But, I suppose, if one could possibly find some good in all of this bullshit, it would be me.
I haven’t kept up with my Ukrainian studies since we moved to Florida, and even before then, I was kind of hit or miss. The only time I was completely focused on the language was when I was cramming before our trip to Ukraine.
I’ve been obsessed - of course - with what’s going on overseas and I’m getting a lot of my news from Ukraine-based media. Of course, that means that all my news is in Ukrainian.
Can I just say? My reading and listening comprehension are through the fucking roof.
I can’t write and can’t speak, but I can listen like a motherfucker.
(Also, I may have a bit of a lady boner for Zelenskyy right now.)
- - - - - - - - - -
I had an epiphany earlier this afternoon.
I had this best friend, codenamed Soulmate Boy, because that’s what my dad used to call him.
He was my everything for such a long time but never any sort of love interest. Not even friends with benefits, even though we would have been great at that.
Anyhoo… while I was in college, he went into the Marines. He’d always wanted to be a Marine, but something went terribly wrong and he was medically discharged. I’ve romanticised and torn apart our relationship for so long, that I honestly can’t tell fact from fiction* anymore. I do know it was an honourable discharge, and I’m 99.999999% sure it was health related.
When he came home, he wasn’t himself. He lived in a shitty apartment in a shitty area near the airport and I never wanted to go there.
I get this random call from him one night and I know that shit is seriously sideways, so I jump in my car and drive from Storrs to Windsor Locks. At like 3AM.
He wants to kill himself and apparently I’m the only one that either understands or can stop him. (Again, shitty memory. Sorry.)
Most traumatic experience of my fucking life at that point in time, but the crisis was averted and life went on.
Fast forward to a few decades later and we have, of course, lost touch.
Until I get the calls and text messages to get on any of the major CT channel websites. They are all broadcasting this… situation.
Apparently, Soulmate Boy, decided that suicide by cop was the top item on his to-do list that day.
He didn’t succeed, but he did do several years in prison.
Tomorrow is his birthday and he randomly flits in and out of my life, my heart, my head, despite my best efforts to shove those parts of my life into a little box and bury it deep in the backyard.
Where was I?
Epiphany. Right.
I’m folding my laundry and it hit me hard… what if he really wants to die, he just doesn’t want to be alone when it happens?
Like an assisted suicide?
I have lots of thoughts about him. Our friendship. Our distance. Just… us, but that was a thought I’ve been unable to shake all day.
I don’t know what to do with that. It’s a lot to unpack, you know?
Any way you slice it, though, it’s left me upset in a way I’ve never been upset before. (And I thought I had a good handle on all my various moods.)
I really hope he’s well, that’s he’s living his best life… but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he’s dead, either.
In all honestly, I think he’s kind of both. Like a real life Schrödinger’s cat.
And, fuck, I know that makes absolutely zero sense if you’re not me, but you’ll just have to deal with it.
*I took a writing class and used the penultimate night of our friendship for my assignments. Scott and Kate has been shared with one person I know IRL. C-Rollz loved it, but he’s the only one I’ve ever shared it with, and he kind of bullied me into it. (It’s also posted on a fiction sharing website, but in the nine years it’s been on the site, I’ve never received one bit of feedback about it.) I think about it occasionally and wonder if I should tighten it up. I mean, the teacher raved about it, but it feels so naive. Maybe that’s part of its magic? Whatever.
I think I’ve learned all possible variations of the word fuck…
I’ve been relatively quiet about the effect the war is having on me, personally.
A couple comments here and there, a lot of reposts of things that make me proud to be a Ukrainian, but not the soul-searching self important crap I post here.
Here’s the thing though - that fucking book, “Losing Your Parents, Finding Yourself”, continues to come back to haunt me.
(You know, the book I set fire to, that published bits from my mother’s will. Yeah, that one.)
So, about a decade ago, I decided to research my roots.
My father’s side is relatively simple. Maine, Maine, Maine, Maine, Maine, Connecticut. There’s nothing fun there to research.
My mother’s side, however? JACK-FUCKING-POT.
Being Ukrainian was sort of this odd… thing? I was a Ukrainian, but I couldn’t find it on a map, I didn’t grow up speaking the language, and I had very little access to the culture because my mother wanted nothing to do with it.
Then, of course, everyone started dying and I lost contact with the ones that were still alive.
So, there I am. Completely alone in the world. (We’re not counting my husband, nor his family. Not that it matters, I’m not close to his family anyway.) Knowing something is missing, but not knowing what.
