8.22.16

If I am an angel, 

then it is a fallen one.

 If I have a heart to give,

 it is broken scarred.

 If I hold tenderness,

 it is at the cost of fealty. 

If I am loyal,

Then my soul wonders.

how did I get this way

How did I get this way, you ask?  How did I become the woman who can't believe anyone would choose her?  Who, despite being confident that she is amazing, strong, independent, and capable, cannot imagine a partner loving her? To answer this question, we have to go back.  Way back.

Enter a tow-head blonde girl-child; curious, outspoken, intelligent.  She wants more than dolls, and doesn't care about getting dirty.  She doesn't understand the jokes; her brain isn't wired to comprehend humor made at the expense of others.  The other girls shun her; she's too much of a tomboy.  The boys don't understand her; she doesn't seem to play by the same rules as her female peers.  They tease her for being quiet, for being kind, for being smart.

Along the way, she discovers that some children have two parents.  She doesn't, and she asks her mother why.  Her mother is honest and straight forward.  She says that she never asked him to stay; that she was prepared to raise a child alone, but that he did try for a while, to be a dad.  When pressed, her mother says he left.

These are the first seeds of self doubt...other children had fathers.  They stayed.  Why not hers?  What had she done? Over the years, this grows to become "Wasn't I worth staying for?", becomes "Men leave me", becomes "I'm not worth staying for". 

Enter middle school and Phys Ed and dances.  Enter scenarios of being the last one picked on the teams, the one no one wants on their team.  The failure.  The outcast.  Enter boys playing cruel jokes by pretending to like her, asking her to the dance, only to turn and say "Just kidding!  Haha!  Why would anyone want to go to the dance with you!?  You're so ugly!".  Enter girls doing the same;  "Why would I be your friend??"

Now she believes that she is not worth staying for, and that affection and interest put forth is untrustworthy; unreliable, untrue.  That men and women feign kindness and friendship, only to pull it out from beneath her feet when she finally believes it.

Yet I was raised to believe in myself, and I have people who love me...they just don't Love me.

So you ask how I became this way?  Why it is so hard for me to imagine someone could want me? Why even when someone is putting forth all the signs that they want to be with me, I doubt, I disbelieve?

Now you know.

Love

Love is a lot of things.  It comes in as many shades of color as the spectrum...and I mean the full, ultraviolet to infrared and everything in-between spectrum.


There are a few things that love definitely is and that love isn't.

For one thing, I don't care what kind of pansy-ass froo froo white lace and promises, catch-the-bouquet sort of rose-colored spectacles you look at love through, it is NOT always patient.  Sometimes what Love wants, Love gets and it's getting it NOW dammit, come hell or high water!  Of course, if it doesn't get it right away it doesn't give up either.  In that respect, Love is patient if you mean "patient" as in "hard-headedly persistent".

Love isn't always kind either.  Sometimes Love is downright mean.  True Love gives you what you need more than what you want.  Sometimes what you need is a good hard kick in the ass.  Chances are, when you get it, it'll be someone who dearly loves you that delivers the blow. 

One thing Love definitely is, is forgiving.  Heck, I might go so far as to say that Love IS forgiveness.  Love is when you just can't stay mad at your best friend, or your mom, or your sibling.  Love is when your kid scribbles on the wedding dress you made yourself and you're so mad you could chew up Hot Wheels cars and spit out Jacks, but you see the look on their face just from them knowing they're in poor favor at that moment and your heart breaks and you forgive them faster than you can say Spaghetti-Os.

Love is knowing when what you have to give isn't what someone needs and letting them go because of it.

It's knowing when what you have to say is exactly what they need to hear, even if it's difficult for you to say it...and it's knowing when what someone is saying is exactly what you need to hear, even if you don't like the words.

Love is doing and saying for the greater good, regardless of personal ideals.

Eir?

I get a lot of questions about the name Eir.  What does it mean? Where is it from?  How is it pronounced?

I know the answer to the first two, and I know how I personally pronounce it and how my parents pronounced it, but I'm thinking that most people would probably not want to have to pronounce it at all.

It is Norse.  The basic meaning is Mercy.  The origin is from the Poetic Edda and refers to one of the "maidens" sitting gladly at the knee of Mengloth. 

Eir herself is thought to be either another name for the Goddess Frigg, or originally a Valkyrie.

