caerula's Diaryland Diary

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the country of Spare Oom

This is what happened to me at lunch yesterday:

I had $2.25, so I went to Wendy's. Wendy's happens to share a building with the Tim Horton's where I unsuccessfully tried to get a muffin yesterday morning, which I should have taken as a warning apparently. So, the drive-through was way backed up, as usual, and I decided to go inside so I wouldn't have to sit in my car overheating in the 100 degree heat while waiting for my food. The line inside didn't look too long. But as I approached it, 6 teenage girls ran past me to get in line. Ran. I just stood there, looking disgusted -- I should have said something, but then a parental figure brought up the rear and ALSO got in line in front of me. She looked at me, then said "Did they push in front of you?"

"Yes."

So what did she do? Make them let me go ahead? Make them apologize? Scold them for their bad manners? NO! She did nothing!

Why the fuck did she ask me if she wasn't going to do anything?

It made it worse than if she hadn't said anything at all. WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH PEOPLE?

Sorry. I'll stop yelling. It's just been one of those one-thing-after-another weeks. I got home last night -- half an hour later than usual, because they are resurfacing the road that leads from my highway exit to my road and a drive that usually takes under 5 minutes took at least 30 -- to find a message from our lawyer. I called her back -- Blue, though off, was out at his parents with YMB -- and she told me that there was an article in their metro area paper about the Dementors' relatives raising children support group, which portrayed them, of course, as noble and long-suffering, still working with this group even though their grandson was cruelly taken away from them by the father who "at first, wanted nothing to do with, but later changed his mind and objected to the Dementors' custody."

Hello? As far as I know, "wanted nothing to do with" does not necessarily equal "was not aware of the pregnancy or subsequent birth and had not seen the woman in well over a year, and therefore requested a blood test before acknowledging he was the father."

The first is shithead behavior. The second is common sense. There is a difference. In any case, Blue has spent the last seven years making his early mistakes up to YMB, and YMB is the only person he owes that to.

I'm not going to talk about that anymore. They are so not worth it.

But whatever happened to journalistic standards? I took journalism classes in college, and I remember that checking your sources was one of the first things drummed into us. Shouldn't the reporter have at least tried to contact Blue and get his side of the story, or go look at the court records, or something?

I did leave him a blistering phone message where I suggested that perhaps he's be better off writing editorials, but that if he'd like to report the news than perhaps he should look at the other side of the custody issue. Oh, I was polite; I acknowldged that I was sure he was aware how difficult it is to stay unbiased in custody cases, and that each side has their own story, and that I was sure he didn't want to print false or prejudiced information as truth. I'll be very surprised if we get a call back. But it relieved my mind somewhat, if nothing else.


The database is finally back up, so I have real work to do. Whoohoo! I've almost forgotten what that's like.

I've found very little time to quilt, lately, what with all the packing mania. I'm having a hard enough time trying to keep Blue from packing my sewing stuff yet anyway. And I'm in the middle of a project that I both need and want to get finished, it's another attempt on my part at original design and my first attempt at actually drafting my own blocks instead of adapting tradition designs. I'm anxious to see how it turns out.

When we move, I'm going to set my sewing stuff up in the extra bedroom. I can't wait. I will have actual space to work in and spread out, a design wall (a flannel sheet pinned to the wall, but that's all you need, really) and Blue won't have to run around picking up scraps from under the kitchen table because he can't stand the carpet to look untidy (yes, he's a tad obsessive-compulsive). He's agreed to leave my sewing space alone as long as it doesn't spill out into the main room, and I happily agreed, provided his video game stuff stays in the den and doesn't overtake the living room either. It sounds like an ideal arrangement; I hope it works out so well in practice.

I can't believe we're going to have a den and an extra bedroom, after living for two years in four rooms without a spare inch of storage space. YMB keeps referring to the spare room as "the baby's room" which breaks my heart at the same time it makes me smile. I generally just comment that yes, it will be the baby's room when we have a baby, but that it will be the sewing room for now. Sigh.

Everytime I think or hear "spare room" I think of the bit in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where Mr. Tumnus thinks Lucy comes from the city of War Drobe, in the country of Spare Oom. I love that.

I love all those books in fact, and the phrase springs so readily to mind because we've been reading them with YMB. As I'm reading them now, to a child, it amazes me to think that I first read these on my own in 1st grade. There was so much that must have been far above my head, that I just filtered out. And there's a lot of violence and killings, which of course we are more sensitive too than our parents were -- descriptions of 13-year-olds stabbing people and amimals has moved out of the realm of fantasy, unfortunately. But it doesn't make me want to keep the books from YMB, as I know some people's reactions are; it just makes me want to talk to him, to ask him his idea of what just happened in the book and how he feels about it. The violence in the Chronicles of Narnia isn't purposeless, without meaning or consequence, and in that way it's far more healthy than watching people beat each other up on tv and walk away.

12:58 p.m. - 2001-08-09

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