Sick.
Posted by binkbeck | Filed under A day in the life...
It’s been a crap day.
Got up fairly early (for me), and Gemini had already made a nest on the sofa. This is a bad sign. Gemini doesn’t like to take naps, she’s hated them since she was a toddler, and when she was about 2, I gave up. And this morning (yes, it was still A.M. when I got up), she had made a nest on the sofa of her pillow and blanket. She was sick. Scouser texted me during the weekend to let me know she was sick, but I had hoped it was a passing thing.
Libra said she felt completely fine, that she was perfectly healthy - she just had a cold. No fever, though. At one point, Gemini’s fever hit 105.9, and I started with the fever reduction in earnest, including forcing liquids. She was wilted on the sofa, glassy-eyed and lethargic, she even took a nap. Libra took a nap too, but that was more out of not wanting to be left behind. Libra is a big fan of naps, more often than not.
Then Scouser came home. He made a nest on the sofa too, with his pillow and blanket.
They were all in bed by 9pm. Scouser is probably calling in sick to work today. With the cold and the snow, i don’t think he’s going to be very motivated to go out into the world.
It was a crappy weekend too. Engineer was great, don’t get me wrong, but I felt crappy. The trip down there… For most of the way on I74, there was a single track in the middle of the expressway… the bus driver was at wits’ end trying to keep us on the road and moving forward with all the snow coming down. Note: When semis are caravaning and only going 30 mph in a 70 mph zone, don’t pass them. The driver and I ( I was sitting close to the front this time) watched three SUVs try to pass the semis and go off into the middle ditch. Oh, and if you were expecting a delivery by Fed Ex this week, it’s probably along I65 or I74. I saw four of their semis in the ditches, and two were jack-knifed. Oddly, no UPS or USPS trucks… There were other trucks on the sides of the roads, but for the most part, they had the names of trucking companies on them. I lost count of the cars early on… just glad that I wasn’t in one of them. The other odd thing was that we didn’t see any police presence, of all the cars we saw, we didn’t see any flashing lights except for the one overpass that was closed for two jack-knifed semis.
I arrived in Kentucky just in time for the worst of my cycle to hit. THAT was fun. I ended up sleeping most of Saturday. And then the digestive issues began on Sunday. The trip back was uneventful. I slept for most of it, because the book I thought I had was missing from my bag. The bus driver pissed people off (many of whom were from Indianapolis) when he announced as we were approaching the station in Chicago that the Saints won the Superbowl. Evidently they wanted the suspense of not knowing.
I love spending time with Engineer, but this weekend, I was definitely not at my best.
I’m looking forward to having a girls’ day out with Pachamama. She and I are planning to get pedicures and go out to lunch. She doesn’t get many breaks like this, as her husband is often working out of town so she has the kids. It will be fun. Dammit.
Tags: Engineer, Gemini, Libra, Pachamama, Scouser
Waiting for you not to come home.
Posted by binkbeck | Filed under A day in the life...
Have I mentioned how fucking great my life is lately? I don’t mean in that “be positive and count your blessings” way. I’m bragging here, not trying to convince myself that I am happy. This weekend, Scouser had dates on both Friday and Saturday nights. Tomorrow I head to Peoria. This morning, when I was having my first cup of coffee (a Very Important daily ritual), a line came to me.
Waiting for you not to come home.
I felt like a country western lyricist on nitrous oxide. See, Scouser is seeing someone new. I don’t know much about her, and have not met her, but since it is new, with each date it was a question as to whether he would come home. There was a point in the evening when I knew he wouldn’t risk driving, and I was happy. It must have gone well. And the second time, same thing happened. Good news! There is a part of me that thinks that is so twisted, and another which wants to squee. Add to that that tomorrow night, when I am in Peoria passing the time while the girls are with my parents celebrating my dad’s birthday, Scouser and Gothwriter will probably be going out for Thai food to celebrate 10 months together.
Oh, and my dreams have been totally kick-ass lately. Granted, I wake up feeling like complete shit, congested and my throat feeling raw. I think I’ve developed an allergy to something in my bed, I just hope it isn’t my feather hug pillow, because that would kill me.
