Kitten Wars 8/3/14

03 Aug 2014 Leave a comment

by Quietude's Junction in journal, Kitten Wars Tags: , , , , , ,

Teeny is in heat. Any cat lover out there knows that each female cat has her own version of heat. While Cleo tells you about hers vocally and loudly in the middle of the night, Teeny is fairly quiet with purrrupping and bumping galore. While she is very receptive to human interactions (PET ME NOW, HUMAN) as she bumps her head into us, she is NOT receptive to dog interactions what-so-ever.

Poor Buddy was sound asleep on his bed this morning when Teeny went to bump into me. She was bumping my legs so forcefully and constantly that I was tripping over her. Evidently, she wasn’t looking where she was bumping and when I stepped by Buddy, she bumped him instead of me. In utter shock that the dog made contact with THE CAT, Teeny bounced back and hissed fairly loudly at him waking him up. As he opened his eyes very slowly from his deep slumber, Buddy got an eye full of angry cat telling him just how wrong he was for letting her bump into him.

In true dog fashion, Buddy lifted his head, looked at me, then put it back on his bed, covering it with his paws as Teeny flounced away. Its hard being the only male pet in this house sometimes and a dog at that.

Drumming Therapy Anyone? 8/3/14

03 Aug 2014 2 Comments

by Quietude's Junction in journal Tags: , , , , , , ,

I had the most fun yesterday. I always knew that drummers usually have the biggest grins when they are playing their instruments. Well, I may have cracked the reason why. Drumming releases stress in the best way!

By nature, I am that person that shies away from meeting groups of new people. I much prefer one to one interactions with good friends. So, it was a huge step for me to actually go to the drumming circle in the first place, but I trusted Rick since I’ve known him 30 years now. He and I have sung in all sorts of chorister guilds together and have maintained a very strong friendship, if distant due to my living anywhere from 100-2500 miles away at any given time. So whenever we would get together it was always hugs, catching up, and fun.

Over time Rick has stayed true to his music and even cut a CD with a group of Middle Eastern musicians, while I have gone in and out. So, when he asked who would be interested in joining up for a percussion group, I contacted him and said, “Sure, but I don’t have a drum”. He gave me the places to go to and offered to join me in hunting out a good one at a decent price. Well, somehow the day of the meetup came and I still didn’t have a drum. Let’s just call it life.

We met up at a store before the circle and he told me I needed to go to another store, but that the circle was due to start. He said that there would be spare drums so I could still participate! Nervous, shy, scared, didn’t begin to tell the story of my emotional grid, but there was a thrumming excitement coating all of it. I met up with everyone. My son joined us and for almost 3 hours we played, we learned, and we drummed our hearts out.

I left with directions to the third store in the Atlanta area to look at drums. Rick told me straight up that when I found the one that was mine, it would speak to me. So, I entered the store and when the guy asked if I needed help, I told him that he was gonna need to really help me a lot ’cause I was there to buy my first drum. Instead of taking advantage of me like so many others could have, this guy joined the excitement bandwagon and began pulling down doumbeks and djembes of all sizes. Then he brought a chair over and showed me how to sit and the proper tilt. He didn’t try to sell me the most expensive one. Matter of fact he told me it was too big especially for me to learn on. He brought me a wide range of prices. When I hit this one drum we looked at each other and grinned. It spoke with a clear sweet sound that was all for me 🙂

So yesterday was day one of my drumming experience. I’m sure my neighbors will get sick of hearing middle eastern drum patterns after a while, but I’m sure gonna have fun until they do!

New Year, New Students, Fresh Start

01 Aug 2014 3 Comments

by Quietude's Junction in journal, reflections Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Each school year I create a “mega” bulletin board that guides the theme for the year. I’ve done paper rainforests, waterfalls, and jungles. Sometimes I choose a science topic that the kids will be studying. The 2013-2014 school year found me doing Space Exploration. I’m guessing that I was quite the strange one at my latest school because people would drop by just to see how far along I was with that bulletin board. Once I finished it, I had a couple of teachers asking if I did murals for side money. I don’t. I make my murals just for the kids. If I did it for money, it would cease to be fun.

At the end of last year, when I was taking down my bulletin board, I was approached by a few colleagues who asked me what I planned on doing with my star burst bulletin board as I was rolling it up and putting it into the trash. They were dismayed that I had spent a few days painting it only to throw it away at the end of the year. I think one of them actually took it out of the trash and carted it away later, but I can’t prove that one. I only know that it developed legs of its own before the custodians came around to pick up the mounds of end of the year trash.

Of course, the follow-up question was, “Well if you’re throwing that one away, what do you plan on doing next year?”

