Category: Journal

Ever since I have been probably an infant, May has been filled with this fantastic feeling of relief as the school and pressures of becoming educated draw to an end and I can begin to focus on the things I most care about. This summer it’s several things long. I want to read more fiction. I want to get a job. I want to volunteer with Catholic services in town. I want to do more web design. I want to work with Bearman on more oral history projects because I love them Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, and Jitterbug Perfume
C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia: Books 2-7 in story chronology not written chronology.
Kurt Vonnegut Slapstick, and others
Arthur Nersesian Suicide Casanova
Islam Books The Dancing Girls of Lahore by Louise Brown, Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia by Carmen Bin Ladin, Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, Baghdad Diaries: A Woman’s Chronicle Of War And Exile by Nuha Al-Rad, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate by Leila Ahmed, My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices by Lila Azam Zanganeh (Editor), Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society by Fatema Mernissi
Feminist Books: Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity by Chandra Talpade Mohanty

DAMMIT JESS THAT IS ENOUGH. Later I will figure out which books are available via the public library.

Today is a simple question of good versus bad.

Bad
– Morse thought my paper wasn’t on the list but it actually was
– Beatty paper has to be written sometime today but it’s not due till Thursday so it should be okay
– Morse sorta hurt my feelings about the paper but i think she was being optimisticc so i shouldn’t take it so hard

Good
– I got a thumb rosary that spins
– I look really cute today in my new skirt from Jeska.
– It looks like my oral histories are going to come out alright.
– I LEAVE FOR NEW ENGLAND IN 2 WEEKS!

I went to Manhattan this weekend as I had planned and had a pretty amazing time. When I got in town I called Josh who was with Jeska and we went to Jeska’s apartment and watched Will and Grace, ate her roommates delicious brownies, and talked which was nice. I really don’t get to see either of them nearly enough and I miss Josh something terribly near the summer because the summer was always our time to go shopping for books and then try feverishly to read them before school came back around and took up all of our time.

Thomas had a Cats for Christ barbecue for the graduating seniors that I got invited too. Apparently everyone was afraid of me because people that usually came to talk to Thomas were not. Hah. I don’t really understand why this would be the case, but I suppose that it’s just sometime the way that people can be. It turns out that his roommate steven went to high school with my roommate brandon. Steven apologized for my having to live with Brandon, but everyone knows I think Brandon is a great roommate. Joe says that apparently Brandon has matured a lot since high school but I didn’t really know him when he first got to Washburn so I have no way of telling.

After the barbecue, where I had eaten a delicious bread sandwich and a lot of homemade ice cream, I headed to Janelle and Clay’s place. It took me forever to find it due to some confusion about Claflin v. Old Claflin road. Campuses need to be set up better. Which is what I like about WU. Jewell goes all the way through campus without much trouble. Though I suppose it does break up around the LLC, so it’s still trouble. Urgh. Why do they do this?! Anyway, Cinco de Mayo at Janelle’s was a pretty brilliant time. We all got messed up and talked. The people there were incredibly genuine (well, i suppose they just seemed this way, i think it’s hard to judge the genuine-quotient of a person until you’ve met them twice). Janelle and I made mix tapes for each other and she gave me a chamomile plant because we’d talked about my starting an herb garden. I’m so excited about it. Right now it’s sitting in the window, and I haven’t killed it yet. I am awesome. It was sweet to hang out with Janelle. There’s been so much bad blood either becaues of Brian or Madeline in the past that we’ve never really gotten to be friends, although I think I’ve always liked Janelle alright. I admit I probably wouldn’t have been willing to be good friends with her during that time when I knew she was about to start dating Brian and then when they finally did. I can be sorta jealous, but I usually can’t get that judgemental. Unless the person is absolutely wrong for my ex, and sometimes it works in bizarre ways, I believe. Like I wasn’t jealous of Ashli at all, but I did think she was completely wrong for Jarod. I don’t know. I guess it’s a pretty natural part of being an ex. Or maybe just a pretty natural part of being me. Either way, it always made sense to me, in most ways, that Janelle would date Brian so I couldn’t really hold it against either of them that they agreed, and it looks like Janelle and I are going to be friends now and I’m pretty excited about that. I don’t think any/much of this makes sense in just the plain context of this weekend only and I know that the situations that kept her and I from being friends while I dated Madeline are probably more responsible for the prolonged delayal of our friendship. The point is that I’m excited that we’re friends.

