Ree's Toejam
two entries in one: family togetherness and boots (permalink)
[EDIT: Those of you who come here when you get your email notification owe me big. I get cranky just wondering how much time I spent wrestling with NotifyList.com tonight. If you don't get my handy email reminders to read my new entries, you can sign up, or be uncool. Your call.]
So I have been told I need to update here. Sorry. If all y'all ever need more Ree-ness to fill your web browser, you can check out my LiveJournal or my Xanga, although I'm obliged to point out the two have pretty much similar contents lately. I have discovered a way to crosspost to both systems without resorting to the basic copy-and-paste, hehehe, and it makes me feel all powerful-like.
I'm supposed to update here, not there, though; guess I should move it along. [Warning: family babbling ahead. Lots of it.]
Um. Can't go gaming the weekend right after Hallowe'en because my dear sweet mother & co. have planned an extended family get-together that weekend! Yay! I get to go to Omafuckingha and chill with the cousins I don't know, the cousins who are married and see me as next in line to wed, and the perfect fucking bitches! Funny thing, that -- those groups seem to overlap by quite a bit. And if you can't feel the sarcasm in this paragraph, people, then maybe you're not paying attention, because I'm slathering it on like I'm building a fort of the stuff. (And I'll thank y'all to keep your Freudian fruitcake analyses to yourselves, please.)
It shouldn't be as bad as all that, despite me deep aversion to my extended family. TJ, the less dear-to-me of my two brothers, was around this weekend and kicked off his stay here by giving me a surprise shoulder rub as I sat here typing. Mmm. There are a handful of things that a male can do that instantly win them points from me, and shoulder rubs are part of that delectable list. If he weren't blood kin and it weren't illegal, I'd marry him or at least date him on the basis of the shoulder rub alone.
Maybe I am a lonely sad little person.
Anyway. Family togetherness. I've concluded that my immediate family isn't that bad. Daddy is, as ever, displaying a marked fondness for Squirt out of his three offpsring, but hell. He has asked my mom and Squirt how I was doing and such, so he does care. I just -- I don't know if I can have a relationship with the man. I don't know how to be his daughter, he doesn't know how to be my father, and we can't even really be friends because we have no common interests I don't know. Maybe it's enough that I don't hate him anymore.
I still maintain that what he did was wrong (cheating on my mother, leaving her for an older woman and a barfly at that, not telling his kids about his remarriage himself), but -- I've done wrong stuff too. Part of my belief system is that, barring extreme youth or lack mental capacity, there are no innocents in the world. We've all done things we knew were wrong, and we did them anyway. We then strive to make ourselves feel better by stratifying wrongdoings and making ours minor compared to the misdeeds of others, but in the end, we've all committed bad turns.
Tangents again. Actually, this is rather on-task, for me -- I started out talking about my family (after my opening strike about being asked to update), and I'm trying to scramble back to it now.
My extended family. I love my grandfather, crochety Swedish-American jerk that he is. Mention the French to him. I dare you. He gets all riled up. Ever seen a 79-year-old man spit nails over a country he hasn't seen since WWII? It's slightly amusing, in a rather wrong sort of way. The rest of my extended family... hm. My mother's sister is the only one I see very often. She's one of those born-again Christian types who gets on the nerves of everyone even the littlest bit less pious than she is. Gah. I'm still smarting from the time she called one of my close friends a "nominal" Christian because my friend didn't attend church every freakin' Sunday.
You see what I have to deal with.
Who else. I think it's just my grandpa's grandkids and their parents -- I have any number of "aunts" and "uncles" who are really great-aunts and -uncles, and cousins of various degress of removal that make my brain hurt. I call them all "cousin" or whatever, regardless of the degree of separation. It makes my brain swell less.
Half my cousins on this side of my family, I don't even really know. They always lived two states away. We saw them at Christmas sometimes, or sometimes on special Thanksgivings. Two girls older than me, a boy just a bit younger than me, and a girl about Squirt's or TJ's age. All but the youngest girl are married. Their father, my mom's little brother, died when I was in fourth grade or so. Bone cancer. Their mom remarried and divorced. I almost hope mom's sister feels a bit out of place at this reunion nonsense -- she's the only survivor of grandpa's kids to have never divorced. She's be the only wedded woman there of that generation.
