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I was dared to take this test:
http://www.think-logically.co.uk/lt.htm
Hah HAH! Take THAT, you… you… Why-can’t-women-ever-be-logical? type guys. I scored 100%!
Brrrrtttthhtttt!
Hint: you can’t let what you think you know affect how you answer.
What I can’t figure out is, if I’m so damned smart, how come I don’t apply this in real life?
Two monks were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was falling. Coming around the bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.
“Come on, girl,” said the first monk. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.
The second monk did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. “We monks don’t go near females,” he said. “It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”
“I left the girl there,” the first monk said. “Are you still carrying her?”
Quick! What word do you immediately see in the image after the click?
Whoohoo!! That website is finally done! DONE! I’m so glad, there were parts of it I enjoyed but mostly it just frustrated me that I was doing it instead of my own new business site.
Gotta get IT done now. So excited. NO excuses or interruptions! I’m itching to launch this sucker. Maybe all the delays were actually healthy. Normally I push, push, push at at thing because I’m so impatient and by the time it’s done I’m sick to death of it and hate everything. Maybe this will be different. It needs to be different. Getting older, and can’t keep fucking around so much.
Crap, guess I can’t totally say the client’s site is DONE done just yet. Have to do some research and prepare a report for her. But that’s not website work – that’s stuff I LIKE doing. It took a bit of dancing since it could’ve been a potential conflict of interest. What she wants done is virtual assistant type stuff and perfect for my own new biz, but I was hired to do her website stuff through the contractor. This is why I hate doing websites – they’re only a tiny part of a whole big interconnected picture. I’m happiest when I’m free to roam around and address everything that pops up – the entire picture. Can’t stand being stuck in a corner doing one thing and pretending nothing else is affected. My brain doesn’t work like that. So I’ll do virtual assistant stuff for her, but it’ll be billed through the contractor she hired, who then hired me. What they charge her and how they state it on her bill is up to them. I’ll get paid and the work will get done — gotta learn to not sweat the details any further than that.
What a month. Helluva way to kick off a new year, though. Can’t say it’s been boring or stagnant, and if there’s anything that kills me it’s boring and stagnant. With Ari seriously talking about joining the military again, Jan talking about moving out, her boyfriend annoying me all to hell just by speaking, and Cob stressing about final exams, my head is full. Fuller than even usual.
Wonder how long the stuff I learned at Mum’s is going to take up room in my daily thoughts. Maybe if I throw it up here it’ll purge it? How do I do that effectively without making this a long, boring monologue?
Back story: my mother was raped by a soldier just after the end of WWII and became pregnant. An Allied soldier. Somebody you expect to be able to trust. She wasn’t allowed to tell anyone, report it to the police, ever talk about it, nothing. It would, in the words of her parents, bring disgrace to the family.
I’ve tried, since I first learned of this as a teenager, and as I’ve learned more details over time since, to impress upon my mother that there is NO WAY IN HELL she should feel any guilt, shame, or anything else negative toward herself about this. This is not a “dirty family secret” as some would like to keep it. It simply… is. Just as my half-brother… is. I asked her once if she thought he should feel ashamed or guilty, and she of course vehemently said he shouldn’t. It’s taken years but I’m determined to get her to see the parallel and feel the same about herself.
Wonder if that has anything to do with why she apologizes all the time, about everything.
Wonder how much of what I do similarly, I should be analyzing closer. Or less close. Which is better?
Learned way more about my ancestors and Mom’s life before me when I stayed with her. Stuff I never had a clue about. Like that my greatgrandfather was a brick mason and came to Canada to see if he wanted to bring his family here. Helped build the University of Saskatchewan. Went back home to Scotland. Fifty years later, his granddaughter (my mother) emigrated to Canada, not knowing her grandpa had ever been.
