along famously: you have a lot in common.” It’s one of the most symbolic childhood photos of me I’ve ever seen.

There was a family dinner that night, and I remember all this to-do about some big scandal with my uncle’s new wife. The Very Big Deal? That she MADE him do the DISHES. Gasp! (I didn’t get it, for the record: while I have plenty of valid beefs about my childhood and upbringing, one I do not have is that we had very fluid gender roles between my folks, to the degree that my Dad was the stay-at-home parent in my early childhood, and my mother the breadwinner.)

This given, even before she showed up, she seemed very, very exciting, and very appealing, since I’d already figured out that anyone my grandmother and grandfather really didn’t like was usually exceptionally cool.

When she finally appeared, she showed up in this somber, sober house of buttoned-to-the-chin people in these crazy black lounging pajamas with feather boas at the cuffs, crazy black hair all over the place, and sat telling off-color jokes to a completely unreceptive audience for the whole of the evening. I was in LOVE with her: she was the first woman I had met in that family who I wanted to be when I grew up. (She tells me that the feeling was mutual: she saw a wee ally in me right off the bat, and ever since, if one of us gets stuck at a family gathering without the other, we’re seriously bummed.) She’s also one of these women who seems to excel at absolutely everything, even though she is fickle as hell. She’ll decide she’s going to do something career-wise totally out of nowehere, with no background, wind up doing better than the folks with the background, and just when she’s peaking, she gets bored and moves on: it’s like she’s managed total non-attachment, effortlessly, to the stuff most folks are highly attached to. Plus, she’s the mother of teenagers who are actually bummed out when they can’t hang out with her: talk about an anomoly.

Last she told me, she was thinking about starting a heavy metal band next. I can’t tell you how much I love the idea of a metal band made of fifty-something suburban mothers: I want to hear a handbanging, screeching anthem about menopause or grocery store parking lot traffic so badly, it makes my uterus ache.

So, Ginny showed up, and we went out for drinks after the event with she, my friend Erika, a friend of hers, and one very awesome event-goer.

Who, FYI, I filled in on something Very Important to Know about book events, and that is this: there are two kinds of people who wind up at drinks or dinner with you after events. There are the one or maybe two people who are so cool you invite them along — that was her — and then there is the one, and it usually always seems to be one, who not only do you just find at the table with you without having invited them at all, but who is inevitably the absolute LAST person from an event you’d invite. Now, I’m not sure there was even anyone at that particular event who would have been in that latter group, but I’m glad we avoided that all the same, especially since NOTHING ever seems to make those people go away. NOTHING.

We stayed out late. Very late. By the time Ginny came back with me to Erika’s (after winning every woman in a ten-mile radious over completely, as is her way), it was 2:30 in the morning, and after she passed out face-first on the couch, Erika and I stayed up until four. The only downside to the evening was that for the first time since I moved away from Chicago, the whole evening left me feeling very homesick (and a little tipsy, but that part was nice).

Let’s see, what else…?

Millennium Park for an afternoon with my Dad. I ended up tearing up watching so many happy kids play in the fountain, in part because something else I’ve realized lately is that unlike when I was doing classroom teaching, I don’t really get the good stuff with the bad stuff in terms of my “students.” I mostly get the crisis, their hardship, their agony. For sure, I do get to see them often feel better about it, and feel better over time, but it’s incredibly rare for me to get ONLY the happy bits without the awful ones.

Much-missed time with my mother’s partner, who somehow manages to be one of the most brilliant women I know — and who also works in a challenging arena: she’s a Holocaust scholar — but also the most hilarious. To whit, after the WCF event Friday, we met Mark (who came into town a handful of days after I did) at an Italian banquet hall doing karaoke in La Grange, where my mother now lives. Until you have seen a Kenosha-bred, polish-sausage eating, femme in a butch body (her self-description), doing Baby Got Back flawlessly, with drunken suburbans fawing all over them, you haven’t seen nothin’.

Some time with my mother was good: but that’s more complicated and for another entry. same goes for time with my sister and some of my mother’s family.

At the WCF event, not only do I believe I have started a new friendship with an exceptional woman, one of the attendees came up afterwards to get two books signed and explained to me — while apologizing for it, of all things — that I was the role model and shero of she and her closest friend in college and grad school, and that my work had inspired them beyond bounds to work in this field. It’s not so much what she said, but the look on her face when she said it. There’s something amazing that happens sometimes when you’re just as touched to meet and connect with someone else as they are with you, for entirely different reasons, and she made my whole week, easy.

Just because it deserves a second mention: my mother’s partner. Baby Got Back. Don’t believe me? Ask Jen (who it was also so wonderful to see: it had been too long).

