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2003-05-31
Now, where was I before I so rudely interrupted myself? Ah, yes, the book review.
Dave Freer: The Forlorn
The last human colony planet hsa regressed to the technology level of 14th century Earth, and the alien, xenophobic Morkth invaders, armed with laser weapons and hover pads, are hunting for the scattered parts of the colony ship's matter transmitter. So the last remaining member of the original crew, now several centuries old, is gathering a strange mix of people to help him in his quest: finding all the scattered sections of the matter transmitter before the Morkth do. Part of his band are a renegade Morkth-bread human fighter, a spoiled princess, and a street urchin and thief who may also be one of the most well-read people on the whole planet.
Fortunately, what sounds like a cheesy treasure hunt turns out to be a little more than that. The plot, which leads that strange party through settings as different as a city state, a desert, a jungle, a fishing village, and a hunter's outpost, in fact plays only the second role in this character driven novel, giving priority to the three main characters and their development. Each of them gets an introductory chapter all to him- or herself, and due to their vastly different backgrounds those first three chapters also serve as an introduction into several different aspects of the world in which the action is set. The characters and the changes they go through during the treasure hunt are fleshed out in detail and utterly believable in their human-ness, with the possible exception of the thief boy, whose transformation is the greatest, and occasionally lacks the motivation to make those vast changes completely believable.
Despite that slight weakness, the book was an enjoyable read up until the end, which I felt was something of a letdown. Several events which are important for the continued existance of the human colony on the planet are mentioned almost in passing such that a less attentive reader is almost bound to miss them, while other events that have managed to take the focus of the plot away from the central treasure hunt are given much more attention. Still, I would recommend the book to anyone with some spare time due to the nice attention to the characters, even if "The Forlorn" wasn't a five star read for me due to the weak ending and plot.
2003-05-28
More Fun with my Uncle
When she came home late last evening, my wife announced that I would have to make any further trips to my uncle or grandma's apartment without her. Knowing how last weekend's little interlude had upset her and that she had been trying to phone up my uncle's spouse ever since, that came as no real surprise, although it saddened me all the same. But after what she told me from that phone conversation she'd had yesterday, I agree that any further exposure to my uncle would just serve to upset my wife even more.
According to his spouse my uncle is so lost in a world of self-pity that he is singularly unable to even recognize the simple fact that there may be other people with any kind of needs besides him, and that includes his spouse. For reasons I won't go into here but recognize and respect, she is unable and unwilling to do anything about that at the moment. Furthermore, always having possessed something of an egotistical streak, he basically views himself as the one legitimate heir of his mother with his children having some form of claim as well, and more or less completely fails to acknowledge the existence of his sister's children, namely my sister and myself, as far as receiving any non-monetary part of the heritage (like those vases and crockery from the last post) is concerned. I dimly suspected something like this, but seeing it confirmed is a small shock nonetheless.
We also learned that although he had told us the week before that he would prefer us to come on Saturday because he didn't want to deal with more grandma stuff on Sunday, he and my cousins were in grandma's apartment on Sunday. WTF? In light of what else we have learned I find it incredibly hard not to imagine some form of duplicity or at least double standard happening.
So we modified our resolution from the weekend to the following: Unless it is necessary for claiming our heritage or we have every reason to believe that things have changed with him, there will be exactly one more trip to my uncle, done by myself alone. I'll try to bring home the two crystal bowls and two crystal vases that we had selected for ourselves, forgoing everything else on our list. And I will take our portable photo copier with me and make copies of those certificates and notes reaching back into the 1830's.
Other than that, I'll just wait for the inherited money to arrive, after which point my uncle will more or less cease to exist for us. I realize this sounds harsh and egotistical, but we believe this to be the only course to protect us from further emotional harm in this matter. It also grieves me more than is apparent from these words, because I genuinely like the younger of my two cousins, I had hopes of healing the rift that had divided our familiy for decades, and my uncle's spouse seems to be a decent person as well, but I also know that under the current circumstances anything we attempted to do would just plain not work out.
