Aileen’s Blog

… I am so damn wordy!  I just looked at what folks see when they go to my blog page and I think I went blind.  Like literally.  Thank god I learned my homerow keys in grade school.  I was just going to post something up here to get a minute away from working on these two final papers that are due on Wednesday… but I think I’ll actually go running right back to them, because seeing all this tiny little print has made me feel really insane.  WHY, W H Y IS IT SO SMALL???

… would’ve turned 22 last Wednesday.  Yeah, that’s all.  Happy Birthday, J.C.!  You see I grew up Catholic, and my religion taught me that after death, we fly around the internet reading web logs.  Not quite what I had in mind for the afterlife, either.  But who are we to question the pope?  We are as the dust beneath his jeweled slippers, and I bet he’d tell us that to our faces.

Here’s a poem of J.C.’s  that I’m figuring he wouldn’t mind me posting somewhere, b/c he had it published in his school’s lit mag.  He and I were in Malaga, Spain with our parents for a week, and they wanted to go to a flamenco dinner show one night that J.C. and I were just not feeling.  We were at that point in The Family Vacation where everyone just needs a break from family time.  J.C. and I had instructions to stay in the room or down in the sort of "rec center" of the place we were staying… it would be night soon, we were in a foreign country with no way to contact each other, so Mom’s safety concerns for us weren’t totally unreasonable… but as soon as Mom & Papa were out, J.C. and I put our bathing suits on and snuck out to the beach.  We’d walked on the beach together in daylight with our parents following somewhere behind us– and it was always fun, I’d been living in CA for 2 years at that point and every time I saw him it was like talking to a different, older version of the kid I’d grown up with– but it was different walking alone.  And at night.  We watched the sunset, and as the moon rose and grew bright, all of the stones and shells in the waters at our feet became magical.  And we decided we would take them all home, loading the pockets of J.C.’s swim trunks with our loot, cradling wet rocks in the fronts of our T-shirts like we were kangaroos and they was our babies.  "We’re gonna come home with like GIANT GARBAGE BAGS of ROCKS" he said, wide-eyed, pantomiming gathering the whole beach into his arms and trying to bag it in frenzied armloads.  I laughed– as I always laughed, as just knowing that he wanted me to laugh was always enough to make me laugh– and thought about how I was always going to have this memory, that there on a beach in Spain I was probably more connected to my little brother than I could have been if we’d just reunited back home, and I hoped that it was special for him, too.

Later that night, I saw his back through the window to our balcony.  He was sitting alone, all of the rocks he’d collected spread out on the table in front of him.  Just sitting back in the white plastic chair, lanky adolescent arms on the armrests, the round white moon over him and over the sea beyond him.  I thought of stepping out too, but decided not.  We would have a lot more time together, to talk and to laugh.  For that night I left J.C. to his thoughts, drank tea alone, and wrote a note to a friend on a napkin from a restauraunt we’d been to.  I stuck my head out to say goodnight to J.C., and held myself back from stepping out and hugging him.  I heard him come in and get ready for bed pretty soon after.  The next morning, all of his rocks were spread over the bathroom counters and around the back and edge of the sink.  He had washed them all, and set them out to dry.  It was such a beautiful, carefully laid-out scene that I took a photo of it with my huge, steel-body SLR that I still have to this day.

Rocks from Spain

me and my sister

or rather

my sister and I

would take walks on the beach

and we’d talk

about our parents

and some random this and that

while I hopped around in the sand like

an idiot

trying to grip my toes and stay balanced

as the Mediterranean would

roll in from the sunset

and make a fool of me

while my sister laughed at me

and along the way

I’d find these rocks

glistening in the tide

like jewels

and I picked one up

for each friend I figured would appreciate

that sort of thing

later at night

sitting on the balcony

overlooking the sea

I laid all the rocks out on a table

the moonlight reflecting off of each one

like a display case

a display case of jewels

I saw all of my friends

and I actually missed home

UCSF Campus Calendar

7th Annual National Survivors of Suicide Day

Where: Parnassus

When: November 19, 2005, 8:30 AM

Join us for a live webcast.  Every year, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention(AFSP) links simultaneous survivors conferences throughout the country through a live national broadcast by satellite or web.  This nationwide event is an opportunity for those who have survived the tragedy of suicide loss to come together for support, healing, information and empowerment.  UCSF Dept. of Psychiatry faculty & staff will moderate a discussion group after the webcast for attendees to share with each other & ask questions.  Admission is FREE and open to anyone who has lost a loved one to suicide.

