I don’t mean to be such a stranger.

I’m nearly finished with organizing, making and getting out the big mailing to nearly 200 organizations in Washington State for CONNECT.  It’s crazy how hard some of this has seemed: I’ve clearly gotten spoiled over the years by new media.  The funny thing is that way back in the day in the early 90’s, when I ran my little alternative school, I was the queen of all things paper: I refused to use any kind of computer at all, even a basic word processor for the first year.  For several of those years, I produced a pretty involved alternative ECE newsletter and doing that and I don’t remember getting it out being this big of a deal.

However, it’s looking shiny and awesome and once it’s off my desk, I will be one very happy chick.

I’ve also been overwhelmed with just trying to run two programs at once, getting the voting guide done for Scarleteen, and trying to keep up with all the usual work there. I’ve been distracted — though that’s likely not the best word — with the elections, national and local.  And per usual, I’m still just not feeling well.  I don’t think I have ever had a stretch of time where I’ve gotten so much sleep every night (I’ve been managing to get 7 or 8 hours a night), and yet, I feel like I could sleep all day, every day, and it still wouldn’t be enough.

I keep thinking that I should be very personally concerned about the current financial crisis, but then I realize that a) I own nothing, b) most of the contributions to Scarleteen aren’t even from the U.S., and c) I don’t make shit now and don’t know how much worse it could really get.  I also remind myself that I have enough to worry about already.  I guess sometimes freedom really is just another word for nothing left to lose.

My Dad is coming up here in a couple of weeks, and staying for a couple of weeks.  He’s been in a really bad way lately, which at times means my having to have one or more long phone conversations with him in a day, where his moods and what he is saying are just all over the place, which is really tough to deal with. One of the most recent several-day conversations involved me patently refusing to cancel his plane ticket simply because he was certain that the dreams he has been having about plane crashes were prophetic and that he would die on the way here (which is a strange concern for someone with a long history of being suicidal to have, but so be it).  Unfortunately, this dream stuff has gone on before, and it’s tough to expect him not to believe them: his mother, my grandmother, stated she was going to die to everyone mere hours before she and half his family were in the truck accident that killed them when I was young.

I’ve had times in my life where I’ve gone through phases of this with him, but it just feels like it’s happening more frequently lately, to the point that I feel like I might need to start looking into what exactly someone in my income bracket can do to find residential care for a parent. Him living with us just isn’t an option: he would never agree to it, and even though we’ve lived well together before — more harmoniously than I live with most people, to be truthful — I don’t see it being a good answer.

How on earth, if I could find something, I could convince my father to even consider such a thing, I don’t know.  In so many ways, he’s so progressive, but there always remains some very prototypical Italian pride my father clings to.   I honestly don’t even know how I’d bring this up to him, and explain why I feel we need to consider it without hurting his pride and also triggering his guilt: he expresses guilt constantly (always has, but more of late) that I’m the only person he has in the world to lean on and that I have no other help or support when it comes to him.  But I’m just getting really worried, and I just feel like I have lived long enough with my parent living like this.  It’s breaking my heart, and I just can’t stand it anymore.

The place he stays at is still in one of the worst parts of the city, worse than it was when we lived in that neighborhood, and it’s just really vile.  Last week, he had this major freakout — validly — because in his dank little room the size of your average bathroom, four huge rats had gotten in.  He was so scared and wigged out that he wound up blowing his disability check to sleep in a motel for a couple of nights.  More then once while I have been talking to him, I can hear freaking gunshots. Given how he is mentally, as well, the isolation that he has very clearly just is not healthy for him: he’s so much better when he’s here, around people, somewhere safe.

I don’t suppose there’s any of you out there around my age who have been in a similar situation with any idea of where I’d even start when it came to looking for this kind of care?

Anyway, that’s most of my stuff.  Things at home here are totally fine, including that my boyfriend found a way to turn bacon into flowers last week, his new brag of late.

Apparently, if you’re at the farmer’s market, and you indulge your carnivore-sweetie’s longing for good bacon by giving him five bucks to buy some from the butcher, and he buys it, but then turns around and buys you a $5 bouquet, bacon has been turned into flowers.   Now you know.

I’m very lucky, dead pigs notwithstanding, to have his whimsy around.  I was just remarking to him the other day that it’s one of the things I appreciate most about him, and a quality I find it pretty rare with a lot of people: I need creativity around me, I need silliness, I need to be whimsical with someone.  I can go without a lot of things in my life, or in a given week or day, but if a day or two passes and I haven’t laughed my arse off, I just can’t deal.  While now and then that means that sex gets shelved — because we tend to take a left turn at silly, to the point that there is just no turning back — I’ll take it.

And on that note, I leave you with something I begged him to let me have a while back, which he penned during a meeting he was clearly very interested in at his day job.  I don’t think his boss would be particularly delighted, but I’m fairly certain I don’t care.

posted in Heather Corinna, Mr. Price, family, workworkwork, simple joys | permalink | comments (2) »

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) »

You know, now and then I forget how glad I am to have grown up in immigrant culture (given, second gen on my part) and in a city of immigrants.

I’m reminded of this at this moment in the way I’m often reminded: I just got out of a cab, post-cocktails with Cheryl downtown (and earnestly, craving a few more, being in something of a lushtastic mood, and right now trying to figure if I should walk myself over to the Copper Gate or not for some Jesus-sighting-Aquavit). I swear to gawd, I can easily say that 90% or more of the most productive, useful and insightful conversations I’ve had about this nation I inhabit have not only been with immigrants, but with immigrants driving a cab. Really, even if you’re not a regular cab-taker, I’d say that for $10 or so, it’s a sort of therapy — though possibly EST therapy if you read as too American — that’s more than worthwhile, particularly if you don’t get exposed to immigrant perspectives every day or didn’t grow up around them.