[I genuinely hope this will be the last entry dealing with all that unpleasantness. Heartfelt excuses to my collective readership.]
2003-05-26
Damned if you do...
After what happened on Saturday I'm slowly beginning to question the wisdom of helping my uncle clean out grandma's apartment. No, strike that, I know it was a mistake, but then he probably wouldn't even have started with this yet if it weren't for our help, so it's a classical case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. Great, just what we need right now.
But the shit actually started the weekend before, because that was when we had originally agreed to meet again to continue cleaning out grandma's apartment. He had wanted to meet us on Saturday, which we told him at great length was not an option because that day we would have friends over whom we hadn't met in almost a year, and moving off that date into the uncertain future was something we just plain refused to do. So we had finally agreed on Sunday.
The Saturday with our friends was as pleasant as one could wish for. Lots of talk, great food, me applying my mad BBQ skillz (stop snickering there in the back rows! ;-) to a few steaks and corn cobs. The only problem was that we had to part earlier than everyone wished because we would have to get up very early next morning so we would be on time for meeting up with my uncle. Of course, Sunday morning half an hour before we had planned to leave, my uncle called to cancel everything due to him having an urgent appointment elsewhere. And from what he told us about that appointment we inferred that he must have known about it at least half a week beforehand. Needless to say, once we had made sure we had hung up and the call was properly terminated we cursed my uncle and his inconsiderateness six ways to Sunday.
Fast forward to this weekend, when we arrived at grandma's place on time, but my uncle was nowhere to be seen, and all attempts to call him ended up at some answering machine. We were ready to drive the 60 miles back home when he finally arrived with nary an excuse, although it's only half the distance for him.
When we entered the apartment, it was immediately obvious that contrary to our hopes but in line with our expectations nothing much had happened during those two weeks. Even the junk, put into garbage bags finely sorted into paper, plastics, textiles, and other two weeks ago was still there, except for the plastics junk bags, which of course were the fewest of the lot. So we continued our dusty, grimy work in a place that was packed with refuse bags, grandma's stuff and of course also his two dogs, i.e. grandma's Poodle and his own white Shepard, who managed to piss everyone off by consistently being in the way.
When during a break the talk centered around all the paperwork necessary after grandma's death, my wife mentioned that she had brought copies of our birth- and death certificates. This sent my uncle off in a tantrum about how he needed all the originals, and why we had those in the first place which left us totally flustered and angry at being yelled at for no sane, discernible reason. He only calmed down a little when after a few minutes of an amazing display of self-restraint on our part we managed to impart the information that we weren't talking about his and grandma's birth certificates, which apparently he hadn't yet managed to find, but those of my mother and all her children. Why he would think us in possession of his and grandma's certificate is still a mystery though. This was what did it for my wife, who refused to further communicate with him for the mercifully short rest of the day, but the cincher for me was yet to come.
Two weeks ago all of us did a cursory examination of everything that was there, and quickly agreed that as far as household items, crockery, dishes, glass and crystal was concerned everyone was free to take what he liked except for a few things that had been singled out right then because they carried personal memories for one person or the other. Everything else was free for all, though. Over the two weeks since then my wife and I had come up with a short list of things we would like to take with us.
During all the cleaning out this Saturday we noticed that a few things, some of them on our list but most of them not, were missing - probably evidence of my cousins' visit there a week ago. So we packed up the remaining stuff on our list, making the effort to ask him only about an especially beautiful and big crystal vase he was OK with us taking it, not even filling one of the banana cardboard boxes my cousins had left behind with the dishes and vases. When we left the apartment though, my uncle noticed me carrying the box, now also filled with some consumables my uncle had wanted to throw away, put on his hurt puppy dog face, and heaped guilt on us for removing stuff without asking him first.