Info URL: http://www.afsp.org/survivor/conference.htm

I wanted to go to that this morning. And I thought that I should: it was going to be a beautiful, sunny Saturday—the perfect kind of day to take the little one to SF, spend as much time at this conference as he might let me, and then make a day of it, maybe go to a park or just explore the area around UCSF.  But I dunno, I just didn’t.  I guess this entry is to prove (to me) that I’m not running away.

August 4, 2001 was also a beautiful, sunny Saturday.  I skipped out on an Infant CPR class that morning because I didn’t feel like walking the 6 blocks from home to the hospital.  Little did I know that only 20 days later, I would walk those 6 blocks in labor, pausing at each intersection to have a contraction.  I had dreamt of my little brother, J.C., for the past two nights: first a dream where he was sitting beside me in a theater waiting for a Broadway musical-type show to begin.  He seemed pretty happy and quite young—he was smaller than me, it was when I was still his “big” sister—and right before waking up I put my right arm over his shoulders and I hugged him around the back of his neck, and it made me feel so happy that I really, really felt sad to wake up, and find that I wasn’t actually hugging J.C.  The next night, Friday, I dreamt that I was leaving an unfinished home, but it was done enough that there was a working fridge there, and I was really concerned about whether or not there was food in there for J.C.  Because for some reason I was leaving but he was going to be there alone after I left.  I saw him again—not like we were in the same room together, but the way that you can see people in the third-person in dreams, as if you’re just watching… but actually I guess it’s like he did look at me and see me, but we didn’t really connect.  He just looked somber.  Not happy, not sad.  He was J.C., but he looked more serious than I’d ever seen him, and I felt so intensely that I wanted there to be tasty food in the fridge and stuff in the house that he would like, that might help him to feel happy while he was there alone.

When I woke up Saturday morning from this dream I felt sad, but it quickly dissipated with the beautiful sunlight and with that relieved feeling you have when you wake up from a sad dream and find that it was just a dream.  I was thinking of him so much and missing him so much after dreaming intense dreams of him for two days, that that morning I pulled out the poems he’d written that had been selected for publication a month or so before in his high school’s literary magazine—and that of course my mom had sent me photocopies of—just so that I could read them and marvel at how deep and thoughtful a 17-year old he’d grown into.  I thought how funny it would be if I called the house, and instead of the usual “Hey, how’s it going?  How’s school & stuff?  Cool, I’m just returning Mom’s call…” non-conversation we would usually have while waiting for Mom to pick up the phone, I instead talked to my little brother, had a conversation with him on the phone like the young adult I knew he really was, and told him how proud I was of him, how just the last time I’d talked with Kuya Cris on the phone we’d talked about him, and how proud of him we were and how much we looked forward to seeing how he’d continue to grow.  That we loved him and were excited about how funny and smart and just generally good he’d turned out to be.  I thought of how uncomfortable it would make him for me to gush at him about how I wanted to hug him, and it made me smile.  I even got so far as thinking that I could always call and just say that I’d dreamt of him for 2 nights in a row, and not embarrass him by saying that the dreams made me really miss him, made me really want to see him in person again, and hug him for real, not in a dream.

But that’s as far as I got before Mom called.  Sounding low-voiced, and not quite like Mom: “Papa’s got something to tell you.”

I can’t remember what else she said because whatever it was just made me feel anxious, it was only a few words, perhaps, “it’s something bad.  It’s really really bad” but I automatically tried to sound calm and reassuring for her, and when she passed the phone to Papa I was ready to hear that he was leaving Mom.

Papa, sounding higher-voiced and not quite like Papa: “Are you sitting down, baby?” “Yeah.” [Silence.  I consciously put a smile in my voice.] “Yeah—in fact I’m actually lying down!"

Pause, then “Oh, you’re lying down?”  Papa sounded so weird, and I got more anxious, and tried to sound more reassuring.  I can’t even remember what I babbled, or how I dragged it out of Papa, it was just such a weird and horrible non-conversation, where I didn’t know what was going on or what I could do to make it better but there was something so completely wrong, it’s like he wasn’t even Papa anymore.  Words I do remember are “It’s J.C.” and “J.C. killed himself.”