I had a moment tonight, too, in the midst of an immediately quick and bustling conversation with my African cab driver, of wondering why it is that I always seem to get the talkative cabbies, and why I pretty much need to say all of nothing to get an energetic conversation started. This particular driver, pretty much at the mere instant I was having that moment, made some comment about how amazing he thought my smile was. Aw, shucks, for sure — it’s one of my favorite compliments, and something people do tend to remark on often, likely because we big-lipped, big-toothed women do tend to have smiles that take up the whole of our faces — but that likely does have plenty to do with it. Someone smiles warmly at you from the get-go, you’re going to get gabbing.

Bar or no bar. Hmm.

* * *
Mr. Price and I went to a Halloween party Saturday night festooned as boy scouts. Given, he looked far more authentic than I having been a boy scout in earnest — and I merely a jealous girl scout — and in hardcore earnest, well through his senior year of high school. But I had a mighty hard time chilling out at the party, even given that any costume that allows me to wear sneakers and cargos is about the most relaxing thing a girl could ask for.

As Mark was far too inclined to share with anyone even remotely within earshot on Saturday, that boy scout uniform drives me freaking insane. I had ripped the buttons off the top of the one I wound up wearing when Mark wore it for me on my last birthday. That kind of insane. Mark has a couple of photos of Chicago he took around 1986, in a trip from Cincy to Chicago his troupe took, and there are photos taken a mere block away from my high school (They were at the Sears Tower and then in Greek Town). The sadness that came over me in knowing that I hadn’t managed to be glancing out the window during class when a troupe full of boy scouts from Ohio passed by, all ooh-the-big-big-city lights a’dazzle in their eyes, was unbearable. Had I noticed this at the age of 16, sitting in my barely-formed classroom with a bunch of other queer art geeks, I absolutely would have rushed everyone to the window to point the scouts out and yell “Hey! Lunch!” I’ve had a weakness for corruptible boys since about the age of 13, and it’s never worn off, even given that the age of said boys has advanced with my own.

Once, likely with the intent to seduce, Mark came out of his office wearing his scout shirt and sash. Alas, he also came out totally pantsless. This, in my occasionally very demented brain, registered a zero on the libido scale because he looked like a scout someone else had clearly gotten to already.

Yeah, I’ve got it bad. But it sure was fun to get home, and boy of boy, did our couch look bizarre the next morning.

* * *

Still on the fence about the bar. Ah, those big life decisions.

I spent basically all weekend doing nothing but very hardcore cleaning, including steaming the stupid carpets (our rental has wall-to-wall carpet in three rooms, which offends my personal aesthetics more than I can say), and doing some things to better insulate the house so that I don’t have the heart attack I did last year with the heating bill. I just finally got a basic abortion walk-through posted at Scarleteen today, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and which we really needed. I suppose I figured that I’ve had so much invective in my mailbox over the last week or two that I may as well put abortion on the front page, since I was taking crap already anyway. Over the next week, on top of editing the monumental-and-still-growing photo backlog, I’m hoping to get one new article up a day or so, from a whole slew of pieces that have been about 3/4’s finished for some time. I’m earnestly trying to be sure I cover any bases in terms of stuff I’ve been meaning to do that are the kind of thing I’ll take shit for (always from adults, mind: go figure that the pieces that seem to freak adults out the most are usually the ones the teenagers are the most thankful for), because it really is easier to bear during times when I already wake up every day to a pile of steaming e-poop.

Yeah, I’m thinking I’m go for that walk to the bar.

posted in Heather Corinna, Mr. Price, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (1) »

Meanwhile, back at the ranch….

Despite coming home and finding a mailbox with a pile of reactionary wait-until-marriage stuff inside, our weekend away in Port Townsend was scrumdiddlyumptious. Photos forthcoming, but for the most part, our exciting locales were the big, fluffy bed, two overstuffed chairs beside a gas fireplace, and a large, jetted tub. I was able to get out early Sunday morning for a seated meditation on a cliff with a moldy bench overlooking the water and then take a brisk walk across the beach. Mark literally took five baths in less than 48 hours: I expected to feel his developing gills as we slept. Sofia clearly also needed a little vacation — all that itching and your people endlessly traveling is stressful for but a small pug! — as was apparent given that save maybe one hour of the whole weekend, she found herself a cozy spot amidst the pillows on one of those chairs and refused to leave.

Saturday was a sweet, all-day mix of various sorts of debauchery — including MST3K fore-and-after-play, which should be a suggestion for the teens I work with, really — and even just by mid-morning, I was relaxed enough to enjoy a very, very nice batch of big, wavy orgasms. Funny how it’s so easy to forget — even given my job and the fact that I remind people of this daily — that the more stressed out you are, the milder your sexual response tends to be. Even the really good ones aren’t as good as they could be if you could just freaking relax; really relax, about everything. Between the stress of all the travel and having to be on so much, the perpetual struggles to keep everything I do afloat and the stress of just doing my work, not having felt well for quite some time, the works, I knew I was tense as hell, but until a day when by where nothing felt at all stressful, I wasn’t aware of how tense.

At the cabin this weekend, I was also reminded that I’m never quite sure what sound sex toy etiquette is. In other words, if you’re in a place where they will or may show up while you’re out to tidy things up, do you have to care about toys and lube and gloves being strewn all over the place? Is putting them in one pile on the nightstand good enough, or are you really supposed to hide them, even when you’re paying to stay where you are? I get the feeling you are supposed to, but the minute I even start to do it, I so deeply resent feeling like I should that I never bother.

