Blog 70: The Elegance of Failure...

Blog 70: The Elegance of Failure…

Oh my diaries…I have been doing this project for almost a year and half, and I still have trouble sometimes writing down how I truly feel, wondering if it will get me in trouble with the people that I love…as it often has. Yet many times what I have written has moved and touched friends and family...probably in equality I have pissed them off too.

I got yelled at last week for what I wrote from one person, and another I feel was truly able to understand where I was coming from…and our relationship mended from a small rip.

The truth of the matter is that writing these diaries, are a form of therapy for me.

It frustrates me when people get angry at me for writing how I feel…after all, isn’t that what a diary is for? And this is what I do…writing my problems and accomplishments as well as my thoughts and feelings help me look at them from all sides…as one should…and if people hang out with me for more than 15 minutes they are acutely aware that this is what I do…and if you haven’t figured it out yet…if I have an interaction with someone and it affects me in any kind of way…I am probably going to write about it…

I ponder whether this one might get me in some trouble too…but I refuse to not stay true to my project…for it is one thing that is completely me…and is something I feel I must continue.

I am having a disagreement with my family…and to be angry and hurt by them is a feeling I so wish not to have.

If you have read some of my previous entries you know how much my family means to me, how good they are to me…how they are the one stable thing in my life, and how thankful I am to have them.

And the thought of me being mad at them is killing me slowly, like drowning face down in an inch of water…drifting in and out of consciousness, almost able to flip over…but slipping away right before the rotation can occur.

I am angry at how my parents are codling my little sister…something they have done for most of her life…which I feel has limited her from the truths of reality.

Many times I have wondered if the same parents that raised my older sister and myself are the same that raised our family’s youngest…for her life is a completely different picture than mine.

My parents learned from my older sister and my hardships in grade school and sent my younger sister to a school where my mother would not be her teacher…so she would not have to endure the teasing, the cruel children and the backlash that came with having your mother being your teacher (not to mention calling your mom “Mrs. Powers” is tough when you have been calling her “Mom” for so freaking long.)

For some strange reason, my younger sister thinks her childhood was extremely hard…and I just don’t get it.

She did not have to deal with the mom being a teacher factor, she didn’t have bright red hair that everyone teased…her hair was straight long blonde. She was not heavy growing up like I was…constantly harassed about her weight. In fact she was tall and skinny and often approached about modeling jobs…she had numerous friends and was not forced to walk around Golden Gate Park alone in her free time just to keep herself occupied (that being said…I know that park like the back of my hand…every corner and kook…is still imprinted in my brain from years of wondering around by myself…the park and The Boom Boom Room are truly my homes away from home.)

She was not sexually assaulted as a teenager…she knows not the putrid smell of a vile man atop her, a cold elbow against the throat…clawing at her innocence…she has not had to deal with how these encounters affect one’s sexuality.

When she was in college she never waited for canned pork and rice in line at a shelter, never was on food stamps, never had to have a job of changing an adult diaper from a man that yelled and screamed constantly cause that was the only job one could find (I took care of this one lady once…she made me wash her depends to save money…those bitches are disposable diapers…not made for reuse, if you all didn’t know…that was some nasty ass shit)…she has only has had one job at a time and never had to work a triple.

And yet so often she mentions how hard her childhood was…and it baffles me…for all the shit that I went through growing up…I still had it easy…I had a roof over my head, I had parents who loved me (yes we would get in fights, and they would piss me off…I still can only imagine the true hell of raising three teenage daughters…all Gemini no less…YIKES) I grew up in a place where I have clean water, rights as a woman…can shit on a toilet not in the woods or some hole in the floor…always had clean cloths and food on the table…

Whatever shit happened to me growing up…happens to a lot of people…and a lot more people, have to deal with even worse shit.

To me her childhood seems like a fairytale that I can only imagine.

I feel like she has been sheltered for so long from the cruel reality…of reality.

But the shadows only last for so long, and as her twenty five years gets ready to turn to twenty six…the dawn of actuality has begun to rise bringing light to hardships that are simply part of life.

If one has seen the sunrise and sunset of reality, the harsh beams it can beat down…how it can warm and nuzzle as well as bitterly burn…the cycles can be daunting but faith in dusk always coming helps numb the pain…and makes it more palatable.

Yet for someone like my younger sister…encased in a sepulchral of dwarfed actuality…simply shifting gears leads to a car accident.

The strident truth that you don’t always get what you want has landed at her doorstep…and due to the fact that this is its first touchdown upon the welcome mat…she stands behind the door unwilling to open the door, but knowing that she has to.

And I have tried so hard to bite my tongue from saying, “Nut up, reality is a bitch that slaps you in the face”…I would whisper afterwards, “but sometimes the sting of pain feels good in its aftermath.”

But she is in denial that life is supposed to be bleak at times.

She is collapsing like Atlantis into the sea.

And instead of teaching her to swim against the current…my parents are once again letting her float in her own bubble.

Yet all great kingdoms at one time or another fall…and in the rebuilding one can right the wrongs…that is where the beauty lies.

In learning to swim against the current one finds inner strength, power in breath and ever lasting endurance…my parents taught me this…and why they choose not to pass these lessons on to my younger sister, I fail to understand. (In some way I do understand, cause if you try to reason about not always getting what you want with her she flips out and yells at my parents and threatens to cut them out of her life…and who wants to deal with that…on the same hand, it shouldn’t even happen in the first place)…but this lesson that my parents taught me has helped me so much, I yearn for them to pass it on to her.

I feel that my younger sister lacks a softness which is the result of being humbled…a trait that proves quite endearing.

The selfish part of me also feels in protecting her so much against the mercilessness of life my parents are some how saying that they love her more than they love me (and I am so good to them…I love them so much, and she can be so mean)…a fact that has left me in a despondent state…now I know in the back of my head that this is not true…that it simply is more towards the merit of my mightiness…but that does not stop the thought from dangling itself in the forefront of my mind.

And this last fact…is probably why I am so upset…I don’t want to admit that…but hence these are my “diaries.”

I love my younger sister…many times when growing up I was quite jealous of how easy she had it, and to hear her bitch about it now, just baffles me….

I pray and really hope that instead of wallowing in self-pity…she finds the elegance in failure…the pureness…that in not always getting what you want…leads to truly obtaining what you were meant to be.

Yes, life is not all unicorns, moonbeams and sparkles…but just because it is hard, does not mean it is not a glorious thing…from the hallow darkness the light emerges that much more luminous and breathtaking.


DANCE MOVE OF THE WEEK


SETTING THE TABLE

Start by high-flying a table cloth on top of your table…give it a nice smoothing out…now place your plates down…let us get some napkin folding action on and place them on the sides of the plates. It’s silverware time!...Knife, fork and spoon…got to be prepared for any kind of food here…after we set those down we grab the glasses…check for spots they might need a polish or two…now that those are all sparkly, what else…put you finger to your head and think about it for a second…oh yeah…salt and pepper…think we are good to go…light the candles with the matches and now everyone can sit down…crap…someone has got to go get the food!