See also

I’ve never been strong on environmental isues. I mean, I care, but the movement sometimes annoys the shit out of me (same as with the liberal movement in general, the feminist movement, etc.) and I’m just not as well-versed as I could be. Basically, I’m a n00b to this.

But I read the newspapers here basically every day, the local small-town paper and the Post-Gazette and sometimes the Trib media (they annoy the shit out of me!) and I’ve been learning, over the years, how completely commonplace it is for major environmental violations to occur with naught more than a person with property nearby giving an interview to the small-town paper. They conduct studies to see whether it was in fact the suspected companies who did the wrong, find eight months later that it was, and… that’s it. No fines, no prosecution, no consequences whatsoever.

And these companies advertise the shit outta Pittsburgh. Consol Energy powers America, and brands itself as the good working-class white guy company, the Real Americans, who don’t want to give those foreigners any energy or jobs, and anytime someone dares to suggest coal is maybe not the greatest energy source out there they start blitzing the ‘burgh with ads about how we need coal and how absolutely stupid anyone would be to think otherwise.

Coal jobs are vital to the local economy — it would be a disaster for this area for the country to start moving away from coal production and toward cleaner, safer forms of energy. I, personally, think we have to do it anyway, but I haven’t lived here my whole life, and I haven’t experienced destitution trying to survive on retail restaurant line-cook wages and then finding that this coal thing pays pretty well and is willing to accept me and then the family finds some small sort of financial security.

Coal mining is killing our community, and yet it is a core part of its identity and an absolutely-essential source of economic security. Southwest PA, all of WV, parts of Ohi, the tri-state area.

Big King Coal owns this region.

I’ll leave you with a link to a local organization that’s out there doing some of the tough work on behalf of the community here and the region’s ecosystem: The Center for Coalfield Justice. If you need stats, if you want someone to interview, head over their way.

P.S. I haven’t even mentioned drilling for natural gas. Another day.

(Originally posted to my tumblr.)

Back in fall ‘08, I was hired for my first-ever full-time job. It was seasonal — six months on, six months off — so I had time in between to rest and recover.

We’re nearing the close of my second season there, and finally today they called me in — tomorrow will mark the day I am officially a permanent employee. So now, there’s no break, no off-season.

But there is enough money to save up for a house downpayment, comfortably. I never thought I’d be able to put money aside while living under a reasonable budget, not one filled with irresponsible spending, but just reasonable, enough for us to eat well at home and go out to dinner once or twice a month and spend a little on entertainment. To be able to do that and not be frantic when it came time to pay the bills, and on top of that be putting away significant money toward a down payment? I can’t believe I’m doing it.

What it does mean is that I won’t be writing as often. Not that I write often as it is, but I’ve depended on having that off-season in the past. I won’t anymore. I’ll write what I can, when I can. I will continue to be active on Tumblr — I’m there pretty much every day. So that’s where you’ll find me. Elsewhere, I’ll be around when I can.

Thanks for all the support, everyone. I am happy today. :)

I noticed something was wrong in the earliest hours of the morning, when my husband had disappeared from bed but I did not hear anything going on in the bathroom and could not see him anywhere.

Around 8, he got up to go to the bathroom and I lifted myself out of bed to use it after him. When he emerged, he was very clearly not well and said, in a seriously distressed tone, “I just had the most awful night” and stumbled around me back to bed.

It’s not emotional, he clarified as he curled up awkwardly on his side of the mattress, it’s just physical. He had problems feeling seriously sick to his stomach, which never culminated in anything, just churned on and on without relief, and had serious sharp pains in several places — shoulder, lower back, knees — and a generalized all-over ache that left him feeling miserable, unable to find a single comfortable (nay, just non-miserable) position no matter where he stood, sat or lay.

“This is how I imagine you feel every day,” he moaned, as he tossed his body into a different awkward position in an attempt to find some relief.

He needed the still, quiet, restful sleep so badly, but hurt too much to stay lying in place in bed for more than a few moments, and the pain was too distracting to be able to actually fall asleep — and precisely because of this, he was in no condition to be anywhere else but in bed sleeping. A familiar situation for me.

A few minutes later, already in his thirtieth position attempting to achieve some state of rest in bed, he pushed over to where I sat on my side of the bed and asked, “How do you do this every single day?”

