Bah Humbug

December has been stuffed full of lots of ugly weather and work work work. I thought I was looking forward to the holidays but that was until I didn't get to my shopping until the last minute and couldn't get my niece to reply to my emails and put off dealing with a thorny family issue with my brother-in-law and then never had him call me back.

It seems my mother gave my sister Jane a baby silverware set to pass on to her children and children's children but when Jane died, it got lost in the shuffle and Mom found it abandoned and the fork and spoon missing in Bob's garage over Thanksgiving. Now, of course, my mother could not say anything to Bob about about it; she's too passive-aggressive for that. But she could bitch at me about it and make me feel bad enough to say something to Bob about it.

But, of course, I hate these kinds of things... I mean, really hate them. So I put off saying anything until trying to call Bob last night. And--of course!!--Bob doesn't call me back. So now what? Mom's still pissed, Bob may or may not know I want to talk to him about something, and I am pissed at Maddie and him for not responding to me at all.

We have been drifting apart for awhile. There's no denying that. My parents have never been particularly demonstrative and they have managed to pass that on to us... Karen and I and probably even Jerald and Jane, although theirs was tempered by Bob's family and by Addie's family, both of which are much more gregarious, if fruitier than ours... (I don't know, they probably think we're pretty fruity!)

So I didn't sleep well last night after crying myself to sleep because I was sad and lonely and wishing there was someone around to hold me, I woke up at 5 am and hurt all over from the ends of my greasy hair through the muscles in my back and down to my stiff ankles and aching toenails, and I thought that I'd just call everyone and tell them I'd been barfing all night and couldn't come over. Not go to Mom and Dad's and not go over to Bob and Marie's.

I certainly feel like I have the flu; my stomach is even queasy--just not THAT queasy!

And I just want to cry some more. Bah humbug. Pinky

PS: Figured out why I feel like shit and hurt so bad... forgot to take any of my pills last night, including three different painkillers, two sleep aids, and an antidepressant. Doubt the two different cholesterol medicines had much effect but the acid reflux medicine might explain the stomach issues. The antidepressant is one of those that takes awhile to interact so one missed dose isn't going to send me into a dive; I was already there and cleverly masking it as I usually do. Denial is a way of life when the things you deny are unhappiness, loneliness, depression, pain, dissatisfaction, etc. etc. Just put on that happy face and keep smiling and no one will ever know how you really feel because no one will ever think to ask... no one will ever care enough to ask...

Photos-Holiday Dresses

There seems to be any number of Christmas pictures of my siblings and I so I thought I'd start with a couple here for the beginning of December.

My mom told me that she found the dress for Jane and then my grandmother (her mother) found the one for me at a different store and they were a perfect match...

...and here I am looking too cute for words.

I distinctly remember wearing this dress and Jane wearing hers and going over to my Uncle Jerry's house for a Christmas get-together, of which there were additional pictures in my grandmother's slides.

The slides were dated January 1964 which would have made me almost two and a half years old when this picture was taken.

I'd say that was a very early memory... Pinky

Photo-Me & my Dad

Here is a picture of my father and I. I am unsure of whether the picture was taken at my grandparents' house in Amherst or at my parents' house in Wooster. The picture was with my grandmother's slides so it's likely at my grandparents' house.

I had never seen a picture of myself as an infant. The story went that my parents didn't have enough money when I was born to be able to afford baby pictures but that my grandmother likely had pictures in the form of slides. So this summer, I broke down and purchased a $700 negative/slide scanner and began going through my grandmother's hundreds of slides.

And, lo and behold, look who I found! Me!

You may notice that I appear to be sucking not my thumb but my middle two fingers. This is something I remember doing up until I was about four (maybe a little older.) Like biting my fingernails and chewing my hair, I just eventually stopped doing it. But I think it's funny that I obviously did it from the time I was very small.

Who da thunk it? Pinky wonders...

(I'm going to try to keep my entries short because I know how I tend to skip super long ones...)

Flaming

I flamed someone today.

