either my laptop or my net connection here is crap, so i haven't been inclined to making much of an online presence these days. that, and i feel like i've been insanely, ridiculously busy. i feel stretched so thin. i'll be happy when this week is over. i work all day mother's day. (Fuck mother's day. My mom's on my shitlist right now.) working six days this week. and i had the move...and i had to finish my final paper. i'm a crab right now. there's just been a lot to juggle lately.

but i went for a nice walk when i came home tonight. found out the place where i'm living was actually an innsbrook development - the company my dad worked for. they have a really sweet development style. they buy up a lot of wooded acreage and farmland, dam up some valleys, make lakes, and sell the land off in large lots that, for the most part, stay wooded and rustic. so that's how the lake i live by originally got here. and since it's been raining a lot, there's a nice little stream created by the spillway that i'll have to take the camera to when i get settled.

got my economic stimulus package $$ today. Nice. Nice of the government to return to me an incremental portion of what they have stolen from the masses.

reading Milan Kundera's Testaments Betrayed now. He rocks. I am consistently inspired and humbled by anything of his that I open...

It's so candlelit, coffee drinking bath time. I am exhausted.

got to see jason last night, which cheered me up a lot. taking Cat over there tonight, so that I can take Bosephus with me to my grandparents. I might beg them to let Buster be our garage cat or something. I don't know what else to do with him.

productive morning. so far i got my hair cut, got my oil changed, went to the bank, and lugged in a bunch of boxes. i may need a little nap, though, to catch up on missed sleep.

moving more stuff this morning. if i take a load today and another friday, i'll be in pretty good shape to enjoy my weekend without feeling like i'm blowing it off. by sunday or monday i should mostly have just clothes, furniture, and all my kitchen stuff, i hope.

i'm all out of it from a half a glass of white zinfandel i drank with my dinner. haha. bread dipped in olive oil and parmesan cheese, almonds, walnuts, apricots, some gouda cheese, and some wine. what kind of yuppie am i trying to pretend i am? haha.

only one more class, thank god. i find myself feeling more and more weird and small and solitary as grad school progresses. dunno, probably just me being more and more weird socially.

but Cat loves me, I guess. even if i can't communicate.

howard, my professor from last semester, walked past in the hall and asked me what class i was waiting for. when i told him he laughed and said that i seemed like "a memoir in waiting." said i seem to have more of that kind of material than the rest of them. which is kind of a good thing...but kind of weird too. drama drama.

...

busy week. work kicked my ass. again. moving stuff tomorrow. and work. 99 cent ribs. bargain day at the bbq place - one can imagine the caliber of clientele this brings out of the suburban woodwork. i miss my boyfriend because we didn't see each other much this weekend and probably won't till friday or so. but...anticipation can be a good thing.

...

that half glass of wine totally killed my motivation to rant or work on my essay revisions. how do writers do the whole alcoholic tortured artist thing? it's naaaaptime.

i saw my mom tonight, briefly. just long enough to be sufficient to piss me off.

she has another boyfriend, whose name is something like heine. not that i need to remember that. i'm sure he won't be around long, and certainly won't be a part of our lives. it only came up coincidentally. my grandparents and the kids thought it was pronounced like "high-knee" which has always been family slang for private parts. with this association in mind, my grandma got her wires crossed and remembered him as "Fannie Mae or something like that" when she was trying to recall his name.

all of that, irrelevant to why i'm pissed off. i'm pissed off because AGAIN she said she didn't have kids. she's only recently started claiming her younger two. Kelsey (my sister) told me this as my mom sat casually a few feet away, staring into her laptop screen. we see one another once a month at best, sometimes, once every three months. we speak very little. when we do see one another, still, she'd rather be on the computer. I don't give a fuck if the man she's dating knows I exist. I'm upset by the fact that my mom feels like we aren't important enough in her life to merit inclusion. It makes me very unhappy that she thinks it's all some kind of trivial joke. And it's very hurtful that she isn't proud enough of us to WANT to talk about us, like most mothers do.

All it takes is something stupid like that and I feel fifteen and emo again. She talks all her shit about loving her kids and being a good mother, but it's all in her own mind. No parent who's worth the title would be so lacking in pride or compassion for her chlidren. i'm less mad that i am kind of hurt by it all. but it's not exactly hurt, either, it's a cynical, jaded kind of resignation. she really can be a complete peice of shit. and what do i do about it? nothing. i just sit back and take it and take it and take it, and get all happy when she does some tiny mom thing like remember to call me on my birthday.

and another thing. she said the pilots were asking if she has daughters and (wink wink) if they might meet them. my mom says, no, they're not meeting her daughters and besides, the oldest one's still dating some guy she doesn't like anyway. why doesn't she like jason? early in our relationship i can understand, though it's not really accurate, that she would blame my depression and my insecurities on my dating partner. it's an assumption that a lot of my family made in the beginning, and it makes sense. i don't see that as his doing, but the confusion and limited communication we had early on didn't really help my head at the time, though they (and i) probably hoped and/or expected a relationship should. it's not really a fair expectation. it never is or was jason's responsibility to fix my emotional state. i had to sort my problems out myself, to a very great extent, or we'd never be where i feel we are now. but back then they just saw me being an emotional wreck and chose the simple causal scenario. however, my entire family has really come to see him and our relationship very differently. Jimmy, my grandma, even my grandpa - all of the people in my life who think no one is worthy actually approve. everyone has really come to like him and to appreciate what the relationship means to me. Except my mom. Though I tell her why it works, that i'm happy, she only retains the negatives.

But what the fuck do I care if she doesn't like my boyfriend? It makes no difference. If anything, I still have a teenage desire to rebel against anything she thinks. Ha. But I do find myself very defensive of him, and very bristly at her of all people voicing any negative opinion. She has no basis for it. It irritates me that she thinks she has any clue about what is really going on in my life or what is best for me. Like she might have privileged information or some insight into my internal life. Bitch, please. She doesn't know the first thing about who I am. All she knows is the timid child that I can't quite shed when I'm around her. All she knows is the old bullshit roles we fell into and will probably never escape. And I'll probably always resent her for her blindness and her ignorance.