My brother died four years ago today. His name was Quinn, and he was beautiful. I am so conflicted about so many things surrounding him. I hate getting pitied, so I rarely bring him up around new people. As a result, about 3 of the people I went to college with even know he existed. I am so used to saying I have 2 siblings that I honestly forget about him sometimes. ----- After my brother died, my dad told me that he had a second brother, too. He killed himself when my dad was my age. That was the first time he had ever mentioned him. I don't want to be like my father. ---- It's my ex's dead ex's birthday, so we're just going to lay around and cry tonight probably.
I feel for you. Even though I have been an atheist for quite a few years now, having been raised (indoctrinated) a catholic, it's still always a struggle to find the words to try and comfort someone else through tough times. Having heard and lived it for so long, it always feels so natural to say "I'll pray for you". But saying something like that is really quite empty, as it generally seems to be more about making the pray-er feel better, not the pray-ee (?). And I can't even say that I feel your pain, as I can't say that I've experienced something quite like what you're dealing with. But I can express sympathy in my condolences. Hopefully it is some amount of comfort to know that even a stranger on the internet can care about your situation and they can genuinely hope that you'll figure things out and be alright. Never forget those that are gone. For the good and bad you experienced with them, or because of them, all has had a hand in shaping who you are. They live on in the actions of those of us whose lives they touched before they again became one with the universe.
I'm getting married this weekend. I'm pretty excited. I'm nervous too, but not about her. Nervous about our mothers. They're both sweet, but trying to hard to make things perfect. They are driving everyone a bit crazy with "but what if we changed this to that, wouldn't it be nice?" The road to mental breakdown is paved with second guessing the cake cutting knife.
But she's soooo nice about it that saying no feels like drowning kittens. It's gonna be great though, the big stuff is all in motion and we are trying to just relax about the small stuff.
Definitely a better plan than my sister's wedding advice: "sometimes people need to be crushed. Crush their dreams. It's the only effective leadership."
Here is what I am calling a "short mean poem." I am posting it here because everything in my life right now is going pretty surprisingly, amazingly great, which is wonderful except it makes for very boring conversation (I find), and because I do not expect this poem will see the light of day anywhere else, certainly not in any publications. Also because it may be short and mean but god damn does it feel good to vent the spleen. everyone else seems to have scrawled off one first what a pity for me, to skip such a popular current topic ! i could've got published again for sure ___ WORK: Context: My work schedule and load runs from the 15th of each month to the next. So the week before the 15th is wrap-up week, usually super busy. Week after, usually relaxed and free. Today is the 22nd of the month and by EOD today assuming I am on schedule I will have completed more than 50% of my monthly workload. This is actually great because I'm taking a lot of vacation in July, so getting this month done early means i can start July's work early, and I won't be panicked or frantic when it comes to taking 10 days off the last week of the month. RELATIONSHIP: Everything is superb on the romantic front. My girl and I went to a festival over the weekend. She won a sharp shooting game and, as a result, a stuffed dog that is about as big as I am. I draped it over my shoulders and we walked out of the festival together while I pondered that I was indeed the girl with the biggest prize at the fair...but maybe, I didn't mean the dog. FRIENDS: I have them. They are fewer than they used to be but the ones I still have are better. BUDGET: Surprise $150 credit on my energy bill this month AND my monthly vet payments are finally done as of this month. I can eat! And drink! And maybe go out some night even! WRITING: Doing it, sometimes. Thinking about how I want to do it, more. In a good place. Sent a submission today. EXERCISE: Been tearing up the Fitbit last few days and calorie tracking. I have to remind myself fitness is a journey, and hot bods are made day by day, but hey...I've got a good streak going right now. FAMILY: I went home twice in the past 2 weeks and didn't get into even a small tizzy with my mom either time. PLUS, they seem to suspect I'm dating a chick, which means telling them will be that much easier when it happens. What else even is there? poem for orlando i have no poem for orlando