I already knew that by the age of twelve my mother had seen two of her younger brothers buried, and her mother miscarry and lose babies at birth. But didn’t know that at 14 she quit school to work fulltime on a farm to help support her parents and siblings. She’d come home and hand over her pay, then spend the rest of the day helping her mother with what would eventually be eight living siblings, including a set of triplets, plus her own son who was raised as her brother.
I learned that the farm my mother worked on as a young teenager also had many POWs, and she worked side-by-side with them. I asked if there was any guards or anything, and she said no. Many of the POWs weren’t much older than she was. She recalled how some of the German and Italian prisoners spoke English, and at lunch and on breaks they would politely ask her to help them with proper pronunciation and grammar. Her father came by one day and heard her, and was absolutely livid that she was speaking to “the enemy”.
My grandparents themselves started work very early in life. Mom’s dad was the eldest boy, so when his father died he had to leave school at the age of twelve (!!!) to work on a farm and support his family. Mom’s mother was 16 and a highly awarded student set to go to college, when her mother died. She abandoned her plans and returned home to raise her younger siblings.
My head is full. I don’t know how to feel about my grandparents. Certainly proud of their incredible strength in adversity. But can’t shake the anger at their hypocrisy. Despite knowing it was part of the times, part of how they were brought up. And, too, they’re dead now, so why be pissed off at dust?
This logic doesn’t seem to matter to my head.
I want to rage against them, for my mother. Demand to know how they could send her to work with POWs when she was young and vulnerable, but punish her when she merely spoke with them. Then when a non-enemy raped her (oh, the irony), punish her again and make her feel it was her fault!
Demand to know how the rape could be a disgrace, but it was okay that they took her child and raised it as their own? Well, kind of raised it. Expected my mother to do all the work, then selfishly refused to let her take him with her once she was married and leaving for a life of her own. Guilt-tripped the hell out of her, said it would literally kill her mother, who was in poor health. They turned a deaf ear as he grew up and allowed the child to think she didn’t love and want him, when the truth was my mother ached to have him but couldn’t break her mother’s heart, so she broke her own instead.
I know I’ve heard only one side of these stories. I don’t care. It’s my mother’s side. That’s enough for me.
My head is a jumble of both pride and revulsion for the people who contributed to who I am.
Ow, ow, ow… thought overload.
I asked a friend today if this blog was sliding toward boring. I have no interest in just writing to take up space. This blog is very different from the “females piss me off when they… ” old blog that I had. I’m not as angry any more. Didn’t know I was angry before until I stopped being so much. Kinda like when something chronically hurts, you don’t notice the pain until it starts to feel better.
My friend replied, “I find it extremely interesting. And check it practically every day.” Hah! See? They USED to say they checked it EVERY day, sometimes more than once. So it IS getting boring!
Relax, I’m kidding. No, I’m really kidding – this isn’t a passive-aggressive thing 
(Although I do think they’re too kind to be truly objective). The truth is, I’m far more curious about how my writing is perceived now, than concerned. Maybe having reflected so much of my inner thoughts in writing to strangers over the years, it’s lost some of the power to influence me.
Wait, I lost the plot somewhere there. That last bit didn’t make any sense. Writing whatever wanders in and out of my head seems like a good idea for a post like this… to a point. But when it just pops like a bubble, I’m left wondering how the hell to wrap things up.
And did I just learn anything? Did this have any purpose, or is it like the posts I think are boring?
I’m left wondering that, too.
Damn, I wish I knew whether Ari was going to join the army or not. My stomach feels tight thinking about it.
Yes, this is exactly how my brain jumps around.
More with the animal theme… another dear friend sent me a link to this video today. It’s almost unbelievable.
I grew up on a farm and it’s a family joke that any time Mom couldn’t find me, she’d just look for the cats, or in the barn.
As a newlywed, I had both an acreage and an indulgent husband so, yes, I have some experience with a variety of animals. The menagerie has ranged from cows and sheep, to rabbits and hedgehogs.
And a racoon, a Canada goose, and baby owls.
