of dislocation & graceful unravelling

my parents’ garden, 05.13.12 | selenographie

top: rhododendron bush, pear tree branch in foreground.

bottom, left to right: dianthus, dianthus, rhododendron.

Bonus smartypants trivia: the phrase “redd up” is of Scotch-Irish origin and is used in Jane Eyre, a piece of Important Classic Literature. I got so excited when I read it that I called my mom to tell her.

& bonus personal anecdotes:

1. I can’t wait ‘til I have a kid and my I’m-becoming-my-mother transformation is complete. My Pittsburgh accent isn’t as thick as hers because: I read books more often than I spoke as a kid; I got a lot of phrases corrected into submission by overbearing grammar dudes (“you’re forgetting something, SM… your helping verb! loop-de-doo!”); and I was embarrassed about my accent when I moved away from Pittsburgh. Now I’m often homesick and am accidentally-on-purpose cultivating a Southern drawl with Northern snappiness and holding onto my old slang terms while trying to assimilate new ones. HEY Y’ALL WHADDAYA MEAN YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT A GUMBAND IS, GEEZ-O-MAN!

2. At work I processed a dictation that was clearly from a Pittsburgher; they said n’at and I was so bummed that we have to transcribe in “proper” English so I had to type out “and that.” Ugh, blasphemy.

(Source: pittsburgh-sports, via champagnelikealady)

“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.” (Thomas Szasz)

[in which I am at the (st)age where desperately trying to collect & archive remnants of my own past is the only writing that matters]

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(postcard from my Inspiration Corkboard III;  photo by Gregory Thorp, 1997)

Things I Almost Majored In:

Studio Art (2002)
Religious Studies (2002)
Philosophy (2002)
Graphic Design (2003)
Child & Family Studies (2003)
Liberal Arts (2004)
Library Technology (2006)
Art History (2008)
Art Education (2009)

“Close only counts in horseshoes & hand grenades.” — Dad(s everywhere).

Un/related note: When I was a kid I once joyfully & obliviously ran straight across a horseshoes court mid-toss and narrowly missed getting my skull smashed in. Parents who yelled at/scared the shit out of me for being a dumbass created Daughter who is stubborn and needing-to-prove-something to a fault. And some day I will be the best worst anti-attachment mom ever.

peripatetic (ramble)

Most of my writing comes from my 1.7-mile walk home from work at night:

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C. & I went to his mom’s house for the holidaze, and Mom’s house is always comforting to me. It appears to be the kind of pristine suburban dream where you can’t touch anything and have to take your shoes off in the house, but to me it feels safe and cozy and reminds me that it’s possible to have a house that is also a home and not simply a temporary storage unit. Mom has lived in that house for over ten years and she’s painted it and decorated it and it is Hers but it is also so welcoming. I can tell how proud she is to have put so much work into creating her space.

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"Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.

“A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.

“But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.

“When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this:
‘You are not enough people!’

“I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who has six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.

“They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome.

“Wouldn’t you have loved to be that baby?"

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (via whylovememylove)

Who said the nuclear family was the best way to raise a child?

(via a-blog-called-everything)

I am sometimes sad to think that my future kids will likely be raised with only half of an extended family because my lovely family lives a thousand miles away and my lovely in-laws are here in Georgia. & although moving South was a bit of a fateful happy accident for me and I really don’t want to live in the North again, and I do have family & community here, I still miss having my side of the family around to lean on…especially during potential future grownuptimes.

(via rustbeltwhiskey-deactivated2012)

My Job Is: Typing

So my job is somewhat mindless in the sense that I have to sit in front of a computer and transcribe voicemails. This is a service Important Business Professionals pay for so that they don’t have to write/type their own Important Notes. One of the reasons that I like this job is because I’m getting paid (and occasionally complimented) for a lot of seemingly-useless skills that I’ve acquired over time due to Having Interest in Things. For example, it’s really helpful that I have a good grasp of English grammar. & I have a personal interest in things like etymology so I’m good at transcribing medical terms or uncommon last names because I understand about Latin roots and cognates and all those kinds of things, so that makes me feel really useful in a way since I can process dictations with few errors and question marks. (We have special question marks to use for when we’re uncertain of spelling — and we have no Internet access to look that stuff up because presumably no one would get any work done if there was Internet…)

But my favorite secret prideful moments are when I know how to spell the names of different locations — and I don’t have to put little sp?s next to them because I am totally sure about spelling Bryn Mawr & Kedzie & Cicero because I rode the train in Chicago, and I know that the Parish should be capitalized in New Orleans locales and Marigny and Tchoupitoulas still sound like incantations. Names of streets and neighborhoods and rivers and cities all sound magical and I know how to spell them and where they are because I like to travel when I can and I like to read and I like to look at maps and figure out how to pronounce things.

I love getting a dictation from a client in Pittsburgh because I know all of the places he’s talking about and I know the proper way to type out the addresses and streets. Part of my job is also reviewing/correcting jobs that were pre-scribed by others, and sometimes I can tell before even listening to the dictation that the message is from Pittsburgh and the neighborhoods are misspelled in a valiant attempt to phonetically depict some crazy Polish names. Then I listen as some anonymous client talks about all the meetings he went to all over the city and I can picture all of these places in my mind and start to feeling very homesick.

Colby said he loves going to Pittsburgh with me when we visit because seeing my family interact makes sense to him, witnessing the background that made me (and then I wonder how I got to be a thousand miles away). I came from a big family in a small house & we were always fighting to fiercely protect personal space while sharing bedrooms. Also I came from a long line of Putting Up With Shit Because Nobody Said Life Was Fair and this is a useful life skill, most times.

We go to Pittsburgh and visit my friends and family all over the town, and Pittsburgh is huge compared to Athens (where downtown is about five blocks squared). We’d take the bus or trolley or a car ride to all these different neighborhoods and Colby would keep asking, is this still Pittsburgh? Are we still in Pittsburgh? Because you can spend an hour going across town and still be in the same city and county. And it’s real strange to think that when I left the city six years ago I felt trapped, riding the same bus routes to and from my job and my house and the coffeeshop… sometimes when people find out I’m from Pittsburgh they’ll ask me if I know so-and-so or if I’ve been to a certain bar and most times I haven’t, because it’s not that kind of town, even though all the neighborhoods feel like their own little towns so I could see how it would feel like that to a visitor. So each time I go back to visit I find all these new things I never saw when I was younger and angsty and I always how it would feel if I went back there to live, if I would feel small or the city would feel small.

itheewed:

My maternal grandparents, Steve & Eloise, 1953. (submitted by stacey-marie)

When I was growing up, my family’s Epic Summer Vacations would be to a New Jersey tourist trap: Wildwood when I was 8, Ocean City when I was 16, and later Asbury Park with my travelling companion when I was 21. (It was expensive to haul all five of us kids across the state, and Mom would have to save up money for quite some time because she would go all-out, by our standards, and rent an apartment for a week within a few blocks’ walking distance from the beach.)

We weren’t very much into purchasing souvenirs — as Mom said, there’s no need to spend money on “plastic crap” when we could grab our own seashells from the beach — but Mom always made sure to get some authentic saltwater taffy from a boardwalk candy shop, where we could watch the mechanical taffy-puller through the window. I always thought that saltwater taffy was made with actual Atlantic Ocean saltwater and that therefore you couldn’t get it anywhere else, but thanks to the Internet…

PARENTS’ BIRTHDAY CHALLENGE: ACCEPTED.