The worst part about visiting my best friend is that her boyfriend smokes so every time I come home from their place my clothes and hair smell like cigarette smoke. Gross. It’s not as bad as coming home from a bar, but stil - it’s pretty bad.

I just can’t stop smelling it. I changed my clothes already, so those are fine, but I haven’t washed my hair yet. I think I had better. The smell is driving me crazy. I’m so glad that M. doesn’t smoke. I used to smoke on occasion when I was drinking.. I am so glad that I never actually smoked enough to be really addicted.

I tried yet again to get my domain email (the persephone@iotoeuropa.org address) and failed yet again. For some reason all I can get is the stuff that I recieved March 19 and 20, which I keep getting over and over again. If you have emailed me after that date I haven’t got it. I’m now debating whether to take the time to download Eudora and put it on this computer or just wait another week ’till I get home to get my email. In the meantime, keep emailing me at persephone06@yahoo.com.

It would seem that I have forgotten to do the Friday Five yet again. It would also seem that I have forgotten how to type - you don’t want to know how many times I had to redo the last sentence to get rid of all the typos. I can’t do much about the typing, but here is the Friday Five despite today being Saturday.

1. If you could eat dinner with and “get to know” one famous person (living or dead), who would you choose?

I’d say Maya Angelou right now because I have been reading her biogoraphy’s and am oh so interested in her, but that will change just as soon as I start learning/reading about someone else. Really I haven’t a clue. I can’t think of anyone I would be interested in meeting who I wouldn’t feel too intimidated by to really talk to.

2. Has the death of a famous person ever had an effect on you? Who was it and how did you feel?

I always get sad when someone dies, but the death of someone I didn’t know or only knew through a TV screen has never impacted me that much. Princess Diana’s death was a shock, but that was only because I had been out of civilization for a week and so didn’t here about it until a few days after she’d died. It startled me that the world had gone on despite the fact that I wouldn’t be there to hear about it.

Douglas Adam’s death hurt partly becuase he was still pretty young but mostly because I hated the thought that I would never get to read any more of his writing.

3. If you could BE a famous person for 24 hours, who would you choose?

I don’t know. I don’t really want to be a famous person unless it is me who becomes famous somehow and then I could be myself. Someone smart and respected, perhaps. Or someone who lives a really interesting life. Oprah, maybe, or Jane Goodall.

4. Do people ever tell you that you look like someone famous? Who?

I supposedly look like Mena Suvari. I don’t see the resemblance, but when American Pie first came out I was told by four separate people that I looked like her and had to endure jokes about how they had seen me having sex on the big screen.

5. Have you ever met anyone famous?

No one I care to mention.

So. Something happened last night that is still distburbing me over twenty-four hours later.

I was over at a friend’s last night. Over at my best friend’s last night and we were watching TV flipping through the channels when she came across a show with some guy she doesn’t like appeared on the screen and she called him “fag boy.” I protested and her response was “well, he is.” I shook my head and let it slide. Bad me. Now I wish I had said more, but I think that I was kind of in shock.

It gets worse. We watched ER last night and Dr. Weaver kissed whoever that girl she was seeing is (I haven’t watched ER in forever). My friend and another girl who was over both covered there eyes and made noises of disgust and in general acted like nine year old girls do when boys are mentioned. I did speak up this time, telling them to grow up and get over it. Once again, I wish that I had said more.

I know there are people like that. It was just disturbing to hear such language and sentiments from someone that I have known for years and really care about. I hate it. I hate this world that there are people in it who are just so carless with hateful terms like that and I hate myself that I didn’t let her know exactly how offensive I found her last night and I just.. it hurts. I feel like the worlds split and the crack runs right through me. The human race is bleeding and I am bleeding with it.

How did we get like this? How did we get that a word would be invented with the sole purpose of demeaning someone based on who they care to love? How did we become so obsessed with who a person chooses to go to bed with? What’s wrong with us? And how am I supposed to live in a world that so often makes me want to crawl under my bed and hide for the rest of eternity?