Here are some pics that my mother had in the collection I recently scanned. The back porch of our farm house was used many times as a makeshift nursery/surgery/recovery room for pets and ailing wildlife we’d find.
The racoon and dog were best buddies until the racoon got older and cranky (I can relate). They would clamp on to each other’s tails with their teeth, and run around the yard in a grand game of “shake, rattle & roll”.
The goose decided our back porch made a lovely summer home. If you look close, you’ll see one of the ever-present cats in the doorway, eating unfazed by it.
I was young when we found and nursed the baby owls, so I don’t remember much except that their eyes creeped me out.
In my defence, it was my husband who suggested that title!
He phoned me, quite upset, while I was away staying with my mother. Our kitten had suddenly become restless and was making a lot of distress noises. I could hear the cat screeching in the background and the tension in Doc’s voice as he told me about it. (It didn’t help that it was almost a year to the exact date that he had woken up to our beloved 11 year old cat in serious pain, and Doc had to get him euthanized, all while I was unaware of what was going on and in the hospital.)
“She’s been meowing like that, and that loud, all fucking day!” he had swore on the phone. Unlike his wife, Doc rarely swears. “And she doesn’t even quit when we pick her up. I don’t know if I should rush her to the vet’s or not,” he had said that evening.
It’s a nice cat/kitten, and we’ve fallen in love with it, sure, but we both were seeing dollar signs flash before our eyes. And my husband was phoning me to ask for my help and opinion, when I was eight hours away and couldn’t do shit. (See? Swearing.)
I’m no veterinarian, but I’ve been around animals all my life, and I’ve been too poor for most of that life to run to a professional at the first worry. So along the way I guess I have picked up some zoological understanding and skills, but not as much as friends and family often assume I have.
I ran through all the usual amateur diagnostics I would have done had I been home — pressing all over, particularly the belly, examining the litterbox (eww), seeing if eating and drinking were normal, etc. Doc reported that everything seemed perfectly routine, except for the fact that our meek little kitty uncharacteristically wouldn’t sit still or shut the hell up!
We ended our phone conversation jointly frustrated and worried, and I wished for the eleventy-third time in less than a week for a Star Trek transporter.
It’s my contention that the difference in climate and altitude I was experiencing at my parents’ place is what made me so brain dead that it never even remotely occurred to me that the damn female was just in heat! Sigh. You’d think that, being away from home myself, I would’ve thought of that.
Doh.
Several days later, I returned home to find a screaming hot pussy in my house. I’m pretty sure I’ve never typed those words before this post, and I hope I won’t have cause to type them again any time soon. Although there is a good chance the stupid little hairball will be back in heat (and driving us all crazy) at some point before February 1st – the soonest I could book to get her spayed.
And while I’m on the subject and you’re already bored, how freaking stupid is it that there isn’t a low cost spay/neuter program in this city, but they’ll happily complain about the abundance of stray animals? Every damned vet I called wanted in the range of $300 to fix this cat! And most of them would surcharge if she happens to be in heat on that day, and won’t do it at all unless she’s up to date on all her vaccines — which they’d be happy to provide for another couple of hundred.
Holy crap! First… I’m NOT vaccinating a cat, let alone a cat that never leaves the house. Second… THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS?!?!
A friend told me about a vet in a nearby suburb, and I called to learn that they charge $150. Period. No vaccines, no extra costs. It’ll be worth the drive.
To quote my father…
“Travelling is nice, but there’s no place like home – with my own sheets, my own shower, and my own shunky!” (shunky=shitter)
Classy? No.
True? Yes.
At the supper table last night…..
Husband: Did you hear that Heath Ledger died today?
Me (being kinda clueless): I know that name, but from where?
Daughter: He’s one of the two guys from “Brokeback Mountain”.
Me: (still being clueless): Oh, that’s sad. But which one was he in the movie? The guy who got married or the other guy?
Daughter: One guy got married?
Me: Eventually, yeah. Haven’t you ever seen it?
