Thursday, January 16, 2025

About a Dad

My dad left us when I was four. I had two big sisters, both who were in their "teenaged rebellion" phase, and I was just a teeny baby. FOUR. My mom, who was studying to be an RN, and working in a temporary nursing job that required her to be a student to keep, had to quit both school and the nurse job. She got a job as a bartender-- a job that would be one of the things she did for many years after that. 

Incidentally, (I'm not sure I'm using that word right here. Maybe it's monumentally). He left us for my mom's best friend. Who had kids of her own, who he ended up raising. Which meant that, in the long ago days of the early 1970s, he didn't pay any child support. My mom was on her own supporting three daughters, who were all still schoolkids. This was, to put it mildly, hard to impossible. 

I have a vivid memory of a summer day I came back from my next-door bestie neighbor's house (my sisters were out doing teenagers-with-boyfriends-to-visit-and-pot-to-smoke things.) My mom was in the recliner chair that she always sat in, and she had thrown something (I think it was a coffee cup? But it had probably been full of alcohol) through the glass front door (not a screen door if it had glass. What do you call those?) The front porch was covered in shards of shattered broken glass, and my mother was sitting in the chair, her face dark and unreachable. I think I said something like "Mommy?" and she said, in a voice filled with dark places you don't want to go, "Go Away." 

I can't even imagine doing this. How and where was she that she told her four-year-old child to go away at night while she sat in a fugue state (I think. Something like that) in the living room? The four year old having to fend for themself, with no adults to help. Sheesh. I'm still kind of scared for little me. I send back into the time travel mind that it's okay. Kim. You'll get out of the dark, and you'll not let other people be in the dark in the future. In spite of the pain you feel. 

I myself have been in some dark places but if I had a child in the darkness, I think that would have pulled me out of the dark to help them. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it. Save your pain and your spiraling for another time. 

I was hungry. I was scared. It wasn't cold, but it was dark. Here, there be dragons.  

I hid on the front porch under a porch chair for hours. My oldest sister eventually came home, found me there, coaxed me out, and we went inside. I'm assuming things were cleaned up, my mother eventually came out of whatever depressed state she was in and things were hunky dory, right? 

This memory has haunted me for so long. I've written about it before; I've tried to write it into a fictionalized auto memoir. Back when she was still alive I thought I couldn't do it because it would hurt her, in spite of Anne Lamott's advice 

I've been mad at my dad, mad at my mom, mad at the world, before. We lived SUCH a hard life because my dad chose to follow his urges and leave us and then not take care of us. But he had done that before and abandoned his first family, some half-brothers I've never met and would kind of like to meet now that we're all old and can realize that it's not about them, but it could be about us. I imagine their mom did not have nice things to say about us, though. 

In between that day and today there were bouts of homelessness. Hunger. Some petty theft on the part of that one sister's boyfriend of the most amazing BBQ I've ever had and still long for. And there were mistakes of my own before being the mom to my smarter than I deserve eldest girlchild. She tells me that my mom was doing the best she could with some really bad situations and yeah. She's right. And she's awfully forgiving of that, in many ways. She has a distance and a kindness that I don't really have, even today, even now after it's been more than thirty years since I lived that life. That "I don't actually know where my next meal is coming from and I have to rely on strangers for help" place. 

I think my mom told me to go away that night because worse things were possible in her mind at that moment. She couldn't be a mom because she was a hurt animal. I wish she were still here today to talk to about that because I don't think we ever sat around as adults and discussed who she was then. 

But hey, this post started about my dad, and I have to circle back (Chekov's Dad, if you will). He was a complete deadbeat. MANY many many of the struggles of my childhood, and shit, even today (because I have awful teeth from not seeing a dentist for the first 22 years of my life and it STILL affects me at 55) are because he couldn't be assed to send us 100 bucks a month for food. 

