Bringing this shit back

I haven't blogged for nearly two years. At least, I haven't written on this particular site on two years, and maybe now no one checks it anymore, and maybe I'm shouting into a fucking hurricane, but that's fine. I feel like shouting.

Friends, I'm riled up. I know I've touched on it before, chastising Zach Snyder for being a shitty, misogynistic filmmaker who splashed the ugly power imbalance inherent in my beloved geek community onto 30 foot screens everywhere. I know I've told you about my indignance having to defend my choice of body art. It's not really a secret that I think about this stuff, worry about this stuff, wonder how I teach my daughter to weather it, how I teach my son to combat it.

This shit is the outside of enough. I am angry. I am nearly forty years old, and I have been fighting this shit for three decades. I am fucking tired of it.

The day after it hit the news that some jackass attacked twenty people in California because WOMEN, my mom and sister shared a thing on Facebook. It was one of those stupid Pinterest graphics, you know the ones: a pithy "inspirational" quote in some all caps font over a montage of filtered photographs of other people's children. This one read, "RAISING BOYS. NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART." The pictures were of little boys doing mischievous things, borderline naughty things, things like getting covered in mud from head to toe, jumping off a rope swing, sticking a fork in an electrical socket, and holding hamburger buns up to their bare chests in an imitation of breasts. Things that make people shake their heads and chuckle, "Boys will be boys!" and go on about their merry way and then exclaim twenty years later, "I just don't understand! How could he have gotten this way? He must have been sick, SICK, to kill all those people while ranting at the top of his lungs about blond sluts who wouldn't fuck him!" I wanted to scream. Instead I took the very obvious, society-sanctioned course and... said nothing.

In one breath I tell my daughter that she is whole, strong, and complete and in another I am supposed to tell her that the fingertip rule at school is for skirts, not for shorts. In one breath I tell my son that he is a heart as well as a body, as well as a brain, and in the next I am supposed to advise him that the tears are for his ex-girlfriend to shed. He knows that girls owe him nothing, that there is no such thing as the friendzone. She knows that comics and building blocks are for everyone.
But I have to repeat it constantly, drill it into them the way that I was once drilled about how to survive an atom bomb. I am swimming upstream. I am angry, and I am tired. I am sick of wanting to scream.

Boys will be humans. Girls will be humans. Boys, most of them at any rate, will grow up to be men. Girls, most of them at any rate, will grow up to be women. We have to have each others' backs.

To the man I love

Dear Z,

I know you don't read this anymore, because anything I've had to say to you for the past three and a half years I've turned to you and said aloud. For the past three and half years, you've been right by my side. I'm writing it anyway, because I have about three decades' worth of stuff to tell you, and you are past hearing me.

The last time I wrote one of these letters, it was an apology. I bruised your already tender feelings even more by being unthinking, and I wanted  - no, needed - to say sorry. I didn't intend this one to be an apology, too, but I have to start it off with one. I'm sorry I took you for granted. I got so used to you being a rock that I kind of forgot how crystalline your core is - like mine, I have to acknowledge. I see so many things about you that I have in myself, and it has given me comfort since the beginning. There are things which are alien to me, too, like your absolute insistence that you neither desire nor require love. I know better. I have seen you after soaking up the rain of love from me, my family, my community. I remember the tension and anger in every line of your body when you came to me, and I remember when I started to see it leak away, leaving a smiling, gentle, happy man in its absence. I know that the home we shared was precious to you, maybe more than you are willing to admit even to yourself. I told you a few days ago that I knew how terrifying it is to know that someone can see you with clarity that you can't turn on yourself, and I know you are worried I am going to use it as a weapon against you. I'm sorry that we never took the chance to ease all those fears. I am so sorry you never came to me.

The crazy thing - and I mean it sounds dumb, it sounds like the sort of thing they would put in a book that had high heeled shoes on the cover - is that once I made peace with my own insecurities, I have never doubted you. Not once. Even when I was blue and swirling in darkness. Even when you threatened to walk out the night before our epic trip. I think it was a mistake then, and I think it's a mistake now. I say it because I have never personally known two people to do what we did - be the absolute best versions of ourselves we could be for each other. I believe to my toes that we are meant to be together to keep us straight in the world.

