May 7, 2010
-
Mother's Day is this weekend and my husband and I are traveling home to visit our parents. It's funny that I just typed "home" instead of "to Missouri", but honestly I still consider Missouri my home. I'm both happy and apprehensive to see everyone, happy because I miss them and apprehensive because of all the recent changes in my life.
I don't often think a lot about holidays or gifts for people on said holidays, but for whatever reason I've really been driven to purchase heartfelt gifts for Mother's Day this year, heartfelt being the key word. My initial response was to buy cards for both my grandmother and mother, and I started by looking for a grandmother card. The first card I picked up was perfect, and I don't mean perfect because I read it and thought it was okay and just went with it. I mean perfect because it said everything I wanted to say in words that could have been from the very center of my own soul. I wiped a tear from my cheek and placed the card and its envelope carefully in my cart as I moved on to the mother oriented cards. I picked up on after another, each one stupider than the last! Everything was about being shopping buddies or getting nails done or said really cheesy mindless things and I was just appalled. Where was the thought and care and love that came through in the grandmother card I had already chosen? I furrowed my brow and grabbed another grandmother oriented card from the shelf and read it. While not as accurate as the one I had picked out in terms of my own feelings, I could see where someone else would have chosen the card. And another, and another, all expressing deep feelings of love and appreciation for the existence of grandmothers. I replaced all the cards I had in my hands and asked inside my head, "Why is it that we only deem grandmothers worthy of our most sacred thoughts and well wishings? Are mothers somehow exempt from serious emotional responses in terms of greeting cards?" I wasn't only reading the "humorous" section of cards either. It was just a general trend I observed. There were no truly serious mother cards. I had to choose between one that threw in a quip about shopping or wine or some other foolish materialistic concept that has nothing to do with the connection between a mother and her daughter. I sighed and gave up. My mother doesn't particularly enjoy cards anyway, and I wasn't about to hand her something that sounded absolutely terrible and shallow. But I shouldn't have had to make that choice to give up. Is that all mothers are now, best friends forever for younger women to drag about from mall to mall while they pretend to be young again and while twenty somethings call them cougars? If that's the case, that's fucking stupid.
The other part of my gift to my grandmother was to be brownies, so it was off to the grocery store this morning. I can smell them now as they just came out of the oven a few minutes ago, and my grandmother has a great appreciation for things made with one's own hands strictly for the purpose of making someone else happy so I think she will be quite pleased. And my mother had asked for socks. She's a very practical person. I didn't expect to find socks at the grocery store, so I had planned to go somewhere else to find her some nice cozy socks. However, as I stepped into the doors of the grocery store I was met with the floral department. There were Mother's Day floral arrangements everywhere. I walked about, staring at the flowers, wondering if my mother would like any of them. I thought of how they would wither and die quickly and how she would just end up throwing them out. But my parents used to have a florist when I was a child and I can always remember how every Mother's Day my mother would bring home two mum plants, one for her and one for her own mother. I searched around for a mum plant and didn't see any. I shrugged and started walking away, but just as I was about to pass into the fresh produce section, I noticed a small stand with a few lonely little mum plants. Two were lavender, one was maroon, and two were yellow. I looked at the yellow one and suddenly remembered the year my grandfather died and my mother was hospitalized for months and near death. While she was in the hospital my dad brought her a yellow mum plant to keep her company. I tenderly raised one of the yellow mums to my face to hide the redness I could feel building in my eyes, and I quickly turned and walked away with it, onward to the cake mix isle. I knew it would be much better than a few pairs of socks.
