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Bear and I have been busy bees. My Gilligan came to visit and then Bear and I went to my hometown for a family thing. Bear and I ended up having a kind of shitty trip. It started off ok, but the last straw was the plane flight home. To preface this story, Bear snores. When he’s in bed, he snores REALLY loud, but when he’s sitting up, it’s mostly pretty soft. Also, our flight was turbulent. A lot of shaking and upset. Last point of note, he’s got the aisle seat and I’m in the middle. So we get on the plane and Bear falls asleep while we are taxing down the runway. After he falls asleep I’m trying to get comfy and I notice the lady across the aisle from him is MAD. I’m not sure at what, but she’s glaring. After takeoff the kid in front of Bear leans his chair back. Bear wakes up when the chair jams into his knees and sticks one foot in the aisle and the other in front of me. I readjust myself and notice the woman is GLARING at Bear’s foot. I’m like great, she’s one of those that is pissed that he’s too big or that he’s not following the strict rules. To avoid her saying something, I wake Bear up when the flight attendants come by, especially when they have the cart. A few minutes after we’ve all settled back down with drinks, Bear gets jostled pretty bad when the lady gets up. She jabs her knee or foot into him. I couldn’t see exactly because at this point I wasn’t paying attention. Thankfully Bear goes back to sleep. Now, until this lady jabs him, NO ONE ELSE on the plane has had any trouble with Bear’s foot. I can see how it’s a little rude of him. If the kid in front of him hadn’t leaned back, he would have kept his knees in his space, but short of cutting off his legs, there just wasn’t a lot of options at this point. After the lady sits back down, I start kinda keeping an eye on her. Not seriously, but she’s starting to wig me out a bit with all her glaring and her deliberately(?) jabbing Bear. About 30 or so minutes pass and suddenly she reaches across the aisle and shoves Bear in the shoulder saying “Some of us would like to sleep too!” Bear and I were in complete shock. I started to get angry at this point. Bear put on his headphones and cranked up his ipod to try and keep himself awake. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be because a few minutes later I realized I desperately needed to pee. I was also still very very upset. When I was waiting in line for the bathroom, a flight attendant was hanging back there for a few minutes after she’d finished cleaning. I decided to explain the situation and ask her if she thought we should call them if something else happened. The FA asked if we’d said anything to the lady and upon discovering that we hadn’t, advised us to call them if ANYTHING happened. I eventually go back to my seat. Bear eventually falls asleep. The lady eventually wakes up. I then hear her muttering. Then I hear her saying “HOW CAN YOU BE SO INCONSIDERATE?!? THIS IS A FULL FLIGHT DO YOU NOT REALIZE?” I ignore it and scrunch down into my seat. I didn’t even think about the FA at this point. I just couldn’t believe she was going to be just that loud. The guy who was in the seat behind Bear was standing in the aisle. He heard her. I heard her. The people in front and behind her heard her. But Bear still had headphones on his head. I didn’t get how she thought he could hear her A few minutes later the FA comes by with water and because I’m hyper sensitive I see her take some. I think “Great. Drink some water and calm your ass down.” I should have known this wouldn’t work. I see her clenching her little cup to the point that it starts to crumple a bit. I start getting anxious. I really want her to hold her shit together. We have less than an hour left on the flight. Of course she stands up though before she’s even finished her water. The guy that was in the aisle moves into his seat to let her pass. She reaches for the back of Bear’s seat. There’s no turbulence at this point. She SHOVES hard and Bear’s seat slams back, waking him and startling me and the standing dude. My blood boils and I loudly call “M’am!”. In that second the standing guy moves back into the aisle preventing her from moving away. She ignores me and I continue to call “M’am!” at a woman standing less than 4 feet from me. After about 4 times she gives me this false innocent confused look and says “Yes?” I said “Could you please leave my husband alone?” She says, “I was just trying to get past this man here.” I said “This isn’t the first time you’ve woken my husband, could you please leave him alone?” She looks at me and says “Im going to get the flight attendant.” My hand shot up and pushed the call button. At this point Bear was trying desperately to get me to let it go and I tried to explain to him that I needed her to stop. She had been making me tense this whole flight almost. I then hear the flight attendant ask the lady “Did you touch her husband?” I assume the lady had told her that I was causing a commotion. The lady responds “I was just touching the back of his chair.” The flight attendant says “Did you touch her husband earlier?” The lady shifts back towards Bear’s chair and touches the back as if to demonstrate, “Right now, I just touched the back of it” The flight attendants voice gets kind of stringent. “Did you AT ANY TIME touch her husband?” The lady clearly has had enough as well “HE WAS SNORING.” At this point I’m pretty sure the crazy must have been obvious on her face too because the Flight Attendant shuffled the lady away. We were told they were going to see if she was agreeable