Author: riggledo

A Thousand Words

~ riggledo ~ 4 Comments

I have never been a fan of paintings.  I’m not sure why.  My Paternal Grandmother was a painter and most of my family, including my mother (who has been divorced from my father for 33 years) has at least one of my Grandmother’s paintings in their home.  I do not.  I never cared and I never felt like sentimentality was a reason to possess or hang something that I don’t like.

I love photographs.  I desperately want to purchase a good 35mm digital camera and take a photography class.  I really enjoy a well thought out, unique photograph of a beautiful, or even just personally meaningful, vista.  I have photographs all around my house, mostly images of San Francisco.  I have no photographs of people… at all.  I’ve never had an interest in hanging pictures of people in my house.

I have a few pictures of my nieces and nephew pinned to a bulletin board in my office, but that’s it.  I’m not sure why there’s a difference, but there is.

When I take photographs, I almost never take pictures of people.  Some of my favorite photography subjects have been the beach, famous (and not so famous) San Francisco architecture, Sculpture, the fountains in Lake Bellagio (I still need to get that roll of film developed) and of course, Mischa.

I don’t take pictures of people.  Not strangers, not family, nobody.  And I sure don’t display them.  I’ve never understood why people do.

I’m sure this mentality lead to my feelings expressed in my recent blog posts, but what led to these feelings?  I remembered something at the end of my session with Deb; something I didn’t actually forget, just hadn’t thought about in a very long time.

When I was a kid, my father and step-monster used to take my Brother and Sister and me to get a portrait taken every year.  Every. Year.  Sometimes more than once.  Back in the day there was a portrait studio in Cincinnati, maybe still is, called Olan Mills.  Olan Mills offered free sessions to shoot your portraits and they made their money on the prints (at least that’s how I remember it.)

These experiences were always painful, drawn out and horrible.  They always resulted in tears.  I hated having my picture taken (some things never change) and I never wanted to do it.  If, however, I was going to have to have my picture taken, I wanted to at least be able to be comfortable doing it.  I wanted to wear clothes that I liked and I felt like I looked good in.  My father and step-monster had different opinions.

“Don’t you want the picture to look nice?” the step-monster would ask.  She always has a demeaning and over-bearing tone, even if/when she doesn’t mean to.  She would stand over and lean toward me and look at me with eyes that were probably uncomprehending, but looked angry to my seven-year-old self.

“I think I do look nice,” I would answer, meekly.  I meant what I said, but already knew I was going to lose this so-called battle.

“But don’t you want to look dressed up?” she would say, thinking this would clarify things.

“No!” I answered angrily.  I didn’t want to look “dressed up”.  I wasn’t comfortable “dressed up”.  And I didn’t have any “dressed up” clothes at my father’s house.

My father’s house was always dirty, and drafty and messy.  My mother says I always came home from my father’s house with a cold and with some sort of wound; a splinter or a cut or bruise.  The clothes I wore would be stained and ruined with motor oil or grease from a wood shop tool that wasn’t properly shielded.  So she stopped sending clothes with me, telling him instead to buy me clothes to have at his house.  So I had garage sale finds and TJ Maxx Bargain Bin finds that the Step-Monster bought for me, without my presence or input.  And she didn’t buy “dressed up” clothes because what would I need them for?

Their idea of “dressed up” was for me to wear hand me downs from my older brother, or worse, from one of the Step-Monster’s children who were eons older than I was.  A button-down collared, Oxford cloth shirt with the shoulder seams hanging low and a large gap in the collar, and a tie, with a double windsor from my father’s collection; that was their idea of dressed up.  And that was her idea of what our portrait should be.

I wanted to wear my corduroys and a modern t-shirt that I believed was stylish and trendy and would make me look better that I did on my own.  It wasn’t “dressed up” but that didn’t mean I didn’t look good.

Some parents have a bad habit of attempting to reason with a child, using logic that makes sense to them, but perhaps not to a seven year old, and when that attempt fails then resort to yelling and issuing commands.  And that is where we always found ourselves.

