September 20, 2008

• 15 things

  I’ve been tagged….

   15 things you may or may not know (or want to know) about me…

  1. I’m the oldest of four children. I have one sister, one half brother (same mother, different father), and one half-sister (same father, different mother). My sister has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I have a nephew through my sister. His father is a crazy druggy alcoholic cultist. Seriously. I’m relieved that he and my sister are no longer together, but I wish she didn’t let him visit my nephew unsupervised. My brother has been diagnosed with Asberger’s and depression. He can’t hold down a job and is on SSI. I think he is just lazy and playing the system, but if he’s content to live that way, there’s not much I can do. Hey, I get depressed too and from tests I’ve taken, I’m borderline autistic myself. You don’t see me sponging off the system. I never see my half sister though she lives fairly close. She only seems to look me up when she wants something.
  
  2. My family on my mother’s side was one of the first families in Virginia. Which means they were probably slave holders (though I have no verification on this). My mother is convinced that there is a curse on our family dating from this time, and this alleged curse explains why we’ve never been able to get ahead. (That’s my mom’s theory any way.)
  
  3. My grandfather put the electricity in the Lincoln tunnel and worked on the Panama Canal. He owned his own construction business up until his partner embezzled the funds from the business and ran off with some floozy. If his partner had not done this, things may have turned out very different for our family.
  
  4. Every house we’ve ever lived in has been haunted. I’ve never seen a ghost, but I hear things and sense things, and sometimes smell things. One of my coworkers has named my attic ghost the “stinky ghost” because I told her about how it made a smell like feces once.
  
  5. I had an “Uncle” Freddie who was actually my great grandmother’s live in boyfriend. She was Irish Catholic so I guess they couldn’t get married? Not sure how that works, but he was also apparently in hiding from organized crime because though he went by the name Fred Clark, Clark was my Nana’s maiden name and my father’s middle name. I really don’t know who he was or what he did that made him take an alias and live out his days in hiding.
  
  6. I am easily frustrated and often disappointed in people and circumstances. I am a hard worker and consistent (rarely late or calling off), but if I feel like I am being taken advantage of, I do my best to get out of the situation ASAP. This applies itself to work and friendships. I’ve dropped people and employers who leaned on me too heavily, especially if I’ve been there for them but they’ve made themselves scarce when I’ve needed them. I don’t like to be treated like a resource. I prefer to be treated like a person.
  
  7. I collect books, comic books, and certain genres of movie. I collect certain authors (Charles de Lint, HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Scott Cunningham, various weird authors…) and certain subjects (magic, Paganism, mysticism, divination, ancient history…). I collect super hero comics and movies. When I was a kid I collected unicorns. Since I’ve gotten older, I collect dragons. (Most of the unicorns have been sold off in yard sales.) I collect aquatic beanie babies (because I’m a Pisces).
  
  8. I have various spirit animals, but ravens, snakes, and spiders seem to dominate. I collect figures and images of all three, though they are actually pretty difficult to find, especially ravens.
  
  9. I’m a bit of a packrat. I get it from my mother, but I’m not as bad as she is.
  
  10. I’m a very powerful empath. I can even “talk” to plants and animals. It’s useful but also makes me very shy of people and crowds. I get physically sick if I have to spend too much time in a crowd (out of my “comfort zone”). For this reason, I am not overly fond of working in retail, especially during the holidays. Some days I’d just like to find a dark room and crawl under a desk.
  
  11. I believe in aliens, but I don’t think they target good old boys named Bubba for the purposes of performing unnecessary anal probes. Sorry. I think if there are aliens out there, they have more important things to do than troll our little backwater planet of xenophobes. Since we’re on the galactic rim, we’re probably less likely to get extra terrestrial visitors in space ships and more likely to get extra terrestrial visitors in the form of microbe laden meteors.
  
  12. I don’t like to ask for help. I don’t like to impose on people. I’m overjoyed and surprised when people offer their assistance, but I don’t seek it.
  
  13. I like to cook, but my family doesn’t really like to eat (unless it’s red meat). When I have time, I enjoy cooking for the people I work with, except for one guy who is ALWAYS bugging me about cooking. First of all it’s expensive to cook for so many and secondly, if I’m getting constant demands to cook without any recompense (he never offers me a dime), it’s not fun any more. It’s a chore.
  
  14. My great grandmother on my mother’s side babysat us as children. She adored my sister and put up with a lot of crap from my brother, but she hated me and used to tell my mother stories about me so that I would get in trouble. No one could understand why I didn’t like her and would hide from her and say bad things about her as a child. My mother only started to accept that my grammy was cruel to me now that I’m an adult and continue to stick by my story. I wish she would have listened to me when it would have made a difference. Mostly when the subject comes up now, I get the impression she’d just like me to drop it since my grammy is now dead and it’s all in the past. Mostly I’d just like her to say she’s sorry, just once.
  
  15. Every electoral year I start out hopeful and end up disgusted. I never intended to vote for McCain and even less so with the addition of Palin. The Republicans must think women are stupid if they think a gimmick female VP sidekick is going to get my vote. I’m not going to vote for a female VP because I’m a woman any more than I’d vote for McCainn because I’m Irish. I’m getting sick of Obama though… just little things like wise cracks (about Palin and a pig…) and that time he “accidentally” gave the finger to Hilary when they were debating. Frankly I don’t know if I want to vote for either one of these guys any more. I’ll probably vote for Obama, but I don’t know that I like him much as a person. The more I see/hear about him, the less I really like him aside from the fact that he’s not a Republican. The Republican party I find insulting to my intelligence, my sense of justice, my rights as a woman, and my ability to make up my own mind without being told what to think, but that doesn’t automatically make me think the Democrats are much better. We really need the other parties to be put on equal footing with the traditional parties. I’m a socialist, dammit. The democratic party may be the closest thing to my political leanings, but if I thought a socialist or green party candidate had a shot, they’d have my vote instead.
  
  (Wow, that was hard. I thought I was going to run out of things before I got to 15.)

  • 12:17 pm
  • 13 Comments