Staring at my nightstand drawer, I smiled a bit and replied, “A lot of medicine. And you to help me.”

I have been having a total shit week, very busy with doctor’s appointments and dealing with some extra-special obstructive, discriminatory shit at work, so I haven’t been up for anything that requires engagement. Just mindless reading. But I can always count on the Penguins to cheer me up.

Marc Andre Fleury made the most ridiculous save against the Philadelphia Flyers last night:

This is why he’s my boyfriend. And also why my husband doesn’t mind.

I feel like a five-year-old who just got teleported into Disneyland for the first time. I start bouncing up and down giddily and crying do it again! do it again!!

Philadelphia’s Jeff Carter rushes to the net and makes a shot, which Marc-Andre Fleury thinks he has frozen but ends up coming out for a juicy rebound. Philadelphia’s Daniel Briere works in front of the net trying to chip the puck in, and Fleury falls on his side reaching to stop the puck just outside his crease. Briere makes one last attempt, trying to chip the puck over the body of Fleury, and Fleury, still lying on his side, rolls on his back and curls up just enough to grab the puck out of the air with his glove, legs in the air, rather like a turtle on his back…

Paul Steiggerwald: — good save by Fleury — the rebound, loose around the net, Fleury can’t corrall it — OH! makes a good glove save on a puck that was going over his body and into the net off the stick of Daniel Briere.

Bob Errey: Absolutely sick save by Marc-Andre Fleury, laying on his right side, and Briere thought he had himself when he chipped it, but Fleury somehow got the glove reaching back! …

I’ve had a handful of names throughout my life.

I was born “The [Mom's Maiden Name] Girl.” My mother had not yet picked out a first name for me. She was living in a hole-in-the-wall shack in a poorer town in agricultural central California — it was where she ended up after my father kicked her out upon discovering her pregnancy. Get an abortion or hit the road, he said. I knew this as a child, but it wasn’t until I grew older that my mother also informed me that he was threatening to beat her, to punch and stomp on her stomach to forcibly terminate the pregnancy. He tried to send her out with no belongings in a scrap car — which was to get her from her then-home on the northern border of Oregon to her adult sons’ home in central California. That’s over 900 miles. She was 43 years old and not in the best of health. My oldest brother — something of a giant — had to gather some friends to physically threaten my father for him to make sure that she was able to make the trip safely.

I’ve never had a moment’s contact with him. My mother claims that when I was around six years old, he called her, having “dropped by” and wanted to take me out for some ice cream with his new girlfriend (with whom he had been involved during the short months my mother was married to him). Fearing for my safe return, she refused. And never heard from him again.

During my first months, my adult sister lived with us — she has told me stories of having to brush cockroaches off of me while I slept. And it wouldn’t be until I entered adolescence that my mother and I settled down in a permanent home: before that, there was not one residence I was able to stay for more than a single year’s time; we hopped around looking for the lowest rents, and spent time living in spare rooms in each of my adult brothers’ homes (three times with one, once with the other).

When I was five years old, my mother married a long-time family friend. When she did so, he legally adopted me, claiming to be my father and being added to my birth certificate as such — whether my mother just went along with this or actively sought it for reasons of future security, I don’t know. Regardless, my name at the time changed from [Mom's Maiden Name] to [This Man's Name].

A little less than a year later, after struggling with him over finances — he wanted her to continue working to support his retirement, with no support for either her nor I — she divorced him. And there, a problem cropped up: in order to get my name changed back to my birth name, she would have to go to court to prove that he was not, in fact, my biological father, and have him removed from my birth certificate. As a newly single mother, she did not have the resources to take on that task. So, even after the divorce was finalized, I remained [This Man's Name] — and she kept that name as well in the interests of having the same name as her daughter.

And that name remained mine for the rest of my childhood, adolescence and early adult life. I hated it. I hated the sound of it, I hated the man it came from, I hated the way he had treated her, I hated the way we were stuck carrying his family name despite having no ties to this family whatsoever.

Ever since I can remember, I have been very eager to get rid of that name.

And ever since I remember, I have been wholly uninterested in weddings and traditional family life. I had no interest in boys or girls as a teenager. I never dreamed about “my day,” about dresses and flowers and music, about honeymoons and housewifery.