“Kevin, we don’t have time for this, go change your clothes,” my father would intone, loudly.

There was no point in arguing further and I would turn away, slowly, sullenly and drag my toes as I slunk off to put on the shirt and tie and pants that had been selected for me to wear.

And I would sob.

I didn’t want to have my picture taken.  I was ugly and I didn’t want to have to see it, or have other people see it for eternity.  I didn’t need a reminder of this life I was living and I didn’t want to take the fucking picture.

I didn’t want to take the picture, and I didn’t want to be forced to do something I didn’t want to do.  I didn’t want to have the power and the choice stripped away from me, compelled to violate my own free will.

And let’s face it.  I was seven.  I believed that if I made it a miserable enough experience, they would give in and not make us do it.  At the very least they would decide it wasn’t worth the trouble and never do it again…  Right?  Right?  Hello?  Is this thing on?

But don’t get me wrong.  My tears were real.  My anguish and desperation were real.  I would sob from the moment I shuffled off to dress as my master had commanded, until the moment we got into the studio and…  Well, I have to hand it to photographers who take those kinds of pictures.  Despite my genuine suffering and despair, they always managed to get me to smile and laugh and dare I say it, look happy.  The pictures would actually turn out as well as can be expected for a self-perceived to be ugly, genuinely UNphotogenic seven-year-old boy.

And my father and step-monster?

They never bought a single portrait.  Ever.

Just the way I am

~ riggledo ~ 5 Comments

Yesterday in therapy, I talked to Deb about the “Amber Alert” from last week.  I was surprised, as I told her the story, to hear the anger in my voice.  I really didn’t realize I was “angry” about the whole thing.  This is just Amber.  This is how she is.  And over the years, we have just grown apart because of it.

This time last year, my mother asked me if  I had gotten Amber’s Christmas card, a photo of her children.  I told  her I had not and she said she would forward me the one she got.  I told her it wasn’t necessary for her to do that.

“Aren’t you guys friends anymore?” my mother asked, astonished.

“Not really,” I answered her honestly.  “I mean, nothing really happened to end our friendship, we’ve just, sort of, disconnected.  We don’t really have anything in common anymore and we haven’t talked in ages.”  I told her the card didn’t mean anything to me and I didn’t have a burning desire to see the picture of the kids.  My mother seemed to find this hurtful in some way, using her “jewish mother” tone of voice to say, “Ooook.  I’ll just keep it then.  I like other people’s kids.”

It seems… maybe… that I might… have seemed a little hostile when talking about this card… maybe.  Deb asked me what it was about the card that bothered me.  At first I really didn’t know what she meant.  I didn’t realized that I was conveying serious displeasure about the subject.  I gave her a few answers:

“What’s the point?”

“It’s a waste.”

“Why do I want pictures of other people’s kids?”

None of these answers seemed to satisfy Deb.  “I think there’s more,” she kept saying.

I told her, I don’t understand why people send out pictures of their children as a Christmas card.  I’ve gotten them from other people as well.  People I don’t really interact with.  People who I’m no longer (or never was) close to.  People who can’t be bothered to give me the time of day for months and years at a time and then one day decide to send me a picture of their kids as a Christmas card, without bothering to personalize it in any way.

“It feels like an afterthought,” I told her, “like they didn’t really care that much.  I imagine them sitting down at their dinner table with a stack of these damn picture cards, a stack of envelopes and their rolodex.  They pick up a card, they right a nice greeting to the recipient and they pop it into the envelope and they send it on it’s way.  They get to the end of their list and there’s one card left.  ‘What should I do with this one?’ they wonder aloud.  ‘Eh.  I guess I could send it to Kevin.’

“The sentiment feels disingenuos.  Like I was nothing more than an afterhought and I wasn’t any more important than a quick flip of the wrist, and off the last card goes.