I am totally a sub-heading person too. I've been living without sub-headings since June 1. It's been a lot of resuscitative fun. Maybe I was drowning. So, inspired by refugees of all sorts: WORK the teaching job that paid half but was more energizing has ended. The teaching job that paid twice as much for the same work has doubled! -- but I can't take January and February off any more. Rewriting course now. RELATIONSHIP This has been very interesting and deserves its own post one of these days. I will be in his province (and in his teeny-tiny apartment) for three more weeks. Then I'll leave and then come back. It's pretty nice. ("But have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years -- that's completely unpredictable. Then, you've cut off all your ties to the land, and you're sailing into the unknown, into uncharted seas." (from My Dinner with Andre) FRIENDS oh dear lovely friends. I miss you all, the ones back home and the ones out here too. I'll try to make contact today. BUDGET Every couple of days, I prod the ex-spousal-unit to SIGN the damn separation agreement which he initiated a year ago. Then I can budget. Meanwhile, it will be fine. It will be fine. OH, YEAH, the EX last week he said this: "It was pretty stupid what I did." Yes, yes it was. At least now that you realize it, we occupy the same cognitive universe. WRITING so much that I need to do -- especially the one-woman show... only a year away! EXERCISE I just bought a bike to ride here in Vancouver. The way to the bf's heart is through the forest, so there's been lots of hiking and biking, kayaking - and next week, canoeing and cannoodling. FAMILY miss 'em, but they're surviving without me. Meanwhile, I discovered a rather close NEW cousin living a few blocks from here. And he's a blues musician. I thought I more-or-less knew them all - but he's the missing one. His father and my mother and father were all FIRST COUSINS. so relatively close. When we met, he brought a huge photo album -- and on page 2 were a bunch of pictures of my siblings and me as little children that my mother had sent his grandfather... wow wow wow. !!! so cool. So thanks refugee for the headings. There are more and wackier headings, but these will do. Now - oh life.
I saw the doggo but your girl is v v v cute too!
We have probably known each other, mostly through friends, for at least a year and a half actually. The short answer is "through friends." The long answer is that a few years back I was single as usual and had been for long enough to forget that sites like OKC are far more depressing than successful in finding a date, at least for me. I decided to change my approach. I decided to use OKC to find tennis partners. I'd thought this out. I considered that tennis was both free to play, and relatively cheap to begin playing; it was an unusual first date activity but dinner and a movie is far worse; it would allow me to observe things about the other person like whether they were a sore loser/arrogant winner, whether they got frustrated if they had trouble, basically it would give me interesting potential insight and some might help me sort out duds more quickly than a regular boring stupid expensive fancy date. Plus I really care about being physically active, so anyone willing to play tennis on a date would presumably enjoy being active too. I only got serious take ups on my offer from girls. I met and played tennis with 2 lesbians who, it turned out, also knew each other through OKC. Most of them also had a few ancillary friends, like significant others, etc. one of the girls really liked to entertain so she would have us together for parties a few times a year until we all casually knew each other. this is already totally too long. OK so then I got to know a subgroup better and developed a crush on MG (muh girl). I flirted with her real hard for like 2 months, contrived us to hook up, and continued to pursue until she realized i wasn't trying to be friends who maybe fucked but the whole shebang. when we started dating i said "no talking. i hate talking about things." so far this completely counterintuitive approach...has actually worked out.
My little brother is schizophrenic. About a week and a half ago he attacked my dad's girlfriend then went in the kitchen to get a knife. He's been in the hospital since and now they're ready to release him. My dad doesn't want him living with him anymore so they're going to put him in a home. I've been in the psych hospital many times and I hate it and I hate that it's come to this for my brother. I can't imagine going into one of those places and never being able to leave. It's like prison for the mentally ill. I think my dad should break up with his girlfriend and let my brother come back home. That's not really a good solution though. My brother needs some serious care. I don't know what to think about all this.
Your brother needs to either (A) be under 18 or (B) do some serious criminal violence against others to be held against his will for any real duration. Ten day psych holds are about what you can get out of a violent incident and even then, that means that the shrinks on duty think they can get him back to a semi-even keel. I've known some profoundly impaired schizophrenics and even the most scrooge-like libertarian would rather pay for halfway houses than any other alternative. The shitty thing about schizophrenia is if you've had more than a couple episodes, you can kind of expect to be dealing with it through your 50s. The great thing about schizophrenia is once you start treating it like any other disability you can lead a semi-normal life. I recommend E. Fuller Torrey's Surviving Schizophrenia. Your little brother will need an advocate and it sounds like that's you. Cowboy up, and good luck.