It’s really swell to be able to look ahead over the next few weeks — heck, the next few months — and know that I don’t have to go anywhere. That doesn’t come close to fixing all of my troubles, but it sure helps out an awful lot. I’m a homebody by nature: I ground at home. When I don’t really get to do that, and am in and out a lot, it makes everything feel even more unmanageable than it is. Seattle winters aren’t exactly fabulous (but thank christ, they are NOT Minnesota or Chicago winters), but I’m glad as hell that I can be home for the whole of winter and spring. Once I really get at least somehat caught up with my backlog of every kind of work, I’m hoping I can spend it catching up on the mountain of books I have half-read, do the last of the housepainting I still haven’t finished, and have the time to do some damn art. And sleep. Get lots and lots of sleep.

So long as we can swing it, I’m going to try and use my accumulated miles for Briana so that she and The Baby Liam can come up for a couple weeks around the holidays. Her living situation is scary right now, even to someone like me who knows from hardscrabble living, and she’s got a pretty substantial break from her culinary school, so not only being able to see them, but just being able to give them a break at no cost would be great. But even that doesn’t involve me having to go anywhere. I get to bring my family to my own front door.

The Babeland event, by the way, was crazy-packed, so I had to do more lecture than Q&A, which is very much not my preference. But it was still a good thing, despite the fact that almost half the place was full with community college students from a human sexuality class, some of whom informed me later that their prof was a pretty creepy bigot who clearly hasn’t read a single study ON sexuality that was published later than 1965, and who routinely lectures even his knowingly lesbian college students about abstaining until marriage. Apparently, this was the only decent part of the class so far according to them, and also according to them and the Babeland staff, the guy nodded off through half of it. I got to walk away with a new toy for my troubles, and I resisted the urge to be greedy, since I’ve been aching for this for an age (I know, I know, it’s leather, but it has laces and a STAR on it!), and also had more than one set of youth educators wanting to talk to me about what the right way is to kindly ask your students not to masturbate publicly. I had no good answers (besides my usual suggestion to just redirect them to something else, giving them the look that says you know what they’re doing, and it’s okay, but not okay HERE) for the couple who worked in a pool with jets: you can’t keep kids off of water jets, man.

My enthusiasm for my to-do list this week tells me all I need to know about how frazzled and overextended I’ve been. When I am earnestly excited to better insulate the house here (it’s a rental, yes, but if we get the heating bills this winter we got last winter we’re in serious trouble), clean the refrigerator (and only a little depressed at how empty it is), when I wake up in the morning elated that the day will be about cleaning my disaster of an office, when doing tax paperwork seems like a break, I’ve clearly been living in Stressville. Besides finishing a couple articles that have been taking way too long (in my defense, figuring out the best way to do an article about how not to be a rapist isn’t exactly a cakewalk), and answering some advice questions, I’m going to be mostly away from Scarleteen over the next week or two. I forget, sometimes, that I’m allowed to do that, and that when it’s not coming even close to making ends meet, it only makes sense TO do that. A cleaner, more organized office, for instance, equals a clearer mind to better figure out how to deal with all the challenges right now. More to the point, now and then, during the times when I’m really not being paid at all or barely getting paid, it’s sage to do other work that needs doing which I also don’t get paid for, and is far less stressful.

Plus, there was that one time where I decided to ditch everything else to clean out my closet and found $300, effectively getting paid more for cleaning than for working. I don’t exactly expect that to happen again, but I’m not going to rule it out, either. Really, given what a slob I am, I’d not be surprised if Mark started secretly stuffing bills into hidden places just so I’d clean up my crap. I DID find a mix tape yesterday from 1988, and nearly wept with the sweetness. Labeled “Obnoxiousness Found Us in Gillson Park, Illinois,” jointly by both myself and my best friend at the time, who always went nuts with the mix tapes for the long trips we’d take — in both senses of the word — I am greatly looking forward to popping it into the tape deck in Mr. Price’s office to see what’s on it. I predict plenty of Beatles, Jazz Butcher (and I also just organized a huge pile of JB CDs a friend and rare fellow fan of them made for me a couple years back, which are a major coup since most of their stuff wasn’t even on CD), Elvis Costello, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, ska and 60’s surf rock.

I’m electing not to talk about the moment a hidden camera would have found me in this morning, belting out “Angel of the Morning” at the top of my lungs while organizing my studio shelves. because, you know, we really shouldn’t document these sorts of things if we want to be taken at all seriously.

(Though as an aside, a reader here gave a very generous donation this week, and I thank you soundly. That not only helps me to be able to toss some change at my developer so we can get some more of the upgrade finished, it also means I can finally go get new glasses, and thus end the nonstop tension headache I’ve had for two months because my prescription changed. You’re a goddess!)

P.S. In trying to finish that article on how not to rape and enable rape, I’m troubled that while we have one word, a very powerful word, at that, for a rapist, we don’t seen to have an equally powerful — and ideally MORE powerful word — for someone who is not just not a rapist, but the antithesis of a rapist. So, what’s the word for a caring, reciprocal sexual person or partner? It’s pretty darn tough to sell a concept when we don’t even have a word for it. “Lover,” alas, is terribly outdated and not something young people are even remotely likely to use. “Partner” isn’t just about sex, and as I was informed a couple years back when I accidentally outed myself to some of Mark’s film crew at 5 AM, it still primarily belongs to us queers. We could make “mutual” an honorific, but it doesn’t feel right. Might be some mileage in “accord” or “harmony,” but I can’t seem to land on it.

P.P.S. The mailbag still is out of control this week. My favorite this morning?

I was so sad when I was told about your website. Teenagers go to your site and find permission to have sex in any way they want. I am a chastity speaker and talk to teens a lot about the risks of STD’s. I know how faulty condoms are and even though people are using them STD’s are still out of control. I was so sad to read a lot of wrong information on your site. Condoms will not protect again many STD’s including HPV the most common STD today and one that can cause cervical cancer and possibly lead to death. You suggest that waiting until marriage to have sex is just not possible. It most certainly is and I hope that you will start giving teens more credit for having self control. We need to encourage then to aim for the healthiest life possible. Many people are dying because of sex but no one has died because they abstained until marriage. Please carefully consider the info you share and make sure it is accurate because so far a lot of what I have read on your site is horribly wrong especially as related to STD’s and condoms.

