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11月20日 A Month With Mom - Part 20 - I Want It, So You Can't Have It
My sister’s email I published yesterday has my stories out of whack now. I was originally going to relate the story of my mother and the cedar chest, but I already did that. If you missed it, here it is:
I’ll get re-organized through my drafts and getting something new up tomorrow. Even writing about her is aggravating and putting me all out of sorts. 11月19日 Last Night I Finished Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
I look at the title for this blog post and I just think it looks for innuendo. It may just be me, but let’s move on. Last night I finished what was a three month journey which was reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. It didn’t take me long because I am a slow reader, if I power read it I could have done it in two or three days. This was my bath book. When I take a bath I prefer to read while I’m in there, otherwise I’m staring at the walls. The book was a good read. If you are an adult and you like the Harry Potter book I woudl recommend you pick this up. The tone or content isn’t necessarily adult, but it does have a higher vocabulary then Rowling uses in her books. I would say this is a mixture of Harry Potter and Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. If that intrigues you, but it. It’s only 7.99 at Amazon now. A Month With Mom - Part 18 - My Mother Issues
Day late… If you haven’t caught on to this series yet I have mother issues. Because I have my mother issues I need to sit down and logically recognize what they actually do to me. Things my mother has made me. Growing up I was extremely self conscious of everything, how I looked, who had what, etc… What has happened as an adult is that I just don’t care. I don’t care what you have. I want what I want for my own reasons. As I’m getting older I can care less what society thinks about me, so essentially I’ve become the polar opposite of my mother. Though Xie will tell me that isn’t always the case. Because of growing up in my household I learned to thrive in chaos. This is great in some of things I do since I can make order out of chaos (well at the same time creating more chaos around the thing I made in order). Unfortunately for those around me this isn’t always a conducive environment for those that deal with me. I get my anger from my father, and I’ve spent many years getting that in check and controlling. It’s something I have to deal with. I have learned however people like my mother are the ones that are most likely to set me off at a moments notice. This is why I didn’t marry a girl like dear old mom. My father after the divorce seems to have his anger issues in check, can we say common denominator? I base(d) alot of what I know about relationships from my parents and their interaction. When things aren’t going well in my own relationships I’m completely oblivious since things aren’t explosive like my parent’s relationship was. While our child isn’t born yet we don’t know truly who the enabler and the disciplinarian will be. I’m pegged for the enabler, and that’s not necessary a good thing. If I get that from anyone it’s going to be my mother. I just need to make sure my son doesn’t become a spoiled brat. Frustration at stupidity. The exasperation I get over comments that are idiotic, that comes completely from my mother. I have mentioned her belief that ninja humanoid turtles were possible. I used to do all of her proof reading for her college homework when I was in high school, and I was responsible for the rewrites. When I was about fourteen she said she was smarter then me. What she may have meant to said was wiser, though I don’t think that was the case, since if she was wiser or smarter she would have said the word wiser. Also for anyone wishing to defend her on that one, she still says she is smarter (Oprah must have told her she was). I have a standing offer to pay for an IQ test so we can settle this once and for all, if she is write (highly unlikely) I may just kill myself since it will be proof that intelligence means nothing. On a side note recently I was just talking about sitting for the Mensa exam. I don’t know if I’m Mensa smart, I may not be, but I’m confident enough to actually sit for the test. The last thing is I get insane over little requests people ask of me. I better be in the right frame of mind because I can go ballistic if it’s something they can do for themselves. I’ll give you the story I use to describe this whenever I talk to someone about her. When I was in high school I told my mother I was going to be taking a bath (yes I’m a boy and I like baths get over it). She acknowledged me and said she was going ot cook dinner. At this point everything is fine and dandy. About 10 minutes later I’m in the middle of reading a book and my mother starts screamiming my name. Now this isn’t a your in trouble name scream, nor was it a where are you at name scream. What it sounded like was the “OMG THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE” scream. I threw on a towel and rush down the stairs. Well the emergency? My mother needed a wash cloth to do dishes . Her answer about me being in the bath? “I forgot”. In ten minutes she forgot what she had been told and acknowledged (and I’m sure she heard the bath water run) and put all of that aside for her immediate need of a wash cloth. To make matters worse, she thought I was down in my room. Now our family was a plit level. The kitchen on the main floor, the bathroom on the second floor, and my bedroom on the lower floor. In theory give or take ten feet I would have had to expend the same amount of