Category Archives: P & G

FBF: Los últimos ocho años

Austin

March 10th, 2018

March 10th, 2018

I haven’t regularly blogged in eight years, and while I’ve talked about a lot of the things listed below, you’d have to browse my Tumblr, Twitter, and probably my e-mails with Chris to piece all of these together. AGGRESSIVE DRUM-ROLL: a FBF! I decided to stick to seven things, because I’m long-winded as is, and literally nobody needs to read eight things about me; I’m not that fucking interesting.

SMALL NOTE: I always double check my Spanish, and was writing “siete”, and couldn’t fucking figure out why my dictionary was translating that as “seven” instead of “eight”. Always check your grammar, and always check for reciting numbers in your head in the wrong order.

1.) My Dad died
I’ve blogged about this occurrence several times, but one of the reasons I stopped blogging was my Dad’s cancer treatment. While I was coding the Listing Admin 2.2 script, I found out my Dad has cancer. While I was coding it’s follow-up (2.3), I found out his chemotherapy wasn’t working. We moved down south to Gainesville (in Florida), which was literally THE MOST BORING CITY ON THE PLANET, where he died of complications due to a bone-marrow transplant.

I will probably never go back to Gainesville. Not because it’s where my Dad died — I find that part hilarious, because one of the things he told my Mom before we moved there was, “don’t let me die in fucking Gainesville” — but because I wasn’t exaggerating when I said it was boring. Like claws your eyes out boring; there is no water except in hotel pools, and there’s no curricular activity that doesn’t include basketball or football.

2.) Health problems
I almost listed all of my health problems up there to be dick, but I’m trying to keep this organised. My OCD won out over a being a shithead, you’re welcome.

I was 21 when my Dad was undergoing chemo in 2010, and during that year, I suffered from what I would later found out to be “attacks”. In 2012, I was diagnosed with two stomach disorders (neither of which are related to each other) and a spine disorder/injury. I’ve struggled with mental health my entire life (PTSD, social anxiety disorder, major depressive order, probably other shit) and I thought I was okay with it. Most days I am, actually. But when you add in chronic pain, you begin to question whether you can handle anything at all.

For the most part I’m functional — I work full time, and I’m fairly active — but most people don’t live with me/have to deal with me when I’m in pain or anxious, or both.

3.) I have a niece!
That title is about 90% more excited than I am right now, but I prefer babies over kids any day. My closest sibling, Hannah, had her in 2013, and while I would have preferred she waited, I’m glad she didn’t for this damn little girl. Here’s a picture of her when she was 2, and not prone to talking to herself in my vanity mirror, or telling me about a day I care nothing about.

4.) I was a nanny for a two years; now I’m not
From 2013 to 2015, I was a nanny to a beautiful little girl. I really loved being a nanny, and the free time it afforded me was pretty priceless. It also paid terrible, and towards the end, I was really unhappy. I’m kind of still unhappy — is anyone who works at a restaurant truly happy? — but I make more money, filing taxes isn’t as hard, and I have health insurance. Do I want to learn different cuisines, like I outlined in my In Ten Years post? No the fuck I don’t, but at least I learned that I don’t.

5.) I came out (twice)
I actually came out to my Mom when I was 19, but her and I had this unspoken oath to never really talk about it, because I was also crying in the middle of the kitchen at the time. I simply asked her (while crying) if she was okay with it, and she said, “yes” and “please stop crying” and “is that what this is about”. I never really thought too hard about the gender of any partner, but when you don’t have any desire to have one, you kind of forget to think about what kind of partner would interest you.

I don’t want to be the asshole who ignores how hard it is for other people, or how much people struggle with that part of themselves — it hasn’t exactly been easy for me — but I also don’t talk about whole parts of my life. Being bisexual is just a thing I am, not my entire personality.

6.) I lost my Dad’s cat and my best friend in a 4 month period
I’ve blogged about losing my friend but I also lost an animal in November 2017. My house is full of them, it’s hard to keep up with them. I’m close to all of them, because animals get me in a way humans don’t; all I want is to be left alone unless I’m crying, and my animals get that. Tanque was my Dad’s cat, and losing him hurt so much, because for my family, it felt like losing another piece of my Dad.