“I’m not attached to these people’s children, and they couldn’t even be bothered to write a simple ‘Merry Christmas.  Wish you were here.’  What’s the point?”

The answer still didn’t seem enough.  “I keep feeling like you’re looking for me to tell you that I’m some how jealous or envious of these people having families, but I swear to you, that thought has never entered my mind… Before right now.”

That’s when the real irony of the situation hit me.  I told my sister, in October, “I need good quality, non-cell phone digital pictures of the children so I can print them out and hang them on my office wall.”

“I know,” she replied.  “I need to take their picture for the Christmas card anyway.”  The thought crossed my mind that it was a lame card.  Nobody wants a card with pictures of other peoples’ kids.  But at least it would get me a picture of my neices and nephew.  Out of all the “christmas card” picutres of other people’s kids I got this year, the one person from whom I would have liked to, my sister, didn’t even send one to me.

Deb asked me for more.  More explanation why I was so unahppy to receive the child-photo-christmas cards.  Why did it feel disingenuos to me?  The only answer I could give her is that it felt one sided, like people were foisting upon me something I didn’t care about without any interest or concern about whether I was interested; without any interest or concern about me.

“Say more,” she prompted.

“To me,” I told her, “Friendship goes two ways.  Sure, we all want to talk about ourselves.  We all want people to listen to us as we tell them about ourselves.  But friendship?, is about talking about the other person.  Friendship is about asking the other person how they are doing.  What’s new with them?  What, if anything, do they need?  Hopefully, after they have answered those questions they will turn around and ask you about you, but if they don’t, that’s when you can say, ‘OK.  Glad to hear your doing well.’ and then proceed to tell them about you.

“THAT is what I didn’t get from Amber for a very long time.  It’s all one sided!”

“Of course it is!” Deb answered.  “You made it that way.  You didn’t tell her about you.”

“She didn’t ask about me.  She didn’t express a genuine interest about me.  She didn’t really want to know about me.”

“She didn’t?” Deb asked me.  “You said she asked about your love life.”

It’s true Amber always asked the dreaded “when-are-you-going-to-get-a-girlfriend-you-need-a-girlfriend-when-are-you-going-to-get-married?” questions, but she didn’t want to know what I would have told her, had I answered those questions honestly.  She didn’t want to know that I am attracted to strong, healthy, athletic men, preferably with a nice tan and not much hair below the neck.  She didin’t want to know that the kind of relationship I was interested in, the kind of sex I wanted to have, wasn’t going to result in the creation of a baby.  She didn’t want to know that the kind of marriage I would want is not even legal in 45 US States.  So I make sarcastic, sometimes even snide remarks, (“What are you?  My Grandmother?  Would you like to pinch my cheeks and talk about my punum too?”) and she either doesn’t get the point or she pretends not to and continues to push.

“So she doesn’t know the truth and the dialoge is one sided because she feels free to express, maybe even push, her thoughts and feelings and what she believes, but you don’t do the same.  And I think we see this over and over again where you form these relationships where you feel like you have to sit back and allow the other person to force their perspectives on you and you start to feel like you can’t express yourself and be who you are around them.  And then you start to accept this as how things are.  I’m concerned that you make it OK.  That you give people permission to do this to you.  And then you feel more and more like you can’t be who you are and be open and honest with people.”

…..

WELL, DUH!