I also went to Chicago with a photo project in mind. The plan was to take photos of places which were important — good stuff, bad stuff, the whole gamut — in my childhood and adolescence. Given how much places change, and knowing already that a few locales of import already were going to look very different, my goal was/is to take photos to build a large wall piece of many small photos, posted with (and I still need to figure out how to engineer this) brief summations of what happened there, and why that given place was important.

In doing this, I had to go to a few very difficult places to revisit. But the biggies were the hair salon where the man who cut our hair molested me at 11, and then the site where I was gang assaulted at 12. Before I’d moved from Chicago, even driving by those places was beyond difficult, and often resulted in me breaking down a few blacks later, feeling fearful and traumatized all over again.

But this time — perhaps I’ve simply had enough time or distance — not only did I not break down, but I was even able to stand right in the parking lot, right where I was assaulted, without tears, without feeling scared or triggered. In fact, I felt incredibly strong standing there, as if a car could even pull in and hit me and it’d bounce right off as my feet and legs were firm and unmoved. It was an unexpected response: I’d prepared myself to feel very upset and vulnerable, and it just didn’t happen that way at all.

In addition, I got to see the house that was my hell, where I also had expected to respond badly. But the house that was so awful for me clearly had a loving family living in it for whom it was now a haven. There were beautiful, joyful chalk drawings all over the sidewalk, and things left astray on the walk, in the accepted disorder of a creative, lively childhood, which made clear that the life being lived there was a good one. It felt like what had since been lived there had somehow washed away the badness, which left me feeling just a few more steps closer to free.

Also? BOTH my parents came to the WCF event. Both of them being in the same place at the same time is an incredible rarity, and while I accepted from childhood that I was never going to have that thing where both your parents were in any way a unit or pair, that it can happen at least every decade or so, even in a limited context, with limited contact, is a luxury and a gift.

I got to see my favorite ex, his kids and his partner, who I like a whole lot, twice, once by myself (though I nearly slept through it, since it was the morning after the night out with Erika and Ginny, where I couldn’t determine if I was hungover from the booze or from my aunt), and once with Mark. That second visit, they’d caught a small mouse in their house. They’d named him Springy, due to how he kept bouncing in the big jar they had him in, but I felt more comfortable calling him Mr. Springy, since I felt it was a bit presumptuous to be so familiar with him when we’d only just met. Since Judy was heading out to Michfest with the girls the next day, and had no time to get out of the city before to set him free, I took on the job myself, knowing there was a forest preserve by my Mom’s on our way back. As it turned out, we went in the wrong entrance, which was labeled as government property only. Mr. Springy and I had a small moment, and I felt certain that he was well up for not only going out on his own in the woods, but infiltrating the government at the same time. I expect great things from him: fight the power, Mr. Springy.

In Ohio, I got to meet both one of my longtime Scarleteen volunteers as well as one of our most active All Girl Army bloggers, both of whom drove some distance to see me, and both of whom were just as exceptional as I had thought them to be. While I can’t exactly call it a perk, upon leaving the coffeehouse for a smoke, I had a man on the street feel the profound need to invent a song and then loudly rap it, singing the praises of my ass. Really, I don’t even think he meant to be lecherous (my backside has inspired — if you can call it that — some odd behaviour from people for a long time, many of which found themselves clearly infected with, and rather embarassed by, Tourette’s), but I did have to explain that no, I didn’t want him to stop because I was ashamed of my bottom, but because I would rather that it wasn’t brought to the attention of the whole of lower Cincy at the moment.

Seeing Mark’s family was also a big perk: I really couldn’t ask for a more loving adjunct family. It was also a perk to see his old Appalachian grandmother: the lady loves her Bible, but she’s also a serious spitfire, and she likes to wink at me a lot.

Best conversation of that family dinner? One of Mark’s brothers was talking about how his little dog Randall had saved his life by barking right before a truck nearly ran him over.

Grandma: Well, I know what saved your life.
Brother: What?
Grandma: Jesus. Jesus was looking out for you. Jesus saved you.
Brother: So, Jesus speaks to Randall. Awesome.

* * *
Those’d be the highlights. I’m sure I’ve missed a few things in there, but in less than an hour, I’m heading out with Fish to go and see Patti Smith, which is just the very thing for me right now (please: as if it ever couldn’t be). A goddess-in-the-flesh (and homage to black sheep everywhere), a good friend and a couple of cocktails will do me quite nicely.

posted in Heather Corinna, family, surviving abuse, s.e.x., women, events | permalink | comments (5) »

Greetings from sunny Minnesota!

(I’m not being ironic: it’s freaking gorgeous here right now. I heart midwestern summer more than more.)

Just a quick hello, as I’m between gigs, currently hanging out on Becca’s deck, enjoying a beer and a lot of sunshine. I’m off in a little bit to the middle-of-nowhere, to celebrate The Baby Liam’s first birthday party w/Briana’s family, in the land of zero wireless and lots of cheese product on hot dishes.