So, tonight, I headed out for cigarettes, and my regular place was closed. I headed further down the road, and wouldn’t you know? They were cheaper there!
intelligence
Posted by binkbeck | Filed under Uncategorized
Found this today. Further proof that my grandmother is brilliant.
She said something along these lines when I was a kid. She is a rather practical woman. She held education in high esteem, tempered with practical knowledge.
(Vegetarian friends might want to skip this part - go to the **) My grandparents had a chicken house on their homestead. This was not an ordinary chicken house. It held 30,000 chickens, give or take a few. There weren’t supposed to be any roosters, since it was an egg operation. She would get me up before dawn to go down there, where we would listen for the roosters. After finding them (I had to carry them by the legs, I hated that part), we then went up to the yard to butcher. She turned the process into a biology lab. She showed me the organs before they were cut out, how they were connected, held in place by membranes. She said it was important to know the anatomy and physiology, but that didn’t cook the chicken.
** When I was a kid, I was really good at taking exams. The standardized tests started in 3rd grade with the Iowa Basic Skills. By 7th grade, I knew the strategies: eliminate the obviously wrong answers and decide from the remaining, skip the questions that are difficult and come back to them after answering all the simple ones first, and when all hope is lost and time is running out just start filling in circles because there was a penalty for unanswered questions that was greater than getting it wrong. In all the categories I usually scored in the 95+ percentile, yet my grades were Bs and Cs. In college when I learned that all tests have biases, I had no difficulty accepting that idea.
Open
Posted by binkbeck | Filed under Omphalokepsis
There was an article in the New York Times today.
I’m still sussing out what this article is trying to say, and comparing it to my own experiential evidence. I think it is noteworthy that all the couples were from a specific region: the Bay area. I find it a stretch to apply their numbers to the population at large, or to make the claim that social trends in one location face universalization.
Obviously, I am polyamorous and I believe that it is a viable option for a relationship structure. The article mentioned the evolution of relationships, that somehow this might be an evolutionary advance. I take issue with that. Historically speaking, it just doesn’t hold water. So much of our current social norms date back to the Victorian period, where the focus was on the vilification of sex and the near worship of death. This may come as a shock, but history goes further back than that.
In human nature, there is a push and a pull. The most stable relationship structure is a dyad. Any fewer than two people and it’s not a relationship, per se. Add more people and the frequency of conflict increases. That is the push toward monogamy. Then again, we are social creatures. We need to feel part of the larger whole, a sense of belonging. That is the pull.
I am frequently asked by monogamous friends how I handle the chaos of being in an open relationship. To them, maintaining and nurturing one romantic relationship takes all their resources. This is not a criticism, not in the least. There is comfort in knowing that there is at least one person who is always in your corner.
So, why am I not monogamous? There are certain conventions I don’t buy. I don’t believe that love is finite, either in volume or in duration. I also don’t believe that love is enough for a relationship to work. Marrying for love is a fairly recent invention. I don’t believe that I can be everything to anyone, nor do I expect another person to be everything to me. Even before Scouser and I decided to open our relationship, I raised eyebrows when I told people that I had a best friend who was male and not my husband. I had a husband, why would I need a best friend? That always struck me as an undermining of what a spouse was/could be. Best friend was a step down in the hierarchy. After my relationship with Asshole, I became really sensitive about being isolated, cut off from friends.
Truth be told, I’ve only been monogamous in one relationship - with Asshole. From the time we married, I did not cheat on him, despite his accusations. Pretty much every other relationship I can think of, I’ve cheated - been non-monogamous and lied about it. That includes Scouser, just before we opened the relationship. Yes, that does factor in to why I, personally, am non-monogamous.
There are the realities of my character and the there are the reasons I use to defend polyamory, and the cognitive dissonance between the two. When detractors claim that polyamory is license for promiscuity, that dissonance becomes clear. For me, in a romantic relationship, sex is important, but it isn’t the most important. There is value in the level of communication and honesty in open relationships… and it has to start with honesty with oneself. That aspect, I think I have down. I’m pretty good at recognizing what is really going on in the landscape of my mind, and when I don’t, I take the time to work it out. I’m pretty good at acknowledging my strengths and weaknesses, holding myself accountable, although sometimes I beat myself up a bit over my failures.