I really love it when people tell me what I do. (As well as the idea that it’s up to me or any other adult to give teens “permission” to have sex, while at the same time telling me I don’t give teens enough credit for making their own sound choices, while they’re asking them to sign a very binding legal contract to another person in order to even CONSIDER that choice.) It’s so helpful: how would I know otherwise? I’m the idiot savant of sex ed, see. I have no idea what I do or say: all these words and statistics and sources just come pouring out of me when I consult my Ouija board every time I answer a question. A few days later, I go look at what I have written and it’s an absolute mystery to me.

I figured the best I could do with that one was to very calmly just primarily direct her to actual, international sources of sexual health information. Probably she won’t use them, or even look, or will find some way to discredit them — even though the CDC is almost entirely in the administration’s pocket these days, so you’d think these kinds of folks wouldn’t write them off anymore. But she is an educator, and I suppose you do never know when you’ve gotten one who earnestly has their heart in the right place, but just has never been informed.

And to think, some folks call me a pessimist.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, Mr. Price, home, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (6) »

Mark is finally home.

Road-weathered and bruised, to be sure, but home. Poor guy: not only did he have to wait for an age to have the car fixed after the accident, be trapped in Ohio throughout, then drive cross-country in the same car, but he had to do it during some of the worst storms many areas he drove through had seen in a long time. At one point, having literally just missed a tornado and seen it on the horizon — and thus, already in a panic — he also had the misfortune, at that moment, of driving by a billboard stating “Prepare To Meet Thy Maker!” Yipes.

But he got himself home, and it’s amazing to have him back here: by the time he got back, we hadn’t been in the house together for a solid month, which is lunacy. It’s funny how much another person’s energy can change a place. Don’t get me wrong: this is the nicest place I have ever rented in my life. Loved my last one-bedroom apartment in Minneapolis, but for the same rent, to be able to get two offices, a wood stove, a huge kitchen and a big place to garden in a far quieter ‘hood is quite the boon. But it feels different here when I’m living here alone, and not just because it’s far too big for one person to live in. The air in here is different: the vibe in here is lacking, almost as if the house was asleep when it’s only me inside it.

Being able to have him come home — flowers in hand for me (as well as an awesome t-shirt from Iowa’s minor league team), new Uglydoll in hand for the pup — and be able to walk to the market together, cook dinner together while dancing around to the 70’s rollerrink tunes we share a shameless love for, eat on the front porch, and then find ourselves making out on the living room floor before bringing it upstairs was idyllic. Getting to wake up this morning and see him all soft-morning-faced and smiling at me was a rush.

And thankfully, being in the headspace to have any sort of sex last night was a godsend. Earlier this week I was on the phone with my Dad, and he’d mentioned that we must really miss each other. Then, unfortunately, he took it one step too far and mentioned we both must be as “horny as hell.” SQUICK!

Look, I hate the h-word already. It’s always been seriously yuck-making for me, and is one of the few single words that a person could say to me to make me not only not want to have sex, but make me not want to THINK about sex again anytime soon. And your Dad saying it — however open you and your Dad have always been about sex — is well beyond one step over the line. I wasn’t sure I would be able to think about sex for a solid week.

Top that with the fact that I’d spent most of that same day getting caught up with Scarleteen advice questions. I’m never kidding when I say that the work I do is one of the best methods of birth control I know. Listening to/reading/conversing about people’s sex problems and crises all day is about as un-sexy as it gets, and on any given day, just plain borders on — or outright is — tragic. Now, every now and then, it’ll be SO tragic that I crave some sex, likely just so I can be tangibly reminded that the healthy, happy sort does exist. But most days, I have to basically find some time between work and play to exorcise my brain.

It’s all the worse when we get teen users who want to get very explicit about the sex that they’re having. I’m not an idiot, I know full well there are adults out there who cruise Scarleteen and read the posts to get off. I’d love to think there weren’t, because it’s really invasive of the users and what they intend in posting, but there are. And I gotta confess, I either think they’re just not right in the head, or, more likely, that they’re projecting so much of their own fantasy unto those posts that they’re not seeing or feeling the reality of them, because I’m pretty immersed in it and I often feel like I need to wash my eyes afterwards, and remind myself that that’s not anything even marginally related to the sex I have myself.

But thankfully, none of that was in my head when Mark came home last night.

Or this morning, for the hour I stepped away from writing this to crawl back into bed and do a little more making up for lost time.

(Yep, still having times when it boggles my mind that we’ve been together for around two and a half years now and the spark hasn’t dimmed at all. It’s just really surreal. Fantastic, but surreal.)

posted in Heather Corinna, Mr. Price, home, my fine romance | permalink | comments (3) »

I had the strangest dream last night.

This makes three times in the whole of my life I have had a dream about Matthew, which is in and of itself so odd: you’d think I’d dream far more often about him.

(Cliff’s Notes for newer readers: Matthew was, effectively, the first great love of my teenage life, and the first person I ever got really close to with even more childhood and adolescent baggage than I had myself: his father offed himself when he wasn’t even two, his mother went insane thereafter and was institutionalized, and he then got tossed into the foster care system where he was molested in three homes out of four. By the same age I left home, he was living on-street, and shortly thereafter became a sort of Chicago punk scene icon. He both saved my life quite literally the day we met by distractedly walking right into each other at a bus stop, was really the first person I even told the whole of my history, helped me get out of my home, and then OD’d on ludes — do people even do ludes anymore?– and blew his head off with the gun his idiot roomie left sitting around loaded, four days after my sixteenth birthday, and eight days after he helped me get out of my house for good. I later found out that had happened on the very minute I’d woken up at four in the morning that day with a start, and that my number was the last on the phone sans a digit: he never completed that call. Suffice it to say, between having to clean up his place afterwards, deal with being the strangest sort of young widow ever, and have my teenage romantic ideals shattered utterly, all while I was trying to get over being suicidal myself, it was a considerable event in my life.)

