death and destruction, oh my…

wow, sorry i haven’t posted for awhile. last week was absolutely insane for me. i am getting ready for two shows on the same night, one where i am dancing, the other fire spinning. the fire spinning has been exhilerating and frustrating at the same time. sometimes, i feel really old for how long it takes me to learn these moves, but i try to be gentle with myself. here are a couple of photos of me spinning fire:

and…

it’s kind of blurry, but i am kind of okay with that, too. it’s not technically the greatest picture, but it’s okay. it’s fun, anyway =)

in other news, i am generally a pretty positive person, but damn, it’s hard to be sunny today. about a week ago, i found out that one of my brothers is probably dying from cancer. in the ultimate act of irony, i was just flipping through my ipod on random, and "don’t worry, be happy" came on….back to the topic at hand…

my brother is mentally ill, doesn’t work and was awaiting disability, and is uninsured. one of the other brothers called to tell me, and was, like, telling me that i had to do something to get him on a special program or something through the university. i am not exactly sure what they expect from me. my brother has so much going against him, the one that’s sick. they found the cancer because he found a lump in his throat. when they called him back, they told him it had spread throughout his body. i feel kind of like a shitty person because my first thought was "i don’t think i can take care of someone just now who’s dying…" please know that my brother was not raised with everyone else in the family, and all my brothers are a minimum of 15 years older than me, so i’ve not been overly close with any of them, it’s like having another set of parents without the good stuff like uncoditional, nonjudgmental love =) i truly believe in my soul of soul’s that my brother is sick because he carries so much hatred in his heart. i wish him peace on this journey, but i just can’t do this again so soon….

yesterday, someone i ranger with out at burning man who had a heart condition, died. also last night, one of my husband’s coworkers and friends who’s wife had been in a coma but had just seemed to be recovering also passed away, she apparently couldn’t recover from losing her own mother and finally, when someone was posting about the ranger with the heart condition, someone else wrote in and told us that another friend who had been a ranger passed away last october. i knew all these people. this can’t even be a three thing, and if it is, we are now almost to multiples of three, as this makes six or more. one of my coworkers fathers is also dying, and she told me last week he had been referred to hospice.

i suppose this is one of the inevitable things about getting older, that people around you start dropping off, tragedy takes some, and others just seem to fade away, but it sure sucks. but demmit, 38 really isn’t that old! what’s going on here?

in spite of all this doom and gloom, things are reasonably okay. i think my girl has decided that she needs more from a relationship than i can give and while i am sad, i supppose it’s for the best. she hasn’t really spoken to me in about two weeks, and when i saw her last, she was telling me how her best friend and sister were telling her she couldn’t call me her girlfriend because we didn’t see each other enough to have a "real" relationship. i suppose if someone is going to listen to others like that, it’s probably not such a bad thing to not have this person anymore. i am sad, but not overly suprised.

i am sure this sounds like the most depressing post ever, but i really don’t feel depressed. i know that i am still grieving, and have good and bad days, but that’s to be expected. this friday, my sister is having surgery, a hysterectomy. i will be there with her, and then go to my performances, and then go back to stay with her in the hospital, so she won’t have to be alone.

so many good, beautiful people gone from the world, this week.

sad.

that’s about it for now, i needed to purge this. will write more later, when i can.

peace. 

good weekend…

boy, did i have a great weekend.

imagine this…i had the fate of at least two gorgeous and awesome ladies in my hands saturday night as i got to prepare them for JELLO WRESTLING!! it was all in good fun to raise money for a project i am assisting with for burning man this year, but it was interesting and titillating. heh. me and several others helped make the jello, not too warm, not too cool, but juuuust right, slicker than snot, and ewey gooey goodness. red jello…..it was all in good fun.

