2.6.98
My friend wrote this to me after I apologized for going on about myself to her in an email:
"That's OK because you are the lone brain in the vat and the rest of us were just created as sensual stimuli for your enjoyment / torment anyway."
That's hilarious! And so true...		 Here’s what I wrote, in a tangle, yesterday as the news hit:
Downloaded only minutes ago was a message from my G-ma. In it she said she’d put money down at a retirement home. … I don’t even know how I feel yet, besides anger and I guess submission. Didn’t I predict she would just do it suddenly, all the while saying she was just looking? Even though I expected this, I didn’t expect it to be so fast. She said the apartment opens up March 1. One month from now. That’s soon. She didn’t say whether or not she is planning to move in then. She didn’t say the cost, nor even tell me anything about the place. At the moment, I don’t care. I only care that other people might move the remainder of my stuff out of what is my childhood home. I can’t make a trip back before July. (I could, but it would cost me a lot of money and in the life-span continuum, it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense for me to fly home to move my stuff to storage.) What’s going to happen to the house? Sell it? Rent it? What about the car? G-ma has too much stuff to put into an apartment. What will she get rid of? I hope nothing I would want to keep. I remember rummaging through my Mom’s stuff while at the Auctioneer’s place picking out quickly things I wanted to keep but someone else had decided to toss. Painful memory. It’s hard to resist the parallels.

Since then, I’ve felt upset and then better. I called her today - no more of this email crap for important stuff - and talked for longer than is wise on an directly dialed international call. This is what I told my cousin about the conversation:

We talked a lot and I feel better. I drilled her with questions, the answers to which make me feel better. It's still hard for me to think of her moving out of "my" house, but I feel confident that she is doing what SHE wants to do. I've asked her to keep me posted about moving and stuff. I'm trying to decide if I want to come home or not to help. Will depend on if the company will help us pay. I told her my concerns about the move and she's noted them. Like, she might have stuff I want and I wouldn't want it to get tossed. Mostly, I want to make sure anything connected to my mom gets saved.

She seems happy in her decision and that makes me feel OK. I was worried that she was thinking more of others than of herself, which was a possibility. I am still stunned by the pace. I’m thinking about it and the longer I do, the better I feel. I’m not worried about losing material things I would’ve wanted to keep now. G-ma assured me that anything remotely related to my mom would be put aside for me. I told her of the particular things to keep an eye out for, like letters my mom wrote to me that I can’t find now. I asked her to save pictures. Other things of G-ma’s I might want are not so important. A few years back I asked G-ma if I could have her wedding ring. She was wearing it on her pinky one day and I asked where she got it. I thought it was new. She told me what it was and that she had worn it for 35 years but now her fingers were bigger and it only fit on her pinky. I thought it was the coolest thing and asked to have it. A very special piece of her life, a thing that was with her constantly for 35 years; I can’t think of anything better of hers to have with me; I don’t need anything else.

I was telling her lots of my feelings, needing to hear them expressed out loud to the person associated with them. She told me, "Don’t get yourself upset." Which made me more upset: angry. I told her I had every right to be upset because this was a big change for all of us and it would be a worse statement if I didn’t show worry or sadness because that would mean I didn’t care. She continued on telling me not to be upset. Uhhh! That’s so hard. I swear every member of my maternal family would rather not feel anything at all! Any show of emotion and BAM! They just have this way of only communicating logic that makes those of us with expressive emotions feel like we’re hysterical. Yeah, "hysterical" fits that just so nicely.

I picked up the black & white photos I took during the trip to Soraksan. Some of them are really good and others quite washed out. I’m trying to decide if it was them or me at fault. Didn’t have a green filter, just a polarizer I didn’t feel like using half the time. On the way there I was thinking about how I felt alone in my feelings about my G-ma, and that led to thinking about feeling isolated in general.

I remembered awhile back telling Dave’s mom that her email etiquette was lacking to the extent that I felt neglected over here. Separated. It’s easier to send small notes daily in sort of a dialogue than to treat email like a letter when questions aren’t answered and the contents just tell what you’ve been doing. It just doesn’t work, you know? She tried writing often, but I still didn’t feel better. When I feel neglected in that way, it’s expressed as anger. I’m really resentful with anger and I don’t let it go. I hold grudges - can hold them for years. Don’t cross me man! Heh. Anyway, so I still feel anger. Obviously, it isn’t just the email thing.

It’s not like I think that they (meaning people on the other side of the ocean) are leaving me, that I am losing them. Rather, I am leaving them and no one is noticing. Aha. Today’s epiphany. They are too confident that I will continue to be close even across this distance. I feel so far away from that life over there (pointing east) not only in distance, but emotionally, and intellectually. I wrote about this before. I’m mad that no one notices this distance and that no one is chasing me like I would pursue someone I cared about who seemed to be slipping away. Instead I just get little letter-emails telling me what’s going on in their lives. At some point I start yelling at the monitor: "I don’t give a shit about what so and so is doing! Tell me something I can engage in!

You know what? It’s the weekend and my sweetie and I have great plans (read: eating lots of good food). Weekly soojaebee tonight (even though I had it earlier this week), then tomorrow shopping for ski pants and dinner at the Hard Rock Café. Ooo, I can’t wait for a veggie burger. OH! And X-Files is on tonight. I’m feeling like ice cream too.

Dave just called:

 "Scully, this is Mulder."
"Mulder! Where are you?"

LOL

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