This morning God kissed me on the forehead. Today I believe, at least a little, that I don’t suck. That things will be ok.
It’s weird. I never know what kind of day it is going to be. I wish I had more control over my emotions.
Lots of my friends are going through similar or worse bad stuff right now. I hope God kisses your foreheads today as well.
I’m not quite *cheerful* but I’m at least not crying or feeling depressed. It’s a start; I’ll take it.
Uhm, stuff.
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tshuma posted this : Somewhat paraphrased – You’re given the chance to live your life over, with your current personality and mind. You can go back to any part of your life and start over.
To narrow down the reasons a bit and clarify: you have your current personality and knowledge of your current life history, but not the world’s. You can change events of your life by avoiding a car crash that crippled you, but you don’t know about assassinations or the events of September 11. You don’t know to invest in Microsquish stock at its IPO and you can’t test out of high school at the age of six. On the plus side, Star Wars in the theater will still be an awesome experience.
Given how I have been feeling lately, this is an interesting question. Given what I know now, I would have stayed with Aunt Vonnie and Uncle Bob starting from the first time I was sent to live with them when I was 6. I would have avoided my father like the plague. If I had stayed with Auntie then I couldn’t have been blamed for Tommy’s accident, though I bet it would have happened anyway. I wouldn’t have been seriously molested. I wouldn’t have been raped. I wouldn’t have the same severe abandonment issues from my mother pushing me around to dozens of different people. I wouldn’t have gone to 25 schools before graduating from high school.
There would have been other issues, and I know that–but I would have been better off. Staying with them would have changed almost everything that really hurt me. I would have found other things to get hurt by, but I have to wonder if they would have been as shattering. We lived up in the mountains in a sheltered place. It’s kind of weird wondering what I would be like if I had been sheltered from bad stuff. Would I be so strong? Would I be able to stand up against things that are wrong? I don’t know. I suspect so, but that’s a coulda shoulda woulda.
But it doesn’t matter what I would like to have changed. Cause this is where I am. And I have to figure out how to pick up the pieces. I’m glad I have Noah. He makes it a whole lot easier.
A brat asked: What question, self examination or otherwise, would you least like to be asked about now?
And what question, self examination or otherwise, would you most like to be asked about now?
A long time ago, when I was a little girl, I remember my father taking me shooting. At the end of the day we were back at his house and he was cleaning the guns and I was sorta helping. He picked up one of the hand guns and held it to my head and asked me, “Do you deserve to live?”
I don’t want to be asked that right now.
I don’t actually know specifically what I want to be asked. This week has had some massively hard bumps and despite the fact that I am doing really well at my job right now I am very much feeling like a waste of oxygen. I would like for a question to exist that would lead me to believe I have some worth. But I don’t know that such a question exists.
I was asked why I have chosen to be so open about my sex life.
It’s complicated. See, I grew up in a family where sex and discussions of sex were extraordinarily common and yet we were supposed to be ashamed of it. Sex was introduced to me at a ridiculously young age and I have been preoccupied with it for most of my life. When I was a teenager I was really into it, but I was called names and told I was bad and shamed for it. I always thought that was wrong. Why were people so upset that I was having sex? It didn’t make sense. Then when I had the first of a series of break downs I realized that I couldn’t keep secrets anymore. I don’t do anything that I am ashamed of, so why should I hide it?
I have also gotten to the point where my being out is a matter of principle and example. Me being this out lets other people see that their interests/activities aren’t anything to be shamed of. It’s a big deal to me. I didn’t originally set out to be a poster child, it just kinda happened. But it works and I’m happy with it.
I was looking at my numbers. I realistically have 105 juniors. There are 5 more who are technically enrolled, but I never see them so I don’t feel like they count for my purposes. 40 of them showed up on Saturday for help on the paper. A slightly overlapping but not entirely similar group of 17 kids turned in the paper early. That’s really good. Effectively, almost 40% of my juniors are willing to come in on Saturday for help. That’s huge. And it was almost fun. 🙂 But I refuse to call it fun cause dude–that’s my Saturday.
More than one kid expressed hope that I will do this again with other big assignments. Holy crap. They want to give up weekend time to get help?!!
Now I have seen : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYhlm9GTAQ0&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eyesbutnobutyes%2Ecom%2Farchives%2F2007%2F02%2Flunch%5Fhour%5Fveg%5F104%2Ehtml and thank you so much for sharing it. I am very happy.
I was also asked where I would like to travel outside the country next. Hmmmm…. In my ideal world probably Italy or Germany. Noah is more inclined towards Asia though, so we’ll see. 🙂
To entertain me while kidlets are writing.
“Ok, what would be hardest to live without, what would would be easiest. The choices are clothes, sex, chocolate, books and your car. Please list them in order of hardest to easiest, and any additional commetary you wish to make is up to you.”
and “What are the 5 most important qualities I think a parent should have?”