Meanwhile, in "my generation", I'm among the younger cousins. My mom took her time marrying while her younger siblings wed and bred. Of my grandfather's ten grandchildren, five are married and at least two have one or more kids already. One has twins, to which I can only say "ow" many times slowly. Of the five unmarried, two are younger than me (one by several years, one by just a month), two are my brothers (both younger than me), and the last is -- me.
I keep telling myself that I don't need to marry at 22 to have self-worth, but in the face of my family... it's hard. There are girls -- women, really -- my age who are engaged, married, going back for the master's degrees, planning on kids in a few years. And I'm -- I'm just here. I like to pretend I'm counting on living past 80 and am just pacing myself.
I have decided, however, to be myself for this shindig. That means dressing for myself, not my mother, my grandfather, my Puritanical aunt or my bevy of blissfully married cousins. Depending on the weather, I mean to wear my brightest tank tops under unbuttoned shirts in various degrees of sub-urban decay. Torn jeans because they're my softest pair and so comfy, or else the ones my mother thinks are too tight even though they're really just comfortably body-skimming.
I suppose I could wear my fuzzy kitty ears around Nebraska, though I'd be setting myself up for smirks of "Hallowe'en was yesterday..." ending with an insult and/or profanity of the heckler's choice.
I am finding myself bored. There's something on AMC tonight -- oh! Yes! Army of Darkness! I own it, of course (got the wall poster and everything), but there are so many different versions of the damn thing. I mean to watch this and see if it varies from mine in any way. There's the Director's Cut, the so-called "Official Bootleg Edition", the Boomstick Edition... I don't even know what mine is, just that's the VHS, released well before the faux bootleg, and has the American ending on the movie (as would be expected for a U.S. copy) but also includes the original/UK ending after the end credits. The trailer too, and no previews at the beginning, which always confused me -- why not head off the tape with the trailer, particularly since there are no previews of other releases, then go into the movie and end the tape after the alternate ending?
Movies aren't required to make sense. Thankfully, neither am I!
(And a closing thought: The telly is running an ad for They Live, which AMC is airing -- Wednesday night, I think? Not sure. In that film the world is laden with subliminal messages that normal humans cannot see but somehow obey. One that just flashed on the screen was something like "MARRY AND REPRODUCE". To which my brain responds, "My cousins are tools and I am defying the -- things -- that control weaker-minded people. Hee.")
...later...
Okay, so I haven't posted this yet (as I'm catching up on the grooviness everyone else has diarised first). I wanna write more, so I add this here. Saves on total entries or something. Hell, I don't know. Why the fuck not? (And guess who finally saw Risky Business for the first time... and got left in her mom's house all by herself... hehehehe.)
Fuck people and fuck my boots too. My dead old black just-over-the-ankle boots have finally died. I had to safety-pin both zippers into place to keep them from opening themselves, but when the heel on one peeled itself back the second time (hey, I have demonic shoes; they move by themselves! -- would that they'd walk me places, then) -- well. That canned that.
So I bought new boots. They're not quite as tall, which means they won't get that ugly-ass crease the taller boots had. They are tan. They also hurt my feet.
My new boots are trying to piss me off and they're doing an excellent job. I can slip them on, zip them up and we're fine for a few hours. Much longer, though, and they put a horrible pressure on my foot, on the top of my right foot, over the ball of the pinky toe.
This KILLS. Not literally, of course, but owwww. Fucking ow. When I take the boots off, I can feel the distorted flesh around the base of my right pinky toe. The sacred boot are mashing my feet like potatoes or something.
Hey! Spiffy boots, you can't do that to me. Don't you know I need you to fit me right? I don't have any other casual winter footwear. YOU are my casual winter footwear. You're supposed to fit securely, instead of loose around the toes and heel and vise-tight around the broad part of my foot!
This is weird. I have long, narrow feet. Freakishly narrow, really. I hate the way my feet look in most dress shoes, for instance. They accentuate the wrong way. And these boots are cute and don't cramp my toes and I can actually get my feet in and zip them up, which is something of a minor miracle with my big, man-size feet.
Bad boots. Please fit. Please quit wearing holes in brand-new socks on that sore spot. Please just make a callus there if you need to and then quit with the hurting. It makes me crabby (yes, crabbier than usual, you rude boots you) and it even makes me weirdly sad when boots I like so much fit me but hurt me too.