Until last night, I’d had only two dreams about him: one the day after he died, in which he didn’t make an appearance at all, only his castaway shoes, and then one when I was in Miami with Sabrina in 2003, 16 years after the fact:

(From my journal) “In the dream, I was in some severe trouble, for not doing what a large mob of Shirley Jackson-esque people wanted or expected of me. I’d tried to hide out with my father, but he was unable to protect me. I ended up in a prison, in a terribly small, dirty cell, and in all the cells around me were a million different ghosts, passing in and out of the bars, whispering things I couldn’t understand, but being very assuming, with powerful presence, though they weren’t so much scary as just intense. I somehow escaped, and went though a series of alleys into a dark blue room, through a gold curtain. Matthew was there, instantly recognizable, though he didn’t look like the bleached, tattooed and mohawked 24-year-old he was, but instead how he might look today, sans window dressing — he had one blue and one brown eye as he had then, but plain brown hair, glasses, et cetera, yet was wearing the clothing he died in. And laying upside down (not sure what that means). When he saw me, he smiled big and started weeping, saying he never thought he’d see me again. We talked, catching up with my life, I said something to the degree of thinking he didn’t say goodbye because he didn’t still love me, he assured me he just couldn’t before now but that he’d loved me all the while, from then until now, without ever stopping. Cue a lot more joyful weeping.

After that, a beautiful old African woman in a lot of jewels passed by the curtain and smiled, and Matthew was then smiling softly, wearing purple and saffron robes; he held me in a tight embrace. And I woke up. With a truckload of astonished tears running down my face, just so tremendously grateful and shocked at the whole thing; feeling his protective and loving presence inside of myself so strongly.”

I’d waited a long time for that dream. I’d dealt with death before Matthew’s, but it was one of those where, since you didn’t get to say goodbye, or have any explanation, you go to bed each night begging — and thinking you can magically make it happen — for some sort of visitation in your sleep from the dead. When I was very young, I needed that dream for one set of reasons, but as I got older, I needed it for simple closure, and I got it in that.

In last night’s dream Matthew had come back from the dead. Not as a zombie or a ghost, nor was it anything about some mix-up. Basically, he simply was back, with no explanation as to how he got back whatsoever: he looked old, he looked tired and he seemed to be in a great deal of emotional agony. We didn’t have a prototypical tearful lover’s reunion: in fact, I met him with Mark, and while it was very joyful in its way, and there was the kissing and the embracing, there was something very sad and not-quite-there about it. He’d come back, but with little or nothing to come back to: there wasn’t a place for him as someone still present, basically. I’d moved on, and while elated to see him, and elated there was a way of having him back in my life, there wasn’t really room, and the magic had long since gone: it felt strangely empty.

He’d then gone to visit a bunch of other people who had been in his life before, most of whom I didn’t recognize. But all of their lives had fallen quite apart, in some horrendously tragic ways, but it was all sort of surreal (especially since the color in it was all desturated and greenish, the color old polaroids turn after a while), as if their lives were only like this not because of his death, but because of his coming back or what he was seeing in coming back.

I was trying to comfort him, but in the end, it was Mark, not me, who provided the comfort. He told him that those people were not really who they seemed to be now, but were still the people they were then, were all really doing just fine, or they would be if he’d just let his guilt go rather than revisiting it. And it seemed like Matt’s pain lifted, just like that.

And that was that: I woke up.

It was very strange, but in some way, incredibly beautiful. In some way I interpret it as a symbolic representation of the fact that burdens which I have borne alone aren’t things I have to go alone anymore, or aren’t my sole burdens to bear. It’s also really lovely to have this visual image of Mark comforting Matthew in my head, both of them sitting face to face, hands on one another’s knees, foreheads pressed together, with Mark easing his unbearable pain so compassionately.

(And oddly enough, Mark just rang. Saturday, the car was finally repaired, so he was able to leave Ohio on Sunday. He’s just now getting close to Montana so — gawd willing — he should be back home by Saturday at this rate.)

posted in Heather Corinna, Mr. Price, subconscious life | permalink | comments (4) »

Every now and then, when Mark and I settle into bed with the idea of having sex… something completely different happens. Like, in the Monty Python way. On crack.

Often, it’s when he’s anxious about things — right now, he’s getting ready to direct his first paying freelance gig — or overtired or a little loopy or I’m not entirely in it yet myself. Now and then, I see it coming. Sometimes, like last night, I don’t.

There we are, all naked or half-naked, in or around bed, we’ve got sex on the brain or as a plan, and then it’s like — POW! Boy mysteriously and immediately regresses to half his age and has this sort of spaztastic “Gadzooks! Cowabunga! AIE! It’s a naked GIRL — right next to ME!”

This reaction is generally demonstrated with what I can only describe as interpretive dance. Last night, it began with a strange sort of Robert Crumb-esque cling to my lower body and sheet-spelunking and evolved into what I could only presume was Mark’s best impression of a jellyfish: arms flailing, wiggling on the bed like a lunatic nonstop, the making of squiggly-face. Usually then, too, as was the case last night, some series of one-liners or funny face-making comes into play, and it all only gets worse the more I laugh.

(At some point too, I always feel I should check in with Mark to be sure he absolutely didn’t want to have sex, because there comes a degree of silly which, while I quite enjoy it, goes past the point of no return when it comes to my getting turned on. I usually try and ask this when either in my head or outta my lips issues the first “Oy gavalt, we’re going to go HERE.”)

These episodes always, always end in some ginormous gigglefest where neither one of us can stop laughing and breathing becomes a serious issue.

