thorvalson.net : babble ether

Okay, so I was trying to think of something to post today without posting all of the stuff that's going on in my personal life and was having some trouble thinking of anything other than all the things I want to say to a person who has been MIA and is now found but en route to enlightenment for the next four days and I'll be on vacation for the next four after that, so I thought - hey! - I'll read someone else's blog and get my mind off of all this...

and I came across this:

"you know how you have a lot of stuff to talk about but you don't say it at first but then all of a sudden there is more to talk about and then you feel overwhelmed by how much is on your mind and you don't know where to begin so you don't begin at all and then it's too late you have waaay too much to say so you might as well shut up forever because you're never going to get caught up and what's the point anyway since we're all going to die someday. you know? so it's been one of those weeks."

...and it summed everything up so gosh darn well that I thought, hey - why not just post that. I express what's on my mind, and Mr. Nice Guy gets a link to his (awesome and hilarious) blog. Two birds, one stone.

There you have it.

Happy Anniversary, Trace and Jay!

Still crazy after all these years....

With so much love to you always.

Morning headline.

In a surprise act of humble generosity, the father of a 4-year-old in Milwaukee, WI, took a day off on a Friday, thereby enabling the mother of said 4-year-old to sleep in and enjoy her morning coffee without the usual pre-wakefulness morning exorcism.

Follow-up letter to whom it may concern:

Maddie, I love you. But girl, you need to work on your bedside manner. Wrapping your little fingers around the edge of my heaven-sent featherbed mattress topper with vice-like grip, and then proceeding to SHAKE my bed down as though ancient golden coins from the lost city of Atlantis will spill from below it if you just SHAKE it hard enough, all the while making these horrific primal sounds taken straight from The Apocalypse: The Soundtrack as demon bats from Hell come flying, screeching, out of your gaping mouth on a Mission From Satan to Annoy the Shit Out of Me As Early As Humanly Possible, does not a pleasant wake-up portend.

That said... I forward heartfelt thanks to you, from all the innocent lives you've saved this morning by allowing me to sleep in on this, the first day of my period: the lady at the bank, the neighbors across the street who overdose at least twice a month and subsequently require paramedics and half the fire department to come screaming down the street at all hours with lights blaring and sirens wailing and loud engines parked right outside my bedroom window, and most of all, Greg, who has been spared the morning ritual of putting away the half-eaten jar of peanut butter you so love to consume against my wishes in the wee hours pre-Shakedown Wake-Up Call From Satan, and who, as my partner, is the most frequently terrorized victim of my RedWeek emotional hysteria.

Celebrating Your Highness,
Humbly At Your Service,
With Love and Blow-Kisses,

Mom

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Alright, here I am, gettin' all up on yo bitches' asses.

I won't go into detail about who this woman is and what she's doing; if you haven't heard about it yet, pick up a paper, surf some blogs. The media has (gasp!) actually given Cindy Sheehan a good amount of attention this week, so I'm going on the assumption that you, like Wikipedia!, know who she is.

What a fucking lame ass our President is to sit on his ranch, humbly sipping his coffee and doing his best to enjoy his vacation, while a crowd of protestors is gathered down the road, begging for a simple handshake. A gesture. A brief acknowledgement. And maybe have a question or two answered. His tactic seems awfully familiar. It is the grown-up version of LALALALA-I-CAN'T-HEAR-YOU.

Cindy Sheehan and Co., aka Camp Casey (named after her son, who was "an honorable man and he died in a dishonorable war," see this article from Salon.com - thanks, Trace!), deserve, like all of us, to be heard. Today they will be attempting to personally hand-deliver to Laura Bush letters written by Americans who, like Cindy, believe that the troops deserve our support and that the best way we can support them right now is to bring them home.

Our country stands at odds with the rest of the world in our position on Iraq, and to continue the effort at this point is to continue making giant asses of ourselves. No wonder people want to kill us. We're assholes. Jaeger Bomb-drinking, machismo-driven, ignorant, quarterback ASSHOLES. GO TEAM!

Seriously. We are going to be in big, big trouble for a looooong time for what has already occurred. A lady knows when to say when, and it's better late than never.

