Parent Rage

This morning, like every morning, I woke the older kids at 5:30, and went back to bed until 7 AM.

This morning, like every morening, my oldest daughter didn't get up until 7 (she has an alarm clock which, I think, she has, unplugged); her ride showed up at 7:10 (pretty much like every morning) and she got ready while they sat in their car and waited (and honked, and stared in through the dining room window) until 7:25.

She goes to a high school for the performing arts; it's a charter school (no transportation) about 20 miles outside of town. I don't drive (bad vision), and she probably won't be driving either anytime soon (same reason.)

I am furious at the casuality with which she uses these people. I can't, for the life of me, understand why someone would keep coming here, day after day after week, while she disrespects the offer of a ride which she desperately needs to get to school; when, if, for some reason (sickness, whatever- and it's a rare occurrence), her ride doesn't show up, she freaks out and feels slighted.

This morning, (AFTER I typed my response to Rose's journal) I lost it - and told her how awful I felt she was treating the only ride she could find to school. She started yelling at me to leave her alone. I told her she was being selfish and a user, and I didn't think it was right she should, on a daily basis, make them sit out there and wait.

Are they stupid? Why do they come every day, knowing she won't be ready? I don't get it.

So, for all my good intentions dealing with uncaring teenagers, I guess I have my own rage to deal with.

WTF? Whatever... The show must go on

My friend Steve & I have been planning a show for about a month. Yesterday, the shit totally hits the fan:

He gets into a fight with his girlfriend; she won't talk to him; he cancels the last practices so he can try to get her to talk to him. He is not answering his phone now. (I tried to call him 2 times, last night and this morning - his phone is OFF.)

The black cartridge in my printer chose to die last night. (I cannot print the show notes, lyrics, etc.,) - so, not a big deal, I'll be flying blind - and I'd really rather have the backup notes.

2 pairs of kids' broken glasses.

Personal issues coming from several different directions via telephone and e-mail.

The worst part is (IMO),

people are so used to talking to me about their problems; it seems, when I have some, nobody's around - too busy... So, the worst part is that I'm wasting time feeling a little sorry for myself.

Fuck

Oh, well. worst case scenario; I'll have to do the 3-hour show solo.

Whatever - the show must go on.

Late Summer

Late summer when the world,

saturated in energy, hanging

on the cusp of freefall into

cool, Autumn lethargy;

when the lifetime of flowers

has moved into middle age,

when day lilies open brightest,

and the rose and the orchid persevere;

in ardent vigor shed their scent onto

slow light and charged, languid air.

To stand there in the long light

drunk on the light, wrapped in her hair

full of the promise that change will come

but not yet, meantime rest

my head upon her breast

golden-green and soft

as living earth can be

full of her breath, held

drawn in quivering wonder

toward her brazen mystery

MEME: What's Your Dosha?

Dosha is commonly referred to as meaning energy balance; actually, the Sanskrit (Pali; Dosa) word means something like patterns of disturbance in energy which affect form. Abhi can probably give a more clear definition than I.

Knowing my Dosha alignment has helped me understand my body; not only how it works and why it isn't working the way I think it should, but how to re-align so that it will work better.

To take a test to determine your dosha click here.

Look at the highest score, that is your primaray Dosha; if scores are close together you may be double- or tri-dosha.

I am Pitta-Vata Dosha

All About Vata
The Vata Diet
All About Pitta
The Pitta Diet
All About Kapha
The Kapha Diet
Double Doshas
Tri-Doshas
The Calendar & The Clock
Celebrities & Their Doshas

Dosha type references are linked from whatsyourdosha.com - I used another site's test, because I thought it more comprehensive.

They called it 'Collateral Damage.'

"He who has not made the experiment, or who is not accustomed to require rigorous accuracy from himself, will scarcely believe how much a few hours take from certainty of knowledge, and distinctness of imagery; how the succession of objects will be broken, how separate parts will be confused, and how many particular features and discriminations will be compressed and conglobated into one gross and general idea.