Not giving it much thought, I said, “I think I’ll do something like ‘Starry Night'”. I know better than to answer questions off the cuff like that. It always sets me up for something later on!

At this point, I need to inform you that I have no formal art training. Matter of fact the last art class I took was in fifth grade which was back before Star Wars came out. So, I was being a bit facetious in my reply, to say the least. I do not consider myself an artist, but rather a dabbler. Well, my colleague took me at face value and was fairly excited that I was going to go for it.

I had all summer to think about it, forget about it, and come back around to it. For some reason, the idea just wouldn’t leave me alone. If I wasn’t thinking about that painting, I was hearing Don McLean in my head with his version. Something somewhere was trying to tell me to try it!

So, here’s a picture of the bulletin board that I made for the 2014-2015 school year. I used navy blue bulletin board paper and acrylic paint. I did not overhead project it. I even went so far as to intentionally leave elements out. This is my impression of the picture only, but boy did I have fun painting it over the last few days 🙂 I’ve had lots of people dropping by just to see where I was with it. I’ve had people sharing stories about when they first saw the original, when they went overseas to the various museums, or when they listened to …. Don McLean.

starry night

In Whose World is Reality

30 Jul 2014 Leave a comment

by Quietude's Junction in journal, Short fiction Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I wrote this a while back. Its from a dream that haunted me. Article 94’s Mark Gardner spurred this one to be brought here by his piece “My Own Monster”. While this is fiction, it has elements of fact in that my grandmother had one of the longest documented cases of Alzheimer’s. My mother kept her at home with home nursing for years. Doll was treated from roughly 1981 until her death in 2005.
********
“My car is missing!” I told them being outright ignored.

Doll just wandered around the kitchen picking up the newspaper, putting it back down before settling in a chair at the table. Opening the cabinet, mother pulled out a glass and walked over to the refrigerator, opened it, looked inside then leaving the door open, pulled out her cigarettes.

“Did you hear me? My car has been stolen! I need to use your phone!”

My mother lit her cigarette then replied without turning towards me, “Well you should have thought of that before you loaned it out. Not my fault you can’t make good choices.” She took a drag off of it then got some orange juice out to pour into her glass. Meanwhile, my grandmother sat there staring blankly at nothing in particular while our drama unfolded around her.

“Mother, I need to use your phone.” I said knowing that if I walked over to it without her permission, all hell would break loose, so I stood perfectly still ever watchful to see if she would acquiesce. Even though local calls were part of the bill, I was not allowed to call out without permission even as an adult.

“Judy, where’s my juice? I need my juice with my paper in the morning.” My grandmother murmured distantly as if just now waking from a long nap. That she noticed her juice was gone was a good thing. Alzheimer’s had done its number on her years ago taking her idea of what was real and now away so solidly that no amount of putting it in front of her mattered. She had her good days when she was sweet and loving, then there were the bad ones where everyone was a physical target that she had to overcome with any means necessary.

“OH good, the woman who looks like my granddaughter is here. My doll baby is much prettier than you, but she still needs to lose weight. I so wish she would come back from school to visit me.”

“Doll, it is me. I’ve just grown older.” I took a few steps over to her and took her hand in mine. It was soft, withered, with the bones showing through from where she refused to eat now. I tried, not thinking about it, wanting her to recognize me just once for who I am. I knew better. It never worked.

“Don’t you talk to your grandmother that way! You’ll just confuse her more!” My mother lit another cigarette from the one burning as if the first one had some kind of fatal flaw in it. She looked at me with utter hatred pouring out of her, the fury of it licking its way to me.

“I used to sing, “Hello Dolly” to her as a baby. She was such a sweet child.” Doll smiled with the kindest of smiles that lit up her face making her eyes glow with happiness. Then she began to sing in a hesitant but happy voice, “Hello, Dolly! Well hello, Dolly! It’s so nice to have you back where you belong!”

Tears came to my eyes as she did that, wishing that she was singing to me once more. My early childhood had been filled with visits to her when she would sing to me and talk with me, taking me places with her as if I was special. She had been so much more of a mother to me when I was there than her daughter was. I missed my grandmother, my Doll.

I never used a typical grandmother term for her. From the moment I could call her anything, she was Doll. Everyone picked it up from me. Even her friends called her that because my grandmother was so very special.

Mother turned, strode angrily across the kitchen and slammed the juice down in front of her mother, taking Doll’s attention from happy memories back to the confusing present. “Mother here is your juice. You know that SHE doesn’t love us enough to come here to visit.”

Turning to me she spat, “Use the phone. Call the police then leave. Don’t come back, you are not welcome here!”

