Ineffective Teeth, Bared
29/12/05 00:54![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eredienIt was going along okay, I suppose, except for the crying jag at Christmas Eve services, until today.
I rescheduled today's events two days ago so that I spent the entire afternoon yesterday with my mother, but apparently watching Memoirs of a Geisha with her was not enough togetherness; she was complaining about it over dinner this evening.
I'd spent the afternoon with a cousin. It had taken much longer than I'd thought to have lunch with her, but I was content, having enjoyed myself--I came home, and in an effort to make my parent's lives easier and my own packing later on in the evening go faster, chopped veggies for tacos and basically made the entire dinner, including mince pie.
They said, "it's nice that you spent time with your cousin"--here it comes, I thought, the disapproval of any and everything--"but you have to go pack now."
Before I packed I wanted to go upstairs to my storage unit, you see, and inventory furniture I had there. Nothing else. Just furniture, so that when a potential roommate asked me, "what do you have to bring?" I could rattle it off.
Given the fact that I'd spent an entire day last year organizing my things in an accessible manner in a small unit, I expected things to be where they left them.
Silly me.
My sister--or perhaps my father, no one wants to take responsibility or blame--at some point moved all of the things I'd carefully set aside as "things I need to take when I move" out of that unit into a much larger unit, which it shared with:
- My old childhood toys
- My mother's old dolls
- Boxes of freebies for my mother's workplace
- My sister's old childhood toys
- The random crap from someone else's storage unit--they'd stopped paying us, so we're legally obligated to get rid of their stuff, and sometimes we do that by keeping it--which my father thought was mine.
So, what should have been a fifteen-minute exercise was instead a two-hour ordeal in the freezing cold warehouse, as I moved boxes back into the hallway and then moved them to a new unit and had to look inside every single one because I could no longer be sure what was my stuff and what was someone else's.
What were the results of this fun little jaunt?
- My father and I got into a fight. It turns out that in the confusion between my stuff and the random crap person's stuff, my father mistook my good brand-new china set which I'd bought with my own money this past year for the random person's, and brought it inside and the family started using it. My mother asked him numerous times to check with me, but did he? No. Then he got mad at me for being mad at him. "I'll get you a new set," he said. "That's nice," I said, "but I paid for this one. I wanted this one. I bought the glasses and silverware to match this one. And you can't get this pattern anymore because the company went out of business." I'm not mad at him for making the mistake, as he believes I am. I'm mad at him for not asking me, and I'm really mad at him for telling me, "I did everything for you girls, and now you're going to blame me for this?" First, he did not. Second, what does that have to do with it?!?
(I have the type of mind that remembers what things are by where they are. This means that if people move things on me--an extra comforter, a box of books, a beloved poster--I won't ever remember that it went missing in the first place because of the change in spatial configuration. (This is why I can't use the medieval idea of the memory cathedral; the inside of the building won't stay put.))
- No one has any idea where the third box of extra childhood books went. "They're around somewhere," says my mother, but the basement is a firetrap. Everything moves around too much and no one gets told anything, so the following books are missing, among others:
1.) The gorgeous chartreuse and black-and-white 1950's-style picturebook about the little girl getting fitted for her first communion dress, which was so weird it warped me for life.
2.) The moving popup books which featured not only the most elaborate moving popups I've ever seen, but also gorgeous artwork of garden animals.
3.) My entire set of original Peanuts comics from the 1950's. I really liked reading the compilations, but I guess I won't anymore.
- It doesn't even help to filch things I want and keep them in my room, since those all get moved around too. The things that got moved around this time?
1.) My mugs were boxed up and put into storage without my consent. This wouldn't be so bad if I'd known about it, or if they were in bubble wrap, or weren't being subjected to -15 degree temperatures at night.
2.) Someone put a very heavy wooden stool and a sculpture and a box on top of the very fragile bamboo Burmese dragon kite I bought at Disneyworld. It looks like it's not broken; I didn't have the heart to check too thoroughly.
3.) I found that four milk crates of books, several years' worth of Cricket magazine, my copy of the magazine my first published poem was in, photo albums, gorgeous coffee-table art books, and signed books--crates which I had specifically moved to my room before I left, or moved away from the eaves so that they would stop collecting dampness and possible mildew had been moved back in the -15 degree room under the eaves again! The responses? Mother: "cold doesn't hurt the bindings!" Father: "they weren't getting mildew!"
