Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Your Toilet Works Perfectly

Okay, story time. About a week ago or so, our toilet and sink started making burbling, gurgling noises from time to time. About half a week ago, the toilet started to pool when flushed instead of flushing properly, and this problem became worse until the point where we needed to borrow our landlord's plunger, which is better than ours, and plunge at the toilet every time it was flushed to get the water level to lower. There was no resistance to the plunging, but the water just refused to flow, and tended to come back up.

We have been dealing with this for several days.

Just now, when I was in the kitchen, a tremendous gurgle started in the toilet, then that silenced and the kitchen sink gurgled back at it just as loudly. Then the toilet and the sink and even the bathroom drain gurgled together, with a slightly directional progression from kitchen through bathroom and then away. It made the counter and floor tremble, whatever it was. And now the toilet flushes just fine again.

It was as though some bizarre creature had taken up residence in our plumbing, and just decided, "Fuck this place, I'm leaving."

It was a truly surreal experience.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

How My Mind Works

Hello. Good afternoon. How are you?
Huh. Cool. Quick to be promoted.
Oh heavens I'm sorry but I think I'm drunk on conflict. I'm feeling like a dark euphoria or something.
Or... maybe...
HmmmMm.
I've been restraining myself so thoroughly and effectively for the last few days... that I really, really want to do something reckless and risk fucking up something beautiful apparently.
Is this what it's like realizing that you're addicted to failure? That's hilarious.
I think... I feel like I am a whimsical entity, this reactive, animal conscious-mind, caught in a moment in which gears larger than itself are shifting. A decision is being made around me. To take responsibility for my own actions. I'm barely even the thing making it any more. I'm just in the high. Loopy, feeling the gears grinding. Wondering what bits of me that I once cared about are the dust, dirt, roots and chips coming off and falling away.
Bye, me! Bye, excuses for being unfunctional. Look ma. I'm loopy. But I am still here.
And you? You're dead. You're dust. You're... you're going to start leaving me alone now.

HmmmMm.
Sorry it was you. It couldn't be anyone in my regular social group. The person I am having to restrain myself with is there, and I have to wait for him to be ready to walk into the group presence with me and ask for their help with our peace accord together.
I do hope that I am not causing you much distress.
Perhaps I am entertaining. Or simply obnoxious.
Let me know, sweet?
Oh, I am such a tease, aren't I, being incomprehensible like that. I guess it's one of the habits I'll have to kick. It's more actually intelligent and more actually difficult, a greater, nobler challenge, to speak succinctly but clearly enough that one is not a challenge to follow.
But permit me this indulgence. For now. Still, if you wish, I can explain... any part of this... more clearly.
No, it's only my fault I'm being incomprehensible.
Do you hate me for it? Oh, do say you'll hate me for it, that you'll never understand me, that you'll look back on this moment and realize that it's not worth talking to me. Ha. Hahahaha. You know what? I think I get it. Yes, that needling would be awful annoying, even in small doses.

Hurf. So... can I not care? Not caring seems... HmmmMm. Not caring about the bad, but being grateful for anything good? It always seemed like such a double-standard, didn't it little starfish, hmmm...
But what do you lose? A few chips off your shoulder that were really only keeping it from a full range of motion. Go on. Throw it away. You... you can be new.
You can be whole. Don't you want to be whole? Capable? Prove yourself and WIN, for once?
Mmm.
Again, Sorry miss, I never could talk to myself worth a damn without an audience.
Because then who am I talking to? Or something like that. Having someone watching... Something about it... makes it... real.

So. How are you?

(She left. I don't know yet whether she's going to come back.)

Monday, December 1, 2014

Validate Me Please

Have I been born or at some point rendered unable to detect an important tell between incredulity expressed out of pure and simple confusion, and incredulity expressed out of anger; frustration; exasperation?

Is there not a valid associative tie between incredulity and annoyance, then? I've seen a correlation too often for that to seem right.
It may have been emphasized harmfully by Mother.

Could Mother really be innocent after all, my understanding of her passive aggression false? No, I doubt it. There is some burden of responsibility that a mother should bear the brunt of maturity for with her child. That a lover should not have to bear the brunt of maturity for with a lover.
What, exactly?

I have felt a desperate need for, and lack of, validation for my interpretations of social interactions all my life. Having thought about that for a moment, yes, I believe all my life within useful memory.

Where is the sense that the validity of interpretation is to be assumed supposed to come from? Certainly, with my upbringing, it was undermined if not entirely destroyed. If I were to be allowed to assume that my interpretations were valid, Mother would have allowed me to defend myself from her passive-aggressiveness with logic. Which of course I did anyway, but it was continually invalidated at the point of my observations so that no argument I made could stick to her.
Narcissist. What have you done to me.

So I crave explicit validation of my interpretations as at least reasonable or understandable, and I crave it constantly. I become anxious and aggravated if it is not present and I begin to feel doubt.
What has this to do with incredulity? Mother often spoke to me in incredulous tones. From her, it seemed to mean that I was an unbelievably bad child. That my inconsideration and selfishness were so great that it was almost inconceivable I even existed. And so when she was angry at me, she would shout at me incredulously. How dare I question the love she undeniably had, while she complained at every juncture of what I was costing her and how much trouble I was that she put up with, and no matter how hard I hurt and raged and explained, trying to make her understand that she was hurting me, she never stepped down. Not once. Because she loved me, clearly.

So incredulity became the badge of "you horrid thing", to not back down became the abuse I was most used to, and letting me have my way became the golden grail I sought that represented the love I never got at home?

Perhaps, but of course I left home horribly twisted, and did not get my way often.

Things to learn and clarify:

To let me get my way is not what loving me is.
One can love me and not let me get away with shit.
One can not love me and let me get my way.
I know this, but the assumed lie may still be deeply ingrained in my emotional responses, moreso than for most.

Confusion is not inherently condemnation.
Confusion is not inherently condemnation.
Confusion is not inherently condemnation.
There are things someone may not understand about me other than how horrible I am.
An unfortunate number of people have the bad habit, but not everyone thinks something is bad just because they don't understand it.

What else?
The validity of my interpretations is assumed to be present, not absent, where no remark of it is made.
Gods, it's going to be a nightmare to reverse engineer that one. Geesus.