I saw Liam yesterday, and he isn’t a baby anymore, he’s a very little toddler boy. Full head of hair, moving around, making a ton of noise, and reveling in his own chaos, just as he should be. I confess, I often feel a bit like an alien when I’m around babies and kids, and when I feel giant surges of love for them, I never find myself thinking, “Oh, I wish I had one of my own,” but instead, simply, “I wish I could see that kid more often.” I’m not sure if that’s really unusual — given the former reaction seems to be more common — or just whether the culture of women presented as needing to be maternal (and thus, women learning to present themselves that way) is just so huge that everyone has internalized that message, and thus, can often react differently. Of course, too, I have spent more time in the muck and the mire with other people’s children than most. In any event, I wish I could see that kid more often. We had a fantastic time yesterdat evening, and I expect that we’ll have some more before I leave.

Speaking of kids, my red-eye flight was from hell. It’s not just about getting exactly no sleep, even after taking a sleeping pill. I was seated in one of the most claustropobic seats possible, and in my row and the row behind, was surrounded by Amish family, who I haven’t been that near since I was a kid. The window was to my right, and at left, a 12 or 13-year-old boy. Not only did he snore like a mother (and here I thought, not sleeping at home for once, where Mark and Sofia are a veritable symphony of snores, that I’d get a break from snoring), but anytime I almost fell asleep, or looked asleep, he’d touch me with his fingers on my arm or my face, my guess is, out of simple curiousity. If I shifted in my seat, he’d harumph loudly, despite the fact that because I’m small and he was 12, we had plenty of room between us. The lone time I went to go to the bathroom, he was so freaking beligerent, he wouldn’t even stand up so I could get out, so I nearly had to give the kid a lap dance in having to crawl over him.

Suffice it to say, given it was Amish family, I didn’t exactly fell able to say, “Hey, sod the hell off, kid! While you’re at it, quit with the freaking snoring, wouldya?” Becca’s husband suggested I should have given him a copy of my book to read, since he was clearly so bored. Pity I didn’t think of that myself.

That child made me neither wish to have any myself NOR to be able to see him more often. And I have no doubt that that reaction on my part is exceptionally normal.

So, yesterday, I managed to nab three whole hours of sleep during the day, after which I had to do a Chicago Tribune phone interview, hoping to christ I didn’t sound as incomprehensible as I felt, but did have a fine afternoon and evening with Becca, Briana and lil’ Mr. Liam. I got to see Heather today, and expect Bri and I to make a long hangout of it tomorrow night. Sunday is the book release party, the first of the three events I’m doing while I’m here.

I’ve gotten more and more acclamated to Seattle, but not enough that the first thing I did when I got here was to call my hairstylist and my dentist and make appointments. I intend on going by the eye doctors while I’m here, as well, despite the fact that my cash flow for these things is not exactly generous at the moment. Alas.

Did have another book benchmark for me today, which is finding some libraries that ordered and are carrying the book, which in many ways, is far more important to me and of more value than bookstores carrying it. I was one of those kids for whom the public library was a second home: iwas latchkey, so it was normal for me to spend a lot of time at the library after school. In addition, when the shit really started to get super-bad at my house, one benefit of still managing to be a dedicated student is that when you won’t be allowed out of the house for anything else, you are often still allowed to get out of the house if you’re at the library. I need to make a point while I’m here in Minneapolis of heading to a couple branches with books to donate. I know I sat with my first copies of more than one vital sex book in the stacks, and it pleases me to no ned to think I can be providing the same experience for other young adults.

P.S. Just because it seems it needs to be said lately in more venues than I can shake a stick at: the feminist blogosphere is not feminism. The feminist blogosphere is not the feminist community. The feminist blogosphere is just that: the feminist blogosphere, and supposing it to be, or presenting it as, a good representation of the whole of feminism, the whole of theory, the whole of feminist activism or community is foolish. To be honest, I don’t even involve myself much at all with the feminist blogosphere or all its dramas in large part because it is so incredibly discordant to my experiences with feminism and community amoung women otherwise.

I mean, certainly, still in our culture, women as a class are in very big trouble. And still as ever, feminism is in big trouble. But in my estimation, neither are in the kind of trouble we’d think they were if we presumed the virtual community to be represnentative of the whole. And that’s the case with the blogosphere, period. It has it’s value, for sure, but an accurate representation of life and community as a whole it is not.