Click here to write your own letter to Laura Bush, or surf around Cindy's site and look for other ways to contribute. Attend an event in your area, and if there isn't one, organize one!

If you can't afford to go down there and get arrested, at least say something.

President Bush: president@whitehouse.gov
Rumsfeld/Department of Defense: public@defenselink.mil
Write to any ol' elected official you'd like! Find their email addresses here.

Bridges

Thank God I am with this man, this wonderful human being who is able to ride along with me through up and down and inside out and through and back again. Never have I met someone so willing to talk about their fears, to hear mine, and when all the negativities and dark sides have been acknowledged, to move forward in spite of them. Together. It's a lot more involved and painful and difficult than that, but the end result has always been a joint effort, and I pray every day that he'll still be there the next.

Some people go through their entire lives sincerely believing that they will forever be alone. I am so lucky to be the one person who has a chance in hell of proving him wrong. And if you think I won't be standing over his gravesite one day, whispering through tears, I told you so, then you, like him, would be wrong.

People ask me, when they see the ring on my finger, if we're married.

I marry that man every day of my life.

Feelin' Groovy

"Mom? Will you pull my hair up off my neck and I'll lay my head down on the pillow so I don't get too hot?"
"Sure."
(I do it.)
"Now that's what I call 'feeling good'."

I'm having a difficult week. If anyone needs to contact me, I will be under the kitchen sink, shooting up a mixture of Comet and Murphy's Oil Soap.

If You Are Not Laurie Oliver, You Probably Won't Read This

Dear Laurie Oliver,

You suck.

Damn unlisted telephone numbers. I would have called you, or more likely would have written a letter, telling you privately, more eloquently, and in more detail than the internet cares to know what a fucking amazing human being you are, but nooOOOoo, you gotta be unlisted. See? See what happens when you sequester yourself from the outside world? You miss out on shit like this. Having scoured the internet for your namesake and coming up with jack squat, other than a hopeful link to a theatre-related article which, for whatever cosmic reason, WOULDN'T FUCKING SHOW UP ON MY SCREEN, I am forced to do this.

In case I never told you, thank you for sharing your journals with me, thank you for introducing me to "Angie Baby" and "The Joker", thank you for being so open and giving of yourself in the few brief years that I knew you. Thank you for being the reason I write this stupid shit (still) today, and thank you for convincing me to some degree that someone will find it worth reading. If I knew where to find you, I would throw you a party and invite all the people from West whose lives you affected for the better and forever so we could show and tell you in person what a phenomenal person you are.

Call me, bitch. I mean that with all due love and respect, and by "due", I mean a lot.

Love and gratitude to you always,
Stephanie Jo Thorvalson

Why do I do this.

Three weeks ago, I walked into my local new feminist bookstore (Broad Vocabulary, owned by a fucking awesome acquaintance/customer of mine, and well-deserving of your hard earned cash), looking for (and happily finding) good, inspiring, music-related books to stuff in the van for Chariots Race's last weekend tour. On my way to the checkout counter, I came across Hip Mama zine and purchased it. With the top headline on the front page screaming, "My kid dropped out of school!" over a photograph of The Old Lady I Hope One Day to Be (a 70ish bespectacled woman dressed in colorful - if mismatched - attire, smoking a big fat stogie), I couldn't resist. Truthfully, the magazine has sat on my coffee table ever since, due to a lack of time to read it compounded with a nagging fear. I cringe whenever buying/reading magazines of this nature, for two reasons: 1) I get really turned off by people who refer to themselves as "hip" in an unhip sort of way, you know, the whole "I AM SUCH A DORK" thing when really your experiences, although individual and worthy of validation, are really not that far-fetched, making you not a dork, but just a HUMAN BEING (let me point out here and now that yes, I am aware of my own guilt in this realm - but I still hate it! They say you hate in others what you despise in yourself...); and 2) I know that reading such intelligent, inspired, thought-provoking, hilarious, and punk literature will only frustrate me in its inspiration to me to get off my FUCKING ASS AND WRITE MY OWN GODDAMN ZINE OR BOOK OR WHATEVER. Like I've been talking about for, oh, at least ten years.
Sigh.