i miss my mom, and getting to tell her of my adventures or seek her advice when i struggle with things in life. this came to light for me last week or so when an unexpected professional opportunity presented itself. i have been asking for an upgrade to my job since i finished my degree and so far, nothing doing. my boss says she’s trying, but i think there’s more she could do, if she were more motivated, and i think the hr person who’s supposed to be helping her is still smarting from her own professional frustration from awhile ago. well, someone who supports me across the street at the main campus it transferred to another position, leaving hers open. after doing some soul-searching, i decided i needed to apply for this job in order to further myself professionally. but, the more i thought about it, the less right it seemed to be, so today, i spoke to my big boss again and told him there’s more for me to do here, still, but i do need for some things to change. i got his commitment that he would help me where he can, and he agrees with my assessment of things, and so now, i still wait. it’s okay, though…i feel better about the decision. what was so acute to me is that THIS is the sort of thing i generally would talk through with my mom, and she’s not here to talk it through with anymore. she probably would have told me "those folks have been so good to you…don’t burn your bridges, those are good people"…which i know, but i also need to take care of my family. if i had gone against her advice she still would have said "well, that’s okay, dear….if you think this will be the best for you, that’s what you have to do". mom’s and unconditional love are like that. i expect to blunder often without her sage personage to bounce things off, her balancing and wise psyche to advise me, but when i think about it, she’s still there, in my heart, and i think i knew her well enough that i can probably predict most of her responses, it’s just still so sad to me that i have to talk into space now rather than interact with my mom, so that i can kiss her on the cheek, tell her i love her, and thank her for listening to me.

there’s a lot more to say, but that will have to be it for now. it’s time to go home. going to see my girl tonight, that should be fun times. spent a lot of the weekend with d….overall, life is awesome.

will write more when i can….

peace….who would have thought that before 40, i could say i’d lived through two wars?

not me.

happy international women’s day…

here’s what i did:
Staging at 11:45 AM at Student Services Bldg.; parade at noon. Wear white in honor of the suffragists — or international attire. Join walkers, musicians, equestrians, veterans’ groups, students and more. Carry banners, flags, balloons, or signs. Start at Student Services Bldg, end up on the lawn behind the Student Union. Hear International Women’s Day proclamations, President Glick and special Women’s Day speakers; free lunch to follow….

we then went to the "food, not bombs" booth and got some lovely vegan (i am not vegan, btw, so totally NOT holier than thou….or anyone) salad and veggie soup, ate some popcorn, said hi to all my friends from the women’s studies program, saw the HAWT professor i have a little crush on (rawr…hehehe), enjoyed the sunshine, thanked the goddess for this day, this opportunity, and for making me a woman.

oppressed or not, i would never want to be a man.

life is good, today.

i hope you did something today….to celebrate yourself, to celebrate womankind, to celebrate life.

word.

there were many people today who had hillary clinton signs.

they were chanting revoluntionary slogans.

i thanked female veterans for serving our country.

today i am happy.

peace.

life, moving on…..

life is moving on here and as generally seems to be the case with me, it isn’t that there’s nothing to say, it’s that there’s so much to say, it’s overwhelming because life keeps going on and i am busy as hell, but loving life, too. i am in a pretty good place regarding my mom. i feel a lot of guilt. i do think she was ready and although i think it was in her nature to fight for her life, she was very tired and very done. but i will always carry the guilt that i didn’t take her to the hospital sooner. i just hope i am not judged too harshly for that. i have to live with it and in some ways, it continues to haunt me. today is a bad grief day, as we approach the weekend of my sisters birthday, the first without her. i don’t think i can fill her shoes, i can only be who i am. i hope that’s enough….somehow i think it will always be just shy of what someone thinks it should be, but all i can do is do my best.