I had a little bit of an epiphany this morning. I reached out to him when I got married and asked him to give me away. He did, and was really happy about it, and drove down to Florida to be there.  He brought the woman he left my mom for, actually, because even though they weren't still romantically together, they were weird roommates. My mother in law even asked me who that woman was and when I told her, said something along the lines of "your mother is a lot more forgiving than I would have been." And yeah. I think she was. To a point. 

My dad-- he failed. On so many levels. And one of them was having a sort of hands off approach to us. He seemed to only relate to us when we reached out to him. To respond when WE initiated it. But shit, ya'll. We were children. HIS children. And he had a responsibility to take care of us, in one way or another, a responsibility that he just bailed on. My sister never forgave him for that and when he died, I think it hit her way harder than it hit me because of that lack of forgiveness. She was a lot like him, in a lot of ways. 

The day he died, the day I heard about it, I was in a sort of brutal twist of fate, teaching the poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas to my intro to lit class in Louisiana. 

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I had to read that out loud because it was in the days before we had computers in the classroom. That, my friends, was HARD. Still is. It's a poem I do not teach anymore. 

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Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Exercise in Virtual Environments

That title sounds serious and academic and I don't think this post is going to actually go there but let's see. Maybe it'll earn a colon: and a subtitle.  Hee hee. 

Because it's winter break still for a few days, I've been spending a lot of time 

1. going to doctor's appointments 

2. exercising by playing virtual reality games on my headset. This includes Beat Saber and Supernatural (which is unrelated to the TV show, and I'm not sure entirely why they picked that name because it's always confusing to people.)  This time around it also included a game called Maestro, which is pretty fun-- you are directing a symphonic orchestra to mostly classical music-- but that one is a lot lower key as far as the cardio goes. 

I've been doing virtual/at home workouts now since about 2021, when I started dancing to Just Dance. I kind of love almost everything about it because it's really convenient (I don't have to drive to a gym-- I just go upstairs to my game room and put on a headset). I think I need to add some kind of weight-training component to it, but that's a different post for a different day. 

This duality of time spent over my break is important because I'm trying, really hard, to get fit. I'm not really trying to get skinny, (although who is gonna lie that in the modern era, skinny equates in most people's head to fit and chonky cannot ever be fit, in spite of all kinds of lies and statistics about BMI and cardio and other things like middle-aged women and menopause and all that jazz). I would not HATE being skinny and fit. I'd really just like to LOOK to people like I work out as much as I do. 

Cause seriously. During the school year, most days, I get up at 5:30 AM so I can get a 30-minute cardio session before I go to work. That's pretty darn dedicated, and it's actually quite an intense workout if done correctly. To give a little data, my Apple Watch right now says my workout today burned 756 calories, and I've gotten in about 8,300 steps so far today (and yes, I know that the 10,000 steps guidance was created by a pedometer company to drive sales, but it's not the worst benchmark I've ever seen for fitness).   And before the day is over, I'll probably manage to get in about those 10,000 steps. 

And my heart rate ranged from 94 to 161 BPM. Which for a chonky middle-aged woman is right in the zone I want. It's going a little bit anaerobic there at the top, but that wasn't for very long, and it's perfect for interval training. 

So, where am I going with all of this? In 2021, when I first started this virtual fitness quest, I lost about 30 pounds. It was mostly pandemic gained weight from stress, chili cheese fries, and a lot of really good ice cream, so it came off pretty fast once I really started exercising. But then it STOPPED. Like seriously, nothing I did, from dropping the calorie count down really low (my husband, for example, lost 50 pounds on the same diet as mine and at first on that diet he wasn't even working out, like for the first 20 pounds or so it was just the food difference). I tried keto. I tried intermittent fasting. I got vitamin shots from a "diet doctor," and I went to TWO different nutritionists. They took my metabolic rate, gave me a plan that you could have gotten out of Women's Day Weekly (the January edition-- in other words, not all that different from something you could have gotten for 2.50 in the checkout counter). 

And no matter what I did for like two years I did not lose ANYTHING. And then, last year, it slowly started to creep back on. The weight. I was still working out, still have a great VO2 measurement on my Apple Watch and still can mostly run up stairs. But the weight started coming back, as it does. 