And I'm not particularly proud of it.

The worse part about it is that I did it on someone else's blog where I shouldn't have. And I'm very sorry about that.

Everyone has people who rub them the wrong way and this woman just seems to do it for me.

(Come to think of it, I have been running into more of them as I get older... I wonder why that is. Is it that I do not suffer fools as easily as I used to or that I'm just becoming more of the misanthrope I was born to be?)
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I will fully admit that my family is basically lower class. My dad was a construction laborer and my mom trained as a beautician but never worked at it after she got married, she was a stay-at-home mom. All four of us kids went to college but neither of them did. My mother's father was a farmer and a machinist and my dad's dad was a tug boat captain, a tattoo artist, a reformed alcoholic and a gambler. Can you say white trash?

We lived in a small town and didn't have a lot of things other kids had because my parents didn't believe in credit cards. We never got an allowance and we started working at things like paper routes and baby sitting as soon as we hit about 11 or 12 for our own money. We got by but always I knew there were others that had it better, had more, and I wanted that too.

I was jealous of my cousins whose dad worked at the college and who got to do things there. My one cousin who was my age got to be in plays there and became a Singing Angel. (Considering I can't carry a tune in a bucket, that shouldn't have made me jealous but it was the opportunity I guess.)

And I knew that there were things I didn't understand because of my disability and still don't understand--like philosophy and some poetry and even some fiction. I could probably read Camus' The Stranger 18 times and still not get it. I just reread a short story by James Joyce posted on a friend's website and didn't get it. Comprehension is still a problem.
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Why did I just go into all that?

Because it all leads into why I flamed this woman.

You see, I knew who she was. I knew that she is a retired Spanish professor and that she comes from a scholarly family and that her husband was a chair at Oberlin and her children went to prestigious schools and that she can be quite arrogant about her background. I believe the word I used when I apologized to my friend whose blog it was is sanctimonious.

Basically, to me it appears as if she has/had all the advantages I never did... or her kids did. And she treated me as though I was as dumb as a box of rocks. I was thrown back into being that poor white trash kid who couldn't read and didn't understand and would spend the rest of her life working retail. (Maybe I collect books to prove to myself I'm not dumb any more.)

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I had written a comment about a short piece by Eliot about a man who was embarrassed by a woman he was with who was laughing too loud. The piece was called Hysteria. My comment which was prompted by the book I had just read that had the lamentable title of Scandalous Lovers but was actually a really excellent historical novel set in 1880's England talked about the lunacy laws at the time where men could put their womenfolk in an asylum for things like hysteria (I was thinking of laughing hysterically in this case) and the women could never get out--end of story.

Now our esteemed Spanish prof (with whom I have had both bad and good experiences while at work at the college) corrected me rather pedantically that hysteria comes from the womb--don't you know hysterectomy? Ah-duh! Yes, I know that. It was given an essentially female name but today the word doesn't apply just to women and disorders of the womb as it didn't back then.

There had earlier been discussions about how people will understand what you write and maybe this was just such a case. But she had gone from being coy in a comment before to being snotty here and I'd had enough. I'd come really close to true flaming before with her but this time I just let it rip.

Maybe I should have overlooked it because I know she is old. We had this discussion about my brother-in-law's mother this past weekend but my brother-in-law's new wife who is a lawyer put it rather succinctly: she's an adult, she should know better.

And so should I.

So Pinky is sorry for that, at least... I admit when I've screwed up...

Photo-Jane and Jer and I

Here is a photo from about mid-1967. The baby is my brother Jerald and the girl holding the baby is my older sister Jane. I am the one on the left. The white thing around my neck is a diaper that has been converted into a sling for my broken left arm.

My sister Karen and I had been over at the neighbor girl's house playing the Three Stooges on the top of her picnic table and I fell off, hitting my arm on a pine tree root, breaking the outside forearm bone near the wrist.

