Is it May already?

Shit... I will be 19 again in a month.

I love my birthday.

So today is the running of the 125th Kanfuckme derby. I think I am going to break down and go... after all what kind of Kanfuckian would I be if I didn't go. OK OK... so some boy invited me to a naked party in New York and I just don't have the balls (ha ha ha) to go and I am using the Kanfucky Derby as an excuse.

Plus when I went to see Dr. B the other day he convinced me with this one line... "But it's the most International event Louisville will ever have... just think of all the pictures you can take..."

Fucker. mmmm... Naked Party. Just think of all the pictures I could take.

Sigh... what's a girl to do. I finished my paper... but I am not too terribly happy about it so I am going to work on it some more and then turn it in. I got the main part out, I just need to back more of it up, and I must admit, it is one of the finest pieces I have written.

So... what are some other cool Kanfuckian things I like?

I love sitting in the Spring sun and eating a Kizto cookie (Kizto emigrated here from Africa and she makes the best damn cookies on the planet). I love sipping Maker's Mark and coke and mint juleps. I love the actual Bluegrass. I love that nature here. I LOVE both Derby and Silk pies. I love bourbon balls. I love the cost of living.

Sad to say that the dislikes far outweigh the likes at this point.

So... I am going to graduate. I try so hard not to burst out into tears when I think about it. I think part of me was holding onto the delusion of when mom was here and there was just always a comfort in stressing myself out with school.

Kind of like when I had brain surgery I just knew God wouldn't let me die a virgin so I didn't have sex. Kind of like the stupidity of cutting on my vagina trying to somehow achieve the same sex drive as Andy. I used to think there was something wrong with me and held on to the delusion that it might just work out if we were more sexually compatible. And I suppose in a way I believed that as long as I was in school, Mom wouldn't die.

That and it's my last successful fuck you to her. The one before that was that President Clinton would NOT be impeached.

Fuck you mom, I got my BFA. Fuck you mom, I have 2 degrees. Fuck you mom, I'm still alive.

So now it seems I am fresh out of fuck you moms. I don't know why I need to say fuck you so much. I think it's the Clay part of me. I could have been blind, so I became a photographer. I wanted to prove to my dad I am smarter then he is, so I majored in Russian. My Russian teacher was soviet so I studied in Vermont. Those people were assholes so I went to Russia. They censored my work, so I became more offensive.

Now I just have to figure out where the good fight lies.

What to conquer next? There are no monsters in my closet. No significant threats in sight. It seems now is the first time in my life I can look back and examine just what I have accomplished.

I started to do it a few weeks ago when I was looking through my photographs of my first trip to Russia. Damn... it is almost too overwhelming for me to contend with.

To keep from being destroyed when my mom eventually died, I went to the other extreme and overwhelmed myself with new experiences. I don't think this is something I can change in my personality.

I know it's hard to believe, but I am more scared now then I ever have been in my entire life. Before I had my mommy to support me. Before I could defy her wishes in order to make something work for myself. Before I wasn't the only one that cared so much about myself because she was my cheerleader. Before I belonged to her and that was an irrefutable fact and now I just belong to myself.

That's a scary feeling... for a woman. After writing so hard this past week about the objectification and de-humanizing of women, it really hits home that I can't feel that I am a person without someone else's validation.

Fuck that. That's the one thing I fucking love about Melissa. She never gets bent out of shape for not having her way or even if some major shit is thrown in her face. She simply wipes it off and goes on with her life. There are certain fundamental facts of life no one can change, such as aging, and she does everything with such class and grace.

I admire her greatly for not putting me through that shit because I know she could, my mother did. There are so many things she could be... She's not in the best financial position now and she is a single mom but she never complains about not having money. There is always enough to do something she can enjoy with Colin... yesterday we all went to the park and I just looked and looked at him. He really does amaze me.

Then we went to Mc Donald's and then Target. We were walking around the store... I found this great fuzzy pillow I just love so much but it was $15 and I am a cheap skate now. I know I will go get this pillow because I just loved it so much, but for now I am going to be mad. We walked around some more and then he found it! A blue wagon.

We put him in the wagon and pushed him from her to me. Back and forth with many delightful baby giggles from the simple pleasure of just existing. There are some things I think children never need to concern themselves with and one of them is if their parents are content with the lifestyle they are leading. That is a condition the parents place upon themselves and the children should not feel responsible to appease their parent's desires.

I could not pass up the joy it would bring to me to know that Colin's life would be much more content if he had the wagon. Besides as we started to leave the thought of not possessing the wagon was not a factor in his 18 month old mind. As I watch him grow, the stages of thinking are so easily transparent.

But he is such a joy. He is mine. He was mine from the day he was born. Melissa knew how much more connected I would be to him when she allowed me to watch him enter this earth. Even though delivering babies is something she does for a profession she has to marvel at those first stolen moments of a new born's life.

Well, maybe it does not fascinate her to no end today, but to me in my limited experience I know that as a woman I care for Colin more because I was there for his birth, and every transition he makes as he slowly gets bigger brings tears to my eyes. Watching him has helped me make it through some of the rough spots, because I know no matter how bad I feel, a goofy face or tossing him in the air always guarantees an enchanting response.

*********************************************************

Will I win?

I went to Churchill Downs and bet and then we came home. I went with Marina and her son, Allege, and Elena. It was $35 to get in!

I have bet on Adonis, Cat Thief and Prime Timber.

Go baby go...

Tick Tock... Tick Tock... come on already...

I saw my Russian (America) professor and her husband. It was nice. I saw a few people I knew... but I didn't spot Dr. B.

OK... they're lining up.

Marina's son Kyle was whining... and I was sick of being there. I like watching the Derby at home, but I did place my bets. Maybe I will win enough to cover my costs.

I really think Prime Timber is going to win.

Oh god... I have never really bet.

They are off...

Cat Thief is second...

Go... fuck I am screwed.

There is still hope.

GO BABY GO!!!!!!!!

Here comes the hard part

Go CAT THIEF!!!!!!!!

Cat Thief GO!!!!!!!!!

FUCK. Oh well... Charismatic. I usually pick the winner at home. Cat Thief is third.

But it was a thrill.

I am not a gambler.

I didn't know Al Gore was here today... that explains just why there were police in riot gear.

Wow.. my first time at Derby and it was the second highest number of people to show. Also the last on of this century...

Sunday May 2, 1999

I thought of my mom last night before I started to fall asleep. Her face contorted by death as she drown from her own fluids. Swollen skin from being unable to move after her muscles would only allow her to breathe. It was really quite horrific. It takes a lot of energy to die.

Ph.D. Kloner's wife's mother died about a month ago. I finally was able to meet his wife. She is in that stage that is so hard to come out of... the one where you feel like what's the point of this all? She also lost her mother to cancer.

I talked with Elena last night... hard. I told her that she has to calm down more and more now that she is here, that she doesn't have to worry about anyone trying to come here and ruining her life. That is how I felt when my dad told us we could go live with my mom 12 years ago when they gave her 3 months to live. I always thought someone was going to try to come ruin what piddle ass amount of freedom I had when I moved in with her.

Funny when I think about it that I just chose a different form of being constrained by worrying so much about my mother and not concerning myself so much with what it meant to be so young. I was determined not to fuck up. I was going to be a better woman. I was going to do it the way it should be done.

I think American women are stupid, for the most part. There are a few that are total gems, but with how feminism leveled out men and made them more sensitive to a woman's needs, women think that taking care of a man in the traditional sense is too much trouble.

Allege's husband is a lawyer. He is so fucking beautiful. So is she. When we were walking around the infield yesterday she had her picture taken by a number of men and a lot just stopped what they were doing and stared at her. She is a woman's woman, and she is not socially accepted here so much because she represents the quintessential Cinderella. She's from Brazil and everything about her reeks beauty.

Rob didn't speak Portuguese and she didn't speak English but he got her up here and married her and he is a good provider. I think any man would do anything for that kind of attention, that show of appreciation that women can give so easily but for some reason just choose not to. But I also think it takes a special kind of man to recognize that need within himself. The need to feel a woman appreciates them for being manly.

That was a point of contingent between Andy's parents and me. His dad just assumed that since his wife put up with his shit for so many years that it's only natural for a woman to put up with his son's, but Andy was not a good provider, he was stingy and for a while there I was the only one working. I think women should work because it gives them a sense of providing for themselves but also to keep life more interesting. I don't think a man should make un due demands on a woman if she is providing for the family equally, however. And I think a man should always show appreciation for a woman to care about him.

I'm not talking about dripping in pearls and all that kind of shit, I mean doing things that make her life a little bit easier like doing the dishes or cooking dinner or filling up her car with gas. Stupid little shit that makes it easier to get through the day. Consideration.

Girls, real men eat pussy.

If you are in a relationship now where your man does not eat your pussy, then he is a selfish bastard and the relationship was over long before it started because he doesn't give a fuck about your needs as a woman. That need to feel all giggly that someone actually enjoys your body. That need to feel an orgasm in such a way. That's some might fine adoration of affection right there.

I can usually tell if a man is going to be worth it by how much he services me and I have yet to feel like a man was doing his fair share of ensuring my sexual happiness. I have had a lot of guys come close, but no cigar (he he he).

I still am under the delusion that if a woman is sexually satisfied, she can make it all work no matter what. Actually it's not all a delusion, Allege has it with Rob.

He's such a great guy too. I can't imagine what the women were like that he dated before because he's so giving. When I see such situations I know that American women are stupid because they don't take care of those needs a man has the way we should, which causes further discourse in a relationship.

What a precarious balancing act...

********************************************************

I think it was all a dream I had about knowing about my friend's wife knowing about the trench coat mafia before they struck. I went over there today and I think I was terribly wrong.

Anyways, I went over to their place today and they live on the most perfect area in downtown Louisville. I think I am going to try to see if I can move down there. I am going to have to start cutting up some department store credit cards so they won't think I am going to run out and run all my cards up.

Ah... the thought of buying a house on this property has just given me such a thrill because it's in downtown and it's nice, green lawn, fish pond, 100 year old house. Used to be a hostel.

It would be perfect... perfect... two stories and two apartments. I would love to either find a place here and live here. What I would really love to do now is find a great job working for a company doing web stuff at home. This is my ideal job.

A place where I feel just as comfortable as being over in Europe. This house is over a hundred years old, so it has that good boom time feeling to it. Before the industrial revolution started to slow and still when Louisville was considered an "IT" city. i would love to have one of those old antebellum homes with all the modern convinces, but then I am such a fucking Southern Belle.

A nice playground for Colin. I don't know if it is possible. I am hoping.

If I can afford the building, I would love to buy it. But I think to rent the apartment on the second floor... I want stability. I want a place I can put a dent into the wall on accident and fix it myself.

My mom put that into me. I love doing home improvements.

Ah... but then I would be tied to this city for a while, and I do want to get away, but I know that even if I got a house here, i could live somewhere else in the country because that's what Jenn does with her building.

I don't know... I don't know... I just don't know...

Anyways... it was a fucking awesome afternoon. We met Jacinta and Allege and Fernando and Lars and Marie and Stephanie and Sylvia at the place where Lars and Marie live and we were 'going to play soccer' but just fucked around and chit chatted. The girls were all talking and the boys tossed the ball. Lars got sunburnt yesterday in the infield and was too stupid to put sun screen on so he wouldn't get sun poisoning. Everyone kept complaining at how red his face was getting and I got pissed off at him and took him by the hand to their apartment to put some sun block on his face and there wasn't any so like a bad little boy I marched his ass to the drug store and we bought some stuff.

He doesn't take Advil, he's one of those kinds of freaks. i was like that at one point in my life but when I realized I was going to be hooked on much worse i decided Advil wasn't nearly as bad as some of that other shit pharmaceutical companies put out. So I picked him up some baking soda for the sun burn as well. He's German, and so very sweet. I think he's the tallest pussy cat I have ever seen. I just love to be around him because he's such a boy. Took off his shirt and everything for me to put baking soda on his back. I told him to put on a white shirt too so he doesn't attract more heat.

He thanked me for being this way with him but I still couldn't help but be a little perturbed.