Ok so here's where my problems with men begin.

Valkyries went around the battlefield, gathering the souls of the dead warriors and ushering them to Valhalla, that's pretty much known.  So what would a Valkyrie of mercy do?  Let them live you say?  Think again.  It was merciful to die on the battlefield rather than live and go home disfigured and/or disabled.  So if you're a Norse warrior  and you're lying there on the battlefield, injured but not dead, and a Valkyrie comes along, the merciful thing to do to you would be to finish you off so you could go on to Valhalla.

Do you see the problem here?

I've basically been named after a Valkyrie who was possibly the Slayer of Wounded Men.

Not something good for your dating life really.

Bulldozer

I live out in the country.  There are houses near me; I'm not in total seclusion, but no one really drives down my road unless you live on it because it doesn't GO anywhere.  It starts at the main road and loops through the mountains and back to the main road again.  That's pretty much it.  So you get used to seeing the same cars drive past, or maybe "vehicles" is a better term.

I would say you get used to the same "vehicles" because its not just cars and trucks.  I've seen people tooling down my road in cars, trucks, trailers, dirtbikes, ATVs, tractors, a Bobcat, riding lawn mowers, and yesterday, a bulldozer.

Yes, bulldozer.  The first time it drove past, I thought "huh, someone must be doing work on their property".  The second time it drove past, I watched more closely and wondered if they were having trouble finding where they were supposed to go.  The third, fourth and fifth time it drove past, I knew the guy must be lost, looking for someone's house.

Then, the 7th time he drove past, he stopped.  In front of MY house.

I tried to peek out the window without looking like the creepy lady peeking out the window, except that's pretty much what I was.

After a few minutes, two dump trucks also showed up, and I swear, just like a Clown Car, about eight guys climbed out of the cab of one truck and three out of the other.  All eleven of them stood in the road watching the guy in the bulldozer.  They walked over to the edge of my property, looked at some drainage ditches, walked to the other side, pointed, talked, then watched the bulldozer guy dig a six inch hole in a random spot, stood around in the road for a few more minutes, got back in their Clown Car Dump Trucks, and left.

Yeah, I don't know either, but that's the sort of crap that happens out here.

Election Day 2012

First and foremost, I'm hoping that no one reading this blog is expecting any quality writing.  You might check my short stories, essays or poetry for that, but not here.  Here I just ramble.  Here is where I open the gates and let whatever comes, come.

When I can remember my password.

You're not supposed to keep a list of passwords, you're not supposed to use the same one for everything, you're not supposed to make it easy to figure out.

Ok, then how am I supposed to remember it?

Sure, I can go through the whole retrieval process, answer questions, give my email.  "How many toes are on your left foot?" a question only I know the answer to, and now I feel I must share that it is FIVE because otherwise you're going to think its six or four or heaven forbid, one.

Once I've jumped through the appropriate password retrieval hoops, it doesn't actually GIVE me my old password, it makes me create a new one.  Except it won't let me make one that I've used before, so every time I forget a password, I have to come up with one further and further from that "reference point" that we all use. "KittyBum21" or "KittyTushi21", etc. (disclaimer: I do not use those).  So now I have to come up with something like "DontForgetThisYouIdiot11" or "YourStupidPassword11" (I do not use these either).

What does this constant branching -out mean?

It means I'm guaranteed to forget my password the next time I need to log onto my blog, resulting in yet another festival of frustration.

*sigh*

Really, Nature?

Nature is all about survival, I get that.  We want sex so we'll procreate.  We're more attracted to people who are healthy, and blah blah.  Even our taste buds help us survive.  We like sweet and can taste sweet.  Some animals can't, like cats.  Cats can't taste sweet, and for good reason.  I mean how often is a mouse or a bug sweet?  Why would you need to taste sweet if you just eat meat?

Anyway, so we can taste things and some chemical compounds of food taste different ways; pleasing, not pleasing, all that.  Like bitter.

Bitter is what most poisons are.  We taste bitter and we go "ew" and spit it out.  Or at least, that's the theory.  Here's my problem with that: taste buds for bitter are in the BACK of your throat, so you take a bite of something poisonous and as you SWALLOW, you taste bitter!  By then, its too late!  You're already going to DIE!

Really, nature?