7.) “Who am I?”
…was not actually a question I asked myself, but the overall feeling was something I had a hard time dealing with. For so many years, I’ve known myself as Tess. Tess likes a lot of things — I’ve been told too many things — and Tess doesn’t struggle in quite the same way. I spent so long locked up in my own head, that as cliche was this is definitely going to sound, I didn’t know who Austin was.

Turns out Austin is kind of a dick, but when you deal with people on a regular basis, you kind of have to be. I’ve also had my ass handed to me so many times, and I needed that. I needed to know what I can and can’t deal with, what my limits are. I have also learned: how many times you can irritate a co-worker (depends on the co-worker, but usually about a solid hour before a meltdown), how to handle confrontations when you’re unable to walk away, when it’s appropriate to cry in a walk-in (before opening hours), and how many lost hours of sleep you can work efficiently on (4 a night for a week).

This is for you, Dad.

Austin

August 14th, 2017

August 14th, 2017

I wish I had a big fucking novel for my re-open; I wish I had thought to write this up in the eight months I’ve had it sitting, but if I wasn’t unprepared, I wouldn’t be me. This is a special day for me; not because I did something that’s been on my to-do for six years, or because it’s been six years since something like Lyone — a thing I dumped all my thoughts on — was in my life. Lyone meant a lot to me, and if it wasn’t for a combination of this day and Chris kicking my ass every time I turtle shelled out of life, it’d probably be sitting for another eight months.

I shit you not, this is what my rough draft of this post looked like for all of those eight months:

[INSERT HUGE INTROSPECTIVE HERE]

BEING AN ADULT IS GREAT 2k17.

I haven’t gotten to celebrate this day with my Dad for six years, and man — he was horrible about his birthdays. He hated getting older, he hated regretting the things he didn’t do since his last one, he hated feeling that regret every single year, and he hated that he couldn’t stop feeling that way. Trying to tell him that he helped people, sometimes in big ways (his job in the medical field) and in small ways (giving his special brand of “boy IF YOU DON’T GET YOURSELF TOGETHER” advice), didn’t shake him of those feelings.

Because we’re the Bat family, it became a Family Tradition™ to completely distract him from all of his feelings. This originated from my Dad’s 30th — a year and a half before I was born — of him moping around on a deep sea fishing ship. He was dressed like a pirate, next to his often-declared love of his life who was also dressed like a pirate, moping around because he was 30. He hadn’t done a lot of stuff at 30, G. He was getting old at 30, G. She took one look at this really tall child and his moping — and married him anyway.

On his 40th, my Mom nipped all of That Shit in the bud, and threw a surprise birthday party. THAT HE DIDN’T ATTEND, because he was — YEP! — moping at the bar he was a part-time DJ at. My Mom called him, and covertly asked, “Hey, it’s kind of late, didn’t you get off work two hours ago? It’s not like I threw a party, ahahahha, that’s a strange and weird thing to do on your birthday. Lowkey, the lights are all off, and it’s BECAUSE I AM IN BED AND NOT HIDING, READY TO SHOUT AT YOU.” He came home, was “surprised”, and then got handed a bust-shaped cake. Yes, a cake shaped like boobs. Because my Dad is a future version of me that lived in the past.

His 50th consisted of my Mom Freaking Out because we were so broke, and she didn’t have the money to do anything. “It’s going to be fine,” she said determinedly. It wasn’t fine; after two hours of moping, she called the neighbours over, who brought Jose Cuervo and weed. We all sang him happy birthday, and let him talk for three hours about cars with minimal eye rolling.

This is for you, Dad. I miss you every single day, and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t wish you were here, experiencing every high and low with me. I want to hear your voice again, I want to cry on your shoulder when it gets too hard, I want to laugh with you just one more fucking time. I want your advice, I want you telling me to get the fuck over it, I want you to tell me I’m okay being me. I don’t get any of that, but I do get this.

Happy birthday, Dad.