Part of that, especially as I grew older, was that I had a distinct sense of my undesirability. I wasn’t interested in anyone else because I thought no one else would be interested in me. As I grew more aware of my health and struggled with my increasing limitations, I never even entertained the idea that anyone could ever be interested in me — not to kiss me, not to hold my hand while we walked through the mall, not to cuddle, not to call me “girlfriend” or “go steady,” not to live with me, not to propose to me and certainly not to legally commit to be stuck with me for the rest of their life. Who the hell would want that? I was a burden; my health was growing worse; they would have to help take care of me, and I wouldn’t be able to contribute to the household enough to count as an equal. So obviously, I wasn’t on the market. It never even got as far as whether or not I wanted to be: it was simply a matter-of-fact acknowledgement of a reality that would never change, and thus there was no point wasting energy trying to change it.

All this is to say that I wasn’t dreaming of changing my name as part and parcel of the supposedly-universal little girl’s dreams of wearing white and being pampered and fawned over and having pretty pictures taken in rolling green fields. I never had those dreams. I just really fucking hated that name.

So before changing my name as part of an adult relationship ever became a possibility, I had three names to contend with. My father’s name (which I’ve never officially carried), my mother’s maiden name, and that other man’s name.

And not a single one of them was a name I wanted any part of.

My father’s name? Sounded pretty cool phonetically, but it was the name of a man who threatened to beat my mother, cheated on her pretty openly during their short relationship, had some pretty serious class bigotry going on, and was by all accounts — including those of his other children, the half-siblings who wanted nothing to do with me — a complete asshole. Yes: there’s a name I want to adopt!

My siblings (on my mother’s side) actually shared a completely different name — they were from a different father — my mother’s severely abusive first husband who thankfully died in a motorcycle crash, and every single member of my family is convinced it was for the better.

And then there’s my mother’s maiden name. The name shared by my aunt and uncle and family up in Oregon, the name I was born with, the name I went by for my first five years of life.

It doesn’t matter. I don’t fucking want it.

I want nothing to do with any of those names. I grew up in a severely emotionally controlling and manipulative family and experienced abuse to the point that I am just being introduced to the idea that I may have PTSD by my counselor. (I protested, and she said “OK, well, we don’t have to put a name to it, but…”) I have pretty bad dissociative issues I am only just beginning to explore; I escaped with moderate to severe anxiety disorder and panic attacks that don’t qualify as panic disorder only because instead of being random, they are triggered by contact with my family. I fit every other qualification.

I was stuck at home with a mother who afforded me no space to develop an individual self, unable to make it on my own away from her because of my disability. I couldn’t work, couldn’t afford rent, couldn’t live independently. I pushed myself to return to college earlier than I should have — after I dropped out the first time and spent months housebound — cutting short my recovery time, just to get away from her. I lived for a year on Social Security disability (after I was approved), $7500 in needs-based college grants and several thousand more in student loans before everything started to run out — money, my ability to continue school and maintain grades high enough in a busy enough schedule to qualify for further student aid — and I couldn’t stay out on my own anymore.

And then I spent a very painful and traumatic six months stuck in close contact with an abusive mother who was keenly aware that she was losing her grip on me and escalated the abuse accordingly.

And then? I was able to move 2500 miles the hell away from all that shit to live with… a man. Whom I married. And whose name I took.

I was able to move to a place I wanted to move to, to live with this amazing person I wanted to live with, who loved me dearly, who was respectful and affectionate and treated me like a whole person, a person of my own whom he just so happened to be enamored with, whose family was warm and welcoming and accepting and easy to be around…

I was able to choose where I wanted to be, who I wanted to be there with, who I wanted to be, what sort of life I wanted to live…

I chose the family I wanted to be a part of. I built the life I wanted to live. It’s a life I just so happen to love deeply, a life that has given me so much more opportunity than I ever had on the other side of this country, thanks to the person I chose to build it with.

That person? Is a man.

I took his name.

I don’t think that’s a capitulation to patriarchy. I don’t think that’s a compromise of my feminism. I think that is a demonstration of my feminism.

I have a name now. It is mine.

the scene: mid-morning on a wednesday. the north end of the ground floor of our building. i sit at my open-cubicle desk next to the scan/print station, barcoding applications. my coworker stands at the station, waiting for a fax to come through before she can use the copy machine.

both are silent. the sky is darkly overcast and the climate system whirrs loudly.

after several moments, she declares: “i wish…”

pause.