I wanted to tell him that if he is ever in a relationship where a woman doesn't make him feel this special again that he shouldn't be with her, but I held my tongue because sometimes actions speak so much louder then words.

So, that's how my wonderful sunny afternoon in the sun was spent. There were some times I wanted to smack Sylvia because she can be such a bitch, but Jacinta could look at me and say "would you stop" because she knew I wanted to pounce on her like a fucking tiger on her cub. Sometimes it's necessary for people to understand that the way they are is harmful to other people, but then I remember she is leaving in a week and I won't have to worry about it anymore. I am sure it sucks leaving a bunch of people your care about but that's no excuse to treat them poorly.

Monday May 3, 1999

I realized something really fucking gross last night. I am inbreed... and it's not what you think. Not like brother and sister shit... like two sisters married two brothers and bred.

In the royalty it serves as no great surprise that half of the birth defects and shit like that came from inbreeding. Well, it wasn't the mountain folk that were so inbreed, it was the gentried part of me. Somewhere along the line they quit branching off and I think that's why I was born with birth a defect. I think it's only natural for you find in someone else the genes you do not posses to try and make stronger babies.

With arranged marriages that stuff isn't so easy. My dad married out of his class and that was a no no because they like breeding with other people they think are like them, but that's just not the case.

I told Elena how funny it was for me to see all these women at the Derby and they all acted like they had so much class and they didn't have the first idea. My grandmother taught me what class, true class is all about.

You can be as heavy as you want, but take good care of your appearance.

My dad kept our hair cut like a boys. He took us to a barber when I was a kid and I was too fucking stupid to know what one was or how he was making me look was totally socially unacceptable. It was so bad, and then I started to notice...

I just got so used to not being socially acceptable that I did things to keep me in that place. In some ways I wouldn't change that part of me for the world but in other ways I wonder if I could have had more meaningful relationships with people worth spending my time with.

But then I spent the day wanting to smack Sylvia because I could have been her... if my parents stayed married and the thought of that kind of life, that kind of awareness makes me want to curl up and die right now.

Shudder... and I am inbreed... somewhere along the line I just know I am.

******************************************************

I think I have had my nose stuck up my ass too much lately.

I am feeling rather attractive now, now that I am sitting on my yellow t-shirt sheets with toilet paper stuck up my nose. That's what I get for being a rebel and blowing snot out the window instead of in a tissue like all good little girls should.

I laid my head back on my pillow to pretend like it wasn't me that just did that and then all of a sudden, I felt weird... then I instinctively put my hand to my nose and a gush of blood fell on my fingers.

I can't stand blood. It makes me so fucking sick. I hate my own blood and I bleed every fucking month. I am always reminded that I am dying and I fucking hate it.

If it's not my ankle that I broke in Moscow it's something else different that tweaks and contorts my body with pain. My headaches... well if I can ever feel anything stronger then my headaches I fucking know there is a problem.

I think the strangest thing about being a woman is bruises. All your life as a girl you look at other women's legs and see that they are mostly flawless, no bruises to be seen anywhere. And then being a woman I don't have the compulsion to do things that I know are going to hurt me like that.

I would rather mentally torture myself with men.

The other week I had a doozie of a bruise on my leg... it was beautiful. I was impressed at it's size and color... I have no fucking clue how I got it but I did.

I wish I didn't feel guilty about not turning my paper in on Friday. Turns out Ph.D. Kloner didn't even show up. I said I would have it done on Friday and it was... I just could have tweaked it and added more stuff here and there.

Sigh... but I know I am still going to graduate.

Tuesday May 4, 1999

So I am reading Susan Sontag's On Photography. It's really an amazing book. In this section that I am reading now, she is talking about Diane Arbus's work and how she took photographs of freaks.

This paragraph struck me the most: Thus, what is finally most troubling in Arbus's photographs is not their subject at all but the cumulative impression of the photographer's consciousness: the sense that what is presented is precisely a private vision, something voluntary. Arbus was not a poet delving into her entrails to relate her own pain, but a photographer venturing out into the world to collect images that are painful. And for pain sought rather than just felt, there may be less than obvious explanation. According to Reich, the masochist's taste for pain does not spring from a love of pain but from the hope of procuring, by means of pain, a strong sensation; those handicapped by emotional or sensory analgesia only prefer pain to not feeling anything at all. But there is another explanation of why people see pain, diametrically opposed to Reich's, that also seems pertinent: that they seek it not to feel more but to feel less.

And then I go boom.

Today and yesterday happen to be the kind of days I wish a bullet would go through my head and pop that fucking cyst open. I am in pain and nothing I do can make me feel better. I want to vomit, I want to scream, I want to sleep and somehow relent to the pain. Sometimes, when it hurts more then it does now, I smile and start laughing.

I am in Danville, and very happy to be here. I spent night talking with Lance (Thomas's buddy but he does not play any of us against one another) last night. Sometimes, certain people I know just need Pop and Granny time. To be loved and cared for just a little bit, to feel what it should feel like when grandparents give. If I could let the entire world know what it is like to have such two wonderful people in their lives, then I would never see my grandparents again. They are the kind of people that treat just about everyone equally but their own they are better to.

So it was nice speaking with him. He is a very honorable man and naturally when I told Anne I had a crush on him, she went for him. I wish when I met such men that I think the world of I could convey that if a woman doesn't care for them in the simple ways I do, then she's really not worth it.

If you are stuck in a relationship where you feel you are giving more then you receive, drop the other person like a hot fucking potato and move on., No amount of caring is every going to get through that selfish barrier they have placed between them and the rest of the world unless something traumatic happens to change their lives, and even then that doesn't always work.

Ahhh... the medicine is kicking in and I am fucked up. I hate the groggy sensation medicine leaves you with the next day.

So, after sleeping the morning away and I could hear Pop speaking loud enough to wake me up I decided to move my ass. I honestly could have stayed in bed all fucking day. Granny and Pop's place feels like a place where you can fall totally apart and then slowly put yourself back together again.

The older I get the more apparent my brain damage is and the less I give a fuck. Other people have to wait half their lives before they had this level of awareness and all it took for me was someone to fool with my head. I feel bad every once in a while and I said some thing to Lena about it the other day and she told me she liked the way my brain works. I think better then half the Americans she knows.

I know I am rambling, I can't help it and maybe I should be in bed asleep, but I know I just can't.

When I read this passage from Sontag's book, I thought... WOW, that's me, right there. It's not that I am such a masochist, it's that if I can feel things for other people, really feel them, then the situations I have been in don't hurt so much, but that's starting to change.

I was a little sad things didn't work out between me and James the other day (once he compared me to his ex, it was over) and Elena started naming off the things I had and what I was lucky for.

"Yes, but I don't have a mom."

Her answer was that only a non Motherless daughter would have "But millions of people don't have their mothers." At first, it comforted me, and now it pisses me off. Fuck it, I know one day she will be among the millions of Motherless children and then she will know just how empty it feels.

I have discovered my most detestable jealously and that is the one of someone that still has a mother, which happens to be most of my friends. I watched Zack's mom look at him the way only a mother looks at her child, and I wanted to fall to the floor and kick and scream bloody murder because my mommy is gone, and no one can look at me with that kind of adoration anymore. Fuck it, I am not going to be so sad.

So everyone in Danville that are among the common folk detest some of the more distinctive Clay characteristics... to give a prime example my grandmother's buddy was cleaning for Jimmy, the oldest boy and his wife wouldn't let her open the blinds. Well Jimmy came in and started bitching about how he wasn't going to give the fuckers at KU (the electric company) any more money then he had to so he started turning off the lights.

I mean, when you can't compromise. She didn't clean for them again because she knows she doesn't have to put up with that shit.

OK. I am sleepy and I am going to go pass out into a coma to rid myself of the mistake of trying to go on the pill again and fucking up my hormones. I think I would rather worry about being pregnant then take something to ensure I don't get pregnant. Fucking rubbers are great and that's all there is to it.

Thursday May 6, 1999

A semi metallic feeling pervades my taste buds this morning. One that tells me I can either be addicted to cigarettes or not be addicted.

I think I will choose not to be addicted. I smoke, I am a social smoker. If I am alone, I don't think about it. Elena smokes like a fucking steam engine. Zack used to never smoke and then he picked it up as a hobby.

I don't know what's gotten into the youth of today.

I visited with Bea yesterday. Her sister died a week ago from skin cancer. I was not told until Tuesday of this week. She didn't feel so much like she was going to die, but I guess she did.

I had a wonderful visit with Bea. Her parents were Lithuanian, and I think they are some of the most beautiful people on the planet. Anyways, she was a teacher after the depression. She went to college when she was younger and that was always my Granny's dream.

That's why it was important for me to get my education. I think to myself "WOW... you did it!!!" I saw so many other women in college that were in their forties because they were stupid and got married first and had babies and then were like... "You mean I have to live my life for myself?"

I would like to find someone special. Some one I can care about and that he appreciates it. Someone that can deal with me being a bitch and still kiss my boo boos when I start to bleed. Someone that loves the evil nature inside of me just as much as the good. Someone that has as much self-respect for himself as I do for me.

I think that's the hardest thing to come by. Even if I can make jokes about being a blue blood inbred, I still respect myself as a woman, as a person, as an artist, as a daughter, as a human. I am important. I matter. I can make a difference.

I care, end of story.

What I care about... that's a different story. That's when you break Catherine Clay into the many facets that make living my life so dynamic. I have no respect for history, not really, but with my own personal history... I can feel it and live it and experience it for myself. From all the people I know to all the friends I have, it all means something to me. And I think facing a new challenge sometime is a very wonderful thing, even if it's something as horrible as breaking a nail to losing my mother.

I figured out long ago that people are not going to want to see you flourish because they are jealous. and you know what? Some of those people you think really fucking care honestly don't. Spend some time in a hospital and see how they react. That's why it's important to live life for yourself and not worry about what other people think. I know there comes a time when you have to consider other people more and more, but that doesn't mean you have to lose yourself inside someone else. Maintain your integrity.

Ladies, if you are in a relationship where your needs aren't being met, then you settled. I think there are several ways you can tell if a woman is happy and one of them is if she is constantly bitching about her boyfriend. Don't you see that when you choose a mate, you are in essence saying to the world "This man, how he acts, how he behaves, what he says is in essence ME."

If you aren't happy and you are always bitching, then whose fucking fault is it that you compromised your integrity for some asshole that sits on the couch guzzling beer and doesn't eat your pussy?

Those men are called trash for a reason.

And if you choose to be in that kind of relationship, then in essence you feel no better then trash. And just because you have money doesn't mean you aren't trash. Look at my father. He is married to some whore that was married to a Mexican drug dealer that he defended 10 years before he married his wife. That's pretty repulsive, at least to me but then again, maybe the Mexican drug dealer had a big cock. I don't know because we never discussed that facet of her personality.

In lieu of last week I just want to clarify why I was so ready to tell James to take a flying leap even though he fucked like a god and was at least on the same level of intelligence as me. He compared me to his ex-girlfriend and there is one thing you never want to do is compare one woman to another, in any way shape or form. All the men I have been with have been different, in the way they saw the world, in the way they treated me and I think it's a sign of trying to control someone by comparing them to an ex, you are setting up a dichotomy where the person you are with can never measure up to the other person and you are not willing to give them a chance to.

I am better then that. I am better then any ex girlfriend any man has had because if your ass is sitting with me then there was something there that didn't work out and just because it was your ass that got dumped and you feel you need to re-create that shit with someone different to resolve it then FUCK YOU. It's time to realize that and move the fuck on with your life.

I know everyone has exs, but when you talk about them with a potential and you still kind of idealize them even after breaking up two fucking years ago, then you have some serious issues and you need to go to therapy.

Plus like I said, I have a ton of self-respect, for all of my characteristics and to find that in a man...

Friday May 7, 1999

If everyone could sauna for one moment in time all at once, the world would be a much happier place.

We went over to Allege's and laid in her sauna. Elena was upset because I scolded her from tying the garbage bag and then sticking more garbage on top of it. It was such a mess. Maybe I was too mean, but I am trying to figure out a healthy way to let out my anger without hurting any body's feelings. Before I just used to keep it all inside.

But after saunaing, it was so nice. There isn't a care in the world and everything seems to be just fine.

