2004-07-01 - 3:59 p.m.
**THIS WAS STARTED ON THE 29TH OF JUNE**
Now, that�s just weird. Look at my horoscope: �Take care of your home base today, Heather, both physically and emotionally. See that your bills are taken care of and that your bedroom is clean. Don't forget to clean out the dirt from under your bed, and the demons from inside your mind. Realize that you might be operating with someone else's program disk that got stuck in your hard drive. Make sure you replace it with your own system disk before you continue onward.� They are feeding into my paranoia. How did they know that I�m poor and I don�t clean? And how did they find out about the demons? Strange. And how did they find out that I pretend my mind is like a computer collecting files in a sporadic and mismatched way??? Wha-wha-whaaaa???? Sigh.
So, we went down to Naples last night, cuz that�s where Jimbo�s dad and grandma were. We went out to eat at a seafood restaurant. His dad is very vacant. He looks like an old hippie. I told Jimbo that he definitely should cut his hair by the time he�s that old. I mean, his dad is like �Santa Hippie Odyssey.� M�kay. He doesn�t have a beard. But still. He was nice enough but just seemed real tired about everything. His father rarely talks to Jimbo, even in person after not seeing him for about four years. He lives out in California with his wife or whatever relation they have. She�s nice and has three daughters who are almost altogether grown.
His grandmother is a different story. She tells stories about everyone else I haven�t met yet and she was there to tell me, that Jimbo was exaggerating his stories, in all the right places. She is SO GRAAAYT. I love their family now. Jimbo says he comes from a family of fuck-ups. Well, that may be true, but his grandmother is perfect. She�s so funny and sassy. She had pictures of when she and her deceased husband (Poppa�Jimbo�s grandfather) were in school in the same year and they met when she was 17, but the picture was like from 1940 or something when she was much younger. Blanche is 72 now, you do the math. And so, Blanche looks all young in her 1940 picture (okay, I just did the math, they were 12 years apart and in 1940, she was about 8 years old), and Lee (Poppa) was in high school at the time. People told him he was a cradle robber...but she didn�t use that term. It was cuter how she put it. It was more risque, almost close to �child molester� but not as horrifying. I have a bad memory. But she had pictures in her wallet of all her grandsons (yes, it�s a family mostly of boys) when they were younger. She had Jimbo in there when he was 13(!!!!!), a year before I met him. His arms were tattoo-less and he had bangs ABOVE his eyes. He was so pale. I cried when I saw it. Cuz I just couldn�t believe first of all that such an ancient (to me) memory was captivated in such an untainted picture. She takes very good care of her pictures. She holds a lot of memories in her head. She raised Jimbo for the first ten years, it�s just a shame that she couldn�t have raised him for the rest of the time. She�s such a wonderful woman. The part of the family that stayed around her in South Carolina turned out almost perfect. Everyone is fairly healthy and legal and operates as a close family...except for one uncle and an aunt who is kinda dysfunctional. But that�s their problem. They were offered enough love, they�re just twisted.
I hope they are still here for the day/night cuz I wanted to hang out with them some more. I have to be crafty about getting off work though. I�ll figure something out.
I got lucky yesterday too cuz of weather conditions, the pool field trip was cancelled. Yay. So there was no whining about having to go or having to stay behind with the pre-k kids, etc.
**AND THIS IS TODAY�S�JULY 1ST**
Well, I left that day and went and got the kids and took them down to hang out in the mall with the relatives mentioned above. The dad and step-mom of Jimbo, bought cutesy purses for the girls and also SpongeBob necklaces. For Jimmy, they bought a big Godzilla figurine and then a set of Godzilla monsters that are handheld size...including Mechagodzilla and Mothra, etc. They are wayyyyy cooooollll. Kmm.
So, anyway, I�ve been uber depressed ever since then. I think it was a mixture of meeting new people (anxiety producing) and seeing how great the grandmother really was (and remembering my grandmother trying to hang me with the clothesline outside while we were fighting; then there was the time when she needed quadruple bypass open heart surgery and my family blamed it on me literally saying: �Heather, she needs heart surgery because of your crazy attitude that you�ve been giving all of us, you�ve stressed her out and caused all this...� etc.; and the time my male cousin and I were playing a game with flashlights after bedtime�when we shared a room for the summer vacation visitation�and we were making silly flirty noises cuz we were giving the flashlight reflections personalities and the next morning�I was 12 by the way�she told me that I should know better than to try to have sex with my boy cousin, when I was trying to explain that he had flashed me his weiner and I had freaked out and thought I should tell her about it). Seriously, that�s my memories of my grandmother.
Jimbo isn�t on the best terms with his family but at least they care and they talk about stuff and tell stories when they DO see him. I don�t know. I guess I was comparing �others� but I just can�t figure out why I�m so gypped out of a normal family. I know, �what�s normal?� ET CETERA. There is normal. Normal is what ISN�T dysfunctional. There�s suck-ass family members and then there are tolerable family members. My family has always been really weird and set in their ways and old-fashioned to a point that they are emotionally unavailable. I�m sick of it.
So, I�ve been depressed. And I have no one that I have a whole lot of access to and feel comfortable with talking to about stuff. There�s always the same feedback...unwanted advice, lectures, ludicrous ignorance. You know the type. So, I went to see about counseling. They said all that stuff that I wrote about yesterday. Doy. I don�t understand why they want to know everything that is going on in the present. Yeah, there�s things that trigger emotions, etc. But don�t they realize that Freud was no dummy and that my childhood has screwed me up and everything that is going on NOWADAYS is all relevant to most people, etc. Duh. Oh well.
I have to go and get a payday loan today. �Hi, I�ll have the usual.� It�s like my new crackhouse. No, just kidding there was never a crackhouse for me. But I mean, if you want to talk about the library...the library is my crackhouse. And no, there is no crack. Only one person in my life gets that joke. And it�s cuz she made it up. I think she was the one. Okay, I�m going now. Tonight is school.
