I told my brother I'd wanted him to get the bat boxers in time for Halloween. "I don't know, I think I'll get in trouble if that's all I'm wearing to answer the door." he says.

Tags: family

One of my new CDs is Ryan Adams, Jacksonville City Nights, and the song that the title comes from sings about pines, and I remember driving along the coast there. When we'd drive down to Topsail for the holidays, we'd always go through Jacksonville on the way. I used to drive my mother crazy because I *always* missed the 'bypass' of the city, and we'd end up driving through the center of town. And every year I'd promise the next time we'd go around it, and every year I'd miss the turn. I never wanted to live down there, or even go to school there, but I loved the visits, and the trips down there. We'd drive for hours through this flat, sandy landscape that was so alien to us--scrub pine, tobacco, those gorgeous flowering bushes that lined the median.

It's really silly the things my brain chooses to remember so vividly.

In a related sense, I walked past someone with their Rottie today, and when a police car bleeped their siren, the dog was vocallizing in response--one of those 'roooo' sounds, but just exactly what our big dog used to do. My brothers used to howl to get the dogs worked up, and it would be the most bizarre choir you can imagine. Bass mastiff, the rottie down there too, and the high pitched, but lower than usual, yodels of the bostons.

Tags: dogs, family
Current Music: Ryan Adams - Tomorrow

My mother calls me this evening--which she never does--to tell mw what a freak my brother is.

This is the one in PA, the engaged one. His fiance works at the hospital right down the road from my mom, so this evening when Tiff's just gotten off of work, he calls her and asks her to take the box in her trunk to my mom's. She can't hear him very well, so she pulls over, calls him back. It's still kinda bad, but he explains--there's a box, he put it in her car, could she take it to my mom's. Okay, no problem. She drives over, she gets out of the car and opens the trunk.

And there is no box. There is only my brother.

---

clearly the near-heart attack my mother had over the grandmother comment wasn't surprise, but rather fear my brother was reproducing.

Tags: family, mom
Current Music: Morrissey - Trouble Loves Me

okay, perhaps saying "Guess who's going to be a grandmother" wasn't the best way to give my mom the news that my best friend from HS is pregnant.

Tags: family, mom
Current Music: Keane - Can't Stop Now

I'm fiddling around on the web, looking up ancestors.

This is my great-grandfather. The Elizabeth Marsh mentioned there is my grandmother. She was named after his first wife, which I still think is spooky.

This is my grandmother's mother's uncle. (and also this.)


This is why my grandmother worries that we won't have a PhD in the family this generation. It would be the first time in *generations* that we didn't have one.

Ooh, there's an endowed James Jackson Putnam chair out there. And possibly a children's hospital as well. And a page with old pictures: http://oasis.harvard.edu/html/med00013.html#med00013putnam

I suppose the good thing about people giving their kids last names as their middle names is that it makes it easier to track family relationships. For example, James's brother, Charles Pickering Putnam suggests that they're related to another of the guys on that page, Henry Pickering Bowditch. But there's about 940 million putnams out there. And apparently they were concerned about who they married because they all married the same people. Down to a putnam/putnam marriage where they weren't closer than second cousins, yet still had siblings with the same names. (Of course, I've got 4 uncle johns, (two marriage, two blood), and two great aunt Nancies (both blood), so perhaps I should watch the stone throwing.)

Tags: family

I've got a lot of coping skills. I blame my father. Writing to Cara, I realised that I do what 'crow does, to an extent--everything is *my fault*. I'm better at it then she is (as in I don't do it as much as I used to), but it's still there. Heather was saying it was what amounts to an abuse artifact.
I see it as more evidence that my father was borderline abusive. Like, he didn't abuse us, we just picked up the same traits that others get trying to avoid annoying him. He's a very good example of how kids grow up like their parents. His dad was very distant, and his mom is a little weird. And so it's not like he was consciously abusive, I think, it was more like he didn't really know what to do. he was the youngest of a family of mostly boys, the only girl was his next oldest sibling. And it was noticable because my mom does know what to do, as she's the oldest in her family, and her parents were more affectionate with each other and with the kids, so the two poles were so obvious. I started thinking about it when everyone told 'song James was abusive, because everything he does is stuff my dad does. He was not very distant, but often sort of...detached from the rest of us. And I think we picked the skills up for sort of the opposite reason as abused kids do. We'd try unconsciously to please him by being good. (not all the time, by all means, but often in our interactions with him) And because he was never very demonstrative, we took it as failure. I took it as failure, I should say. I don't know that the boys picked up on the same habits as I did.

I think it was just bad enough that all of us recognized it as 'not how we want to be' so we all work hard at not being like that. I do find myself slipping into his behavior patterns more than I'd like to--when I'm with strangers, for example, I quite often block myself away, so I can pretend no one's talking to me because I don't want them to talk to me, instead of trying and failing--so I sometimes over balance it, and act uncharacteristically outgoing, which is very draining. I know it's a situation where eventually I'll find the middle ground that works both ways, but I've had a lot more practice with being closed down than being public, so it's a hard balance to find. Eli works at being a jock, instead of a brain, and nate is a master at avoiding any kind of conflict with Ben. Primo wheedling skills.

Tags: bitterness, family

So, my best friend has a boyfriend who hadn't contacted her in a while, even though she'd seen him a couple of times, and left a message and such. So she pretty much figured he wasn't interested, and called one last time. So he writes to her, a big long letter (which I figure is always a good sign, cause who's going to waste time talking to someone you're not interested in?) And there, towards the end is this sentence.

"However, sometimes I think you are too quick to apologize for matters which are not your fault."

And I started thinking about it. And he's right. And I do it too. I assume that the world revolves around me a lot more than it does, but not in a really possitive manner. If I write the last email, and no one writes back, then it's my fault. I said something wrong. I did something wrong. I made a Canadian joke, and his mother's canadian. However! I think that we have very good reasons for doing it, and in a way, it's something that people who interact with us have to learn to deal with. I know because of my father, I often assume *I've* done something wrong, that it's my fault someone isn't talking, or is mad. We're very insecure about some aspects of our life because we're so used to a lack of feedback being a bad sign. Not a 'no problems, keep going' sign. I am very gradually retraining myself, but 25 years of conditioning is hard to overcome. My friend's dad was much the same in that way--he didn't say, "you didn't do X" or "You did Y wrong," he just walked around in a pissy mood, and waited for you to *know* what you'd done wrong. So when someone's in a bad mood around me, I seriously panic, cause it might be my fault. And I try and make it not my fault.

My problem is, to what extent is this someone else's problem? I'm trying to give my friend advice, and all I can think to say is "explain briefly why you do this, tell him that because you are insecure about a lack of communication, you'll work on not taking things personally if he'll try a little harder to give you positive feedback." What else can I say? Is there anything else I can say?

Tags: family