So, if you’re a person who feels strongly about feminism, but the blogosphere is bumming you out, I’d really encourage you to turn off the computer and go find some real-life community. Join up with your local NOW chapter, volunteer at a women’s crisis line or shelter or with a more ad-hoc feminist or women’s community, or just make your own. Names that go with faces that go with voices that go with a more visceral connection really do make a world of difference.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, family, feminism, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (6) »

SCARLETEEN: EXPLICIT ADVICE FOR THE YOUNG

I gotta say, I’m not sure how often I give what I’d call explicit advice. If I did, I think I’d use a lot less words than I tend to and sum it all up by just answering every advice question with, “Things will always get better. And then they’ll always get worse. A good orgasm is good when they’re better and when they’re worse, and a shitty relationship is good for neither, so don’t ever promise to stick around for both.” But I digress, as I often do.

Despite how whoo-whoo the copywriter who does the front page for the P-I clearly felt the need to be, it was pretty darn cool to see that staring at me from the city paperboxes the other day. The reporter did a fantastic job and it’s a really excellent, positive piece (though I felt more than a twinge of discomfort at some of the more traumatic parts of my youth being mentioned sans context in a big paper, but then, I don’t keep it a big secret, and it is good for people to see that abuse survivors, like, DO things) — and featured on the front page, yo — which is a great energizer for me. And lord knows, I needed it. This old girl is TI-RED these days.

So often, press pieces about Scarleteen have had this sort of begrudinging acceptance. Like, “Yeah, I guess kids need this stuff but it sure sucks that they do, and yeah, I guess this woman does serve a lot of them and do a good job, but it’d sure be better is she was somebody’s nice, married, surburban Mom, and not this childless, queer, feminist skank who actually really likes having sex, and not the kind we’d prefer she liked. But I guess it’s still a good thing.”

This? Much better. And a fine how-do-ya-do, I’d say, from my new home city.

* * *

But none of that is half as cool as a phone conversation with my Dad today telling me, all choked up, that he just had the very best day of his life.

What happened?

He got to go into a bookstore and get a book solo-authored by his kid, who he has watched and mentored with her writing and work since he taught her to read, and without fail, ever since. My father may have his failings, but I cannot think of a single instance in my life when he was nonsupportive of my aspirations and my creative work, no matter what direction they went in.

Apparently, he not only felt he had to tell every single person working at the bookstore that HIS KID wrote my book, but he also sold every copy the Barnes & Noble he was at on the north side had.

As these conversations were relayed to me, the cashier, when my father was buying a copy and going on ad nauseum, said, “Oh it’s for your daughter, that’s nice,” to which my oh-so-gracious father replied, and probably loudly, since he has no idea how to speak quietly, “No, it’s BY my daughter, you dumbass.” It’s easy to see where I get my charm from, now ain’t it. Ladies and germs, my fabulous public relations department.

I guess when he walked in and found it, he saw some other woman thumbing through a copy, and he asked her about it, and she said she’d really needed something like it for her daughter. So, as he did with everyone ELSE, he made clear that HIS daughter wrote it, and — my father, toothless, road-weary and all, is a highly infectious and gregarious guy — she ended up buying a couple copies, as did someone else nearby. On top of that, he and this woman went out for coffee afterwards. Hell, even if all my book did was net my Dad some normal social contact that most people get but he rarely does (his economics and homelessness — though he’s still in the SRO — are only part of the issue, as over the past few years, he’s also become pretty agoraphobic, not surprisingly given his neighborhood), that’d be a damn fine result.

But sitting and listening to one’s parent, especialy a parent who has been around some serious luminaries in their day, and had one helluva life, tell you that seeing and buying your book (especially with the peanuts they have for cash) was the best day of their life is a really wonderful, loving, incredible thing to have happen as someone’s child.

Of course, I cried like a freaking baby. I mean, bloody HELL.

Especially considering that just the day before today, I’d gotten a small package from him in the mail with a letter that closed with this.

* * *

Still been chugging away every day with Garrett to get to a finish on the full site upgrade for Scarleteen. It’s looking phenomenal, and I’m really excited, especially considering how much easier some of this system will make my life. But days and days on end of making graphics and staring at code utterly fries my brain and makes my limbs feel like lead weights. How you techies out there do this shit every day of every year is completely beyond me.

It’s one thing to do it when combined with other work — I code and do graphics regularly, but I’m also writing, doing more creative work, at the same time — or when you have the time to take long breaks, grab a walk or a hoop or a yoga fix. But given our deadline and the crazy amount of work that shifting an almost ten-year-old site (how the hell did THAT happen?) into an entirely new format and layout, there’s been so much work packed into the day that half the time, I’m forgetting to eat and barely have time to wipe my own butt.