“i wish i could use the system.”

i look up.

at the moment, our intranet is down. i am assuming she means “i wish i could do my work.” but she continues.

“i wish i could get something. everybody seems to get something out of it. when we’re just trying to get by on our own, you know. they get something for free. i wish i could get something.”

and now i know what she’s talking about. i take a breath and try to maintain a conversational tone.

“i actually grew up on welfare. and it’s pretty hard. there’s so much you have to keep up with. it’s much better when you can make it on your own and don’t need that help.”

pause.

“when i was little, we actually got our food from food banks. you know, stale cheese and cans of evaporated milk, that was all we had. it was more trouble. i like it much better when i can do things for myself and don’t have to rely on that stuff. struggling with all that. it’s not easy at all.”

silence.

her copies are finished and she returns to her desk. i go back to my applications.

***

edited to add: if you want more on the things poor people are put through to get a few crumbs worth of help, read this old post from kactus, a poor single disabled mother whose presence on the internet I miss very much. um… in fact (looking at my comment there), it looks like it was but a few days before I started this blog!

It has been a rough several weeks for me. I was called back to my job on October 7. Around the same time, I developed an awful headache whose symptoms were entirely unlike my normal headaches (in kind; severity was … severe, but so are my normal ones) and only in the past two days has that faded — leaving in its wake a severe fatigue that actually came close to preventing me from writing six-digit numbers on applications at work yesterday.

Of course, when I am emotionally burned out, my body crashes. Serotonin screwup, adrenal fatigue, other stuff? I don’t know. And it has been a very emotionally turbulent two weeks. The temperature dropped without a warning, and the sudden winter weather has been an unfortunate sensual reminder of the awful personal events I went through last year, starting in October. It’s like I’ve been dropped into my own life one year ago, even as things have resolved or improved or smoothed out on that front… it ties only with my summer stuck in California as the worst events of my life, intense and injurious, dropping me into suicidal periods that (fortunately) ended up only scaring the hell out of me, rather than killing me.

And it has been a pressure of intense, high stress. I don’t know why I thought it would be safe for me to raise my voice in concern on very high-profile matters. Maybe the outrage finally got to be so strong it couldn’t stay quiet any more. But I did, and I can’t take it back now. It makes me wonder why I bother, ever, becoming involved in any space, rather than remaining in the background, quiet and invisible, slipping just out of notice. I can protect myself that way. It’s safe there.

Several people in my life, including at work, over the past several weeks who have been like watching flashbacks of my own life during its worst periods. Echoes. There’s the major and severe, mimicking the deeply abusive behaviors I could never escape from. And there’s the passing, the minor, the couldn’t-possibly-be-their-fault — speaking habits, common phrases, facial expressions — though, to be honest, even those wouldn’t be triggers if they didn’t come immediately after the behind-the-back scheming, theorizing about conspiracies, the twisting, the lying…

Why did I ever think I could do this? Why? What could I ever criticize? I am not just imperfect, you must understand. I am broken. Broken, broken. How can I ever expect to speak critically and not have that eye turn back on me? Why do I? When did I lose those self-protection skills? I used to know how. I used to remain highly disciplined.

But something gave me strength and security. And sometimes, that’s the worst thing a person can be given.

I don’t even know who my real self is. I never have. I’ve walled her off, time after time, building stronger and higher and deeper, covering my tracks, looking over my shoulder, making sure that nobody even knows she exists… if she doesn’t exist, she can’t be harmed.

I don’t even know whether she exists anymore.

Guess what you get today? Video! Previously Buddy was featured finding creative ways to share my tea: one and two.

This is the game Mitsy plays with me when I sit at my desk. I’ll touch her on the front side, then reach around to a spot of fur poking out under the shelf in the back, and she flops and rolls around feigning great surprise and indignation, mewing at me — then flopping back around and staring expectantly for me to continue. This goes on til my arm gets tired reaching up, and she’ll keep rolling and flopping for some time, staring down and meowing at me.

And pictures.

Mitsy cuddling on my lap.

Both of them on my desk, stirring up trouble.

Buddy is a big huge bully. Often he will fight his sister out of whatever spot she occupies — on the wide open floor, in a box, on a chair, or in this case, on top of my desk — and either take over, or just wander off. Bully, I tell you.

I am going back to tag all my photos. I have wanted to get my collection organized for over a year now.