Oddly enough, it ends up serving the same purposes sex does, just via a different route: it’s pretty darn intimate to make a total arse of yourself naked in front of someone else, and to have someone else feel free enough to do that with you. If you’re all stressed out, pent up, all that laughing is one helluva release. You get your ednorphins, you get your dopamine. And quite in spite of myself, I have to admit, it’s fun as all hell and always an unexpected surprise. Sure, you have your moment where you’re all “Oh damn, that orgasm I was looking forward to so isn’t happening.” On the other hand, there’s always another day, and while it’s pretty doable to plan to have sex, it’s nigh unto impossible to plan to be an all-out naked goofball. I mean, you can’t exactly say, “Hey sugar, you wanna get silly tomorrow night?” I mean, we all have our things we can do to get in the mood to have sex, especially when we’re with a partner we know and who knows us well, but there’s a pretty specific space you have to be in and can’t make happen to be a giant freaky spaz.

That said? Um. I’d like to cash in my raincheck for that orgasm now, please.

posted in Heather Corinna, Mr. Price, my fine romance, sex/life | permalink | comments (5) »

Know what is supremely nice?

To be away from home for a couple of days, come back more than a little tired and stressed out because in your absence, anti-feminist trolls decided it would be a good time to make a mess of your message boards, something you discovered at midnight the night before; to have to spend all day when you got back cramming 30 hours of cleanup into six because at a young adult board, mob mentality always makes any acrimonious dynamic even worse, and to finish by crying your eyes out with a close friend whose relationship busted up in a really harsh and painful way, all while you have yet another early period (with The Bad Ovary™, no less: though I suspect it’s really the bad tube, but whatever) because there was no way you weren’t going to cycle-sync with a house with four women in it.

That’s not the nice part.

The nice part is to have your day finish with your partner coming home and giving you the biggest hugs ever, listening to your venting, setting a lovely table and making you a glorious meal (despite the fact that you’re eating it in your smelly pajamas post-Vicodin-induced haze), sharing a few sips of their whiskey and snuggling you into a cozy stupor on the couch until you fell asleep.

It’s not as if I forget it often — I really don’t — but now and then, I just have to say, yet again, that there are areas in my life in which I’ve got it mighty, mighty good.

Addendum: Topping all that off with the surprise gift of sending a tuner over so that I can play my piano? Nice touch, Mr. Price.

Addendum 2: Topping all THAT off with two nights in a row that resulted in several very tasty orgasms for me? Boy hit this week right outta the park.

posted in Heather Corinna, Mr. Price, home, my fine romance | permalink | comments (4) »

One last COPA-related nod before I set it down for a bit, do a quick interview for an Aussie mag about the All Girl Army, then bury myself in the big endgame of my book edits accordingly. My deadline is exactly one week from now, and between now and then I need to finish the initial edits on three more chapters and an appendix, then write a short summary, do the resource list, the dedication, the acknowledgments, update the TOC, then go back through the whole thing front to back for one more spit-and-polish before turning it in.

I expect to sleep and leave the house again sometime next week. I expect to eat infrequently, and when I do, to be unable to discuss anything but Chlamydia, breakup ethics, gender identity and how the hell to address pornography properly in this context.

I just have to say, before I plunge full-stop into this last stretch, that on that whole adventure, my boyfriend was such a rock star.

It’s really not easy to go somewhere as someone’s partner — and really, as nothing BUT someone’s partner — and have absolutely everything be about them and how awesome and important they are. I’ve been in that spot once or twice, and even as someone who dislikes having the spotlight put on me (which is very much not the case with Mr. Price), it’s still been tough.

But you’d never have known it was anything but easy-as-pie for Mark. He was a total pro in dealing with the awful flights to get to Philly and me, with discussions about nothing but this case, with the courtroom time and my moments of neurosis before, with the crazy celebration after. It may as well have been all about him for how damn cool he was about it all.

And really, sparing very old, very good friends, I can’t imagine being comfortable having taken any partner I have had before to this juncture. Anyone who was anything less than My Real Deal, would have felt strange, like taking someone you’ve been dating for a week to a family wedding, you know? It was also so, so cool to have everyone love him so quickly and immediately. All in all, having my very real partner with me made a whole lot of difference throughout. Sure, this love-of-my-life stuff still totally freaks me out sometimes, but most of the time, it is just the absolute thing.

After the trial, after I grabbed a couple drinks with Moe, I headed back to the hotel and we had this utterly awesome couple of hours just curled up under the sheets, gabbing and gabbing amidst many, many snuggles. We lucked out, in general, with both of us being complete snuggle-bunnies as people: these snuggle-fests have happened more than once, to say the least. In this particular instance, the fest culminated with some ungodly good sex, to boot. Bonus!

This is a particular bonus, by the way, when one is going out for a night of drinking. I explained this theory to a couple of our cohorts, but I’ll explain it to all of you out in the cheap seats as well, should you be unaware. Alcohol really inhibits the arousal cycle, and not just from a male not-getting-it-up standpoint: for everyone. It makes it a bit easier to want to have sex, for those who have a hard time sober, but it makes it a lot harder, physiologically-speaking, to bring all the bases home, if you get my drift. So, when you know you’re going to go tie one on, you simply have sex before, rather than after. Takes all the pressure off, and lets you go out already feeling good and looking all glowy. So, from me to you, sex first, sloshiness after. You’ll thank me later.

Boy raised the bar, is what he did. Next time he has something of crucial importance, I’ve got to seriously step it up and give back as much of a gift as he did me this time, or else I’m going to feel like a total slacker, especially since the last time he had something hugely important and all about him (making his last short film) I ended up getting the funny paralysis on the set and scaring the hell out of everyone.

