Three Weeks of Family

is sometimes too much. But at least I got some pictures out of the deal:

The first week of family was graduation. Oh. My. God. Not only was there the stress of dealing with the mass of family members that had gathered for the occasion, but I had to attend the event itself, complete with a gymnasium full of people I generally loathe, and the house full of people that I usually don't loathe so much, but, because of the circumstances (being packed into tiny spaces and forced to converse with them for hours), I came to hate a bit. Too many people for my little introvert soul! Before the ceremony, though, Colleen and I got away to go to her friend's graduation party in the country. On our way back, we came across this modified sign, highly appropriate given the Palouse's sometimes-steep, hilly terrain.


Then I got to leave. The plan was that I was to drop off my sister Keely and Aunt Mo at the airport on my way to happy solitude in Helena. Nope. I made the mistake of inviting Colleen along. I didn't think she'd be allowed to go. Wrong. In ten minutes, she was packed and ready to accompany me to Big Sky country, from whence our parents would pick her up "sometime." Excited to finally get a chance to show Colleen a little of Helena (she always comes with our parents and/or when I'm too busy to do anything), we happily spent the first week touring the restaurants, shops, cafes, and public spaces of Helena. We hit The Merc, where the coffee is always incredible and the chess board always open:


We explored my building, St. Charles, finding some keen halls for longboarding:


And we wound our way through Golden Girls' Antique Shop, where Colleen found a milkshake machine and this oddly appropriate (yet so inappropriate) postcard:



It was all fun and games for sure, but I started to get nervous about having a guest for an undefined period of time, especially an undefined period of time of which the end terminus depended on my parents. I love my sister, and she was great to have around. But I requested a single room this summer for a reason: I don't want a roommate. I love having time for myself, I like having groceries last longer than two days, and I want to be able to spend some non-awkward time with my boyfriend and computer. Plus, although, I repeat, I love my sister, being around family members means thinking and talking about family problems: who's an alcoholic, a bitch, in denial, going to divorce; who's the favorite (to my dismay, everyone is pretty sure it's me), who's treated shitty (everyone else, apparently), who's falling apart. After a few milliseconds, it becomes plum depressing So after being around family members nigh-constantly for three weeks, I finally convinced my parents to pick Colleen up. Peace at last.



More pictures when I post from my computer.

Blue-eyed Soul

Sometimes I think that I suffer from too much empathy. In Sue Monk Kidd's novel The Secret Life of Bees, one of the characters feels others' sorrows and tragedies as if they were her own, and, if you look at it one way, dies from it. Kidd painted her positively, but it was clear: this woman was simple-minded and sweet, and by that, we mean lovably stupid. She wadded up her pain, in the form of newspapers, and put them in a stone wall.

I, too, overpempathize. Watch a sad movie with me. See me react to the deaths of people I barely knew.

When I ran across this series of essays by my creative writing professor, Dr. Ann Bauer, I – I'm not sure what to say. It derailed my weekend. I read a few of the comments on her latest Salon piece, and the reactions ranged from sympathy ("I cannot imagine how hard it must be to tell this story") to "croak the bastard at once" to accusing Ann of being a bad mother ("How often has anyone been nice to him lately? You think his mother would want someone to be nice to him?") On Tuesday night I'll sit across from this woman, knowing now what nightmare she goes home to, what no-win decisions she's had to make while being my professor, the reasons for the circles under her eyes.

It'd be nice to have a stone wall to shove this into.


EDIT: Turns out I am pretty simple-minded. A little Googling would have brought up this page, which clearly shows an Ann Bauer who is NOT my professor. Oh, well.

Mom, Dad, I've got something important to tell you...

Well the cat's out of the bag now. It wasn't much of a cat, and it wasn't much of a bag after all, really. But when you're twenty and looking at telling your parents that you've found the man you want to marry, the cat is a tiger and the bag is a bank vault. Or insert Scheodinger's cat joke of choice here, because instead of reacting with any kind of surprise or excitement, my entire family (one by one and completely independent of each other, I might add) gave me a sort of "No, really? Go on! Who knew?" reaction. My little sister and dad even openly laughed. Talk about anticlimactic. Am I really that predictable? Lol. What a whole lot of fuss over nothing.

Say uncle.

I track my uncle’s wanderings into the fluorescent neighborhood diners, through the alleys carpeted with that timeless puke-and-brown-glass-shard ambiance, and down the artfully crimped sidewalks of this city, carefully inspecting everything; they all beckon to me, even while they raise the hair on my neck and give me the distinct feeling that I need to wash my hands a few times before I wipe the cold, greasy sweat from my brow.

Along the way, I knock on every speakeasy door. It’s easy to get in. Sometimes all it takes is the proper knock – a Google search with just the right combination of code words, a click on a fuchsia hyperlink, and I’m in. Other times, they’ll open the little sliding door and question me: Email address? Name? Zip code? Word hidden in the image above? If they interrogate me, I slip them what they want, but only just. I never tell them my first name; I always give an email I don’t check. It satisfies them, though, and I duck through their portal into a whole new world wide web.

When my eyes adjust to the harsh black backgrounds, I must nod to the undeniable, vulgar power of these rough havens. I blink, and in a flash of the screen, the safe, tame internet I love, with its sleek webpages, site maps, calm sans serifs, and working search functions, is swept into oblivion by flashing animated GIFs, crawling text, and blinking headlines screaming things about cosmic sperm, solar-powered adventures, and declassified reports.

I stumble, drunk on puce promises and dizzy with swirling conspiracies, from one end-times coven to the next – lost here in discussion threads, gazing now at the doctored photos of tragedies – hoping to find some trace of him. Someday a click will bring me to a little scrap my uncle has left behind. It will be chartreuse, with strangely capitalized phrases – “Honest Eyes,” “No Nudity or Obscenity,” “a Purple Penis” – and I will suddenly see, will abruptly understand some esoteric truth of the Universe that will explain, pardon, condone somehow his drifting soul.