And I've been so frikkin' frustrated. I can say all I want that I'm just exercising for the fitness, and that's not untrue. But honestly, I want to LOOK fit, and I don't want doctors to write that really rude word on my chart that rhymes with shmobese. I don't want them to be surprised when they run my heart rate and it's good. Because they think I'm lying about how much I exercise. 

Anyway. The final tie in here is that I went to a new family practice doctor and instantly liked her. And she listens, and she did blood work, and she gave me a medication because I've been, for several years, slightly on the edge of having serious insulin resistance. Which means, as she said, that I've been "fighting with my genetics." THANK YOU. That's what I've been saying!!! I don't know why I haven't been given this medication before. 

I've taken it now for three days and even if it doesn't do anything metabolically (which I have to say I actually think it already is. There's a certain "tautness" to my skin when I've exercised productively, and I've been missing it for a long time.) 

But even if it doesn't actually mean much for the chemical balance in my body, my mental feelings at working out have radically changed the last three times. I feel GOOD about it. It's not a sludge slog that I don't think is going to work anyway. I've got so much energy and I feel like I could keep going, even though I'm tired and sweaty and need to take a long bubble bath. 

If that doesn't help in some way (placebo effect is fine with me if it placebos something) then I'll eat my hat. (I don't own very many hats, either, so it'll be a fuzzy winter one.) 

I want to say that I don't care about the weight loss but I'm gonna be totally honest that I do care. At least a little bit. I'm hopeful that I can just get to a place where I look like someone who plays volleyball or something. Who can pull a plow while holding several babies. Who can make a lot of pancakes and feed a whole army without getting too tired. Who knows the difference between dark clouds that are going nowhere and the ones that are gonna lead to the scent of petrichor soon cause there's a rain coming, and we need to get the laundry in. (I dunno. Farm girl stuff.) 

And if this medication works, and it's an old one, not a newfangled expensive thing that every Hollywood someone has been doing, then I'm going to have some strong words for the doctors that wouldn't listen to me in the last few years when I asked if there was something we could try. 

And I'm still gonna keep beat sabering those little triangles away, and whacking those balloons with baseball style bats. Cause fitness is fun, and I suddenly have a tiny little spark of hope. 


Monday, January 13, 2025

Time Travel in the Age of AI

This post is about time travel, DNA, and ghosts, and AI. Very sci-fi of me. Sort of. 

I got a text from a family member yesterday that required me to think back 30+ years to a time when I was very young, and very foolish at times, and thought I would be young forever (apparently) and thought I was way too smart for bad things to happen to me. HA! 

I had to think back to remember a couple of things (and by the way, I got a little bit of that wrong, in a "meet your own grandpa" kind of way that I'll have to try to remedy) and it made me realize JEZUS MARY AND CHEERUST it's been more than 30 years. I know this. I know this for sure; my hubster and I have been married significantly longer now than we were single without each other. And that's frikkin' weird. But in this particular moment & this series of text messages with said Fam I traveled to an ancient date. 

The early 1990s. THE 1990, in fact. This is where the DNA comes in. (See-- I'm getting that title into the text. This is what we writing teachers call a transition, and clever use of a hook.) Said fam was reacting to a DNA test his fam had gotten. And someone who we will call Cousin A was reached out to by Second Cousin B. So there's some family adoption and unknown relative distance (there's the time travel again) that's involved in this query. 

And again, I had to think back in time to a time when I was so young I had literally no wrinkles. No grey hair. I was actually skinny. Like annoyingly skinny, and said things like "I just have a fast metabolism" to people. NO. I JUST NEVER ATE FOOD thank you very much. And had a very active job and was seriously being neglected and needed to eat two sandwiches (thank you very much I did eat those sandwiches and hence am now a chonky middle aged who will slap skinny me for that "fast metabolism" curse.) Thinking back in time, I.E., time travel, is hard. There's a lot of water under that bridge and it makes the memories murky. 

