raise consciousness, especially my own

No good deed goes unpunished, so the saying goes. I never heard this phrase until well until adulthood. At least my childhood was not branded by the scar…

For the past several days I have been struggling with the anger and other sorts of fallout produced by someone who is meddling in my life. for various reasons I cannot simply ignore her. It is better to make what repairs can be made sooner rather than later.

At the same time, it is not in me to take a passive stance and pretend it doesn’t matter to me.

My solution, after a couple of nights of sleep, is a snail mail letter.

As I contemplate what may come of this, I expect she will dislike me a little more. I can live with that. She may decide not to contact me any more. That is perfect. She may come unglued all over me. I am mentally prepared for that. I will not be taking her calls, so mail of one sort or another will be her recourse. I can always respond after thought and not in the heat of the moment.

Here is the heart of the issue for me: There is the stink of distrust about my life. This is what I would like to vanquish. And maybe my solution is fine. When someone’s actions and/or words bring on a surge of distrust, probably calling them out is completely appropriate. This certainly is not an out-of-the-blue thing, as to this person.

So as may be apparent, I am weighing my response very carefully. There is something of the bully about this person, as if often the case with people who have boundary problems. I think in my response I am drawing my boundaries in bright pink marker, so she will know when she crosses them. So, Ok.

The straws in the old folks room have a new home.
They are wrapped in a cold weather scarf and resting upon a shelf with the clothes. I wonder which of them decided the straws were better off there than in the cabinet.
I decided to just let them be there. Why not.

_{this is the cousin to the old fellow stuffing tissue into his mouth to hold his teeth in place and then trying to explain things to me}

Soon I will be in full wedding mode. Today that means assembling all the pieces I need to bring along, packing up the car, and driving.

There are lei to pick up. The delicate lei for the bride and groom could not survive a night.

There is the bride and groom to meet and greet, for the first time.

And now for the consciousness raising part – there is dealing with the owner/controller of the venue they have chosen.

Yesterday I arrived with the cake and flowers and boxes of candles and glassware. I had been told to “use the cottage”, where I could store certain items in the refrigerator. I had asked for the arch to be moved into position for me to decorate.

First I opened the cottage, where every surface was strewn with papers and manila files. There were boxes on the floor, great piles of discarded plastic such as might have been used in place of painter’s cloth. I recalled she had been doing some touch up painting when I made the site visit months back.

The refrigerator contained food. Someone had kindly removed most of the food to a single plastic bag (humongous size) and stuffed it into one of the drawers. That was the drawer I needed for the lei.

I cleared the main shelf for the cake, transferred the food into other places, making room for the lei. I cleared the counter so I could have a surface for preparing the flowers.

The arch was still attached to the fence under a shedding tree, its white self covered with detritus, remnants of prior weddings in the form of tape residue that had attracted dirt build up. It was not heavy, but awkward to move. It is vinyl and neither sturdy nor stable, I discovered as I cut its plastic bonds and maneuvered it across the lawn.

In vain I sought some rebar or similar poles to anchor it in place. Eventually I settled upon the most level spot around the periphery of the lawn to set up.

First I used up all the paper towels in the cottage and some I had used for candle wrapping to clean up the arch. The tape residue was a lost cause, as were the legs as stained as the teeth of an old tobacco chewer.

I laid the arch on its back to attach the decor to the top, and once raised up, had to find a way up there to straighten it all out, and make additions as needed. This part flowed along nicely, with a delicate mist cooling the air and keeping the arch flowers fresh. My attempts to anchor the feet of the arch all failed, but I was successful in hiding the stained legs with monstera leaves inside flower pots I had brought for another use.

The chairs.

It is because of the chairs I am here on this goal. When she showed them to me on the site visit they were stashed away in a storage area. Might I say buried behind and under … stuff… Just to remove them would be a major chore, not to be conducted in my wedding attire. Not to be conducted the day of the wedding by me in any attire. And did I mention the dirt on the arch? I am thinking of chairs to clean… this is not the sort of wedding where the chairs are dressed up. They are a simple convenience on the lawn. I can now see that chair covers were a wedding planner’s answer to filthy chairs, and they became a standard decorator touch.