3.) My taiaha and my naginata, which were last seen in an unobtrusive corner of my room, were just kind of sitting there in the dust and cold weather. Me to my father, tightly so I won't explode: "This needs to go inside." Him: "It's just wood, it can stay out here." Me: "No, it really can't. The bamboo expands and contracts with the cold and if it does that too much it'll split. And if this breaks I have no way to ever get another one." My father: "Okay, put it over there." Forty-five minutes later, when I carry it in the house, my father: "let me carry it. You're not doing it right." Me: "This is the right way to do it, actually." Mother, squealing: "Watch the light fixture!" Me: "Mom, I'm fine!" Mom: "Why do you want it inside anyway? It'll be fine outside!" Too tired to go into it again, I think, "I hope it'll be ok when I wrap it again in the spring," and wish I could muster the energy to curse.
While I was out, my mother also unwrapped the plastic on the brand-new backgammon set she ostensibly bought me as a present and started to play.
I have not done any wrting yet, which makes me sad, though I have caught up on administrative things like emailing editors.
Plus sides to the vacation so far?
- I found a copy of my thesis for midnight_phonenix to read.
- I found an essay which I think might be reworkable eventually for Cabinet des Fees.
- I found--after a mere hour or so of searching--the hideous thing I wrote in junior highschool after reading my first Dunsany, which I needed as source material for the Fay Novel. It may or may not be posted here eventually; I have brought it back for the housemates.
- I got Tales Before Tolkien in softcover.
- I had a lovely long talk with my pastor, who finally got his first tattoo and also got a new piercing, and gave me some ideas about depression, and expressed symphathy in the following manner when I complained about work that starved my soul: "It's hard, but you'll eventually find something. At least you're not satisfied with a boring job; that'd be worse. You weren't raised that way. At least, I didn't raise you that way."
- I had a good talk with lotusblosm and A., although didn't get to spend long enough with either.
- Tomorrow--okay, today--I will be leaving to visit with friends for the entire rest of the vacation.
I still feel defeated, though. Every time I think, "soon I will be able to move out and take the books with me," I realize I still will have to sort through 50 years' worth of kipple in the basement when they die--beautiful things collecting dust unused in boxes, or crap which they just can't be bothered to sell.
I'm so sick of their lives being so filled with crap. They can't display it; they can't take care of it; they can't muster the energy to get rid of it; they can't find the time or tools or money to fix it. In a few cases they don't even know they own it. Crap fills the basement and the warehouse and the backyard, a slow organic thing being shifted from one place to another. My own few precious things are broken, forgotten: skin horses, once important to someone.
I rescheduled today's events two days ago so that I spent the entire afternoon yesterday with my mother, but apparently watching Memoirs of a Geisha with her was not enough togetherness; she was complaining about it over dinner this evening.
I'd spent the afternoon with a cousin. It had taken much longer than I'd thought to have lunch with her, but I was content, having enjoyed myself--I came home, and in an effort to make my parent's lives easier and my own packing later on in the evening go faster, chopped veggies for tacos and basically made the entire dinner, including mince pie.
They said, "it's nice that you spent time with your cousin"--here it comes, I thought, the disapproval of any and everything--"but you have to go pack now."
Before I packed I wanted to go upstairs to my storage unit, you see, and inventory furniture I had there. Nothing else. Just furniture, so that when a potential roommate asked me, "what do you have to bring?" I could rattle it off.
Given the fact that I'd spent an entire day last year organizing my things in an accessible manner in a small unit, I expected things to be where they left them.
Silly me.
My sister--or perhaps my father, no one wants to take responsibility or blame--at some point moved all of the things I'd carefully set aside as "things I need to take when I move" out of that unit into a much larger unit, which it shared with:
- My old childhood toys
- My mother's old dolls
- Boxes of freebies for my mother's workplace
- My sister's old childhood toys
- The random crap from someone else's storage unit--they'd stopped paying us, so we're legally obligated to get rid of their stuff, and sometimes we do that by keeping it--which my father thought was mine.
So, what should have been a fifteen-minute exercise was instead a two-hour ordeal in the freezing cold warehouse, as I moved boxes back into the hallway and then moved them to a new unit and had to look inside every single one because I could no longer be sure what was my stuff and what was someone else's.
What were the results of this fun little jaunt?
- My father and I got into a fight. It turns out that in the confusion between my stuff and the random crap person's stuff, my father mistook my good brand-new china set which I'd bought with my own money this past year for the random person's, and brought it inside and the family started using it. My mother asked him numerous times to check with me, but did he? No. Then he got mad at me for being mad at him. "I'll get you a new set," he said. "That's nice," I said, "but I paid for this one. I wanted this one. I bought the glasses and silverware to match this one. And you can't get this pattern anymore because the company went out of business." I'm not mad at him for making the mistake, as he believes I am. I'm mad at him for not asking me, and I'm really mad at him for telling me, "I did everything for you girls, and now you're going to blame me for this?" First, he did not. Second, what does that have to do with it?!?