I’m ashamed of myself. I did speak out, I did object, I just didn’t do it as strongly as I now wish I had. I’m not going to call her now and bitch at her either, the moment has passed. But I do make this pledge pass, I will not let such things slide again. The next time she or anyone else uses such a term around me or expresses such sentiments I will speak firmly and let them know the full depth of my disgust and that they are not to say such things around me and that I wish that they wouldn’t say them at all. Then perhaps once I have spoken out fully I won’t feel quite such a strong need to hide under the bed.

I’m having trouble getting my domain email right now. I am too lazy to download Eudora to put on this computer (oh, how I miss DSL) and so I am trying to download it through my yahoo address, but I am having trouble getting more than a couple of pieces at a time and I get a lot of email from email groups to that address. If you actually want me to see your email you will have better luck reaching me at persephone06@yahoo.com than the one I ususally use. That’s just ’till I go back home, then I will be back to ignoring the yahoo account.

I had another good ride today. We went outside for a little while at the end. My girl’s funny - she thinks she needs to be in the lead all the time. She gets annoyed if another horse is in front of her on the trail and tries to push by.

Yesterday I did a lot of nothing. I hoped that a day without shoes on would help the popped blister on my heel to heal, and it did seem to help a little as it had scabbed over finally by this morning. All for naught though, the scab seems to have been worn off by my riding boots and now it has returned to a bright, red, icky looking hole on the back of my foot.

Going over to D.’s in just a minute for dinner. Fondue, I think. It’s nice to be home where I have friends and things to do. It’s hard to believe that I have been here a week already and its hard to believe that I have been here only a week. It seems like I just got here and at the same time it feels like I never left. Strange. I love it here, but I miss my husband. I wish we could move down here and be here together.

It’s been a long, long time since I last posted pictures of my girl, so here you go!

It’s hard taking pictures of a dark horse on a cloudy day

I’m not even going to discuss exactly how long I spent brushing all the mud off of her last night. Then I get out there today and look at her! Oh well, she has fun.

Isn’t she pretty? Not that you can really tell with these poor pictures and with her blanket on and the mud (oh the mud). She is clean again for the moment, or at least she was when I left the barn today. I’m sure she will look something like she does here again by the next time that I get out there.

I had a good ride again today. I expected that after not riding for nearly ten months we would have some pretty interesting times. It seems that every time I used to go away for a week or two I would come back and have forgotten how to ride and she would be in full gallop mode and we’d have a wild couple of rides before settling down into routine. Now I’ve been gone so long and while I have forgotten how to ride some, she is being as good as gold. We even had a nice slow canter today, quite unexpected after such a long period of not working together. Slow is a concept that at one point I thought she would never grasp.

I finally made it out to the barn last night. It was good to see my girl again and I found that I hadn’t forgotten how to ride as completely as I thought I had. She was amazingly good and put up with all my flopping around like a sack of potatos - I think that she had missed me. I’m going out to ride again today though I probably shouldn’t. I rode for an hour last night which is quite a bit for not having been in a saddle in nine months or so, and today I am rather sore.

I’m thinking of taking some riding lessons where I live now, if I can find a place. I really shouldn’t because I really can’t afford them, but it would be nice if the next time I make it down here I wasn’t so completely out of practice. I wish that I could bring my big baby up with me, but I can’t afford to do that right now and I’m not sure how much longer we are going to be living in that town anyway. I don’t want to move her constantly and I am really nervous about finding a new place to board her.

I didn’t write Friday night as I had planned because I went over to a friend’s instead. Saturday and Sunday I spent in Seattle, getting back around midnight Sunday night. Too tired to write then. Yesterday I was lazy and then went to the barn. I was exhausted when I got home (around ten) and went straight to bed.

I did write a little in my seldom used paper journal over the weekend. My intention is to copy some of that into my journal here.

I am in Portland now. Left home on a 10:30 AM flight yesterday morning headed for Vancouver BC. Took a shuttle from the Vancouver airport to the greyhound station and then a looong busride to Portland. I got here a little after midnight last night.

Tomorrow monring we leave for Seattle - where I actually was for a few hours last night (have I mentioned how much I hate the Seattle bus station?). I’ll be there ’till Monday and won’t have access to a computer. I will post more here tonight though, and might even write an actual entry in the journal!

