For a long time, I resisted. This was partly for privacy reasons (though ironically, one of the people who in the end convinced me to sign up through multiple invites was one of my favorite InfoSec professors), but mostly it was because I didn’t want my information overload problem to get any worse.

Call it my fear of artificially induced A.D.D.

And when an old-school lifelong friend of mine tried to talk me into it, I resisted that too, at least initially. But then, after finding out how much of my high school class was online and knowing my twenty-year reunion was coming up, I succumbed. And as much as aspects of it annoyed me, being able to talk to wonderful people I hadn’t seen in decades was great.

Email requires consciously contacting people. Facebook was like passing people in the hallway and getting a little window on their lives – the choice to comment (or not) was mine. And, to be quite honest, it’s allowed me some RL opportunities that not being on Facebook wouldn’t have (mostly, the chance to see old friends who wouldn’t have known where I was otherwise as they passed through Denver or Munich).

There’s a reason even rational people sell their attention and privacy to Mark Zuckerberg.

That doesn’t make a good idea, but there’s a reason for it.

In this world where we all abandon the villages which would have helped us become adults, raise our children, be families, and grow old together, in some sense, Facebook allows us to reconstruct those villages, if imperfectly. I see my friends’ kids grow from across an ocean, get parenting advice from old friends, laugh with people I love. Especially in my situation, where my meager support system was completely obliterated by moving to another continent and where the language around me isn’t the one I dream in, it’s had particular value.

But… I know better.

Facebook’s sole interest in keeping your information private begins and ends with keeping you around so that they can sell your attention and your data. (This is the same, let’s face it, for any “free” service provider – *ahem* Google *cough*) If the pull of the relationships you’re maintaining is much stronger than your desire to keep your information private – or if the policy is confusing enough that you think your information is private when it isn’t – you’ll stick around, and they can continue doing whatever they do with your data. And given that they change their privacy policies on a daily basis, well, generally, Facebook wins that battle.

I’m a smart girl – I know better – and yet I know I’ll lose touch with some people I adore when I leave.

It’s not their fault – life is incredibly busy, and while you may love browsing the pictures of your high school locker partner when you can do it casually, contacting her directly is work. After a long day of work and kids and commutes and blah blah blah, who needs more work? Sometimes, reading a whole blog post seems like work.

Of course, that’s probably because we’ve all had our attention spans shattered by reading mass quantities of Twitter and Facebook updates. I find myself skimming posts because of it that I would have read before. In fact, I’m going to be shocked if anyone reads this far.

But.

Rationality has to win out eventually. I hope – I sincerely hope – friends will still make contact with me once I’ve deleted my Facebook account tonight. I know lots of folks will try to talk me out of it, but it’s the right thing to do. Call it reallocation of attention and an attempt to control which information Facebook owns about me in the future.

(N.B. Even if Facebook claims (and I don’t know that they even do) to delete all information associated with an account, one would be a fool to believe they actually do.)

Look, as a person, I’m actually not all that private, but I am intensely aware of what I make public when I tweet or post here. But because Facebook feels like you’re having private conversations with your closest 300 friends, you tend to have the private conversations you wouldn’t have on public channels. And Facebook has – and keeps – all of that information.

Not good.

It’s the price you’re paying to chat with your bandmate from senior year.

So: much as I am going to miss contact with friends, I’m deleting my account. I need – and want – to reallocate my attention away from Facebook.

I’m not disappearing from the Internet – I’m not even completely avoiding Short Attention Span Theater (i.e. I’ll still be on Twitter) – but I’m going to delete my Facebook account for good.

So, old pals, if you’ve read this far (or you find this post later) and you still want to find me…

Blog: http://blog.kgrothoff.org
Website: http://kgrothoff.org
Email: krista at kgrothoff dot org
Twitter: @kristamonster

Skype and RL phone calls on request (the latter cost me nothing in a large part of the world), snail mail address available if you email me.