I own Surviving Schizophrenia and I coincidentally have E. Fuller Torrey's page open on my wikipedia tab after I saw the book on my shelf and wanted to know who he is. I've been diagnosed as schizoaffective but I think I have schizoid personality disorder. But what do I know. I have another younger brother. It'd be nice if we could all live together and support each other but my family is massively dysfunctional.
The run-of-the-mill mental health system is pretty fucked up (read: underdeveloped). I'm very sorry this happened. At the luncheon last week I was reminded of the different resources available. Via post history, I read that you're in Georgia? Here's some great resources including a free clinic for help. This is a link to the Mental Health Association of Georgia. The MHA is pretty good (from what I know) with both mental health advocacy and directing patients to actually helpful resources. I linked you straight to the resources page where I found one of a handful of free clinics I could find. We only have one out-patient here in CFL, but it takes care of diagnosing, check-ups, treatment, the whole 9 yards for free. They estimated saving patients over $1mil last year alone in out local clinic. I hope this is a help.
"There's too many people in front of us!" the kid complained, as we waited for the start of the Father's Day 5K. He got to work on the problem as soon as we were underway, dodging through the crowd and soon getting so far ahead I couldn't see him. He's in the white shirt behind #433, I am barely visible in a blue cap far in the back. This was an experiment, his only previous race being a kid's mile event. We did a practice "run" a week earlier, taking over an hour to cover three miles on a hot Sunday morning. I gave up the idea of a 5K after that festival of whining, but kids are moody and he got his mojo back so we decided to go for it. It was warm again on race day but the course was shaded except for a loop on the high school track for the start and finish. I managed to catch up enough to keep him in sight, but my expectation of casually jogging alongside providing water bottle sips and encouragment had changed into a hard slog. I figured he had made the standard mistake of starting out too fast. We did the first mile in 8:06. He was pacing a kid of similar age, the two of them passing adults now and then. I heard them talking, and figured one of them would blow up and they would both start walking. We did the second mile in 8:02. My personal best time was at a 7:07 pace in ideal November weather, and the heat of June was taking a lot out of me. We had talked about meeting at the finish if we got separated, but now I wanted to see which kid would finish first. We did the third mile in 7:56. He dropped the kid and kept going. I managed to catch up, wheezing and remembering all the races in which annoying kids had passed me. He skipped all the water stations and refused the bottle. We got back onto the track and he asked if we should finish together. I had nothing left for a kick, but managed to keep up. We crossed the line under 25 minutes, found a shady spot and sat down to watch the other runners come in.
Only two pre-teens beat us, and the younger of them was two years older than my partner. He would have won an under-10 division, but his age bracket was 1-14. Something about surface area and power-to-weight ratio means there are always some little brats who finish ahead of me in shorter races.
How awesome! I'm glad you had this experience and I appreciate you sharing it. Well done Papa and Mini-Oxygen!
I love it when they explain songs
Well said, top regional functionary, well said.According to Sholokhov, in response to the request one of the top regional functionaries stated that "Lenin could not have been a mushroom" because "a mammal cannot be a plant."