Hardest to easiest: sex, clothes, books, car, chocolate. I don’t even like chocolate, that wasn’t a competition. Yeah, I’m not giving up sex buddy. HELL no. But I’m shy. 😀
I think parents should be patient, positive (in the encouraging kind of way), good listeners, stamina (kids are exhausting), and most importantly–parents need to be able to have good boundaries. So they can model them and so they can survive the little twerps.
Last year a tradition was started by a few really neato people. I’m going to copy it.
March is question month. You can ask any question. It can be as personal or non-personal as you want and I am screening the questions. I will also let you ask anonymously if you want.
I wonder if I will actually get any. 🙂
The computer tech guy sent me a link this morning: http://nerdyshirts.com/browse.aspx?catid=100367
He said he thought of me as he browsed. 😀
24 parents called today in preparation for Saturday’s essay writing bonanza. Time to go home.
Today is a poster day. It has been chaos and silliness all day. Some of the things heard:
“Oh yeah! I’ll make you wear orange. You totally look good in orange.” – from one butch boy to another butch boy.
“Oh yeah… this is my FAVORITE marker!!” – said by a boy who was sniffing a whole series of markers and now has smears all over his nose.
And I was asked, “Is it illegal to have orgasms in class?”
And, “Do you do ecstasy?” to which I said, “Oh yeah, every weekend.” Then I walked away. The kids didn’t know what to think.
And the kids are planning to bring me food for our study session on Saturday. 😀
I’m wandering in circles mentally wondering why, why, why am I so crazy.
Well, maybe it’s time to actually talk about him.
Some days I get it into my head that I am not good enough. When I do this I latch onto something as an example to prove that I am not good enough. This time it’s related to sex. I’ve taken way too much pride over the years in the fact that I am generally considered to be very good at sex. I have gone out and deliberately learned how to be better.
But I’m not the best at everything. And sometimes knowing that hurts. Sometimes knowing that means that I hate the people who are better. Especially when they are people I know, people I am jealous of anyway.
I know I need to grow up, but this one sucks.
And in the process of being stupid and immature I hurt Noah. I wish I could be all that he deserves.
One of my babies passed a note under the door to a neighboring class yesterday with the word, “faggot” on it while I was absent. The teacher was very upset and the grapevine let me know this morning.
When this period started I was not my usual cheerful, enthusiastic self (despite my journal’s appearance I am normally incredibly upbeat at work). Instead I had everyone sit down and I told them that I had heard about the note and I am very upset. I said I was about to tell them more about me than I think they usually need to know, but in this case it seems very relevant.
I told them that I have dated girls very seriously. I told them that I have been active in gay rights movements since my early teenage years. I told them that many, if not most, of my friends are gay. I told them that their inadvertant behavior can be very hurtful and mean. I told them that I spend a lot of time bragging about my wonderful kids and telling lots of people how proud I am of them, and I am really hurt that I can’t do that right now.
I told them that basic human respect is something that everyone deserves. That picking on someone for their sexual orientation is just as horrible as picking on someone for their race, or religion, or gender. It’s just wrong no matter how you slice it.
I told them that I know they are teenagers and therefor very self-centered and that it is ok to be self-centered most of the time–it’s the age they are and that’s fine. But they need to start thinking past themselves and recognizing the far reaching effects their actions have. It’s also ok to make mistakes sometimes and say something rude or hurtful on accident–everyone does. What makes them the good and wonderful people that I am so proud of is the ability to recognize when you mess up and apologize for it and try not to do it again.
I also told them that the class next door where the note was sent is a freshman class. My kids are juniors and they are very much examples of behavior for the younger kids. I explained that if my juniors show intolerance as being acceptable that the younger kids will be just a little bit further towards being uncaring of the people around them.
The boy who wrote the note is visibly upset and writing an apology letter. He will be reading the apology letter to the class next door at the end of the period. He almost cried when he told me he was sorry for letting me down. He’s really not a bad kid and I assured him that I won’t like him any less for this and I won’t be mean. But I do need him to show that he understands what the grown up thing to do is. And he’s doing it, with a little encouragement of course… but lots of teenagers refuse. And the letter he is writing is very thoughtful and considerate and sweet. I’m proud of him.
My fun day at home wasn’t so fun by the end. By early afternoon my head hurt, my neck hurt, and if I move around my stomach let me know that a run to the bathroom was imminent. And, whatever was in my system was letting me know that it wanted out of my system anyway with a lot of pain involved.
Well that rocked. Or something. I slept through most of the afternoon and still went to bed early. I woke up at 3 am and rolled over and noticed that my stomach still hurt enough that even minimal movement is agonizing. So I called in sick to work and Noah drove me down there to deliver lesson plans. Have I mentioned that I love my husband?