And I know I made Papa and then poor Mom describe everything to me in more graphic detail than I think they could handle, but it was what I felt like I needed to hear.  Because if I didn’t hear them tell me every piece of the story they could figure out, and describe every terrible, horrible scene, then how could I know they weren’t mistaken?  What if they only thought J.C. had killed himself, but actually he could be made O.K. again?  I heard all the things they told me though and knew there could be no mistake; I talked to Papa and to Mom and to Kuya Cris and had them tell me every detail again and again, and when all was done I knew that those must be the only three people in my family now.  I had never cared for the symmetry of four.  I always felt there was something special about the number five: five fingers, five toes.  Five people in my family.

Well, now it’s  Sunday 11/20, but since I started the story, I feel kinda committed. I may as well just finish it up.

I didn’t fly east for J.C.’s funeral.  I would have if I could have seen him, but Mom assured me that it was going to be a closed-casket.  So on that Sunday, August 5, I finished researching and writing a final paper that I had begun on Friday, the 3rd.  That week I wrapped up all the summer classes I was taking so that I could take the fall semester off.  The next week I walked my huge self into the ground trying to take care of things I’d been neglecting because of summer finals: I met with my academic advisor to solidify my post-baby academic plans, went to the bank to tie up loose ends over checks from my stolen checkbook that had been used, dragged around my giant metal cart (Mom & Papa bought it for me when they visited in July) to buy groceries, and do laundry.  And the week after that, I walked to the hospital and had a baby.

I went back to school when he was four months old; he didn’t have a space in UCB’s childcare yet, but only one professor I spoke with seemed to have qualms about me bringing him to class.  So on Thursday mornings I dropped him off with my apartment’s building manager, and other than that we were always together: in class, at the library, at the store, in study group.  Stressed-out college kids would tell me that getting to see a baby in class was the highlight of their week, that they could walk in wrapped up in the higher-education rat race, and they would walk our of their class with the two of us smiling and hopeful, maybe even thinking of their own mothers, or of their little nieces and nephews back home.  He began the semester fairly lumpy and helpless, and finished the semester a flirty, sociable eight-month old, accustomed to sitting quietly through university lectures, accustomed to being smiled at and waved to and finally able to sit up independently and look around, trying to draw even more smiling and waving.  He brought out such sweetness and love in people; one classmate even had us over to his dorm in the evenings and the three of us took over the downstairs rec room, where there was a piano.  The young guy– I don’t know if he was actually younger than me, or if I just already felt older than I was– would play music and sing us songs, from Beatles to blues, while baby crawled around exploring and laughing, and I ran around after him.  I’ll always remember that semester as a terribly hard, but special and beautiful time.

The following fall there was a space for him in UCB’s daycare, and by then I was quite close to graduating.  I had tried so hard to get him into this wonderful, locally-renowned childcare system, though—and once I graduated, who KNEW what kind of childcare I’d be able to buy him—that I decided to add a second minor to my degree, in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender studies.  And I was happy that I did, because when he was diagnosed with autism at the start of the following fall semester, a couple of weeks after his second birthday, the university childcare center was full of knowledgeable, supportive adults, and little peers who had known him since they were all infants together, so they were accustomed enough to him to still try to play with him, even as their language skills developed, and his did not.

So, THAT year was primarily about school and dealing with autism, with all the assessments and therapies and appointments (he worked with an occupational therapist, a speech therapist, a psychologist, a behavioral therapist), and trying to plan and prepare for his entry into the public school system, because at three years old he would no longer qualify for the therapies he was currently receiving through the federal early intervention program, and instead he would begin receiving services through Berkeley Unified School District.

We made it through that year, he transitioned into a full-inclusion preschool the next fall (half kids with a variety of special needs, and half typically-developing peers), I got him a scholarship to continue receiving speech therapy from Children’s Hospital Oakland, and it was pretty much only after he’d made it through that tough transition semester, and I was set for graduation and graduate school, that it really hit me that I had never dealt, in any real way, with losing J.C.  With J.C. coming home alone and killing himself.

So in April I joined a short-term “Survivors of Suicide” support group.  Eight sessions—the first one of which was on my birthday!—with the WORST facilitator in the world.  She was so awkward and tended to monopolize the space, totally cutting off some people’s sharing with what I’m sure she thought were nuggets of wisdom and experience.  She meant well, but I think the group was most useful just as a place where we could all go each week and cry and moan to people who weren’t really going to be bothered by our tears and despair.  I mean, of course we cared about each other the way anyone cares for someone who’s crying.  But we could cry and openly experience loss and guilt and anger and it wasn’t going to stress these people out as much as it would stress out, say, our mothers or partners, were they to see us suffering like this.  It was one of those experiences where you just get out of it what you put in, so I went ahead and threw in, and we had a couple of our best meetings on the two sessions when our regular facilitator had to be absent, and there was a much less domineering intern filling in, who actually let us talk to each other.

