Subtle Glow

This was taken right across from Harvard. We were just on our way back to the train station when it started to rain. I stuck the camera up and flashed the picture as we were running by.

Then I came home and played around with cross processing.

that just maybe, it might be a problem if one were to look up random domain names to see if they were registered?

No?

Ok, how about the sheer excitement and nerdy delight when I try to navigate to www.normal.com only to find that NO SUCH SITE EXISTS?!

and, to go a step further in my state of insanity I anxiously try to register the domain only to find it actually IS taken.

Only some asshat registered it but wants to keep it all for their bloody self! When I had such plans for it! and they didn’t even put up a stinking page or ANYTHING!

Ok, well maybe I only thought of what to do with it 10.4 seconds ago but it was gonna be COOL dammit! And some fucktard took the name, AND normal.net and all the other NORMAL domain “dot” anything is taken all for their very own stinky self. And they’re not even DOING anything with them! I mean, what IS THAT?!!

Stingy fucks.

Well, it’s very clear here WHO has the problem.

Tomorrow marks one year since I started blogging. Happy blog birthday to me! Although, it’s kind of lonely, considering no one but me knows about this place (and I have the site stats to prove it, ha!). But I’m sure I’ll post something on my old blog, which is still up and running.

I have a friend who can keep a secret like you wouldn’t believe. I was talking to her tonight and trying to pry some info out of her about a former co-worker of ours (because I’m a nosy biatch who likes to take advantage of our friendship and her knowledge of company dirt like that). She wasn’t giving in though. I told her, “oh my gawd, you are a friggn’ VAULT!”

Seriously, I don’t even work for the same company anymore - what’s the harm in telling me some inside bullshit about FORMER employees? I mean, come on - I told her how much her boss makes, and how much her boss’ boss makes. What the hell?

Which brings me to my next point. *I* am totally NOT a vault, when it comes to my own secrets of course.

My point? Well, just give me time and I’m sure I’ll let it slip to at least a COUPLE people that I have this site, and that I abandoned my old blog, and started a new one. Because I can’t keep my own shit secret, that’s why.

Except for one thing… which I have not yet shared here. Don’t worry, though - I am sure I will eventually. Cause I’m like that - all non-vaulty-like.

The Leafy Seadragon… one of my favorites!

A few pics from our trip to the Birch Aquarium in La Jolla last month. I am so impressed with my camera!!

That whole thing about it repeating itself… ugh.

My parents were very young when they got married and had me. My mom turned 17 about 5 weeks before she gave birth to me. My father had just turned 19.

Not surprisingly, they divorced when I was about 5. By then they also had my brother, who was around 2. Family life was ugly prior to the divorce, during the divorce, and pretty much every day after that. My mom found it increasingly more difficult to make ends meet, caring for two young children while she worked for meager wages. She was 22, uneducated and unskilled, and had little help from my father.

As a result, when I was 7 my brother and I went to live with our father. The next 5 years were a living nightmare set in hell. It was the worst thing we have ever been through. It set the ball rolling for many problems in future years, including undiagnosed and untreated depression throughout my teen years. The only way I made it through those years without swallowing an entire bottle of tranquilizers that both my father and step-mother were addicted to was knowing that there was an out. My mother was working her way through college in order get a job that would allow her to support us on her own. The living arrangement was temporary. Had that not been the plan all along, I would have given up.

I did in fact try to kill myself, probably more than once, but only once was I actually serious about it. Oddly enough it was after we moved back in with my mom. I spent so long thinking that would solve everything, make everything better. And then it happened, and I couldn’t figure out why I was still struggling. I gathered up every pill I could find in the house - which turned out to be a bunch of cold medicine. I swallowed them a handfull at a time, until my throat starting closing with every swallow. Then I forced them down one at a time until they were gone. I went to bed and waited. My ears started to ring, my head felt cloudy, I got dry heaves. It was my mother’s birthday. I didn’t leave a note. I obviously didn’t die. In fact no one ever knew. I never went to the hospital, had my stomach pumped, nothing. Everything worked its way through my system eventually and life went on.

It wasn’t until I was 19 or 20 that I started trying to figure out just WHAT was wrong with me. I was working part time and going to college - my days off I spent trying to get out of bed. The days I did get out of bed, I would no more shower and get dressed and had no energy to do anything but go back to bed. I was living with a boyfriend at the time and he would make comments about how I really seemed to spend a lot of time… well, doing nothing. I had stopped all contact with my father by that time, but he found out how to get in touch with me and we spoke on the phone - once. My boyfriend was shaken by the amount of rage he saw coming out of me during that phone call. He ended up prying the phone from my hand and hanging up on my father. He never allowed another one of that man’s calls to reach me - and I preferred it that way.

So here it is, twenty years later. As vividly as I recall all of that, I know it is in the past. It’s history. I stopped counting the number of years it has been since I last heard from or even about the man who was my father.

Every once in awhile, that past creeps in and clouds my judgment. I know this, because I have an almost 7 year-old son now. His father and I are divorced. He lives with me, and his dad is very involved. For as much as things are similar now to the way they were then, I know that this is a different family than that one. My son mentions wanting to spend more time with his father - at times he wants to go and live with him. The more it comes up the more I am sent into a tailspin. I have no idea what the right decision is. In some respect, I think about the decisions my mom made back then - when I was 7 - and I think she gave up to easily. If I let my son go live with his father, am I giving up too easily? Will my son look back in twenty years and think the same about me? Am I afraid that the next five years will contain the horrors that I went through at the same age? Yes. Is it most likely just fear and unlikely to be the reality? Yes, and Yes. Do I have any idea how to handle it? A resounding No.

The reality is, I don’t know what will happen. There is no way to know for sure. Obviously we can’t see into the future and know anything for certain. It’s just too much to think about for me - with the timing of everything.

So far, so good. I asked The Boy to let mom sleep in (”Please don’t even come in my room until I am awake.”) and you know what? He didn’t come in and wake me up!!

I don’t know what it is with children and why they think that just because they are awake, everyone else must want to be, too! They just don’t know it!

But the fact that I was able to sleep in and catch up on some much needed rest, could quite possibly mark the start of a Good Day. And we need as many of those as we can get.

How do you know if you love someone?

I’m just wondering, you know, because I don’t really know how to tell. How do you know you love someone while you love them, rather than later when you realize you loved them.

Ok, so I got the domain registered. I got the hosting up and running. I got the nameservers transferred, and I got the damn blog shit installed all cool and everything. woohoo!

So NOW I can start really playing. But not tonight, I’m fricken tired.