Yesterday was the Phi Alpha Theta induction ceremony, plus we congratulated the seniors who are about to graduate and had a farewell reception for our retiring (or phasing retirement) professors. Tucker and Wagnon seemed to really like they’re Shadow Boxes that Cara and I made them. Especially Dr. Tucker, but it makes sense that she would like hers better because what the hell do we know about Wagnon. We mostly just guessed on what he would like in his box. I feel like Tucker’s didn’t have enough color, nearly, but she really liked it and who knows, maybe it’ll match some room in her house well now.

I took off work a half-hour early yesterday to go to the play, “touched.” It was written by marcia cibulska who is married to dr. prasch. what a great play! the triumvirate of phi alpha theta presidents (cara-past; joe-present; me-future) were a little unit of people who didn’t know what to say about theater. we also got invited to the afterparty, which was cool. we hung out with dr. moore from the comm department and talked about obscenity. then the director of the play (a rather uncouth fellow) came into the room which was near a bathroom and said “i’ve gotta go shoot this beer out.” meaning pee everywhere and meredith was like, “see, that offends me more than ‘fuck’. but maybe i’m just old fashioned.” lol. this was the highlight of my life thus far. getting to hear her say fuck and then claim that it was oldfashioned of her to prefer fuck to blatant/rude talk about peeing was hiliarious. she hung out with us kids because we were cooler than the adults and she hates ‘these kind of people.’ i think we all do.

eventually, as we were about to leave, prasch made us mingle and sent us into different rooms. i obviously got in the best group and had a great time chatting about our crazy families, et cetera. i think the director would’ve had sex with me if i would’ve asked. creepy.

i can’t begin to explain to you how sad i am that i will be missing a murder by death concert this may. the only bright side to the equation is that i’ll be missing it because i’ll be in new york city. what a dreadful trade-off? i don’t think so. i’m also missing margot and the nuclear so and sos in three of the cities i’m going to by a matter of days. heartbreaking. but i’m sure they’ll be around and do a real tour at some point, plus i’m not that sure that i really really like them.

have i mentioned i’m really into folksy breathy women with sweet voices and guitars? carla bruni, jenny lewis and the watson twins, keren ann, isobel campbell plus the usuals lisa loeb, ani difranco, and joanna newsom you rock my world. oh it’s so amazing.

i’ve been using my camera a lot more. i think it makes life a little bit more artistic and things feel a little bit more alive.

i’ve been working on a paper about Mujeres Libres all day. Fucking awesome, they are. Man. I can’t even begin to describe it. Well I guess I can and will be here in a few minutes. They’re just so rad, the things they do. And I’ve pretty much realized that anarcho-syndicalism is the only way for us to overcome the triple enslavement: to ignorance, to capital, to men. I suppose it’s just a double enslavement for some of us. but whoa. i’m also pretty excited about becoming a latin american scholar these days. morse has me all worked up about it. and i’ve decided that latino people are some of the best in the world.

ah. this one is for all the blog entries written as a form of procrastination.

Work tonight has been less than uneventful. In fact, almost obnoxiously so. The only thing really keeping me going is the breathy, female, folksy music i’ve been getting into, oh and my ipod passed out from exhaustion about a half hour ago. This is me with a half hour left of work. Ugh.

School is going pretty well. I’m so glad it’s almost over though. I only have 3 more hours of class and then 1 in-class final. I don’t know the date of it although it is my intention to find out. Tomorrow, it’s writing a paper all day and then friday, after class, it’s off to manhattan to celebrate. i can’t wait.

These stories are accompanied by Photos in the Immigration Rally album on my facebook which is the “Photos” link above.

One is of my new friend Omar: He’s carrying the Venezuelan flag which he got to do because his brother Javier, who is 8, came up while we were handing flags out and asked if I got one from “him”, pointing to the guy from HALO with the flags. I said yes and asked him if he’d like to help carry a flag and stand with us. He said yes and while we were talking his brother Omar, 6, came up to us and said that he would like to carry a flag too. All of the people carrying flags marched across the capitol steps to the side where the march was going to begin and Pedro remarked on how beautiful America is.