That was the point were I was actually grateful for the exhaustion that had me in its grips by then, because otherwise I would very likely have exploded. As it was I kept the thoughts to myself about how we had agreed about all of this two weeks ago, and how someone, probably my cousins who up to now hadn't exactly been much of a help in cleaning out the apartment, had done quite the same last weekend by removing stuff without asking me first, which I don't really mind seeing as she was their grandma much more than she was mine, but fair is fair.
So our personal resolution for the future: no more trips to grandma's apartment unless and until my uncle is more balanced about all of this, all the accumulated garbage bags have been removed, and we have the promise that the dogs will be kept out. And while that last point may be negotiable, I'm adamant about the first two.
We'll see.
2003-05-19
Resonance Frequency
Reading Layne's account of her Saturday evening with Lauren aka Crushgirl has broken open the old wound of my Other Love that I had almost kidded myself into believing was slowly healing when in fact the change from searing, blinding, paralyzing pain to a dull throb punctuated by the occasional breath stealing bout of hellishly sharp aching was mainly due to me meticulously trying to avoid bothering the thing and mostly succeeding. Of course, with me religiously reading Layne's blog and her writing about her crush or two, that was bound to happen eventually, but I wouldn't want to miss her writing for the paltry price that is the pain of an aching, broken heart, especially since it would just hurt in any case anyway...
So now I sit here, almost crying with the torment that the most severe case of crushing on a woman that I've ever experienced is causing me, while the detached observer part in me absentmindedly pokes at the wound, abstractedly musing about how long it might take for that festering hole in my heart to heal, arriving at the conclusion that the answer might possibly years, if at all, making the rest of me shudder with that realization.
I've had a few crushes before. The first of them happened in highschool, brought me to my first tears in 7 years, and ultimately made me leave my self-imposed, self-erected emotional prison and start searching for the emotional part of myself again. There were a few more, but none of them even compare to this one.
This time it's different, because besides all the other things normally attached to such an unrequited desire, this time I know fear as well - the fear of ever meeting her in person, astronomically small as the chances for this are, thank god. Because I know in that place deep down that is reserved for the deepest, most fundamental truths, that should we meet and touch in any way, for an embrace or just for shaking hands, the energy of that contact would jolt through me and the sheer emotional overload of it all would so paralyze me that running away to a safe place would be just plain impossible.
So I am grateful for the small things in life, like the fact that there are oceans between different continents, that I am rather averse to taking risks, or that intercontinental flights are too expensive and too long to induce me to just fly over and tempt fate, destroying my wife's life, and possibly mine as well, in the process.
2003-05-15
Am I PMS'ing?
Screw the book review, I feel the need to whine!
With my genetic makeup being XY, I'm not supposed to be able to PMS, because, well, the M part is kind of impossible. Nonetheless I feel quite a few of the symptoms that my wife has displayed during that time over the years: sudden mood swings, a generally bitchy emotional state, slight indigestion. You name it, I seem to have it, except, thank God, the cramps.
I'm also far more agressive than usual. Take for example the fighting in one of the recent comment threads over on Layne's blog. Ryan got accused of being just another dumb male, Erik joined the fray, and things were generally looking ugly. Normally I would have just left in disgust, but no, I had to butt in as well, write things I normally don't even think, and get back a response fitting the level of stupidity necessary to do something that dumb. And the worst of it all? I'm still angry at myself, because I haven't been in a stupid flame fest since, oh, 1994 or something like that.
And the tears! I could literally cry at the slightest provocation or emotion coming my way, even when those selfsame things left me cold just a few days before: News that 7 of the German hostages in the southern Algerian Sahara have been freed - I'm almost crying. More news that the forceful rescue of those 7 has probably endangered the life of the 10 remaining hostages - it's all I can do not to bawl out loud. Reading that the Kansas University sex scandal seems to be dying down with the good Prof. Daley still in his office and basically cleared of all charges - eyes brimming with joy and relief. Reading further that Sen. Wagle won't give up and intends to carry that baseless case even further - tears of anger and frustration welling up. And it's like that All. The. Time.