I’ll delete the account late tonight CEST. I have very mixed feelings, but I’ve been threatening to do this for more than a year and never go through with it. No, I don’t think I’m so important that this has a major impact on anyone’s life, but there are some beloved people with whom I have only maintained contact with through Facebook that I don’t want to disappear from without a trace.

N.B. I’m well aware there are other alternatives developing out there – Diaspora, for one. We’ll see. And Twitter has its own issues, but that’s for another post.

With apologies to the entire southeastern United States for the title

Seems like the only time I post these days is when something that’s been brewing in my head for months or years comes together as poorly-written prose, but I promise, I’m not getting all weird on anybody. Well, not any weirder than usual.

I work full time and, like a lot of people, I have this second job^[1]when I get home. I’m fortunate enough to live with my best friend, so it’s not as if I have no one outside of work to talk to, but sometimes I have something I simply need to core dump that I’d rather not dump directly on the few external contacts I have at the moment.

And so it ends up here.

If my blatherings annoy you, the great thing about the Internet is that you can just stop reading. But rest assured, I’m not going nuts on anybody… sometimes, I just have stuff I need to say out loud, so to speak. This is as good a place as any.

1. ^[1] ↩

This started as a larger post about something bigger, but I think this is really what I’ve wanted to say on the subject, and the rest of it belongs somewhere else. Bear with me if you want, ignore if you don’t. My posts are too long-winded to read in the Twitter/Facebook world anyway, so I won’t be offended.

On forgetting, forgiveness, and having a number of cheeks less than five

I wish I could remember the exact quote, because I think it’s a really important point with respect to the idea that one must forgive and forget – but basically, it goes something like this: “Forgiveness is one thing; but if someone says you have a chip on your shoulder because you haven’t forgotten, they say that because you remembering is inconvenient to them.”

There’s a reason we remember things, even long after having forgiven or reconciled them. I think people can forget one-or-two time events, but they’re less likely to forget patterns of behavior. I don’t see how you can call that anything other than a survival mechanism; there’s a quote we’ve all heard attributed to a ton of people (Einstein, Kipling, Rita Mae Brown^[1]): “This brings us to the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” I find it to be equally true that expecting someone to behave differently when there has been a long-standing, consistent pattern of behavior is, at best, a vain hope.

I have been forgiven in my life by many people, often when I didn’t deserve it. I fully recognize that people who forgive my more persistent personality quirks and failings are not pretending that whatever I’ve done hasn’t happened and that it will not happen again; rather, they accept that those things are part of who I am and 1) expect me to try to rein them in, 2) simply don’t let them bother them, or 3) expect that I will not/cannot rein them in and, if they find that unacceptable, avoid me.

I don’t get to choose which path they take. If I were to try to force a path on them – and I do not – I should fully expect that they will eventually get to option 3.

(Note: I try, very seriously, to work towards reining my own quirks in, even if the people in my life don’t always mind them.)

I cannot, however, expect people to forget things I may have done that hurt them in the past, regardless of whether or how they forgive me. No one has that right.

I can ask for forgiveness, but memories are part of what defines us, even when we don’t want them. They tell us someone can be trusted with our deepest hearts, or perhaps should not be. They tell us someone is dependable – or not. They teach us what we will accept from others in the future, and they give us hints about how to – and how not to – treat other people based upon how we felt in similar situations. Memories create both empathy and caution, and without those things, we would all hurt and be hurt over the same things again, and again, and again.

We’d all probably be psychotic, frankly.

So, sure, please do turn the other cheek – for as many cheeks as you have to spare. But you should neither kick nor let yourself be kicked in the head repeatedly.

Now, before you get the wrong idea, let me state very clearly that I believe in forgiveness.

Let me say that again – I believe in forgiveness. And I do forgive.

I think in holding grudges, in containing hatred and fear and disgust, you do little more than poison yourself. I think it’s important to try to understand why someone is they way he or she is, to try to understand the roots of their behavior, and to try to empathize with whatever they may have been through that made them that way. Forgiveness costs you nothing, I promise you.