So yeah, I don’t even know where all this schpiel was heading.  I know it started with National Survivors of Suicide Day.  But I’d be a liar to say that that was what made me think about all this stuff, since I think about J.C. every single day.  And almost every day, I am reminded that he killed himself.  It’s really amazing how often stories come up where I would reference my little brother, but now I don’t tell them anymore, because after the laughter at how funny or clever he is people tend to ask, “So how old is he now?” or “Does your brother live out here too, or back in Buffalo?”, stuff like that.  And it’s always a conversation killer to tell people your younger brother is dead.  And people, not knowing what to say after something like that, often just ask how old he was, or “what happened??”  And “he was seventeen” and “he killed himself” are just no way to ever get a conversation back to being fun and pleasant.

So, for as much as I talk about him, it’s as if I didn’t grow up with my little brother at all.  In fact, when people do ask about my family—again, it comes up surprisingly often, I think because I have a little one it feels natural for people to ask if I have family in the area, and when I seem nonchalant about my family being across the continent they wonder if I’m from a big family—they hear that it’s just my mom, dad, and older brother in NY, and it’s so weird to think how it sounds like we grew up just two siblings, a big brother and little sister, sometimes people have even said things like “Oh, you were the baby!”  When of course I wasn’t.  We had a baby boy, who was always “the Baby Boy,” or “bubung,” and some of my earliest memories are of being three-years old, imitating with my six-year old sister how our mom would sing-song to J.C., “The baby, the baby, the baby.  The baby, the baby of mommy.”  I sometimes want to tell people that no, I did not grow up the baby girl with one big brother, in a family that had an oldest boy.  I grew up the middle child in a family where I was grouped with my big sister—they even dressed us alike—and my parents only recognized one boy– and not only was he The Boy, he was the baby.  Thus J.C. was marked as different from the start, while my older sister and I were treated much the same… in fact they’d try to make us MORE the same sometimes: I remember Papa having me walk back and forth with him and my sister sitting on the stairs watching, so they could both then get up and copy me, trying to figure out how to make my big sis walk less “like a boy.”

So I grew up with a big sister I idolized and could never be as cool as—and I had a little brother who looked up to me, and admired me.  And I came to admire him, as we grew out of our childhood rivalries and seemingly overnight he got tall and smart, bigger than me, and added wit and compassion to his natural goofy humor and smart mouth.  I always figured there would be a time when he was older, more grown-up, like maybe when he graduated at the end of that school year, to tell him how proud I was of him, how much I admired and loved him and how much I looked forward to me and him and Kuya Cris all being grown together, taking care of each other and of our parents as we all aged and followed our various paths in life.  I just didn’t know that as my life path was about to take a hugely different turn from what any of us had ever planned for ourselves—young parenthood—his path was coming to an end.

I’ve been heavily and completely involved in really intense job-training for a couple weeks now—yesterday I learned how to physically restrain dangerous children, pin them to the ground, support someone else who has to take a kid down by putting a shirt or mat or something under the kid’s head, so kid doesn’t get rug-burns on their face—I totally cannot even deal.  So tonight, I REFUSE to deal or process or revisit any decisions made or words said today, and instead revisit 2 weeks ago today, before training madness started, when I was actually on top of ALL of my work—for the masters, credential, ASL certification, other part-time job with preschooler and his family—and I was SO CHILL.

At work in the morning a wild little boy who everyone treats like trouble told me I was his favorite teacher, the sun was shining, and I was headed towards the streetcar I take to SF State.  The stop I get on at is across the street from a BART station, and outside the station was a group of folks holding signs calling for a walk-out (of school, work, etc.) to rally and march at Civic Center, apparently choosing Nov. 2nd because it marks Bush’s reelection.  Augment my lazy description of what it was by reading about it at http://www.indybay.org/, if you like.  At any rate cars were honking their support as they drove by, and I realized from their signs that this was organized by a group I’d never heard of, apparently called The World Can’t Wait.  I like to see different groups—it seems like every rally/protest/march around here for the past year or so has been plastered with “A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition” signs, so it’s nice to see other organizations getting their voices and their names out into the public consciousness.  If they actually get their act together enough to arrange a happening and invite speakers (Cindy Sheehan was coming to this one), I like to show up just ‘cause. I could have no clue what they’re really about, I’ve sometimes found out that I actually am not down with them at all, but I’ll still check them out just b/c they’re new and they’re serious enough to organize.  I might add my voice, add my head to their head count, but I guess generally I’ll just see what they’re about.  Plus if it’s the weekend, it could be a fun excursion for the little one.