Dream Weaver

~ riggledo ~ 2 Comments

(Be forewarned.  This gets ugly.)

~~~~~

I’ve been so torn about what to write about today that I’ve frittered away all my writing time not writing.  Dang it!

I’ve got some strong feelings and I’m not sure how to articulate them… Not like that’s ever stopped me before…

First of all, I had a strange dream this morning.  At first it wasn’t too big of a deal.  I dreamed that I was riding, as a passenger, in a small airplane with Lance Bass as the pilot.  It was some sort of celebration for him on his “last day as a member of *Nsync”.  I remember exactly three things from this part of the dream:

  1. Lance and I were apparently already friends.
  2. I asked him, “*Nsync still exists?”
  3. He did an unannounced barrel role in the plane and freaked everyone out.  (Can you even do barrel roles in non-fighter jet planes?)

The dream turned dark and disturbing when we returned to the air field, however.  Upon returning to the air field/airport all hell broke out as there was random and indiscriminate shooting taking place inside the hangar.  It gets weirder.  Somehow, and go with me here, Mischa, my cat, was the  one doing the shooting.  I don’t remember a lot of the details of this part of the dream but I remember that as the scene progressed and there was some “defensive shooting” being done, Mischa got shot in the chest.  Now that he was no longer shooting at people, I made my way over to him and scooped him up…

And took him to the vets office that was conveniently located to the side of the hangar, of course, because why wouldn’t it be?  I rushed in the door of the vets office with Mischa lying limp in my arms and heard his labored breathing as he fought against the air rushing in and out of the bullet hole in his chest…

And I told the vet to put him to sleep.  Without batting an eye or missing a beat, the vet, grabbed a syringe full of whatever they use to put animals to sleep and injected it into Mischa…

And I held Mischa in my arms and listened to his breathing slow and ease until…

I woke up.  Late, as usual, and rushing to get ready for what was supposed to be a fairly laid back day at work, but turned out instead to be one interruption after another.  Much of the day was spent thinking about this dream, until I went for my regular therapy session…

~~~~~

Actually…

I was going to say some things about the conversation I had with Deb, but I’m realizing I really need to mull it over some more, and that I should put that off until tomorrow, and that writing about my dream was a little more difficult than I expected and has me a little disjointed.  I suppose if I was smart I’d delete this whole post and go home, huh?

Sock It To Me

~ riggledo ~ 4 Comments

I’ve had a fairly uneventful couple of days.  And yet, I don’t know where the time went.  I feel like I don’t have a handle on things right now.  Not in a depressive, woah is me, kind of way exactly.  Just, time seems to run out all the time.  I don’t know where the time went and why I didn’t get more done with it.

Friday night I stayed up way too late working on my socks.  I finished them, except for the “grafting” at the end.  I didn’t know what that meant, or how it is done.  I mentioned that to Juana the other day and she said something about alternating knitting and purling and she threw out the name of some technique the name of which I can’t seem to remember, but makes me think of Kussmaul, which isn’t right because that’s the name of a type of breathing that relates to Insulin shock (excess sugar in the system) and has absolutely nothing to do with knitting – Clearly.

I brought the socks in today and Juana showed me how to finish them off.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it again, but at least I know who to ask next time, too.

But I stayed up until after 2:00 in the morning working on them and then slept until after noon on Saturday.  That’s a good way to lose valuable time right there.

On Saturday, I got up with a plan which very quickly fell by the wayside.  I ate some breakfast and watched TV while I worked on my menu for the week.  Well, I guess really I worked on my menu for the week while I ate breakfast and watched TV.  It was supposed to be a quick process but I was easily distracted and it took a few hours to complete the menu and my grocery list and head out to shop.  By the time I made the three stops I needed to make and came home with my loot it was after 8:00 and I still needed to take a shower.  My lofty plans of eating a healthy dinner of Salmon and Brown Rice were shot and I ended up eating left over pizza instead.

One of my stops on Saturday was at Bed, Bath and Beyond where I bought a flour sifter.  I had to go there because much to my surprise, I could not find one at Target.  I needed the flour sifter because Sunday morning I made scones.  I have been craving scones like my mother used to make, for years.  Not that there’s anything particularly special about the way my mother makes them, just that they were always hot and fresh and she put about fifteen times more sugar in them than the recipe calls for (which is only about one and half teaspoons.)