So here I am, reading this zine, specifically an article by China Doll Marten about how her rebelling-against-the-rebellious-mother-by-being-"normal" daughter (gee, where have I contemplated that one before) is suddenly dropping out of school for all the right reasons (amen, sista!) and how she, as a punk-culture mom, is dealing with it.
Oh, weep. To glance into one's own possible future and see, not the terror, not the horrifying scaryness of it all, but the real possibility for some parents' nightmare to be, in actuality, hopeful and good. Oh, my.

What the fuck am I doing? Why am I writing this blog? Why haven't I gotten off my ass and done something with my experiences and written about them in a more concerted-effort sort of way? Why do I think that my little drop-out story, my teenage hell, isn't worth writing about simply because someone else experienced the same thing? Why do I think that every word of every sentence describing each experience has to be completely, 100% unique for anyone to have any interest in it whatsoever, as though I need to fully develop and articulate my own language or cure cancer or do something REALLY BIG and special for anyone to give a fuck about it? And really, what makes me think that my actual experiences - down to the molecular level - AREN'T unique? Don't I still sit down and read zines like this, articles and books written by people who have had similar experiences to myself and countless others - don't I still sit down and read their bullshit solely because it is THEIR individual take on THEIR individual bullshit, and although the stories may be similar, they will never ever be the same, having been written in individual unique voices? Didn't Mr. Rogers have a valid point when he preached on TV that there is no one in the whole wide world that is just like you?

Get off it, Thorvalson. And get off your ass.

Rediscovered:

This is Officially My Favorite Album of All Time. Anything that made me alternately sob and dance on my bed as a 15-year-old that can still make me at least do the latter at 27 years old is definitely an album worth hanging on to.
Oh, Jeff Gamlin, formerly of Fifteen Minutes record store in Rockford... Wherefore hast thou forsaken me? How - HOW - on earth did you let me sell you this album. I don't care if I told you my head was on fire and I needed money to buy a fan for the flames. You should have taken the cassette from my hands, put it on an unreachable - but viewable - shelf, and made me bow down facing Mecca to pray for forgiveness for merely THINKING that I could somehow get through the next ten years without that piece of musical beauty.

Amused. And not so. In snippets.

Amused:

I just opened up my Flickr page to start downloading photos (they will be up by this afternoon), and the greeting message says, "Oi, Thorvalson!"
"Oi." I feel like I was just greeted by The Cockney Rejects. Good moanin', Tho-vahlsin. Oi! Punk rowk fo-evah! Eh! And fuck you!
Flickr commonly greets its users in multiple languages (i.e., "Hola, Thorvalson!", "Bonjour, Thorvalson!"); I just didn't realize that Cockney was an official recognized language of this online community. Someone should add "Yooper" to the list.
Well-uh, hi dare! How ya doin, Thorvalson?!

Still amused:

I took Maddie to her new school yesterday for the first time, where we received an impromptu tour of the K4 room by one of the teachers present in the building. Not bad. Coat room, pint-sized toilets for the kids, TONS of books, the usual toys, sand/water table, etc. There are huge windows on one wall, but made of glass block, so the kids can't actually see out of them, which is a little disappointing, but it's not like Jefferson High School (modeled after a prison) or anything, so we're happy. Maddie's take on the coat room?
"This room is creepy."
Also, she was fascinated by the towel dispenser, which is one of those rotating cloth thingies, and which she has never used before. Of course, she had to use the bathroom immediately upon seeing the cute, tiny little toilets, and so the subsequent handwashing was equally inspiring, what with the new contraption and all. This. Is. So. Cool.
Accompanying us on our tour were two students, as of this fall 6th grade and 9th grade, respectively. Tippecanoe goes up to 8th grade, so the latter individual was hanging out for the summer before the big move on up to official Insanityville. Good sign: Kids hanging out with old teachers during the summer. I did that. That's a good thing. I am seriously freaked out, however, by how big those kids were. I don't mean overweight or anything, I just mean TALL. Like, my size. I guess I forgot that (most) 14-year-olds are in puberty and therefore prone to appearing more on the adult side than their pre-teen peers (not to mention the fact that I appear to have never gone through puberty at all), but HOLY SHIT! It hit me like a sack of bricks: I really, really, really need to take some self-defense courses, because MY GOD I AM A TINY LITTLE WOMAN! If my daughter ever rebels (which, of course, she won't, because I am the best mom ever and how could she possibly ever hate me for any reason whatsoever I'm wonderful! Love me! Or face the consequences!)... One day my daughter will be 14 years old and facing the reality of inner-city public schools - experimenting with drugs, weaponry swap meets with the local gang, etc. - and if she should ever decide to align herself with the forces of evil and actually, physically try to fight with me... Holy shit, I'm gonna get my ass kicked. I hope Greg never leaves me, 'cause I'm gonna need someone around to help change the bandages and to keep the basement door pulled shut so the little demon doesn't get out and eat me.

