Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Monday, Jan. 03, 2005 - 6:18 p.m.

For a breakdown of some of the humanitarian organizations that already have relief programs in place in Southeast Asia - and are, presumably, better equipped to distribute food and help there than those organizations I have seen on the news in recent days whose "help" consisted of landing a helicopter or parking a truck, tossing some boxes to whomever got there first, and taking off again - go here. I personally don't think chunking boxes off of a helicopter to the biggest guy or fastest runner an adequate response to or method of dealing with a disaster. If you agree with that summation, you may want to give to one of those linked above. The page also has short descriptions of what the organizations are doing to help the tsunami victims. For myself, since the health situation over there is in serious jeopardy, I will be cutting a check to Doctors Without Borders and another to Oxfam to help with drinking water and building temporary housing/shelters.

Can I just say? Sunnflower has like, one of the best templates on Diaryland or any other weblog. Seriously. I love it. I want one that well-organized and stuff. Plus, she's nice. And patient, because, God love her, I'm pretty sure I stomp all over her nice feelings several times a month, if not several times a week, especially when Lola is in full possession of her faculties. Alas, but I am one of those people who feels a weblog is by its nature designed to provide righteous venting, and boy, do I utilize it to that end. But I am digressing. My main point is that Sunnflower is pretty much the bomb. (which expression, as you can see, I have clearly not learned to excise from my vernacular)(or something).

So, I went down south to visit the slightly immediate fam over New Year's. This is the family consisting of my favorite cousins, and the aunt and uncle who used to love me when I was acting, but have less respect for me now that I dabble in reality tv and other non-glamourous work situations. In fact, they pretty much consider me the loser black sheep of the family, along with my other uncle who has been unemployed for the last few years and who suffers from the absolute worst case of Peter Pan Syndrome I have ever seen. In addition to this refusal to grow up and get at least slightly responsible, he uses his brain much less than a person with all the frigging degrees he has should use it. Ie., one 4th of July, he made his own fireworks, which he then loaded into the back of his SUV on a typically hot southern California day in the desert, and drove out to the huge home my aunt and uncle have on top of a mountain, in a fire zone.

You can hear the disaster coming, can't you?

So, he pulls up the longass driveway to the very big, sprawling hacienda up there on the highest peak for miles, the flanks of which are covered with dry brush and surrounded by multi-million dollar houses, and he proceeds to park in the hot southern California desert sun with all his windows rolled up and a cargo area full of homemade, illegal fireworks. As in, explosives.

Have I mentioned he's a chemist?

Sometime in the late afternoon, when the sun had reached its zenith, and the day was maxxing out on heat absorption and delta x's and stuff like that, the fireworks - wait for it - spontaneously combusted.

Let that roll around your mind for a while. Relish the picture. Fireworks zinging around the inside of an SUV, lighting every portion of the inside of the thing on fire. Smoke, sparks, the whole nine yards.

Don't forget the whistles and bangs inherent in fireworks.

Now picture a middle-aged boy trying to put the whole mess out with a garden hose before the vehicle itself explodes or the tree above it catches fire.

And he drove that burned out hulk of a car for another year.

And THAT is the sublevel to which I have been ascribed standing in the family. I am on a par with the guy who left homemade fireworks in his SUV in the sun on a hot day until they exploded.

But I went down for a visit anyway, because they'd called at Christmas Day, and I'd gotten all wistful because I missed all the fun of a huge family and friend gathering over the holidays. And anyway, I like my cousins.

What followed was the pushing of every single button I have, and then some. But after not seeing family members for a year, I got a keen, birdseye view of a great deal of the dysfunction and issues related to being a member of my family, even the non-Doyle side of it.

My mom's family is whacked, yo.

And the high points are that I am pretty much clueless and incapable, and that if I would only listen and follow directions, I would have all the answers and everything would just fall right into place. I got schooled on relationships (they're hard work, everyone has issues, you have to stick with it), jewelry (here's how you buy your components, you can't make money on jewelry, how do you expect to sell jewelry, you can't keep up with a lot of orders on your own), what I should do for a living (landscape design or acting), moving to France (do you speak french, what are you going to do there, how do you plan on that), and work (you work on computers, right? get your resume out there, start at the bottom and work up, you should be acting, jewelry isn't really a job, shouldn't you be doing something in your chosen field, what happened to landscaping, why aren't you doing that, etc. etc. etc.)*. It was actually much worse than that. But in the interest of my sanity, I am giving you the toned down version, rather than relive the irritation.