This summer has been a motherfucker, that is for certain. It was so much - far too much, frankly - and I was overwhelmed, and I leaned on you really really hard without ever having a discussion about it. I took and took and took from you, and what I gave back wasn't much, and I know you burned out. I should have kissed you more. I should have reached for you all those times I really wanted to instead of letting you close in on yourself. I should have flung myself into your arms the second you walked into the room at the Prospector. I didn't because... I don't know why. Because I was afraid of being rejected. Because I was afraid it would feel like a bigger burden. Because the sheer magnitude of what I feel for you terrifies me, and I know it scares the shit out of you too, for different reasons.

I am so tired of living my life in fear.

I love you. The words can seem so trite, so I tried to show you every day how much you mean to me, and sometimes I wished how you showed me was clearer, but the fact is neither of us did a good enough job with saying those words. I've loved you since about three months from the day I met you. Maybe it didn't even take that long. I love you still. You are in a tiny circle, truly rarified company - the people I have chosen to be my family instead of having Fate fling them in my path (this is where I say, hi, mom! hugs to the sisters!) I want you, too. Right by my side.

Bea misses you horribly. So does Jack, although he is less forthcoming. I miss you most of all.

-s

whenever i am doubtful, this reassures me you were meant for me

Now what?

I am sitting the empty room that used to be my living room, in the spot that was my spot. I have sat in this spot thousands of times, and this is the last time. I feel like I am full of glass.

I managed to make it all the way through this whole last day in my home without a tear, until it was time for  the Cap'n to go. I wasn't sad about his last walkthrough - though he was - I was sad because my ex is the most callous human being I have ever had the misfortune to meet. Two days after being made responsible for my felines, he's decided that they're too much to handle. This is because my cat with serious, chronic bowel issues which are treated with medication shit on his carpet. A cat with bowel issues had a bowel movement. Game over. Never mind that her issue isn't diarrhea, it's constipation, and that it's highly unusual that she had such loose stool, and that she's prone to dangerous dehydration if she's not carefully monitored. Never mind that she's been hospitalized with a needle in her vein for three days. Just tell me you want me to pay to clean your carpets and find a new place for my problem animals to live.

That was just the ugly cherry on this awful sundae of suck. I spent my day turning the spaces which two days ago were our sanctuaries back into boxes. I did it by inhaling noxious cleaning chemicals and having my hands immersed in water for about nine hours. I browbeat and bullied and coerced my sweet son and wonderful partner into doing the same. Z made trip after trip to our three (3!) storage units, uncomplainingly hauling the stone bunnies and half-filled notebooks that I couldn't leave behind. Why do we have three storage units? Because we still don't have a house. We don't have an apartment, a trailer, an RV, or a spot under the bridge. We have marvelous, caring friends, though, and a trip planned to Juneau - I said fuck it yesterday morning and booked it because there's no way I'm eating my kid's 15th birthday cake off someone else's plates - and we have a housesitting gig or two lined up. But no place to call our own. No place to tuck my bunnyrabbit in at night. No place to let my cats curl up behind my knees and rest.

I am really angry at my landlord for not seeing what it meant to ask us to leave in the middle of summer. I know it's not his job to make sure that we have a place to live, but we've been his tenants for eight years, minus two weeks, and I think we've been pretty good ones. We don't want to trade this lovely home for a two bedroom basement, and I'm angry because I feel like he drove us to a decision like that.

One of the first craft projects I did in this house was to decoupage the lightswitches. Gnomes in the Cap'n's room, peonies for the bath, a repro oil painting in the bedroom where I nursed my babe every night. I was going to take them with me, because nostalgia and all, but I decided to leave them. Maybe my landlord will see them and realize that we were not just his tenants, we were a family, and this was not just a holding cell until something else came along. It was our home.

I have to get up now, out of my spot, and unplug the router and walk out the door and not look back. in a minute, I will. In a minute.

Keep on swimming

I have tried to write this post so many times now I have lost count. Every time I dissolve into helpless tears, which I guess isn't an unusual situation, but it seems like the status quo these days rather than an exception.

On the Friday before Memorial Day, our landlord came to me and told me that the house we live in was being sold, and we had until July to move out. On top of the impossible task of finding a new place to live - Sitka being notoriously short on affordable decent housing, I have been dealing with the grief I feel over losing my home. Now, eleven days before I have to close the door forever, I am weeping every day and I have reached to point where I am putting every last thing I encounter into a box to save, because my heart is too sore to send any more memories away.

