you know, I think it probably doesn't really matter what I do professionally or what I do with my life in general, as long as I'm kind

so there's that
I might have to work on it though

repercussions

On Sunday I was in kind of a bad place and, out of habit, called someone that I should not have. There were repercussions.

Wanting to send the message that these repercussions are not ok, wanting these repercussions to not happen again, I reached out to a mutual friend/acquaintance asking for his help with this, thinking he would relay the message, that they would call me a bitch, and at least J would get the message and leave me alone.

Instead, I was surprised when J's friend responded to me with kindness. Sorry that I have had to go through this, letting me know that, unfortunately, this is not the first one of these requests that he's gotten, promising to talk to J, to consider thoughtfully the best way to approach the issue with him, to respectfully keep the details of their conversation to himself, shielding me from any further emotional/verbal abuse per my request.

It occurs to me that this is how much my interactions with J over the years have warped my perception, my perception of this situation and how others perceive me, thinking it a matter of commonsense that his friend would respond to me with hostility rather than compassion, kindness and understanding.

In some ways it helps to know that this is a pattern with J, and that there is not just something wrong with me, which is what I have been hearing from him for the past six years. But I also hate to know that he has put other people through this, can't help but feel some complicity in normalizing and accepting his behavior for so long. And yes, I know it doesn't make me responsible for his behavior. But it's difficult reconciling this past with who I want to be, the threads of this past that keep finding their way into my present, in between some old way of being and some new way that I keep just missing, that I haven't quite found my way into yet.

self-care

lavender and chamomile bath
plus lavender and chamomile tea

session

so many connections made this morning

tried to walk them off

linking stories and words

walked to a yard sale
and didn't buy lemonade for fifty cents or touch anything really
i walked back down the street and tried things on and took them off
came home emptyhanded

making the connections i already had in words coming out before i can censor their double meaning

it became a habit

jason then jordan

for something like six months
of talking about myself for an hour every week i did not tell her about jason
jason who was in my life from 16 to 23
not i did not tell her about jason
i did not tell her jason exists
did not seem relevant somehow

when we finally talked about him a few months ago she wanted to know why "he is gross"
it had not occurred to me
that i did not have an answer because it seemed so obvious like common knowledge, jason is gross

never forgot any of it just didn't know how to connect it
only how to bury it in my stomach

with everything else
connected

start wearing purple wearing purple

This made me need to post this video: (although sadly I can't listen to the video b/c my laptop is broken and N's laptop's speakers are busted--I'll have to put the CD on later)

my little life

For roughly probably a year and a half now, my partner and I have been dealing with the mystery of our laundry occasionally reeking. It started with our towels. We washed and dried them and folded them and hung them up and discovered they reeked. Like headache inducing weird unidentifiable smell approximating grill smoke or charcoal reeked. We rewashed all the towels. They still smelled. We googled, experimented, and after some trial and error and many many quarters later found the winning combination: pre-wash spray down with febreeze + downy ball full of white vinegar.

Theories have abounded over the past year and a half as to how to explain why our clothes sometimes come out smelling like this as well as theories of how to avoid it and thereby avoid having to rewash all of our laundry over again. Our best theory, which we came up with after I noticed that our A/C was pulling charcoal smoke into our bedroom when our neighbors grilled, was that we must be doing our laundry while people were grilling and smoke was getting into the basement. Though we never smelled smoke in the basement, doing the laundry in the morning seemed to help avoid the problem and we haven't had the problem for most of the winter.

Last night my partner and I, both already exhausted from work/school, set out to do the laundry so it will be ready for him to leave for Coachella (of which I'm extremely jealous by the way!) We sorted and loaded up the laundry basket, stepped out of our apartment and both immediately said, oh crap, remembering that the door handle had broken off the door leading to the back stairwell which leads down to the basement a couple days ago, leaving the door permanently locked. So we hauled the laundry down the front stairs, outside, around the building, through the side door into the basement and started our three super-full loads of laundry.

When we came back down (the front stairs, outside, around the building, etc.) to move the laundry to the dryers, by the way, my partner somehow managed to drop his keys in the small space between the step down and the inside door to the basement, which required about three to five minutes of (locked out panic!) plus fishing to get the keys out.

A couple weeks ago while doing laundry we noticed someone smelling the dryers, and so before putting our clothes in the dryer we thought to stick our noses in there, and guess what? There it was, the smell. Our dryers reek. Not wanting to leave all our wet clothes to mildew we dried them anyway, and lo and behold everything that went in the dryer reeks and everything that hung to dry is totally fresh and normal.

It still doesn't explain why the dryers reek, or why they only sometimes reek, but the mystery of the source of the smell is finally finally solved. Though it's a little bittersweet, because now all the clothes are back in the hamper, except for N's, which we had to just febreeze so he can pack them tonight, and I am really not wanting to do it all over again until that stupid doorknob gets fixed.

And still, my life is really not that hard.

[eta:] 5:45 pm--got home to find doorknob fixed. dryers smell normal. decided there is just enough time to redo laundry before N needs to have everything packed. Walked to gas station to get the one quarter we were short. Just removed laundry from washing machine, all three loads again, still smell. Sigh. Make dinner, and try again tomorrow with more febreeze I guess.

[eta:] In case anyone was worried, by the time the clothes came out of the dryer again they were pretty much ok--clean clothes for all!

on Keira Knightley's domestic violence awareness ad

[trigger warning]

So, an ad has been made with Keira Knightley in it by an anti-violence against women organization that will be shown in theaters to raise awareness about domestic violence. I haven't seen the video, though I read the transcript, and it is supposed to be pretty powerful. You can see the video and transcript here.

Echoing what I said here, I have to say that I actually have a real problem with this ad, since it's not going to come with a trigger warning when it's shown in theaters. If I saw this in the theater it would pretty much ruin the movie for me or I would have to just get up and leave. I understand the need to drive home the reality of this violence, but for lots of us it's already real, and it's blatantly insensitive to survivors and victims (and ironic) to not respect survivors'/victims' need to not have this sort of material forced on us or to have some kind of warning ahead of time. I'm not entirely sure how to get around that, but I think we need to work on better ways of raising awareness about domestic violence that don't force people who have already experienced it to be potentially re-traumatized with no warning. We've already borne enough of the costs of domestic violence, put it on someone else now.

I'm sure some people will say I should just suck it up and be triggered for the greater good, but that's a personal decision--whether survivors want to put their own health second to raising awareness, and that's a choice that survivors should get to make on their own and not have forced on them.