Living Like This

My Grandma passed away last Tuesday. She was 91, and hadn't been mentally "with it" for the past 6 or more years. So, most of the family seems to be taking it pretty well. They say she's really been gone a long time anyway. But I don't care. She was Granma, whether she knew it or not, and now she's gone. When I first found out, I was horrified, especially at the idea of how the news would affect my dad and my sister. Granma was Dad's mother. He was at work all day Tuesday, so he wouldn't find out till late that night. My mom is the one in our immediate family who found out first. She called me when I was making dinner and told me. It was pretty awful, for reasons that are many and hard to explain, but if you'd grown up in our household you would understand.
The next day I felt alright. And the next. And the next. A few times I was able to cry, but only for a few minutes. I talked to my sister and two of my aunts (Granma had 4 children, Dad, Marcia, Karen, and Lory, so I was blessed with a good share of aunts). But I couldn't really cry or feel strongly when I talked to anyone. I really didn't know how to deal with it. Guess I still don't. I got a lot out today though, I'm pretty confident. Rode my bike to the beach (which is a ways and takes a lot of time and energy), and thought about a lot of things and cried and sang and cried. I got pretty off topic...I have a lot of things nagging on my mind right now, some of them being about Granma and some more of them being about how fucked up the world is and how I am actually contributing to how fucked up it is....
I passed several dairy farms on the way, and one of em always kind of bugs me. It has this sign that says "NO VEAL" right in front of all these rows of little rectangles of land enclosed with wire fencing, separated from eachother, each with a crate and a calf. The calves sit in their enclosements looking more bored even than cows in a pasture look. Normally I try to let the image roll off my shoulders, like hey, no veal! that's good, right?. But today I was already upset, and already thinking about how much dairy I eat and how I probably don't need it, and how for Christsakes my housemate doesn't eat the stuff so why should I need to? Methane emitted from cow farts, outrageous amounts of water and biomass necessary to produce milk, cows being totally unnatural and harmful to the ecosystems here, the oil/gas necessary to operate the machinery necessary to get and transport the milk...oh hell, go ahead and tack on unnecessary suffering of young animals, why don't you???!!!
I mean oh my god. Why on earth am I having anything to do with this? I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. So I cried about these things. I just felt awful. I still do, but not as bad. It was getting quite overwhelming, these feelings were, but then I talked to my housemate and she made me feel twenty times better--simply by listening, being sympathetic, and talking with me about it. And it really helped that she said she thought about the same thing almost every day. How cool is that.
But yeah, I'm still here on my laptop using fucking electricity generated by coal or natural gas or somethin awful. Oh god. And how am I going to not drink milk? Or eat cheese? I wish I could just say no more, but I gotta know what to replace that with. And make sure I'm willing to actually go through the motions of replacing it. Like, say kale has tons of calcium so I decide to replace it partially with kale--then I have to eat lots of kale all the time! Or several different dark green leaves. Whatever, always requires something difficult for my vegetable-less vegetarian self. Oh and I talk about hypocrisy.

Darling, Reallyyy

Darling, really I don't have the slightest clue as to what I'm going to put here..Ah dear...
Yes, when one creates an account and a blog solely for the purpose of commenting on Amanda Palmer's blog, one is bound to come out speechless.
Unless you're me, in which case you'll ramble incessantly and waste a whole lot of someone else's time..or rather, help them waste it.
So um..
Today, I revisited my old church...Yaaa...I'm an atheist. I went to church when I was a kid, cause my parents (mainly my dad) made me. He stopped going altogether after a while though, so I did too. I was religious a couple times cause the fuckers are so good at brainwashing. (Pardon the complete disrespect there, it's just hard not to feel taken advantage of to some extent).
Anyway, I went there today for the first time in years, just hopped on my bike and ended up going there. I'd been thinking about doing it for a while. I just wanted to see how it looked after all this time, how it felt to be there for a bit..It felt tremendously sad. Probably because I am tremendously sad. My dad woke me up this morning and I got pissed and yelled at him. I was going to pretend like nothing had happened, but then he went out and drove off somewhere, and I just started crying. About everything. It was a short cry in the first place, let alone for everything, but I guess that's life. When I got to my old church, I walked up to the courtyard and looked at it. I thought about walking through it, but it just seemed too weird. Seeing that courtyard again made all this pain swell up inside me, like I was looking back at something I'd lost so long ago. I sat down a ways a way from the courtyard entrance and just thought for a while. I mean, why the hell had been I wanting to come back to this place so much? And why the hell did it hurt me so much to see it all again?
I'd had a couple of weird dreams about that courtyard recently...one had something to do with a fashion show and my anger at finding that a whole room was devoted to fur clothes...I'm not sure where I came up with that..But something about it all had definitely been nagging at my mind.
Sitting there, thinking about it I decided that I was missing this place because of two things. One, it was one of the first places where I really noticed a lot of love. And two, because it was such a huge part of my childhood. I spent a lot of time running around there with my friends when I was a kid. I haven't seen any of those kids in ages. In fact, I only had two friends there, while most of the kids went to the same school and hung out in a group..I always felt pretty damn lonely. Still, I sort of started out there to some extent, and it seems strange to just never go back to a place you spent so much time in. Also since I was a kid, everything seemed pretty good. It was just so much easier to be happy, the whole world looked better than it does now.

And at home, there's always been a lot of shit. Since mom and dad are so distant, since they can't stand eachother but continue to be married, confiding in people is something I really don't do enough. Lately, I've been looking at my situation and wondering how the fuck I'm going to get out of this house with my sanity in tact. And then I think, man if it's this bad for me, how is ANYONE in this world sane??? From what I've been told, I have it pretty damn good, so...damn..life is tough. I've always sort of assumed most people are perfectly sane, but I'm finally starting to realize that most people are probably completely bonkers and spending as much as a day with them could result in major drama. Haha..Who knows? People who socialize?...Ya, that would explain why I don't know..
Later.