auntie to the 19th power

#19

portland, oregon welcomed a new citizen 2 weeks ago when my brother jay and his beeyooteefull wife had their first baby.  he’s pretty cute and, judging from his parents, will only get cuter.  my brother posted a cute little video of the new baby boy max hiccupping while my brother giggles like a school girl in the background.  classic jay.  and little max makes 19, 19 nieces and nephews.  since i was 11 months old i’ve been an aunt and the older i get the more i appreciate the differences and characteristics of these people my brothers and sisters have produced.  the oldest of the 19 even got married a little while ago.  married.  what. the. eff??  talk about making me feel not only old, but like the biggest loser ever.  my nephew, 11 months my junior, beat me to the altar.  so not fair.

speaking of nephews, i like to try to take my sister jen’s 2 sons out for little trips and whatnot.  they’re the perfect ages (10 and 12) although they are definitely mature for their ages.  they don’t whine or complain or cry.  like when i took them to six flags discovery kingdom in vallejo last year, they were perfect!  they didn’t bitch or moan or beg for anything.  they are polite, but fun, you know?  and this is coming from me, a chick aspiring to never have kids of her own.  i don’t love kids, i just love certain kids.  i love those two boys.  so since the oldest of the two was out of town for spring break, i took the younger one to the movies.  originally i wanted to take them both to a skate park that sounded super awesome over in santa cruz, but their mom, my sister, thought it might not be a good idea since they’re still young and the kids at the park might pick on them for not being “local.”  i get it– kids in santa cruz can be on weird side.  so, the nephew chose to see “knowing,” partly because it was the only choice beside the hannah montana movie that wasn’t rated r.  i thought “knowing” might be creepy and it totally was.  i hate creepy/scariness because i totally internalize movies like that until i convince myself that whatever horrible disaster is torturing the characters in the  movie will soon effect moi.  so the nephew told everybody the next day that “auntie cait cried.”  first off, i didn’t cry from fear, i teared up when nicholas cage had to leave his son, ok?  it was kinda sad!  i did however hide behind my hands everytime those creepy staring guys showed up.  whatev, nate, i’m not ashamed.

weezer said it best...

i’m surprised i had any tears left in my eyeballs anyway.  i spent the whole previous weekend bawling my eyes out while watching movies.  “seven pounds” tore me up so bad the boyfriend was looking at me like i had lost my damn mind.  but, hello?  that movie is effing sad!!  i cried so hard that i gave myself a nasty headache.  then i watched “bobby,” a movie about robert f. kennedey’s assassanation.  i cried because of what america lost that day.  he was a revolutionary, he was obama but 40 years early.  i guess the country wasn’t ready for him.  but i cried because i felt the loss, i cried because he could have been great.  i cried because he was taken too soon.  i cried for my country.  then after i watched “milk” (finally) and felt the loss of harvey milk, a man who did such great things for the gay community, but who was still too radical in 1978 for some people.  what would he think of the progress that’s been made?  or would he see how far there is still to go?  i cried for him and for george moscone and for the people those men inspired and for those he didn’t get to inspire because dan white ate some damn twinkies and got away with murder.  i had to ask my parents (born in 1940 and 1948, respectively) how did they live through those years?  i had to ask how they felt watching every single symbol for hope or change be gunned down before they could realized their dreams.  mlk

..."say it ain't soooooooo..."

jr, jfk, rfk, malcom x, harvey milk, john lennon.  it makes you appreciate pres. obama even more because he made it to the top, he followed in the footsteps of the great men who went before him and then kept going to create footsteps of his own.

it almost makes me want to cry.

the chronicles of caitlin

"these are my hands, these are my faults, these are my nasty little thoughts, i wrote them down for you to contemplate at a later date..." --stroke 9

i used to keep a journal.  i received my first real journal, like the first one i actually wrote in frequently, the one i wrote in until it was full, from my sister michelle when i was maybe 12.  i think mormons are into journaling for the same reason they’re into geneology– writing in a journal is considered keeping a personal history that your descendents can read and learn about you and your life, the times you lived in.  the problem is this: the crap i wrote about at that age (12-17) is useless.  honestly, it’s horribly embarrassing.  i’ve gone back to read old entries and i just want to reach back into time and punch my young self in the face.