When I’m sick I am even more whiney and babyish than usual. So when I got an email from a girl I sorta know this morning asking for references for Tom I nearly cried. I told her that yes, he is very safe and will almost certainly never cross any boundary she has and let it go at that. I didn’t tell her that he is a great casual play partner and a difficult boyfriend. I didn’t tell her that she should stay emotionally uninvolved so that she can walk away when she stops being “new” because his interest will gradually fade anyway. *sigh*
And right now I am feeling the disadvantages of being poly/open/slutty. I’m tired of telling people I am not interested. I want a break from having to deal with being nice in letting people down gently. I always feel guilty and I want to not have that feeling for a while. I’m tired of having to give justification for why I don’t want to play/fuck/date/whatever. Once or twice I’ve said, “Right now I’m just so into my husband that I’m not interested in anyone else” and people follow that up with, “Well, when then?” Excuse me? You just put yourself on the “never” list.
I’ll quite bitching now. I hate being sick.
I am in my house… alone. I am almost never alone in my house. Noah is being a geek and took our house guest with him. Which means they took the car. Which means I am alone in my house and I am stuck here.
This is so cool. 🙂
I don’t entirely agree but this is not that far from why I believe in homeschooling. Mostly I think the author is a bit rabid, but generally right. It’s all complicated.
And yeah, I keep my mouth shut about Libertarianism.
Three years ago today my favorite dance partner, terpsichoros took me to my first DHP. I went because I heard it was wild and exciting. There was also this other boy going and I wanted to flirt with him a lot. Tom and I had very tentatively opened our relationship in December though sex wasn’t permitted with anyone until January. I was on a mad hunt for new people because the near celibacy of the previous year and some were just too much for me. At this DHP I ended up sandwiched between the boy I was crushing on and the strange host of the party. I never did figure out what made him go for me so hard that night.
I went out on first dates with the host of that party and the boy I was crushing on within a week. 🙂 The other boy was an intermittent part of my life for about a year in a very casual way. But uhm… the host, that would be Noah, didn’t end up being casual. At that time he had a primary and I had a primary and I had a lot of rules governing how much contact I got to have without outside people and there were time restrictions on how quickly anything could happen. Which means that on my first date (2/26) with Noah I told him that there would be no sex. Given what a pushy tramp he is he still was very pushy and forward sexually and that pushiness very nearly made it so that he didn’t get a second date. But I spent time with him, often going to the gym with him, and talking over the next few weeks. About a month later we finally had sex and it was ok. 🙂
We got closer and more emotionally intimate. He became the first and only person to ever ask me, “What happened to you?” He is still the only person to ever care that way for me. He wants to see me. We dated until late November. During this period I was the one insisting that I was still just a secondary. He was very enamored of the idea of my being a co-primary with the other girl he was involved with. I had the sneaky suspicion this wasn’t actually ok with her at all and later it was discovered that I was basically right. I broke up with him because I would not be “co-primary” and I didn’t want to come second behind her. I wanted to be the Most Important Person to someone and as long as I was so obsessed with Noah and enraptured with him I couldn’t look for that. It never entered into my head to ask him to change the nature of his relationship with the other girl. That would not have been ok in my head.
So I dumped him, hard. It wasn’t pretty for either of us. It didn’t take long (maybe a month or so) and even though I was pretty certain that a Relationship wouldn’t work I just couldn’t stay out of his bed. Ok, maybe the sex was better than ok. 🙂 But I tried to keep distance there. Then I made a nine month mistake commonly referred to by short hand as “Puppy.” During that period I managed to stay out of Noah’s bed through sheer force of will and desperation to find something that might work somewhere else. Noah was still very much my best friend. His relationship with the other girl went away with much drama. He dated other people, some for short periods some for longer. He started dating a very nice, gentle girl while I was early on in my mistake. I thought he was happy. I was trying so hard to be happy.
Then, by a year after breaking up with him, I was single again and stopping to look at my life and what I wanted. I was still spending time with my wonderful best friend. I was still pretty completely obsessed with him. I dreamed about him. I thought about him all the time. I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to ruin his happy relationship with the new girl, I had broken up with him and I didn’t deserve him anymore. Though I did have active plans to ask him to knock me up when I was 26/27 because I couldn’t imagine a better co-parent.
But in March, two days before the second anniversary of the first time we had sex, he came over to have dinner and hang out. We did that often without it turning into anything other than friendship. This time he told me that he wanted me more than anything, that he wanted to marry me and spend forever with me, and even though he believed I would say no–he had to ask or he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself. I sat there in stunned shock for a couple minutes trying to find words. He believed this meant I was trying to figure out how to break it to him gently that I didn’t want him and started stammering out how he knows it won’t work and I don’t want him and… I told him to shut up and launched myself at him and told him yes. Yes, I would marry him. Yes, I want him. We did kiss, but very specifically on both our parts we kept all clothing on. He uhhh was still with the other girl. We talked about how much it was going to hurt her and I was very sad there was no way that I could see for all of us to be happy. I wasn’t going to give up on him again though, not for anything.