I wish I could have a graduation party. I think if I were to tell my sister Lesli we could organize a small party with some really cool people. I feel like this year I really deserve it. Last year, being the same year mom died I just wasn't up to feeling that good about myself while everyone was still feeling so sad. Now we are just enjoying ourselves.

Sylvia had a party last night at Utopia. It was cool. There were supposed to be more people, but it was good.

I also think I may have a job, but I won't know for sure until after tomorrow and even then I am not so sure I am ready to sign a contract to work for a company. I hope they don't make me do that. I don't think I would deal very well under that capacity. We will have to see, though.

I found out just yesterday that my guestbook can only hold 250 entries, so all of the first entries are now gone. They weren't even the first because I lost like 30 by accidentally deleting the whole lot of them.

I like to go back and read the ones where couples share that they were successful at getting their girlfriend's to ejaculate. That makes me feel so good because if I can help people have better sex, then I am like a free sex therapist. There are some things you just don't even want to tell in therapy but you can over the web.

Granted there are still a lot of things I haven't done, either. I am pretty vanilla in the bedroom. I don't kink out like I know some people do. For myself, I prefer the old fashioned way of having sex, man in control. Then you can move your legs around anyways you want to. But then there is always doggie style. That can be the best. I am pretty lazy because I like to squirt so much and most guys are so freaked out by it they do whatever I want so I keep on doing it.

However, I have noticed the better in shape I am the more I can do with my body on top.

Damn I miss having sex. I just am not up to being sexual with anybody now. I am trying to figure things out in my head. Look around at how other women behave so I can be more careful.

I guess Marilyn Monroe never knew about vibrators...

(diamonds are not a girl's best friend...)

Saturday May 8, 1999

Last night was a very good night indeed.

I came home early from Melissa's because she was budgeted and didn't have to work. I saw Sabel at BP and she told me everyone was going to Cahoots. I hadn't been there in a year and now I remember why.

I walked to Jacinta's. I am not afraid to walk the streets alone at night. Foo Foo Foo. So I watched as she finished getting ready and then we went and picked up Michelle. Milli and Fernando went in Milli's car. We had some kids drag racing us, sticking an oil bottle out of window ever so lewdly.

I yelled out for them to show us their butts. Of coarse they did. Then when I was standing outside of the car, a bus load of men were near and they all started hooting and hollering because I was standing on the street by myself. I have very beautiful friends, so no matter where we go someone is getting some kind of attention. I think that's why we stay good friends.

I used to be a Goth chick, but now I am so much more happy hanging out with the foreigners because we encourage each other to be beautiful.

So I am reading Marilyn French's Her Mother's Daughter... and when I read this section, I couldn't help but cry and be somewhat angry:

"Sometimes I think I will die before she does. I don't want to. It might cause her pain. For myself, I don't care. I am living out years I would have not been granted had I been born a hundred or two hundred years ago. I am nearly fifty, an age not many women reached then. And I have bad habits. I smoke too much and drink too much and also I travel frequently by air. I often stay up late at night, have to fight for sleep when the sounds of morning begin: car doors slamming motors fighting to wake up in the cold winter stillness, the whine and grind of garbage trucks, the fucking birds.I personally hate the birds in Moscow the most. I like to spend the night out of bed, walking through the streets of foreign cities, usually giving head or with my skirt hiked up in the air arms linked with those of newfound friends, all of us uproarious, singing, laughing, making jokes about being arrested (in certain cities, anyway, like Zurich), going from pub to pub to after-hours clubs, ending in my hotel room (sneaked in past the desk clerk in Zurich, that proper city) where there is always a bottle, four or five of us sitting around on the beds, smoking drinking, laughing, singing until dawn has given way to morning. My newfound friends and I swear love and fellowship which, next day, I will remember and they will forget. Still, if I meet those friends in two or three years, they will remember me but I will not recall their name, and perhaps not even their faces. Not me, I remember just about everybody and everything, I think it shows a common courtesy to remember such fine details The night we spent together will have gathered itself with the other soaring nights of my past, each of which stands discrete and distinct in my catalog of ecstatic moments, yet from all of which the faces have disappeared.

"Because I have always come home again. Who knows what those faces might have turned into had I stayed? I don't, on the whole, stay with faces. I seek moods. The faces that are constants in my life-well I don't care to replace or repeat them. My children, with all their unending problems. My parents, with theirs. The only thing that endures is that line, blood, the people who can't be changed, exchanged, substituted for. Not that I want to change them, not that there's anything wrong with my life. Quite the contrary. My life is exactly as I want it, as I would have wanted it. I have independence, and -finally-enough money so that I don't have to worry daily about making ends meet. I have a career I love and some success in it. I get to travel all over the world, something I wanted to do from the time I was very young. I have everything anyone could want.

"Except... and suddenly, gently hardly noticeably, my mother's hand opened and surrounded my father's wrist. She reached toward him. She touched him. And my eyes filled with tears and I though- the way off thoughts just suddenly light up in your mind-I though:oh, if only you'd done that years ago! It would have made all the difference!

"Later, of coarse, I saw her gesture as a braceleting, a manacling of his wrist, this man on whom she so depended. Later, too, I wondered at my teariness: I never cry, never. At least I never did. Because since then I find myself bursting into tears at anything at all- pictures of famished children on the television news, stories in the papers of lost children, reunited families, young fathers dead on duty-in fires, in police work, in the military. A television play about the incarceration of an old grandmother in a nursing home reduced me to a sniveling pulp, grabbing tissues by the handful from the box I finally put beside me.

"Of coarse my strange emotional state does not interfere with my work. Many days I get up early in the morning and go out with my camera to photograph; many nights I work in the darkroom into the morning. I prepare diligently for my journeys, reading everything recent so that I will have some idea of how to approach the new subject. Usually I look for what no one else has developed, like a footnote to someone else's chapter. This isn't because I am egotistic that's just implicit, bitch although I may be No shit... is that why you are using the ultimate tool of objectification to further your own ideas? Is that why you choose a career dominated by men... to prove you are just as good if not better then them?. It's because I figure that the lines of thought that are already developed are those that are acceptable, and if you want to change things, you have to look for what is illegitimate-in subject or in approach.Defiance is such a powerful weapon. This tendency has caused me great difficulty in my life: it is always easier, whatever your line of work, to fall in line behind those who have gone before, and add your little tot, than to say to hell with what's gone before, what about what hasn't? Such an attitude can keep you poor."

Of coarse as I read this passage I was a blubbering mess. How can this bitch write about me? How could she go in and steal my soul and manipulate me almost exactly how I am but with a fictitious character? Did she totally make up this woman, so close to who I am so many years ago in hopes that one day I would exist? It was written over 10 years ago, I was already born. I know I can't complain too fiercely, because some of you that come here and read my thoughts feel like you are violating me or as one beautiful poet once wrote "I feel like someone is going to sneak up behind me and tell me to stop..."

I suppose I want you to know that I am assaulted by outside influences as well. Sometime it pulls the newly sterilized scalpel out and cuts straight across my chest and quickly and efficiently cuts again making a T shaped incision exposing all my guts for the world to see. Just like they do autopsies. Sometimes I have a mental image of how when I am particularly a bitch, I do this to people in my mind and I feel better.

My mother had her first line cut early... one that took her belly button away. I knew as I felt her dress as it rested against her chest that there was a new scar of tightly sewn skin in the shape of a T where there hadn't been while she lived. I rubbed my finger along it, trying not to scream out how much I hated her for dying and making me so fucking independent that I can't cry or feel the anguish her death has caused but in waves.

Right now I am in a wave... one where I go running to Chicago and the solace of Zack's arms. He loves me, he really loves me and he is so good to me. I feel comfortable with him. I just might trust him, and that's a very hard thing for me to do.

Have a nice Mother's day tomorrow... love your mother as long as you have her because knowing she is six feet under hurts a whole hell of a lot, especially when there is an entire day set aside in the entire world where you can't run away from the fact that you can not appreciate your mother ever again.

Sunday May 9, 1999

God, being with Zack is the best. I feel like I should end this party girl life style I have been leading, and then when I get to Chicago, we have a party to get to.

We walk in and it's his friend's, Jess, going away party. Zack does the family circus and a lot of the people that he sends messages to were there so as she was introducing Zack to some of these people for the first time they are all "Oh... you do the family circus!"

"And this is his friend, Cathy."

"Oh... you are Cathy from the TRIP!!!!" I wanted to die. It was too fucking cool. I like being an Internet celebrity even on such a small scale. It makes me feel like I am doing something right and people do respond.

So... with that little boastful moment aside (yeah, now my ego is huge) I want to take a minute to talk about who my mom was.

Mom was a munchkin, 5'4". We looked like twins at different junctures in our lives except for my lips. I was always told how much I looked like my mother (which is why I fought so hard to have my own identity).

She was spunky, she was strong, she was so fucking stubborn and I could call her a bitch. When she pissed me off I could express myself like a firecracker and be done with it. She allowed me the freedom to be this way, but I think she started to regret it when she got older because I got to be too independent in some ways.

We had the same eye color and the same body type. We both gained weight on our bellies. I think she wanted me to be like her when I was a teen, and it was always hard to measure up to someone that had been the class president and captain of the cheerleaders.

She was such a good art teacher that she won awards. She went to Japan with one of her students because she won the International Student Art Award established by Pental.

My mother was a painter and if I had to choose her style, I would say it was expressionist. When she was younger, her paintings were so fucking cool. I mean, the ones she did before her death were pretty amazing as well, but you can see in her work there was a time when she actually had the concepts and techniques of a kick ass painter. I wish she could have stopped and have done that instead of teach, but she fucking loved her kids.

As I matured and met people in my social group, I found a number of rather talented people had my mom as their teacher. I was always flattered to have her as my mom when I met these people because they always thought she was so fucking cool. Edie, one of the chicks I went to Spring Break with, was one of her students. She is an excellent photographer now. Then there are the Bradley twins, Mitchell and Matthew.

Anyways, all this is leading up to a really funny story, funny to me.Mom painted her paintings chunky. I mean thick globs of paint on the canvas that you could reach up and poke with your fingernail 3 years later and paint oozes out of the fracture like blood from a cut.

So mom was always invited to these museum functions because she was an art teacher. One such function was the Armand Hammer exhibit and the only place they showed it before it went off to auction was the Speed Museum. Mom and Anne were off staring at another painting when I was looking at an Ingres, don't know which one, and I reached up and touched it.

The security guard almost had a heart attack and I felt at that moment in time I had done something so fundamentally wrong that I was going to go to hell, especially when my mom found out.

My defense was even more priceless. "But MOM, it's NOT REAL!!! It Doesn't FEEL like your paintings!!!!" This was my pre-brain surgery days... more like my hormonal, pre-pubescent days.

Of coarse I never lived it down. It was a topic of conversation for years to come. "Cathy touched an Ingres once!" Part criminal and part in awe. I miss her telling this story to people that weren't quite strangers with that look of "oh I have such a special daughter."

That's what I miss a lot. Her looking up at me and telling me I am special. OK, OK, so maybe she meant it because I am slightly brain damaged, but still...

Monday May 10, 1999

Zack "might" have pneumonia. That sucks. We had a really nice day just sleeping in his bed yesterday. I really needed to be lazy. We went and saw The Mummy. It was ok in that mummy sort of way.

I really don't know how actors can act in that kind of shit and feel really good about themselves, but I guess that's why they are actors.

Then we went to the grocery and the video store and got Elizabeth, Enter the Dragon and The Paper Boy. Since we went to the doctor this morning Zack didn't feel like going into work, especially since he keeps coughing. So we watched that paper boy movie, and the only person I could think about was my brother.

If you would like some insights into the mind of my brother, you should check that movie out, it's really fucked up. The Greatest American Hero plays in it.

Well, that's not fair, my brother hasn't really killed anyone... but I bet if he could get away with it...

So Zack's new place is right across a Ukrainian Church. I think I will go check it out tomorrow to see what kind of Mafia scum are here in Chicago. I haven't seen too many babushkas running around, but then we laid in bed yesterday until 3.