Inwhich I make bad decisions that are sadly executed rather well

Austin

January 21st, 2011

January 22nd, 2023

For the past week or two, I’ve been experiencing excruciating pain behind my eyes that I chalked up to the heater drying my eyes out. My left eye was really red and swollen and when I started experiencing an ass load of symptoms – Wednesday night saw I-think-my-eyes-have-fallen-out-literally and my BB!Reid could not (shockingly) make this better; Thursday day I felt like I had slammed my head into my ceiling sometime in the middle of the night and (not surprisingly) forgot to tell the Mom about it; and Thursday night’s constant pressure, and the redness and watery-irritation spreading to my right eye – where I was feeling like a truck had run over my face 3858584858 times, something that only got worse over a period of seven hours, I made the truly magnificent decision to, ya’ know, tell the Mom about it.

The parents are cheapskates, cheapskates that work in the medical field1 – which, ya’ know, isn’t at all bad, and is actually more convenient. The parents truly know certain things that other parents would pull out of their asses, and they have access to discounts on the money pit hole that is appointments and prescription medication. This does not, however, stop the parents from getting out of the sister and I going to do the Doctor, and it was to my surprise that the Mom got me in right away, and I was off to the eye doctor in five minutes flat.

My eye doctor was as flamboyant as ever, smelled like men’s cologne – a secret fetish of mine, and yes, I claim that is in no way as stalkerish as that sounds! – and was the second person to mistake me for a 16-year-old (the first being Christina » (kidding! (sort of lalala))). The Hannibal-esque equipment was still there – … yes, I did look for it, and was momentarily relieved to see it wasn’t there before I turned around and saw it sitting in the shadows behind me – they still left the computer sitting all open, hackable and tempting, and I swear every time I go there there’s something new to the endless amount of equipment – this time being a mechanical object that looked suspiciously like the gun Eames pulled out in Inception.

The point is, I have Iritis, which is basically just my irises being dicks and inflaming on me (I still love you, though!), and when I got home, I washed the dishes, pretended to be doing something on the computer, and watched a little bit of Criminal Minds and American Dad. I was redoing my toe nails when the Dad was all like, “WILL YOU STOP GO SOMEWHERE ELSE AND CLIP YOUR FUCKING DAGGERS” and I said something along the lines of, “hmph!” and soon found myself laying on the floor of my bedroom, fake plastic sunglasses on and head underneath my bed to get away from the one window that wasn’t blocked out (and is conveniently the one that gets the most sunlight).

As usually happens when I’m left to my own devices », I started thinking, “oh, hey – maybe I should cover up that window so I can lay down on the bed”, which of course had me rifling through my drawers to find the only sheet available:


Yes, my Harry Potter sheets.

My Grandma had amazing taste – amazing taste in clothes, fashion, hair, make-up and, of course, decorating. She’d buy two or three sets of the same sheets, and make curtains to match the sheet set; she was fucking amazing besides, but really. So, the ‘curtains’ (they were totally sheets, but if she can do it, I can certainly half-try!) next to the Harry Potter sheets had a match, a match I made into a canopy top that remains to be finished.

And, really, Harry Potter sheets wouldn’t be a bad thing, except I care what people think. My room is one of those rooms that’s cluttered with my things – in a very organised sense, keep in mind – and when I force Krissy » into decorating my room she’ll take one glance at it and run with “go to interior decorating hell, Tess!”. I’m totally the one with the Star Trek, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Batman figurines, the one who displays their crap TV series and movie collection all over the room, the one that flaunts questionable manga, and Harry Potter and Merlin slash photographs on two cork boards, and the one that has books about witchcraft and a Buddha figurine that’s rubbed periodically, and rocks from that one spiritual store that technically could be lived in if one went around sleeping in stores they wished they could live in.

I don’t care about these things, because they’re part of who I am, what makes up my heart, soul and terribly perverted personality. They’re all there for mostly shock value – but I don’t want some stranger to walk into my room saying, “oh, Star Trek, nice! There’s a digital T.V., oooh a canopy bed, a nice desk and a… not-really-nice clawed up chair OH YOU HAVE A CAT I AM ALLERGIC and that’s a nice vanity, so chic AND IS THIS HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE SHEETS AS CURTAINS WHAT IS LIFE AT LEAST DO MOVIE 5 I’M OUT”.