to moving seats. Bear was told very kindly that he should not be touched or allowed to feel bad for snoring on an airplane. Apparently the lady didn’t want to move though because right before we all had to be seated for landing she pops back into her seat. She didn’t look at us or say anything for the rest of the flight. True story. Lets just say Bear and I gave her PLENTY of space when we were getting off the plane. This weekend was hellish for sleeping. Bear was doing his normal freakish sleeping at all hours thing (with the biggest naps falling between 6am and 2pm). Friday night was great. I even woke up at like 8 am because I went to sleep early and slept well. Then Saturday night I had nightmare after nightmare. I also woke up about 4 times. First I went to read on the bed because it was getting late. I fell asleep. I woke myself up, took out my contact and got in my jammies and went to read some more. Then Bear woke me up when he came to lay down. I fell asleep again while he was reading, except then he started to watch something and I woke up. I laid there very uncomfortable for a bit because I was tired but I’d been having a nightmare where my mom and grandma were there, but something scary was happening. It was vague and scary enough to make going back to sleep hard. Espcially with Bear playing on his computer. I finally got so frustrated, I went to lay down on the loveseat in the living room. It was dark and quiet and cool and I felt myself relaxing. Suddenly I was looking for something with AJ. We were traveling all over space and kept taking these little trips to look for it. Probably the Maltese Falcon. When suddenly one of the trips was gonna cost us $8,987. I remember the amount. I freaked out and said I couldn’t go on the trip. Except we had taken a shuttle to this little space station where we got slapped with the price for the big trip. I was like, um. I do not have that much money. I have a mortgage yo. I actually told the crazy lady who was telling AJ and I that it was gonna cost us that much that I had a mortgage and I could not give her $8k for this flight/trip thing so that AJ and I could keep searching. AJ freaked on me. Apparently she’d know the cost? And there were more expensive ways to go but this was our cheapest and best options. So the lady turns to her little minion and was like, “Take them to X and clear it up. Don’t leave them alone.” We freaked a little at this and made a break for it. We got caught when we went into a bar trying to find a way home. I mean, getting away from this lady is one thing, but we were on a space station. Turned out this lady takes people’s money and then liquefies them and hey, they went on this trip. Maybe they just didn’t come home. I don’t know how the fact that NO ONE COMES HOME wasn’t a huge fucking sign, but AJ and I freaked out again. Only at the bar something amazing happened and this old woman stood up and said she’d take our place. I remember I was screaming at the lady. When the old woman stood up, so did a few other people. AJ and I were like… WHAT is going on. Apparently the lady owns all the people on the space station. The lady isn’t human and she keeps these people here so that she has a collection of people to liquefy. She knew we’d have a hard time to get off the station so she took us to see what happens to the people and then let us go. I felt horribly sick and we were running away again and then we met up with these crazy people who were hiding from the lady on the station. They knew all the ins and outs. They were like gutter rats. She probably knew where they were and might be able to set traps, but as long as they avoided the traps they were safe. They were also CRAZY AS LOONS. Except that’s kinda gross where my dream went next. So lets say when my mind played that trick on me I woke up FAST. I was then horribly confused as to where the fuck I was. I realized I was on the couch and RAN back to Bear and cuddled him and ignored the light until I fell asleep. Then Bear woke me up at 6 because he couldn’t sleep. Then I slept until noon because my body hates me. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Sunday was kinda loony toons for Bear and I. I was restless all day. And of course Bear and I didn’t fall asleep until almost 4am and we got up at 7:40. I don’t feel sleepy, but lemme tell you, my brain is misfiring like crazy. I’m stealth tired. I think the takeaway from this weekend is “Do not trust the loveseat. Even if it is cool and dark and quiet, it lies.” I had the most fucked up dream last night. I couldn’t fall asleep and I couldn’t fall asleep and I freaked myself out thinking someone had broken into our house. Nevermind that I sleep just fine on the nights that we leave windows open. Finally I fell asleep and I started dreaming. I would swear to you that I had this dream going on for hours. I don’t give a shit what people say about not being able to have a dream that is connected for most of the night. I do it. So I starts off that I’m driving through mountains to visit this tiny town that lives in a isolated valley. It sounds like a bad movie script. I get there and I’m staying with these people and I’m supposed to be learning from them? It feels like I was learning spinning but I distinctly remember competitions and computer stuff and games. Someone’s board broke and we had to replace it before we could continue. There were pieces that weren’t competition and we just learned from them. At our terminals. Clearly my brain is crazy. But this is how the dream went. And I had a partner there. He wasn’t Bear and he wasn’t Carl. I didn’t travel there