There has been much discussion amongst my friends and coworkers about where I actually live. "Sort of Glassell Park, sort of Highland Park, kind of Mount Washington" etc. Nope. Turns out I live in Cypress Park, which is a phrase not uttered by white people, because it is their Voldemort. Cypress Park is owned by the Avenues, a street gang with ties to the Sinaloa cartel. It has an 80% hispanic population, over half of which are Mexican nationals. Whites and Asians outnumber blacks because, apparently, the Avenues ain't too fond of the African American contingent so actively harass and persecute them. LA gang laws were revised in favor of totalitarianism back in '95 because a wayward family of white folx got lost on their way back from the park and a posse blocked their retreat with mattresses and garbage cans and then opened fire, wounding a 2-year-old boy and killing a 3-year-old girl. The neighborhood erupted in outrage because the LA Times featured the girl on the front page... and of course she was white, so of course nobody cares about the hispanic kids when they die. That was about eight blocks up. It's on my way to Super King, the Mexican/Armenian grocery that has fifteen kinds of Baklava but no popcorn. A friend picked me up for lunch yesterday. Pointed out his girlfriend's uncle's house, which is a block away from me. The uncle has stopped replacing windows when they get shot out because they get shot out too often. On the plus side, they planted a nice little garden so... zucchini. It's funny. My roommate deadbolts the laundry door, and deadbolts the house even when he's inside. But I've been invited to park my bike outside because, after all, the neighbor's bike has never been stolen. Oddly enough I'm more worried about property crime when I wander up into white people territory because the people around here don't really seem like the bike theft type. Them squidgy hipsters up in Echo Park, though... I guess we all have our forms of magical thinking. I'm over 350 miles on the bike. Sunday the temperature around the bend through Universal City read 118 degrees. I brought a lot of water but still felt like shit; I was thankful to not be one of the homeless people passed out on the pavement in the shade like so many squirrels. They closed the 2 because it was on fire. Rode through drifting smoke, like something out of Falludjah. It was a good thing my ride was only 15 miles because if it had been 17 I would have been in trouble. I Lyfted Monday (temperatures were overall about 8 degrees hotter, and although nothing broke 118 the neighborhood around the studio spent about 6 hours over 115) and my ride home got lost because Waze doesn't know what the fuck to do when all the onramps are closed due to exploded transformers. Ran into a coworker from The Horrible Show at Home Depot last week. He'd done the thing in Fiji that all my Facebook friends did, and was headed up to Seattle for The Real World. I was annoyed because here he is, working more than me, without realizing that I'm making a much better rate on a much better show. It also took me a little bit to come to grips with the fact that my job? I do it grudgingly. It's the thing I settled in while I do other things, and I have many other things. Nearly everyone I know is doing only this, and they have families to support. And they have to live here all the time. The Home Depot with no earplugs? That's his local Home Depot. It's not his "I'm here for the next 12 weeks" Home Depot. He's got, like, a mortgage nearby. The thought of it makes me feel hollow inside. We submitted revised drawings on the birth center two weeks ago. The state authority said "yeah, this is no longer ADA compliant, actually, none of your doors are ADA compliant, you're going to have to tear them down and rebuild everything because who run Bartertown?" It took a week of wrangling for our contractor to take him by the lapels, shake him and point out that you don't need every fucking door to be ADA compliant, so we have to move one door. Joke's on him. Because our electrical contractor is a slovenly shithead we hadn't had a chance to put up drywall yet anyway. My daughter made me a picture frame. It's pink and covered in nuts and washers. Her daycare teacher helped her fill out a "I love my daddy because" madlib that, of course, is covered in garish magic marker. Among its highlights are the fact that I am 5 years old, that my daughter wishes to give me "a kind animal" and that she likes to go running with me. And that I'm always telling her I love her. We do things for our families. In the end, we hope they pay off. There will come a time when I do not live a block up from Avenida Assassinos and it will not be 118 degrees in the shade. And those are the times I will spend with my kid.
Never have I been so glad to be paying the absurd rents demanded in the bay area for a summer than this past weekend. Try not to melt.Sunday the temperature around the bend through Universal City read 118 degrees.
Found a Car! Yay! Almost identical to the one it's replacing. Same make, model, year, but with 70,000 fewer miles than my old steed. PIcking it up this afternoon from a nice old guy who likes to buy pretty cars with engine issues, fix them up, then sell'em to soon to be undergrads/masters students like me. I may or may not have gotten a discount because I wasn't afraid of his pitbull. The guy who wrecked the old one decided that he doesn't want to pay me a single rotten cent, so I'm weighing my options. (Insurance isn't helping, the situation is really unfortunately complicated thanks to the aforementioned asshole.) Related to the soon to be masters students quip up there, I got into one of my fallback schools the other week. Because it's a fallback, and not somewhere I'm actually likely to attend, I didn't really make much of a deal out of it, but maybe I should, just a bit. It's nice to be told that at some level, my resume both professional and academic indicates that I am an acceptable candidate for masters level work, at least at some institutions. A while ago I committed to getting a tattoo once I was accepted into my master's program, and now that I technically have gotten into one, I'm going to start looking at parlors. Two of my younger brothers are planning on going with me and getting the same word, but probably not on the same place on their body. I'm trying to talk the 21 year old out of getting it on his wrist and being basic. Also I somehow bruised my achilles tendon and walking 3/4 of a mile to Pediatrics all day is going to SUUUUUUCK. I'm going kayaking this weekend. I'm gonna sit on the water by myself and drink a beer and leave my phone in the car and just breathe for a while.