  • « The Dad used to be an x-ray technician (for thirty years!) and the Mom is a medical billing coder.
  • Happy Father’s Day

    Austin

    June 20th, 2010

    January 22nd, 2023

    Happy Father’s Day, Dad — you mean more to me than you’ll ever know (probably because I’ll never say it, but shush). …and before anybody asks, that’s the back of the Mom’s head — the Dad is not some hippy mullet-wearing dude (…OK, he’s a hippy dude, but still no mullet!), but from the reputation he has on my blog, I sense that wouldn’t be such a bad thing!

    In 10 Years…

    Austin

    May 21st, 2010

    January 22nd, 2023

    I almost didn’t write this, when Michelle » tagged me, because like Manda », I had a really hard time coming to my own conclusion of what my life will be like “in ten years”. It’s hard to say, and not for the reasons that are apparent; yes, I am young, but what I feared was not knowing where I’ll be in one year, much less ten! “Time will tell” kept going through my mind, and before I knew it, three weeks have already passed! I then decided that looking at this in a different way from everyone else might help me open up my shell a little bit, a way that wouldn’t scare me from writing it up. A ten year resolution, of where I need to be in ten years, for me; not where I want to be, but where I know I can and will be.

    I also decided to actually use pictures(!) in this post. It’s not my style or preference – going through my own pictures has given me a new found respect (as if I needed more!) for Krissy », who always uses photos; how she does it on a regular basis is going over my head at the moment – but I felt that since it was my own photography, it would be a great addition (and kind of less boring for those not in any way interested in where I’ll be in ten years).

    In 10 Years… I will be a photographer that travels, and works for National Geographic and Vogue Italia, because I can multi-photograph like this (and I just like taking pictures of animals and fashion… which, according to PETA, can’t possibly happen (I STILL LOVE MY PRINTS AND FAKE FURS)). I will have attended at least three Lady Gaga concerts, photographed her once, and made enough money to print up large posters of my favourite manga(/anime) characters, because it’s kind of less creepy than printing large posters of Ewan McGregor, Gaspard Ulliel and Gerard Butler – or worse, Lady Gaga herself.

    I have also stated my love for Latino and Asian dudes many times, but if it’s not apparent – I want to be partners will a Asian or Latino man-dude in the future, and have great sex with said man-dude. It’s no rush, which is kind of why I left it out initially, but like most things, my posts cannot lack of perversion. Just to make you think, “wow, when I’m having a bad day, and Tess posts, I’m like, ‘well, at least I’m not her‘, and I suddenly feel better”.

    …and the whole happy thing Manda » stated, because if I don’t have happiness with all of that, I won’t really be living any of it.

    (I also tag Christina » (in her corresponding LiveJournal, of course), Dee » (which should be interesting, because she’s one of the few older (than me) bloggers out of school that I actually admire), Clem » (I’ve never spoken to her personally, but I know she’ll make a funny story out of it or draw dinosaur pictures, and I like both (especially together!)) and finally Georgina ».)

    …the K-K-K Stuff!

    Austin

    February 23rd, 2010

    February 23rd, 2010

    While » …and the Indians Mated With the White People – the infamous entry about my Dad’s explanation on my heritage – was a hit back in the “day” when I ran on WordPress and still had all my comments, I never planned on making a second edition, or expanding that story in any way, because go read it’s amazing by itself, but as per usual with my Dad, what he told me last week just needed to be blogged, and needed to happen.

    For those who aren’t familiar, and/or don’t live in North America, the KKK » stands for “Ku Klux Klan”, and was a hate activist group that specialised in spreading the following message: white people rule, and if you are not white, you die. For many, this kind of outlook was especially a home run, and the entire “organisation” itself is often the butt of a lot of jokes seen in movies, skits and TV series’, as well as read in books and heard in music1 – as seen today in this entry. The KKK is often associated with the Baptist religion2 as the KKK really only exists in the southern part of North America, and Baptism runs deep in my Grandpa’s families’. My Grandpa Rodney and that side of the family doesn’t actually practise religion like my Papa and his family do, but our family roots apparently tie to the organisation. In » the aforementioned entry, the Dad mentions our heritage as:

    Me: Dad? We’re Indian right? From Grandpa Rodney?
    Dad: Yes, we are. About a couple of centuries back, we were pure Indian until we mated with the white people.