i was so stupid… i didn’t have a clue about what’s important.  i would devote pages and pages to the d-bag boyfriend i thought i was so in love with from age 14 until the end of the journals.  i didn’t manage to get that a-hole out of my life until i was 20 years old.  god, that’s so embarrassing.  i wish i would have listened to my parents, to my mom specifically, and not wasted my youth being retarded over that guy.  in the end, he left me.  well, i left him, but wanted to get back together, but he met someone else and didn’t let me back.  that ate away at my soul for months– it was my main reason behind going to france for that study abroad program.  so, in a lot of ways he did me the biggest favor anybody could have, one i didn’t have in me to grant myself.

ugh.

i know the point of making mistakes is to learn from them, but i still find it painful to look back on all the time i spent toiling over him when i could have been with my friends or my family.  i would have taken the s.a.t.’s and applied to colleges if i hadn’t thought me and the d-bag were gonna live happily ever after together after i finished high school.  i could be a college graduate right now if it hadn’t been for him.  but those few months in paris changed my life in a lot of important ways and i wouldn’t have had the desire to go if i hadn’t been trying to run from something.  oh, well.  i know “time spent wishing is time wasted.”  i guess i wonder what my life would be like now if i had never met him or if had realized what he was sooner.  the mistakes i made with him and for him and over him brought me to where i am now, so would i change anything?

i’m happy with the boyfriend and i’m happy i went to paris.   but i do still wish i was done with college already.  i feel like i’m just adrift– nothing changes.  people who haven’t seen me in years will ask “where are you working?” “where do you live?” and i’m like, well, i still have the same job i had in high school and i still live at home with the ‘rents.  does that make me super lame or what?  should i feel like a huge underachiever?

so i guess this is my new journal.  i just hope that someday i can look back at these years of my life and feel pride or gladness or like it was time well spent.  i don’t want to wish i could go back in time just to slap my younger self silly.

do you have any regrets?

lost and found

the escapee

on sunday, charlie escaped.

he decided that the lady walking by the boyfriend’s mom’s condo with her baby in a stoller and leashed dog posed a threat to him and to the entire family and he needed to be the brave hero and save us all from… i don’t know.  but he did.

so he pushed the screen door open with his little flat face (someone *ahem* had not closed the door completely) and made a break for it.  the neighbor in the townhouse across the way apparently saw the fight my little a-hole dog was picking and managed to somehow capture him and put him in her fenced backyard.  i didn’t know any of this was going on as i was upstairs in the boyfriend’s room watching it’s always sunny in philadelphia dvds while indulging in my greatly deserved, in my opinion… and probably only in my opinion, sunday afternoon nap.  it wasn’t until my cell phone started ringing over and over (i ignored the first call because the caller id revealed a 1-866 number which i assumed to be a d-bag phone salesman hell bent on ruining my coveted sunday nap), but then i saw that this strange number had left a voicemail which i still chose to leave for later since i again assumed it was probably just blockbuster harrassing me about returning a dvd that, yes, is severely overdue, but honestly who the hell cares– blockbuster’s probably going the way of circuit city and tower records anyway so fuck off.  but then my dad’s name flashed on the screen and i love my daddy and don’t ignore his phone calls so i answered and dad said that home again pet recovery (the people whose microchip lives in my precious pooch’s neck fat) had called the house to alert me that charlie had been found.  well, i didn’t know charlie had been lost so the idea that he had been found seemed ludicrous and i immediately ran downstairs and interrogated the boyfriend about where the fuck is the dog, when was the last time you saw my dog and what do you mean you don’t know??!!