Perhaps it's just my empathy playing tricks with me, because my wife has been like that for more than a week (real PMS in her case) and shows no signs of swinging back to normal now that her period is over. She is so emotionally exhausted that no amount of loving, caring, and cuddling on my part seems to make a dent. She soaks it all up with a look of gratefulness that instantly makes my eyes all wet and shiny, but it doesn't seem to help. And that feeling of uselessness, of being unable to help, is driving me up the wall.
Massaging her back and feet is an excercise in frustration and futility - to me it feels like trying to knead an oak board, and to her most things just plain hurt. And while we would both just love to release those emotions through lots and lots of sex, especially now that my parents-in-law are on a holiday trip to Italy and we have the house all to ourselves, she's so tight and tensed up that although we're both almost bursting with horniness, she just isn't able to let go enough to make it work.
Damn. Double Damn.
But together we'll find a way through this funk. At least that much I'm sure of.
2003-05-13
Burial
When we left the house in the morning, dew was still glistening in the grass, and the air was heavy with the cloying smell of the rape fields all along the roads. After the rather hot days before, this one promised to be pleasant, not too warm or too cold to be outside, no rain, and a little sunshine here and there.
On our way to my uncle, apprehension slowly tightened his grip on me. Who would we meet at the cemetary, what would my uncle be like, after we hadn't heard so much as a peep from him for more than two years? Although we regularly had tried to call, and had written the occasional letter, nothing had come back for all that time until he had called with the bad news the weekend before.
The original plan called for us to meet at his house, then drive to the cemetary together, because I didn't know the city so well. As it turned out, we passed the cemetary on our way to my uncle's house, and then got held up in a traffic jam caused by some heavy road construction work. The result was that I was even more nervous for being late, still I spotted my uncle's car when we passed him after a few miles, he driving to the cemetary while we were still going in the direction of his house, hoping to meet at least my cousins there. But all that greeted us there were two dogs, grandma's sorry looking poodle and my uncle's dog, baring his teeth at us and looking extremely unfriendly. So we drove back through the road construction spot to the cemetary, where we finally met up with my cousins who guided as to the chapel.
The group of people gathered there was pleasantly small, no more than perhaps 20. This somewhat raised my comfort level, because aside from the fact that big groups of strange people make me slightly nervous, it meant less awkward hand shaking and accepting condolences afterwards. Soon after we arrived the ceremony started, a progression of organ music and speeches highlighting the life and especially the last few years of my grandma. Sadly, although what was said during the ceremony was interesting and pleasant enough, giving me the opportunity to get to know facets of grandma no-one had ever mentioned to me before, the speaking talent of the orator left much to be desired.
This left me with some mind share for my wife, who I had noticed had become increasingly silent and introverted with every passing minute. Knowing that her thoughts were wandering back to the death of her favorite aunt more than two years ago, I took her hand, trying to give some comfort through the touch. After a while she relaxed a little, but still kept herself wound up tighter than I had seen her in a long time.
When the ceremony in the chapel was finally over, the progression to the site of her grave started, accompanied by the ringing of the graveyard bells, a nice addition and much more appropriate than the sting quartett that had been rumoured to be part of the ceremony but to my great relief was entirely absent. After grandma was lowered to her final resting place, the inevitable condolences commenced. Several of the guests surprised me by sharing short anecdotes from grandma's life with me, me?!, of all people. Although I had learned during my year working as a paramedic that I have that relaxing effect on people under extreme duress, this took me completely off-guard. Those anecdotes gave me glimpses to facets of grandma I would never have suspected her to possess, such as a kind, affectionate heart towards her neighbours. So I was slowly learning that there was more to my grandma than what my parents had been telling me all those years. Surprises everywhere!