Learning what it means to be from Ukraine, remembering the good memories and filling in the blanks with the social / cultural stuff I didn’t know… it was something.
I went full Ravenclaw. I out Hermione Granger’d Hermione. I jumped in and there was no looking back.
I started educating myself on Ukrainian history. I started taking Ukrainian lessons. I went to Suzi-Q. I went to Toronto. I hired a company to do the genealogical research for me. Then, I had them arrange a trip to Lviv and my grandparents’ village.
I had an identity again. A sense of purpose.
I felt like I belonged to a family again…
Even if I was born in the United States, I am the first generation that was born in the States. (My grandparents were born in Ukraine, my mother in Germany thanks to the Nazis…)
And just as all the pieces were starting to come together, just as I was getting ready to plan a return trip to Ukraine, this happened.
How very first world, yeah? Oh, no, that pesky Putin ruined my vacation plans…
But there’s more to it than a missed vacation.
A lot more.
I don’t know how to process this.
My shrink is going to have a field day with this next week…
Are toddlers even capable of understanding safe, sane, and consensual?
From one of my 18+ Sims groups.
While I have a number of mods, one that is 50 shades of… 18+... is definitely not one of them.
I definitely have nothing against the lifestyle, but it’s nothing I want to bring into my Sims’ lives. Growing weed in the backyard is more my style. *grin*
All I can say is, somebody has a sense of humour.
- - - - - - - - - -
It’s Racery time and I have not been motivated to run in any way shape or form. Part of it is that I get stuck in my head and lately that’s not a very safe place.
I did cap yesterday. Four and a half hours at a leisurely 18mm pace. An hour on the treadmill is hard. Four and a fucking half hours is INSANE.
I want to cap again, but I don’t want to do it all in one go, so at about noon, I’ll hop on the treadmill and go for 7.5 miles. Then, at some point before Quidditchcast, I want to get in another 7.5 miles. I want to steal a shout out in the worst way today. I need the atta girl so badly.
- - - - - - - - - -
So, Putin did start a war with Ukraine.
I’m not surprised; he waited until the European countries and the States were at their weakest.
Nobody wants to get too involved, because he’s so unhinged. They’re afraid to bring themselves into the firing line.
Sanctions are useless. Meetings are useless. He’s not going to break. He won’t give an inch until he either destroys Ukraine or takes it over.
As I discovered several years ago, there are people in my grandparents’ village with my grandmother’s maiden name. Two names that appeared on the genealogical report I had someone do. I’m not convinced they’re really my grandmother’s family but, somewhere along the line, we must share the same DNA. They survived WW2. They got to watch Ukraine become a free country. If they’re still alive, they’re reliving the most terrifying time of their lives.
I went through all the Ukrainian tutors I had tried and most of them live in or around Kyiv. There’s one near Odesa. (Yes. That’s the correct spelling. The other version is Russian.)
Then, there’s the guy who was our assigned tour guide / interpreter during our trip to Lviv. Super worried about him, even though Lviv is currently out of the line of fire.
I’m watching from the sidelines, safe and sound in my middle class suburban home in the southern US, and I’m terrified for them. Fuck, the Kyiv Post was reporting this morning that they attacked a children’s’ cancer center. FUCKING CHILDREN DYING OF CANCER can’t even catch a break. They didn’t need to bring children into this. Not like that.
Seriously, fuck Putin.
Ukraine’s glory has not yet died, nor her freedom,
Upon us, my young brothers, fate shall yet smile. Our enemies will perish, like dew in the morning sun,
And we too shall rule, brothers, in our own land.
Souls and bodies we’ll lay down, all for our freedom,
And we will show that we, brothers, are of the Cossack nation!
I’m running out of icons and pretty colours on my little sidebar.
I’ve decided to scrap the third draft and start over again…
Welcome to draft 4, which is already filled with random notes like this one.
TBH, I don’t know which one of us was completely shitty when that was written, but my money’s on me. Beka seems like he’d be straight-edge. (When he’s not statutory raping a fucking 15 year old, that is. KEEP IT IN YOUR PANTS, BEKA.)
Yeah.
So much shit on my mind and instead, I’m tearing apart a story that I’ve already written three drafts of to play with new point of views and - hopefully - get them to keep it in their pants. I DO NOT WRITE KIDDY PORN, GODDAMNIT.
At this rate, I’m going to have to age them up… and I hate that. I like AUs, but that’s totally not the story I wanted to tell.
Yearning. Slow burn. A love story spread over three years.
That’s the story I want to tell.
And the one I am completely incapable of telling.
Oh well. The 4th time’s the charm, right?