And sometimes forgetting is worth it too.

But if you wipe the slate of memories clean every time you walk away from someone who either cannot or will not stop doing something that damages you – and you can do this, to a certain extent – then every time you come back to that person, if you do come back, you may find yourself in a sick cycle of rediscovery. Worse, you will find yourself reacting in ways you may no longer understand because you’ve pushed the context off into a corner of your head – the events don’t disappear when you try to wipe them away, and really, neither do the memories, no matter how much you may want them to.

And eventually, you will stop trying to forget because it is not in your interest to do so.

Puppies eventually cringe at the sight of newspapers, if you’re that kind of owner.

I let events from my past be rewritten again and again and again to the point that for certain periods of my life, I only had displaced memories of emotions and the consequences of events, but never of the events themselves. I was totally complicit in this, because I didn’t want to be the one accused of carrying a chip on my shoulder (as I was every time I reacted to anything), and frankly, because I wanted to move on. Letting my life be defined by memories of tough times wasn’t convenient for me either.

And then I started my own family.

Suddenly, it wasn’t about whether or not I could pretend. It was about whether or not I could be different from my past. I have a responsibility to people other than myself to be as good as the best of my examples and better than the worst of them.

I am not going to place blame or shame for things that happened when I was younger. What would be the point? I even understand why they happened. I always have, even if others involved would never give me credit for that.

I forgive most of it, if forgiveness is even necessary.

But the past did happen. Even if that is inconvenient to everyone involved. And some of us – those of us, for example, who now have to be parents and spouses and friends – now inherit the burden of making lessons of it for ourselves, for taking the paths that were good and ignoring – or even fighting – the paths that were bad. And we also have to take care of ourselves, in that we have to recognize when someone is going to hurt us, to take advantage of us, to cause us damage.

John Waters made the comment in an interview I watched recently^[2] that you can blame your parents until you’re 30, but after 40, you need to stop whining and get on with it – after that, the die is cast and you deal with your lot. And he’s right.

I don’t think it’s that simple, and it takes some people longer than others, but I think the sentiment is the right one if you want to have a good life before you drop dead. If you want to make the most of what you’ve got left.

I think you can extend that idea to a lot of things, not just parents. You can extend it to bullies and bad breaks early in your career and exes and a lot of other things sufficiently distant in the past that the only good they really serve is to hand you a lesson from which you really need to move on.

My take on it is that at a certain point, if you’re still stuck in the miserable cycle of your youth or young adulthood with someone, you eventually have to simply start parenting yourself and get it over with, because no one else is going to. Not whoever you have standing in as a mother/father figure, not your spouse, and not your parents, no matter how much you love or respect them. No matter how much you want something from any of those people that they can’t give you.

Sounds creepy, I know, but really – at some point, you, as the adult, have to sit down with the little girl or boy in your head and do what you’d do with any kid you’d give advice to. If you have to sit down with the miserable 16-year-old you were and say, “look, this too will pass, it isn’t all your fault, and by the way, what Person X said about you is utter bullshit,” then do it. Even if Person X happens to be your actual parent.

It took me until I was 35 to do that. And the consequences of that upset some people, understandably, because suddenly, I was behaving differently. But for me, it was the freedom to define myself, finally. I was totally complicit in letting other people define me, and I still fight with that constantly, but the only way to stop that is to do it yourself.

You are not going to be able to stop other people from acting in ways that are part of their nature, or part of the dysfunctional cycle you’ve had going on with them for decades, or whatever. You may not even be able to stop yourself. The only power – and the main responsibility – you have is to try to deal with your part in the deal.

And part of that, often, involves not forgetting.

Even when it is inconvenient.

Good Lord, turning 40 is turning me maudlin and preachy. Next year, I start shaking my fist at the kids on the lawn. And I fully expect them to remember me doing it.

1. ^[1] see http://www.quotationspage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=282 ↩
2. ^[2] http://bigthink.com/ideas/24048 ↩

It occurs to me that there is almost certainly no German equivalent for the English phrase, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”^[1]

And that would be because here in Germany, there isn’t.

