A Force For Good?

So here's me feeling like absolute crap because I don't want to go to bed alone (The Juggler lives elsewhere, the SO works nights, the Exotic lives overseas) and so I'm pulling up all this stuff and pretending it's important. It's not. What's really important?

I hate you all. I need you, right now, and no one's here for me. I'm there for you when you need me, why are you not here for me? This is not fair. I'm lonely.

I don't really hate anyone, of course. I'm just lonely and that ends up fluctuating through a whole bunch of wild defense emotions, like anger and resentment. Realistically I'm not going to do anything about it, not yet -- maybe call the Juggler if he's still up but I've been monopolising him lately and I don't want to interfere in his time with the Other Woman -- but it would take a whole bunch of major changes that I'm not willing to make to find some way not to be alone at night. I don't have more to give another person, or more time for another person, and none of the three can accommodate right now. So, famine in the midst of plenty. Water, water everywhere... but no drinking. A little salt in the stew and the mornings are sweeter for their companionship if I only make it through this unscathed.

It sure gets me through my other issues while I'm procrastinating.

Love is remaining open to another even when it hurts, even when the open hole leaks internal fluids because it's momentarily empty.

Singing Sunlight and Construction

If you had been watching me you probably wouldn't realise I'd swung so much between now and last night. I don't really run around crying and then cackling in joyous glee. Still, I'm up right now, and I was down last night, and there's a world of difference between the two.

But, what's not to be happy about? The Juggler ended up emailing me last night to say could he please call me -- could he, would I like him to, how likely is that to send someone into hysterics in that situation? So I got company and talk and got to plan the weekend. I'm going to drag him and The Other Woman to a garden center and spend all their money. Well, not all, but I think I've got some ideas for the start of some bones. This will be an edible landscaping thing for the most part, with fragrance where there's no food. I like double uses in my plants.

So definitely blueberries and I'm thinking a creeping thyme lawn. I'm sort of an exotic edibles fan myself but I don't want to give them anything too marginal. I'm thinking an arctic kiwi, too, and ...well, the thing is anything we get will probably need to be moved next year unless we do some serious reshaping of the space right now. Possible...

So, but. Someone cared. It's a beautiful morning, just perfect for minimalist sundresses, and right now I'm on a date with The Exotic (an internet date, I can type in my livejournal in between, go figure) and later on I've got a date with the SO. I'll be alone again at night but there's no sense borrowing trouble...

Also, I have not yet spoken about the Garden. I will elucidate on The Garden at no great remove from now.

Oh, yeah...

And why construction? Because some roadwork through the beautiful soft cool/warm morning air drifting in the open window woke me at six am. I got to sleep at, erm, four am. Luckily it didn't seem to last long. Construction is a very summery thing, I think.

It's now officially summer. Rejoice!

Brutal Stability

Beautiful day. Lazy skin-temperature summer warmth with cottonwood fluff floating everywhere. Sunny, perfect, my roses are blooming, my plants need me to be their mommy. Unbeliebable. Book-reading naked on the sofa in a stripe of sunlight, or on wreck beach, weather.

Okay, so you have a seesaw. The kind that's basically a board put over the bar in the middle with a seat on either end. It comes with the basic Life Package Deal.

If you're the only one on the thing you can do whatever the hell you want. You bash yourself up, sure, but hey? So what. You can climb up one edge -- carefully -- and stand in the middle and make it go back and forth and back and forth so the ends whip wildly around. You can sleep on it.

Then you start adding other people. And the other people are all on their own seesaws. Stick them on the ends and the ends start jerking up and down if they do and you're left standing there in the middle trying to keep your balance.

This sounds fun, right? It is fun. But if you care about these people suddenly there you are trying to stand up and keep your balance without pushing them off the seesaw and without jiggling your own too much to get in the way of theirs. The one big balancing act metaphor extended? Make sense? No, good.

That's the long way of saying that I feel a responsibility to keep control of my emotions when it impacts the people I love. Duh, you say? Well, no. This idea of being completely accountable to myself for my actions, the idea that I have control of my actions -- and so whatever I do is mine, my own, and not someone else's fault -- that's a big one. What gets to me is that it seems to be internalised first, and now I'm starting to intellectually realise it's there.

This is not a feeling or a thing I can take for granted. This is something completely new, completely strange, completely beautiful -- this is the fact that there are things in the world that are important besides me and that's something I can't really grasp in words and hold out to you. That's something that just is inside me now and that I would never, never, never have believed any human could achieve if you asked me when I was fifteen. To care about someone enough to alter your behaviour, even if it hurts? To put off gratification for something? Pfah! Humans weren't like that, then.

So this is what's been happening lately, two examples:

This morning during my date (yes, I'm on a roleplaying date with the Exotic still and talking on livejournal at the same time) I started talking about my weekend plans with the Exotic. I'm going over to the Juggler and the Other Woman's place: they have my garden, there's lots of talk there, it's in the city where I feel more connected, there are things we want to get done. I have kind of spent the last two weeks more or less straight there. (Two and a half? Who knows). He misses me when I'm gone even though I can get in contact with him there and he with me -- we won't go into why. So he says:

I can't promise you I won't break down this weekend.

