Older Sister’s off in La-La-Land (Las Angeles) and Me? Well, I’m emo.

I seem to be loosing whatever slight “edge” I had.
I remember telling myself some years back, in a mantra of sorts, that “the middle-child is strong, the middle-child has no emotion, the middle-child does not cry,” but I seem to have left that mantra in the ditch some years ago because I am loosing my “edge.”

So, I tried staying up as late as possible on the 28th. I tried, but she (my older sister, who was packing all of her worldly possession and was preparing to move away the next day to California [to go to UCLA]) was getting really snippy and stuff, so I went to bed.
The next morning was, for me, eerily quiet. My little sister was at work. Dad was on his computer in the basement. My older sister was in her room putting the final touches on her luggage.
So I ate breakfast and waited for mom to come home from London (eye appointment).

It was still so quiet.
My little sister came home early and my older sis and my dad (who was driving to the airport with her, and was going to fly there with her to help her get set up) were carting luggage upstairs to the front room.
Still, for me, silent.

Mom came home around 12 and we helped her unpack the stuff my grandmother had forced her to bring home, then mom broke first. I knew she would cry. She always does. She tried laughing, tried laughing it off. I hugged her and went to the next room to tell my older sis that mom was crying, so she went to see her.
I had told her the day before that mom would probably cry all day. She had said “What? No. Really?” So I told her “Oh, definitely.”
I was only half right.

So, we all pitched in moving the luggage to the van, then dad and my sister started getting ready to leave.
Mom started crying again, and I could feel that hard, stereotypical lump form in my throat. I had to keep turning away, pretending I was fixing my hair that was being blown by the wind into my face.
My little sister hugged my older one and said “I’ll miss you.” And my older sis laaaaughed and we all laaaaughed ‘cause those two just do not get along.

Though, when my older sister phoned today, she asked mom to tell my little sis that she was really sorry she laughed at her for that.

So then, laughing, I hugged her and I think she knew about the damned lump, because she held on to me. Maybe it was just my imagination, or maybe it was because I was hanging onto her for dear life. I don’t know.
I turned away form her and said “Aw man, now I’m gonna start crying!” and laughed as I “fixed my hair” again.
Then they drove away and my little sister ran inside to go back to conversations left in limbo on MSN and mom and I stood there, waving.
She turned to me and said “You’ll be okay. Right?” And I just…broke.
I threw my hands up to my face and just started sobbing. In between sobs, I managed to cough out “I just don’t know.”
Mom put her arms around me and started saying something along the lines of “She’ll be back for Christmas. Christmas isn’t that far away.” She then told me to go lay down. So I did. I closed my door, sat in my computer chair and just sobbed.
I knew, and still know, that she’ll be back for Christmas, but it seems like forever-away.

I know I usually just complained about her, but even though she was beyond bitchy most times, she truly cared. She made me laugh SO HARD the last two nights we spent watching movies. When I had posted on DeviantART that poem about knowing a girl who was raped (in first year) she called me at Omi’s and tried to explain everything, tried to calm me down. Last year, when I felt so damned alone, she called me repeatedly to cheer me up. She sent me a hilarious book to help me. She took me to Alberta with her. Me! The tee totaling, 80-year-old in a 20’something’s body. Sure, she was a stereotypical older sister: smarter, “cooler,” more independent, more free, more sure of herself than I could ever be, envied beyond belief, and so god-damned annoying most of the time, but she’s still my sister…


Today, around 3PM when I was in the house alone, dad phoned and told me about the trip down and the plane and the city and how “horrible it is, so many flowers and palm trees, haha!”
When I hung up, I went down to the basement (I still don’t know why) and went into the fruit cellar and sat on the cold, concrete. Mocha came over and started doing her silly “I’m-a-gonna roll around on the floor and look like a fuzzy-cute-idiot” thing. Then she stood up and started purring and headbutting my knees. I just looked at her and said “Do you know who that was? It was your mommy. And she’s never coming home.” Which I know is not true, but it just feels that way. I started crying again. And Mocha just sat there and purred.

I know, I know, I know. She’s not gone forever, but it just seems like…if I need her to talk to, or to listen to me, she can’t just call me up, or hop on a bus anymore. Sure, there’s MSN and email, but with my older sister…I dunno, it just doesn’t “work” the same unless she’s right there, in front of you, or right there, on the other end of the line so you can hear her breathing.

Maybe it’s ‘cause we’re only two year apart. I dunno. Maybe it’s the fact that I won’t physically see her again until Christmas combined with the stress of school starting again. I don’t know.
I’m just…I’m crying again! God!

