Yes! I have Notetab again! I can journal in earnest, now!
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Still Reading:
Lady Chatterly's Lover ~ D.H. Lawrence
From the 'So bad they're good'department:
A farmer was out milking his cow one morning when he saw a fly go into the cow's ear. She shook her head a minute or two, but the farmer didn't think anything about it. A few minutes later, the fly came out in the milk...yep ~ it went in one ear and out the udder. :::snicker:::
When god created Eve, he originally gave her three boobs. The middle one kept getting in Eve's way and was pretty useless, so god removed it. As Eve stood with the useless boob in her hands, she asked, "What can you do with a useless boob?" So god created man.
The devil decided to go to church one day. He arrived in a huge cloud of smoke and flames and the parishioners ran out of the church in a panic, except for one little old man. So the devil goes up to the man, shaking his spear at him and bellowing, "I AM SATAN! BEELZEBUB! DO YOU NOT FEAR ME??!!" The man replied, "Why? I've been living with your sister for 48 years." Heheheheeee
A dream ~
I am a part of the crew of Enterprise (sheesh! Didn't think I liked the show that much!) and but instead of being on the ship, we are in an amalgam of open landscape and the house I grew up in. At this moment, I am being an absolute klutz as I talk to Trip, who thinks he is hidden enough behind some stuff so I don't know who I'm talking to. Everything else is going wrong. I even drop a hotdog, just as I am raising it to my mouth to take the first bite of it. I am fairly disgusted with the whole situation. I say something to the effect, "I wish Trip were here..." (to Trip) and he asks me innocent seeming questions like, "He's a great guy, huh?" I can't say enough about him. As I talk, I have to walk by Trip and put my hand on his shoulder in order to get around him (it's a bit crowded with stuff in this part of the room). He is sitting away from me and turns his head a bit so I can't see his face ~ he doesn't want me to know who I'm talking to.
Behind me, I hear two crew members talking about how they hate the fact that they turned the Enterprise into a TV show and that every moment of our lives had to be on tv. You couldn't get away from the cameras. I realize that is why I am so klutzy ~ I can't get any privacy to be myself.
Gee ~ can you talk about wish fulfillment? Whoo hoo! Trip!!
Well, it was an interesting day, to say the least. I went over to help my dad bale hay again and we had lunch with my grandmother afterwards. I guess I should backtrack a bit first...although, I admit that I hesitated to write this entry at all. It is a bit sensitive. But it bothers me. It really does.
On the grand scale of things, I really haven't been around my dad that much. I'd see him for a few hours every few months and such (I believe that I've written quite a bit about it in the past...ya think? :::snicker:::) I've spent more time around both him and my grandmother than I has in years and something had really been bugging me. Everytime it happened (until today), I'd be so shocked that I couldn't and didn't know what to think, let alone say.
I have heard my dad say 'n****r' (I refuse to type more than that ~ and I'm more than a little disgusted that I even had to deal with it at all) several times. He has used this word quite a bit around me, once even in public at a pow wow. He and my grandmother had a conversation the other day, right in front of me, about some local guy who was running for public office who happens to be black. They talked about how (I'm paraphrasing slightly) 'all the blacks were behind him but they didn't think that no 'n****r' was ready for such a high office.'
Today, I had heard enough. Again, the conversation had turned to politics when the word was used. When my dad finished what he was saying, I had to say something and these pages show that subtlety is not my forte'. I said, "When I say this, I mean it in the most respectful way possible...but I think you need to get a refund for all that money you've been giving your church because you've obviously haven't learned much from it."
"What do you mean?"
"I can't believe you're still using the 'n word'!"
"The what? 'N word'?" (both my grandmother and dad were looking at me strangely by this time)
"Yes ~ the 'n word'!" (I was hoping they'd get a clue. I really didn't want to have to 'draw them a picture', so to speak...)
"What do you mean, the 'n word'?"
"I can't believe you're still saying (I literally choked on the word ~ I really didn't want to foul my mouth with it) 'n****r'! I haven't heard anyone say that word in years until I came over here!" (It's true ~ since I was a small kid during the 1970's...sheesh...)
Here is where I really started to get angry...
"Well, if you don't like that then you won't like it if we hang out very much ~ I say worse stuff than that!"
"Then we won't hang."
At this point, my grandmother decided to add her two cents worth. She began talking about how she didn't talk like that and how she liked 'them' and whatnot (this was after the conversation earlier in the week about the local guy). She didn't get the point...although the more she talked, the more she was actually proved my point. Again, I had had enough.
I said, "No, your thoughts are reflected in your speech. You just talk about 'them' as if they weren't as good as that dog out in the yard." (See? I told you subtlety wasn't my strong point...::grin::)
At this point, I felt that they were both starting to gang up on me because I dared to say something about the way things have always been (that was one of the excuses that came up ~ it's just the way they've always talked. Ugh.) I felt as if they were trying to rationalize the whole thing and convince me that there was nothing wrong.
Now we get to the part of this flea circus where I should probably feel at least a little embarrassed but I'm having a hard time doing that. If I had to deal only with my dad, the whole thing would have ended pretty quickly and we would have moved on but no ~ my grandmother had to make me see that there was nothing wrong...and I said...
"It (I meant the bible) says that god created f***ing man ~ not the black man or the white man!" (It's getting bad, in my book, when the easier word to say is 'f***ing.')
In the end, I ceded from the battle. My grandmother just didn't get the point. She kept saing, "I agree with you..." and would proceed to tell me about how it was 'just the way they talked' and how her dad were 'feed 'them'' and such as if she were talking about stray mutts instead of people. I kept telling her, "Well, that was then. You have the ability to change your actions now." I almost got dizzy from the circles we were going in.
My dad actually did apologize to me. He said that he didn't realize that he was offending me. I appreciated that. Now to see if it holds...my grandmother, on the other hand, kept saying, "That's okay that you said that."
"I know. It needed saying."
"It's okay that you said that ~ it was your idea."
"No ~ it's not my idea. Nobody talks like that anymore."
I was really glad to leave today. Here I am, after listening to all this for the last few times that I have been over there this week and she's trying to make me out as the bad guy. At the same time, I tried not to cackle too much. I felt like such a kid when I did leave. I kept thinking, "I can't believe that I finally stood up to them! God ~ that felt good to say what was on my mind instead of just letting it slide! Oh my god ~ I can't believe I said 'f***ing' to my dad...and my grandmother!"
I guess it all worked out the way it was supposed to ~ when I got home, I had some books waiting for me. The quote that caught me eye said, "People are illogical, unreasonable and self centered. Love them anyway."
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