The owner/controller of the venue was to have met me there yesterday, helped me with the arch, and brought out the chairs. I was content to work alone, but as the day wore on and she did not appear, I went on a search. There were cars there, but wherever the people were, I could not find them. I saw one fellow carrying some hedge clippers as I carried a box down to the site, and when I returned, he likewise had vanished.

My answers to all this: I contacted the bride and suggested that as the client of the venue she contact the owner and make certain the chairs appear on time and ready. I am not expecting “ready”. I will wear grubby clothes and change later. I will bring bottles of cleaning spray and rags. I will reduce the task of cleaning the chairs to the shortest possible time. Better yet, when the owner appears I will hand her the cleaning material and tell her the chairs need attention and I am doing the flowers. I do not care whether she likes me or not. My attitude has been formed by having had to enlist the bride every time I needed her attention, as when I set up the site visit. Her lack of professionalism is appalling. She is a case study in how not to deal with clients.

The only reason this woman has any business at all is because her site photographs well.

All right. Now to prepare my attitude and enter my day. The sky has not yet begun to lighten. These are my pre-day moments. Wish me luck!

As Mr Tiki pointed out, my mistake was fully in synch with my parenting style – my failed parenting style.

The situation was this. Mr Tiki’s old old old father who is now living with us does not like to shower. There is very little he does like to do, or for that matter will do. Being that on his upcoming birthday he turns 99 perhaps it is enough he is still getting about on his feet and dressing himself.

Back to the shower. When he moved in with us, he was under hospice care. He was officially dying. Someone came in a couple of times a week and showered him.

After he stopped dying, and hospice went away, came the awkward question of who was going to shower him. At first someone came in, but we live so remotely that was not working out. Papa declared he would shower himself, and he did, one time.

Yesterday, it having been a very long time since that event, I suggested to Papa that before he went to the dentist, he should take a shower. He insisted that the dentist was only looking in his mouth, and so he didn’t need a shower. I suggested that the dentist would be very close to him, looking into his mouth, and it had been a very long time since his last shower. He refused. I said, well, in that case, I guess I will have to shower you.

At that, he said oh no no, I will shower my self.

But he did not.

Now you or I can take a shower and be out of the house fairly quickly. But for him, it is a diva turn. It takes maybe an hour. It took several more times nudging him to get him to understand that he was not getting out of it, and over the course of that discussion, he became more and more aggravated, as did I.

He finally did shower, but by the time he was through, what had happened between us had assumed gargantuan proportions in his mind. I had bullied him into taking the shower (well I did say if he wanted to go out the shower was mandatory) and I had used language on him no one had ever in his life used (well, that may be true but not in the sense you may be thinking. I think possibly for the first time in his entire life a female gave him an ultimatum) and now there was an unbridgable chasm between us.

Well that last part was not music to my ears. Once again, I realized that having the upper hand in a situation such as this is rarely the right hand to have.

I mended things between us, and I think maybe there is a silver lining in that he knows he can go through an unpleasant conversation with me with no loss of respect. But, it is up to me to find another way to make sure the old man gets into the shower regularly.

To rub a little salt into the wounds of the day, I managed to disappoint two people.

One, I had done a large job for, and she simply didn’t like my best work. It is more of matter of not liking her own look, and there is nothing I can do about that. She is so harsh on herself. I wish there was some way she could be self approving. The day will come, maybe five years from now, maybe ten years from now. She will look back on how she looks now, and wonder how she could have not liked herself.

The other person, it was a dialogue about social responsibility, or so I thought. My remarks on same were rebuffed so sharply I thought at first she was being tongue in cheek. Then I discovered I had deeply offended her. I swear, it is simply not worth it to enter into discussions on deeply felt issues on social networking sites. I only do so where it seems to me I am essentially in agreement with the person who made the original statement – I am not into drama or controversy. Changing anyone’s opinions is not a goal of mine. I am not so naive that I think my thoughts on any subject are the one true answer.

All that being said, I wish when people inform me they do not like something I do or something I say, that I could file those remarks away somewhere I could pay attention to what they mean and ignore 100% the pain they inflict by saying to me “You did a bad job” and “the way you think could not be more wrong”. I know their opinions are essentially reflections of their state of mind and have little to nothing to do with me, and I keep telling myself that. OK, time to grow some broader shoulders and stop sniffling.