Remember when I said I was only half right? Mom wasn’t the one who cried all day.

JIt’s not that I don’t care about my little sister, I do. I really do. It’s just…I don’t know.
It just feels like she’s gone forever and it hurts so much.

So, ya. That’s the end of my silly-emo-ramblings. Sorry about all that.

Breathe

{ Not about her.
Just to clear things up.

Just me...breathing.
I suppose.}


Portrait of an unknown woman.
Left torn,
forgotten and dashed upon blooded rocks.
She’s sitting,
waiting and singing
her own tragedy.

Oh soft voice,
oh sad songs,
oh sorrow…

Brows creased,
her knees shake.
Cross-legged portrait
of wanted,
craved,
redemption.

The stars are crisscrossing
across her fogged window
and her
clouded eyes.
Fogged and clouded
by love and anger.
Hate.

She lost herself
somewhere along the way
of her
begging for redemption.
Always lost and lonely,
always sinning and singing.

Singing her temper
out, into the brisk breeze
of another cloudless night.

The bulb’s burning,
it’s almost midnight.
Her hand scratches against scratches
long lost to months of re-grown skin
and days of re-grown
self.

Lost,
in this sea-breeze of anger,
this
ballad of tragedy of fogged hearts
and eyes
and tears.



I hope
you can forgive me.

Thursday, August 3rd, 2007 -- "Accept it" (About Pro-Choice, beware.)

Written yesterday.
Thursday, August 3rd, 2007.
(Like the last one, it was written during an interlude of cataloging)



Am I the only one these days that is still passionately pro-choice?
I mean here I am, working away at the church’s mess of a library and I’ve come across multiple “Jesus wants you to have your baby!” books.
Now, I was born and raised Catholic (although I have “opted” out of it) and I understand how and why the church views abortion the way it does, it’s just…things have to change and evolve. Religions have to change and evolve. The things preached in the 16th century were not necessarily planned to make sense in 2007, and really, many of the teachings don’t “fit” anymore.
I understand the church’s view on abortion. But must it be so absolute?
The book I’m looking at right now is telling me, outright, that if I have an abortion for any reason, I’m a weak, coward of a woman and am going to hell. No questions asked. No leeway. No nothing. There must be change. Maybe that’s why I opted out of religion. I can’t take the absolute truths religions preach.
If I was, say, walking home from class one night after missing the bus and some drunken man grabs my from a shadowy corner, rips off my clothing and rapes me, leaves me in a bloody and hurting mess behind the empty building, and I happen to get pregnant…well, according to my parent’s religion and this book, I was asking for it and I have to suffer the consequences.
I can not accept that.
There are far too many women going through literal hell in order to avoid a supposed after-life hell.
I can not accept that.
I know far too many women like that. And it hurts me to watch them suffer, knowing I can’t do anything. Knowing her child’s husband still comes around, once a year, and demands full custody. Knowing she has to fill out OSAP forms for the Catholic school she goes to, how she cringes and squirms as she fills out the sheets asking for monetary assistance for school. Watching her hide the sheets as she writes out “We live in student housing. He’s 4. He’s still in diapers. He eats. a lot.” To laugh along with her when she asks me if I think putting in that his birthday is in 2 months would make a difference to the mean men at the office.

It hurts to hear them go on about how much it hurt.
How he used his fists. How he drugged her. Raped her. Left her in the backyard. How the police would do nothing and how she hadn’t been on the pill.
To hear how fucking afraid she was, and still is. She knew her parents would never understand…or help.

I can not accept that.

I am a feminist.
I am pro-choice. Not anti-life.
I do have my limits, though.
I believe in the freedom to abort a conceived child, under drastic circumstances, not just willy-nilly.
My “rules,” as I seem to be calling them, are not absolute. Maybe one day I’ll decide abortion is bad. Maybe one day I’ll decide abortion is okay, not matter the circumstances. I don’t know. But I do know that my life “rules” are not absolute.

This is my religion. A combined mess of twists and turns. A muddles crowd of shouting women in my head. A fear of repercussion and a need to step out. A list of religion-induced morals that, even though I no longer follow the religion, have been so ingrained, nay, so infused into my being that I will not give them up.

But these absolutes? This “You are woman. You are weak. You are going to hell.” attitude? No. I can not accept that.

This is my religion, or so it seems. And I think, maybe, I can accept that.

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 -- Oh, Charles!