energy to come from my room or the bathroom to come to the kitchen. She would have expended half the energy (minus the energy to start yelling) to go down to the second floor and get it herself. It was absolute pure laziness. I pointed it out to her, and she didn’t care. She wasn’t old or invalid, she was healthy and approxiamately the same age as I am now. The worst part, I was dripping wet, freezing, and I still had to get the washcloth. I was a sucker and should have said no, but I was a mama’s boy. That story though is an example of many many things that are quite similar. Because of her necessity or decorating the house for the holidays, I now loath decorating for the holidays/ I have never had a christmas tree in my house, that may change next year with the kid on the way. Compared to my mother’s house and her record breaking three christmas trees she did one year, my house will be quite sparse. My mother likes to tell people how things are to be decorated and have everyone else do the work. After the divorce I became the man of the house. I learned to loath the holidays. When your mother is healthy you shouldn’t be fifteen and being Santa Claus setting up the tree late at night for your siblings, but yet I was. I love the holidays, I just hat emy mothers version of them. These days though i’m preferring Halloween over Christmas, black and gory for the win. Ok I’m stopping now otherwise this will become the post that will never end. A Month With Mom - Part 19 - My Sisters View
A while back I received the following email from my sister (It’s been mildly edited to protect names and some grammar):
Obviously I have replaced my sibling’s names with their rank and order. We don’t refer to our youngest sister as our youngest sister (who by the way is two years older then my younger brother). I just don’t want to be the reason their name shows up in a google search. I did think it was important to show that my views on my mother are not mine alone. I did receive permission from my sister to use this email, so there is no surprises. 11月18日 A Month With Mom - Part 17 - Dating A Girl Just Like Mom
This one is a day late…… A few months ago I wrote about the girl that was my longest relationship before my wife. Well this girl was a lot like my mother. She was very bossy and wanted things a certain way. She cared about the appearance of things and not the reality. I don’t want to hash everything I wrote in the other post here again, so I won’t. Read the link if you want ot hear more about her. On the other hand, during that whole on again off again relationship, I managed to essentially date and live with a girl just like mom. It was the relationship from hell, and I’m sure part of me deserved it. The best thing is after the relationship was over and I was with my future wife I saw how much that girl was like my mother. It also made me realize how much I’m like my father. So in turn I realized how much it was never going to work out. Maybe my anger towards my ex bleeds over to the anger I have my mother (or vice versa). Who knows. This wasn’t meant to be a long post, but more of one stating that I did not marry a girl just like mom. I just dated one. A Month With Mom - Part 16 - Dealing With The Ex
Sorry - this one is a couple days late. My parents don’t get along. I mean really don’t get along at all. I’m not sure I can stress this enough. My father always seemed to be doing what he did in the best interest of the children. My mother on the other hand was in a money grab and used leverage. This was nothing out of the norm from before the divorce however. From about age seven until age fifteen, I was keenly aware that my parents did not have a good marriage. I remember telling my friends that my parents were going through a divorce. Ironically, they managed to keep going and going (along the way they also had two more kids). My parents were a mismatch from the beginning, and if I had not entered the picture they might not have gotten together. They did and now for some historical information. My father attempted to be the disciplinary or the family, my mother was the enabler. She was very very much the enabler. If my father tried to set something down (this is looking back mind you), my mother would take a position just to be the opposite of him. Of course if my mother wanted to agree with him, I could just bring out that everyone was doing something, this would normally allow me to gain her consent. Now some of this I remember and some of this is stories passed down, I’m going to try to remove the bias and just give you some examples: When we were living in Elyria, we didn’t make a ton of money. Sometimes we were scraping by month to month. It something that happens to a lot of families, and even as an adult I still find myself doing that most the time. One month we had twenty dollars left in the bank account. My father was counting on this money to provide lunch meat for himself for work. My mother on the other side had other plans. Knowing full well how much money was in the bank she went out and bought wash clothes, effectively draining the bank account. My mother was never happy with what she had. My father was constantly remodeling to her tastes. He learned a lot of things about working on a house, so I guess you could say that’s a good thing. I however remember the house always being in the state of flux as some project or another was constantly being performed. Of course now as an adult I leverage my father for knowledge he gained from that experience, but my wife can’t live in that sort of atmosphere. So that tidbit is something to take for taste. During the early nineties my mother decided she wanted her own money. That’s