Daughter’s boyfriend: I will NEVER watch that movie! [chuckling] My dad said he would disown me if I ever watched it.
Me: …
Boyfriend: The only guy I know who’s seen it, his girlfriend made him go and he said he had to get really drunk beforehand.
Me (having already had a long, tiring, and frustrating day, with no patience left for immaturity): Oh, ferchrissakes, I can’t believe in this day and age, there’s still homophobia so bad that you can’t even bear to watch a freaking movie!
The rest of the table: …
Why, yes, I was kind of spoiling for a fight. Why do you ask? Jan’s boyfriend, rightly or wrongly, seems to be the most frequent lightening rod for my impatience. I try to remember that he’s only 18, and is a product of his parents’ (sometimes ignorant, IMHO) attitudes, and that it will take a while for him to (hopefully) mature and develop opinions and attitudes of his own.
I try to remember this, but I’m not always successful.
It’s interesting to watch a young couple grow and evolve. I’m crossing my fingers that Jan’s boyfriend will move away from his father’s very conservative and close-minded positions, and develop some that are less in conflict with what we’ve tried to teach our family. But then who knows, maybe Jan will develop her own life-defining opinions that are completely contrary to ours!
Eek. Scary.
Kinda doubt it, though.
Anyway, so Heath Ledger died. There’s quite a bit of local press about him because of the filming of “Brokeback”. I’m not good with names, or faces, or keeping up with the celebrity de jour, so I was surprised when I realized that he was also the lead in “A Knight’s Tale“ – one of my favourite movies. I never made that connection before. (Duh…)
‘Kay, now I’m tired, cranky and sad. He was a good actor, and from the sounds of things, a nice guy.
When I took Mum’s many knickknacks and photos down to clean the living room (because I had *cough* accidentally *cough* gotten dust everywhere), I suggested that she may want to re-evaluate and be selective with which ones she puts back up on display. For instance, the recent family photo of us on the wall is more than adequate – she needn’t have individual frames of our children’s school pictures from ten years ago up too. Or her married granddaughter’s kindergarten photo. Or the toy car her adult grandson gave her when he was a toddler. Or the jar of pickled bums gag gift someone gave her two Christmases ago….
I mentioned how Doc and I are determined to resist the urge to fill up blank spaces in our new home, and just put out the things that have particularly strong meaning for us and that we enjoy, so they can be showcased and have a place of honour instead of being lost among a ton of other, somewhat less significant, items.
But… that’s just us, of course. Ahem.
My mother, bless her heart, is no fool. And she’ll tell me when I’ve crossed the line and offended her. The line seems to have moved tremendously over the years, and it frequently surprises (and sometimes even frightens) me how much I get away with saying.
So with her agreement, I took down the large but ragtag collection of photos and removed them all from their mismatched, and often broken, frames. Meanwhile, she dragged dusty boxes of snapshots out of closets, and we’ve been sorting them all out ever since, with pleas from me for her to write names of people on the backs of the photos I don’t know. Somewhat daunted at the size of this Pandora’s box we’ve opened, we’ve agreed to ignore the photos in albums for the moment.
What has resulted is “a bloomin’ mess!” all over her living room carpet. Five piles of photos and memorabilia (old school papers, ribbons, etc) – one for each of us kids. Then there’s another pile of miscellaneous family group shots, most taken at assorted Christmases, with furniture cleared away and tables shoved together in the old farm kitchen to make room for our large family and several neighbouring families as well. A large pile is photos from the first few years just after my parents and two brothers immigrated to Canada, as they were taking many pictures of their new life and sending them back to Scotland. By far, the largest, and tipsiest pile, is one labelled “scenery”. How many faded amateur pictures does a family realistically need of the Rocky Mountains? These will end up stuffed back into the bottom of a box “to sort through and throw out some day”. It’s piles like that that, in the past, had discouraged and derailed Mom from this task before she got very far.
