Isle of Remote

Tuesday 11.29.05 [2:33 am] delete entry | edit entry

I hope ya’ll had a fab Thanksgiving. Mine was really nice, despite all the medical drama. I had a swell time with the Mom and I even made an effort and visited my friend - you know the one I talk about incessantly? Yeah, her. It seems kinda weird to hang with her now. We don’t seem to converse the way we used to. Every topic somehow bounces back to her husband (who is out of work yet AGAIN). Still, it’s good to keep the lines of communication open, right?

I think work between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays should just be a forgotten thing. Does anyone really get any work done during this time period? There are four holiday parties on my calendar already and those are just the ones that are work related! I’m definitely going to keep the holiday prep on the light side this year.

Still, if my goal is to be not stressed as the holidays approach, I need to get a regular amount of sleep. It’s 2:37am and I’m fading fast.

Goodbye my sweet love. I barely knew you. But you made me happy AND you kept me awake on those no sleep days. I probably never let you know just how much I appreciated all that. But I did.

You will be missed and I will be sleepy.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m having issues with the person formerly known as my best friend. I’m still not sure where our friendship is headed, but I realized I’ve now grown accustomed to her absence in my life. It doesn’t hurt anymore, but it does still manage to befuddle me.

About a month or so ago I get this email that her email account has been letting her send but not receive messages. Says that apparently she has not received any messages in a couple of months before she noticed the problem.

I happen to know these are not the busiest folks on the planet. Asleep by nine, up by five. Work, work, home, eat, pets, tv and early to bed again. So it’s not like she’s been so busy that she hasn’t had time to check her email. And she did notice that she was able to send, but not receive messages.

They have DSL like I do. Her lovely husband has not had a problem with his email. And all his IT knowledge (a field in which he earns his pay) was unable to fix this glitch. Is it wrong that I think he did something to sabotage her email account? And two months is an awfully long time for her to realize she hadn’t heard from her family once, isn’t it?

I called her a few weeks back out of the blue. (I believe when you get the urge to call someone you really should - there’s something that person needs to hear from you.) So I call and we had a brief, impersonal conversation in which she told me she has to be better at being a good friend. Of course that’s the last I’ve heard from her.

Cut to conversation with my mother. Seems my father complained to her that I haven’t been returning his phone calls. How does he manage to piss me off without even talking to me? This is a grown damn man! You got a problem? Talk to the person you got the problem with! And then don’t freakin’ lie! I have returned all phone calls except one which I forgot about, but did ring back a week or so later, but didn’t leave a message. It was his cell phone so I know he knew I called.

So I’m thinking - is this one more way for my relationship with my father to shape my relationships with others? My best friend marries and doesn’t call me anymore and so I’ve pretty much cut her out of my life like a trans fat. Because I don’t want to keep pushing myself on people who don’t want to be pushed upon. Have I done this before? Yes, several times.

I told my mother last year that I’m tired of putting myself on the line for my father to disappoint me. Yes, I accept the man that he is, that he’s never going to be able to live up to my (low) expectations, but I can’t do all the work. It’s time for him to be the grown up. And because he removed himself from my life without caring how much it hurt me, he’s going to have to work a little to get back in. I’m not cutting him out - I wasn’t raised like that - but I’m just not inspired to work that hard at something that’s always left me grieving. Once you’ve burnt your hand on the stove, you’re smart enough to avoid doing it again.

So I’m re-evaluating how I need to proceed in the course of my relationships. Do I deliberately hold things back because I don’t want to get hurt? Yes. I mean, if your own father, whom you adored as a little girl, can drop you off his radar in a split second, how is anyone else supposed to love the real you?

Do I carry self-hatred around with me? No. With everything that is in me, I know that my absence from these two people’s lives is a loss to them. But it’s also a loss to me - relationships are an investment of time and emotion and it does something to you when someone shows you that investment was not worth as much to them as it was to you. That rejection is something you carry inside you like a festering tumor - you don’t know it’s there until something doesn’t feel quite right.

How will I move beyond this? I have to let myself be vulnerable. People are always going to hurt me, disappoint me, leave me. That doesn’t mean it was anything I did - IF I’m being true to myself.

We were never meant to find that sense of completion through another person - people are fallible. They make errors in judgment. They are broken. They have many, many flaws, some of which can strike you right out of the blue and leave you so breathless and wounded. But I have to hold in my heart and my head that there is someone who already loves me so perfectly and completely and passionately that His perfect love can even allow me to accept the imperfectness of those in my life who have hurt me. I’m having a hard time grasping on to that lately. I’m so overloaded with so many feelings that sometimes I feel as though I’m just waiting for everything to spill forth and pollute the earth - I am a living, breathing Pandora’s box ready to spew the ills of my life on to an unsuspecting world.

