parasitegirl | Entries tagged with mother

I talked to the Dean Mommy today. All is good.

I've shared with you how the Dean taught me about the squirrels.

Now, if you're wondering how my mother ended up like she is...here's two great pictures of my (now passed away) grandmother.

That's her under "Crick Prince" getting her first gas mask!...as Christina she somehow ended up being nick-named Cricket.

And Grandmother durring the 7 year courtship of her third, final, and best husband, Bob. She wasn't planning on making any mistakes. The two of them biked all around California, hiked, and more. In this shot she is proudly wearing a shirt with Malcom X on it, as Dean Mommy had become a principal (and teacher and admin) of Malcom Shabazz City High in Madison, an alternative public high school. My grandmother, having been a teacher herself, thought most principals were pricks...but eventually supported her daughter in the transition.

I often sleep in my own Malcom shirt and Malcom X and Virginia Wolf were early t-shirt figures in my home. Virginia Woolfe was on the Room Of One's Own (one of America's longest running feminist bookstores where my mom was a member of some sort AND the Team Of One's Own softball shirts, which also featured the woman symbol, with a fist in place of the circle, with a catcher's mitt behind it...GOD I wish I had one of those now.

Other Grandma stories.

http://parasitegirl.livejournal.com/770527.html#cutid1
http://parasitegirl.livejournal.com/770194.html#cutid1
http://parasitegirl.livejournal.com/769433.html#cutid1
http://parasitegirl.livejournal.com/764977.html

Just a reminder...please don't fall prey to the idea that Easter is about a bouncy little rabbit. That is pure propaganda....and bullshit.

My motehr was progressive enough to sit me don and explain to me that all that hard work is done by the Easter Squirrel. Unfortunately, squirrels get a bad rap for being rodents and, in the past, were considered far less marketable, so Hallmark and other companies created the front-man of The Easter Bunny...who has essentially stolen the glory and the paycheck of the squirrel.

It was often hard for my mother to find cards that celebrated the squirrel. Once, in my childhood, she gave me a card with an illustration of an elephant wearing bunny ears. Under the greeting inside she simply wrote "The Easter Squirrel has friends...."

And let's not get into the Easter when I went to stay with my grandparents and my born-again aunt, uncle, and cousins. My aunt attempted to explain to me that squirrels were not the reason for the season, Jesus was, and told me a story which I could only relate to because some of it overlapped with lyrics I'd heard my father sing in his bluegrass band.

But, things are looking up for the squirrel which is why my mother sent me this...

( The TRUTH! )

...some of you may believe that I have made up the above story, I have not...which should explain a lot.

My mother's very very very early birthday gift for me arrived today.

( LUCY! )

I am surounded by ceramic cats, bears, and rabbits.

Damn, my family can talk. And we have been swapping stories which I will try to record later including:

-When they met the backwoods members of the family, heard the N word a lot, and met their stupidist relative.(related stories "drank moonshine" and "hit on by own cousin")
-The time they couldn't cash grandma"s pay check because Uncle Bob bit some lady in the butt.
-survival skills in high school and teachers who looked embalmed.
-cars owned and wrecked...

My mother has been scanning a lot of the pictures she got from Grandma about a year ago when Grandma was moved to hospice. This is just a few but should bring joy to vintage photo lovers. I will post more later. Doing well.
( Picture Pages. )

The obituary, which is very much the product of both her children (including the typos of the two, she taught for 35 years):
http://obituaries.citizen-times.com/obituaries/keepsake.php?id=64031

FYI: I go to 15 different schools. If I recognize you and remember that you taught last year at a different school (and which school that was) and you’re not part of my support staff, it means that you managed to make an impression on me. This is even more amazing if you are not a homeroom teacher.

Last school year this woman annoyed me.

This year…she picked the wrong day.

( Shut, the fuck, up...please. )

Attention San Fran and bay-area folks. In an attempt to run away from winter blues Dean Mommy and I may be in San Fran from Christmas until the 4th.

Dean Mommy and I will of course wish to spend some time together, but I keep worse hours than the Dean so I should be free some evenings, afternoon, and late nights (and new years eve,duh). I will need transportation help, due to my lack of a drivers license. I am also going to be emailing Elizabeth Strong about drop-ins and private lessons.

Let's see a show of hands as to who all is in the Bay Area now.

I'm taking it easy on the wrist, no complicated crafts.

Alas, my flannel pajamas with the penguins on them are near death. I can ill afford to be without pajamas. I seam ripped the almost threadbare bottoms of my pjs and am now constructing new flannel-lined pajamas. They have to be lined because the fabric that I found isn't warm enough. I need to go back and get some more top fabric because I underestimated how much I'd need. I finished the pants lining today. I do love my serger. It took about 10 minutes.