I owe him, big time.

posted in Heather Corinna, copa, Mr. Price, my fine romance, Auntie Heather's Helpful Hints | permalink | comments (1) »

And now for something completely different…

Too. Much. Heavy. Stuff. I’ve been so emotionally and intellectually overwhelmed the last couple of weeks following the last entry (which so many people were so beautifully responsive to, thank you so much). With the events in both Colorado and Lancaster, the latter of which is doubly haunting for me, since it’s where we spent the first six years of my life, and the ridiculous media and general public approaches to both. With stories like this (if there was some award for the most sickening, disturbing thing said about rape in a given month — and how fucking sad it is so many disgusting things are said so often that I don’t feel able to say in a year — this one would win it, no contest). With editingeditingediting, and then spending two weeks of concentrated time going back and forth and forth and back between my editor, the publisher and the marketing folks desperately trying to hit upon a title for the book which everyone could agree on so we can take it to the bloody distributors already, dammit. With a couple of the girls from ST and the AGA in deep crisis. With conflicted feelings per the feminist community as usual; per having others around who do the sort of work I do at ST who can really get it, per just needing some intellectual communion I cannot for the life of me seem to find anywhere. With being annoyed at all the grunt work I have to do,and the fact that over the last couple months, I cannot find even an ounce of time to do some artwork, which is generally the salvation of my mental health and my often sore heart. With just really feeling like it’s possible that the way I have worked over the past decade, at this constant, breakneck pace, I have accumulated a need for vacation time worthy of all of that, as in, if I could take a whole year off right now to lay on my back somewhere warm and stare at the sky? I would. Would that I could.

I felt uncomfortable, with all that’s been going down in the world over the last month, having any entry up but the last one, which now permanently lives here. But I need a small respite into the land of silly, especially since I went and got myself some brand of sick this last weekend, to boot. I tell you, it’s a very hard balancing act sometimes having one part of you be a very silly, light whimsical person and having the other part, and much of the work you do — largely because of the world you live in and your efforts to keep constant awareness so you can try to fix it — be the other side of that coin.

So.

Sometimes Mr. Price and myself head to bed early to go roll around in it, get sticky, and make lots of happy, guttural sounds. Other times, we go to bed early with an eye towards an extended snuggle period in which we whisper back and forth for hours like little girls up late at a slumber party.

A week and a half ago, it was the latter. As it was, we were both so tired, we ended up falling asleep record-early, around 9:30.

And were woken up again not an hour later, quite suddenly.

Mark grew up in the quiet ‘burbs of Cincinnati. I, however, grew up in the third largest city in the states, and spent a good half of the life I lived in Chicago in a damn noisy ghetto, right at street level.

I can sleep through ANYTHING. I once slept, for weeks, through a building janitor letting himself into my basement apartment at night to creepily watch me sleep (the one night it did wake me found me breaking my lease the following morning). I have slept through car crashes outside my window, through domestic arguments next door, above or below, and through two floods, waking only once I was literally bubbling to breathe. When I moved to Minneapolis, I couldn’t sleep for weeks because the quiet was so freaky: I’d wake up and have to go outside to double check that the world hadn’t ended while I was napping.

Considering that I now also sleep with one snoring pug and one snoring boyfriend, back in a major metropolitan city, though getting to sleep is ever still a challenge at times, once I am asleep, the girl is dead to rights.

So, when, say, a car horn is wailing endlessly right below, I might toss and turn a little, maybe mutter “mrrrmmma urrrshle” (literally translated as “what an asshole” for those of you who aren’t fluent in sleepy-Heather-mumblese), but I’ll sleep through it.

Even when it’s Mark’s car, in our driveway, right below our bedroom window.

THE MARK PRICE GUIDE TO CRISIS MANAGEMENT

Find a dyke. If you have one nearby, wake her up. Plead with her to do something, anything, to remedy the situation like magic. Because this is what dykes are apparently made for, to fix shit for everybody else.

I’m asleep. Dead-to-the-world asleep. It’s warm under the covers. I’m all snuggled with the pug and — I thought — my sweetie. Sugarplums probably aren’t dancing in my head, but it’s likely that Otis Redding, reborn just to give me a private show, and lots of vegan donuts are. In a very layered, festive Bugsby Berkely number. With Tom Waits. And there’s enough cigarettes for all of us, even with me and Tom around.

Some horn is blaring, and somewhere in the maze of my subconscious mind, I hear it and do a good deal of annoyed, murky muttering, sputtering forth some form of incomprehensible gaelic curse involving a brassed-off hedgehog and malevolent cornflakes. But I stay asleep: I can do this, see, I’m an awesome multitasker.

But then there are lights on. Bright lights. My blind boyfriend is running around the bedroom like a lunatic waving his hands around. I don’t smell fire, the dog appears to be alive and well. Sparing whatever stupid ass is outside laying on their horn, I do not understand what all this fuss is about, especially since without my glasses, he appears to be doing some sort of dance akin to what I’d expect to see at a Pentacostal gathering. But he’s not Pentacostal. Did he convert? When? Why? Did they offer him film funding?

Just because some drunken bonehead is playing with his car is just no reason to get all fussy. Go to bed, hope it ends: if not, sandwich one’s head with pillows and suck it up.

Clearly, Mark disagrees. Sofia and I are still adjusting to the light and the noise, both (I feel I can speak for her) blearily looking at the veritable madman spinning in circles, naked, in the bedroom, stricken by a sudden case of Tourette’s barking, “Horn! Car! Help! MY car! Pants! Help!”

In my sleepy mental fog, I only understand one part of this.

Know where your pants are at all times.

“Where are my pants!”

Umm, I dunno. Why do you need them? It’s not like I haven’t seen your stuff before, babe, and you know already I think it is tay-sty. Yum-yum. Bring it back to bed, wouldya? Oh! Are you cold? Here, have a blanket. It’s warm and cozy. Mmmmm. Toasty blanket. Sleepy goodness.

“PANTS!”