At the time my mother was in Amherst Hospital having her severely diseased gallbladder removed and my dad made the mistake of telling me that she was just down the hall when he took me to the hospital for X-rays. Of course, I wanted to go see her and wasn't allowed. I do recall going to stand outside the hospital and waving to her from the sidewalk while she looked out the window. Vastly different from today.

So Pinky says...

Photo

I'm going to try to post at least a couple photos a week. Some will be of me and some will be of places I've been or the like. I have a negative and slide scanner and I'd like to put it to good use. I have old negatives from my England trip as well as photos from college and farther back that I'd like to scan on the regular scanner and put into the record as well, before they are lost to time.

This is a photo of an Olan Mills picture my mom has in the upstairs hallway of their house. I remember these dresses. In the picture to the left Jane is wearing one just like it which she would grow out of and I would grow into.

Friendship

I don't think I make a very good friend. In fact I think I make a pretty horrible one.

But then I don't think I ever learned how to be one. I learned how to be a sister and that was about it and a sister doesn't necessarily need to be a friend; she just has to be a sister because that's a relationship that's not going to go away. (Though I have heard and seen ones that have and it boggles my mind.)

I just today send a long email to a woman I consider a friend, apologizing for getting nasty with her. (I am also sort of her supervisor at work but she only works in the evenings and I am only there one night a week so we only ever really work together 4 hours a week. I am the only full-time person so I am the titular "supervisor" although everyone does what they are assigned to do.) I asked her to do some data entry for me and, because of the new store configuration, I could hear that she was chatting with an off-work employee rather than working, and I came out, mad as hell and sarcastic, saying it would be nice if she could yak and work at the same time.

Now maybe that's not what she was pissed off at me about and maybe she wasn't pissed off at me at all--I'm really good at reading into situations things that aren't going on at all, it's what makes me a good writer but a lousy interpersonal communicator.

So who knows? But this isn't the first time I've been short with her or with other people and it's not the first time I've had to apologize.

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The older I get the more I think I was simply born a misanthrope. Maybe the career testing I took when I first got to college was right, maybe I would have done better as a fire spotter for the forest service, living in a remote tree house, searching the skyline of mountain peaks for plumes of smoke--all by myself!

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I don't think I really had a close girl friend until I was in junior high. You know someone you passed notes to and shared secrets with and talked about boys with. I was in seventh heaven that this girl was my friend. My older sister has a best friend and they did all kinds of things together and I thought that this was how Ruth and I would be.

But things fell apart at some point. I didn't want to smoke and I didn't want to defy my parents and go out with her and the guys she hung out with. So she "dumped" me and I was as heartbroken as if we had been lovers.

I had always considered myself unlovable as a person--family didn't count, I somehow knew in my heart that they had to love you, at least that's the way it was in my family--and so this just reinforced my lack of self-esteem even more.

This came along at about the same time as all the other issues that coalesced into what I'm now calling my nervous breakdown. Another brick added to the wall that eventually crumbled down and buried me. (Sorry, Pink Floyd, but I borrowed your metaphor.)

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I got through high school without any close girl friends, knowing that I would get out of that place of torture and go onto someplace far away where I could reinvent myself. And I did.

At Dayton, I made friends and had close girl friends and housemates that I still talk to occasionally. But I also had another spectacular girlfriend break-up.

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(Please note that none of these were ever sexual in nature. I'm way too rabid for a cock to care at all about getting into a cunt! But I firmly believe that you can love someone of your own sex as strongly as you can love someone of the opposite sex without sexual love being involved. Sometimes I wish I could have that kind of love with someone of the opposite sex without a cock getting in the way but that's a subject for another blog!)

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Sue wasn't my roommate to start with freshman year but we became fast friends toward the end of first semester and definitely into second semester. She was very charismatic and I think her original roommate hated her friendship with me because I was taking her place in Sue's affections. We went home for the summer planning to live with different roommates sophomore year but right next door to one another in the dorm. And we wrote each other back and forth twice a week it seemed (this was back when snail mail was the only way we had to communicate.) Her old roommate was moving to TX to live with her fiance.