- - - - - - - - - -
I’m trying to keep myself distracted.
The pending war in Ukraine. The new job. Life in general.
I’m a big ball of stress right now.
So, of course, the Sims released a new game pack today.
By all accounts, it is buggy as fuck, even despite being held back by a week. (And wasn’t that a week - the short version is, EA self-censored and refused to release the game in Russia. All hell broke loose. EA backed off and held the release a week to ensure that the game would launch globally at the same time. A whole lot of stupidity ensued.)
Still bought it. Haven’t even bothered playing yet.
I probably won’t get a chance until the weekend.
Maybe EA will patch it by then. (Or not. We still have bugs in the game that are several years old and well known by everybody. Like, there’s no way the SimGurus don’t know about them. Why they aren’t being fixed is anyone’s guess at this point.)
Also not helping is the fact that the 2023 NHL All Star game is being held in my backyard. At that place. That I used to work at. Before I got fired for being bipolar.
I’m torn between wanting to go and staying home. I don’t know which option is healthier.
I’m just glad that life is starting to become closer to normal again… I have a half marathon towards the end of March and I just signed up to run a 5K in early March. I have a Boombox concert to go to, and I might head to Universal on my birthday to see Gavin DeGraw.
Remember when I said that I didn’t think 2022 was going to be full of, um, triggering activities?
Well.
Surprise!
I’m a fucking idiot.
So.
I turn 47 this year. If you want to work in specifics, I will now be two years older than my mother was when she died. (She died in March, but her birthday is (was?) in May.) It’s pretty hard to wrap my head around that. Like seriously. How the fuck did I outlive my mother? I certainly don’t take care of myself, other than pretending to be a runner and pumping my body full of all kinds of (prescription) chemicals.
Oh, and while we’re on the topic… she died in 1992. The calendar is telling me we survived 2020 and 2021 and are now in 2022. You probably don’t need to be an accountant to do that math in your head…
She has been dead for thirty fucking years. THIRTY. (And yet, she continues to live in my head rent free.)
Moving on.
While we’re talking about easy math, how about 2022 less 2001?
Yup. Dad’s been dead for 21 years this April.
Holy Jesus motherfuck.
I am not ready for these milestones.
And I thought that being married for twenty years this August was going to rock my world.
- - - - - - - - - -
Recently, my six year old MacBook shit the bed. The power button broke into little bitty pieces and the fan ran all the time. It would overheat. It would freeze up. It was getting pretty nerve wracking. I was never sure which laptop was going to boot up.
I ended up getting a new one for Christmas.
While moving all the software and crap was easy, hooking up all my peripherals was a bitch and a half.
I love Macs, but they are, hands down, the worst fucking piece of equipment to upgrade.
I have a Logitech wireless keyboard that I am so in love with it would be illegal. But, it’s got a USB/Bluetooth dongle thingy.
I have a great black and white laser printer, but it’s USB only.
I have a super nice HP colour laser printer that works sporadically over Wi-Fi, so that is normally connected via USB.
I have an old LaCie drive that holds all my music and photos. It’s Thunderbolt 2.
I have two HDMI monitors. One that actually connects over HDMI and one that used a Thunderbolt 2 / HDMI dongle.
The new Mac has Thunderbolt 3 ports and does not have a single USB port. (Well, technically, I guess it does, but it’s USB-C and everything is USB A? B? 2.0? 3.0? I don’t know. The “normal” USB.)
I spent a lot of time researching my options because upgrading everything to work with the new Thunderbolt 3 bullshit wasn’t going to happen.
I bought a really expensive dock. I bought HDMI to DisplayPort cords because the highly recommended dock didn’t have HDMI ports. I dropped over $250 on what could essentially be called band-aids.
Only to get it all hooked up to find out that NOTHING worked.
No monitors. No keyboard. No LaCie drive. Absolutely fucking nothing worked.
Because I’m not a total idiot, I always spend the extravagant amount for AppleCare. (I’ve really only needed it twice and both times it was a lifesaver. As my father used to say, you buy insurance hoping you never need it, but you’ll be glad you did when the world falls apart around you.)
The poor tech dude who took my call… They’re not supposed to recommend things that aren’t Apple branded or aren’t affiliated with Apple in one way or another, but I finally got him to give me a brand name.
$65 out of pocket for a dock and a little stupid USB dongle for the keyboard.
Fuck me.
Should have just called Apple before I even bought the damn computer.
(Also, I just realised that I got my first Apple Macintosh desktop computer in 1992. Right after my mother died… so I’m also celebrating thirty years of my love/hate relationship with Apple products.)