There is one, and only one, right way to do something. All other methods of getting something done are sloppy, inferior, or, quite possibly, don’t happen, even if you see them happen in front of your nose.

Now, much to the chagrin of people who talk to me, um, ever, my favourite example for almost anything stereotypically German is my mother-in-law — she is so German she makes normal Germans look, well, un-German, so it’s hard to resist. And she yet again fails to disappoint as an example here.

One day, when my in-laws were on one of their visits where I was unfortunate enough to still be in town, my in-laws came by while we were still eating dinner.

My MIL looked at us with big round eyes, astounded.

“What is THAT?!?!!??”

I had expected there to at least be a naked man or something in the kitchen, but, um, no.

She was apparently referring to food.

I looked at the table. There sat a dish my husband has made in her house since, approximately, the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. It couldn’t have been that surprising.

“Chicken curry,” I said, shrugging and going back to eating.

“No it isn’t!!!!” she insisted, her eyes still as round as saucers and her countenance slightly… offended?

“Yes, it is,” I said, perplexed, and went back to eating. I do try to ignore her, folks. I really, really do.

“No,” she insisted. “THAT,” she said, pointing to a dish on the stove, “is not chicken curry.”

“Ah, that,” I said, nodding toward the coffee cake I’d baked earlier that day. “That’s a coffee cake.”

“No, that can’t be.”

I raised my eyebrow at her. “It certainly is…”

“No, it can’t be. I’m quite certain that no one in Germany… what KIND of coffee cake is it?”

I am used to these bizarre conversations where she won’t believe water is wet if I say it is, but they tire me. If just having her in my kitchen is an insult to my intelligence, you can imagine why they are cordially invited to stay in a hotel when they visit.

So I sighed, poking at my dinner. “Yeast coffee cake. With streusel. Very normal.”

Her eyes got round again.

You’d have thought I’d just revealed that I was dabbling in prostitution for extra cash.

(Note to self: remember to casually drop line about prostitution into conversation next time I am forced to talk to ILs.)

“But… but…” she spluttered. “I am QUITE certain – QUITE certain – that no one in Germany would ever make a coffee cake in THAT. That would never happen, I am sure of it.”

All I could think was, “Are you shitting me?”

See, we moved to Germany with almost nothing and inherited a lot of dishes from excess parental supply/dead grandmothers/overzealous Schnäppchenjagd (bargain hunting with a fearsome German flavor) at the Aldi. It was like the usual hodge-podge of cast-offs your typical grad student has in his kitchen before he is flush enough to acquire quality kitchenware.

Big. Fucking. Deal. We’re flexible. We go with the flow.

But see, I had made a coffee cake in – horror of horrors – a casserole dish. As one does, when one does not have a cake or loaf pan. It tasted great.

It was also, apparently, an abomination. My mother-in-law blathered about this for a bit, boggling the crap out of my mind, and then looked at me oddly.

“Can I have some?”

She took a bite. Apparently it didn’t offend, though she didn’t say so.

This was then followed by, “I didn’t know you liked yeast cake! I like yeast cake,” said in a tone of voice that said I had somehow offended her by deigning to have preferences she hadn’t already decided I had, and worse that they agreed with hers.

And then, “But I’m quite sure no one in Germany would EVER make a cake in that!!!”

I just did, lady. Check the map.

I place this under failure of imagination.

Now before I make a broad generalisation about an entire culture, let me just state that I am not making a broad generalisation about an entire culture. Which I am, but, well, I’m not.

I work in academia, where a failure of imagination can be fatal. My colleagues aren’t really like this. Many younger people aren’t like this. I suspect most Germans in creative professions aren’t like this. I just run into this mentality so often when I’m out and about in the world that it’s impossible not to note its ubiquity.

So to all Germans who are flexible, creative, open-minded, I am really sorry about this post. I like you. You can come over for casserole-dish coffee cake any time. I promise coffee is served in actual coffee cups. Or possibly tea cups. You can adjust, I’m sure.