* the answers to those questions/comments are duh, some issues are way too fucking big to share a house with, not when you want to put a bullet thru your head instead; i can buy my own stuff just fine, yes you can, i already am, and yes i can, i already figured it out; i like jewelry more, and acting is no longer a realistic goal apparently; not yet, i don't know right this very minute because i really need to sort out my immediate problems first, and it's really more important to find a job here where i actually live right now, then it is to worry about a job in france or how to get there in another year or two; no i don't work on computers, i know how to look for work, i'm already at the bottom, unfortunately whether or not i get to act isn't all up to me and frankly i have to find a paying job first, i don't like jumping thru hoops to make people happy and jewelry is easier, this is my chosen field, etc.

I know it was meant to be helpful, and the questions were also to find out more, but it seriously made me realize that my entire life has been spent with people who constantly told me "you can't do that". And it really irritates the living daylights out of me when someone who doesn't know anything about a particular field asks a few questions, then gets up and googles a term, then returns and tells you well, they just googled such and such, and they got 10,000 hits on it, so you just haven't googled the right things, despite the countless fucking hours you have spent in front of the computer trying to search out the right information, they were able to go in knowing nothing, and in just 5 seconds find everything you had searched for, because you, afterall, don't know what you're doing.

Yes. It really was that bad. I am not exaggerating. Thank goodness for my cousin, because I thought my head was going to implode. I am literally surrounded by people who think I am inept and incapable, from the guy I live with to my parents to most of my friends and family. It's astonishing, really, because I know I might not demonstrate it adequately here, but I am an incredibly capable, intelligent person. Ask any boss I've ever had. I have letters of reference to prove it. But for some reason, I tend to surround myself with people who apparently think I am a moron. I suppose because I understand them and feel comfortable around them, since I grew up with parents who not only felt I was an idiot, but also that I was far too smart to be such an idiot. I now fully realize how Lisa Greene felt in college. Everyone took care of Lisa. She skated on everything, because she never had to do anything for herself; it just all landed in her lap. I ran into her once, a few years after we'd both left the university, and in the course of discovering that she was actually a very nice, intelligent person, and not the airhead bimbo I had believed her to be at school, I asked her wasn't that a pretty frustrating thing, to always be looked after, and her eyes flooded with tears faster than I have ever seen a person well-up, and she nodded and very quietly said "yes, it is," in a way that made my heart ache for her. We talked several times after that, and I have always regretted losing touch with her afterward. She was so much more than I - or apparently anyone else - had ever given her credit for, and I bet when she finally got where she'd been going when we were reacquainted that it was quite a thing to behold.

At any rate, I get that, now. I hate being talked to like I'm a child. I hate being treated like I need help and am incapable of success on my own. I hate people who seem to think that because I haven't carved my path in stone, that I will never get there, or that I'm a lost cause because I have to figure out all over again what I want to do with my life. Life is a series of re-inventions. If you are one of the lucky few doing exactly what you want to do and what makes you happy, then more power to you, but judging from the number of stressed-out, unhappy people there are in just this country alone, I'm thinking you're pretty fucking rare, and the rest of us are just trying to figure the shit out, re-inventing our selves and our lives as we go along. So yes, we take a different path than we had planned, now and then. Or we find the path we're on is up too steep a hill or maybe just not the path we really wanted, afterall. And we get off of it and onto a new one. If you have all the answers when you're 5, and the way you've chosen goes well for you, you're a lucky, lucky person. You can afford to be generous and cut some slack to those whose paths haven't gone as well, or who found out the journey wasn't what they'd thought it would be. It takes a lot more courage to change direction in the middle of your life than it does to keep plodding along unhappy - I know, because I've done both. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe there are too damn many people continuing down paths they hate because they're afraid to change direction, and they can't stand those who have the courage to change things, because they themselves are so unhappy. I don't know. I'm just trying to find my way. And I'd appreciate it if you didn't stand alongside the road telling me what I'm doing wrong or making little comments as I pass. Either cheer the people in your life on, or shut the hell up. They know how to walk just fine; they don't need you telling 'em the best way to pick their feet up and put them down again.

Man. Issues. I really just wanted to say there were puppies. With good-smelling puppy breath. And that it rained a LOT on the way home. Aside from that, Happy New Year.

Peace out,
Katie

ps. the tree *did* catch fire. i neglected to mention that. it looks fine now, though.

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Yesterday's News - Next Stop

In which Katie shares sad news - Wednesday, Apr. 01, 2015
In which Katie returns after a very long absence - Monday, Jun. 25, 2012
In which Katie pokes her head in and brushes some of the cobwebs away - Thursday, May. 06, 2010
In which Katie asks you to write your congressman again. - Monday, Jun. 02, 2008
In which Katie asks you to please click the link and send the message to protect the rights of artists - Wednesday, May. 21, 2008