Eredien's Journal

My dad and I got into a fight today because he didn't respect my opinion about something and then later tried to shush me loudly and rudely when I tried talking to him about why I was upset, and my mother has a totally racist 'funny' work forward printed out and sitting on our kitchen table that I am trying to figure out how to confront her about, but those are not the only things that have me thinking, "something's badly wrong here, in this place."

My mom and I just came back from the Muppet movie--I'd been wanting to go, so she took me. It was pretty fun (I am really looking forward to the Studio Ghibli adaptation of the Borrowers, which was like my favorite book in 3rd grade!) until we got to the parking lot after the movie, at which point a panhandler walked up to our car. My mom rolled down the window a crack, and the woman asked, "look, are you nice people?" My mom repeated the question sarcastically--"are we nice people?"--rolled the window up, said, "I guess not," and drove away.

I sat in absolute stunned silence all the way home while my mom made the following comments:
- "See, those other people next to us didn't help her either."
- "There was this guy in front of my office who used the 'I need help' spiel on me and my coworkers without realizing he'd said it before, and when he'd used it before we'd given him help and places to go and he went there for a while and then was back in the same spot using the same old story a month later."

We paused in the parking lot of my parents' home:
- "I want you to know, [Eredien], that if she had really needed help I would have helped her."

I interjected at that point, saying, "how do you know what she needed? You didn't even listen to her."

My mother: "If you really need help you don't go up to people and ask if they're 'nice people.' You go up to people and say, 'I need help.'"

I don't always give to panhandlers. I didn't tonight because I didn't have my wallet on me, and I haven't been giving lately because I'm deep in debt and need to save my money to get out of the spot I'm in. But there's a difference, a big one, between listening for a few moments and going, "sorry, I can't help you today," and meaning it, and saying, "well, I'm not a nice person!" But I wish I had my wallet tonight.

I am baffled, and hurt, and angry, and shocked, and deeply saddened. I am also angry that I'm angry, and baffled that I'm baffled--what the hell else did I expect? Must I truly grow a tougher skin again and pretend like everything that offends or upsets me doesn't matter just so I can live in this place without daily screaming fights?

- I have read 2 John Brunner novels in the past two days, The Shockwave Rider and Players at the Game of People. I did not like Players. Its allegory was way too heavy-handed, and its main female characters served to a.)be love interests for the viewpoint character and b.)act as a foil to the viewpoint character and show him the allegory wasn't what he thought it was. I didn't even find the premise clever beyond chapter three. I think this would have been way, way better as a short story. The novel was also racist (oh, John Brunner and your problematics!) I liked The Shockwave Rider, although I have a hard time remembering the title, since there are really no shockwaves or riding in the entire book (the title is a reference to the book that inspired it, Future Shock, which makes a lot of sense. It's just that I've never read Future Shock and keep forgetting its title because of that). I enjoy books with strong and intelligent women who love their boyfriends but don't take shit from their boyfriends, tame genetically-engineered mountain lions, narrow disasters averted by last-minute computer hacking, cool architecture, and men and people in general who listen to their consciences even when that decision is really pretty risky. Though a lot of the technology in this book is outdated (tape backups? Punch cards?) a lot of it isn't (pocket videophones? Wall-to-wall 3-D TVs?) and the ways in which the technology is *used* (to disrupt corrupt governments by strategically leaking classified government documents wikileaks style, to smuggle people out of secret detention facilities that are not supposed to exist, to dupe credulous parishioners out of money to line the pockets of unscrupulous priests, to give the police easy access to the movements of everyday citizens, to create new bio-technologies that show great technological promise for humanity but may also cross ethical and moral boundaries) is cutting-edge stuff.

- I made vegan vodka tomato pasta. It's good.

- Oolong has been exploring the outside back porch, which has a tall wood railing. She keeps trying to sneak out between the slats, though. I have to try her harness again, because she's so stupid she'll go right through and so uncoordinated that I'm kind of afraid she might fall off the porch down to the ground 2 stories below.

- I cry a lot in the shower, due to historical problems finding any truly private spaces indoors as a child. Now I have apparently associated showering with sadness, to the point where every single time in the past week that I have showered, I have cried for at least fifteen minutes afterward, often for no good reason, sometimes because I came to an important realization in the shower. It's annoying. But I am also due to get my period. More about this below.

- Tokai shed yesterday. Go, Tokai!