BUT:

When I revealed to a (very nice) gentleman of about my age that I make a horrible housewife, so I am not one, and I certainly don’t iron, he looked totally confused.

“Yes, of course, but ironing must happen.”

Nuh-uh. Not at my house.

It was implied in his shrug of understanding that ironing happens anyway, and that it happens through the power of me, though I also work full time, just as my husband does. If this is the case, I presume my hired elves^[2] do it while we sleep. It must, because ironing not happening is impossible.

(Don’t get me started on ironing – I’ve watched the neighbor women iron the family underwear outside on sunny days, and let me just say, before you get any ideas, that we Grothoffs? We wear wrinkled underwear. Totally unironed. How’s that for abomination, Germany?)

I CAN iron. I don’t. I tend to burn myself and it takes me too long. So it does NOT, in fact, happen.

Failure of imagination.

And then – and this was related to me by my husband after his last trip up to visit with Torsten – my MIL sliced her hand open on a small sharp knife which was pointing up in the silverware container of the dishwasher. My husband suggested, wisely, that she load them point-down, as we do, to avoid mutilation. She responded immediately, still bleeding, rejecting the idea – this is not done because it will break the silverware container.

Yes, because a silverware container is harder to replace than a hand.

Failure of imagination.

Wearing a ripped T-shirt as a pajama top? Nooo. Ripped clothes are horrifying! (Note that worn T-shirts make great soft pajamas for little boys who get bad eczema and are uncomfortable at night.)

Eating a piece of bread with two hands because there’s something on it which is threatening to fall off? Noooo. We eat bread with one hand. Always. That is the one true way.

I use my detachable bicycle basket, often, to bring stuff in to the office. It’s convenient. And on the way home, I use it to pick up groceries when I pick my bike up at the station. I don’t know why, but the fact that I have it with me but did not bike to work (only as far as the station before I took the bus) always throws people. I don’t understand what’s so weird about that – it’s just functional. It’s intended for carrying things, and I use it for stuff. It doesn’t have to have a predefined single use. It’s not like I’m using it as a toilet.

There is exactly one way to skin a cat, eat bread, load a dishwasher, care for your clothes, teach your children, live your life.

You go to school, get degrees, get a job for life, retire, and take a lot of vacations. That is how it is supposed to be, and if you’ve done anything else, something is wrong.

Except that for my generation, things are changing – people don’t generally have lifetime jobs because the world doesn’t work that way anymore. And so maybe there’s hope, born of necessity.

But even with that kind of change, for someone who has led a flexible, varied life, Germany is a real challenge. This is a hard place to be creative – it can be narrow, critical and aggressive – and I admire the people who manage in spite of it. Because in Germany, there is exactly one way to skin a cat, and there are people who are remarkably confused – sometimes even unnecessarily hostile – if you do it a different way.

1. ^[1] Edit: 9/23/11 – I stand by what I’ve said here, but it appears that a nearly identical idiom to “All roads lead to Rome” (“Viele Wege führen nach Rom“) does exist. I’m just not convinced many people here believe it ↩
2. ^[2] Possibly this one – He broods, irons and slays beasts on the balcony. ↩

1. I’m done with the GOOG, at least as far as leaving the email there.
   krista at kgrothoff dot org OR krista at cerias dot net, please. Yes, I know I can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but I can at least not let a new one out so easily. Reasons include, but are definitely not limited to this and this.
2. Google+, which I hadn’t invested myself in, ain’t happening. I have a profile. I’ll probably delete the profile. If Google doesn’t do it first. (See links above.)
3. Facebook, I’m sorry, but I’m probably on the way out there too, sometime next week anyway. I’ll look in occasionally and I’ll import my blog posts, but I won’t check it very often. I debated reimporting comments here, but that would violate a lot of people’s sense of privacy, so if you want me to see comments soon, put them on the blog directly.
4. I left GoDaddy. Aside from the ummmm… in-your-face advertising, the site itself was about as appealing as a malware site – and looked like one. My old domain, kgrothoff.net, is still there, but should point here to kgrothoff.org in the next day or two.
5. Blog is now at blog.kgrothoff.org. The old address should point to it soon – site there is broken until DNS propagates.
6. New main website to come here also. Sometime. When I get around to it.
7. If you’re all lucky, there’ll be more cute preschooler pictures here soon. If you’re not lucky, you’ll see pictures taken and posted by a cute preschooler of his folks passed out in the living room, exhausted, probably in their underwear. Not pretty. Not at all.

