All Night Mambo!

Kitty is fine. Still medicating him and watching him. But since the little bugger is fighting the medication and not making with the puking etc. I think we're good.

Patch and I are good. Life is good. Work is good. (Still busy, just not mad-insane-overwhelmingly busy.) We're in Escrow. Jesus B Christ the paperwork! Nobody tells you about all the paperwork. It's not just signing things, it's actually fill out and come up with answers paperwork. *bleah* But hopefully we'll have a home at the end of all of this.

I started crying the other night, while Patch and I were being domestic, cooking dinner together and discussing our plans for the house. Just the thought of having a home again puts me in happy tears. I can't wait to have my friends over to dinner and to fill that place with love an laughter. It calls to me in my dreams and I'm so scared something will go wrong and it will all fall through at the last minute. But hey! Aside from standard anxiety, it's all good!

My offices moved to Burbank from Hollywood. Today is our first day at our new place.

I walked a mile to the bus stop and then took the bus about a mile to the office. I will do the same for the return trip.

The new campus is beutiful. We have a rose garden, lemon trees and grass! You know NATURE. I love it. I had my lunch on a bench under the shade of a tree. The only thing missing was a book to read.

So instead I walked around exploring(like a dummy)and now my feet ache. 'Cause you know, that and spending most of the day on my feet putting files away is a great way to start slow. (Just like my PT told me too.)

Tired, sore and somehow refreshed - NR

So end of day Monday I saw the doctor and he prescribed physical therapy. Mind you at this point the knee is just "not right" maybe even a little tight on occasion, with a vague achyness/tiredness at the end of the day.

I've been busy at work and only called them now. Guess what? They can't see me until Monday the 27. Here's hoping I'll be feeling great and can just cancel on them. *sigh*

My pants are too snug in the waistband. My shirt keeps rolling up from my hips to my waist. I am just so very consious of my "love handles". *bleargh* *sigh*

How often do you guys see your parents? Weekly, Monthly, Once a year?

How often do you talk to your parents (phone/im/email)? Daily, Weekly, Quarterly?

I woke sometime in the early dawn and lay around trying to get back to sleep. Now that I've read through and caught up, I feel tired, heavy and it takes a certain effort to breathe. I am lacking energy. Food and water would probably help, but right now, I'm going to try to go back to bed before my father wakes up and I have to play hostess.

Last week (? - it feels so long ago) we spoke to my mom's realtor who is also a mortgage broker. She geave us a lot of good info, but she can't do FHA loans. Miss fyrebringer recommended the broker she used. We have an appointment with him on Monday morning. *woot!*

Hopefully then, we'll have a clear plan of action and we can start looking at houses.

Oh, and Daddy is in town for the next 10 days or so, staying on our couch. *yay!*

I actually stepped away from my desk at lunch in an attempt to de-stress. Walking to Lucky Strike we had to move through the usual band of crazies on Hollywood Blvd. Including, today's added feature - Street Preachers! With Bullhorns! talking about the "Lake of Fire"tm and some shit.

On the way back, we're kinda joking and riffing off of what these folks are yelling when I see someone holding a sign that say "What Holocaust?" You have go to be shitting me. I had to work really hard not to scream at him.

Now the Obama/DOMA/DOJ thing.... yeah... I'm not feeling very flexible or tolerant of other folks BS right now.

This weekend I got to see my mommy. Patch & I met her & Jim at the Santa Monica Craft Show. We were slinky-ing along, one person getting ahead of the group, another lagging behind. At one point I went to where my mom was, wrapped my arm around her waist and leaned over to kiss her shoulder. Just as my lips were touching her shoulder, my brain said “WTF?” my stomach quailed, suddenly I was very self-conscious and the moment became awkward. My mother for her part didn’t notice or react as if this was a strange thing.

Why did I react this way? Because, I don’t act like that with my mom; I do not show my mother physical affection. She taught me touch was bad. Not, she explained to me what bad touch is (although she did do that), but she taught me that physical contact is in-appropriate. She didn’t ever say to me, “people shouldn’t touch”. It was just the undertone throughout my life, which is really weird when you hear her lament that I was not a cuddly child.

I remember my mother teaching me that kissing on the lips was wrong. Her argument was that germs were easily passed that way. But she trained me solidly, not to kiss like my father’s family; on the lips.

Like most children, I used to have tickle fights with my father. He’d make a buzzing sound like a bee and then poke me with an index finger. Then he’d intensify the sound and poke me with his other index finger. This would go on until A) I fell off the couch (hurting myself) trying to escape or B) my flailing around knocked his glasses into his face (hurting him). When I was 10 (5th grade), my mother put an end to it. I don’t remember now if she lectured him in front of me, or lectured each of us in turn; but I definitely got the “You’re too old for that sort of behavior”. I could never quite fathom why, but I understood that it was something shameful. Soon after that any physical interaction with my father got automatically scanned in my brain for “wrongness”. Which means I feel that awkward quail, even now, if my father hugs me a beat longer than usual.

During my college days, I related a story to my mom that included the fact I was giving or receiving a massage and my mother made disapproving noises. She told me that massages were an intimate thing and should really only happen between two people who are married.

In thinking about it now, I never realized how much of my life was coded with the message “people of the opposite sex shouldn’t touch”, which in my brain morphed to “don’t touch”. I knew that my life had been saturated with a distrust of men, but I had always attributed that to my parents failing marriage.

I realize that this is one of the things I found so freeing about Faire. There weren’t the same constructs as in regular society, people were physically affectionate and genuinely warm. There was nothing wrong with having your arm around someone’s waist or leaning on them, kissing them on the top of the head. Human contact was not just the norm, but encouraged.

I live this way with my friends now. I greet them with hugs and kisses. I snuggle up to people. I sit in men and women’s laps and while sometime there’s a sexual undertone to these interactions, mostly there isn’t. I don’t have to guard against it. I don’t have to check the appropriateness of the touch. I now trust that A) I *know* when something crosses the line and B) if I tell someone they’re crossing the line, they’ll back off.

I find that I am not angry, as much as saddened by all of this. While I recognize that this is going on, I don’t know how I can overcome thes layer of awkwardness that prevails in physical interaction with my family. Maybe someday it will be normal for me to casually hug my dad or my mom, but I’m sorry it’s already taken 30 years for me to reach this point.