So, I cross the street, passing cars honking support for the cheering, chanting, stoked and upbeat sign-holders, and go down into BART.  I get out at Civic Center and emerge from BART into UN Plaza… and smack dab into the middle of a bustling Farmers Market!!  (Look at this really lovely newspaper article at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/01/11/LVG9J42OIA1.DTL.

It is FULL of really interesting info, and then comes back to the Farmers Market for the last like five paragraphs.  Come on, don’t you want to learn something today??)  Now you KNOW I love me some Farmers Market, but I swore I would just walk straight through WITHOUT SHOPPING, check out this protest and then get the hell back to campus and do homework.

I do stop to buy a mocha from an elderly Asian couple though: just because I’m not shopping, doesn’t mean I’d pass up a chance to buy an unnecessary hot caffeinated beverage.  The man with the giant Palestinian flag getting coffee ahead of me is someone I recognize from Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley (vendor or street-person, I can’t remember which but definitely someone I saw with that kind of consistency when I lived up there).  “Hey, where’s it happening today?” “Up there little sister, front of City Hall.” Yeah, I know: I just wanted to see if hearing your voice would help me remember how I know you.  It doesn’t though, and after dropping a bunch of brown sugar in his cup he steps aside and I ask the squinting, impossibly wrinkled man behind the stand for a mocha. He nods his white-haired, baseball-capped head as if in approval and while he makes it, I pay the elderly woman and add Shrimp Rolls to my order—2 DOLLARS for 3 rolls wrapped in broad translucent noodles and stuffed with mint, lettuce, rice noodles, tofu, I think there was lime juice in there and two big poached shrimps in each roll—yummy!  I feel lame for having to pay with a $10, but she doesn’t mind and it’s cool because while she’s getting my change, I get to be in on this conversation:

(Homeless man appears at my elbow) “HEY, mama!”
(Elderly Asian woman, who’d been pretty cordial but formal with me, giggles like schoolgirl.)
“How you been? Can I get a Sobe?”
(Elderly woman smiling, getting a Sobe bottle) “Yeah, it’s a long time. Ha?”
(Man takes the bottle and sticks it in his bag, continuing to chat up the lady) “Yeah, you’ve been away for while! We all missed you around here…” etc., all to her apparent delight.

That’s a sweet little exchange, right?  I like to see people light up and get happy, and I like to see people who’re selling things decide to give them away, and I like Farmers Markets and I like rallies by groups different from the usual suspects… so one might wonder, what more could I ask for out of one afternoon?

Well some people are just never satisfied.  I may have headed out to protest and march, but I ended up on a raging consumerist binge.  I started out able to fool myself that I was quite on-task: I was just going to buy a few bumper stickers from a guy who had them laid out on the grass at the border of the rally: 3 for $5, and I wanted “Another World is Possible” (blue on white), “Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is most important that you do it” (a Ghandi quote in white text on green), and this Cree Indian prophecy: “Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money” (brown on white with green vines at the top and bottom—nice-looking, right? I think they’re probably at www.peaceproject.com).    But then further up into the rally, I saw a table with lots of stickers and buttons laid out and they were only asking a dollar donation for each thing, so of course I wanted to support that and blah-de-blah and bought FIVE more stickers: “Blessed are the peacemakers” for a Catholic acquaintance who is ambivalent about the war(s), a few other gift ones, and “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness”– a quote of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who I learned to admire in a Nonviolence Today class at Berkeley. I think I’ll post from an interview with him I just saw online in another entry. Because I know you care. I wonder who’s reading this? Oh well, I guess that’s why it’s my blog: it’s like my chance to just blab without having to have ANY consideration for my audience—possibly without even HAVING an audience!

So ANYHOW, I walk away from this table with 5 stickers, I’ve already got the 3 stickers from earlier, and here my friends is where the downward spiral begins.  Because what do I do, now that I’ve bought stickers for like 5 different cars (when I supposedly don’t even support driving)?  I head back to the first guy, and buy 3 for $5… AGAIN. WHY, you ask?  Ostensibly the donation-for-stickers table reminded me that I’ve been on the lookout for square-shaped stickers for a few months, and I’d seen a few laid out on the grass that I liked.  But really, it’s just an illustration of the fact that I am so mindlessly, hopelessly addicted to retail that simply comparison-shopping for stickers at a rally can trigger my auto-transformation into a glassy-eyed, money-spending consumer.