Feeling way too productive this week and like I'm not getting nearly enough sleep and how is it almost July already and how have I gone on a few dates lately without worrying about it.
This week's the last week of the academic year here. Feels good to finally hand in all assignments. If I don't screw up the last final, I'll have 64 credits to my name this year which is about twenty credits more than I was hoping for at the start of the year. Anyway, I started playing Overwatch yesterday. It reminds me of TF2 back when I still liked it, very fun and addictive.
Not much to report this week, I've just been working and trying to sleep as much as possible. I need a beer and a break, but the workday is almost over! As an aside, I made another hubski graphic thing just for fun: The mountains have basically nothing to do with hubski (aside from the 'ski' pun), but I wanted to work that font into a project and mess around with layer masks. Enjoy!
Random thoughts. I recycled 3 desktops the other day. It's amazing how getting rid of those have created so much space in storage. I have to more to dig out. I have in my collection of books two volumes of letters between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. I do not know where these came from. I wonder if I should read them. My Quran and NIV Study Bible are missing. This upsets me. I wonder if the wife and I could find work in Wisconsin . . .
I love throwing stuff away/recycling. That stack of papers in the corner that isn't in the way? Realize they're three year old car or veterinary receipts that aren't relevant, and the room feels much nicer. Let me know if you have any questions on Wisconsin! It can be fairly urban (Milwaukee), city but not BIG city (Madison), seasonal resort (Rhinelander) or impossibly rural (anything north of Highway 10).
Thanks! I actually know Wisconsin rather well, as I've visited a few times. I kind of would have my heart set on a smaller town, like Wasau or Green Bay. Madison might be a bit pricey, but I like the town. That said, I think I'm kind of done with city living for a bit.
I grew up not far from Wausau, though I haven't done more than drive through it in fifteen years. Any of the smaller towns are nice, and the housing prices are pretty great. Southwest Wisconsin is really pretty, and since you're 45+ minutes to Madison's west side and over an hour to downtown, prices are still really good. Something like Dodgeville or Platteville southwest of Madison or Boscobel due west come to mind. These are pretty small. Platteville has a small state college. PM me any time if you have questions or anything. :)
Madison has a lot I like. As with anywhere, it has its faults, but there's a lot of good. Decent restaurant options, nice lakes, nice climate. The university and state government make it pretty stable. I noticed Monday there were a LOT of people out exercising, and I think we're a pretty active city. There are some nice trails in town, and the serious road bikers like the roads southwest of town (rolling hills). I'm not sure I'll live here forever, but I do like it.
Dude I love Wisconsin. The wife's ancestral homeland is Marshfield. Couple years back we did Walk Wisconsin, which I didn't do as far as I could because my foot was broken. It's funny. I never get shin splints but that's twice that jogging in stupid shoes has broken a fuckin' metatarsal. Neither time happened in Wisconsin.
Small world. My ancestral home is also Marshfield, and I grew up about 30 minutes away in an even smaller town. One or two cousins are still in Marshfield. Growing up, Marshfield was the closest movie theater. There are probably dusty CDs at home that I bought at the Sam Goody in the Marshfield mall for $17.99.
Wisconsin is an absolutely beautiful state filled with some amazingly nice people. Cost of living there is probably relatively cheap and there's so much to do, both outdoors and in. I'd love to live there and the wife probably feels the same.
Went to my first music festival last weekend, shit's wild. It felt like a hot, dusty version of white-peoples' heaven, filled with unabashed hedonism, drugs, thumping music, and sunburns as far as the eye could see. I got my month's worth of dancing in without re-injurying my knee and found a few new artists I enjoyed, including a glitch / edm / house / weeaboo artist, here's a song reminiscent of Daft Punk: I also got 6x36 new mouse brain tissue samples last week for three more projects, which should round out my work schedule for the next year or so. Pretty much every major experiment I will be doing has now been planned. It should now just be a matter of a shitton of pipetting, coding, and learning a last few set of techniques like working with viruses and stem cells (Each of which could 1-2 months of training...). I can't decide if I'm happier now that the rest of my aims / PhD proposal are starting to be set in stone or sad that the wild brainstorming will be shut down for a while.