But what is most exciting, but also draining, for me are the piles of photos I had absolutely no idea my parents had, and probably never would’ve known if I hadn’t nudged her into this project. A bundle of irreplaceable old black and whites from my father’s army days show glimpses of his everyday life in Germany, and his buddies. A much smaller but surprising pile of photos revealed my parents in their “courting days”, as well as my maternal grandparents in THEIR “courting days”… images I was led to believe didn’t exist! And one particularly rare photo – my father at a town dance, about 16 or 17 years old, grinning with his mates and pretty girls sitting on their laps. As far as we know, this is the only photo there is of my dad before he met my mother.
It’s been like looking through a treasure chest. Not just of photos, but of rare truths and raw emotions – something that isn’t traditionally allowed to surface in my parents’ generation and culture. As we sort through the images with the goal of organizing them and picking out the cream of the crop for future scrapbooks and display frames, Mom has been telling me many interesting stories about the people in the photos – my kin.
At one point we realized it was getting harder to see, and were shocked to look at the clock and find that the day had slipped away and we’d been at it for more than eight hours. My mother started apologizing profusely to me. For what? I demanded. For it taking so long, for me doing so much, for not noticing it had gotten dark, for not having supper made, for….
I swear, if I stubbed my toe in Alberta and my mother heard about it, she’d probably try to take the blame for that as well!
Whenever she does this – whenever she expresses concern about my health, about me doing “too much”, about me not resting enough, etc, etc – it’s all I can do not to scream. The woman is 80 years old and has seen more hardship and grief in her life than I could ever fathom, but she has spent a large portion of her days since I got here thanking me profusely for any odd wee job I do and scolding me for not lazing about and having a holiday.
Boy, have things ever changed.
It looked promising for a while there as my youngest brother was going to come and “tag” me out and stay with Mum the second week. That was supposed to be today, but plans have changed yet again so I’ll be here for the remainder of the time after all.
I felt like crying, as I’d had my hopes up I could go back to my own home now without worry. But ya know, aside from missing my husband and kids horribly, and not being able to do more than just basic work with this dial-up connection, this trip has been remarkably positive. Even Doc has commented on how happy I sound on the phone, compared to the high stress that usually accompanies these visits.
If I could only get my mother to stop worrying about me and thanking me for being here, as if it’s some kind of huge deal! My god, there isn’t enough time left to EVER repay her for what she’s done for us in past years. I feel so grateful for this opportunity to give back even a fraction. Helping her accomplish some of the things that she’s long wanted to have done but that she hasn’t/can’t, has been an added bonus.
Well… “helping her” may be a bit misleading. For instance, I may have, um, kinda sorta forgotten to drape the hallway in plastic before I sanded the drywall patching, to contain the dust.
“Ach, I’m so sorry, Mum. I’ve got that dust everywhere! I should’ve thought. Well, if you wouldn’t mind getting me a bucket and telling me where the vacuum is, I’ll clean it all up and wash everything off.”
“Oh, no, dinnae worry aboot it, you’ve done plenty already!”
“Don’t be silly – I caused it so I’m going to clean it up. Besides, I’m here and I’m tall with long arms and can reach where you can’t, so it’ll be less spring cleaning for you to do yourself later.”
I got the living room fairly thoroughly cleaned, but had to abandon the ruse before I could get very far in the kitchen, as I’m pretty sure she was on to my game early on. She refused to just sit while I worked, so she was doing as much as I was and wearing herself out. (Hell, she was wearing ME out, too – the woman is tough as nails.) But it got a big chunk done and off of her current ”Tut” list, so that felt good.
Tut, tut, look at the cobwebs – such a disgrace. Tut, the dust in here is awful, I hope nobody looks up there. Tut, that ceiling fan is filthy, what a hopeless case I am these days… etc, etc.
I got more than I bargained for, though, when I subtly suggested a new, and less physically demanding project: that we sort through the family photos while I’m here – yet another thing that she’s lamented for years about not ever getting done because she has no time.