Behold, my fabric:

( Grooovy )

Dean Mommy will also be contributing to my winterwear. Today's email tells me:

I sent you a package yesterday. I found a gift for you at a local artisan show. I hope that you enjoy it. Will soon be followed by some very warm moccasins that I am making for you. (Be forewarned.)

Readers new to my blog can be forgiven for wondering why moccasins made by my mother are something I must be warned about. They might even wonder if my hand crafting is something I learned from my mum.

My mother is not gifted in crafts, but this does not stop her. She has taken up knitting and will attack a ball of yarn until it is long enough to be a scarf or square enough to be an afghan square. If the result is in-between or amorphous it is stitched around some catnip and becomes a toy for Ozma, her cat. If you click on the mother tag you'll learn more.

But she is my mother. In the same mail she notes:
"I hope that you can keep busy and happy enough to pass through the Four Evil Dark Months. I am in a pretty good depression-fending-off knitting, photo, reading binge myself. Bought some equipment to cut my own mats. "

What I am about to say may come as a surprise to those of you who have grown familiar with my face and torso via lj, but it won't come as a surprise to my mother.

The most difficult thing about preparing to do a photoshoot is this: I do not like having my photo taken. Not one bit. I've learned to rein in my camera cringing around others because it really is my problem, not theirs. The exception is my mother, who has a fine collection of photos she like to think of as "Kayt's backpacks in various foreign countries". What can I say? Moms reduce us to our core beings, and my core hates posing for the camera. We share blood. Her blood in me whispers " I'm right behind you with a camera, turn swiftly and step behind something."

"My daughter shuns my paparazzi ways" from mother's pictures of Mexico. You'd think I was famous.

You've seen many pictures of me, but they usually fall into two categories:

Photos I have taken of myself, usually where the make-up or costume is the focus.
Photos taken by others of me in action: teaching, dancing.

The focus is rarely ever me posing for a photo. Those photos are out there, I've learned to pose, but 50% still have that "Take the fucking picture" face or the smirk of "I am humoring you, but just barely."

I want to be a good photography subject. I want to, as Momo and Nam have suggested, pull together images I like to give them something to work with. I am trying, but trying reminds me that my core simply wants to have this happen magically. I want to show up, black out, and have lovely pictures materialize in a few weeks. It's not like that, I know, but it is what I want. I am having a hard time , as others have suggested, posing in front of my mirror , taking test shots, seeing what angles look good. That reminds me too much that this is prep for having my photo taken.

I know, photo shoots are a work in progress. I don't think this one will be my last.

I probably prepared more than I needed to, and I definitely worried about Gaijin Shock more than was necessary. I waved my panties at no one.

The 8:30 start time for the short (one hour course) meant that I had to kill time between work and workout, but the other weekday evening short course begins at the hour I leave work. The schedule will be better when I ramp up to the regular hour and a half course, which I will enter after I have done two more short courses.

I shleped through the rain to the studio. It is less than five minutes from the Kashiwa station, across from a well known local shrine, on the 5^th floor of a building. Five Japanese women and I piled into the elevator and went on up. The average member seems to be around my age, mid20’s to mid30’s, and they seem to be there for general workout more than spiritual reasons, they seemed more relaxed and less made up than an aerobic s group but less new-agey than the average Japanese bellydancer/ yoga/innerbody workout/gall. With the shape I’m in nowadays, and my height being what it is, I no longer feel like the ungainly foreigner, nor do I particularly stick out. Despite it being my first time (and the only first timer in the class) I was utterly average for the class: My waist flexibility and back posture rocks but I’m lousy at balancing. I’m getting ahead of myself.

The studio is tiny, but everything is here.

( Read more... )

The only moment of Gaijin Shock was two women who responded to my question as to where the bathroom was and then did giggly double takes at me.

It should be noted that while in the yoga studio, in an all female (non-bellydance) environment, my Japanese speaking voice becomes very high and very polite…higher even then when I am asking for something from a superior.

Changed into my yoga togs, and holding my liter of water, locker key, and orange towel, and entered the room.

There, in the steamy sauna of the Hot Yoga room, were many white towels on the floor and many people sprawled out on the towels with smaller white towels covering their faces. I was reminded of Okinawa, when my mother and I took a ferry through an hour and a half of rough water and eventually realized that there was a very good reason that many Japanese passengers were sprawled out on the filthy carpeted ground floor. Staying on the lowest level of the ferry, flat on my back, imagining better times, was the only reasons I didn’t throw up for the duration of the trip. As Dean Mommy says, there are times in your life that you are rudely reminded that your body is a bag of liquid and things floating about. Hot Yoga is also a time when you become aware that your body is a bag of liquid, and that your skin is a membrane, not a wall.