He broke up with her. It was uncomfortable and hard. I really have nothing negative to say about how she responded at all–there would have been no better way for her to be. Noah and I started trying to figure out how we fit together without any one else being between us. It was actually a slow warm up. Even though we were sort of technically engaged already we tried to not be instantly together all the time or enmeshed. We only saw one another a couple times a week for a few months. We didn’t advertise how seriously we were taking the relationship for a while. I told him that it was important to me that he not just be exchanging one full time girl for another full time girl. We had to be seperate for a while before we could be together. That sort of worked. The warm up was slow-ish (I’m honest) and good. We started making plans for the future.
One thing we talked about a lot was selling this house and renting for a while so that we could build up a more significant deposit on a better house. Eventually this plan was vetoed for a variety of reasons, but not before his then housemate moved out. It was June by then (whoo hoo, three whole months later) and I was experiencing plagues and pestilence in my apartment. (The flooding from the upstairs toilet and the bug infestations were just Not Funny.) Given that he needed to have some help with his mortgage it looked like he might have to get a new housemate. But… my apartment was sucking… So given that I would be moving in sometime in the near future anyway I just moved in then. Then I ran off to the east coast on vacation and started proceedings for the gorgeous ring that is mine.
We spent the summer trying to figure out how/if poly was going to work for us. Yeah, most of what we figured out is that poly is a fucking headache. We were also talking about the ominous cloud of wedding planning hanging over our heads. Then I got sick. And people were sweet and wonderful and tried to be helpful in convincing me that going to a doctor would be a good idea. In this process they told me that some of my symptoms could potentially indicate a very serious illness that could kill me. While in the midst of freaking out at the idea that I could die I looked over at Noah one night before going to bed and said, “If it turns out I am dying, can we go get married this weekend so that at least I get to be married to you before that happens?” He agreed. So I went to the doctor–uhm yeah… not dying. I’ll be fine. Well don’t I feel silly. So I came home all sheepish and told Noah that I wasn’t dying. He was happy about this. I sat there and fussed and dawdled as I worked my way up to saying, “So uhm, would you be interested in getting married this weekend anyway?”
This was on Thursday before Labor Day weekend. We found a lovely B&B up in Tahoe, booked a room for the weekend and drove up on Friday. We bought a pretty dress and lovely gold rings on the way (my “real” ring still hadn’t arrived). We had a lovely night enjoying our last night of sin before we became all legally sanctioned. The wedding was small (us and the minister) and quick. We said our own vows and I had moments of terror–oh god, what if I am FUCKING UP?!!!! But I stomped that voice out ruthlessly. We went back to the B&B and had a lovely dinner and enjoyed our wedding pint of Haggen Das vanilla ice cream–it’s all about priorities. 🙂 We drank port and enjoyed one another very much.
By late September neither of us were dating anyone else. The poly headache just kind of… was shelved. We fell more and more deeply into enjoying one another and figuring out the rocky bits of how to deal with one another (I may be harder than average to handle, but Noah has his moments too). Meeting his family over Thanksgiving was an experience I will never forget, or need to repeat.
We had a lovely fun Christmas season with some really hot people, but have been really cheerfully monogamous for the past couple months. Given that breeding is in the pretty near future it looks like monogamy will continue to be the mode for the forseeable future. Yeah, we are crazy enough to want to breed and to do it soon.
Do I know this relationship will work out? No. I’m really hoping. I believe that a lot of what makes relationships work is wanting to make them work and I think we both have a very high level of investment in making this work. I love him. I like him. I think this has at least as much potential as any other relationship and more than a good many. So I’m hoping.
Thank you terpsichoros. I owe you more than I can ever repay. You gave me dancing, which I love, and you introduced me to my future. Did you have any idea what you were doing? 🙂
aberrantvirtue we have that wireless router you said you wanted, but we haven’t seen you. We also have an American Gift Giving Holiday present for you. I would like to get this stuff delivered very soonish. When?
cyclothemia we have weird stuff from Japan for you. When can this be exchanged? Maybe Thursday at PE?
labelleizzy we have a Christmas present for you. When can this be passed along?
rose42dance we have an American Gift Giving Holiday pressie for you. Must be exchanged. When?
mzmtnlion have two pressies. Must give. When?
teamnoir have pressie. Must give. When?
loren_q see above.
i_am_dsh see above.
flyinamazon see above. 🙂
blackrose900 have shirt that will likely fit you. Is Gorgeous. Will I ever see you again?
Alright! Let the pinging begin…