At the same time, I do have the ability to let myself off the hook. I do not expect perfection in myself. Initially, I wanted to open my marriage in pursuit of a specific relationship. That didn’t work out. I had talked about having an open marriage from the time that Scouser and I married. I had seen bad examples in the past, but I was convinced that it could work. And I was convinced that it was a solution that best fit my sense of self. That part has come to fruition. I feel more comfortable in my skin than I ever have, even with the bumps in the road Scouser and I have experienced in the past year.
Dangerous territory, what a hormone storm looks like…
Posted by binkbeck | Filed under A day in the life...
Suddenly I burst into tears, reading the news. It was about the State of the Union address. I am watching it right now on PBS, but not really listening. I don’t have the attention for that. Scouser is laying down in the bedroom. He pretty much disappeared after eating supper. My two male cats are still woozy from getting neutered today. They don’t want to be touched. Yes, even my cats are rejecting me.
It is because of these hormone storms that I know that fear of rejection is my Achilles heel. It is getting to the point that whenever I am overwhelmed by such thoughts, it is probably hormonal - if I just check the calendar I am probably in range. My heart feels squeezed. I panic. I really don’t have any friends. And that is not true. I know that is not true. I have awesome and wonderful friends. There are people who truly, deeply love me. I KNOW this, but right now, I can’t feel it. I feel abandoned and lost. If people try to reassure me, I’m certain to interpret it as pity, as the kinds of things people just say and don’t mean, because crazy makes people uncomfortable and they want it to stop.
Copper forgot to tell Meximom that I ordered Girl Scout Cookies. She’s already put in the order with the company. I know that it was an incidental thing, and yet, in my head, I am broken hearted that he forgot. I instantly translate that to mean that anything I say to him has no meaning. It’s irrational, I know. That’s the point. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, and it is applied to everything.
On the social networking stuff, there is rejection in how people respond to me, rejection in not responding to me. There’s no winning on either side. I have to pull in and stop, stop reaching out. Right now, the only place suitable to the likes of me is the lovely cool mud under a rock because I am so liable to strike out and actually express my hurt. The hurt which is based on the barest threads of unintentioned slights. Left unchecked, I’d go on a bridge-burning rampage.
None of it is important. I don’t mean that in a martyrish way, what I mean is that none of it is real, none of it is based on anything real or patterns of behavior of other people that have any indication that what I am thinking in my head right now is accurate. It is passing. I will remember the strength of these emotions, but I won’t remember the details of how I got here. I will remind myself that I am just crazy, and live in fear that someone else will find out just how crazy I can be. I am afraid of losing the ability to reality-check, to reign it in. The kind of self-destruction I am capable of is not physical - it is more social. I work really hard at not taking it out on the girls, and I usually, most often, succeed. When this sort of thing happens, I try to find ways to limit access, sequester myself. Yeah, blogging is not exactly that, but I am hoping that by putting this out there, those close to me might be able to recognize that it’s not them, and it’s not me, not the real me, anyway. I feel invaded, that my mind has been hijacked, and while I can’t see the hijacker, I can see the effects in my emotional landscape and I am trying to conceal, mitigate, camouflage. I’m getting better at forming the mask when this happens.
Peterpandemonium
Posted by binkbeck | Filed under Omphalokepsis, Uncategorized
This is in response to an article I stumbled upon…
For the record, I do not believe that I am a paragon of maturity.
I contrast myself to my mother, who has been mature since she was 6. When she was a child, she worried about how her parents would manage to feed and clothe the growing family. She used to hoard her lunches, keeping them until she was sure there was enough supper for everyone. When I was a child, I never worried about such things, even though I was aware that money was tight. I am fully aware and appreciative that any stability in my childhood was directly related to my mother’s maturity and her sense of duty towards me. At 21, she was a new graduate from nursing school and head nurse of the cardiac floor, at the time, it was an intensive care unit. She was dependable to many people, and respected despite her youth.
When I was 21, I was more concerned about clinicals, club clothes and Ladies’ Night at the clubs downtown.
There are aspects of this article I agree with. According to it, I am a middlescent. Mom and I have had many conversations about this. Maybe I should send her the article, but I think that would send her into shock and fear. She is still hoping that one day I will grow up. She does acknowledge that I don’t skimp on my obligations, I just have fun in the meanwhile.
