it's not easy living with me, I know. I'm the moodiest of critters, too often curled mollusk-like into my own shell, betimes bemoaning this or that or the whole kit n caboodle of my lot, tending to place blame for dissatisfactions wholesale on geography. poor chicago, it's not to blame for my malaise, ultimately. but I can sure make it sound like it. to live with me is to attend an ongoing litany of plaint (hi, een) and confected concoctions of how fabulous it would be to move elsewhere in one direction or another-- now closer to my family, now nearer friends, then away overseas, or what about just striking out behind the wheel across this great nation, no agenda, cameras and gazetteers in hand?
I ordered new carpet today for all the bedrooms and Ben's office.
They will start on Tues. By then I should also have received the guest bedroom furniture and Ben's office furniture!
Once the carpet is in , and furniture put together and in place I'LL BE DONE!
Well, I'll still have things I'll want to add to the house, but we will be waiting till spring to do those since they are all outside!
Photos will follow carpet and furniture - I promise.
It's National Adoption Week. I found out by accident; for my family every week is Adoption Week! I came across this article on Google News. The article talks about the complex reality of adoption:
The British Association of Adoption and Fostering (BAAF) has published information today stating that one in every three parents looking to adopt would not consider a child born out of a pregnancy that included alcohol or drug abuse by the mother. This view on adoption is troubling given that nearly half of children in the U.K. that need adopted families originate from homes where drugs and alcohol were abused.
With National Adoption Week beginning today, BAAF wants to place an emphasis on steering prospective parents out of a fantasized ideal of adoption and into today’s modern reality of adoption. (Bolding mine.)
I don't blame adoptive parents for wanting a baby with a "clean slate". Raising a child with special needs, be that a disability or a troubled past, is heartbreaking and difficult. But the idea that a "baggage-less" adopted child will be just like a biological child is a fantasy. Every adopted child has a past:
Genetic ties and shared history can never be severed. An adopted child and their new family must always live with that difference.
YES. I want every person who has any contact with an adopted child or their family to understand that. I want people to understand that adoption is a beautiful and wonderful thing, but that it ain't perfect. Adoption is born out of hope, but it's also a connection forged out of the grief of parents: birth parents who have to give up a child and many adoptive parents who are unable to concieve. Adoption changes everything you know about family and genetics and love. I want people who know my family to acknowlege that. Don't put adoption or my family on a pedestal.
"Adoption is such a miraculous process!" Yes it is, but so is having a biological child, and that is messy and scary and frustrating while also being joyful and more fulfilling than anything else in the world.
Happy Adoption Week to everyone touched by adoption. God preserve all of us! :)
If I'm going to hell,
I intend to know
I fucking deserve it
in the end, i didn't bring emily along for halloween. but it was a good thing i didn't because i would surely have lost her in the midst of the fun. i don't think i've partied this hard since i was eighteen. lol.
i'll let the pictures do the talking.
so while we started out all sober, posing for photos in the conventional manner, it wasn't long before we were all reduced to outlandish drunkards. and though i was puking my guts out by the end of the night, i say for next year's halloween, 'let the debauchery begin!' ^^
ah, man, I've missed my little ibook-- chris got it working again just last night and then was off to work super-early this morning, so here I lie, having my old type-in-bed time once more. an indeterminate brain is confronted by the opportunity...
honestly, I've felt a bit adrift without the tether of words composed here-- facebook brings something else entirely-- reconnections, semi-connections, a superficial sort of webbing, but webbing nonetheless-- it's brought me back into some form of contact with more than one lost friend, for which I'm enormously grateful-- but the writing medium is altogether different, requiring by custom if not strict technical limitiation (as twitter) a tendency of hyper-abbreviation. this tenor is most surely the coin of the realm more generally, but as an expressive form it does little for real mulling through-- my milieu. yes, I know, it isn't as if vox (or for that matter wordpress, blogger or, heck, my trusty paper journal) has gone away, only myself that has elected to neglect the form-- the medium itself remains available throughout my various distractions.
and to what do these distractions amount? little coherent cumulatively, I fear. there's me, always inclining to weigh and measure. recently here and there been torturing myself for no good reason with google searches for people I no longer need any connection with-- wretched, idle hands. I know better. well, at least the killing curiosity is soon exhausted with lack of any relevance, but it's a waste of energy. and other wastes as well-- time and self spent merely watching video, tuning out, dialling down the day. then there's been some good reading (margaret atwood-- and attending her gorgeous many-voiced book launch event downtown on friday). a weekend full of sleep, fighting off one of the many seasonal bugs flying around. glorious golden autumn days. car repairs etcetera.
adrift. diffuse. in need of locating a likely thread to stitch it all into some sense.
one thing tho: we've begun to plan weddinging for 2010-- in our own idiosyncratic way, with sites of celebration in chicago and northern michigan-- we've started sketching it out for ourselves, what's wanted, what's not wanted, how to accommodate the needs versus desires of those we love, how to make something authentic and real and delicious and right for ourselves, to relinquish any mar from the past's damaged expectations-- to begin anew, rightly and brilliantly, for ourselves.
Hello pumpkins! I haven't forgotten you, I swear! It's just been an odd end to the year and I have been having a bit of a hiatus from photography - wedding and street-wise. It was much needed, but what can I say - I have now started to have a lovely tickle to actually want to lift a camera up and start taking some photos again. :) So, watch this space, as the film is in my Holga 35mm and I'm back on the streets of London!
Ok,
You've talked me into it
stock the fridge with beer
and get this show on the road
it's all piss
but who are we to judge
never say
meant to be
to me again
because if that were true
well, it's in my blood
to live in boxcars
and yet here I am
with my 4 door sedan
but who am I to judge
let's sing it to just the red eyes in the back
...I would buy everything in this store. I look at their website and salivate. I walk into their store and get weak at the knees. If I found some genie, my third wish would be to get a hundred-thousand dollar giftcard to this store, right after world peace and the elimination of hunger.
Seriously....this quilt? These shirts? This skirt?? To die for.
- Ben and I rode our motorcycles south and east through a bit of Amish country. Hills and curves OH MY!
- Finished painting front door "wild currant" - but still to tacky to hang back up.
- Finished painting the halls, the guest bedrooms, the offices, the kitchen, the sun room and entry. (thanks to Pat, Carol and Pete)
- Ordered new office furniture for Ben - I'll be pulling pieces from his office to make mine work better.
- Wired more of the house for TV cable and internet (thanks to Andy and Steve).
- Tomorrow I pick up the last of the family room furniture and talk to the carpet folks about new carpet for Ben's office and all the bedrooms (Ben gets brown, bedrooms get beige)
- Put together one of two side tables for our bedroom (they match patty's lights) and have another for living room
- Have an order holding on Overstock for the "couples" guest bedroom - holding out for the bed frame I want.
- Cleaned up the kitchen from the 4 days of painting and home projects
- Fixed the lighting in the entry, sun room
And when all done, I was able to cook dinner and eat with Benny! I have decided to "master" the electric cooktop before pulling it out and replacing it! I did not burn dinner! Hurray!
So you know, I miss
- My kids
- My girlfriends
- Whole Foods (especially the soaps and salad bar)
- Sushi
- Trader Joes (especially the frozen foods)
- San Francisco (in general)
- The beach (even through I did not get there often)
- My kids (again, because I really really wish they could come visit my new home!)
- And all our CA friends - Too many to list y'all - but you know who you are.