Over the summer Sue worked for Kodak (she was from Rochester NY, the home of Eastman Kodak) and met an older guy. When she came back to school, she discovered that this guy was a nut case and he began a campaign to try to get her to come back home by threatening to commit suicide.

At some point, her roommate and I switched rooms so I was living with her and things just kept going down hill. He called the suicide line to say that she was going to commit suicide and we had everyone under the sun all over our room. She drank too much one night (and we smoked some pot) and I had to take her to the emergency room because it looked as if she was vomiting blood when it was really only sloe gin, and I had to pretend I wasn't drunk off my ass and stoned out of my mind and talk coherent to the dean of students.

It was a total screwed up mess. She was and I was and this guy was.

She finally ditches him and things settle down a little. We finished up the semester and went home for Christmas. When we came back, Sue told me that she met this other guy at a bar over Xmas that she really liked. I'm a little surprised but I say, what the heck, she's in Dayton OH and he's in Rochester NY and as long as no one is calling suicide lines, I'm cool.

And things would have been cool, except that she wanted him to come down for a Valentine's dance in February and she wanted to rent a car, she wanted me to rent a car. (Because I want to win friends, I can be talked into just about anything.) So I rent a car. She asks me if I won't also sleep on the floor of one of the other girl's room so she and her guy can have our dorm room to themselves. Sure, okay, it's an adventure, I say.

That is until I am driving us all back from having pizza the day after the dance and total the rental car by running up the back end of a city bus. City bus 1-rental car 0.

I have a broken leg. The girl in the front seat, Cheryl, has a broken wrist. Sue and Al have scraped up shins but are unhurt. I have to call the rental company about the car and call my parents and tell them what happened. (My mother had told me not to rent the car!)

And all I wanted to do was sleep in my own bed.

I told Sue this and she went ballistic. She lost it. You would have thought I had betrayed her in the worst way. She vowed she would never speak to me again.

And she didn't.

We lived together in the same room from the middle of February until the end of April and barely said two words to each other. I felt as if someone had struck me through with a sword or a lance and I didn't yet have the sense to fall over dead.

I told her that I thought it was too soon after the break-up and turmoil with the other guy to fall for this one and that I was just thinking of her but she told me I was meddling in her life and to mind my own business and she didn't need someone in her life that was trying to lead it for her. So she vacated my life, figuratively if not literally.

I saw her once after that. She came back to Dayton for her first roommate's wedding. Joan and I had gone on to become good friends, roomed together in the house we lived in off campus junior year and pledged a sorority together. We weren't terribly close but then I wasn't terribly close with anyone after that.

When I saw Sue and Al at Joan's wedding, we said hi basically and avoided one another. As far as I know they are still married but I could be wrong. As far as I know they has two sons but that was a long time ago. She wanted to be a special ed teacher. I wonder if she ever did it.

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Since then, I've had women friends, some closer than others. One I've had a very long time and only recently have seemed to had some sort of falling out. I'm not sure what exactly that was about really. We've known each other for over 20 years and have been through some good times and bad on both our parts so I'm sure that each of us can reach the other.

I have made several old friends as well, my parents' age, who have moved away and that I wish were closer.

And then there are my work friends like the one I first mentioned--people I started out working with but who have definitely become more than co-workers.

I have always felt that part of friendship has been doing things. I'm a worker bee, not a socializer.

I would rather help someone do something than sit around and chat on the phone. I don't mind talking so maybe what I need is a bluetooth headset so I can talk and do at the same time. But I also don't talk a lot of the phone (or call people) because I feel like I'm taking up their time. Surely they have more important things to do than talk to me and I always feel unaccountably (and unjustifiably) hurt when a phone call gets cut short because it's just reinforcing that notion that I'm not worth talking to.

(Do I need a therapist or what?) ;)

But anyway, this is my story of my friendships such as it is. Sad really, but I guess the point of remembering is to learn from your past mistakes, right?

That's what Pinky thinks...