Where'd you go? Most mid-size/large festivals are kind of...well...I'm not a fan, to put it mildly, because of exactly how you described it.
Delaware, and yes, it was weirdly, dehumanizingly large, with large hoards of people forming massive rivers as they migrated from one stage to another. The entire weekend I kept catching glances of people at their top / bottom, dancing like crazy or bruised and doing drugs out of dollar bills on the lawn, only to never see them again. But it was still fascinating to see the people who went all out to every apparent outward extreme to have fun: dressing up, making signs, dancing, and drunkenly enjoying the shit out of their food. It was both a turn-off and weirdly attractive to see how happy people were when they let go for the weekend. I do feel bad for the service workers who had to clean it all up afterwards though.
Firefly! A coworker was there for five or six days. He slept for 30 hours afterwards. I saw him last night, and he tells me, "Yea it was a ton of fun. The four of us got a night's worth of sleep every three days. We spent like $600 on drugs. Each." Don't feel too bad for the service workers. I have a ton of friends who work festivals, and not only do they get paid pretty fat day-rates, they often get time off to see shows.
I imagine a combination of ecstasy/MDMA, long-term and short-term psychedelics, and sundry stimulants. Because all regular life-responsibilities are abdicated for a few days, those festivals approach a level of experimentation usually unheard of.
I solemnly swear to never work HR in another agency that hires minors. Anybody else have trouble going to sleep around the solstice? There's just so much light and my body refuses to get tired until about 10:30, which is way past my bedtime. I mean, I love getting to take a book or a crochet project on the patio and work on it until whenever but I love sleep too. :/
I've been playing around with software defined radio stuff lately. I feel like such at hacker! I managed to listen in to my local PD's radio comms, which frequency hop and are digitally encoded (It's trunked P25). I did all this with a $20 USB dongle and free software. A police scanner that decodes this kind of radio traffic costs $500+. Next on my list of things to try is mapping aircraft in real time by listening to their ADS-B that they broadcast while flying.
This looks nice! Does this dongle work for a wide range of frequencies like the RTL-SDR dongles and is just better at ADS-B, or does it only work well for ADS-B and not well for anything else? I'm looking to buy another RTL-SDR dongle in the future to listen to trunked radio better.
I haven't used it, but I went down the rabbit hole with FR24 to the point where I applied to host their equipment. FlightAware put their name on this thing and is selling it stupid cheap; I have no idea what you can do with it besides flight tracking. You'll still need an antenna.
Done with the school year! Now I just need to figure out what to do with all this free time.
What's the strongest drink in the world? A few of those please. Brexit referendum today, as of posting this just under 1% of votes have been called (it's done on a council by council basis). No idea what this portends. I'll see you all in the morning, when my nation's fate is sealed.
This weekend is going to be insane - if I snag a slot. Every 6-ish weeks there's a sort of community therapeutic retreat of an Adlerian strain called P3. I believe it started as UYO way back when all across the country. Since then they've branched out. This retreat is where I learned how to put into practice a lot of my own skill set I picked up in 'groups' and workshops. I've been having dreams reminding me that it was coming up (neat trick, wish I knew how to use it for forgotten homework or essays), but kept forgetting to take action to grab a slot. Naturally, this will be an intense time, ten-fold so given the context of the past couple weeks. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but one of the instructors is the friend who was THE go-to person in the heat of it all with regards to creating a support system for victims. The other instructor is a personal mentor of mine, who I'd like to think is an up-and-coming star in the local field, so it'd be just as interesting to observe/learn from him in this situation as well. If anyone does have contact with a victim or doesn't know how to support, feel free to contact me and I can post/reply with the bona fide sources that I know of. Completely on another note: I LOVE summer time in Florida. I don't like intentionally deep frying my body with oil, mind you. Though, the way sunlight heats and exposed skin... ahhh... Just standing in the sun, only for a few minutes...Ever eat a jalapeño? Remember the prickling of your taste buds? The heat firing across your tongue? The salivating of your tongue? The endorphins after? All of that. All over. Your hair roots rise flushing red to scowl the sun as rays flow across your skin, golden warmth braising even the darkest shades of your skin as pores well up to douse the flames. Ah man, it feels great. I never want to move north.