My mantra this week: Perfect love casts out fear. Perfect love casts out fear. Perfect love casts out fear. I’m so afraid that if I let myself crack, there will be too many pieces scattered about and nothing to put back into a semblance of me.

I guess that is why I’ve been so angry lately. A simmering pot of anger on a slow boil. All that emotion has to come out somehow, and isn’t it amazing how anger is …. more acceptable than breaking down. I’m not a good manager of my anger. I am, however, extremely good at stifling it….to a point. And then I’m out of control. I can stifle a good 5-10 years - so if this were an Olympic sport, I would so be bringing home the gold.

I guess it is a step forward that I’m realizing this. Maybe now I take another step forward, and then another. Maybe it’s time I learn how to take refuge in the arms of the one who created me. Somewhere along the line, I lost the assurance that He could heal what was broken inside me. I mean heal 100%. I recognize that I’ve come this far, but somewhere inside my head I’m saying, “this is best He can do with what He’s got.”

Hmm. Seems there was a lot brewing inside these past few weeks. Honestly, I didn’t know all this was going to come out until I saw what I was typing. It’s given me a lot to think on this night.

I made it through the heinous month that was September. Alive. Yay for me.

It was touch and go for a minute there - it was a crazy work schedule. Some days I worked from 7am to 11pm. Include weekends on that chore list and it makes for one cranky Abbie.

But I held it together and now I’m back. I can honestly say that I hope that I never have to go through that again. The only thing that kept me from losing it all together was making sure I planned some fun activities on my free time. I mean it wasn’t much - a quick facial here, a walk in the afternoon, stopping for a special treat - you can’t live putting all your energy into you work, even if you love your job with a capital L, y’know?

Anyway, I’m glad to be paying some attention to this blog of mine again. I’ve missed it and you all. I’m going to spend the next couple of days reading what ya’ll have been up to. Hope it’s all good stuff!

I’ve not felt much like writing lately. Don’t know why. Just feeling sort of blue. But I will be back and I will snap myself out it soon - a person can only wallow just so long!

Although I love my new job, it does take a lot out of spiritually and emotionally. I’ve got to recharge!

Tonight I was very privileged to sit in a room with very educated people. People who grew up in low income families who heard the world tell them they should not aim too high in life, but should merely try to keep their heads above water and try not to get arrested.

I used to think that these were stories of the past that we would share with future generations as we celebrated the fact that all those stereotypes were behind us now. But it is not so.

We are not near where we should be at this day and age. There are people who think that minorities are taking the spaces in colleges and jobs that should be held by whites. That we are being handed these opportunities because of laws and ordinances. This is a belief based in bigotry of the worst kind. It is bigotry because it makes the base assumption that no one of color in education or an occupation is qualified to be there. It is also bigoted because it makes the assumption that the white students are qualified to be there.

The fact of the matter is programs like Affirmative Action came to be because not just qualified, but over-qualified people of color were being turned down for jobs, looked over for promotions and denied entry into schools because those in positions of power chose to believe a stereotype, rather than the truth.

Tonight I listened to men and women who are independent and educated talk about the things they had been told by ignorant people. As high school students, these people had excellent grades, amazing test scores, strong communication and social skills, yet because of the color of their skin or the sound of their last name, these students were ignored by administrators in their educational pursuits.

How many people have we passed over who could have contributed something valuable to society? Did we encourage the woman who wanted to be a doctor to be an english teacher instead? Did we ignore the Hispanic child with a knack for politics, or push the Asian kid with a head full of poetry toward the mathematics department? What do we miss out on when we ignore the individual and based our world on narrowmindedness?

I have the belief that whenever we do something evil to someone else, we destroy that person’s destiny to do good in our lives. On the grand scale, when a person kills another, perhaps they kill the one who will pull the killer’s child from in front of a speeding car. On a day-to-day basis, I think if we inflict a wound on another person’s spirit, we damage our own spirits in response. We can only live in as much joy as we’re willing to give. That which we hold close to our chests denies us the pleasure of sharing.

Always choose to lift someone up, rather than bring them down. It is not our job to impose limits on how high others can soar, but to make sure they are prepared for the journey in the best possible way.

This little fellow has taken up residence on the fire extinguisher near our mailboxes. He (or she?) is there all the time - I don’t see her (or him?) leave, nor do I see a little birdy-daddy (or mommy) come to bring food. I guess it must happen in the very early morning.

New York Times reporter sent to jail in leak case

By James Vicini Wed Jul 6, 6:03 PM ET

A New York Times reporter was jailed on Wednesday after she said she could not break her promise and reveal her confidential source to a grand jury investigating who in the Bush administration leaked a covert CIA operative’s name to the media.

Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan ordered correspondent Judith Miller to jail immediately and said she must stay there until she agreed to testify or for the rest of the grand jury’s term, which lasts through October.

Another case involving Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper was resolved when he told the judge he had just received the “express personal consent” of his source to reveal his identity. “Consequently I am prepared to testify,” he said.

The dispute has become an important case involving freedom of the press. It has pitted the news media’s traditional use of anonymous sources against the efforts of a federal government prosecutor to investigate a possible crime.

Miller told the judge she did not want to go to jail but had no choice but to protect the identity of her source as a matter of personal conscience and to stand up for a vigorous, independent press.

“If journalists cannot be trusted to keep confidences, then journalists cannot function and there cannot be a free press,” she said in a clear, firm voice in the packed courtroom that included her husband and the newspaper’s top editor.
The grand jury investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, a Justice Department prosecutor, seeks to determine who in the Bush administration leaked the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media in 2003 and whether any laws were violated.

Plame’s name was leaked, her diplomat husband said, because of his criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war.

Journalists say using anonymous sources is crucial to their reporting, including exposing government wrongdoing in cases like the Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon’s presidency and the printing of the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War.

When Hogan ordered Miller to jail, she showed no emotion, and one of her lawyers put his arm around her shoulder. The judge said confinement at a jail in the Washington, D.C., area might convince her to change her mind and testify.

CONFIDENTIAL PLEDGES

Earlier in the hearing, Miller was firm that she would not testify. “I do not make confidential pledges lightly, but when I do, I must honor them. If I do not, how can I expect people to accept my assurances,” she said.

“Your honor, in this case I cannot break my word just to stay out of jail,” Miller told the judge.

“My motive here is straightforward; a promise of confidentiality once made must be respected or the journalist will lose all credibility and the public will, in the end, suffer.”

Miller, an investigative reporter who covers national security and foreign policy issues, said she did not consider herself to be above the law.

She said she had thought long and hard over the July 4 Independence Day holiday about her decision.

After Cooper entered the courtroom, he went over to Miller and they briefly hugged. Before the hearing began, perhaps anticipating that she would have to go to jail immediately, Miller handed her necklace to her husband.

Her attorney, Robert Bennett, told the judge she had not committed any crimes and that she never even
“After 40 years in this business, I have the nagging feeling that Judy Miller may be the only person to go to jail in this case,” Bennett said. No one has been charged as part of the grand jury investigation which began in January 2004.

Hogan said Miller had no choice but to cooperate under the law. He said she was defying the law by not testifying and “may be obstructing justice.”

In a statement, Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, said: “There are times when the greater good of our democracy demands an act of conscience. Judy has chosen such an act in honoring her promise of confidentiality.”

Cooper said that as of last night he had planned to tell the judge that he would not cooperate. But that changed “a short time ago” when he received word from his source that Cooper was no longer bound by his pledge of confidentiality.

After an unsuccessful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Time magazine last week handed over the subpoenaed records. Cooper said those documents included notes containing the identity of his source and their conversations.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Wilson)

Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.

I have a weakness for Latin men. Sigh. I was just reading a perfectly salient article about race relations between blacks and latinos. Good points I’m sure. Only they put the author’s photo at the top of the page and all I could think was “he’s cute…wonder if he’s single….”

I seem to be on a serious manquest these days. It has been a while, but it was really important for me to work on some issues first. But now I’m feeling all healed up and happy, so I guess there’s no time like the present, eh? Well, I guess there is a better time since it’s after midnight and the sort of manquest a lone female attempts at these hours requires an exchange of currency. It’ll keep till morning.

I just had the greatest weekend even though I had two classes to take on Friday and Saturday. Had a great time at the fair on Saturday and went to the House of Blues for their gospel brunch on Sunday. And I did lots of laughing. Even today I was laughing so hard I was snorting! Then I came home and cried. Whatever. Talked to my mom and started missing my grandmother a bit. I’ve got to go see my mom this weekend for her birthday surprise. I’m trying to go out on Saturday and come back on Sunday. It’s too hot in the desert to stay until Monday and I want to do some stuff around the house this weekend.

Made a decision not to look for a new place just yet. I’ve decided to wait until next spring and start looking for a place to buy. I feel like this would be my time. I finally feel like I’m in the place I am supposed to be in. I’m also writing again.

The last 6 months have gone by in a bit of a haze. My friends and I have deemed this the Summer of Fun and I’m totally looking forward to getting out there and doing a little living.

But I’ve got to get some sleep - 6am is just 7 hours away!

PS - Meadow! Shirley Valentine is one of my favorite movies! My friend and I argue over the ending all the time. She thinks she went back to her husband and UK I say her husband moves to Greece. What think you?