i have been very busy doing web editing and stuff for the fire troupe i have become involved with. it’s a ton of fun and we are working on choreography for the upcoming season. right now i am in a fire fan piece that’s a tribal bellydance fusion number that’s shaping up nicely, but i have no more hair on my arms =) tonight is the first night for the new semester of my bellydance class, and i have fans practice tues-thurs and regular fire practive wednesdays, which leaves monday my only night i am not out of the house for something during the week! exhausting yes, but very worth it, my body feels great and it’s awesome! i wouldn’t trade it for the world, though. we are also doing fundraising both with the fire troupe and an art project we hope to take to burning man this next year. i built that website too….wanna see? here it is: http://www.shivavista.com let me know what you think. the creative bit on the front page i helped write and i built the entire site from scratch. there isn’t a huge amount there, but it still took a bit of time.

i am also going to be the stage manager this year for the drum, dance, and didgeridoo festival that takes place near the end of the month long arts festival that gets held in my town during july. it’s going to be so awesome! the webpage for the festival does not do it justice, i should ask her if i can do a different one, because the person who does hers i don’t think really wants to do it. something to think about =) so, we have a bunch of exciting new artists coming this year that i had a huge hand in getting here, and i am very excited! we are doing fundraising for this festival too, and earlier this week scouted out a great club that we think will be an awesome venue for us.

my daughter seems to have pretty much given up on school in the secondary sense and wants to get her ged and go to college. i am trying not to be too judgmental about this decision, but it’s very hard. i suppose she is now her own person, but i am disappointed. she seems to feel easily persecuted and i hope that soon she learns a personal sense of responsibility for her fate and the things that happen to her. i don’t want to write anymore about that.

work is moving right along too…..

all the time i have spent doing this other stuff means less time for relationships, but i think that’s okay. i am still on good terms and things continue to go well both with d and s, my girl. we haven’t been able to be together a whole lot since my mom passed, but have managed enough time to stay connected and we will just see how things go. yesterday, an old depeche mode song came on that struck home with me. "though it’s not love, it means something…."

i think i will leave things there for right now.

peace. 

still alive….

life is still carrying on for me. i am trying to learn how to live without my mom. some days are easier than others. as much as i loved her, i am also seeing that a lot of what she had become in my life was an obligation and i didn’t need her as much as i thought i did and i didn’t depend on her as much as i thought i did. i don’t know if i should feel good about that or bad. without a doubt i miss her in my life….i think i was just more independent than i thought. i know there is a sense of freedom that exists now that didn’t before. good goddess, am i a selfish fuck? i don’t know….

last week, i had to buy a car. love the car, hate the thought of making another payment. ew. the car is a nissan altima. i love it. it gets great gas mileage. i had been looking at getting a subaru and while all wheel drive would have been nice, in reality, i just don’t really drive in bad weather often enough to give up some comfort measures to have it.

in other news, d and i went to concord and santa cruz this weekend to help some friends that just got married to celebrate their recent nuptuals. they ran off to hawaii to get hitched and didn’t pack any of us in their suitcases, so we threw a party for them when they got home. it was a pretty good time. we took the new car and it was a ton of fun. i started drinking wine with my friends about noon on saturday and ended up drunk dialing just about everyone who’s ever talked about drunk dialing me or who has, in fact, done so. i was happy to tell everyone i knew how much i loved them =)

i had never been to santa cruz before….there are a bunch of little funky houses situated strangely along the sides of mountains but overall, the experience was charming. definately some place to return to when one can.

it’s been about four hours since i began this entry and my train of thought is wrecked. so i will end this now.

peace.

dear mom….

i can’t believe that it’s only been just over three weeks since you left this life. this death thing is such an incredible dichotomy. in some ways, it seems you’ve been gone an eternity and i can’t believe it’s been such a small amount of time, and in other ways, i keep looking around the house, expecting to see you there, or hear you yelling at me, or i sit at my desk at work and expect the phone to ring and i am going to pick it up and it’s going to be you on the other end saying "hoi".