This sentence, now, is where we work the ghosts into the story. I first realized that the idea of ghosts is often something we are just haunted by. A person, yes. A beloved pet was where I figured this one out-- Tituba, my black cat, my first kitty baby, would appear behind me sometimes after she was gone. I had to get more black cats to save and pamper to make up for losing her. She haunted me in the very best way. And then, after my father-in-law died, I would see men far in the distance wearing a shirt that he would have worn or standing with the slight stoop he had (as a very tall man, this was something of a defense mechanism, I think.) Or smelling whatever 1900s man cologne it was that he used to wear. A ghost. A person (or cat) that I missed in my life and wished I could really see again. THey also haunt you when you're sleeping, visiting in dreams, or those thoughts you have while you're trying to sleep, things you could have done differently, better, worse. Ghosts visit me a lot at about 3 AM, which is also (coincidentally?) when I have the most frequent sleep apnea drops in Oxygen. Those ghosts like to poke you awake, maybe? 

So. Back to the time travel and the DNA: this lost Cousin B. They might be someone who opens up a pathway that had previously closed, and that's a little scary butterflies in the stomach fear of "what if" but also kind of exciting in a way that I can't even relate but also a ghost of some previous timeline that I can see just out of the corner of my eye, if I look very carefully. I might update this with less obscure references in sometime future, time travelers from that future, let's see. 

And this is where the AI comes back into the conversation, and what we English teachers like to call the "reverse hook" where we go back to the beginning again and end up this clever post. I honestly don't know exactly where to fit the AI into this story.... but at least my narrative here is unlike anything that Ye Olde CHATEGPT is going to spit out. I think. (Look. I'm working on one cup of coffee here and also my left hand carpal tunnel is flaring AGAIN and I guess I'm gonna have to get that surgery after all. Dammit.) 

Dear future and past versions and alternate timeline versions of me: it's gonna be okay. Or it was okay. Or it wasn't okay for a bit but then we got over it. Love ya. Mean it. ~~ me. 

Saturday, January 11, 2025

Evolution

This particular blog was created a few years ago as a place for me to post creative writing stuff. All of the energy was being put into promotion, talking with other writers, and trying to push myself into the whole "successful small press writer" niche that I know folks who have accomplished. (Ugh. that sentence construction sucks, but I'm not rewriting it). Because hey, we have FB and other social media, and we can have casual everyday conversations (kind of microblogs) there. Right? Right? 

Heck, I've been an early adopter of blog technology and stuff for a long time. I had a blog back in the mid-90s (shakes fist at the cloud to get off my lawn) that was so procrastinate-y that I managed to write thousands of words that could have been my dissertation.  It still kind of exists; it just got changed into a mommy blog and then abandoned. It's still cute. There are photos of my babies on there-- the babies who now are 19 and hogging up my couch and not paying income tax. 

Back in the late 90s, when The Matrix was still a cool movie franchise, and my friend group and I spent a whole day watching the Star Wars movies three times AT AN ACTUAL THEATER, sandwiched with cool restaurants and margaritas, we used to have bulletin boards where we would chat with "friends" we met there about random topics, unrelated to the ostensible subject the board was designed for. I had a good friend on the "David Bowie's pants" thread, and we would regularly team up to tease one other poster who was known for being sort of cranky (I can't remember their usernames.... it's been 20 years... but there was something about flames? or bombs? in his username, like he would be "explosive" woooo. So hence the teasing). And it was fun! 

And then, circa 2009 (ish?) FB was invading campuses across the nation. I was teaching in Louisiana, and students thought I was still cool (I had some fun RYP things back then. Even a hot pepper rating for a while ðŸŒ¶️ and now we think that's kinda gross, even though as a chonky middle-aged woman I wouldn't mind qualifying for one again). And they begged me to sign up. It seemed sort of innocuous. Fun. I did learn a little too much personal info about a few of them and developed a policy of not being friends until after there was no chance they could be in one of my classes again......