    I had originally thought I was 50% English, but that isn’t true. Apparently, I’m:

    Me: 50% English, right?
    Dad: No. You’re 25% English, 25% Indian, 25% German and 25% Irish. Rodney is half-Indian, from his father, and half-English from his Mother… you know, I’m talking the K-K-K stuff!

    And yeah, I’m totally excited that I’m more Indian than I thought I was, and I’m not as horribly Irish as my hair likes to insist I am – and yes, the K-K-K stuff had me cracking the fuck up, because only my family disregards important “monuments” as jokes, and only my family snubs their past religion(s) in a manner that would make my late Grandma go into a second heart-attack – but this is coming from the same man who thought it wasn’t hypocritical to, after quitting smoking, barge towards a innocent passerby, thump the cigarette out of their mouth and say “smoking kills3.

    1. « Not that I can blame the jokes; I just made a joke.
    2. « It’s actually Catholicism – or the Catholic religion – that’s tied to the K-K-K, not Baptism; nonetheless, Baptism is also the butt of most jokes, so it’s an honest misconception.
    3. « He didn’t actually do that, only said he’d do it, as he’d be “a horrible ex-smoker”. Still, I am fucking THERE with a video camera when he is one.

    Doctor! Doctor!

    Austin

    January 29th, 2010

    January 29th, 2010

    I felt like using that title because it’s actually a song by The Blood Brothers », and you know me1, if there’s a reference to be made, it will be had.

    But I’m not here to talk about The Blood Brothers, or how awesome they are, or how I cried at the news of their break-up, but in relation to this entry » by Rachel » about a doctor who played around with his bushy eyebrows, and repeated the process a million, billion times.

    So, I didn’t feel sorry for her like the commenters clearly did, and I just LOL’d SO HARD I almost had a cramp in my side. Which, if I were the superstitious type, I’d think that today’s events were Karma LOL’ing at me and biting me in the ass, as the saying goes. So along with the Dad and the sister, I had an eye doctor’s appointment this morning, and I was the last to go. I go through the whole shebang with the Halle Berry-esque nurse, and the Doctor comes into my room first. From there, the nurse decided she would have this conversation rather loudly in the hallway outside my room:

    Nurse: She’s just been dilated, you don’t need to see her first.
    Doctor: Oh, she is? So, the other two are dilated.
    Nurse: Yes, both of them are fully dilated, I just dilated her. You need to see them.
    Doctor: OK, I’ll go see them since they’re both fully dilated.

    So, after feeling like a fat pregnant lady — and feeling like the Dad and sister were pregnant as well, as they were talking about them — I was then told to wait “just a moment”, a moment that I am convinced turned into an hour. During that hour, I stared down a headpiece I swear came from The Silence of the Lambs2, and chastised my nurse internally at leaving a unlocked computer in the hands of hacker in the guise of a developer — but that’s neither here nor there, and for a different entry entirely.

    I eventually did see my eye Doctor, where I would have convinced myself he was gay by his elegant and wide hand gestures and the way he consistently crossed his legs — except, well, my late Uncle had ravishing hand motions while being utterly3 straight and he did happen to be wearing a wedding ring. Of course, this in no way means I think my Doctor can’t be gay because he wears a wedding ring, or that I wrongly accuse others of being gay to myself — I’m just suggesting, in the future, that perhaps doctors should think about using terms such as “dilated” and the situations that surround them, as the sister and Dad got a kick out of hearing that they were pregnant, too.

    (For the less than sarcastic variety, yes, they heard it from their rooms, too – and yes, we did laugh hysterically in the car on the way back.)

    1. « And if you don’t, you certainly should.
    2. « A headpiece he actually ended up wearing! Cue in the frantic heartbeat of trying to stuff down my laughter.
    3. « I use “utterly” because most of us still think he was in the closet.