I did carve out a few hours today to fit in two photo shoots with visiting friends, and get contact made with another major paper who wants to do a piece, but now I have to get cracking. In the barely-more-than-24 hours I have left before I go to Minneapolis for a week and a half, I have got to get a pile of books addressed and sent, do laundry, pack up clothes, photo equipment and book stuff, eat some dinner, have sex (hey, when you’re going out of town and know it’ll be a while, you need to be pragmatic about fitting it in), grab The Baby Liam an extra birthday present, deal with some banking, do more work with the site upgrade and maybe lose my mind just a little more before I pass out on my midnight flight.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, family, Happy! | permalink | comments (4) »

(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.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, home, family | permalink | comments (8) »

There’s something highly amusing about spending the evening in a hundred-year-old dive bar, and playing poker for (oyster) crackers with my Dad and Mark.

Really, it’s all the more giggle-inducing when you’re “gambling with crackers” while sitting across the table from the whitest guy in the universe (my melanin-impaired boyfriend).

Best exchange of the evening?

Mark (who won big, but refused to throw all the won cracker-chips into his mouth and munch them crazy, crumbly Cookie Monster-style to amuse me): I am the WINNER! You are the LOSER!
Me (calmly): No, I am simply a person without crackers.
Mark (incredulously, to my Dad): Do you see how this goes? Amazing. Even a simple poker win is somehow political. How does she do that?

My Dad just chuckled and shot me a grin. Apple, tree, my friends.

(By the by, when playing for crackers, don’t space out and eat some of yours. It kind of screws you over. This is especially vital when playing for actual chips, especially if you value your teeth.)

posted in family, Auntie Heather's Helpful Hints, Ballard | permalink | comments (1) »

Ah, redesign.

So, while my father is still sleeping — and why he always insists on sleeping on the couch when I set up a room for him, I will never know — with my pug curled on his legs, I’m sitting in the office here downstrairs working on the redesign for Scarleteen.

Because in a month or so, the site revamp really should be finished so that when the book rolls out, the site looks its best and also has the supports needed to help sell and promote the book.

Umm, eek.

My end of the work isn’t huge, really: the users have always liked our design scheme and vibe, so I’m not making ginormous changes, just some sprucing up, and some work to create a layout that will both work in Drupal and be more useable overall. We also need some text design upgrades. Thank christ the users like the yellow jammie stripes we’ve had for years, because I couldn’t bear to part with them: they’re just so cozy. In fact, without even realizing I was doing it, I like them so much I unconsciously painted the upstairs studio in the exact same stripes.

(My poor AGA blogger and also longtime Scarleteen user who visited me a couple weeks ago had to feel like she was sleeping inside the site. Thankfully, most of our houseguests aren’t Scarleteen users, so they just find the stripes fresh and charming, rather than a little disturbing. Maybe the stripes are the issue with my Dad, though. Hmm.)

Truth be told, I miss design work. Back in the day, when I first started all the sites, I did a lot of freelance web and ad design to keep me afloat, and it was one of those things I rarely got tired of doing. It always feels a bit like rearranging your room, when you’ve got an existing design, with existing limits and contraints, but you get to freshen it up a bit so — ideally — you get that fine combination of the comfort and familiarity of your old room with the feeling that you’ve inherited a new one.

I wish I could donate every minute of the next couple of weeks to doing this, because fiddling with colors and text, moving things around to see how they fit, fashioning patterns and such is just a seriously good time. It’s the kind of work you can very easily lose hours and hours in without knowing they passed, and any work that has that effect is always my favorite.

Of course, we’ll see if I still feel this way about it once I get it done to the point where Garrett and I start trying to fit it into Drupal and make everything work. It’s always the functionality stuff that bursts my happy-play-with-the-pretty-colors bubble.

* * *
While I’m doing this, I’m also talking IM with Becca about Montessori and such for her in-utero kid. It’s awesome to be able to talk to her about this stuff, but it’s also a really big bummer not to be there with her for all of this. Moving here has had a lot of perks, but there have been some very real losses, and not being able to see the closest friend I’ve ever had, especially right now, is absolutely one of them.

Thankfully, she has a visit here scheduled for a few weeks from now, too. Here’s hoping that when she leaves I don’t end up with a reenactment of the night before I moved from Minneapolis, when I had a cry about leaving her and Briana that I — and poor Mark — wasn’t sure would ever end. I’ve had some hard, hard breakups in my life, but it’s been really rare for me to end up upset to that level, where breathing was difficult, where I didn’t think I would ever stop drying, and where your stomach muscles hurt from sobbing so hard. Over the first couple months I lived here, I’d have to make myself just not think about Becca and Bri, because when I did, I’d end up a big, weepy mess all over again.

Anyone who supports the cultural mandate that romantic relationships are by default somehow the most important, more important and bigger than any other, has never had a cry like that over having to part with friends.