Tuesday May 11, 1999

I am so disappointed. They are good people at the church. No Mafia scum. But then again, I didn't actually get to go to a service. Oh well, next time I am here I will run over.

You know, I am always amazed when people can understand my Russian. I know I speak it well and I know I have learned a lot by living with Elena, but when I can look at someone else and speak Russian and they get me, it is always surprising.

So for those new readers, Zack is one of my best friends in the whole world. We went to college together and he defended me during the whole censorship thing. I love him dearly. But there will never be anything between us, besides, I am not so sure his boyfriend would like that. Zack wouldn't like that.

It's funny just how dependent I have come to be upon him. It's rather a comfort, I know he is my friend for life and we were talking about that the other day. I think once you release some of the shit from your soul, the things you know that hurt you, once they are away from you and voiced, then they kind of lose their power. Like I can talk all kinds of shit about my dick head brother and call him scum and what he thinks and how he feels doesn't effect me like it used to. I wish we could have gotten along, but he is insistent on being immature and leaving me shitty guestbook entries that I can always tell are him. I guess indifference deflates any kind of ill behavior, as long as it continues.

But back to the many accolades of Zack. He doesn't think he's perfect, but he's pretty damn close. I think people that can admit they have fucked up and try to be better people really are closer to being perfect, as long as they don't intentionally hurt anyone along the way.

We talked harder then we have in a while yesterday. Revealing each others weaknesses that we don't share with just anybody. That's so hard for me to do. I hate to admit that I am weak anywhere, but I am.

Me Mate, Peter, wrote to me and said he couldn't understand how I could move from guy to guy so easily and I know the reason I can is because I never emotionally invest in one person. Not that much of myself. All my friends know different things about me, but I must admit, Zack knows the most. I feel very vulnerable to him and if I ever lost him over something stupid I did, I would never forgive myself.

I think I need to spend more time with my nephews. Nate has been acting up in school and from where I have just been consumed with school and boys I haven't really had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with him. I know I shouldn't feel oh so responsible, but he is a part of mom and in essence, me. And since I don't think I can be anything to my other siblings, I will just be something to my nephews.

One thought that keeps prevailing my mind is that I mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but to some people I mean a whole hell of a lot more and to each of them I represent something different then what I can see for myself.

In other words, my mom tempered herself to suit all of her children's behavior. I can't always expect to have a good impact on everyone, either. Some people just don't get it.

However, the people that don't take me for granted and are patient with me see how much I have changed. I can't imagine how Melissa sees me. She knew me back when I was still a virgin and fueled my imagination to travel. I thought of that the other day, and I wonder how she feels about that... Maybe she doesn't even think about it that much.

I think I should pull a Ferris Buhler. But I am in Chicago and not in high school. Plus I don't like driving here so much. It's so funny how much I depend on Zack. I rather like it. I like depending on a man because there are so few that I know I can really depend on.

I must say that Zack and Syndy really have the best fucking apartment on the planet. I mean the design and the fucking kick ass art work. Makes me regret that I never really traded work with other people while I was in art school, although that is easily to rectify. I did buy several pieces. But this place is amazing. It's just awesome.

Thinking about Peter again... I think the reason I can emotionally move after being involved with anyone is because I realize just how short this life is, and if you spend too much time wasting on what you had instead of what can be, then that's time you are spending not enjoying your life and you only have one.

Just call me an eternal optimist because I see nothing worse then death, and even death is just a beginning.

************************************************************

So... I really think I have changed so much from so long ago, but really I haven't. I went back to read some of my older journal entries and read this from September of 1997:

Correct me if I am wrong, but don't most people have ex people they once cared about? Then what's the point of making the person you are with feel like shit because they can't measure up? And if it was so wonderful with Madame X, then why are you here with me? Just answer that one little question, otherwise KISS MY ASS.

So eloquently spoken. I look at myself much differently now, but I suppose the principals remain the same.

Wednesday May 12, 1999

I did it... I REALLY FUCKING DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!

I graduated from college. I called to check on my grade and I passed and I graduated. I am done. I am finished.

And I think I am going to move to Chicago. There is nothing holding me here, and today as I was walking towards the plane coming from the metro, this overwhelming sadness washed over me. I didn't want to leave. I have people up there that want to see me and are always happy to see me. I think I need that now.

I miss my mommy more and more and I miss caring about someone and have them care for me. I felt like Zack was taking me to the first grade today when he dropped me off at the metro to go get on the plane. I had never really been on it by myself. The other day when we went to the doctor I felt them rumble by and it scared me how hard they moved the little stations. That's the coolest fucking thing about Moscow, their fucking metro rocks. Everyone can feel glamorous in the Moscow metro, if only on their way going to work, shopping, or having a discreet affair.

It's usually all in marble and each station has different things. I could be down there for hours, and have spent many hours just riding around on the metro looking at people, looking at architecture, feeling like I was a part of that culture and society whenever someone stopped to ask me a question even though I had American style shoes on (Doc Martians).

But the metro in Chicago is tragic. And the parking is horrendous. And the rent is high. And they city is smelly. That's one cool thing about Louisville, it has it's funk, don't think it doesn't, but not like those monstrocities.

But living in a big city affords one the feel of living life more complete. I love the city. I can't help but say that Moscow is by far my favorite city, since it was the first city I knew on my own, but it doesn't seem practical to live there because I feel like Russia will be immersed in a Civil War soon and a lot of Americans are going to die. I am not comfortable traveling this summer through this mess.

I hate to think of things this way, and I hope to God I am wrong, but I was talking with Elena the other week and I think she can feel it coming. It's like this black hole that opened up and I felt it get bigger as I was there in September when the market really fell. There's a fracture in people that won't allow them the economic freedom that most industrialized countries have. Elena seems to think that this summer will be like the picnic before the war.

I go back and forth on whether I want to be there or not. I don't think so. It's just too much.

"Everything can be bery, bery nice this summer. Just bery..." with a roll of her eyes to accentuate just how nice it can be. I don't believe her. I think it would feel horrible, just awful and after seeing the hole get a little bigger, I don't care to see more of it.

And I think Elena was right about my fantasy of being a war time photographer, you can see too much. I have already seen enough. I want to step back and try to forget a little. Not forget... just hurt less. I am sick of hurting for now. I want some time off for being a good soldier. I want a nice job and I want to feel confident about myself and my ability to function in society. I want to grow old and be happy and thankful for the freedom I have as a woman and the love I have in my heart to share. I want wrinkles and gray hairs and hot flashes. I want everything there is to experience as a woman, well, all the good stuff. But nothing like what I have experienced for myself. I don't think it's an ideal way to raise your children so they take care of you when they start living their own lives. I want to believe in a future instead of living for now, but I don't think that habit is very easy to cure.

I want to experience solidarity.

Thursday May 13, 1999

Today is Lesli and Doug's Anniversary. I don't know which number it is, something like 13.

So our little UN has dissipated for the summer. The main reason for this is that Lars has left for the Pacific Northwest today. I wouldn't even go and say goodbye this morning... although last night there was a big party at Michelle's parents place where most of us swam and got drunk.

When it got too late we all came back here.

Lars is really affectionate. I can understand how some girls can misunderstand his affection for his love. I wish people could be more open and affectionate, but I don't see that happening.

So I am kind of sad today, plus it's rainy.

I know how to cheer myself up! Watch videos from Russia! Oh... but even this is making me horribly sad. I got this letter from my Welsh pen pal which furthers my belief that there are going to be a lot of problems over there this summer:

This NATO shit has sure got everyone worked up here, (in Zelonoborskiy anyway) some shops are refusing to serve us now, and for the first time in a year, someone attacked me from behind with a very low quality and blunt knife. No real damage, I think I surprised the guy by laughing at him. (of course he was totally fucked, and it was just labour day, so the red flags have been flying) the TV here is showing the US and UK in a pretty bad light; obviously CNN/ BBC news is showing another side of the same coin.

Elena got this magazine, Ogonyok, and there is an article in it about how Russia is prime for revolution. The article is titled "The feeling before Civil War." In it, Elena says that the war that Russia will have will make the mess in Bosnia look like eating ice cream, and I fucking believe that.

What kind of impact will these events have on your life? If you don't live in fear of Russia selling it's bombs to other third world countries, then how about them just annihilate their own fucking country because they have not been allowed to flourish.

But there is nothing I can do about it. You see, the hoax of being American is that you are deceived into believing you have all this freedom, but you don't. All we can do, for the most part, is sit and sip pink lemonade as we watch the destruction of wars unfold. We really have no control over our government. It's all a mafia within itself.

I am going to blubber with Elena now. I think I really do need to cry.

Friday May 14, 1999

OK... so I didn't really blubber, I rested and then went to aerobics. I can't understand why women want bigger breasts, after seeing the contraption I have to strap on my tits which resembles a mini trampoline, I just don't get it. And then I have to lie on my back every once in a while because my shoulders get tired from holding my fucking tits up.

So Melissa was still hacking from last week and they finally put her on an antibiotic. She needed a breathing session this morning so she could stop coughing. So she missed today. But Marina came with me and I think this instructor isn't as motivating as Linda. Linda is such a bitch. She'll whip your fucking ass into shape. But she has one of those bodies that is so toned and so sculpted it's just a little much. I still admire her.

A couple of weeks ago when Elizabeth was here and staying in the Seelbach a friend of mine from high school was working there and we chatted. His name is Kirk. I lent him my red red Prom dress that Granny made when I was in high school for some bitch to wear for Halloween about 6 years ago. The dress is almost 10 years old and he told me that he left that dress at his grandmother's and she probably threw it away by now.

I wanted to cry when he said that because my dick head brother and his white-trash (ex-best-friend-of-mine) greasy cunt wife threw most of my stuff from my childhood away this past summer when I was in Europe. So to think that someone else had such consideration for me made me want to cry.

So for some reason, I pulled off the road as I was going to Marina's and when she opened the door I almost didn't recognize her. She had remarried 3 years ago and she is so beautiful and happy. She took me to the basement and there under a big plastic bag was my dress! I wanted to explode I was so happy.

We sat down for a while and chit chatted. I asked her how she felt about what is going on with the world.

She was a teenager in Italy during the war.

All she could keep saying was that she felt so much for the children of Kosovo. That not even the women are that important, but the children...

The reason I feel that Russia will Civil War is because I feel like the Russians are quickly approaching a point where they have nothing left to lose. How desperate you can become when you are pushed to this limit... I feel like a junkie to this disease right now. Pushing so hard just to keep from feeling the pain of losing something. I'm real bad about pushing people away, but I am starting to open up more and more and learning that there are people that will use you, but there are also some really fucking awesome people that are really worth trusting.

I am learning more and more how to let go. I know it doesn't sound like it because I had to know if Mamoska had my dress, but I am learning what to care about... or put my love into things I know will flourish. Maybe that's selfish of me, but I want to have a more predictable life.

So I came back and bathed and went to the Video store and the grocery since Zack, Echo and Stephen are coming for Zack's opening. I bought a lot of groceries.

Jacinta, Carolyn, Marie, Michelle, Florence, Grisha and Milli came over and we watched the video we had done the days before Lars left. We all laughed a lot and I am just so fucked up. All of us are such hotties. I think that's one of the reasons we liked each other so much because no one was really sleeping with anyone. But we all really cared about each other. It's nice having that kind of friends of my own, knowing I can be just as important outside of the group individually as inside. So we watched this movie call ORGASMO.

Had ORGASMO followed through on the action, I think it would have been one of the best movies I have seen in a while. I have never seen so much ass in my entire life... and not one naked set of tits! ORGASMO had a side-kick that knows what are really a girl's best friend.

It was all funny as hell. Mormons and the porn industry.

Well, I don't think Jacinta liked it too much, but that's ok.

Saturday May 15, 1999

Zack is here. He has an opening tomorrow at Zepher Gallery. I am sooo jealous. But putting my ego aside, I am soooo proud of him.

Colin's sperm donor showed up at Melissa's place this morning at 9. She just took her paper from his hands and closed the door. I figured that he would have shown up sooner.

Zack and I were talking today about all kinds of things, but one thing that made me feel really good and is an attitude that i try to employ these days is that if I am uncomfortable in a relationshit, I can just end it right then and there. He incorporates the same attitude...