When we moved into this place eight years ago, I had only ever lived in one house longer than two years. When I was a child, we moved very often, a consequence of my mother being in the army and of her own inability to put down roots. I attended thirteen schools in my thirteen years of schooling and was homeschooled for half a year. I never knew what would survive one move to the next. I don't have my baby books, or the gourd lady my Grandmama brought us from Peru, or any of my favorite picture books from when I was a child. I don't have my prom shoes or my hand-embroidered baby blankets.All lost in the shuffle from place to place.

So when I started the monumental task of reducing the life I made for my children and me in this house to labelled boxes and a gargantuan pile destined for the garage sale, I was paralyzed at the idea of throwing any of this away. I still am. I know it sounds silly, but the abandoned blocks at the corners of my craft room were the happy hours my baby girl contented bounced in her chair while I sewed her brother's Christmas gift. The glittered stars were the magic of Santa that my son learned was in his heart, not in the North Pole. I don't want to sell the light-up shoes my mom bought to bribe her to ride her bike. I don't want to see the coveted Jedi robe on some other kid's arm. I know that when I send away the squeaky ladybug, that memory of opening a box from Lacy and finding them inside will be gone, too. I won't have the object to fire the memory.

So I cry, and I find it impossible to part with another thing. I am so tired of trying to let this all go.

My house is full of teenage boys.

Not right this second, because they are all raising mild havoc up at the high school where they belong, but I have been lurking in my bedroom sans foundation wear for like two days because I don't own my own living room right now. What I mean is, we are housing kids from out of town for Music Fest, and DAMN can four boys make a mess.

That is unfortunate for so many reasons, not the least of which being that I haven't finished a damn thing since the last blog post, and I am champing at the bit to make something, ANYTHING. (I will admit that I am nearly done with the manfriend's birthday present (his birthday was two weeks ago) but I can't bring myself to battle metallic embroidery floss for it.) I have gotten a load of compliments on the striped skirt, and I have been enjoying wearing it except for two things: it makes me feel really, really conspicuous and it seems to have to power to turn the weather from fine to awful. Seriously. I have put it on my body three times now, each of those times on a calm, fair morning, and by 2 in the afternoon, it has been blowing sideways, pelting rain, and colder by 10 degrees. Also, I bought a jade green shirt to wear it with, and the effect was rather more Christmassy than I like. Back to the drawing board.

I cut my hair again. Well, Casey cut my hair for me. The last time it was this approximate cut I kinda hated it a lot, but it seems not so terrible this time. I can still set it, unlike last time, and I can nearly get the sides up in rolls, so that's okay. I am thinking seriously about doing something radical to it, but I am fucking vain about my hair, and a coward to boot.

So what's the point of this post, you ask? It's to ask your opinion! I have been thinking about making a new circle skirt for ages - since Casey (not my hairdresser. a different one) had a sewalong for them last summer. I have a few, but they are all prints, and bordering on novelty prints at that. My question for you is: navy or black? My first impulse is to make a black one, since the vast majority of my wardrobe is black, and it seems like it would be pretty utilitarian that way. But there is something a little romantic and nautical about a navy one, no? Maybe I could scare up the elusive mustard cardigan to wear with it.

In conclusion: no new nothing. Cut my hairs. What color skirt?

Am I too old to wear things like this?

I finished this last week when I had a ton of time on hands. You will note that this post only contains a single project; that is because although I had an entire week off for spring break, I did no crafting to speak of beyond completing this skirt. You have no idea how much of an accomplishment that was, though. This skirt was nearly the end of this year-long experiment.

It all started with this blog post. I just think everything about this outfit is fantastic. I love the circus-y quality that Lilli manages so effortlessly, and the tutorial seemed so simple. I could do it in a weekend! Oh, little did I know...

I ordered this fabric on Etsy, and got it in relatively short order. I just cut it in half down the length, intending to pleat the whole of it into a really full skirt. I was encouraged by comparing my measurements to Lilli's. Then I read the instructions .