************************
I woke up shaking, frozen stiff in my bed, still hearing their voices, smelling the cigarette smoke as it burned my nose. My muscles were ready for the fight that was coming. My brain was churning, waiting for the next verbal attack from my mother, but it wasn’t coming. They are both dead, long dead only their memories still haunt me; my dreams keeping them vividly alive.

Crafting the Change: In Reply to Goddesses and Doormats #queenofallevil 7/30/14

30 Jul 2014 6 Comments

by Quietude's Junction in journal, reflections Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Lately I’ve read a few pieces written by queenofallevil that are really hitting home. She writes about empowering yourself and refusing to belittle who you are to someone else needs or expectations. She talks about how to achieve self-realization in a very straight forward manner. While blunt and to the point, what she says needs to be heard, read, understood, and used by so many of us. When you come from any sort of dysfunctional relationship, whether it was how you grew up or was a romantic one, the first step is to be aware of what happened to make it dysfunctional and eradicate it.

Personally, I am one of those people that over-cares and over-does. In my first marriage, my husband-to-be actually told the priest that the reason he was marrying me was because I made everything work. I made it easy for him to live his life the way he wanted to. In essence I was his executive assistant to be, not his future wife.

Being a helpmate is not a bad thing, but when I took care of all of the details constantly for someone who, while admitting that I did so, continued to use me in this manner without trying to change what was going on, I lost track of who I was. He did not want me to work saying that the military was taking care of everything and would stop if I worked a true job, so I was allowed only a small job to cover extra expenses. Over time my sense of self-worth and id just dissolved into who my mate needed me to be. I lost my voice, not physically, but mentally and spiritually. I left my interests and hobbies behind so that I could help him achieve his goals. I buried myself in his needs and wants to the point that others didn’t even know if I could talk or express an opinion of my own.

The best thing I did during that relationship was to go back to school during which I fell into my profession. I started out as a voice major. It was something that I loved, but something that was costly in time. He didn’t mind that I sang and practiced all the time. It wasn’t until I changed my major to speech pathology that things truly got rough.

During my second year of classes, I started getting job applications constantly sent to me with salary quotes. After he picked one up and read that I was going to make more money than he did, well things started getting rough. No longer did he allow me time to study or do my projects. I had to squeeze in all the extras that a graduate student is required to do during the hours that he was not at home because once he got home, I was required to be available for him at all times.

It wasn’t until he left on a year-long duty overseas, that I realized that without him and his needs, I didn’t know what to do. I was finishing up my master’s degree at the time, about to intern, when I finally got angry enough to do something about it. I realized that I didn’t want to continue to follow him around anymore. I wanted my own career, managed by myself without his interference or even his input. I wanted out in a big way, which was my first indication that something was truly wrong. I was growing out of the doormat stage of that particular relationship, unfortunately I had not grown enough to recognize and stop the pattern.

My first dysfunctional marriage led into my second one in which I continued to be the care-giver, the organizer, the doer of the relationship, and in this case one more step … the provider. Focusing on what had to be done and how to do it, I made it to where my second husband didn’t believe that he needed a job at all. He simply stayed home, played on the computer, or played at creating items for his hobbies. Was it entirely my fault that he chose this venue? No, but I made it easier for him to do so. After all, why work for someone else making a little bit of money, when your spouse has made it so simple to just stay home and have fun. I won’t say that we could afford what he was doing, we truly couldn’t but that part never truly bothered him, only me as I began the spiral of exhaustion of mind, body, and spirit.

So, this cycle repeated itself, in a slightly different manner, but the result was the same.

My lesson is to become less available to everyone else’s needs around me. It is very hard to not be the person that has the supplies, has the answers, and knows how to fix or do whatever needs to be done. It is harder still to stop wanting to help everyone around me. As a natural care-giver, I need to work socially on what I do professionally … teach others, not do for them.

As a society, we use the word help in a very positive manner in which the person helping is supposed to be doing a good thing. We have created a generation of people who have been brainwashed into being the end-all and do-all of their families and relationships, but this is not necessarily a good thing. In response to the care-givers, we, as a society, have also created a generation of users; people who think nothing of running their helpers, the ones who love and care for them, into the ground from all of their demands both necessary and unnecessary.

So, in reply to what queenofallevil is writing about, I believe that the answers lie both within and without. People need to recognize their dysfunction and work to alleviate it, but the change is not just for individuals. We, as a society, need to acknowledge the dichotomy and work towards crafting the change.

Baseball anyone?