Well, I have to go. I think Steve and Echo are going to be here soon and we are both so excited and nervous about all of us meeting. She rocks, she writes some of the most beautiful prose I have ever read. I must add that I love Jennifer Jourdanne as well.

But Echo...

Monday May 17, 1999

This has definitely been one of the happiest strangest weekends of my life. So Echo came across my page and signed my guesbook. I thanked her and checked out her web page and have loved her ever since.

But meeting her in real life was the bomb. She is so fucking beautiful. Her heart, her mind, her body. She is just a power-house and whoever can figure out the gem that she is... they will be a lucky person because she has so much soul. Her best friend is Steve. She saw Zack's site and then she thought to set them up.

It worked!!! Now they are these really two cute boys in love and they are the kind of couple that everyone can envy. They get along so great.

With everyone being here, it was nice to find other people that I felt comfortable enough with to just be a rancid cunt and say all the nasty things I thought as I experienced them. It wasn't even as if I was that rancid, I mean if we are the same way, then how can it be wrong?

Steven thinks he is just evil. I told him we are all like that. It's just a lot nicer getting what you want from people by being nice instead of exacting revenge on stupid people that don't deserve the effort. Well, I didn't say it quite so eloquently, but that's what I meant. Then I told him that when you are older, you just exact your revenge in a different manner. And it's so much sweeter.

I am not ready to give that piece of myself up, totally, even though I know I am a good person I still like to feel human. I didn't give them a good impression of Elena because I haven't been happy with that relationship but what can I say? When she gives me an opening I take that opportunity to vent some of my frustrations in an elegant manner so I don't hurt her feelings. I don't enjoy hurting other people's feelings all that much, the main reason being that it's too fucking easy. I like tormenting people with their own ignorance, and I love making fun of myself because I can do it so well.

This morning at breakfast Echo and Steve didn't know whether to laugh or cry at my dead momma comments, but since I was laughing I told them they were suppose to laugh. I have to remind myself that people don't always see the humor of having a dead mother.

I would outline all the positives of having a dead mother for you, like you don't have to listen to her bitch and she can't hurt your feelings with her mouth, but then there is the other side that if you didn't resolve any internal conflicts before she died, then you can't move into this new way of thinking.

So... it was awesome. I am in love with Echo, and she said I was "more giggly" in real life. I hope to god we do stay great buds because I personally think the world is a better place having her in it, her personal writing... is better then mine. As you critically read that, then you can feel just how beautiful she is.

OK... so last night I went to Melissa's. She thinks she was allergic to the antibiotic she was on and she spent the night in torture. She needed help taking care of Colin in the middle of the night and I didn't think he would wake up, but it's like he knows when she is sick, so he will wake up and keep her from resting. Last night was the first night I spent where she did not rise when he was crying. I was proud of her. I was exhausted from having a surreal weekend, but I loved helping her out too. It's not often she asks for that. Colin woke up at 2 and I got him a bottle and he went to sleep on my chest on the couch. I wanted to sleep so I just put him on my chest and fell back asleep and at 3 woke up to put him back down and he started crying again so I made another bottle and just resigned that I was going to keep him with me because I couldn't think of what else to do.

To sleep with a little human nestled next to your body... it's awesome. Every time I moved, I was conscious that his little body was next to mine, so I would move him so he would be more comfortable as well. I can't get over how much bigger his body is!!! He is growing so fast.

I think there is a point where we all feel like we stop growing in our bodies, but I have never really come to that point because I can feel my own growing pains. My mom did this little calculation when I was about 2 about my height, and it said I was going to be about 5'2". I was all about that, accepting that but then I hit a major spurt when I was 16 and I was about 5'8". Now, some years later, I stand about 5'10". If you were to measure your arm span, it would be just about how tall you are suppose to be. Mine is 5'2". I am not as symmetrical as I would like to believe.

I quit smoking. I am not going to do it anymore. I am doing it all on will power. Zack said he wished he could smoke like I do, basically I am a social smoker, but I decided that after living with a smoker and dating one that it's just too much for me to deal with. I will stop. I hope it's once and for all. Plus I don't want to look like a hag and have wrinkly lips and bad skin. I actually want to be healthy.

So, last night after Lissa went to sleep I talked with Zack. He stated that there are some incongruencies in my character these days, and I know there always will be, but I also know what he means. He wants me to be as strong as I feel about myself, but every once in a while, I don't like myself.

Then I start to think why I don't like myself, and I realize that there is no reason not to like me, all that shit I think about is societal shit that makes everyone feel inferior in order to keep us all under control and be good little American citizens. Don't question authority, it's tradition, all that other HORSE SHIT.

When I am able to collect my own thoughts about myself, then I start to feel pretty fucking awesome. I rock and I know it. I am a babe and I know it. I am more interesting then I care to find out and I still have thing unnerving knack for overwhelming myself with my own personality. Sigh...

Tuesday May 18, 1999

So Zack was calling me out the other day for being shallow.

"If you really care about a person, it shouldn't matter what size dick he has."

"I don't give a fuck. Men have their preferences..."

"So that makes it ok?"

"No, it doesn't. But I am just utilizing a system established by men."

I saw how my dad's law partner is running for some kind of official office. This is the same cocksucker (yeah, I am one too, so what's your point? I just like the way cocksucker sounds, with all those hard consonants) that told me that it didn't matter that my dad drove a Porsche or a Model T while I didn't even have enough clothes to cover my ass when I went to school... basically the gist of that conversation was that my father didn't have to be responsible to his children. And he's on fucking TV talking about family values and how he loves his grandchildren. GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK!!!!

You know, men like to think they are so elusive, so different then females. We fought for our rights and as we put up with less and less of men's shit, it gets harder and harder for us... think of all the single moms you know. How much harder is it for a single mother to raise her children alone, then to put up with some fucker that doesn't even spend time with his own children? I had a dad and he neglected me.

I like to think that men think by saddling us with all this responsibility that they are forcing us back into submission, but what some of you stupid bastards that have kids and never see them don't realize is that women pour their beliefs into their children, and usually when mothers aren't consumed by a variety of psychosis and are bad to their children, their children still listen to their mothers because we were a part of their body and the man's role becomes incidental WHEN YOU CHOOSE NOT TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR CHILDREN'S WELL BEING. If you don't spend any time with your kids, then you really aren't spreading yourself into the history of your children, the history of your family, the history of the human race.

The human race is the most self-destructive species. There is no hope for us, even though we keep pretending there is some. We are destroying our environment. Apparently there is still some what of a half ass attempt to feel like we can somehow manage the damage we have created, but there is no way. We just keep adding more and more shit, new shit to an already unmanageable problem.

And then what do we do to ourselves?

How do you change your world? Do you still practice random acts of kindness? Do you bother to recycle anymore? Do you wear sun screen or use Oil of Olay? Do you do things to make people appreciate your more, or are you a bastard or a cunt so they could really care less?

No one gives a fuck about your personal problems, they care about how you feel about yourself (so you can make them feel better) because when you are comfortable with yourself, then you are a pleasure to be around and hence the true meaning of popularity. If you don't like yourself, then why do you expect other people to?

So... I already miss my college days. I am trying to think of some truly classic moments. One of the best ones is when it was toward the end of the semester of a particularly tough semester I got an invitation for a drawing to win $100. Well, times were tough, I wasn't really working and I was out of art supplies. I thought what the hell, I will go and get some free food, since I did earn that much because I had made the Dean's list the semester before.

I got there and the main building was just crawling with students. Apparently I was not the only broke person on the Dean's list... they didn't anticipate every fucking body on showing, so I filled out my form and rushed to get some coke because it was so hot that day. For good luck I wore my leather tab Levis and had an extra surprise...

I was on my way out, I was claustrophobic and there was no more food or pop and I had finally located Jacinta, who I had just started working with in the Rare Books Room in the library. We talked for a little while and then they did the drawing. There was no fucking way I was going to win that hundred bucks with over 2000 people being there and just 2 winners.

So when they called my name, I didn't hear it. Jacinta's face lit up with pride and envy because I was one of the lucky ones to win the money. As soon as I realized it, I let out some of the best egotistical cheers while shaking my ass and announcing my victory was because I was not wearing underware to whomever wanted to listen.

Wednesday May 19, 1999

I will use the force to combat the dark urges of horniness I feel in the depths of my soul. Actually, masturbating can be made into an art form, but only if you are a chick.

So... after careful consideration and much agonizing, I have come to the conclusion that the Party Girl Lifestyle I lead DOES NOT HAVE TO END!!!!!!! (And the crowd screams with delight as Miss Clay makes this MONUMENTAL decision .) After spending the last couple of days with Melissa and her routine of child care, I have decided that I am not ready to be a mother!!!!

Actually, yesterday morning when I was there, I told Colin to just let me sleep 10 more minutes and instead he let me sleep 40 and what woke me up was when he started to cry because he had taken a plant and dumped it all over himself.

This put me in a really bad mood. I couldn't understand how I could possibly be so sad at some dirt spilt... and then I thought that maybe, just maybe, my abusive father had something to do with it!

Thank you daddy, for treating me like shit as a child so that whenever I did something a "normal" child would do wrong, I have feelings of inadequacy (which I now realize I am amply adequate for anything) well into my adulthood. I know it takes a special kind of man to degrade a child into nothingness.

I haven't had such an emotional reaction in such a long time. I was truly amazed. I thought Melissa was going to come out and scream at me for being a lazy bitch and allowing this to happen, but she calmly told me that he had done it before and it was no big deal.

I still felt like shit for the rest of the day.

I felt so bad that when Damian asked me to go to Tennessee, it seemed like a good idea. But so did getting a job as a substitute teacher (I only did it for the money, I swear). My certification expired last year (amazing now that I have complete use of my facilities after mom died that I can look at a situation and say 'Man you fucked up' and not feel that terrible about myself). So I do not get to enter the life and times of being a substitute teacher this year... sigh...

After that clear blow to my ego, I decided I didn't really want to go too far away so we drove down Bardstown road. It was rainy and gross but there was a special place I wanted to eat, but that was not possible, so Damian and I got into his car and stepped back in time and at at some restaurant with 50s decor and a 2.50 chicken dinner. I felt like I was in a movie. I do not feel associated with typical Kentuckians anymore, and that makes me a little sad.

I went into a pharmacy when I saw a bunch of cool stickers in the window and the girl kept looking at me like I was from another planet. I finally had to set her straight and tell her I was from Danville. I think she was surprised since I wasn't wearing jeans and tennis shoes. Anyways, she told us to go to this dive and it was perfect.

Then we went to My Old Kentucky home.

Just as we walked up to the house, the sun began to shine bright, and I felt the spirit of Stephen Foster move through me. The cunts in the ball gowns were rancid, and the one wearing black was such a bitch. I just wanted to sneer at her and say foul things like "Didn't they wear corsets back then?" But I was good. I just rolled my eyes at her arrogant ass.

I am sorry to report that My Old Kentucky Home is quite boring. Before that the people that lived there were living in a cabin, and let me tell you, it looks like the people that made it had very simple tastes. I mean when you are moving from a log cabin into a house with so many rooms, it can all see so amazing.

As a comparison, I will use the Cadwell house at the end of St. James Court, but then that's not fair because the mistress of the house was French and she knew that parquet floors are beautiful and add so much to a house.

We talked a lot, and the drive there and back reminded me of places I have been... the Ukraine... Germany, parts of Russia at one point I was even (GASP) reminded of Vermont. I saw lots of nature, and it was a very good thing. It was nice just being lazy. I like being lazy here lately.

So I came home and Grisha was here and we saw some news cunt announce that there were still tickets to Star Wars, so I looked at Grisha and said "come on... let's go... it would be a very American thing to do."

So we went and saw the late showing of Star Wars, and that was very nice.

Thursday May 20, 1999

I figured yesterday would have been a very uneventful day since most of the day I played on my computer.

She called around 6... that was 3 in Ca. It was a very disturbed Tanya.

I knew her call wasn't good. I knew what she was going to tell me and didn't even hesitate as my fingers tripped to dial her number.

"It's me..."

"...hello?"

"What's going on?"

"Katya... is that you... gasp... it's Hannah... she passed away today."