What bothered me about the article was the avoidance of what “adults” are supposed to be. It focused on commitment, responsibility and maturity, without really defining what the standards of those are. I would agree that my maturity is questionable, yet I’m not really drawn toward younger people. Few of my friends are younger than 30, and none in my immediate circle. I don’t believe I personally have problems with commitment or responsibility. Since leaving Peoria for college in 1989, I’ve lived with my parents one summer, when I was between colleges. After my divorce and the financial setbacks I had, I did everything in my power to keep from moving home. When Gemini was born, my parents wanted us to move to Peoria and I refused. There had to be another way. For me, Peoria was too close, too much like moving in with my parents.
When I read things like this, I worry about my girls and what kind of society they will need to cope with when they are older, trying to make it on their own. At this point in time, I am of the mind of my parents and Copper’s parents: the age of 18 is a watershed, closing time. It doesn’t matter where you go, you can’t stay here. I’m not an advocate of them starting college right away - I think they need to get a taste of the real world to figure out what they really want to do, because college has been and is being reinforced as an extension of adolescence. I would love it if they wanted to go backpacking around Europe or something like that.
Communication: Captain Subtext
Posted by binkbeck | Filed under Omphalokepsis
Captain Subtext (Sorry for the crappy video. This was the only clip I could find that explained who Captain Subtext was.)
This weekend, when Engineer was here, we watched season 1 & 2 of Coupling. My face still hurts from laughing so much. Seems Captain Subtext is in season 3. In case you don’t know, the show is about the difference between what is said and what is meant. I am one of those people who completely miss subtlety, I miss the hidden meaning of what is said.
I get it that people say things they don’t mean. It’s supposed to spare feelings. Right. Yeah, we should meet up for coffee some time. or I’ll call later in the week to make sure the ex will take the kids. And then it never happens. This is one of those social niceties that drives me nuts. The ironic thing is these people want to be perceived as nice, when, from my viewpoint, they come off as shallow and/or dishonest. It’s not so much that they are “lying” - they just want to reject me through subtext. Makes perfect sense.
It wouldn’t bother me so much if Scouser and I didn’t need to coordinate kid care. He’s got his things going, he wants to know if I have certain nights free so he can make plans. I don’t know what to tell him. Is it fair of me to put a hold on a date on the calendar for something that may not happen? I tend to think not, and (hint, hint) he’d better believe that I would be pissed if he did that to me.
Subtext can be an important literary device. But it seems that in real-life, all it does is either make the person using it feel superior or let them feel they are off the hook.
Maybe I’m missing something?
Tags: communication, Coupling, subtext
Soulmates
Posted by binkbeck | Filed under Uncategorized
Scouser and I met through an online ad. If any one of thousands of things were different than what they were, Scouser and I probably wouldn’t be together. In terms of our relationship, well, let’s say that the title of “best friends” would be a step down regarding how I feel about him. We have many personality traits that complement each other, and we share many values. I cannot imagine my life without him, nor do I want to.
But Scouser and I are not soulmates.
I have a lot of trouble with the concept on many levels.
What is a soul mate? There seem to be a number of interpretations, depending on which philosophy the believer subscribes to. Some believe that it is someone with whom one travels from life to life. This could be someone important in the person’s life: a parent, spouse, child, sibling, etc. In the dating scene, and in Western cultures, the idea of soulmate tends to be that one special someone who you get along with fantastically, who completes the seeker. In this paradigm, the soulmate is a romantic relationship. Pardon me, I just threw up in my mouth a little.
I do believe in reincarnation. I do not know in what form we are reincarnated, whether it is a transmigration of the whole soul, or whether the soul acts as catalyst to personality. I read something on this tonight that really struck a chord with me, that the soul is like the flame of a candle, and as one candle is dying another can be lit from the flame. Is it then the same flame? What I do not believe in is the function of linear time outside of this form of reality. Even if there is a complete transmigration of the whole soul from one life to the next, I don’t believe that that sequence is linear.
Here’s my problem with the whole romantic soulmate, that one person in the world perfectly matched to another who “completes” them:
- If you reread my post about truth, I think that our beliefs and perception of the world is greatly colored by the social norms, attitudes and beliefs in which we were raised. We may reject them, but we reject them for something else viable still within that culture. Scouser’s comment on British Empire is a good example. Scouser, in case you don’t know what a scouser is, is British. Would he have different ideas about international affairs if he was born 100 years ago? Most certainly.