And now I’m missing teaching in the classroom, to boot. Best get back to designing to chase the impending blues away, and to, you know, get it done.

posted in Heather Corinna, family, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (3) »

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.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, activism, home, family | permalink | comments (4) »

After my coffee permeates my brain, I’m heading out this morning to accompany my friend Ross and his eldest daughter to a skate clinic for younger girls that one of my Scarleteen users and new AGA bloggers teaches at. How cool is that? Hoping to grab some fun photos of the (as she calles them) “lil’ rippers,” and engage in the simple pleasure of watching teens be proactive. I see the more passive ones way too often for my own good.

I spent that whole day yesterday working on graphics for the upcoming Scarleteen fundraising and promotion, which included many hours of perusing stock photography until my eyes bled. Want to know something seriously sad? When you search for photos of teen women, a good half of them are half-dressed or in bikinis. Suffice it to say, the same thing doesn’t happen when you search for photos of teen men. Ugh.

Also spent some hours on the phone with my Dad, who got mugged for the now ninth time in his life: some jerk followed him from the currency exchange where he was cashing his disability check, which meant he lost the whole of his money to live on for the month. When he was last visiting here, we got him an application for low-income housing, and he got a postcard back, telling him he did qualify and would be put on the waiting list, but sweet jesus, this just can’t happen fast enough. I may need to make some calls and see if there isn’t anything to be found in the interim, because this is just lunacy. At a certain age, it’s just beyond unfair that you can’t have some small measure of safety and comfort in your life.

Speaking of certain ages, I really don’t keep up lately, but is there a dearth of sex advice and information sites for adults these days? Because over the last year, we’re getting more and more adults, some even older than I, coming to Scarleteen with earnest questions and it’s really quite weird and, suffice it to say, borderline appropriate, given the fact that it’s really important our teen and YA users have some feeling of ownership with the space. More selfishly, I have to confess that I also find most questions from middle American marrieds more depressing than almost anything a teenager could ask me. I mean, it’s one thing to have someone’s 15-year-old boyfriend not get that two minutes of obligatory heterosexual intercourse as an entire sexual experience is substandard. It’s an entirely different matter whan the partner in question is 45, for crying out loud.

Before I shove off, a desperate cry for help from me for Wordpress experts: is there anyone at all out there able to give me maybe an hour of time, max, to show me how the hell to change items in the sidebar here, which is written into my template? I haven’t even been able to add a permanent link to the book since I updated, and it’s getting really critical, as is just updating basic links, the archives and the lot. HTML I get, easy. CSS is another matter entirely. For some reason, it just all looks like Greek to me. Glad to barter for your time: if someone wants a print, for instance, I’d be happy to do a swap or suchlike, or even toss a few bucks your way. I just really, really need to be able to know how to do this basic stuff ASAP. Thanks!

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, family, sexuality | permalink | comments (7) »

I expect to be mostly incommunicado over the next week, because my fabulous friend Mya is coming in for a visit from Minneapolis. In addition, we’re finally having the housewarming party we’ve been meaning to on Friday, and I’ve also just had the fantastic joy of spending a day and a couple evenings with Jeyoani (at right).

Big social month, apparently.

It was awesome to be able to finally meet Jey. We have a very similar spaztastic energy and enthusiasm: in fact, her first night here, we didn’t get to bed until 3 because for the life of us, we just couldn’t stop babbling. Great to be able to meet her at last: Jeyoani is the eldest daughter of my friend and mentor Cheryl, and we’ve chatted online and by phone for a couple years now, and she’d also partnered up with me in forming the AGA with Jenny and Becca.

Oddly enough, she met Mark before she met me, by way of rescuing him from a transportation fracas in L.A. about a year and a half ago. (During which I felt like a total ‘net celeb stud, by the way. He’d called me all panicked because he was there for a workshop, and his ride blew him off, so I was all, “Where are you? L.A.? No problem. Let me put out my bat-signals amoung everyone in the whole world I know, who OF COURSE will jump to help my sweetie, and we’ll fix this pronto.” In ten minutes, it was done and he was rendered utterly speechless in the wake of my supershero powers. Good times.)

It’s also a pretty cool thing when you can go out with two close friends who are also mother and daughter. The older I get, the more range my friends have in terms of age and identity, and there’s something really fantastic about that: the wider and more diverse a net I have, the happier I am. Strangely, that was always the case with my romantic and sexual relationships: not sure why with my friendships, until the past handful of years, that was less the case.

Cheesy as this is going to sound, it’s so hard for me to imagine my life without my friendships. That’s life without family. The move has been tough in that regard (it’s always especially touch to forge new friendships when you freelance), but nothing close to as tough as when I first moved to MN. I had near to a good three years there without a circle of friends, and it’s no damn wonder I got whacked with hardcore depression then.