Everything stopped. Time melted as we talked on the phone. You want me to be there (San Francisco)... I can get on a plane and be there tomorrow. When's the funeral?

Then the total surreal-ness of the situation sank in as I sat and listened to Tanka tell me how her niece succumbed to cancer. None of these comments are in order for now (after a few drinks) it all blends in.

"Oh, Katya. She was in so much pain. Most of her organs shut down a week ago. The doctors gave up on her in March. They (her parents) took her to Hungry trying to find some kind of treatment. Make a wish sent her to Disney land or world, whatever the fuck is in Florida... She was a kidder up until the day she died. She was teasing my dad about pulling his finger. She had all of us around her a few days ago and she said 'I'm so lucky to have my family with me.' She was so thin, Katya, the lump they found in her liver was just a little thing and the other day it had grown like a melon... She was in so much pain, she kept asking 'what did I do to deserve such pain.'

I listened the way only close really good friends can listen. It didn't matter when we talked last, we still feel so much for one another, I don't think that can ever change. She helped me when mom was so ill...

"She was gorgeous... her eyes shone like little stars, her hair had grown back. She was just such a doll. A couple of days ago she asked me to get her something from the toy store. I asked her what she wanted and she asked me to surprise her (because when your child is dying you get them whatever the fuck they want and there really is no surprise)... I looked around for something so special. She always wanted to be a princess. She was so girlie. She was always doing make-up and curling her hair. So even though she could no longer sit up, I bought her this costume... without a tutu. She told me she would put it on later...

For my mother on mother's day... ahh... Katya it was so perfect. I bought her a spa package and just took care of her all day. I made those stuffed Russian peppers and cooked an apple cake, like the ones we did in Russia. After she finished the spa, a seaweed wrap and other things, we went for something to drink. She was so relaxed, just so appreciative. I looked at her face and it was as if ten years time had melted off...

When Hannah saw my father again, she told him that she was sad that he was going to go, but this time she was going to go with him and be with him forever.

She kept saying 'when I get better' this and that..."

So maybe you are thinking why should I be so upset? Well, the main reason is that I actually had the honor of meeting this little dynamo. I even photographed her.

I listened and listened... feeling that feeling one can only get of feeling utterly naked and raw that only death can embrace you with. I listened and cried, as she did when I called and told her about how my mommy had died.

So... does anything seem important anymore?

"No. You can't take anyone or anything for granted. There is no time left on this earth and you never know when it's going to be taken away from you."

Don't you see... the end of the world is not neigh... it's already begun. What they mean in religious philosophy is that you need to live your life and be a good person to those around you because YOU NEVER FUCKING KNOW..

I want to hear about you, Katya. Tell me what you have been doing.

With some hesitance, I stumble. She won't remember much about today, nothing anybody tells her is she going to remember (crazy Russian construction for you). It's just a calm, a feeling of peace and total devastation all rolled into one. I don't think people that lose anyone to anything other then cancer can fully understand.

All the nights of diarrhea and chemo farts that singe the hairs in your nose. Blood, blood and lots of blood... chemical makes ups of a person's body changing daily. Their scent something so foreignly familiar. Their breath, their teeth that crack and disappear sooner from the rot of chemotherapy. The total understanding that you are sick and will never be 100% well like people in the general population.

But don't think I don't know death as it comes knocking next door how much it hurts no matter what the form. I just know with cancer, everything is different. With cancer you can only feel so helpless as you watch someone you love melt away into the embodiment of suffering, you watch as everyday they die before your very eyes, knowing that you have no power no control and no mercy to this disease. It doesn't care if you scream yourself to sleep in your pillow, cancer doesn't care that you are being robbed of feeling the life force of someone you want to be around. It doesn't care if you are cheated. It is an equal opportunity offender transcending race, religion and sex.

I can even think of my mom helping her out and being so warm and friendly to her where ever they are as they both join the sisterhood of dying from cancer.

Live your life viciously. Live your life today. Live your life as if there will never be another second again and love as many and as much as you can.

Hannah was only 5 years old. I can't remember the months and days and hours as Tanya said them to me, but she was just 5 years old.

I went out tonight with my friends. I thought as I looked over the city about life and death. How I was going to write about this and people kept telling me to smile and be cheerful. I would try, faking it here and there, but as we went to the bar, and I could look at my friend's faces, their eyes and see just how much they don't understand... and I thought to myself "Whose next? Which one of my friends will be sick this way?" I mean if 3 members of my own family ALONE have been kissed with this disease, how many more will know? How will they react? I don't want to see any of them suffer this way, I remember talking to Tanya about mom being ill and what I was going through, I even remember the exact fucking day in my heart when Tanya called and told me she was diagnosed.

"When I am better for good..."

What have you done today? What makes your life interesting and new so you can fucking feel yourself as you live and not regret not living as you die? Did you make yourself breakfast? Did you masturbate? As you sit there in your cubicle, in your office, in your bedroom and read my thoughts, do you understand what I mean when I ask you what have you done for yourself TODAY to make it more special then yesterday?

Does your life mean anything to you or are you waiting for 5 o'clock to come so you can go home walk your dog and argue about money again with your spouse? If you found out tomorrow someone you loved has cancer, what can you say that you made today more special?

Did you eat some chocolate cake and enjoy it, smell the nasty car fumes as you moved through the streets, did you see a tractor on the road, did you look at a flower blooming, did you notice that new gray hair, did you pluck your eyebrows, did you use sun screen, did you try a new lotion on you skin, paint your fingernails, kiss somebody, lick somebody, taste someone, wear a pair of stiff shoes, go see that work of art, drink a bottle of wine, feel and sense yourself as you let or were in someone else's body?

What are you doing?

When I saw Hannah in the hospital, we were coloring. She was joking when she asked if she could draw on my face. I obliged because I find such things amusing. She colored my face green. Her grandparents thought I was mad, but it was amusing to her. And I even have a photo of that and that means more to me today then it did yesterday.

Friday May 21, 1999

I'm sad today.

Saturday May 22, 1999

Irony...

Irony that makes me hurt so much... the pain, back to the pain, the uncontrollable anguish that leaves me in turmoil... the pain that is so quickly buried but right there underneath the surface...

The pain that cuts so deep and make me laugh all over again because this, dear folks, is what makes me feel so alive and drives my passions through the roof.

I blame you, you fucking piece of shit, Thomas Eugene Clay, Jr. I wish I could say I hate you, but I feel nothing for you, the piece of shit that you are. I suppose if anyone listened to your sick psycho contemptuous dribble leaving them in constant turmoil for any length of time they would naturally stew in their own consciousness of knowing what a fuck you are and so the cancer would naturally come back.

I wish it were you. You have no right to breathe air. You have no right to life because you are nothing. You mean so very little to anyone that knows you. You will never experience my compassion again as long as I live. I despise you and everything you are.

Once again I am filled with the rage... the rage that only hurt feelings and suffering can bring on. Back to feeling everything I have tried so hard to forget this last year.

The irony... don't you love it. I mean just 2 days ago I said What would you do if someone you loved was diagnosed with cancer? Sometimes my psychic abilities astound me.

You sit on the phone, listening to the tests that have been performed. Knowing that there is very little doubt in your mind that this is not a false alarm. You cry, man you cry. The pain of your mother's own death is too fresh, tormented face captivated in anguish.

Feeling, once again, so helpless.

I know this is bad. This is horrifying. I can't help but laugh a little as a tear streams down my cheek right now. My grandfather is going to die from this disease. There is no way he can go into remission. The only man that has ever been my father. The only man that has loved me the way men should.

So... I am really fucked up right now. My hope has been decimated for the time being and my life will go on hold once again. I am sure I will make up with Anne again and some of the fractures of my life will come back together.

Just when I was almost there... almost free from this. Like a rubber band it snaps me back into shape again. Remembering what is important in this life. I will do what ever it takes to help because as a woman it is my responsibility to prove that I care about the only parents I have ever really known. I miss my mom. And her dying from this disease is the reason I am so fucked up. Before I had hope, but now... I will just sit and sip lemonade, waiting once again for the other shoe to drop, as Dr. Dakan would say.

Sunday May 23, 1999

So... maybe I over reacted a bit yesterday. But how are you suppose to act when you hear such things?

A sense of calm has washed over me. I went to Jacinta's this morning and cried my eyes out. She just held me and loved me the way we all need to be held and loved when life kicks your ass.

I feel pieces of me that lay dormant for so many years starting to come back together. I know that it's not the worst thing in the world to happen, but I worry about my grandfather and I worry that maybe he won't have the strength to fight another round of chemo. I know he will do it but...

So... I took photos of Mike today. Found some solace in creating. I haven't really taken the time to pose someone to that extent in a while. I usually like more natural poses.

Then we went to a Bar-B-Que. It was in honor of Liuba. She just graduated from Law School and she has her shit together. Sometimes I envy the younger people I know that graduate from college when they are 21, but like Liuba said, in Russia they usually only have 10 years of school where we have 12. And Russians are usually better educated even though American students are more independent. I don't want to get into all that shit though.

So I met a bunch of people tonight and on gentleman named Boris that heard me speak Russian and thought I was Russian. He didn't honestly think I was American until I spoke several sentences in English. That always makes me feel good and then Liuba told me my constructions were very good. I suppose I have Elena to thank for polishing me up.

I didn't think we spoke that much Russian because we go back and forth, sometimes I am thinking about other things and it's not so easy for me to switch but I noticed when Zack was here last time how much we do speak in Russian. I don't want to be rude to people that don't speak it, but at the same time it's whatever comes out and sometimes it takes more of a conscious effort to make sure I am only speaking English.

I think when I wake up today I will drive to Danville to be with my grandparents.

So it was wrong of me to blame my brother like that... I don't want to give him all the blame, just a nice chunk. When someone is emotionally unbalanced like the way my brother was pushing my grandfather to be, it's a lot easier for someone to get sick. I don't think any members of my family that had cancer were ever in the most healthy places in their lives emotionally when it happened.

I also figured out another reason why I am so emotional is because it's that time of the month again... I miss Andy every once in a while because when he was being a cunt, I could usually tell that I was about to start. Plus he had the weirdest cravings. They say men can go through similar symptoms of PMS too.

So... yeah... maybe I am not so horrified as I have been before. I feel a little strange. One thing I can't stand to see in this world is when a girl I know has long hair and then cuts it all off short. Or a guy for that matter. I think back to the horror Anne conveyed when she was in treatment and how quick her hair fell out. So... I have a hard time with seeing that.

There was something else... but I forgot. It's 4 o'clock in the morning and I should go to sleep. I did live some of the party girl life tonight, just not a zealous one. Tomorrow will be better somehow.

Now I remember... I think when I hear about people taking chemo I think back to when mom was in the hospital and that was the only way she could take it. Pop was the same. When they cut his stomach out and put it under the skin of his left breast, I think he was in treatment in the hospital too. I don't think he has an old cancer, either. I think this one is new.

But it's all too early to speculate now. He'll have all the tests done tomorrow.

Keep your fingers crossed...

Monday May 24, 1999

Tests tests and more tests. Nothing is set in stone today. Scope tomorrow. More tests later. His lung capacity is down.

Kissed Anne on the cheek. She wants to stay angry. Fuck her. She has hurt me far too long and I am not playing fucking bullshit mind games anymore. I was immature in the past and if she can't get over her fucking childhood hang-ups that doesn't mean I have to be drug to her level.

So there was that mess and then something interesting happened to a buddy of mine whose wife went nuts and decided to beat him up. It's about fucking time it was over. When it takes more effort to feel alive then it does to be alone, it's time to say "this relationship is over." Of coarse I only have his perspective, but judging by the marks on his arm and his nature, I am pretty sure she is gone.

I kept thinking what could have driven her to that kind of madness, to physically abuse someone. The only person that I have ever done real bodily damage to besides my sister is myself. Anne liked to fight as much as I did. I don't like to anymore. And I controlled myself very well last time she went ballistic.

I was late to the doctors office, but they were suppose to come back for some lung tests. They never showed up so I went to the other doctors office. On the way to the hospital... I can honestly say it was one of the hardest things I had to do emotionally. I looked around and saw shit about cancer in everything... a billboard with an even for cancer survivors... and it disturbed me even more.