i picked your ashes up from the mortuary last week….i can’t even remember what day it was. on friday, they delivered the mini-urns so that each of us could keep you with us. i got 12 of them in case any of the grand kids wanted them or something like that. your death certificates arrived in the mail on saturday…..unexpected and sobering, in some ways again i thought they’d never show up and in some ways i hate it because it’s another reminder to me that you aren’t here anymore.

i talked to a friend of mine who is a paralegal yesterday and she says because we have a deed on file that shows you and i as joint tenants, no one should be able to take the house away from us, which is a relief. i have to file a  paper with the county giving them a copy of the death certificate stating that you’ve passed, and we should be fine from there. of course, that means sis won’t necessarily be on the house, but i don’t know if there’s anything i can do about that. you know i will do right by her.

she hasn’t gone back to work yet. she’s talking today of both going back to the bar to bartend (oh god), or going and applying for a job on a cruise ship. i know you would be rolling your eyes the same i am. she says she has no ties here now, i suppose we and her son have been relegated to the status of chopped liver, eh? we will see what happens with that….

speaking of, dg got laid off last week. before he paid his rent for december and january. sis says she got up on friday to take him to get a copy of his birth certificate so he could go job hunting again, and then he told her he didn’t want to go. i swear, those two are going to be the death of me. it doesn’t seem much that either one of them are too keen on working and i am not too keen on continuing to support them with no help. will keep you posted on that one…..

there have been a million times i’ve thought of you, at least, in the last few weeks. talking things over with different siblings and smiling with rememberance of specific things we did or experienced. i miss you soooo much. in a lot of ways, you were the sounding board and the vent i used to gauge how things were going in my life because i could tell you and you would guide me, being so much more wise than me and having lived so much more and through tougher times, too. now there’s no one to temper me, no one to tell me to think about things before i make a rash decision, and no one to love me unconditionally. d even tried to pull a fast one on me last week, towards the end. i don’t know what’s going to happen with that, but i will do my best to stay the course, even if it should be alone.

the days go on….i have been lazy lately. sis actually mopped the kitchen floor last week…it took every ounce of self-control i had not to say to her "wow, i am impressed….i didn’t know you knew how to mop"….and i totally didn’t mean it mean, it’s just that she’s never done it, ya know? bellydance classes haven’t started again, but the one’s i am doing with the fire group are on-going and things are going good there.

well, i better go pretend to work now.

i love you and i hope that you are at peace.

in other news….

 i can’t believe it hasn’t even been a month since my mom’s been gone. that truly amazes me. i got her death certificates in the mail this weekend, which was jarring.

the weekend was insular and full of sloth. i did see my girl on sunday, first time since before my mom got sick. it was good to see her.

i didn’t do laundry, i didn’t do much of anything. i think sometimes you need that….i have done more than my share of that since mom died =) i know we need to start going through her stuff, and this will ultimately make my life more orderly, but i just haven’t been able to manufacture the energy for it yet. i think i will ask my sister if we can start doing one small thing at a time. even if it’s just one drawer of one dresser at a time, one shelf, one box in her closet….the sooner we have her stuff gone through, the sooner we can move my sis in there, the sooner i can move daughter up there and the sooner we can turn daughter’s current room into a massive closet for d and my stuff. i want all storage devices and stuff out of our room. the only thing that will be kept in our closet will be robes, tv’s stuff like that. the basement will become our lair =) i like that thought. it isn’t like anyone in the house gets up early enough to cause us much trouble getting to the laundry facilities =) these are the initial plans for the getting on with things.

there is more that we need to do. we need to pull up the floor and subfloor in my mom’s bathroom and redo the flooring. there’s a section of the drywall near her shower that needs to be patched and repaired, and her bathroom needs a serious and severe updating and cleaning. i am trying to decide how i want to do that. might get new carpet for sis, but maybe not. we will see with that….it’s going to be expensive and i think that bri’s room needs it more than my mom’s. but the flooring in the bathroom, definately. now it’s just finding the motivation to do all this…..

happy monday, everyone.

bleh.

peace.