Home’s strange, if this is home. I still think of it as home.. but I think of my apartment in Canada as home too. Here things are the same as when I left but still different. Little differences in appearance remind me of the big changes. It’s strange being back. I feel out of place, like a puzzle piece that looks like it should fit but doesn’t.

The little change annoying me at the moment would be that the nice 17″ monitor that I was so looking forward to using has been moved across the hall. It makes sense that my dad would move the monitor from the computer I usually use to the one he usually uses since the family room one hardly ever gets used with me gone, but I wasn’t expecting it. I suppose I could use his computer.. but nah, I like this one better, even witha crappy monitor.

I had this strange email thing going on yesterday. When I went to check my email it told me that I had 5200 or so messages - I usually get about a hundred and fifty to two hundred per day. It took absolutely forever to download and I thought that I must have been email bombed or something, but hardly any new messages actualy showed up in my inbox. A couple of months ago I was having computer problems and in addition to copying stuff onto CD-ROM I changed my email settings so that email woud be left on the server. I guess that Eudora decided to download all of the messages from the server instead of just the new ones.

I’ve been too busy and scatterbrained to write. It looks like I will be heading home to Portland this weekend and staying for a couple of weeks. This is all very sudden and I am rushing around trying to find an affordable means of getting down there. I’ve got quite the headache as a result. More later.

My bio page is back online in the journal again. It’s all up to date now. Go look to find out all sorts of ineresting facts about me.

I’m working on my “about me” page for this site (finally, I know) and had trouble putting my age down. I keep wanting to put twenty-five. That’s been happening a lot lately and I don’t know why. People ask me my age or a reference to it comes up and twenty-five springs to mind.. I actually believe that I am twenty-five for a few seconds at a time. I’m not.. I’ll be twenty-four in a week or so, but I keep thinking that I am twenty-five.

Strange.

When I was a kid I always knew exactly how old I was. Since I turned nineteen or so it hasn’t been like that, I’ve had a lot of confusion about my age. If someone asks me for it I usually have to stop and think about it. Sometimes I even have to do the math from my birthdate to figure it out. Usually my wrong instinctual answer is either a year above or below my real age, but lately it has always been twenty-five.

I should know how old I am. I shouldn’t have to stop and think about it or have the wrong number pop into my head when I think that I do know. Once again, strange.

So much for writing up each book I read as I finish it. I’ve read probably ten or fifteen books in the past few weeks and all that has made it here are a few quotes. Once again I resolve to do better starting now.

Just finished reading: Midwives by Chris Bohjalin.

Have I read it before: nope.

Shallow or deep: deep.

Worth reading: yes.

Will I read it again: probably not.

How good really: Pretty good. Doesn’t make it to my favorites list, but still, pretty good.

Comments:

The fastest reserve ever. Someone on a mailing list reccomended this book about a month ago. I tried to check it out then but it wasn’t in. It wasn’t in once again when I went to the library a week ago, so I put it on reserve along with a bunch of other books. Five minutes later I went to check out my books and the librarian said “oh, you have a book waiting on the reserve shelf.” In the time it took me to find one last book and make it to the checkout counter it had come in.

The book is about a trial and is told from the point of view of a child (well, teenager) so of course just as soon as I started reading it I thought To Kill a Mockingbird I’m not the only one apparently, after finishing the book I read the quotes on the back and sure enough, one of them compares it to that wonderful novel. This book is good, but it doesn’t live up to Mockingbird. It’s not really fair, anyway, to compare anything to a book that wonderful.

Oh yes, the story. The story is told from the POV of a fourteen year old girl. Her mother is a midwife on trial after she performed a home cesarian on a dead women in her home to save her infant son on a night the phones were out and road conditions made it impossible to get the woman to the hospital. At issue: some people believe the mother was still alive when the midwife cut into her.

It’s a good story and a good book, though there was a point in the middle where I found myself rather bored and wishing the author would hurry on with the story. The beginning and the end were wonderful, and the end was not what I had expected from reading the beginning.