panic quickly replaced any semblance of rational thought even though the reality of the situation was that charlie had already been recovered- someone had already found him and called the home again people with his id number which he wears on a little yellow tag on his harness.  however, this fact did not comfort me.  rather i chose the hysterical mother whose child has been kidnapped and the kidnappers have just called to make their ransom demands route and acted accordingly: nutso.  i pretty much just hung up on my dad without thinking and tried with shaking hands through ragged sobs to dial the home again number from my voice mail, which had told me to select option 1.  well, i kept hitting 1 until the button practically jammed and i finally (it felt like minutes but it was literally seconds) got connected to an operator who i told my story to and charlie’s id number.  he then connected me to the lady who had charlie and i tried my best to keep calm as we spoke but my voice wouldn’t stop shaking and i was starting to panic even more because as the panic rose my irrational brain began to send me messages that this woman was not the good guy– she was the bitch who stole my fucking dog.

i wandered out the front door sort of aimlessly looking for the townhouse she said she lived in but i don’t live in the damn community so her telling me in her bitchy, exasperated, just-come-get-your-asshole-dog voice that she lived in townhouse number 2 wasn’t exactly helpful.  for all i knew townhouse number 2 could have been on frickin mars.  but this pretentious bitch acted like i must be a grade-a moron not to know exactly where her precious townhouse was located.  as it turned out, it was literally maybe 50 feet away.  i made the boyfriend go the door because by now i was not only puffy eyed, hysterical and barefoot (a la amy winehouse minus the crack addiction and enormous beehive), but also pissed off at this woman… that may have been an irrational reaction, but at the moment i couldn’t care less.

i. just. wanted. my. dog. back. now.

he did so and was led to the neighbor’s fence door and out came charlie all la-dee-dah, like, “oh hey guys what’s crackin?”  the boyfriend placed my beloved pug in my arms and i clutched him to my chest, buried my face in his neck and bawled.  i didn’t even take one look at the woman who pretty much saved my dog before rushing back into the house with my baby, ran upstairs to the boyfriend’s bed and sat rocking my dog back and forth in my arms while i cried and cried and kissed and hugged him until he started to wriggle, which made me squeeze him even tighter.  finally, i let him go, he gave me a look like i had lost my mind, which i guess i had for a while, and ran back down the stairs.

the whole thing lasted about 10 minutes.

i curled onto the bed and wept because i felt like part of my soul had been torn from me and because i knew that the whole thing could have gone down so differently.  what if someone had taken charlie’s harness off since he was just in the house and didn’t really need it on?  what if the dog he fought with (it wasn’t until the next day that i realized he had dried blood in his fur from a small puncture, probably from the other dog’s tooth, on his neck… it’s probably best that i didn’t notice the injury until the following day or it might have thrown me into another hysterical fit) had mauled my little dog who thinks he’s much bigger than he is?  what if that lady hadn’t called the home again service and just kept him or sold him?  what if he had run away farther to the busy street and been hit by a car?  what if i hadn’t gotten him back so soon, or not at all?

i’ve thought about the reality that dogs don’t live forever and wondered how i’m going to handle charlie’s eventual death (knock on wood, cross my fingers that that will not be for at least 10 to 15 years from now)… this incident suggests that i may not handle it so well.  i will most likely become a basketcase for at least a month, possibly requiring sedation or at least heavy doses of very strong anti-depressants.

so, yeah, luckily everything turned out fine, panic wasn’t exactly necessary, but for those minutes that i knew my dog was not with me i felt my life crashing around me.  i mean i always knew i loved my dog, but now i see how deep that love and devotion runs.  i need him.  he’s a source of comfort, a snuggle buddy, a friend i can talk to who always looks at you with sympathetic eyes.  dogs love you unconditionally and i realized that day how much i loved his squished face and bulgy eyeballs and the way he sneezes right in your face.  i never want to feel like that again, but i know i can’t be with him 24/7 and that someday i may have a new reason to panic.  hopefully next time i will not hyperventilate, but rather approach the situation more like the boyfriend who remained cool as a frickin cucumber, although at the time i accused him of not caring enough about the dog, but he was right because really he was never lost.

and i, for the first time in many many months, shot a little prayer up to god, thanking him for bringing my baby home safely.  and that microchip was the wisest investment i have ever made in my life.  if it weren’t for home again, well, i don’t want to think about that.  but thanks home again.  and neighbor lady i will bring you flowers this weekend to say thanks for rescuing my dog from a fight and getting him back to me, where he belongs.