Greenstorm's Journal

Note: the bottom part of this post is important to me. If you don't want to read th ewhole thing, I recommend going from the ninth paragraph down or so, rather than from the top

It's been a very odd week, all told. Shifts in my lifestyle are a-happenin'. Some of the changes I like, some I don't like, but I think they're probably all related, pushing each other along in a ball of consequences. These are the changes I initiated in the move to Tillie's.

Before last night, I'd slept at home for something like four nights in a row. I may well have not done that for just over a year and a half. It's an odd thing to think about, because right now I'm sharing the little one-bedroom apartment with Tillie, all my stuff is packed, it's the time I could realistically be expected to be away a lot. Instead I make choices which involve me staying at home rather than, say, going to Graham's or Juggler's overnight so often.

Part of this choice stems from a bit of a pickup in the stuff I need to do in my four-day work-week. Things have become more cleanly compressed into those days, so they're very busy, and I need to get so sleep and wake up early on them-- not prime date evenings, and close to pointless with Juggler sometimes because of how late he gets home from work. So, it just makes sense to stay at home and get the sleep I need.

Part of it comes from my attempts to eat more reasonably-- home is where the not-eating-out food is.

Part of it is because of assorted rat stuff-- I want to see my babies more, because I love them, and I also need to do more rat maintenance for the whole allergy situation.

All of the above is compounded by the fact that I can get home every day, so I end up there to do that stuff, and I also go through and feel homey there and choose, often, to cancel things and stay in.

I'm not sure I like some of the consequences-- namely, I'm really not getting much time to slow down and talk to Juggler or Graham. Hopefully this is a temporary thing, caused by Graham's allergies, my weirdness to scheduling, and my busy work-week instead of some sort of "the habit has been broken so it ain't happening anymore" sort of thing. I figure, in two weeks I'll worry a bit, and more after the move, if I still need to worry.

Anyways, this whole thing looks like it's turning into the reason I moved: I want to spend more time at home with my babies I said, and now, after an adjustment period, I am. It's good. It's definite change. It's a shift in th elifestyle I've had for a very, very long time. If it keeps shifting this way, I might be breaking ten-year records. If it keeps shifting this way, I might throw out the phrase distributed living and be some sort of a normal person in this regard.

On an intensely related but hard to link verbally note, I spent a lot of yesterday with Bevan. We walked around downtown and Stanley Park in the rain, getting wet, while I was dressed like a rock start and wearing my contacts. We talked. We then headed back to his place. Now, Bevan is the oldest of four boys. I have three younger brothers who are in approximately the same age range (mine are about two years younger than his). They live in a graciously laid-out house with a dog who is very like the dog I grew up with, and two parents.

I have trouble conveying the way this felt properly. We sat at the big wooden kitchen table by the windows (it's always a big wooden kitchen table, they're harder to destroy) and I drank tea to warm my fingers. Boys thudded down the staircase, thumpthumpthump as they jumped the landings. Bevan did this too. They drifted through the kitchen moodily or grandstanded through as the case may be and chatted. They spoke in brother-speak to each other, where no words were mistaken because these people has learned language together and had so much shared background. His mom made me tea. His dad showed him how to put pizza in the oven.

I remember that for a lot of my life I lived in this, and it was love. Dad wasn't always crazy, mom wasn't always depressed, there were days and times like this when I felt held to the world as if by the thickest glue and I never wanted to struggle. At one point I said to Bevan, if this were my home I'd be sitting here with a book. Do you know how many times I did that, going up and sitting at the big wooden table and reading when supper was being prepared, and the boys would congregate as they got hungry, and the dogs would be under the table, and there was just that sense of people who belonged there? I usually read during dinner, or dad would tell me to put the book away and I'd do it reluctantly for the first five minutes. Our stairs were better than Bevan's, the landings were spaced so you could jump from landing to landing and never touch the stairs once. We had two dogs with nails to click on the floor.

And right now I just sit here typing with my eyes blurred and try to fit words to the situation, and I feel this overwhelming urge to violence, to shoving these memories into your head so that you'll understand, because they're too real and too big and too intense to convey any other way. I don't want to delicately choose words to evoke. I want you to have been there.

Because of this, because of yesterday, an enormous part of my life has been given back to me. Kynnin, I don't know if you read this, but you're the only person outside my family who remembers what my home was like, and that was only after the divorce when we rattled around like peas in that huge house. My own family has burned it out, the bad parts tainting our memoried so that we never go back there and we lose the memories in the shunning.

Bevan's been very good for me in this way twice now. He reminds me a lot of Kynnin, intellectually and physically, and I've rediscovered my enjoyment of abstract talk with him without being too shadowed by memories. Now there's my family.

I'm feeling intensely grateful right now for all the people in my life. I think I have a Big Six now instead of a Big Four: Bevan (as above), Tillie (take the bedroom tonight), Juggler (OMFG a trustworthy boy), Trevor (just liking someone is enough for years and years of friendship), CrazyChris (ironically, reminding me how to be sane with the emotions I'm given), and Graham (for emotional entanglement baybee).

These people are my friends, and also the edges of my soul; they're responsible for my being a part of that vast(ly cliched but real and true) current of humanity.

So there.

Love y'all.

So I'm done The Beauty Myth by one of these Naomis (anyone who writes about women's political stuff seems to be named Naomi) and given the book to Mom, from whom it will trickle to Juggler. Now I must find The Once And Future King by TH White, and a collection of Jonathan Swift. I've decided I'll spend some money on books once in awhile so I can have the joy of lending them out until they disappear after I've read them.

The other night I learned that my biological dad left my mom because of violence, not the other way around (she didn't leave him). I knew he'd been violent, but mom was too (not young but) naive and inexperienced to know it was a problem. My dad, OTOH, was trained in military stuff and freaked out over these incidents that happened, like, once every six months. He was scared he'd lose control, and do something really bad (other than, like, just sending mom to the emergency room for stitches). He just left, poof, one day... and he never came back. Funny, that's always the thing I was scared of guys doing to me. I was one and a half at the time, I wonder...

My dad's brother was a high school teacher with five kids who one day ran away with one of his students.

I was very-almost aborted on my dad's part, because after the prognancy started he decided suddenly he didn't want another kid (he was paying child-support on one). Mom was like, 'nope, I already made the decision to have this one, you do what you want'. He decided, then, that he actually did want me.