And so. Almost 20 years later, we find the landscape of today. Right-wing fascists have absolutely taken over Twitter (I will deadname that site forever. They don't get to hide from me.) We know more about some people than we ever, ever wanted to know. For a while, FB was kind of holding firm, not being a total hellscape, even though it was definitely making me shop too much, but then, the algorithm decided I was really into conservative X-tian merch and probably guns, and also Celtic knot jewelry and started showing me random ads. One of those three is kind of true. So I started getting all these ads, and try as hard as possible, I couldn't stop them from showing up in my feed. 

It might be some kind of negging strategy, but JESUS I don't need that. So, since summer, I've been mostly avoiding it. I took it off of my phone, and only log in now periodically via laptop, like the Goddess intended. 

I went on there this past week, and immediately was upset by politics, (which granted, is rational right now, but sheesh; I already know these things are happening). I also almost immediately purchased something... which I have been kind of cutting back on after seeing the horrific documentary on Netflix called Buy Now..... where I immediately deleted all of my cheap Chinese product purchasing apps. So I binged, like a true Aholic does. You can't have one because it turns into more, and the next thing you know, you're waking up on a wet lawn covered in Twinkie wrappers, and packages from China will show up in a few weeks filled with fast fashion. 

And now cue the announcement from Mark Z. (who now looks a lot like the meme that was going around of him last year that someone had fancied up to look prettier. He took the advice of the world, and honestly, I kind of don't love that for some reason.) FB is rolling out AI "people" to chat with us. And no longer using fact-checkers, who were definitely the problem here. /s.  And more. So, I'm probably not going to post there anymore, and I probably won't full-scale delete my account forever, but my pop-ins are rare and getting rarer. Read the article above because honestly, it's even grosser than I realized. 

I'm also trying to wean myself off Instagram, because it also makes me shop, in spite of all the cute bird (and hippo!!) content. And because I love my VR headset workout and Beat Saber, I am still worried about the influence of certain companies on my life but also doggedly pretending it'll be ok. 

I do read too much Reddit, especially the Leopards Eating Faces group, which I am calling social media methadone, because it's not fun, but it keeps me from getting the DT shakes. I tried Bluesky for a hot minute, but then I accidentally agreed to follow like 100 people I didn't know, and my feed filled up with their content, and I don't really know how to extricate myself from that problem. And right now I'm not really motivated to do that on there. It gets a "meh" from me, dog. 

But also. It's a full 10 days away from the semester's start and I've already finished all of my syllabuses AND learning management platform prep and am almost done with the full first week of lesson plans. And I finished playing the newest Life is Strange game (mostly two thumbs up), and played enough Stardew Valley to get bored with it again. I might even read some actual printed books later. I have barely shopped, enough so that I suspect Paypal and Mastercard are going to start emailing me sad "Where are you?" emails. But like. Who knew not scrolling through hundreds of hours of doom and ads and people trying to stealth sell you candles was taking up too much time? 

Anyway. I'm about to start a new semester where I will be actively trying to stop students from writing with too much Chat GPT and doing a cool conference and committees and fun parts of my job, so I don't know how much I'll really write here, but I think our shunning of MySpace was probably premature and we should all navigate back to less actively chaotic evil platforms. So this particular blog is going to be where you can find me ranting in a non microblog way, as long as my carpal tunnel doesn't flare like it just did and make my left hand typing almost impossible.... 

Also-- Grammarly keeps trying to change things and sometimes it is right but sometimes HELL NO LEAVE ME ALONE. 

Anyway. One last meme I found when I was looking for the template to create my bad viral template of the above Anakin/Amadala post.

Come see me here sometimes. We don't need social media overlords who were creating that platform to diss hot chicks who were mean to him..... we can chat in other places too. Really. 

I miss y'all, so if you do stop by, leave a comment. Back the way we used to in the 90s. When a certain future world leader was just a TV show personality we could ignore. ::hysterical laughcry::