After a frugal lunch and more, surprisingly pleasant, talk with some of the guests, we drove back to my uncle's house, where he started talking about grandma and her life, chaining one episode after the other until he ran out of words, except for the occasional "And what now?". During some short talk with his wife we learned that his not answering our letters was just the way my uncle is, so introverted, reclusive and all around silent that he apparently makes me look like a loudmouthed show-off. She also mentioned that she was at the point where she could deal with that silence not much longer, and seriously thought about leaving him if things didn't improve. That revelation touched me more than the whole burial procedure the day before, because she is such a genuinely kind, warm, and caring woman who after having lost her first husband early in her life and not having much luck with men in the years after, sure deserved a lot of love and kindness in return.
After that sobering and saddening talk we decided to drive to grandma's appartment to start sorting through her stuff in order to find all the things like rent, gas, news paper subscriptions, etc. that demanded our more or less immediate attention. Not surprisingly, her appartment was exactly what I would have expected the space inhabited by a 85 year old lady for more than 25 years to look like: somewhat untidy, unorderly, and crammed full of all kinds of stuff. Most of that stuff turned out in fact to be wool, lots of wool, inordinate amounts of wool, under the bed, in the wardrobes, in the cabinets. Everywhere we looked we encountered wool and half finished pieces of knit clothes. Luckily, among all the wool we also found the things we were looking for. Exhausted by the search and dismayed at the sheer amount of stuff that was waiting to be sorted through and thrown away, we called it a day and agreed to meet again the next day to start seriously cleaning out the apartment.
On our way back to my uncle the next day, I told my wife my three humble wishes for that day: that it should be somewhat cooler than the day before, that the two dogs be kept at my uncle's house and not brought to grandma's appartment again, and that my uncle be either somewhat more helpful or not get underfoot too much. As I had expected, only the first of those wishes was granted, and so we had to put up with two overbearing dogs and a less than helpful uncle in an appartment that was crowded and stuffed to begin with. I was sad for my uncle and the loss that the death of his mother meant for him, but still I couldn't help thinking that it would have been better for everyone involved, including him, if he had taken the dogs for a nice long walk and left us behind to do the work alone.
At least the younger of my two cousins and my uncle's wife were a great help, and we managed to pack most of the junk from the kitchen, corridor, and bathroom into refuse bags which my uncle promised to remove during this week, so we can continue with the work next Sunday. I am sceptic whether he'll get anything done during the week in his current state of mind, but there's always hope I guess.
(The one highlight during all of the packing and cleanup was finding a stash of photographs and birth, death, and marriage certificates reaching back into the 1830's, so maybe someday I will be able to reconstruct a complete genealogical family tree at least until that time.)
[Sorry, I know that wasn't particularly entertaining or decent writing, but I needed to get that out of my mind! Now, to get the book review waiting at the back of my mind out as well so I can free my brain to start talking again about more entertaining things, like, say, sex...]
2003-05-12
Yes!
I don't usually like to me-too something, but I just have to second the praise for Mark Morford that can be read from time to time on Intellectual Poison. His eulogy of San Francisco was a much needed spirit raiser after a weekend of alltogether too dull, numb, and generally slightly gloomy emotions squeezing all the good ones out of my mind.
I desperately need to blog about Grandma's burial and all that followed, but whether I can muster up the energy to do so remains to be seen. Meanwhile, it's nice to see there are still pockets of relative sanity in the world, like San Francisco... (S.F. and sanity in one negation free sentence, that's what the world has come to! ;-)
2003-05-08
Abandon All Hope...
I'm slowly slipping to the dark side, I can feel it. First it's In Extremo's "Herr Mannelig", and now it's the Bloodhound Gang. Layne must be bewitching me while Intellectual Poison is slowly creeping through my veins. Help, what are you two doing to me?!