It’s not even a special recipe; it comes from the Betty Crocker cookbook.  The problem is, my Betty Crocker cookbook doesn’t have the scone recipe in it and my mother packed up all her cookbooks when she bought her house several years ago and they’re all stored in her attic where she can’t get to them and therefore couldn’t obtain the recipe for me.  Surprisingly it’s much harder to find on-line than you might think and I’ve been without a good scone recipe for years… until now.

You see, a couple of weeks ago, I had some bananas that were on their last leg and needed to be used or go to waste, so I made banana bread.  The recipe I have for banana bread calls for buttermilk.  I love buttermilk food products, but I detest buttermilk, go figure.  The smallest container I could buy of buttermilk was a quart and the banana bread calls for 1/2 cup.  Having a significant amount of left over buttermilk I needed to find some more recipes to use it in.  So I made biscuits.  They were pretty good.  A little denser and less flakey than I like.  I believe I over kneaded them.  I’ll know for next time.

I still had half a quart of buttermilk left and I needed to find something else to make.  I found an app on my iPhone for a recipe finder where you type in an ingredient and it gives you recipe options.  I found several recipes for blueberry muffins and I love blueberry muffins.  I lost track of which recipe was which and soon I ended up with a cream cheese muffin recipe that sounded really good but wasn’t a “blueberry” recipe.  I decided to take my chances and make it blueberry anyway, only not really knowing what I was doing and not wanting to get too far overboard I only used a 1/2 cup of blueberries for the whole recipe.  They did turn out pretty well but I wasn’t sure if there were enough blueberries so when I brought some into work the next day I offered my coworkers some “Theoretically Blueberry, Absolutely Cream Cheese Muffins.”  Theoretically blueberry, because there was a very real chance of someone getting a muffin with no actual blueberries in it.

While searching for buttermilk recipes and finding blueberry muffins, I also found a recipe for scones.  So I had to make them.  And I did.  And they were deeelishus.  And too many of them.  And too fattening.  I ate them while watching Winter Wipeout (which is not something I can crochet or knit while watching if I want to get the full effect) and while gearing up for my afternoon with Lil’B.

I wasn’t really sure what to do with him and I’m running low on creativity these days.  I started thinking about movies and thought he might like to see Tron: Legacy, but I wasn’t sure.  I don’t know that much about it and I never saw Tron so I didn’t really know if it was appropriate for him.  I put it out to Twitter because anytime you need a question answered you turn to Twitter, right? No?  Hmmm…  I asked “Any reason for a 9 yo to not see Tron?”  I got one answer, hours later, which simply said that if he has a short attention span he won’t be able to get through it.  I think the GI Joe fiasco last year proved that’s not a problem.

I arrived at Lil’B’s house to find a herd of people.  His uncle and his family, from Bakersfield, was visiting.  I wouldn’t have been surprised to have been sent away without Lil’B under the circumstances, but that thought never seemed to cross anyone’s mind.  While Lil’B was finishing getting ready some of his little cousins asked me what we were going to do.  I told them I wasn’t really sure and it depended on if Lil’B had something he wanted to do, and then I said, we might just go to a movie.  They started asking what movie and one of them suggested Tron: Legacy.  Lil’B came out of his room, ready to go and I asked him if he had anything specific he wanted to do.  He said, “I don’t know.” (Naturally)  I asked him if he had any interest in seeing Tron and he said, “I don’t know.” (Naturally) And then another of his cousins spoke up, “Ooo. Go see Little Fockers,” he said enthusiastically.  I missed bits and pieces of their conversation but I heard something about “shot in his penis” and this was funny, apparently.

Now I know what you’re thinking.  Little Fockers is rated PG-13 and Lil’B is only 9.  But his mother doesn’t care about such things and he has seen more than a few movies that were rated above his age bracket.  The movie was actually pretty good, though there were things about it that were a bit above his maturity level and I was a little uneasy from time to time.  After the movie I asked him what his favorite part of the movie was and he said it was when Jack and Greg got into a fight at the kids’ birthday party that had them thrashing about in a ball pit.  I asked him if he had any thoughts about or questions about anything that he heard or saw in the movie and he said he did not.  I hope that means he didn’t think much of the sexual innuendo and questionable moments and not that he was embarrassed to ask.