Of course, this means going back through all my photos before I moved out here, too. From March 2004 through December 2006. It felt much longer than it seems, typed out like that. Feeling trapped. Controlled. Cut in half, the only person who loved me 2500 miles away. My friends, so loving, but my social circle so wrapped up with my family that I have not been able to keep up those beautiful relationships since the move.

It hurts. The good things hurt. The bad things aren’t documented, with few exceptions (me staring glassy-eyed at the camera with a distressed smile, forced to pose with my family at the church event celebrating my class’ graduation, where my family threw a fit because I spent some of my time with my friends and their families, and they felt betrayed). But I remember them immediately when I see the smiles. Because the happiness was never unfettered. The happiness was desparate, tenuous, fragile, aware of its own brevity. There was no such thing as a moment of happiness that was free from all the pain. It was all baked together, inseparable, each a part of the other. I could never have happiness without knowing it would bring even worse pain as soon as it ended, and knowing how soon it was set to end…

And now here I am, cut off from the life I had, no contact with anyone except the occasional email to my mother (though she seeks me out daily, by email, calls to my husband’s phone, invitations to myspace and twitter and facebook, finding my accounts by association with my friends) living a totally different life, much calmer, freer, and finally now able to feel happiness… unguarded.

I had to have my shield, then, and it had to be strong, and always ready. My self, the person I truly was, was holed up in a fortress deep inside, very small, restricted, not allowed to explore, grow; too dangerous. I was saving it, unable to nurture it, but protecting it for the day when I might be free from the constant assault, safe.

Here I am. I don’t need a shield here. I have, in fact, grown accustomed to living  without the weight of the armor, always protecting. Grown accustomed to just living, just doing, just being what I am, and enjoying it.

But whenever I dip into my past, I find that I am vulnerable again. I have to fumble for that shield. Shit, I forgot it. Shit shit shit shit. Overwhelmed, crushed under the weight of everything rushing back.

I lose touch with the world I sit in, right now, in this chair with the windows open and streaming in light and noise from outside, the locusts foreign to me when I moved here, my cat sleeping comfortably on the floor, the kitchen in a mess as we reorganize where we keep the spices and the dishes. The kitchen where I can cook, now, without fear that I will be yelled at, guilt-tripped, physically pushed aside, my work taken over, can’t even put a pot of water on to boil without it being changed, always wrong, never able to do anything and have it just be mine.

This kitchen now, where I enter, I pour my tea from my refrigerator, I put my pot of water on to boil, I take my box of pasta down from the cabinet over the sink, I clear the dishes out of the drainer and put them away. And that’s that. No one behind me to move everything I set down, chastise me, ensure I am never allowed to do a single, small, petty little thing for myself.

I am caught up in the old kitchen. Where my hand is grabbed as I fry up the pork for tacos, held, and another hand does the same thing I was just doing, while telling me that I was doing it all wrong. Where I find my pot of water mysteriously moved, set on different heat, on a different burner, after having been yelled at from the living room about doing it wrong. The laundry in the back, where I am instructed on how to operate the washer as I try to set a load of clothes to wash, even though I have capably done my own laundry many times, I am assumed to never know, never understand, never be capable, never be self-reliant, always someone else’s burdensome extension.

Going through these pictures of the good moments, the fun, the smiles and sun streaming, this is where I am, caught up, again guarded.

And suddenly I start, and wake up. And realize that the person I am waiting for to come home is not my mother, but my husband. That it has been a year since I have seen my mother, and a year and a half before that. I have not set foot in California in two and a half years — now the same amount of time between when I finally got my first digital camera and when I packed all my belongings in flimsy cardboard with layers of packing tape and stepped on to my much-anticipated one way flight from LAX to PIT.

I am sitting here as the locusts make their locust-noises, I hear the rhythmic hum of the ceiling fan in the downstairs neighbors’ bedroom, I see my cat sleeping peacefully on the unvacuumed carpet and the bucket of cleaning supplies ahead of me. I realize that I have a bed not fifteen feet from where I sit, a nice queen size bed with a memory foam topper, in which I sleep every night, happy and secure, with my husband. Happy. And secure. Unguarded.

It’s a hard transition.

The cats helped me paint a couple of frames for the cyanotypes we made on our May vacation.

And then they took a break.

Buddy may have been better named Dusty.