As soon as we settled on the other side, Javier asked me what we were celebrating. I told him that I think most people were here to support immigrants. He said, “But I was born here!” and I said “Yah, I was, too, but I think it’s important to let people who weren’t but now live here know that we support that they came.” We started the march about then and a few minutes later I told him “I think most of us are here because there are people who want to make it more difficult for people who weren’t born in this country to come and live here and we don’t think that’s a good idea because we like living here and think other people should get the same good jobs and schools that we do.” He seemed to understand.

Meanwhile, Omar was just really excited to hold his flag. I was really impressed with how far they were able to walk and carry the flags. I totally would’ve wimped out about it when i was there age.

After we finished marching, we circled the American flag on the south side of the steps. I think this was a really cool moment because Pedro spoke about how the US is a melting pot.

Having other nations’ flags there is pretty controversial right now because people see them as a sign that these immigrants won’t become part of our culture, but I think they’re really missing the beauty of what’s happening.

Throughout the march, I constantly carried a little American flag that Lauren had given to me. But I also carried the Venezuelan flag when Omar got tired of holding it and the Nicaraguan flag for a while too when Javier wanted to play with the other boys running around. Now, I am pretty confident that I am not of Nicaraguan or Venezeual ancestry. Similarly, Latinos are carrying British and Italian flags while Mexicans are carrying Brazilian flags and we’re all doing this in the United States.

I know that many American’s belief that this country was founded to be a great melting pot are mostly false perceptions of history, but they’re perceptions nonetheless, and that counts for something. The people at these rallies believe that the US should be a great nation of immigrants. All of us come from very different places, but our journey to the US makes us very much the same because it is a struggle and a personal journey to get here.

And think about if I did try to carry my flags. It reminds me of being in Poland and trying to explain my nationality to a group of Europeans that thinks in such clear European race terms. I am adopted so by blood I have German, Swedish and English ancestry, I think. By culture of my adoptive parents, I am Polish Jew, Irish Catholic, Czech Gypsy and Cherokee and from my overbearing mother with her dad’s temper (stereotypes!) to the vinegar we use as flavoring in everything: I can trace clear ethnic influences just within the culture of our family.

I think that this, now more than ever, is what makes our country really cool.

I accidentally ate chicken broth today. I suppose it’s my own fault for stealing Joe’s egg drop soup but uggh. And the waiter at Sun’s is usually the Host and so he’s probably one of the worst waiters I’ve ever had, but mostly just cos I felt so bad for him because you could tell that he was trying incredibly hard he just didn’t really know what to do. And then we get egg drop soup and Joe tastes the chicken broth in it so he asks about it and we find out that it really doesnt’ contain chicken broth and i get all upset when the waiter leavves and go to the bathroom to get sick but i don’t have enough food on my stomach to actually successfully get sick so I have to just deal with it and now my tummy is angry at me, but it’ll get over it. It wasn’t that much broth and more than anything I’m just traumatized.

I rethemed my mac today. Hopefully I’ll think to make/post a screen shot of it here in a bit but it’s hard to say. I rarely follow through with screen shots because I have some crazy idea that someday I’ll post all of this in a printed book type thing so that I have it all stored and relatively safe. This will probably not happen though, especially because more than anything I want to have ALL of my blogging archived in print which means I have to go back and upload all my other entries into something with standard formatting. Or I suppose I could go through with Pagemaker and delete things. All the trouble though. What a bother.

Cara and I are going on an adventure to get things for the retiring history profs, specifically Tucker and Wagnon. It should be fun and it will at worst make me feel like I was productive today because really I haven’t been. but yah… all of my address book contacts which call a lot now have photos with their names in my celly and my mac looks hot. Alabaster, what a pretty name for a machine.

my life continues to unravel, and by this time i’m pretty sick so we’ll see if it’s mumps or just a sinus infection. doctors appointment tomorrow either way so it probably doesn’t matter.

the good news: i had car trouble today. which should be bad news but listen to this… i have car trouble on the way to dillons so when i get there i look under the hood and realize that i don’t even know where fuel injector goes in this car so i’m prolly not going to be able to check that fluid to see if i need to buy more and i page dad. i then miss his return call because my phone didn’t feel like ringing most of the day. i hear the message ringer instead and check the message then call him back. before i get any response, i start heading back to the apartment because this makes sense and i’m headed there anyway for campus leadership festivities. as i’m backing out, i see a kansas gas truck and am like “hey that could be dad” but it didn’t have any of the stuff that dad’s truck has on the roof of it so i knew it wasn’t. then i continued on my way, and of course the service light comes on again immediately. while i’m driving on 29th toward burlingame, my dad passes me in his van and i wave at him and watch as he breaks so i pull over at the gas station i’m right next too. he comes and helps me and we get everything running to sort of within a while. i really love my daddy.

i like how life works out sometimes. even if this is one of the worst weeks i’ve ever lived through.