I’m always so saddened to see the teens at Scarleteen who make their entire social lives their partners or their partners friends, and just seem to either not get or space out how important platonic friendships are. When the relationship is still ongoing, they don’t have a real support net, they often have all these troubles with abondonment issues or with giving their partners a normal amount of personal space, and it seems to kind of skew the view of romantic relationships as only one important kind of relationship. Of course, when the relationship ends, they wind up totally alone, since the friends they had were shared and there’s that usual your friends/my friends awkwardness that happens with a breakup when it comes to shared social circles.

We have a user right now who is in that spot, and just feels she’s too shy to make friends, but we’ve heard that before, and oddly, someone the same too-shy’s can cultivate romantic relationships, a disparity I can’t quite figure out.

You never want to tell them, point blank, that romantic relationships, especially at their age, tend to peter out a lot faster than they suspect, and friendships are more lasting, because a) a person only needs so much buzzkill when they’re just starting their lives and b) there are just so many variants there that neither of those things are always true, by a long shot. Truth is, during developmental years most of their relationships PERIOD will often be phasal, will come and go, or will be somewhat temporary because everyone’s identity is in such a state of flux. Note to self: figure out a nice way of explaining this — might help during those years when we often feel like no one will stick by us — without sounding like you’re saying they haven’t got a chance in hell of anyone sticking around until they’re older, and in such a way that supports the value of both their friendships and romances, and makes clear that the cultural notion that any one type of relationship is more vital than the other is hogwash.

That said, there are rooms to clean, errands to run, and still a load of catchup work to continue, all left around in a giant pile from the last few months of book craziness. If I catch up with everything that has fallen behind even by the end of this whole year, it’ll be a bleedin’ miracle.

P.S. And to be filed under the “I Need a Miracle” department (ah, those deadhead years, how I miss’em), until recently, I somehow forgot how insanely happy a bowl of steel-cut oats with raisins makes me. Almost fifteen years ago or so, I had a partner (the one who still holds the crown of my favorite ex, ever) who always made them for breakfast: at first, they seemed so utilitarian and plain, I wasn’t too excited about them. But then, the beautiful texture of the oats made itself apparent, and having someone make you warm, toasty grains in the morning was such a treat. A much-belated thank you to Michael Hays for turning me onto those delightful oats. Yummy.

posted in Heather Corinna, family, Auntie Heather's Helpful Hints | permalink | comments (2) »

Last week I was terribly unproductive. (This week has been much better: next week best be better still.)

Having my father here was just amazing. Per usual (sparing my annoyance at the television constantly being on, especially since I’m barely used to it being in my house, period), we got into a routine almost right away, shifted right into our usual comfortable dynamic, talked a lot, walked a lot, watched movies… and I tried not to cry too much.

It’s very rare when I wish I’d made different choices in my life. I generally feel very good about the ones I have made, and the sacrifices that entails — primarily financial — are ones I can live with.

But when it comes to my Dad, I find myself wishing I had found some way to have a livelihood that involved me having money. I HATE that I had to send my Dad back to the SRO in the ghetto-hell he lives in. I hate that while he was here, it was a luxury for him to be able to walk around feeling some measure of safety; to be able to sit on a porch outside at night feeling confident he wouldn’t be shot in the head. I hate that I can’t just fix that: it should be so easy.

Sending him back home last Wednesday night was just so hard. Both because I’ll just really miss him, and because I want him to have a better life than he has, and I feel like a rotten daughter to be able to help so little. (This is about the only reason I have any investment and hope in the book selling millions of copies from a monetary perspective: wishes to the universe it does if for no other reason than it giving me the ability to move my Dad here and into someplace safe. That, and I really, really need a part-time assistant: I just get further and further behind with everything with every passing month.)

It’s reruns for anyone who has read me for a long time, but my father and I have an incredibly unique relationship. He brought a copy of “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” with him for me to watch, because, while in many respects it is a highly bizarre movie, and not representative of us, he felt the dynamic and tone of the relationship between father and daughter in that film was us to a T (and was so excited about it, he wouldn’t be quiet through the film), and he was spot-on. Strange mirror to look in, really.

I was trying to explain to Mark that in many respects, our relationship is both more sibling-like, and more spousal than parent-child. Before you get the creeps (Mark was all, “Yuck!” until I explained what I meant by that), understand that what I mean by the latter is that we’ve always shared responsibilities; it’s always been presumed I was an equal partner in our relationship and the shared aspects of our lives. In some ways, that wasn’t so great, but for an exceptionally independent child, I’m not sure what else would have really worked, and I’d say that for the most part, that approach was and has always been ideal for me.

(Save that as a small child, at one point my father insisted he’d prefer I call him Dave, rather than Dad. I became quite confused, and asked if he wasn’t my Dad. He assured me he was, but would prefer I didn’t call him that because he didn’t want to be my capital-F Father. It’s cool to give your child credit for being a smartypants, but this concept was a bit evolved for a four-year-old, especially one who once tried calling her mother by her first name in front of friends and getting a VERY negative reaction to this, which she was NOT about to risk again. Suffice it to say, after seeing me terribly tangled in his sticky web of grownup logic, he accepted that he was getting called Dad.)