a good thing. She decided she was going ot make dolls and enlisted my father and my grandmother on her venture. She made enough to purchase a living room set after hours and hours of labor and sewing on all three of them. I remember I did quite a bit of stuffing myself, but I don’t believe I did much else. Now you would think that this is a good example of the family working together. However, my mother didn’t seem to understand the concept of “cost of manufacturing”. She believed that the whole thing was pure profit and just poo poo’ed all the money that it cost to create the dolls before sales. Thinking back I hope my father set the profit margin, since my mom would have probably sold them for a loss and then went “Golly, look at all the money I have from sales”. Before moving on to the post divorce era I’m going to relate one last story. There was a movie I wanted to see (I was 15) - it was “People Under the Stairs” and I wanted ot go with a friend. My father said no, it was an R rated movie and he didn’t want me to go. My mother snuck money to me and dropped me off to see the movie. She was in full enabler mode. Later when my father found out the fight between them was explosive, don’t mix two volatile chemicals together. I have my own father issues I may write about another time, but this month is about mom. After the divorce my father and I didn’t talk for a few years. We talked lightly after awhile, but it didn’t start getting regular until I was traveling for consulting. This led to a whole new ball game in dealing with them. I didn’t want to accidently pass information from one side to another, but at the same time I had to make my feelings known. I would get my fahter to talk about things my mother had told me - indirectly inquiring. I also did the same thing on the reverse. The problem is I normally sided with my father’s point of view. I was this go between, trying to maintain peace on each side of the family. When I first moved into my house i was in the middle of everyone, so my house was going to be the holiday get together place. A Switzerland where neither side could fight. Well that didn’t last long before i stopped talking ot my mother. The most interesting thing was the Thanksgiving when we first moved back to Ohio. On my father’s side all of his siblings still get together the weekend after Thanksgiving to have a family meal. My brother lives next door to my father. My mother was staying at my Brother’s house that day…… Somehow, in some wierd mix up of the galaxy, my mother invited herself over to my father’s house. (I’ve mentioned that they do not get along at all). Her excuse was to see all of my aunt’s and uncles who could care less about her. The rest of the family completely agrees that she was there only to see the house and see how my father was doing. I don’t know how she managed ot get the nerve, but I wouldn’t enter the den of a place where I know I’m not wanted. But maybe she just wanted to see if my father’s curtains made her look fat…….. 11月6日 NANOWRIMO - Day 5 - 7031 WordsOriginal URL: http://creeva.com/2008/11/06/nanowrimo-day-5-7031-words/
Well another day, another few words. If only I could count the words I type in my blog. It may just be a little bit since I prepared so much material ahead of time, but it sure would help and look better. 11月5日 NANOWRIMO - Day 4 - 6197 WordsOriginal URL: http://creeva.com/2008/11/05/nanowrimo-day-4-6197-words/
Yesterday was a light day, I was quite busy. I even forgot to do a word count update post yesterday. Boo me! I’m now up to 6197 words. I have noticed that there is going ot be a TON of editing I will need to do. So far I’m successful at fighting the urge to fix spelling or grammar yet, I’m hoping to do that in December. I just thought however I owed everyone an update from yesterday
11月3日 NANOWRIMO - Day 3 - 6109 WordsOriginal URL: http://creeva.com/2008/11/03/nanowrimo-day-3-6109-words/
I’m too tired to update you much more then a total - but I thought I would give you that much. 11月2日 NANOWRIMO - Day 2 - 5036 Words So Far
With my new word total of 5036, I’m ahead of the curve, but not by much. I seem to be willing to waste time on other things and not truly devote enough to it. Never the less, it seems that i’m making good progress and I’m not falling behind. In the three years I’ve done NANOWRIMO this is the furthest I’ve gotten. Let’s hope i can keep going. 11月1日 Remembering Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling
It’s been a few years since I’ve read Hacker Crackdown. It was/is one of the best computer crime books I’ve ever read, Litte Brother is a close second. Inside the book Sterling goes over the details of the biggest computer crime sting operations of all time. I’m not going ot say everyone was guilty to the extent they were prosecuted, but some of the crimes that were prosecuted in this novel helped bring in the computer crime laws we have today (for better or worse). The first time I read this was in 1995 on a 286 laptop with a 9600 baud modem. I downloaded the book online, Sterling was one of the first mainstream authors to release his work for free online. For someone at the time was reading Phrack and to have something that was professionally published (I’m not knocking Phrack - I loved Phrack) was a completely different experience. The book covers the history of computer crime before it jumps into the meat of the story. Never does it really feel that the Sterling is pandering to you for anything, instead it teaches you. For anyone interested in computer crime I would highly recommend picking this up. So far I’ve worn through three copies myself. |
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