I would not say I am cut from the cloth of the care giver, but here I am with two old people and my little grand daughter. Nine loads of laundry today because the dogs went out and ate grass then barfed it onto our bed.

The juxtaposition of the old and the new in terms of personness is so very interesting. Two sides of the coin for sure. Neither age can be left unmonitored. Both ages in diapers and doing weird things with potty habits. There are no habits, actually, but adventures, and the random removal of the diaper and then the mess.

My role is not only caretaker, but something else I cannot exactly describe. Learner, I guess. I am learning to appreciate the richness of each day as it unfolds. The sensitivity of the dogs and their willingness to adapt and accept what changes may come each day. Knowing that tomorrow is Saturday, and it is market day in Waimea. I will not be giving anyone baths or showers in the morning. I will play with the morning dogs and leave. I will bring my camera, and perhaps my photos will find their way somewhere.

In the midst of all this, my photos and my jewelry are turning up in island publications, and that is a big surprise. Who knows, maybe someday someone will even pay me. Maybe that does not matter.

Tonight Papa has a belly ache and skipped dinner but had ice cream. There is something different wrong and I do not know what it is.

My grand daughter is here, and I told her a story to help her sleep.

Mr Tiki is out of sorts but denies it. I was out of the house all day at a fair, where I was working. I think that is why he is grumpy. Or maybe I have no clue.

My daughter thinks I told her having two old people who cannot do anything for themselves would not impact her visit with me. I believe what I told her is that she should not feel she needed to change her plans, that we could manage fine with everyone in the house.

Tomorrow I spend the day with my grand daughter. Perhaps that is why Mr Tiki is grumpy and will not admit it. My daughter is thinking since I must stay home tomorrow her tiny Tikini will not have a very good day. This may not look like day camp for 3 year olds but it can be that. I have moved a few breakable things and hidden the old folks’ medications.

Thinking this all through, I am guessing the secret is just walk through the day and let come what may. When my girl returns from her journey later maybe she will be happily surprised, and with any luck at all Mr Tiki will find his smile wherever he dropped it.

Have you ever noticed that there are Pinterest boards with millions of followers? Literally, millions. Yowsa. Would you like to have that many people paying attention to you and what you like and perhaps what you do?

It is a clouded thing for me.

So today I did a little study on this Pinterest phenomenon, because I wondered what it means to have 2 million people following your boards.

I discovered it means there is a big number by your name, but when it comes to liking your pins and repinning them, it all plays out pretty much the same as if you have a few hundred followers. Isn’t that odd?

I do like Pinterest quite a bit, for several different reasons, most of which seem to be peculiar to me. Today I lingered some on one of my boards, just looking at the images. I wonder if all these images have sharpened my perception or my skills any. I find I am more conscious of color and light, especially intrusive light. And texture can be overwhelming.

Mr Tiki’s parents are getting to be really old, and they live alone. He wants to invite them to come live with us. There are so very many reasons why this is unlikely to work out. But most of them have to do with the old folks wanting to stay put. Insisting on staying where they are.

Today I realized I just had to say yes.

Craig Newmark, who brought us Craigslist. One of the first popular social networking sites.

Today he published a blog on flamers. I am going to paraphrase, because I want to share what I got out of it.

There are people who are happy when they are inflamed. They like that pissed off feeling. They like to post stuff that gets people all riled up. And when we respond, it feeds their frenzy. Eventually, almost everyone who interacts with flame throwers gets singed. Feathers ruffled, anyway.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. These are the people who post those horrifying stories, like one I recently read about a guy in Oregon sent to jail for collecting rainwater on his own property. They read these articles, and without going “hmmmm I wonder if that is true” they go ahead and pass it along with a little hyperbole tacked on to show their disgust.

When I researched that story, what do you know. The guy had actually constructed two dams on his property stopping the flow of streams and thereby collecting water that equally belonged to his neighbors, depriving them in dryer times of water for irrigation. He was warned for over 10 years to cease and desist, and kept rebuilding the dams until his ass was hauled off.

Now some of my friends are flamers. That is simply their style. I never thought about them this way. But now I have been made aware.

And I will follow Craig’s advice and not bother to correct them on their own threads (anymore) but rather post separately my “did you see this and here’s another side to the story”.

Just sharin’.