I suppose now is the time that I admit that I’ve been in a bad mood all day. maybe? I don’t know. Joe and I didn’t have the best day of our relationship. Some of this is because I woke up way earlier than I meant to (arround 7 or 7:30) and got to lay in bed hoping I’d fall back to sleep by 8:30. It just set me in a pretty bad mood and unable to sleep for the next several hours. then i started cleaing sometime around 12 and got really frustrated by the lack of storage so i went out to buy storage tubs and that turne dout well. i also scored a “nesting basket” for my knitting supplies, something i’ve been wanting for a while and i got a trash can for the bedroom. who knows. maybe we’ll use it? i hope so. joe seems less optimistic about it. i also got two towers for panties, pjs and socks. Or in joe’s case, boxers and undershirts and socks. whee. how much fun is that? i’m really excited about it and the room is damn clean so i finally feel like i can relax. i’m hoping that a quick dust over of the whole place on thursday will make everything perfectly sparkly clean and i can take pictures of what our place looks like when everything is in array.

I had this terrible panic attack at about 7:10. Given that I had to work at night, this was probably a bad thing. It mostly started because I’d been holding back this bad mood all day trying to pretend that everything was fine because I was convincing myself at the time that this was the truth. Joe saw through it. By evening though, we went to get food for him and rent movies and I got all bitchy about it because i felt he was taking too long to get ready. and then when we got out it ended up taking too long through really nothing we could’ve done to avoid and I didn’t get to get food nor did I really have time for it before work. Instead of just grabbing food and being a few seconds late i proceeded to get terribly angry and then i just melted into this terrible panic attack. I think i should start keeping better records of what phrases i repeat during panic attacks. They would probably give me good insight into why i have them. Today i kept repeating “Help me” and shaking uncontrollably. And Joe didn’t know what kind of help i wanted or how I wanted it. So then he’d ask and I’d say “hold me” and he would but i just shook a lot. I also went into a frenzy of apologies and self-deprecation. That’s old hat though. The “help me” is new. What kind of help did I mean? Straight Jackets? Xanax? Desperate Housewives. No one knows.

My cousin Tara’s cancer is back. I’m sure i mentioned this before. anyway, I guess she’s really sick so now I’m perhaps going to give her some/ a lot of my blood. I hope that it doesn’t come down to her needing a transfusion but I’d be really happy to give her one if that is what she needs. it makes me feel really good because I really like giving blood and I pride myself on being O-negative. It’s nice to feel like I get to have a really positive impact on someone’s health potentially. It connects me to God in my own way.

Speaking of God-connections. Mom’s cousin Darylene and I talked for a while at the luncheon after the funeral about spirituality and things. She’s a really interesting person but she seems completely at peace with the world which is great. and I felt really spiritually safe talking to her and opening up about different parts of myself and my beliefs/relationships with God. She was really understanding about all of it and kind of helped me understand the way Saints should function in my catholicism, or at least understand it more than I did.

My mom’s uncle passed away on Thursday or Friday and the funeral is today. It’s nice to see everyone but I wish we all gathered around town for more than a funeral. All of mom’s relatives are so spread out though. There are centers of them in Dallas, St. Louis, St. Marys, and then some spread out to Topeka and Philadelphia. Getting us all in the same place seems somewhat impossible at times. The funeral seems to be okay. Last night at the visitation/prayer service all of his children seemed okay. He’s apparently been ready to die for about 6-8 months now and he was suffering a lot. I’m not really that upset about it either. And it’s a catholic funeral, which means I can pretty much avoid grieving at all cos no one gets to speak. Though I get the impression that the Kettermans were the only loud Rodenbaugh’s growing up. And probably Bobby and the rest in St. L.