Readers, math is not my best subject. No matter how many times I crunched those numbers, I could NOT figure out how on earth she managed to get her pleats flat and even and not overlapping one another. I couldn't make my pleats not lay on top of each other. Then Tilly made this pleated skirt and I got terribly discouraged. So easy! they declared. The stripes/chevrons make it idiot proof! Sewed up a dream! In an afternoon! Fuck it, I thought. I set it aside and cut the waistband. I was careful with my measuring and striped matching, since I had to piece it, and I interfaced it (I thought) properly. Um, wrong. I interfaced the front half of one piece and the back half of the other. I nearly cried, but instead I just forged on.

I cut a single pocket, because I didn't want the side zipper to interfere with the second one. Then I bravely lopped off enough from each skirt piece to make the pleating lay the way I wanted it to. I set to carefully pinning my admittedly MARVELOUS pocket into my neatly matched stripes, and sewed that son of a bitch up. I went to pin the pleats into the waistband and... It didn't fit. It was in, fact, about four inches too big. On a whim, I tried the waistband on around myself. Too small. Somehow, mysteriously, I had shrunk the waistband. SERIOUSLY FUCK IT. I walked away.

All of this occurred two weeks before my aforementioned time off. I bunched to damned thing up and threw it onto the pile on the dining room table. I spent some time making lamb shanks and embroidering instead. Then on the day I wrote that last post, I gave myself a talking to. Ridiculous, I said. Quit being a baby. Quit being a quitter. And I picked up the stupid fucking skirt and finished it. 

I fixed the tight waistband by adding two loops and two giant covered buttons. Yeah, I said two. Only one pictured, you ask? That's because a 4 inch wide band that sat on my natural waist tipped this right into weird EGL territory. I am certainly too old for that foolishness.  I didn't come to that conclusion until I had blundered my way through topstitching that monstrosity on, though. I was so over the whole process that I didn't even bother unpicking it. I just took a pair of scissors to it right on the skirt. I trimmed the waistband in half, turned the raw edges in, and topstitched THAT, too.

my stripey pocket! it's flannely!

The last thing I did was finish the hem by hand. I had intended to turn it up further and blindstitch it with my machine, but I liked it better hitting me right at my knee, so I added some hem lace and catchstitched it by hand instead. It took me about an hour and a half to finish off the handstitching.

 My weekend project skirt ended up taking about 16 hours all told, spread over the course of about a month. It's done, though, and I proudly declare it number 14. I like the way I styled it today, although the herring weather caught me off guard, and I was chilly. I just threw on a pair of black tights and a cardigan and moved the scarf to my throat, and it looks awesome right now, too. I want a turquoise or aqua or jade cardigan to wear it with, since I think the cobalt Lilli flaunts would come off a little jingoistic here (she's in New Zealand, I think.) Somehow I think this combo needs blue to set it off. What do you guys think?

I hope you didn't come for the cake.

Chances are, if you are reading this, that you know me personally and have a better than passing acquaintance with my mercurial and capricious moods (and my propensity for tossing around $10 words like I bought them half off.) I have struggled all my life to master them, with varying degrees of success, and when they turn dark I struggle all the harder. The difficulty comes when the darkness intensifies and I can't master it; the ensuing waves of guilt and failure begin to force it all into a spiral that sometimes can be very hard to pull myself out of. Today is one of those days for me.

I'm tapped.

I don't know why there are days when my eyes fill with tears that have no purpose or even cause. I don't know why I can't enjoy the company of my friends and family when this strikes, why I can't eat a meal in a room filled with people or have a discussion about gemstones with my seven year old. I don't know why I feel like screaming at the love of life to just leave me alone for a few hours, to get the hell away from me so I can weep over nothing in peace. I don't know why I can't even stand to pet my sweet, sick cat who spent three days in the hospital this week. I don't know why I can't just decide to be happy. All I know is that I am a dry well today, a pitch black echoing hole in the ground and I can't even make a decision about what to eat for dinner. That pisses me off.  It exhausts me.

I'm going to show you the skirt I finished last week (back when I had the moxie to care about things like resolutions.) Eventually, that is, but not today. Today I'm going to lie on the couch and watch really shitty t.v. and cry about feeling guilty for laying this all at your feet, when all you came for was a picture of my latest doodad. I might muster the courage to order takeout, or maybe I'll drag myself to the store for frozen pizza, but then again maybe I'll just eat the rest of the ice cream and whatever cheese there is. Tomorrow, I'll try again.

Keep checking back, okay?