Jacinta, Carolyn and Jose are here now. We are going to learn how to dance Cuban style...

***********************************************

So... you know... I finally figured out that I have some control over my brother's psychotic well being. I also remembered that now that I know I can write whatever the fuck I want I can remind him why so affectionately call me Nazi cunt bitch, a name that I wear with pride.

Thomas, get off your fat lazy ass and get a job. You such are such a fucking piece of shit. When all mom's money's gone, what are you going to do? Have your wife be in another wreck?

I wish I could be better and Christian when it comes to you, and turn the other cheek, but when you were stealing our dying mother's medication and yelling at her making her into nothing, I totally despised you and wished you were the one that was birth chunk. I get on my hands and fucking knees thanking God I was never born a boy, I think you would have found a way to kill me as a child. Watching you turn into this fucking monster that you have become is enough of a death to me. You fucking be greedy and live your life in the shadow of greatness, because you will never ever fucking amount to one tenth of the person I am.

I was the first one to swing on the swing set.

Tuesday May 25, 1999

So... Mikey called me up and bitched me out for not telling her how I feel. It was a good conversation because I was afraid she would pull another 360 on me and feel like she quit caring about me. She assured me that she wouldn't be like that again and this time, I believe her. I have known her since I was 15. You will also be glad to know that Miss Cassie Dalton is up and running about. She lost some of her short term memory, but she is alive and that's all anyone can ever hope for after having suffered from a swollen brain.

I wonder if I am getting to be more bitchy because this is the way I had to be for so many years when mom was so sick.

I am also having a hard time accepting that I am not so alone anymore. All my friends fucking rock and they are letting me feel like they will stand behind me stronger then I have ever felt before. Now that is a really fucking nice change of pace. It means I have really good fucking friends now, ones that are as adult as I have had to be since I was 15.

Tanya and I were talking on the phone last night, and I feel so bad for her. It fucking sucks all the feelings she has right now. I know how it felt to lose my mom to this fucking disease, I can't begin to *IMAGINE* the anguish of seeing a life not quite lived out, and one that was so cherished and so special.

I think Billy Joel had it right when he said "only the good die young." That way the rest of us are sitting here wondering what the fuck this is all about.

I am going to Danville today. I am driving my grandparents home because they will need to come back tomorrow. I am in a good frame of mind, I can make sentences and articulate myself, however my grandparents are still in shock.

My grandfather... he's such a fucking funny man. He makes me laugh all the time and I am sure I inherited his sick sense of humor, which makes me happy. He can tell you stories... I am not going to think about it. It will make me cry and I have to go and be good to them.

Wednesday May 26, 1999

He knows he's dying. I drove their car here and Anne drove mine. Granny rode with Anne and Pop with me.

We had the best fucking conversation I have had in a long fucking time. He doesn't get pissed at me anymore and try to tell me what to do. He tells me when I do something that isn't very pleasing to him and that's it. So I promised to leave my brother alone.

We talked about all kinds of things. I wanted to cry a lot of the time. I wanted to cry when I first saw him recovering from having a scope done.

"Dr. Aaron wouldn't take a biopsy if there was nothing there."

Sometimes, as time moves forward and everything is spinning around me there is one sentence that sticks out with such clarity, such searing pain that it forever enters my consciousness from the way the hospital smells to the way she gave me that side ward glance as she uttered this observance.

With this one sentence, we both knew. And with my drive here, I realized Poppa knew too. He even admitted that "when I go..." Mom never did that.

"It's just so fucking hard this time." Anne said.

"I can't figure out why... but I totally agree."

"Because before we were invincible." Before... mom was alive, and if she was going to live through her hell, god dammit if you weren't going to live through yours.

"... I was there when they told her she didn't have a bone marrow donor..." Anne went and saw one of Lesli's student's sisters that has AML too. When she said this to me, a chill ran up my spine because the last e-mail I sent her I told her to harvest her own fucking bone marrow (in case she is ever sick again) because I was never too keen on the idea of having my marrow sucked through my hip and walking like a fucking duck for 6 months. Of coarse I didn't really mean it, but I was hurt when I tried to kill myself the only thing she could think of was that I was her resource and the person I am and my feelings were none of her concern.

But I think that Pop being sick has given her a real wake up call. I thought I was going to have to be the only one they could depend on because Lesli has her family and can't really drive up to Danville at the spur of the moment and Anne... I could not tell. She told me yesterday that she was going to be dammed to have it thrown in her face when Thomas would start throwing up who was taking them to the doctor. (he isn't really involved in their lives but to call and bitch about what I write about him here.)

So that made me want to cry all over again. I wanted to cry when I saw him, lips sunk in from where his teeth were missing... patiently awaiting him in the nasty tupperware thing to be slipped back on.

When we were kids, Pop would take his teeth and slide them out of his mouth just a little and put them back in. We could never figure out how to push our teeth out of our mouths. I would sit there as a child and push and push with my tongue. Then, when I was in kindergarten, our teacher told us that if we lost a tooth, we were going to get a star by our names. I went home and yanked my two front teeth out that day.

I know he is dying. This past year he has been so sick. He will have a good month or two. How can I possibly flesh him out from mere words... I think it's impossible. He's the one that taught me how to drive, when I was 14. He just put me behind the wheel and told me to drive straight.

That was the same year I lived here in Danville with them. You know, it's really sad when two parents fight over you like you are a possession. It was so fucking bad when I was 13 that I remember standing in the backyard of my father's house listening to the two of them attack one another and trying to convince one another that I wanted to live with whoever could yell the loudest. I was horrified. Here were my fucking parents acting like children again. They didn't really give a fuck what I felt, they just wanted to hurt one another.

I wish I had screamed at the top of my lungs "FUCK OFF BOTH OF YOU!!!" but I decided that the healthiest thing for me to do was to come here and live. I lived here for almost an entire year. Granny cooked for us every day, took me to school (Dad wouldn't let me go to Danville, where my mom went to high school because that was where most of the black people went and probably because that was mom's alma mater), washed my clothes, gave me a sense of serenity. It was the first time I had some balance.

But Boyle County High Skewl was not my idea of fun. I have never been to school with so many rednecks. Not that I have anything against them, but they sure did have something against me. OK, I must admit that when the lady from Planned Parenthood came to talk to us I was the only one listening because some fucking redneck was talking about using butter as a lubricant (I almost died as she told me about it in graphic detail). I hated feeling like I had to be dumb in order to fit in.

I thought that Boyle County would have been better then Oldham because I hated going to middle school at South Oldham because people made fun of me so much. I didn't know that your freshman year in high school, people actually started to grow up. If I knew then what I know now, I would have tried to have been a foreign exchange student.

So... anyways, my grandparents treated me better then my parents, and it was the first time in my life I felt stable and I hated it. I loved my grandparents dearly, but the school environment wasn't really conducive to my learning, especially when one of the red neck girls gave me a black eye (I remember thinking to myself over and over that I wish she would die and that spring she did die in a car wreck) for calling her a bitch.

I felt so out of place here, more so then being picked on at school and being abused at home.

I remember being so embarrassed because Pop would stop the car if he saw a can on the side of the road and he would pick it up and recycle it so he could give Lesli a little extra spending money since she was in college. We had a fight about it and I will never be more embarrassed by my immaturity at that moment then any other remarkable immature moment to date. This was before recycling was a big deal.

So... today, now i am crying, when Anne was finished drinking her soda, she went to throw it away like it didn't matter and Granny told her that if Pop caught her doing that he would not be happy because he saves cans for his boys.

I really hope my grandfather is OK. I hate this time right now... because the worry is all consuming and look at how much shit I have written. I hurt so incredible much right now because there is no plan of action yet, there won't be until Friday, and even then, what is there to look forward to? If he is resigned to die, there is nothing anybody can do to change it. And he doesn't seem to be too keen on the idea of having surgery again.

I read somewhere that one of the great authors said that you weren't willing to change if you weren't willing to have everything you cared about wiped out so you could start all over again. I am wiped. I have been wiped for a long time now, but... I want him to know my babies. I want him to push his teeth out of his mouth for them and I want them to look at his full belly as it protrudes from his left breast (that's where they stuck his stomach, above the rib cage when they took out most of his esophagus 9 years ago when he had cancer the first time). I want them to listen to his funny fucking stories and his accent and all the things that I think are important to me.

I am not ready to let him go just yet, but it's not my decision. I'm not ready to let him go because for the first time in my life, we had a conversation today and I found out more about him on my terms then by listening to a story he has told me before 100 times. He used to plow the marijuana fields when he was a boy and it was Kentucky's cash crop. He puts flowers on the graves of his grandparents, parents, some other people and a retarded aunt that was "treated like a dog" every Memorial day.

Yesterday I sat on the floor and held his leathered hand. Sometimes, he squeezes my fingers until I have to pull away. Yesterday, he just held my hand and felt how cold it was from washing clothes and how soft it was in his as he moved my fingers back and forth.

Today, I still don't know how sick he is, but I also got to be a lot closer to him then I have ever felt before, and I wish for that closeness to continue.

Thursday May 27, 1999

Happy Birthday Joe.

I am exhausted. My muscles are sore from doing Tae.Bo and driving back and forth from Danville 2 times yesterday. Plus waiting in the doctor's office and the hospital.

Pop doesn't understand why we are so worried, but like Anne said 2 days ago, we are no longer invincible.

Worry worry worry. Won't know anything for sure until tomorrow.

Friday May 28, 1999

So Joseph is doing a journal.

I went to this lecture last night. It was interesting. Ph.D. Kloner gave it so you know it was awesome.

But a lot of this has me thinking, what with Joe and his impending divorce and just thinking about men in general. Society would have you to believe that women are the ones that are bowled over by their emotions. I think part of the reason women had so much trouble in the past is because men wanted us to feel about them like they feel about us, trying to force their system on to women and expect it to be the same, but it's not.

When I care about someone, it's pretty obvious. I do nice things for them, and just by listening to them, I know what they need out of life. Some people just need a shoulder to cry on and some people just need you to share some of the good times.

There is one fundamental concept that will never change in my mind and that is that we all need one another.

I need certain other things. I need the validation I get from writing this journal. I need to know people appreciate me that aren't in my family and think that I am pretty fucking cool. But then again, I have learned to let a lot of things go in the past year so it makes it easier for me to articulate the thoughts I can not express always in front of people and I get my own frustrations out at the same time.

My main frustration now is that women don't necessarily feel life the way men do, and I think men are 10,000 times more sensitive then women and to hide their feelings they act all macho.

I hate that.

I can be just as cruel as a man when it comes to hurting someone. I don't like to do and I hate when I feel like I have to do it to show that I will not be controlled so easily. Some men accept this but most of them don't and if they can't control me in one way, they try in others.

I try to make these men understand that I was raised by a man. I didn't have a step monster to look up to back then, so I learned their little game and how they treat women so I don't put up with a lot of shit.

There are some basic principals that I treat most of my lovers by and that is to show kindness, loyalty, some kind of devotion, and showering them with lots and lots of attention. I am a very sweet person, but to break that bitch shell you have to prove yourself to me and for the most part, men usually fail.

However, they always come back to me. My favorite compliment is "I still think of having sex with you when I masturbate." I would like to think that most men I have been with feel this way, but then they probably think of all their exs when they masturbate. But to hear it... that's such a compliment to me because that means I was satisfying some sexual need in them.

Sometimes I think of an ex lover when I jack off, but that is rare. Some guys just don't know how to fuck and the ones that do... do stupid shit that makes me think less of them as men.

I usually never tell people how I feel about them either. I have become a master of masking my feelings so I can take in everything and then break it into tiny little pieces once it's over.

I try not to be judgmental, because the only people I feel that I can judge are my siblings since we have l been through the same lot in life. Other people have not lived through half of the things we have so how can I possibly even try to judge them based on how I judge myself?

So... usually I judge men by the way they make me feel and sometimes I don't bother listening to their "cake hole" because some of the things they let fly out of their mouth are just too stupid for words and shows that they have no consideration for me or my feelings. That or they aren't thinking before they speak.