Written this past Tuesday.
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007


Kay, so my dad has me “working” at the church, right?
I’m re-organizing their mess of a “library.”
By “mess” I mean there’s no logical system here. Someone went around and put little stickers on the books they thought were Marian, Sacrament, Jesus related, etc. It’s a mess.
Anyway, so it’s my “job” to put all the book into a computer program I’ve got so we can make a huge-ass list, and then we (father and I) will have to put the books in order by Dewy Decimal Number.

My dad and the old(ish) priest (Father Mike…he scared me) went through the books and weeded out all the really bad, right-wing, horrid stuff and it’s all in boxes in the hall outside to be sold/gotten rid of.
Fine, dandy, neat-o.

But I’m still finding some…odd ones.
I just found a book called “African Triumph”. There’s a brown and red and white picture on the front of African Tribesmen. The book itself is about how awesome the missionaries in Africa were. Chapters include: “Mysterious Continent,” “Early Mission Days,” (here comes the fun) “First Blood,” “The Drama Begins,” “The Gathering Storm,” “African Triumph,” “Fire of Love,” and “God’s Heroes.”

”Fire of Love”? Sheesh! One sided much?

The main, African, character is a Tribesman named “Charles”…apparently he “loved to wrestle.”

Spolier! Charles is whipped like mad by the Tribe’s “king” because he converted. Bad Africans.
Then the king demands complete loyalty from his tribesmen and, quote, “one of the guards named Bruno, threw down his spear and joined Charles and his brave group.” Go Bruno!
Then Charles and his buddies were condemned to death. But somehow escaped, and became “God’s Heroes,” huzzah!

Really. REALLY. I thought they went THROUGH these books.
The pictures are horrid, too.

Well, I really should get back to cataloging these things. Maybe I should put Charles’ heroic tale in the boxes of books to sell. Meh. Maybe not. I mean, I always love reading one-sided stories of slavery, persecution, forced converts and evil evil African kings! YAY!

*gag*

It was written by a “Charles,” I wonder if he’s the hero?

…………

…FUCK!

Did someone slip these books in just to piss me off?
“The Real Holocaust: The Attack on Unborn Children and Life Itself”
Back of book: “We are being conditioned to accept abortion!!
The insistence that all women have the right to abortions on demand did not evolve form our Christian heritage and love of freedom, nor from the legitimate struggle from women’s rights; but was thrust upon our society by a powerful anti-god force which hates and fears our race, our civilization, and most of all, the religion of Christ.
The first “Holocaust,” with its alleged mass slaughter, has been used to create a false sense of guilt in Christian nations by making them feel their Christian heritage did nothing, really, to keep them from committing acts of vicious cruelty. This has been called, a “sneak attack on Christianity.”
The abortion holocaust is no sneak attack on Christianity, but rather a full-scale frontal assault on western civilization.”

I really….I…….I don’t know what to say.
Other than, as soon as I read the first line about hating and fear “our race,” I shouted out “WHAT?!” in the church library.

It’s just like Doctor Bickford says, the “problem” of abortion is a COMPLETE race, gender and class struggle!!
Think about it!
THINK!
What image comes to mind when you think of “western civilization”? White, middle class, male. It’s the “norm.” “Christian” seems to equal white, and the word “God” means (in biblical text) a man. Who is most always depicted/seen as being white. So, if abortion is threatening western, Christian civilization (which is also a predominately “white” word, ‘cause who’s more civilized than the white world?), it’s threatening white, middle class, men. Abortion threatens North America’s desire to stay a “pure” entity. Hence lynching back post-American civil war. “perfect Family” competitions in the States in the 20’s, 40’s etc. We, the Western world, were trying to preserve the white, middle class, race.

Do you ever see pro-life picket lines in front of family planning centers or abortion clinics in predominantly African-American communities? No. Why? ‘Cause the mentality (not MY mentality, but “white, western america”) is “They’re more primitive anyways, let them kill each other/themselves off.” But as soon as a white woman decided to not have the child conceived by, say, an abusive boyfriend/husband or a rape, then the entire community is up in arms because she’s killing off a potential “perfect, white child.”

This book, written in the 1980’s, fosters white ideals and, really, it’s white ideals that are to blame for almost all wars.
The American “perfect Family” competitions, the reformatories, the lynching’s, the still present hate crimes and discrimination can be likened to Hitler’s Germany. Yes, not the same, but the entire world was anti-Hitler because he was bold and did what he did out in the open. It’s similar, just more evasive, more subtle. Less “in your face”. More “it’s their fault.”
Just because it’s not obvious and/or not being thrown in our faces doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
We can’t ignore it.

This started as a journal about stereotypes and discrimination, segwayed into abortion and then went into societal problems.
Bravo me.