I hear:

Don't go over this weekend, stop seeing the Juggler, stay home and do nothing to reassure me, give up your interests.

I get mad. Not a little mad, really truly angry. Now this is where I'd normally be flapping that seesaw back and forth. But instead what do I do? I say.... I'm angry, I don't know what to say. We switch from internet to telephone. I whine for about five minutes miserably, then I say:

I realise you're not asking me not to do anything, you're just trying to warn me so that I know in advance and can make decisions accordingly.

Which is, really, no more than the honest truth. What does this mean?

It means I never got a good chance to get angry at the Exotic. I never got to yell and scream. I never got to show him 'my side' of the story -- there was no my side. There was just him trying to be helpful, and me... cooperating, even though it was not the greatest piece of news I'd ever heard because I want him to be happy. What the hell sort of monster of self-control climbs down off a good mad in order to understand something that limits her and help another person feel better? Where did I learn to do it? How? Why is it that even when I realised I was doing it I didn't stop, but continued instead to be reasonable?

Now that I can do this it means that I have to. It's empowering to be able to do it, but it would be liberating to not take responsibility for it and just do whatever the hell I felt like because it wasn't my fault.

The other story comes right down to sex, pure and simple.

The Juggler and I are practicing controlled escalation of our relationship, at least in a purely arbitrary-social-physical-hierarchy sense whereby, say, oral sex is ruled as somehow less high on the scale than penetration/intercourse. This is because it helps the Exotic to deal with the fact that it's happening far away and he feels left out. Basically, the Exotic lets me know when something is okay and them I'm free to escalate to that point.

If I were given free preference I'd be escalating a lot more quickly than I am.

So sometimes, on the phone, while I'm sitting there beside the Juggler, the Exotic will tell me, 'I think it's okay for you to have actual sex now.'

What do I do? Do I pounce on that, take him up on the offer, hang up quickly, indulge? No, I do not. I say, 'think about it for a little bit and put it in writing in an email to the group, I don't want you to be pushed or rushed.' Heartbreakingly, I did this because I thought he might change his mind. And he did.

And I'm obeying those guidelines. I'm not squidging around them, I'm not stepping over them just a little, I'm not ignoring them because if he's going to say yes sooner or later it doesn't matter when it starts.

Talk about self-denial. Talk about compensating for someone else's stuff gently, about not taking advantage of weak moments, about not pressing for something I'd really like, about...

When did I learn to do this stuff? Who is doing this stuff? I'm not a good enough person, I'm not a strong enough person, to do this well. So what's going on?

What's going on is the web. What's going on is that my insecurity and fear of losing these people is pushing me to do good things so that I'm worthy of them. There are so many awesome people in my life. If I do something really stupid they'll all see it, all hear about it, and all judge me accordingly. It's not just a matter of one person getting messed up by something I do -- it's a matter of losing everything, and suddenly everything seems like a lot. This is me living up to standards. It's incredible.

And it is, in some ways, terrible. Owning all this stuff means I'll never have a day where I can just do whatever I want, whenever I want, no matter what it is. There are always other people to consider, always other feelings to keep in mind, always this goodness in me to live up to. It's brutal. I'm literally forced to do this, by myself, and from myself I have no escape.

I guess this is life, grown-up style. Let's see how well I can do.

Why I Love The Internet

Someone, please laugh. She didn't get it. Roleplay exerpt, important names removed to avoid search engine hits:

(Namecensored) smiles, "Well...she's short, and young, probably about my age." she says vaguely, waving her hand around slightly. "She sometimes has a puppy with her." she adds trying to be helpful.
(Mychar) tilts her head the other way, grinning impishly again. "Are there a lot of them here? I don't remember having seen that many."
(Namecensored) looks at (Mychar) curiously, "Do you mean dogs?" she asks somewhat confused.
(Mychar) nods quickly in response. "Yep, presh. I had a slinker when I was little, and I've seen some others, but I've never seen too many terran animals around."
(Namecensored) shrugs, "Not too many dogs around. Valerie and I both enjoy the company of the dogs and we are both busy, and don't want relationships now." she says by way of explanation.
(Mychar) blinks at that, her silvery eyelashes sweeping up in surprise. "Don't want relationships, presh? I thought humans were uptight about..." She trails into silence and glances down at the animal, one eyebrow lifting in amusement.
(The Dog) looks up at (Mychar) with equal amusement. (Namecensored) smiles slightly, "Well...we are both busy working, and relationships take time to grow, time that the both of us don't have, and Valerie doesn't want to have one." she stops, "If you want to know more, you'd have to speak with Valerie herself. Its her business not mine, and I've probably already said too much." she says before falling silent.
(Mychar) shakes her head quickly, the amused smile lingering on her face without rancour of any kind. "Of course, presh. I just didn't know you guys did that sort of thing. It doesn't bother me any."