I am Southern. This means I sit and listen to whatever a man has to say. Since I was given this honor to be born in such a family like the Clay's, I have to respect what it means to show that I have proper breeding. Most of my proper breeding did not come from that side of the family, though, it came from my hillbilly Christian grandmother that wanted an education more then she wanted to work in a factory. Life doesn't always end up that way so even though she could not make her dream come true, she could live through me as I made it happen.

POP JUST HAS EMPHYSEMA!!!!

What a fucking relief. Every fucking knot in my body is gone now.

I fucking feel so much better.

I can still move on with my life, but that was really fucking scary.

So, I guess Anne and I will talk again, but I don't know... I don't know... I don't know... Thank fucking god I don't have to go through that shit right now.

I swear, nothing can bother me that much right now. I am sorry if I scared anyone, thank you so much for your support this week, it has been hell. I know emphysema sucks and all, but it sure as fuck isn't cancer. And he's not debilitated.

I learned so many things about him this week... I learned what a Hootchie Cootchie show was... Pop went to a carnival (there's a reason they are known as freaks) and some woman could blow smoke rings out of her cunt. That's fan-fucking-tabulous.

I could blow smoke rings out of my cunt right now I am so fucking happy, but I think I am going to take a nap first.

Saturday May 29, 1999

I went to a place I don't go that much last night. I was so fucked up and as I gazed into the full moon I realized for what most of this madness is coming from. I hate the full moon. It makes everyone act a little more crazy then usual.

Can you feel it yet? The Pre-Millennium tension? It's not just the full moon, it's the last 6 months until Y2K so everyone if going fucking crazy, it's not the computers that will blow up, it's us. We are driving ourselves mad because the change of the zeros. It happens ever time.

I am not going to do anything too terribly rash until the new year has passed.

So I just needed to cry for all the tension I have been feeling this week. I went out to my mom's grave and laid there fetally and cried and cried and cried. I watched as the sun set and pink clouds outlined the sky like a ballerina's tutu.

Funny, my mom used to call our cunts tu-tus when we were children. It makes me laugh... to think of what it was like to have a tu-tu.

So I am listening to music I used to listen to when I was in high school and it makes me think how much of an influence it had on my life. I bought Concrete Blonde's Bloodletting and with the first song she is talking about having the ways and means to New Orleans.

There is another song on here called Joey, and I could never help myself from thinking about Joe when I heard it. I can't imagine what he is going through. I saw my parents do it, and I think of all the things in this world that you can do to children is to divorce them as you are divorcing one another and then use them as weapons to hurt one another. Thank God he doesn't have blood children with her, but I know having Hannah has to hurt like hell too. You get really used to kids being around. I think that's why dad was able to let us go when I was 15, because we weren't so cute and didn't say such precious things anymore and we talked back to him and he couldn't stand it.

That's one problem I have, I will never let a man dominate me in any way, shape, or form. If you can't treat me as an equally intelligent person, then leave me the fuck alone. You aren't worth wasting my time or energy on.

You know, I think guys are dicks to women because they are afraid that if you are nice to them, they will fall in love with you. What people don't understand is that it takes many years of trusting and caring about someone before we can feel close enough to love and appreciate them. To watch them grow and change and struggle and bloom. I am blooming. I am the proverbial late bloomer, trying so desperately to catch so many of the pieces of myself from my teens up to the adult me. Experiencing, I need the experience, Peter, so I can say I understand how certain things feel to different people.

I try not to judge things until they are over. Not everything sucks, I can find the beauty in most everything and I am learning to be very patient.

You know what I love... I love that some people think Kentucky is so backwards that people don't intellectually grow at the same rate. What these specific kind of geniuses don't understand is that your emotions have to age according to your intelligence, and both should go hand in hand or you will never grow. Or at the very least suffer from arrested development.

I hope that any man that comes here and thinks that he is responsible for such a vulgar outburst does not flatter his ego in such a manner. It's not just one man or one person or one of anything. I am just translating some of the things that have occurred in the past few years to make me realize more and more why I will be uncompromising in what I want from a man.

Because I really don't give a shit if I fit your criteria, I exceed most expectations of most men. What I care about is if men can meet up to my standards, and very few do. Maybe I should be more compromising in my standards but I have been compromising my standards for quite some time now. I need to feel loved and I need to be beautiful.

I do miss being fat. I miss having my extra roll there to support my tits. I am finding it more difficult the slimmer I get to keep from slouching or humping over. I have decided when I get to a more comfortable space with my body my tits will have to go. They hurt way too much. It takes more effort to keep my shoulders up. I don't know how my mom could fucking stand having jugs all her life. I think they suck.

I have been informed by some blat that I have no sense of self and that I am bitter and I hate men. I don't hate men, I love sucking their dicks. I am just more realistic when it comes to life then princesses and fairies and the like.

And I would never be so egotistical to think that by reading someone else's journal that they are exactly how they portray themselves to be.

I am a bit more complex then that, my dear.

I do not get my self worth from other people, period. Validation for my own thoughts and beliefs, yes, but not my self worth, that comes from inside and my experiences. I have never met anyone else that has been through as much shit as I have and come out of it a winner except for my grandmother and my sisters, my little one in particularly since she had leukemia. I am confident enough on my own to be by myself because that is how you die. I rather enjoy my bitter, hateful character especially when I am alone and can jack off thinking about sucking dick.

Ah... maybe therein lies the problem. I haven't found that many people that can measure up to how they feel about themselves verses how they let other people make them feel. I have had a taste of my own mortality and everything else tastes like shit in comparison. If you aren't living life for yourself and you decide their perception is better then your own, then you deserve whatever you get out of life.

I don't know why I bother addressing those concerns, maybe because I just simply feel like it. Maybe that blat is just jealous of my page because it kicks severe ass and I know it. I never try to make anyone feel any less then what they are... maybe you are just feeling inadequate in the face of greatness, my dear. Yes, human jealously seems to do that to people, make them feel less so you can feel better about yourself. Sorry you are jealous because honestly there is nothing to be jealous of unless you aren't living life for yourself... then I can understand why you would be jealous.

Sunday May 30, 1999

Yesterday was a very strange day. I have been going through, cleaning up my pages, making them more pretty, adding some new photos and just feeling cool. It was nice to sit in my underware and talk to other people about traveling and photography at the same time.

Usually as a rule I don't go out surfing for different web pages unless I feel the need to connect with other people. Usually I am just so busy with my life that I don't notice everything going on around me. Sudha left today for India. Marie leaves today also for France. People are suppose to meet up in Spain this summer, but I honestly don't feel like I have the energy to travel this year. I would like to get a job and get settled.

So usually I don't like to read other journals. They disturb me with their nutra kisses.

So last night we went to Denny's and as I was sitting there with all my foreign friends just trying to stay awake along come Pam and Paul and the kids. It was awesome to see them all. It was weird to have two sections of my life come together and then a third one too. Our waitress was the little sister of a friend of mine when I was a punk rock girl with porn star white hair.

I kept watching her, recognizing her teeth and her clumsy manner. She accidently didn't noticed her fingers in our food as she served it and that grossed me out a little. I hadn't see this one in over 10 years, and it was strange to think of her as an 8 year old that played violin. She is so sweet. I kept thinking to myself I knew her, I knew her and when I remembered how I thought to myself how my girlfriend's tried to get me to desperately give lemon grass to my mom, it would help her with her cancer. We never did and she lived on chemo alone for almost 10 years. Sometimes she would drink carrot juice.

So that was weird seeing part of the human family, the core, out with my own little international entourage.

So I looked at a lot of my first pages and man... they really fucking stink. Little more then slapping an image up and letting it load. I wish I had the time to go back and re-do all my photo pages, but I have so many new ones I would rather work on. I am getting tired of doing this. I need a job. I haven't worked in a while and I am so overwhelmed. I have most of my bills paid up, but it's getting to a bad point now... and I hated living paycheck to paycheck and I will be damned if I go back to that.

I forced myself not to buy anything last week. I needed the time off. I need to spend lots of time alone for a while so I can quit spending money to attempt to fill this emptiness I have inside of me. In other words I need to practice being a narcissistic bitch and live life for myself. I admit that I haven't been the most giving person this year, and I have made several mistakes, but damn if they weren't interesting mistakes.

Hmmm... I really don't see myself as bitter, but I don't like criticism either. Milli was trying to imply today that I'm not so close to Jacinta because I forgot how old she was. She's 4 years younger then me and I always forget that because she is so fucking mature. Her love and strength have seen me through many a bleak moment and sometimes it's hard for me to respect the cultural mores. I know her birthday is in November, either the 14th or 19th.

That hurt my feelings some, but I won't let it bother me anymore because I kicked Milli's ass. He later confided that I should be glad I am a girl because he would have laid me out.

Well, then fucking think about your insults so they are more sarcastic then cutting. You don't need to hurt anyone but yourself. And at this point in my life, I am pretty much raised and have come to accept certain parts of me that will never be submissive.

Anyway, I apologized for kicking his ass, but he didn't tell me he thought he was wrong for saying some of the shit he said to me. He sure as fuck wouldn't say that to a man and just because I don't have a dick, doesn't mean I can't go out and get one when I want. And they can come in all different shapes and sizes.

Sorry boys, just using some bullshit criteria you put on women to make us more like objects. I am learning how to carefully objectify myself, and establishing my own terms of service.

Ok... sleep.

Monday May 31, 1999

"Aunt Caffy can tell a really scary story..."Nate looked up at the other boys with wide awed wonder.

I looked at the 13 and 10 year old and I think they were amazed they had captivated the attention of an adult. I just wanted to be close to my nephew because I haven't really had a lot of time to go spend with him.

I sat and told the story of a man that was once a king, but in Russia they are called Czars. I told how he was a powerful man that built a new city on a swamp. And how he would pluck the hairs out of a man's beard in court if they didn't shave and how he found babies born with out brains and kept them in formaldehyde so you can see them in the museum and how you can feel all the dead people in the city because they were forced into labor. They sat back in awe. Paul came up later and started bullshitting them about a scary story and I made fun of him and he said "Yeah, let's teach 'em about Hochie man." I know I can't spell his name, thank you.

I love having nephews. I love that i mean something to them and that they remember the time we spend together. And that I make them laugh and giggle.

It was a night of the human family last night. I so needed to feel connected to a group of people and since I saw Pam and the crew last night at Denny's I knew I needed more. It was such a joy. Everyone telling me happy birthday.

Lesli has been deliberating what to get me for weeks. She knows I don't need anything so she came up with the perfect idea and that is to take me to dinner. I have never really had time alone with my oldest sister except when I was a girl and she would wake me up on my birthday if it was a weekend and wake me up with breakfast in bed, have me take a bath with salts and just get me ready and make me feel special that day. We never had any money so she would just treat me with time. I remember my tenth birthday for some reason, when I still had my own bedroom at that time because my mom hadn't rented my room.

I shared a bathroom with her and it was so nice. She was such a good sister for that. When Anne moved into her room later we argued so bad that Anne moved downstairs. I didn't really care how messy I kept my bedroom, I always knew where everything was. This is how I felt about my room... my bathroom had to be kept clean. I am neurotic about keeping my bathroom clean, I always have been.

The coolest bathroom I have ever used was this past January when I was in Los Gatos at Conni Kay's house. I felt like a vestal virgin because there was ivy everywhere and light green tile... tucked away in a corner with high walls and no shower curtain. That was my favorite bathing experience to date. Next to my tenth birthday. She told me how I was going to start to become a woman, and what changes to expect. Thinking about it now seems so strange to me.

Maybe that blat was right and I am too bitter about life. I try really hard not to be but sometimes I feel myself being all too human and escaping into the problems of someone else instead of myself and I don't need that in my life anymore.

I am sick of being miserable for other people. I need to protect myself a little bit more.

I think I may need some time away for a few weeks from doing my journal. I think I have given too many guys the wrong impression of me and they think they can tell me anything if they feel closer to these words then they do me as a person, and I can't have that.

I suppose I was always right about one thing, feelings are pornographic.

Pure
Photography

PHOTOS\

Dr. Block's

Nature

Cubes

Europe

Portraits

Fantasy

Dying

Kazantip

Birthday

Russia '96

Russia

London '99

Stills '98