Unfortunately, in the middle of my Dad’s trip, my mother also sent an email that was pretty clearly an attempt at sabotaging or sullying my Dad’s visit. I’m 36 years old, and given all the other issues my mother and I have to resolve and ever grapple with, I really, really wish that she’d find a way to let go of the negativity about my Dad. They haven’t been together for 30 years now, after all, and while it was her first relationship, and sure wasn’t easy, she’s more negative about my Dad than she was about the abusive bastard she married afterwards who nearly turned her eldest child into a total vegetable.

The time before this that I saw my Dad in Chicago — when he was doing TERRIBLY, he’s been doing much better now, he looks in far better health, he’s not as close to being on-street again — I went back to my mother’s afterward, and we ended up getting in a terrible row about him. She’d asked if I was tempted to try and care for him, and I’d explained that of COURSE I was. I explained that even given the terribleness I’d weathered with her (which I have not with him) I’d feel the same way about wanting to care for her were she in the same position. I took the time to try and talk a bit even about how hard it was to have my two parents in such radically different positions financially and per their quality of life. And she started in with the sort of thing she’d say to me when I was a child, about how she knew him so much better than I did, blah blah blah. I was angry enough that I found the chutzpah to explain that at that point, I had spent DECADES close to my father… and she had not, so it was really ludicrous at that point to tell me she knew someone better she’d been with for a handful of years who I had spent far, far more time with in my life.

That, for whatever reason, seemed to sink in that time, to my amazement. So, I expressed that henceforth, I just could NOT listen to any more strife about my father, whom she hasn’t had to deal with at all, in any respect, since I left home in my teens, and that I really expected her to respect that, especially since I felt it was just really out of order to keep putting me in the middle of a one-sided battle (my father has never talked shit about my mother to me, ever, not even when it would have been totally valid) for the whole of my life, over someone I cared very deeply for.

I thought we had an understanding on that, but the passive-aggressive email I got belied that. It’s a tough spot to be in, because pretty much since birth, my father and I have had this Heather-and-Dad-against-the-world relationship that didn’t leave room for anyone else. Even before the awfulness in my mother’s house started, our relationship was very exclusive, and I think for my mother, it meant that she didn’t get the love she wanted or expected from EITHER of us. I can imagine that all dysfunction aside, and the fact that she very much really screwed me in ways she shouldn’t have back when, we made her feel very lonely. I can imagine that it probably hurts to see how much closer I am to him than I have ever been to her, but in the same vein, the opposite is true for my sister, so it isn’t as if she doesn’t have a close relationship with a child. And lord knows, if I had NOT had the relationship I had with my father I would have been a complete basket case, and someone unable to have any kind of relationship with anyone at all, let alone my mother. Of course, too, it’s not as if as children we choose which family we connect with and who connects best with us: that I’m more like my father than I am my mother, and always have been, is in large part, hardly something I could have controlled.

Barghblehgah. Family crap. Never easy to navigate, especially in any kind of public forum, but it’s not that much easier in my head, either. I still, two weeks later, haven’t figured out how to even respond to that letter. “For the love of Pete, knock it the fuck OFF already,” is about all I’ve come up with, and I don’t see that exactly netting the best results.

In any event, the visit was wonderful. I’m so, so grateful my father was finally able to get disability, because being able to see him having gained a little bit of weight, in clean clothes, knowing that however shitty the roof, he’s got one over his head makes all the difference. It was a real treat being able to make him beautiful dinners, share some good wine, take walks, watch him play with the dog, have us both smoke too much, talk too much, and watch Mark’s amusement at our doppleganger-like mannerisms and behaviors. That I got to also have Briana and The Baby Liam here in the middle of his visit just made it all the better, especially since my Dad has always had that awesome baby and kid magnetism that just makes kids happy to be near him. It was cool to watch him with a wee one: it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. All in all, the whole works was cool: even when it’s tough, even when we’re at some kind of odds, my Dad is someone I just never get tired of being around.

Thus, though, my lack of productivity in the days immediately following. It’s hard to have the people you care for so close to you and then so far away again.

I have to get started on some backlogged photo editing today. Among what needs to be edited, I was really pleased that my father let me take some portraits of him. He doesn’t really like having his photo taken, never really has, and he wasn’t the most cooperative subject, but it seemed like such a tragedy to do so much portrait work, yet have nothing (save one of the first photo portraits I ever did, actually) of the person who is likely the most important person I’ve had with me throughout my life. I didn’t get many, but the few I did just make me really happy.

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