On our little journey through Kiddieville, I was also given a copy of the 05-06 school year supplies. Again, holy shit. Back in mah day, we didn't need to buy us no stinkin' paper tahlls; the skew-uhl done buyed 'em for us. Not in this day and age, no siree. I even gots to buy her "1 roll clear packaging tape by Scotch," none o' that generic crapola, 'cause they gots to have the good stuff in orders to tape the kids to the walls real good when they start gettin' rowdy. And we didn't even HAVE "hand sanitizer." Uh-uh. Nope. That fancy-pants kinda stuff didn't even EXIST, and if it did, it were only for dem rich kids up thair on the east side. We used arr SLEEVES. And then we rubbed all up against each other in the hallway, givin' each other all kindzah dizeezes 'n shit. That's what's gonna end the planetchy'all. Hand sanitizer. Supergerms're gonna rise up and take over, and then we won't need none 'o them stinkin' paper tahlls 'cause thair'll be no people left to use 'em. Amen.

And, finally, under the Not So Amused category....

It finally happened. Actually, I can't say finally; it's more like, "already."
After asking her for fifteen minutes yesterday afternoon to please just give me fifteen minutes to play guitar by myself and hang out for a bit, find something to do for a little while and afterwards I'll play Boggle Jr. with you please just give me fifteen minutes, Maddie threw a crying fit and ran into her bedroom. I sighed, put down the guitar, and then the following conversation happened:

"Maddie... come here. What's wrong."
(she literally drags herself into the living room, sobbing hysterically, looking truly and awfully defeated, like her entire spirit has been sucked out of her via high-powered vacuum demons from hell)
"I... can't...."
"What's wrong, honey?"
(she collapses into my lap)
"I think you don't love me anymore."

I think you don't love me anymore.

Jesus. What do you say to that? Honestly? I mean, I think I did an okay job of telling her, yes, I love you, and here's all the things I love about you and here's how I felt when you came into my life and thank god you're here or Mommy would still be a big crabby poopyhead all the time (laughter, "YOU SAID YOU'RE A POOPYHEAD! YOU WERE A POOPYHEAD?!")... But how fucking terrible it is to hear the one person on earth whom you are supposed to convince beyond a reasonable doubt that you love them eternally no matter what even-if-you-kill-somebody, how awful it is to watch that person sulk and crumple up and sink into your lap and say they don't believe.
Fuck.

New day. Do I get a do-over? Please? Thank you.

Laundry and groceries, and plenty of affection.

A Different Kind of Greatness Strikes Again

Okay, I don't really have a lot of time to get into this right now, but for those of you who have ever lived in Rockford (or who still do), please read the following sentence, taken from a feature in this week's MKE magazine:

"Recent diversification and the stability of the remaining industries have allowed the city to invest in recreation and culture."

Uh, excuse me Eric Paulsen. I know you're doing your job, and you're trying to give Rockford a better name for itself than it currently has in most Milwaukeeans ears ("Rockford? Yeah! They've got GREAT coke there!"), and when assigned to the task of scraping up just a handful of nice things to say about any Illinois town, let alone one so depressing... well, it's daunting. But come on. One drive down State St. in either direction will show you the error of that sentence.
Well, let's see! Going west, we have drugs, prostitution, strip clubs doubling as cocaine distributors, an imploded carcass... oh wait, that's downtown... and if we venture east... ooh! STRIP MALLS!

Recreation and culture, indeed. And I'm sorry, but renaming North 2nd St. "Martin Luther King Boulevard" FORTY YEARS AFTER THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT does not diversification make. Did you not get the memo?

Tsk tsk tsk.