I think that Bohjalian was pretty fair in the handling of the contraversy concerning homebirth. The book was about a homebirth where a woman died, but plenty of evidence in support of homebirth was given in the book.

I really don’t have much to say about this book right now, other than it is worth reading. I only copied one quote from the book, though there were probably several more I should have kept.

As always, if you read this book, please let me know what you think of it.

When I listen to certain music it makes me feel as if I need to write something. As if I have something to say. I don’t know if it’s just the need to pass along the message of the music or if it is to express the way the music makes me feel somehow, but I feel that there is something inside of me that needs to be said. The only problem is the words are never there, just the feeling. Most of the time I can’t even recognize exactly what the feeling is.

Eeeh! Just getting caught up on Jenn’s weblog and, gasp, she’s pregnant!. Congratulations, Jenn.

However, this just goes further toward proving my point that if I read your journal or am in any way involved in your life you will get pregnant. It seems that just about everyone I know/read is either pregnant or has recently had a baby and a fair number of them were unplanned. Most of the blogs and journals I read are written by mothers or soon-to-be-mothers (there’s also one father to be). Most of them were not parents or soon-to-be parents when I started reading them. This is a sign. My attention causes pregnancy.

If anyone of you on my links list wants me to stop reading you as a form of birth control just let me know

Seriously though, congratulations to Jenn. I live vicariously through all of the pregnant journalers until such a time as we decide to have our own.

I so need to do some of the stuff listed on this page. Spam is evil. Must fight spam.

How in the world did a whaco like this get elected to public office? Because of course making a proclomation that the devil is not welcome in town is going to solve all sorts of problems. Will we ever be enlightened enough to have true separation of church and state?

I’ve often assumed this. Maybe not about the nineteenth century, but about the past and places in the world today with high child mortality. Here no one expects to lose a child. It happens - but always to someone else. I read about a mother losing her entire family in a fire or something and wonder “how can she go on?” It seems impossibly tragic, like something so horrible that it just can’t possibly happen, though of course nothing is so horrible that it can’t happen.

I read once that the average lifespan of Aboriginees in Australia living in the traditional manner is still amazingly low, like twenty-five years or something. A mother losing all of her children there is probably not all that uncommon. How do they go on? How can one live after such a thing? How can one live seeing that happen to others around them and knowing that it could happen to them. It seems like the should be numb to it in ways, that it shouldn’t hurt so much when there are others who have suffered the same pain all around them. When they knew such a thing was a possibility and they are not alone in their loss. It seems like they should have some better way of dealing with it and coping with it than we do here where such a thing almost never happens. But still, how do they go on?

How depressing the idea is. Yet it seems true. I’m a woman in love with a man who loves me.. and yet the quote rings true. Relationships where both parties love equally seem awfully rare. I look around at all the couples I know or knew and one party always seems to give more. Maybe not at the start, but once they’ve been together a while one party always seems to give more.

Later in the same conversation:

I suppose that it is terribly sexist of me that that doesn’t ring as true at the first quote. It seems like it shouldn’t be. I guess I just want to believe that love is easy for someone out there, at least. I know that it isn’t always or even the man who is loved and doesn’t love, it is just as frequently the woman who takes more than she gives. Still, even though I know it isn’t true it just seems like it should be easier when the man is taken out of the euqation (or the women, for gay men).

I preach that there really isn’t that much difference between the genders, just a little bit of hormones and a lot of pressure from society. I really believe this - most of the time. Yet I persist in imagining that when one loves another of the same gender the two should be on more equal footing and better able to understand each other. That such a relationship should be simpler because it is somehow cleaner without all the dirt thrown in by society that still lists the man as head of household in heterosexual relationships. That the lovers should be on more euqal footing with eachother and so avoid the problems so frequently caused when one member of a relationship feels like less than the other.

Maybe it is a bit easier for a woman to understand her partner better when it is another woman rather than a man and a man to understand another man better, but from what I have seen that doesn’t really make love any easier. It just seems like it should.

It’s just nice to imagine that it is easy for someone because love seems like something that should be easy. It isn’t - it never is - but it should be.