That’s all. Never was all that impressed with the Cloud, and am now less so, luddite that I am.

Me: The other train driver will probably get mad and tell him to get off. Train drivers aren’t supposed to sit on each other.

Torsten: Unless they want to, Mama. Then they can do it.

Me: (pause)

Me: You’re exactly right, Torsten. Then it’s just fine.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kiddo was only tired the last little bit, and there was a long stretch at the airplane museum in the middle.

I don’t think I had a real bike until I was nearly six, and I wasn’t very steady on it until a while later. Not that T is ready for the training wheels to come off, but for day 2, I’m pretty impressed. I’m glad we got that Laufrad for him… his balance is really great because of it (you were right, Samer!)!

So, this week, kiddo:

1. Magically decides to be potty trained. Three accidents, none of the truly disgusting kind, and is suddenly excited about underwear. (He has been refusing up to this point.) Sneaks off to the bathroom to poop, comes back all proud. Can I tell you how nice it is not to change those diapers?
2. Sits down, messing around, and types his own name on the computer, without help, while we aren’t looking.
3. Writes his name, which is long, with just a little help on the S’s and N’s. Yeah, I don’t care if your kid has been writing since he was two. This is awesome, and nyahh nyahh nyahh (Competitive parents drive me bats. We’re just proud of T when he makes leaps, and this week has been a big one for him).
4. Rides a mamatruckin’ bicycle. Like, a real one.

I love my kid. Hard to believe three-and-a-half years ago he was half this size and newly-born. He amazes me constantly.

Also? He is the funniest person in the world. Nyahh nyahh.

Mostly, this was because it suited a scene I was writing.

Part of it was simply because I really like it. And sometimes I give in and let myself drown in a piece of music for a while. Not that often, and certainly less often than I should. (It’s one of the few vices I’ve ever really allowed myself, and even then… I don’t play anything anymore, even though I miss being a musician almost every day of my life to the point where it palpably hurts. But that is another story entirely.)

But partly… partly it was because of memories.

And memories are hard for me these days.

The memories here, specifically, are warm, fuzzy, good memories. Sitting in my dad’s study while he was in grad school, listening to him practice classical guitar. Canarios. The Harmonious Blacksmith. Asturias. He would learn to play them again later, after years of career and strife, but in those days, my young father would sit with me in his study and play, and in my mind, at least, all was warm and loving and good, in the way things usually are to three- and four- and five-year-olds (not perfect – I remember other things too – but still good). I would read or draw pictures with his stencils, and he would play. And we would talk, and listen to John Denver. He spent long hours with me – my mom worked nights – and we were best buddies.

I have loved classical guitar ever since.

I don’t play guitar very well – my parents decided I would play the piano (a joke, with my small hands) – but in my head, I know every note of those songs.

Later it would be my brother who played the guitar, who knew the feel of those songs in his hands, but they are forever in my head. In my soul.

And so when I bought Garrett’s Rock Symphonies, Asturias was a surprise. It wasn’t so much that it sounded like my father playing – it doesn’t. My father’s Asturias is more like John Williams, and this version is like what John Williams would probably sound like if you set him on fire and gave him a violin. (Note: Please do not set John Williams on fire. He is just fine the way he is.) But the memories are there anyway, in every note.