But lets start at the beginning. The Blodhound Gang has come up on a few occasions in the comments section of Layne's blog, and while I was officially excused for not knowing these guys by the lady herself, my curiosity was piqued. Well, it seems they have found their way across the Atlantic and into the German mainstream, because lately one of the biggest radio stations in the area has begun playing "Bad Touch".
Saying that I like it would be understating things. I absolutely love it, which I find kinda sorta disturbing. ;-) OK, it is the only song from them I like so far, although I dig the blatantly sexual and politically incorrect lyrics of several others, so maybe there's still a tiny sliver of hope for me...
2003-05-05
Farewell, Poodle-Granny
When my uncle unexpectedly called, I knew what had happened before he had finished saying his hellos. For one thing, it was the first time he had called after the death of my mother - his sister - two years ago, and his tone of voice left no doubt as to why he was phoning us.
It turned out that two weeks ago grandma had stumbled and fallen, receiving a femoral neck fracture in the process, which is still pretty much a death warrant if you're 85 and don't have a vastly above average condition. Things got progressively worse until she died last Thursday, and I think she would have appreciated the irony of ending her own toils on labour day of all dates.
Saying that we weren't particularly close would be understating things, so I'm not overly grieving (although I must admit that the feeling of having lost your last living grand parent is unexpectedly poignant). I'd always had the impression that she wasn't particularly close with any human being. In fact the only living things I have consistently seen her give any kind of affection to were her dogs, all of them poodles. They accompanied her everywhere she went, which quickly gained her the name "Poodle-Granny", but only when she didn't hear, as she preferred to be called Grandma <surname>.
From what my uncle told me though, it seems that the death of my mother, especially the manner of her death and the way she was buried according to her own wishes (no tombstone, no ceremony, just a daisy-sprinkled lawn) wounded something deep in her which she never truly recovered from. Wherever they are now, maybe they'll find a way to reconcile...
When I called my uncle again yesterday, he was grateful about our offer to help him dealing with all the shit that the death of a family member entails on top of all the hurt, although in the end he refused, already having secured some assistence through other means. He was also genuinely happy to hear that we would like to attend the burial, and looking through grandma's drawers he had found some old photos of mom and grandma he wanted us to have, so maybe we can start healing that rift again.
2003-05-03
Same procedure as last year
There are few advantages and many drawbacks to living in what amounts to one of the larger sandpits of Germany. When after less than a foot deep of something that might pass as a sorry excuse for fertile soil if you blink sufficiently long and hard, there is nothing but dry sand underneath, most of the common garden plants flat out refuse to grow unless you supply them with copiuos amounts of compost. And with the speed that even large amounts of rain just seep into the ground within hours never to be seen again, if you don't water everything meticulously during the dry summer months, what little growth there was during spring time quickly withers away in the draught.
But there are advantages, and one of them has started happening in the last days of April and will go on until 24th June: asparagus, large amounts of some of the best asparagus in Germany, in fact. The dry, sandy soil in the area warms quickly, so asparagus season starts relatively early, and it also produces asparagus with a very fine aroma, that most of the imported stuff from Greece just can't compare to. Living within driving distance of one of the larger co-ops in the area means that we can buy not only locally, but directly from the producers, so the stuff is fresh and relatively cheap.
The first meal of fresh asparagus of the season was as wonderful and delicous as always: deep-fried turkey breast and fresh potatoes served with a heaping of asparagus cooked just long enough to be tender, then slathered, over the vocal and long-lasting protests of my father-in-law *sigh*, with molten butter, and most important of all, none of that awful, far too heavy Sauce Hollandaise that just smothers the fine aroma of the asparagus. Hmmmm, culinary heaven!
So I foresee the same things happening as every year: we'll gorge ourselves on that delicacy until come the end of June we are so overstuffed and sick of the smell that we'll easily go the rest of the year without missing it, until the yearning starts again in late March or early April next year.
Same procedure as every year. :-)
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