with him? I don’t know. But I remember at one point he stayed out of a leg of the competition and it was a big concern. Eventually the whole town needed to travel to another place. I remember this felt like some kind of an emergency? So we are all walking and the partner dude gets stuck to the side of a hill. Like, the ground comes up and traps him. And it starts raining? And water shoots out of the ground? I think this was the emergency. So anyways I’m really concerned about getting the partner out of the ground and the rest of the tribe is thinking they’ll send this one guy. He’s the most…good? person from the village. Because inherent goodness defeats ground that can swallow and trap people. Right. So he goes to free my partner dude and he gets thrown to the ground… by the ground? I dunno. It was bad. The village people freak out that my partner is one of the evil things. And I start creeping along the side of the hill to try and free him myself because I don’t want to tell the village people how I know he isn’t evil. But water starts falling on just me and the village people notice and I have to explain that I know he isn’t evil. So apparently a couple hundred years ago, there weren’t people running around. There were just these creatures:
And there was one black one and he was evil and a bunch of white ones and they were good and then there were a ton that didn’t know what they were. So this one white one battles the black one and swaps their heads thus defeating the evil. Or incorporating it into herself and forcing the goodness from her head into the evil. So whatever. Not defeated, just spread and shared. And that’s me and the partner dude. We hatched out of the creatures with the swapped heads and have been just fine ever since. No ramages of evil or random miracles coming out of asses. We are sometimes together and sometimes not. So I’m explaining all of this to the village people. It was more that I was told them who we were. They already knew the story? That’s when the partner bursts out of his earth cage. And I woke up. And all day today I’ve been grouchy and it feels like something is pushing into my left eye. Some days I’m pretty sure I’m kinda crazy. (Linda, title is from The Trapeze Swinger by Iron & Wine) I wanna talk about abuse and why we stay in relationships today. The fact that my mom, dad and a stupid girl that I don’t even know cause me to want to talk about abusive relationships probably says scary things about my sanity, but since I didn’t start this blog off wanting to talk about my mental health and wellbeing I think the less said about the genesis of this topic the better. I’ve known at least three women who stayed in abusive relationships. Two of them I even know pretty well, almost as well as you can know another human being. I can’t say why certain women stay in abusive relationships and others seem to find it easy to leave when a relationship isn’t healthy. I can’t say why a woman will find strength when she does end up leaving or where that strength comes from. There are some things that I do know. I know that it’s not weak women who stay in abusive relationships. Some of the strongest women I know fall into abusive relationships. Maybe because they think they are too strong to ever be taken advantage of, until it happens. I know that women don’t stay in abusive relationships because they are stupid. Some of the smartest women I know have been in abusive relationships. I also know that abuse doesn’t necessarily come from spouses or significant others. Hell, I’ve negotiated a relationship with a man that I knew was abusive before I ever got into it. As my brother tells me, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I do know that sometimes there’s nothing you can do. From my own experience I think I know now that if a man is abusive there’s nothing you can do but stay away. I also know that I tend to never accept that there’s not a solution. So that’s my own stupid failing and it tripped me up. I thought there was a way to protect myself and still be in the relationship. I also know that abuse isn’t limited to women. Men fall into this exact trap of thinking they can protect themselves and so enter into relationships with people who have redeeming qualities. I, and in my opinion others as well, think that in the end it will all worth it. I don’t believe it’s because women are fooling themselves either. It’s not them getting tricked by some hormones or excitement or other emotions. The fact that someone would say that women are being led astray by thinking they can change a person or by the excitement from being around that person makes me 1) want to vomit and 2) want to beat someone. By the time a woman realizes that the partner she has picked is abusive, it’s not that you are still so fluttery at the thought of being around that person that’s keeping you there. It’s probably partially the fact that you picked that person. It’s partially that you love this person and have been putting them before or equal to your own wellbeing for at least some amount of time before now. It’s that there’s shame associated with being in an intimate relationship with someone who would hurt you, sometimes not even deliberately, but often. I find women who manage to walk away from damaging relationships strong. I hope there’s someone there to give them hugs and prop them up when their sanity is at risk. I also wish that someone had been there before they fell in love with that person to say something. Often this doesn’t work, but maybe, just maybe, sometimes it does. |
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