(I have the type of mind that remembers what things are by where they are. This means that if people move things on me--an extra comforter, a box of books, a beloved poster--I won't ever remember that it went missing in the first place because of the change in spatial configuration. (This is why I can't use the medieval idea of the memory cathedral; the inside of the building won't stay put.))
- No one has any idea where the third box of extra childhood books went. "They're around somewhere," says my mother, but the basement is a firetrap. Everything moves around too much and no one gets told anything, so the following books are missing, among others:
1.) The gorgeous chartreuse and black-and-white 1950's-style picturebook about the little girl getting fitted for her first communion dress, which was so weird it warped me for life.
2.) The moving popup books which featured not only the most elaborate moving popups I've ever seen, but also gorgeous artwork of garden animals.
3.) My entire set of original Peanuts comics from the 1950's. I really liked reading the compilations, but I guess I won't anymore.
- It doesn't even help to filch things I want and keep them in my room, since those all get moved around too. The things that got moved around this time?
1.) My mugs were boxed up and put into storage without my consent. This wouldn't be so bad if I'd known about it, or if they were in bubble wrap, or weren't being subjected to -15 degree temperatures at night.
2.) Someone put a very heavy wooden stool and a sculpture and a box on top of the very fragile bamboo Burmese dragon kite I bought at Disneyworld. It looks like it's not broken; I didn't have the heart to check too thoroughly.
3.) I found that four milk crates of books, several years' worth of Cricket magazine, my copy of the magazine my first published poem was in, photo albums, gorgeous coffee-table art books, and signed books--crates which I had specifically moved to my room before I left, or moved away from the eaves so that they would stop collecting dampness and possible mildew had been moved back in the -15 degree room under the eaves again! The responses? Mother: "cold doesn't hurt the bindings!" Father: "they weren't getting mildew!"
3.) My taiaha and my naginata, which were last seen in an unobtrusive corner of my room, were just kind of sitting there in the dust and cold weather. Me to my father, tightly so I won't explode: "This needs to go inside." Him: "It's just wood, it can stay out here." Me: "No, it really can't. The bamboo expands and contracts with the cold and if it does that too much it'll split. And if this breaks I have no way to ever get another one." My father: "Okay, put it over there." Forty-five minutes later, when I carry it in the house, my father: "let me carry it. You're not doing it right." Me: "This is the right way to do it, actually." Mother, squealing: "Watch the light fixture!" Me: "Mom, I'm fine!" Mom: "Why do you want it inside anyway? It'll be fine outside!" Too tired to go into it again, I think, "I hope it'll be ok when I wrap it again in the spring," and wish I could muster the energy to curse.
While I was out, my mother also unwrapped the plastic on the brand-new backgammon set she ostensibly bought me as a present and started to play.
I have not done any wrting yet, which makes me sad, though I have caught up on administrative things like emailing editors.
Plus sides to the vacation so far?
- I found a copy of my thesis for midnight_phonenix to read.
- I found an essay which I think might be reworkable eventually for Cabinet des Fees.
- I found--after a mere hour or so of searching--the hideous thing I wrote in junior highschool after reading my first Dunsany, which I needed as source material for the Fay Novel. It may or may not be posted here eventually; I have brought it back for the housemates.
- I got Tales Before Tolkien in softcover.
- I had a lovely long talk with my pastor, who finally got his first tattoo and also got a new piercing, and gave me some ideas about depression, and expressed symphathy in the following manner when I complained about work that starved my soul: "It's hard, but you'll eventually find something. At least you're not satisfied with a boring job; that'd be worse. You weren't raised that way. At least, I didn't raise you that way."
- I had a good talk with lotusblosm and A., although didn't get to spend long enough with either.
- Tomorrow--okay, today--I will be leaving to visit with friends for the entire rest of the vacation.
I still feel defeated, though. Every time I think, "soon I will be able to move out and take the books with me," I realize I still will have to sort through 50 years' worth of kipple in the basement when they die--beautiful things collecting dust unused in boxes, or crap which they just can't be bothered to sell.
I'm so sick of their lives being so filled with crap. They can't display it; they can't take care of it; they can't muster the energy to get rid of it; they can't find the time or tools or money to fix it. In a few cases they don't even know they own it. Crap fills the basement and the warehouse and the backyard, a slow organic thing being shifted from one place to another. My own few precious things are broken, forgotten: skin horses, once important to someone.
(no subject)
6/1/06 05:04 (UTC)Big hugs to you.