Now with 11 stickers, I head into the farmers market, walk around browsing and eating a pear, and walk away with persimmons, green beans, and a big bushel of the dark green kind of dau gok (Chinese long beans)—all at a dollar a pound! COME ON IT WAS A STEAL!! That’s one of the things I love about Farmers Markers, how the prices can change based on what kind of day it is.  Plus I love how they actually make me want vegetables, since when I see vegetables in stores they do nothing for me and I never feel motivated to buy them.  In a Farmers Market though, you’re outdoors, there’s song in the air from people or even bands playing for donations, and you know that the money you spend there is going directly to the small farmers who’re selling it to you, rather than to a big retailer.

All right, so now I’ve got more stickers than I know what to do with, pounds of fruit and vegetables that I will surely regret having to carry around for the rest of the day, and am I sated?  Oh no.  In fact, it gets far, far worse.

I cross the street from UN plaza, and go into Marshalls.  That’s right, Marshalls department store—did I SAY it gets worse??  Here I wandered around looking at random stuff like discounted Baby Phat and Roca Wear (go on and crucify me, you righteous hippies!), and bath gift sets—I LOVE those things!  They’re just so attractively packaged, whenever I mean to buy just a bottle of moisturizer or something I almost always end up with a whole set of stuff that goes in a matching mesh bag that ties with a ribbon.  What’s perhaps most disturbing is that I was “shopping” here knowing FULL WELL that there’s not even a chance of me buying anything at a dept. store, since I decided before my last birthday that I won’t buy myself new clothes until after I turn 26—arbitrary I know, but I’m hoping it’ll finally break me of the habit I’ve developed these past few years of buying new clothes, and go back to just thrift-store shopping.  Which has been working out fine—but I still go into new-merchandise stores sometimes, not even buying anything, just to “shop.”  There, I admitted it. I am that much of an addict.  In fact I’m sure I’m beyond “addict” by now and well into “strung-out junkie” land.

Speaking of which, I then walked right out of Marshalls and through the Tenderloin to check out Ross.  Aw yeah you heard me: Ross Dress for Less.  I was happy as a shopping clam, hopping puddles of urine, excusing myself to walk head-down through sidewalk-spanning drug deals, sticking my face in my shoulder bag sometimes along the way just because the green smell of my pounds of produce was that irresistible (oh don’t look at me like that—there’s much more to be seen on those blocks than some chick smelling her purse), and when I landed at mothership Ross, I was quite happy I’d gone.  I got hugged on the leg by a beautiful little toddler, got asked my opinion by a couple cute Latino men who were trying on shimmery evening gowns, and of course, I got myself a bath gift set. I TOLD you I have a problem!  Why won’t you hear my cry for help?? Organic honey, and it’s a travel set so it’s these sweet little travel-size bottles… and I love it, really, like the honey-smelling child I never had.

So what, I’m a conflicted activist who leaves protests to go shopping.  In fact one of those stickers that I wanted said “Live simply, that others might simply live”—nice, well-phrased reminder that the planet’s resources aren’t limitless, right?  But on my oil-fueled car, and with my burgeoning home collections of shoes (hooray for the Chinatown Salvation Army, where almost all the shoes are EXACTLY MY SIZE!) and huge cheap earrings (hip-hooray for dollar stores!), there’s no way I can pull off that sticker without feeling hypocritical. I do hope I’ll reach a point in the way that I live my life where I *will* feel comfortable getting a sticker like that; maybe when I’m supporting biodiesel instead of using up fossil fuels, or when I can stick it on my bike instead of a car.  It’s all good, I’m a work in progress, and I honestly hope that I always will be.  I’m just happy that I’m living in a place where I feel able to TRY to be the person, the citizen, the mother that I want to be.  And it’s ok if what I often want these days is to drink cheap coffee, shop, and smell like honey.

Ah-ight, that was a whole lot of “thinking about myself time,” so the next time you see me self-indulging like this will probably be so I can process when something I feel weird about happens at new job.  Expect next post to begin: “After talking little Johnny down from punching himself repeatedly in the nose, I had some time to think while I drove the facility’s van through SF to the ER…”