In short: pure clueless innocence. Okay, so it was within the context of a roleplay, but still...

Every Hour on the Hour!

It's the Greenstorm Reality Internet Network! Bringing you all the best pickin's from Greenstorm's brain. It'll settle down this weekend. Here goes:

I've got the garden preliminary-watered. That is, I hadn't done it for four days so things were pretty dry and the mulch (mushroom manure, I'm on the third story balcony in pots. My medium is sunshine mix, sometimes with added peat, mulched with mushroom manure) was resisting water a little bit. Two of my roses, JFK and either Heritage or Brother Cadfael (I didn't label them) were pretty dry and requires a lot of trickling as the soil'd pulled away from the sides of the pots.

So tomorrow I go out and fertilise before I leave for the weekend -- miracle gro, 20-20-20, which even at high dilution I don't want to use on perfectly dry roots.

I've got a lot of blooms out there. Earnest Markham clematis is blooming, fading slowly from a brilliant COLOUR to a less brilliant silvery purple-maroon. One bloom, but beautiful -- I can't wait until next year.

For roses, the other one that's either Heritage or Brother Cadfael is blooming (I think it's Heritage and the other is Cadfael but I'm not 100% until they're both out at once) as is JFK, Love, Abraham Darby... okay, not that many. But Cecile Bruenner, the other of Heritage and Cadfael, and reine des violettes are covered in buds, and reine and tentative-Cadfael are showing colour. My Sterling Silvers are doing terribly. I am very tempted to trash them and start over. Ye gods, -kill- one....? I'll think about it.

I've got violets coming up nearly everywhere. Weeds, they say, on the East coast. They're not hard to pull up where they're not wanted, though, and how could anyone have too many violets? I have one growing in with reine, it's going to be the neatest muscari-crocus-rose-violet cottage garden style pot I have.

The honeysuckle has finally begun wrapping around the bamboo stakes I set up for it. They were a little wide for it to be comfortable. The rosemary, a creeping variety, has shot down a couple feet and is almost touching the deck. Alyssum is blooming like crazy everywhere and it smells wonderful -- white, in case you're wondering, self-seeded from last year.

My mint (orange, chocolate, and apple) is looking a little buggy. I think that's because it's under the overhang -- need to move the gianormous pots out to the railing. My Cecile Bruenner is covered in aphids, all those lovely sprays of new flowers full of them, but I gave it a soap spray and there are tons of ladybugs around (one was completely black, which was neat).

I'm hoping the honeysuckle doesn't get aphidy. It did last year and it's harder to control than the roses.

Kiwi and bamboo growing like madmen, the kiwi blossoms have stopped looking like little tucked-up bubbles and have grown stalks to hang down. the bamboo shot at least two feet while I was gone, I need to keep the water on it to provide stuff to fill all those expanded cells. the culm diameter is certainly bigger on these new shoots, which is really good. I want big bamboo, dammit!

I'm worried about the soil that the serbian spruce is in but it does seem to be doing fine, and the clay should help it conserve moisture. It looks happy enough. The other red clematis, the Ville de Lyon, is growing unbelievably quickly as well.

The baby's breath is lovely, the carnations are working their way towards full flower, the geraniums that overwintered themselves (!!!!!!!) are sending up flowers now. My rosemary cuttings appear to have taken, or at least not to be dead, the lavender ones are looking a little rougher but hanging in there. The original scented geranium (attar of roses) is huge, and my passiflora cuttings are hardened off.

To the Other Woman's garden I will bring:

o basil (not yet hardened off)
o a passiflora cutting for their fence (or maybe their shed, they have trellis space...)
o the jalepeno seedlings which badly need pricking out
o orange mint (they will need to acquire pots cause I'm not putting invasive species in the ground)
o and chocolate mint ditto


Oh! The two miracles of the day:

My clematis cutting that I stupidly tried to overwinter inside and thought I'd killed is tossing up leaves despite being stuck unwatered in the sun in a tiny pot for months!

My liquid amber minirose that was looking terrible when it came out of winter got cut back about a month ago to the ground and it's absolutely vibrant with tons of new leaves now!

I really need to get on defoliating those roses next year if it's mild. It makes worlds of difference in general health, and doing it in the spring when everything's already growing sucks.

Indoors the white bird of paradise is growing yet another leaf, and I need to harden it off for the summer. The jade is looking better with regular watering even though I haven't chopped it yet. The african violets have mostly stopped flowering and need to be juggled until they end up in a good sun exposure -- with the changing slant of the sun nothing's certain and safe.

My ground cherries need to go in big outside pots. :( And, I believe that's enough for now. Time for my second date of the day and/or more gardening. Let's see if I can pry the SO from his computer...

Discovered!

Someone is commenting on my livejournal! Someone with a brain is commenting on the content of my livejournal! I really hadn't considered that possibility. Hey-O, Breklor, and thanks. This is entertaining. :)

Unfortunately this seems to be expanding my social circle. I'm never going to get around to the supporting roles at this rate.