I picked a towel and lay down, covering my face with the orange towel. I breathed in through my nose and started to get used to the 100 degree, 65% humidity of the room. It wasn’t too bad. After five or ten minutes the class started and the instructor gave me, the one first timer, the quick skinny on being a first timer: Don’t go at 100%. Don’t compete with those around you. Breathing…

Well, I don’t really have the ability to take anything at 60%, but what followed wasn’t too strenuous. Belly dance keeps me limber. There were moments where, when in poses that prevented me from having a clear visual, my form in regards to little things was not what it could be. The instructor often moved around the room during the class and could quickly clue me in with a hand gesture or adjustment. This type of yoga goes through the same number/order of poses each time, so pretty soon I should have the routine in my head. As I have said, I have good waist flexibility, getting my head to my knees is not a problem. Balance is something I need to work on, which was not a total surprise. My ankles can be dodgy and I knew this from dance.

The heat didn’t overwhelm me and I didn’t feel like I was sweating as much as I thought I would. I felt pretty chipper about making it through the hour. I was giddy and a bit light headed. I showered up (although I was last in line in the mad dash for showers.) And brought my pink face up to the front counter.

A word about my face: I flush pink. I always have, no matter how fit I am, and once my face flushes it goes a wicked crimson. My heat beat might not be racing but my face screams at people. When I dance I always wear a layer of pale green foundation under everything to neutralize the pink. When I first took aerobics classes in Milwaukee I recall picking something up at Walgreens (CVS) after class and having the check-out lady ask me about my vacation and sympathize with my sunburn…which I did not go on and did not have. I can feel the heat from my face and it irritates my skin. I am often reminded of a character in Rushdie’s Shame who blushes for the shame of those around her and does to so fiercely that it burns her from within.

I am happy that no one showed concern for my red. I purchased a memebership and my first 10 class ticket and headed home.

I don’t know if I drank too much water after class, but I do know that I spent a great deal of the night waking up to urinate..and this morning had a headache as if suffering from a mild hangover. My muscles aren’t sore, but they are a tinge tender, as if I stretched a great deal, which I did.

I have reservations for next week Tuesday and Thursday because my schedule doesn’t allow anything sooner (tonight I see Elijah’s show, Thursday I practice my dance set, Friday I dance at SimSir, Saturday I have a dance workshop and class, Sunday I have the dancing with fire workshop, and on Monday I turn 31..)

Rest, Interred Pissbag.

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A few words about Opus, the cat who has passed away: Opus wasn’t a good cat, ever, but once I brought him home he was my pathetic cat. He was such a god-awful cat that people did not hesitate from asking why we kept him. I can’t explain it, but he was ours…for the few better moments of sleepy warmth and the many moments of worse.

I have written about how the death of a pet impacts people once before http://www.livejournal.com/users/parasitegirl/20375.html but today I bring you four-stories of Opus: The Origin of Opus, 24 Hour Urgent Care, The One Everyone Knows, and Hunter.

( Four pet tales )

Rest in peace.

Travel tales!

I think it has been firmly established that I tend to be a cheap traveler when it comes to accommodations and transport. My mom’s the same way. We’re both happy with small guest houses with minimal comfort located vaguely near, but not in, backpacker locals…bonus if the owner feeds you fruit and baguettes in the morning. I figure if I’m going someplace that I wanna see that place and not the hotel room…and backpackers sometimes make me itchy.

I have learned to revise this plan of attack slightly if traveling with someone I intend to be having lots of sex with or if going to some godforsaken-piece-o-hell backwater for reasons beyond my control. Wataguy and I both suffered from my vote for an artsy basic-looking hotel in London*…and in Huddersfield we both simply suffered because it was Huddersfield.

( Tips and tales for travel in Thailand and Cambodia )

*Kensington Rooms, where staff may or may not give you the wake-up call you asked for… cruel because the rooms have no clocks. That’s if you managed to get into your rooms, bloody-fucked-up-locks, but if you made it in you soon learned the rooms contained not much of anything and the items included in the rooms often didn’t work and the shower…I can’t go on … at one point, while in a rush, the doorknob came off in Wataguy’s hand. The soap and bath stuff, however, were a wonderful scented blend of ginseng and something.

(Editor’s note: I can’t figure out which kanji on this machine means stop randomly auto-correcting my mistakes, you’re just making it worse. Fetid shower was almost posted as fetish shower…a point which is not up for discussion)

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October 2012

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Buggirl's Increasingly Strange Tokyo Tales...

...the all powerful Ozma has spoken.

Entries tagged with mother

Grandma

Just a reminder

Thank you, MOO!

We've got some good pictures.

Christine

It's you...I don't like you.

San Fran?

Crafting for winter.

My Face

Orange Towel.

RIP: Rest, Interred Pee-bomb

Travel Tale, as promised