- What if I was raised and heartfeltly embraced certain prejudices, attitudes and beliefs about a certain group of people, and then my soul mate was born into that group? What if my soulmate was born in another country, one which I don’t speak the language and he/she doesn’t speak mine?
- What if my soulmate was the person next door who suffered a ruptured AVM and was catatonic before I was born?
- Are two people ever perfectly matched? Granted, there are a lucky few who are incredibly compatible, and I count Scouser and me in that number. But is it ever so perfect that there is no conflict whatsoever? I truly, emphatically doubt that. That is why the whole idea of romantic soulmates seems to me more of a cop-out than anything else. It seems an easy excuse not to work on a relationship: obviously this person isn’t my soulmate, so it’s futile to work on it.
Tags: destiny, free will, predetermination, reincarnation, Scouser, soulmates
Truth
Posted by binkbeck | Filed under Omphalokepsis
Truth? Or Dare? Is there a difference?
One of the many issues I’ve taken on for myself is whether there exists an objective, absolute truth. I’ve been thinking about this since I was in high school, had many debates, discussions and near fights about it. It has influenced my spiritual path, my political beliefs, my relationships, and the way I see the world. Ideally, our courts are set up with structured ways, rules and customs of discovering truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. And they fail. Not always. It is a fallible system, because we are fallible creatures.
I’ve said before that I wonder about our limitations regarding our ability to receive sensory input. I remember in college, having a discussion with Torch about Ayn Rand. At the time, I could understand and believe some of the things she espoused, but there were others that completely eluded me, and one of the main ones was her insistence of relying on what could be seen, what could be witnessed, what could be perceived by the five senses. That part didn’t make sense to me, seemed too limiting. It assumes that we all perceive information the same way, and that our brains process it identically. Time after time, that has proven not to be true.
For the record, I do believe there is an objective truth, and I believe that it is out of reach. I think that many people try to reach it, they aspire to it. Some take short-cuts with religion, stereotypes, cultural norms and mob thought. I strongly reject that the majority is right, in fact I’m more likely to take more care in scrutinizing something that is decided by a larger group of people.
I’m reading a series of articles called Responsible Thinking.
- What makes us think that we are so much smarter than those people who thought the witches were endangering their children or the world was flat or the Jews were a menace to society? It’s easy for us to know these things were wrong now, with the benefit of hindsight and when the people around us all agree that they were wrong. But would we have known it back when the problem occurred, if we were subject to the same influences as those who supported the false positions?
I know that I am an intelligent person who can apply concepts of logic to information received, but I do not know that I am free from the influence of the people around me. I’ve made mistakes, so many mistakes, in my life. No, I don’t always think things through. In every single decision I’ve made in my life, I have never had all the information I needed to make that decision with complete confidence of acting within the truth. Looking back, I can fill in some of the blanks, but I have to be careful not to criticize myself for what I couldn’t have known then.
Personally, according to my moral code, there is a difference between responsibility and blame. In those situations in which there were unintended consequences based on information I couldn’t have known, I am still responsible, and I have an obligation to respond, to try to fix, to make right. But I don’t accept guilt or blame. In those situations in which I know something to be true and act (or don’t act) despite that or ignore it, then I deserve blame. Lack of omniscience does not get a person off the hook, but it does mitigate guilt/blame/shame.
When I was at CURF, I had a sociology professor who, on the first day of class, told us that he was a racist because he received and profited by all the advantages of being born a white male to a Protestant and relatively affluent family in our society. His racism was de facto, and he’d been fighting it ever since. He said that he, personally, could never level the playing field, but he would work every day of his life toward that goal, in his own thoughts, in his actions, in his associations and causes. He said that he personally didn’t believe that race or skin color or religious affiliation or gender preference, etc., made one person better or worse than another. In his skull, he didn’t feel like a racist, and that was the danger. Because most white people don’t, and yet the system continues because they don’t suffer because of it. Was he telling the truth?
Tags: morality, religion, truth
Doesn’t translate…
Posted by binkbeck | Filed under Uncategorized
Mamihlapinatapai means “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.”
Why can’t we have words like that in English?