Okay, he’s having a moment. But maybe pants will fix it and then I can go back to sleep. I mumble that unless we had sex, he never takes his pants off in the bedroom, so they’re probably in his office. (When Mark is screenwriting, his process generally involves removing more and more clothing as he goes on: I do not understand this process, but as a casual onlooker with a hearty appreciation for his backside, I have no complaints.)

However, I only mutter this after several rounds of “I don’t know, turn off the fucking LIGHTS!” and after he’s already found the pants and since left the bedroom. Oh well. I did try and help. La-di-dah. Back to bed. ‘Bout time.

Then I begin to hear voices. They’re not happy voices. Then there is a loud knock downstairs at the front door.

Be on the lookout for lynch mobs.

Apparently, at this point, Mark had come to several conclusions:

1) That awful horn was HIS car. Even though it’s an old car, without any alarms or the like that tend to go off when they want to, and even though he wasn’t in it, but was sleeping upstairs.

2) That those voices and the knock at the door are everyone in our neighborhood, waiting for him with rope and a nearby tree.

3) That he is living his worst nightmare, in which he has not merely been rudely awakened by a crisis he must manage, but by public humiliation of the worst variety.

4) There is simply no time for one’s anal-retentive complexes at a time like this.
Suffice it to say, my sweetheart is far more obsessive-compulsive and anal-retentive than I. Of course, everyone is, which explains the state of my kitchen.

So, for instance, whereas I would walk in the snow barefoot (and in high school, once paid the price for that with a bad bout of pneumonia when, one hit of acid over the line, it seemed really wonderful to take a long hike in the middle of a Chicago winter in one’s sundress and bare feet), Mark would go to bed with his shoes (and the two pairs of socks he always wears) on if I let him.

The only time I ever see his feet are when we’re having sex or taking a bath. Otherwise, I’d have no idea he had toes.

Mark would also sooner die than go out in public with his glasses rather than his contacts.

You will never see Mark naked in any photograph I ever take (no matter how much I beg to have a historical monument of the nicest bottom I have ever seen, even just for my own personal use).

So, you can imagine my surprise when, in stumbling out casually with my pug in tow, I saw Mark under the hood of his car — a strange enough occurrence all by itself, since the only other time I have seen this happen is when I insisted we go under there since clearly, the strong, smoky smell emanating from within was Not A Good Thing — quasi-shirtless, shoeless and in his glasses. It was like someone honked the horn to call us out into an alternate dimension.

Thankfully, for Mark, who was utterly convinced that every neighbor we had was outside with rope, stones and flaming crosses, it was but one neighbor, who had no intent to lynch.

Be bald, and call upon your bald brothers in your time of peril.

It was, rather, one of the neighbors in the multi-unit building next door, also bald, and also apparently once the owner of a wayward car which liked to yell in the middle of the night.

So, when I finally stumbled outside — having since woken up enough to figure out that the asshole leaning on the horn was the invisible driver of Mark’s car, which is an entirely sensible conclusion to reach while barely awake, for the record — with a couple of tools in hand just in case, I found two baldies under the hood. As it were.

Know your tools. Even if you don’t know what they’re called.

He needs to work the nut off the battery connector, since myself and Bald Guy #2 have explained that this will assure that the wily, strangely self-directed horn will not have the capability of shouting to the rooftops again while we sleep.

He asks if I have a pliers. I’m too out of it to explain that he needs a wrench, which I hand him.

He does not know this is not a pliers, and clearly thinks I gave him what he asked for. But that’s okay.

When all else fails, stamp your feet, pound your fists, and verbally abuse the once-inanimate object in question.

As it turned out, the mechanically minded of us were actually of little use with this fiasco. Because what finally made the horn stop yowling, well before we disconnected the battery, was simply Mark — in his great strife of having been woken to, by his perspective, giant public humiliation — pounding his fists against the horn, yelling at it to shut the hell up.

Go figure.

After this entire adventure, the poor guy was so hyped up with adrenaline from having been woken up like this and, again from his perspective, almost drawn and quartered by the neighbors, it required much wine and much sitting on the couch watching (the unpredictable choice of) “American Movie,” to feel secure enough again to brave bed and sleep, knowing now that somewhere outside in the world there were cars — maybe even yours! — who had minds of their own and could torment you while you peacefully slept, without warning or mercy.

Given that horrific nothing, it’s shocking, really, that some booze and a flick were enough. Then again, he also had a dyke and his pants.

Oh, be good: I said AND, not in.

Caveat: Mark is actually generally WAY better in a crisis than this. Do not take this to be a testament to his skills, nor mistake my exploiting Mark’s traumas for our entertainment as an accurate representation of how he normally behaves in crisis. And yes, this caveat is here because I’d like to sleep somewhere tonight that isn’t the couch. I’m no dummy.

posted in Heather Corinna, Mr. Price, home, my fine romance | permalink | comments (1) »

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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I don’t believe it’s about concern for young women’s ability to follow the instructions for EC, as I said in a comment here to one of the AGA bloggers posts about EC:

Two years earlier in age, young women have, and are given, the ability to follow the directions for driving a CAR, on the road, with other cars. It’s also an easy okay that married women under 18 have the ability to REAR A CHILD. Our culture has ZERO problem with putting young teens on antidepressants or Ritalin, and no trouble entertaining the idea they can use those ably. Our culture has women under the age of 18 graduating high school, passing the SAT, readying to begin military service, college, job training. And yet, we’re supposed to believe that all of these young women could not possibly handle the complexity of the following instructions on the package of levonorgestrel: Take 1 white pill within 120 hours after unprotected sex and 1 more white pill 12 hours later.

And I can’t fathom that anyone in charge believes any of us are so stupid not to see the conflict in that.

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P.P.S. Found a helper (thanks, William!) to help me shift the journal over to Wordpress, so hopefully, sometime soon, that’ll come together and make updating a fuck of a lot easier. This once-a-month stuff is just ridiculous.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, Mr. Price, family | permalink | comments (0) »