My son is just now at the age where I spent a great deal of time with my dad, and I think we have a very similar relationship, in the best sense. We spend a lot of time together, and explore the world together, and I really deeply enjoy the person he is. When I was his age, I felt like my dad really enjoyed who I was too, constantly amazed or amused by some little thing I’d done. At least, that’s how he made me feel.

And so the fact that I’m able to pass on that part of my childhood is all for the good.

The hard part is this – estrangement does more than solidify the future; it also paints parts of the past you’d never anticipate.

I haven’t spoken to my parents in four years now. The details aren’t important, other than to say the last words I heard from my father were to never to contact him again, and I have rebuffed any of my parents’ efforts to contact me, as there were implicit conditions on the continuation of our relationship that were (and are) untenable. And so I had to bite my lip and let it go.

Mostly, it’s been for the better.

But there are moments where it hurts almost unbearably. We don’t live in Munich proper, but out in a suburb next to farms and fields, and so sometimes, particularly if Torsten and I are walking at night, the stars are absolutely brilliant, and we talk about them. And tell stories. My father and I used to lie out on the lawn in Salt Lake and do the same things, and every time Torsten and I do this, I can’t help but remember. And just being with Torsten makes me remember all sorts of things that were cherished parts of my childhood – late-night walks to the 7-11 for Rocky Road Ice Cream bars, making paper-tube marble tracks in the basement, watching sing-along shows (does anyone else remember Tony Salatan?), and listening to my dad play guitar. (N.B. It isn’t that I don’t remember or didn’t love my mom; she worked a lot, though, as I recall, or maybe she just didn’t play as actively with me. I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. My dad had an enormous impact on me though, and as a young child, it made me feel loved and safe and good.)

The problem with an estrangement, though, is that you find yourself wondering if you even have the right to remember those things fondly. If a decision you’ve made (or that was made for you; it’s a point that can be argued, although I unequivocally and irrevocably set the ball in motion) causes others pain, do you really have a right to remember the good times and smile? Is it even possible to?

Intellectually, I don’t feel guilty about it – sad, certainly, especially when my son asks me about my mama and papa, but it was a long time in coming for many reasons. I feel bad for everybody involved, but it is possible to feel bad about something and also understand it has to be that way. But it’s important to remember that my parents aren’t the people they were at 25 anymore than I am the person I was at 18. Maybe I can still celebrate and miss my young parents without feeling like that means I have to regret my decisions now. (I don’t, for the record, but nothing really prepares you for this situation in life.)

At some point, I am going to have to come to terms with the ambiguity. Life is not black and white, and people aren’t either. I feel fortunate to at least have that piece of reality down. And I am going to have to be able to rejoice in the good parts (the stars, Asturias) and try very hard not to pass on the bad ones, even if one hurts and the other is hard. My son deserves both, and maybe so do I.

Whew. That didn’t quite go where I intended it to, though some of it has been rolling around in my head for a while.

Time to listen to the rest of the album and get back to happy fun novel writing.

Mr. Garrett, please send warning if you do Canarios.

For example, child has figured out that Mama and Papa’s carefully-crafted “you’re in trouble” façades are, in fact, just that. Or at least he’s figured out how to change “you’re in trouble” to “you’re really funny”.

This morning, when a very very sick Mama was struggling to get Torsten dressed, Torsten did not want to get dressed. Mama came back from England two days ago and Torsten would much rather hang out and play with Mama.

And so I made a sad face, the one I make when I’ve had to tell him to do something one-too-many times and I realize he’s not listening to my voice anymore.

Torsten: Mama, don’t cry…

Me: Ok, I’m not crying. I’m just sad.

Torsten: Shh… shhh… don’t be sad. Shhh… don’t be sad Mama.

Me: <sad face>

Torsten: Don’t be sad, Mama… Think about BRAINS!

(N.B. Torsten is on a Zombie kick after hearing Jonathan Coulton’s “Re: Your Brains“. He’s only ever heard the chorus, but that is apparently enough…)

Me: *snort* *chortle* *laugh*

Torsten: *victorious face*

Keep in mind, my child is not even three yet.

We are so screwed.

I love it.