When I dropped him off his cousins and uncle were still at the house and the young boys came rushing up to ask what we had done.  Angel told them we saw Little Fockers and then he went into the bathroom.  The boys turned to me and asked “How do you get a big brother?”

I told them I didn’t really know.  “I know how to become a big brother.  I don’t know how to get a big brother.”

“I want a big brother!” one of them said.

And then the other said, “I want you to be my big brother!”

I was surprised.  “You do?” I asked.  “Why?”

He answered with a big grin on his face, “Because!  You’re cool!”

Knocking

~ riggledo ~ 4 Comments

I’ll be leaving work for the day shortly.  Before I leave, I always make a stop in the restroom so I’m ready for my grueling four mile (20 minute) commute home.  I know.  Feel sorry for me.  There is no way for me to get to the restroom from my office without passing the elevators and as I did so I saw a woman waiting who has been a thorn in my side since the day I started this job.  She’s evil and pushy and demanding and full of herself and I don’t like her one bit.  And in a second I’ll tell you how I really feel.

As I passed her all those thoughts rushed through my mind.  In an instant, I thought of how much I dislike this woman and all the reasons why.  I also thought of her daughter, who is, by chance, a well-known Olympic swimmer and household name; a former contestant on Dancing with the Stars; has judged Iron Chef America; and has a number of product endorsement deals.  Her daughter, who, from what you can tell by her public appearances, is a kind, sweet woman, liked by everyone.

I imagined this woman faced with the accusation of being all the things I said of her, feeling the need to defend herself and doing so by saying something along the lines of, “If me being evil and pushy and demanding and full of myself helped my daughter get where she is today then I’m glad to be all those things”, because this woman strikes me as being that kind of person; a stage mother, someone who might have pushed her daughter into being something she may or may not have wanted to be.

I couldn’t help but wonder about a childhood like that and then I thought about what it would be like to have those opportunities, whether they were desired or not.  And I thought about the opportunities I didn’t have growing up.

I’m glad I didn’t have parents who pushed me to be something they wanted me to be, without concern about what I wanted.  (OK, I just heard that in my head and I realize I very much had parents who pushed me to be things they wanted me to be, without concern for what I wanted, but in a very different context.)  I’m glad I wasn’t the disgruntled child of a stage mother pushing me to be a professional when all I wanted was to go play and be like normal kids.  I don’t think that would have been a great way for me to grow up, especially if I didn’t really know what I wanted to be or do.

On the other hand, I wish I had the opportunity to find out what I wanted to be or do.  I wish I had the option to experiment and find out what I really liked and the opportunity to pursue it full force; to be the best I could be at something I wanted to do.

I wish I had learned to play the piano.

I wish I had swimming lessons.

I wish I had learned to ice skate and ski.

I wish I had tennis lessons.

I wish I had acting and singing lessons.

I wish I had taken dance classes.

I wish I had all those things and anything else I wanted to try.

All those things cost money my parents didn’t have and I get that.

I can’t hold it against my parents that they couldn’t afford to give me these things, but I can’t help wonder what I might be like if I had those opportunities, not just to learn skills or develop talents, but the opportunity to be involved with things, to be active and social.

I wish I’d been encouraged to get out and interact with people, to participate in activities and events.  I wish I’d been encouraged to live life.

Instead I was encouraged, nay, I was ordered to sit back, stay out of the way, watch life pass me by and never be a part of it at all.

~~~~~

The woman in the elevator may be evil and pushy and demanding and full of herself, but she gave her daughter opportunities.  She encouraged her daughter to play a part in the world around her.  She created a world where her daughter could be somebody and live life.  How wrong can that be.

Besides, thanks to her, I have personally held in my own two hands two gold, two silver and one bronze olympic medals.  How many people can say that?