slipped.

like a baby bird that fell out of it's nest, tonight i'm feeling refused by my mother-land.  right now i can't seem to escape the barriers thrown up by being raised in the deep south by a northwestern woman who believed in holistic healing, taught me to speak in a non-regional dialect, and never made anything with a dollop of bacon grease in it.  now that my granny and daddy pace (my father's father) have passed on, i somehow feel that my ties to one half of my roots have deteriorated.  now all that brings me back to that sweet honey soaked south that i remember so vividly is my father's mississippi lilt on the other end of a phone line.  and the more that i try and double back across the escape route i embraced so far north, the more reasons i find to mourn.

and here's another one.  i'm realizing that my half-breed lineage is a non-starter in so many ways.  i am familiar enough to southerners to warrant a polite nod, foreign enough to not be trusted fully, and not quite exotically foreign enough to be fascinating or sought.  i am feeling vaguely ostracized by the heritage i want more and more to embrace because i cannot be easily recognized as 'one's own kind'. 

i've seen myself from the third person just now as a functional working part of a greater whole.  but when the components are stripped to just a few, i no longer fit into the blueprint.  i am a cog, not a more sophisticated and indispensable thing than that, and i find humility in this.   

partially, i'm sure, it is this introverted-ness that must be plied with alcohol at parties to relinquish it's control.  unfortunately, it also causes slips of the tongue into ridiculous non-sequiturs or too much information that drives people away.  so i sit, silly with my half-witted speech, watching the people i've come to care for find camaraderie amongst themselves, and i find my sense of satisfaction in the maternal pride of seeing them flourish together.

and most of the time, i feel filled with respect for them as they come together and embrace their commonalities and grow and swell because of one another.  i cherish this about them, and it is usually enough for me to bare witness to that.  i think i just need a while to be quiet with myself, and i'll remember that i'm just being theatrical and it will all go back to normal.  but for right now, in this moment, i miss la and bigga and stefanie and the all too infrequent feeling of being embraced by my sister.

   

if the sun were shining i could see the happy.

the paralegal in our firm is taking off a few days in january to go to obama's inauguration. several of my friends are doing the same. what an amazing moment to be present for. i wish i could be there to experience that surge of electricity and wash of hope. this past week has walked on air in so many ways. everyone has been so desperate for a reason to feel anything besides the desperation and futility that has seemed to weigh down each individual molecule of air these past several years. i'm so proud to have participated in that historic event, i'm so proud of people for taking a deep breath and pushing open the door for change.

how utterly depressing, though, that the very black voting base that mobilized to support obama contributed so heavily to the passing of proposition 8, especially in california where they now treat their slaughterhouse cattle with more dignity and respect than they treat their neighbors.

but, cultural stigmas run deep and are hard to shake. there's no getting around the fact that their culture is very male oriented and masculinity is emphasized so very heavily. and what's less masculine than two dudes cuddling? well, three dudes spooning, maybe.

proposition 4 did get voted down, much to my relief. how stupid are people to believe that a terrified teenager is going to go to her parents to ask them to sign a permission slip allowing her to get an abortion? how 'sarah's' life would have been saved if her parents had known was not made very clear, i'm assuming that she had some sort of disorder that caused her to hemorrhage or someting, they probably should have backed that up with more info. not just 'teen dies during abortion because her parent's didn't know!!' and how gullible to believe that's why the people who wanted it voted in supported the proposition in the first place. right, a parent's right to know, that's why they were in favor. it couldn't possibly be the hope that if your dad knows you're pregnant and want an abortion, he'll beat the shit out of you with a bible and make you keep it. making abortions more difficult to get won't curb reckless teen behavior, in fact it'll just drive teen girls to more desperate measures.

why is the puppy cam off line?!?!?!?

the winter of our discontent, prequel.

today i can't stop staring at this. the state i was born in didn't ratify the nineteenth amendment until 1984. two years after i was born. even though it doesn't affect anything tangible in my life, i still feel betrayed in a ridiculous way. and ashamed to have fully half of my lineage rooted deep in a place that viewed my gender as property and second class citizen's until 24 years ago when, more than likely, they decided to ratify the federal law to humor us womenfolk and to downplay their reputation as the country's least socially and intellectually advanced state.

when i was a kid we used to buoy ourselves up with the old 'at least we aren't alabama!' which was consistently the state on the last rung, educationally speaking. but they ratified in 1953, thirty years before we did. a silver lining on a very black cloud, but still.

now that my grandparents have passed, and nobody that i care about still lives there, i'm content to forget that i spent the first decade of my life stewing in humanity's backwash. and i know that there are less advanced places in the world. but that's just it. we weren't supposed to be 'another part of the world', we were supposed to be part of america, land of the 'free'.

and it's not just my hometown, and it doesn't seem any less dismal just because women now have the right to vote, and it's not confined to women's rights or civil rights or tax reform or foreign policy... i'm just feeling the pre-election day cynicism that suffocates any glimmer of hope or warm feeling i may occasionally harbor for this great land of ours. i just don't trust my fellow americans to step up to the plate and make the right decision. they're too slow and stupid and easily impressed by headlines. they are terrified of change, of movement, of truth, of spice. they would rather complain about the price of gas than drive a honda civic. god forbid that we have to adjust our astronomically extravagant standards for living which were unreasonable and beyond our capacity to maintain in the first place. we've been living a lie and now we don't want to deal with our own fucking realities. if i could expat i would.

no fever, no fantasy.

well, now that the fever has broken mostly i'm feeling a bit more grounded in reality and a little less taken with hyperbole.

last night i cut off the hem of a thrift store dress, smeared my face in too dark cheap make-up, slipped into a pair of too dark pantyhose and went to a charming halloween party hosted by wonder woman as a-man-da's inappropriately trashy secretary. and i proceeded to stuff my face with the world's best vegetarian sausage balls. who knew?

let me just say that peggy noir's house is so amazingly 'adult' in a materialized straight from southern living, tastefully artistic kitsch mixed with swanky new furniture and nicely restored antiques way that i can't hardly fathom belongs to someone in my age group. it reminded me of being at my mother's house. in a wonderful and beautiful way. creating a magnificent home was always something my mom was outstanding at.

when i got up this morning and looked underneath the layer of post-house-guest filth that still clung to every surface in my home, it occured to me that maybe because it's the junior version of the house i grew up in, peggy's house also represents the physical embodiment of the exact opposite of what my design style has developed in to.

i'm getting to the age where who you are and the directions you choose become halfway set (as much as anything ever does, anyway). and, in spite of more than a decade of balking this mindset, i sometimes feel that gentle nudging reminder that i'm 'supposed to be' building a socially acceptable, modeled after an idealized version of our parents' living space like a lot of my other contemporaries. mostly i'm over it, but there's no denying the occaisional twinge of fear that i come off as 'unsuccesful' or 'slovenly' because i don't own any new furniture. living off of thrift store fare is supposed to be something relished only by college kids. but i genuinely love it. even if i weren't consigned to it because of no money and no plastic, i'd prefer it over anything you can buy at crate & barrel. my darling d put it best, 'i'm always going to be more excited by something great that i find for five dollars than fifty'. true enough.

but, i've always been destined to be a crazy old lady with pink hair and a collection of human teeth and bird bones (i've got that part down already). at least i won't have any credit card debt.