I know my gifts will be well received. It's the changes that I don't want to talk about. My husband will be unemployed in a couple of hours and I really don't want to tell my parents. I don't know what the will say. I don't know how they will feel. It's the first thing I've ever allowed to happen without their approval, nay, against their will (as horrible as that sounds at 23) and I'm fucking scared. I've always valued my parents' opinions very highly and I feel like I've betrayed them by giving him the go ahead to give his two weeks notice. Additionally, there's the woman we are mutually dating, and while I don't really care what other people think about our choices in terms of relationships and lovers and other related issues, I am slightly worried that I might let something slip about her and I'd have to be quite quick on my feet to patch it up before it sounded like something out of the ordinary. For example, what if my husband's crazy mother asks about how I sewed our costumes? I'll have to mention that I borrowed a sewing machine from someone and could easily pass that someone off as nothing more than a friend. On the other hand, what if something sparks a memory of playing board games and I mention snuggling with her and my husband on our apartment floor playing Arkham Horror? It would be a little more suspicious to say that I misspoke at that point I think. It's just...really stressful to hide things from parents, a stress that I've never really felt before. I don't lie. I'm not a liar. In fact, I'm an absolutely horrible liar. I would make a lousy politician. Consequently, to have to focus on not allowing sensitive information to slip from my lips, or even the mere fact that I have "sensitive" information to begin with, will be really taxing for me. Ugh, sparing someone's feelings with a lie is such a foolish thing to do, because when they find out you've lied it will hurt far more than the truth ever would have. But, at the same time, telling my parents half truths to keep them from worrying about our financial situation is probably the best option. I'd rather have them simply never find out. We will finish our business here, move somewhere else, settle down there, and then my husband's old job will be a long forgotten memory. But years? Years of deceit? This will certainly be a new type of endeavor for me...
-----------------------------------------------------
I've been chaining Starlys in Pokemon Diamond for several days now. I've caught two...but sadly one was modest and one was calm, both terrible natures for physical sweepers. Additionally, I kind of feel as though chaining is a type of cheating, like Action Replay, so the actual catching of the shinies didn't really excite me as much as I thought it would. However, on one attempt, before I even started chaining I walked into the grass and entered a battle. I sighed because I was going to use a repel once I got to the center of the grass, so I was prepared to just run away as the battle began. I rolled my eyes and looked down at the screen. A Shinx, whatever. But then I did a double take. A yellow Shinx! A SHINY Shinx!! My husband had been looking over my shoulder a few days ago commenting on how stupid all the shinies looked, until we got to the fourth gen Pokemon at which point he pointed out how Luxray looked better in yellow because he's electric anyway. I shouted and tossed a Quick Ball and caught him first try. My first legitimate shiny. I had only seen two previously, after all the games of Pokemon I've played. One was a Quagsire in the Safari Zone (ugh...) and the other was Liza's Lunatone during the gym battle in Emerald (double ugh...), so I've never had a real chance to catch one before. But now I had one. I personally like blue Shinxes better, though, so I traded the little guy to my excited husband when he got home from work. It was a good day for Pokemon.
-------------------------------------------------
My hair is very yellow right now. It is the perfect color to mimic Zell's hair on the 14th, but I personally don't like the way I look. I promise to post pictures eventually, but not right now because I'm super lazy. And on that note, I'm really tired of people telling me it looks awful. I know it doesn't look that great. It's not supposed to! It's for a costume! I don't mind if someone tells me once. That's fine. I like to know everyone's opinion. However, there is this one person in particular who tells me EVERY FUCKING TIME SHE SEES ME that she dislikes it and I really just want to punch her right in the face at this point because I've explained the situation and that I agree with her several times and she just keeps bringing it up! She's sooooo overbearing! In fact, I wouldn't mind not seeing her for at least a month because I'm getting really sick of her commenting on my looks in any fashion, be it insult or compliment. I think she was (and still is) very attracted to me when my hair was its natural color and she seems to be obsessed with the fact that I have a nice body and it's rather awkward considering I'm not attracted to her in the least. Our personality types, much less my thoughts on physical appearance, are just not compatible. Bleh...so awkward.
Anyway, because I don't like it I've decided to use this bleached hair as an opportunity to do whatever I want with it. I ran some ideas by my husband and we both decided that the coolest sounding option would be for me to do half my hair blue and half pink, blending it in the middle into a purple color at the back of my head. I think it should look fantastic. Again, I promise to post pictures eventually.
Recent Comments