- My cousin in NYC is a fabric buyer for a place that sells huge amounts of fabrics to places that make clothes and then sell the resulting clothes to mass-market department stores across the US. I didn't know this, but when I found out, I forwarded her an article I'd read back in Feb. about fabrics and their representations of people of color. I implied there was a huge market in this stuff, especially for kids' clothes. Hopefully she and her employer will take the hint and make a load of money, and make a lot of kids and their parents really happy, by giving people awesome clothes featuring some people who might not all be white! :)

- I have resumed conversations with my parents, but think I will end them soonish. This will make visiting my family in NY in July difficult, since I want to see my sister and Jan and apparently Jan's sister and her boyfriend, but don't really want to interact with my parents much. However, when my father said I was sounding happier on the phone, I realized he just couldn't distinguish between my actual genuine happiness and my talking to him about random things because I felt it was my duty as his daughter. Granted, possibly this is also my problem, but since my mother also did not bring up the 20-minute conversation I had with her last week about why I had stopped talking to them for six months and needed to talk to them seriously about fixing some problems I had interacting with them, problems they were largely causing, I don't think that my conversations with them will be going anywhere near Genuine Happinessville, despite my trying to steer the metaphorical car in that direction, and I'd rather have no relationship at all with my parents than one that I feel is false on its face, when it could be so much more, but they just aren't interested in bringing up things that are hard for them to talk about or finding serious solutions for the problems they have with me and I with them, because they might get upset and need to cry or be angry for a while, at themselves or me or both, and showing weakness and asking for help to fix their relationship with me isn't ok, it's just easier to tell themselves they have a crazy and disrespectful daughter who they won't ever understand.

possible physical TMI warning (PMS), which also contains a recommendation for a Droid app
- I have installed the most-awesome ever application on my new android phone (all the features of the old sidekick, for the same amount of money a month, and backed by a company whose data servers probably won't go out of business anytime soon, like the Sidekick data people did constantly? Yay!) It is not the touch keyboard that lets me type almost as fast as I can read, which is still pretty cool. It is a thingy called OvuView, which is free, and lets you track your period. It also lets you track variables, such as "lots of cramps," or "mild headache," or "temperature," or "moodiness," or "appetite" or "sleeplessness." It also tells me when my period is probably going to be. Since I am *notoriously* bad at tracking this myself, to my detriment and the detriment of everyone around me, this app pings me every night and makes me enter as much or as little data as I want to enter. It's fantastic. Now I *know* that if I eat a half a pack of tofu during a protein craving, can't sleep, and cry for an hour, I can track it and see if there's a pattern instead of wondering why I feel like shit and want to sleep all the time. It makes me feel way more in control of my body and my mood. Instead of being buffeted around by mystery moods and sicknesses which may or may not be hormonal in origin, I can just put how I feel in the app, and go on with my life.
It projects the dates of your next period, too, and uh, probably does a lot of other stuff I haven't figured out yet. You can also apparently use it to calculate fertility (though this is not a feature of the app that I will be reviewing).
I've tried keeping a paper diary and a calendar about this before, because I know hormone-related moods and painful cramps were a big problem in my life and in other peoples' lives, but I never was able to remember which symptoms I was keeping track of in my little notes, and sometimes I forgot to track it, and would have to start all over again, and since I was feeling like crap, I'd get discouraged that I couldn't even keep a period journal write and cry for an extra hour. This app? If I'm feeling like crap, it takes me a minute to open up the application and say so, and then I know I don't have to *remember* it to write it down later, and so I won't worry about it all day when I'm already having PMS and mood swings, and won't get home and forget what I was going to write down, so my fears of being an abnormal freak whose hormones are even affecting her memory, and hence her sense of self as a woman and a capable person in general, is *gone.* It's AWESOME. Recommended.

Ultimate goal: convince my doctor, using historical data, that I really do have some kind of freaky hormonal imbalance that turns me into a saltwater tears factory with no desire to eat; instant, painful, and socially awkward GI problems; and the desire to hide under a blanket with a warm cat for one week out of every four a month, and convince her that it is really ruining my life, so I can figure out what to do from there that's not hormonal birth control (which makes me that person for the whole month straight, and scared my partner and me the whole time I was on it because I would start crying as I was smiling, which I'd not done much before I took the medicine, but restarted my period on a regular basis, and which I've been doing an awful lot since having my period on a regular basis).