To this dilatory notation must be imputed the false relations of travellers, where there is no imaginable motive to deceive. They trusted to memory, what cannot be trusted safely to the eye, and told by guess what a few hours before they had known with certainty."

~Samuel Johnson: Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

In 1985 I was living in an apartment just off West Michigan Avenue in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

The place was low-rent, 1/2 HUD housing, and was a hodge-podge of race, color, creed, gender, disability, age, and ethics. Most of my neighbors bought dope from the rest, and sold it to each other when times got hard.

IN January 1986, times got real hard. Somebody had sold some, let's just say, abominably-less-than-pristine cocaine to someone who didn't live in the complex. The customers were most definitely not happy.

They weren't thinking very well, either. since 20 years have gone by, please forgive my lack of memory concerning the numbers; I will say that the purveyors of said blow-a-la-roach-powder, baking soda, and FSM-knows-what-all lived in apartment #1200, which was on the other side of the complex from where I stored my stuff all day, and my bones (and the stuff that holds them together) at night, behind a nice Schlag lock. I also kept those bones (and accessories) stoned as often and as intensely as was possible on my student budget; being an active part of the neighborhood brain-candy store helped, too.

I digress...

Apartment #2200 was about 75 feet from my bedroom window. At about 2 AM, the gunfire started; the double-pane plate glass balcony doors then the single-pane plate-glass windows of the two bedrooms blew into large shards with not-so-small holes at their edges, shattering and spiderwebbing and making wierd scraping sounds as they tried to outdo each other in their frantic efforts to obey the law of gravity, I barely noticed. I was busy trying to be awake and see something through the muzzle flashes - it's amazing how long a bunch of hot light can hang in the air...

the perps fired more than 50 rounds into the wrong apartment that night, the home of a single mom and her small daughter (I think that's right), and then the tiresqueealing began, and the big block whater-the-fuck-it-was left the premises and, for about 30 seconds (30 eons, more like) it was silent, save for the doppling down of the getaway car fading into ignominy.

The people in #2200 were not hurt. A fish tank in the apartment behind #2200 was shattered. If I'm remembering correctly, 20-gauge, 9mm, and .410 shot were picked out of the walls, both inside and outside the apartment.

The perps were (to my knowledge) never caught.

Congratulations Nina

These qualities very much describe my oldest daughter; good thing, because she is being inducted into the National Honor Society tonight - her mom will be there but, for various reasons, I cannot make it.

She's a junior, and should have been inducted 2 years ago, or last year; but, because she was either working or performing service, she put off the ceremony until tonight- they told her she had to be properly inducted, and they would induct her if they had to drag her there tonight. :)

Nina's GPA is above 3.89, and she could really care less - although she gets an odd (smug) look when she reviews her report card at the end of the semester; a little smugness is allow, I think, for such diligent and sometimes tedious work. She loves education; the old, new, and odd ideas, the new skills to learn, tools to use, and her imagination is always humming along in the background; twisting, turning, permutating these ideas and methods to see if somebody missed something important, or if she can find a different way to make something work- I think she views the universe as a multi-dimensional Rubik's cube with a soul.

I just wanted to let you know how proud I am of her.

I Hit the Bottle

I opened a bottle of sparkling cider (cranberry) for my kids' dinner. It's been a really tough day here; I won't go into detail in this journal, but necessary changes are afoot, and today wasn't an easy day on that path.

So dinner. Fried chicken (deli), baked beans, potato salad, macaroni salad, veggie tray - and sparkling cider, which, immediately covered me (and everything close by) in sticky pink fizz the instant I popped the Painter cap. I stood up, took two steps, the ground circled, swooped up and smacked me; I landed on my left shoulder, I hit the bottle.

So... Bruised rotator cuff, sore lower back, (some of you know my woes with ~L4 and ~L5 after getting into a fight with a Lexus about 10 years ago - you shoulda seen the Lexus... Smarting hip, that icky post-impact feeling... :whine:

Anyway, I'm going to ice it and take drugs and probably drink some alcohol; as the drugs I have are not really worth calling drugs, and neither is the alcohol (4%); and then I'm just going to try to be really, really still.