27 Jul 2014 Leave a comment

by Quietude's Junction in journal Tags: , , , , , ,

Growing up as the only grandchild of an avid baseball fan could have been a strife had I been a “girly girl” but by the time I was five it was fairly obvious that I was a diehard tom boy. I was that girl who made mud pies then stored them for later in the tang jars using the tang to spice them up to see what would happen over time. I knew they wouldn’t be eaten, just was that kind of curious. I caught night crawlers in my mother’s pitchers, played with the roly-polies and climbed anything that everyone thought shouldn’t be climbed. My dad taught me how to throw a Frisbee much to our roof and his lack of a ladder’s discontent. He also gave me a Big Wheel about that time that I raced around the block as fast as I could tumbling everyone and everything in my way. While I was always embarrassed when someone fell or I almost hit a moving target such as a dog or cat, it only made me go faster. So, when I was six and moved down to live with my mother’s parents, it wasn’t that big of a step to go from all that to learning how to play baseball.

My grandfather was as much of a diehard baseball fan as I was a diehard tomboy which was a match made in heaven. Understand that my grandfather was born in 1898 and didn’t have much to say to girls, but when he saw me watch the games with him and heard me talk about going to the Mets World Series in 1969, well, he took matters into his own hands. Without talking to my mother or grandmother who were both still trying hard to turn me into a Cupie Doll with curly strawberry blondes curls, which by the way I NEVER had, he drove me over to the Western Union and bought me my first baseball, glove, and a pitch back. Then he took me out into the yard and showed me how to throw that ball! I can’t tell you how many hours, days, weeks, I tossed that ball, but I know that I finally wore it out. I tossed, threw, and slammed balls into that thing until I blew holes in it. When I was about eight, he bought me my first bat. It was a tiny thing, more of a toy size than a real bat, but that was ok. I was a tiny girl. At the age of eight, I was the size of a normal five year old, if that. So there I was in my designer clothes that my mother and grandmother chose for me each day, outside throwing balls as hard and fast as I could into my pitch back. Once I got that bat, well, he took me out into the open field that we all called “The Park” and showed me how to hit that ball! I was in heaven!

My grandfather died in 1989. He had cancer for a very long time, but in the end it wasn’t the cancer that got him but rather just old age. He was bed ridden for years before he went with nurses in his home to take care of him. He was a gentle man, a gruff man who didn’t have much to say to females. As I grew up and my mother wouldn’t let me play “boy games” that would develop “boy muscles” he and I talked less and less. I missed those early days when he would take me places and show me all those neat things. He was a wonderful man who I love and miss to this day.

Memories of another time, a different me

27 Jul 2014 Leave a comment

by Quietude's Junction in journal Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Tonight is a time of reflection. I find myself remembering an old boyfriend from college, Rob Greenway. He was that bohemian personality who was a musician with a genius IQ. I used to say that he belonged to the philosophy of the month club. He liked to try on different Eastern philosophies for size then, when you asked him why he did or didn’t do something anymore, he would reply that it went against …. (fill in the blank) philosophy. During the short time I was with him, I think he went through three different philosophical venues in about 3 months. His brain just couldn’t stop searching for a version of the truth that he could accept. He was a very gifted musician and song writer. He kept several spiral bound notebooks of songs he wrote with their annotated key/chord structures and his guitar tuning for each one. He loved to listen to various acoustic guitar players, then would sit sometimes for minutes, other times for hours figuring out just how they tuned their guitar to create the pieces that they did. Until I met him, I was naive about guitars and thought that they only had one way to be tuned, silly me.

Rob was a kind person, a romantic with a very quirky sense of humor and his own sense of honor. During that time I was going through an extremely shy stage of life and was fairly quiet.  I was that girl that would long for something but never quite get up the courage to go get it. While I was with Rob, he taught me that I was placing boundaries upon myself that I didn’t need. My grandmother said that I never quite learned how to smile as a child, but the neighbor said I smiled with my eyes only. Rob taught me to smile with my entire face, to let the joy out. We would sit under the oak trees on the old North Campus of UGA where he would play his guitar and sing to me the songs that he wrote while squirrels pelted him with acorns. He swore that they aimed just for him. I went along with it just to tease him.  He encouraged me to do the things that I only dreamed of but didn’t do because I had been trained to never step out of the box in public. He told me that acting outside of the box was every bit as fun as thinking outside of it was. He would laugh at and with me on those late nights when I would “set the balloons free” on North Campus after they had orientations and such. It was a simple joy, but so much happiness was derived from watching the balloons float up to the stars.

I haven’t seen or heard from him in 16 years or so. I ran into him at the Ren Faire one year as he was racing to his performance. We hugged and caught up as much as five minutes will allow you. He had traded in his sweet tenor voice and guitar for the penny whistle. He said that too many nights performing in smoky taverns had destroyed those perfect, clear notes of his. He went off chasing his dream, his performance, his love and craft. I wonder where he is now and then and if he finally found that dream of his.

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