Here Come the Holidays

Happy Halloween, y'all. And then Thanksgiving. And then Hannukah. And then Christmas and Kwaanza and New Year's. I know Ramadan falls in there somewhere, but being one of those move-around holidays (like Hannukah) I never know when it falls.

The video below is from a favorite film of mine, "The Nightmare Before Christmas." It's such a nice marriage of opera, film and Tim Burton's weird and slightly dark visual stylings. It's fun and exposes kids to a formal style of music they would probably never hear anywhere else, just like my generation heard most of its classical music in Bugs Bunny cartoons ("Kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit!").



It's odd that Mom died just before the holidays, and that her memorial is scheduled for just after the holidays. No reason, just strange.

As for me, I do have news. I received the WIA grant this week and on Monday I will be going in to sign up for classes and get my schedule for school. It will take about six months and then I'll be suitably employable in this Web-weighted design world we now live in. I even found out that the grant will reimburse my mileage to and from school. Like I told Warren, my caseworker, I might even make some money on this deal.

It's going to be good to have some structure back in my life after these months of unemployment, with the only routine being the frustration of looking for work and finding practically nothing. And with the openings I did find, sending out dozens of resumes with 20-plus years of really good experience on them, only to never receive a reply from a single submission. Hopefully, all that will be changing soon.

I'll be going up to Arroyo Grande next weekend just to visit and spend some time with friends and family because it may be a while before I can do that again.

So, not much of an entry. I just wanted to do something visually festive and let everyone know my training is a sure thing now. More on all this later.

And those in Washington and Maine: Vote "NO." You know the referendum/question I'm talking about!

And They Say They Don't Hate Us

Just a quickie entry about the attempt to repeal the recent same-sex marriage law in Maine.

The same folks who were behind Proposition 8 in California are mounting the campaign in Maine now. And their message is exactly the same: "Won't someone think about the children," which is total bullshit. Neither campaign had anything to do with children.

When Mom died this month, she died knowing that all her children were married; everyone had someone who would be with them "for better or for worse, through sickness and in health, forsaking all others until death do us part." She didn't have to settle for a limited domestic partnership contract agreement for one of her children. My husband Steve and I got married with the same vows, the same commitment and the same depth of heart and feeling as any of her other kids. And we probably appreciate the institution a hell of a lot more than most heterosexuals because it's something we thought we'd have to do without because we were second-class citizens.

To all those folks who are busy trying to repeal Maine's law, and who say that they don't hate anybody, I can only say, "What if someone wanted to take your marriage vows and rights away? You and your spouse would be roommates, longtime companions, and your children would still be yours, though they would be borne out of wedlock. And there would be many rights of marriage (150 in California, about 400 in Maine) that would vanish for you in an instant. But, hey, it's just the same as marriage, just without that very special word." Would anyone be satisfied with that? You say you don't hate gay couples, but you want to strip them of all those things, all that honor and dignity?

Just like with Proposition 8, people are actively working to take away rights that have been conferred on all citizens. They are putting words into the documents of government that limit and reduce the rights already granted to their fellow citizens, formally creating a second-class group of people, all in an effort to "do good" and keep things "normal" (see previous entry). The damage they are attempting to inflict is more massive than they could ever see in their myopic frame of reference, and the lives they are ruining are, over time, beyond number. And yet they see themselves doing good, and I truly believe they are sincere in that sentiment. But how tragically wrong they are.

There is a federal case moving forward in the 9th District Court. The last I heard, the judges had asked the pro-Prop 8 folks to provide the court with solid evidence that granting marriage rights to same-sex couples would damage and denigrate the institution. Unfortunately, there is no real evidence beyond the opinions of the religious right that pass for fact in their own minds.

Thank God Steve and I are married, and our marriage is protected by the Supreme Court of California and the laws of this state. Sadly, no other same-sex couple can get married in our state now. But, on a positive note, a law was passed and signed by the governor that says any marriages performed outside of the state will be honored by the State of California, so people can go to Canada or Britain or the Netherlands or Spain or Vermont or (still) Maine or Massachusetts or Connecticutt and get married and bring that union legally back to California.

For a gay couple, the decision is so simple: we just want to have our marriage honored like any other. We just want to be a valuable part of our community and make the same commitments that everyone else makes. Is that so hard to understand?

Life is Creepy

I found these two photos online. They're not cute. They're not adorable. They are genuinely disturbing, and these two "entertainers" should be sued for all the therapy these children will have to endure to undo their encounters with these jolly folk who truly believe they are bringing joy into these young, tender hearts. I've often wondered what the true motivation is for people to become "children's entertainers." When I see photos like this and I can't help but think of John Wayne Gacey in his clown outfit, face all painted up with a big wad of balloons in the fat, meaty hands. Ewwww.

It's kind of an allegory for the horrors we face in our daily existence. Those "helpful" folks who come into our lives and complicate them to the point of distraction -- or insanity. Some people do it in the name of religion. Some do it in the spirit of social consciousness. Most of them never really take into account what the people they're "helping" really need. They do it out of their own need to be "good," and interpret their actions as selfless. This is probably the biggest scam of all: self-righteous self-deception.

On the home front: Steve and I are doing well. Steve's still on three days a week at work, but he also has his unexpired unemployment insurance account, so his "days off" are being supplemented, which is helping a lot in making ends meet. Hopefully, within a month or two, the owners of the business will see that things are getting back to normal and they'll hire him back full time.

As for me, I have completed all the paperwork and research necessary to apply for my WIA grant. I've found a great school in Burbank with a dynamite program that's just what I'm looking for. Now I have to apply for the money and hope it comes through. If all goes well, in six or seven months I will be totally trained as an Adobe Certified Expert in Web design (a very bankable thing), with a portfolio of Web work to augment the substantial print portfolio I already have.

I wrote an obituary for Mom last week. Sister Kittie asked me to, and I was more than happy to oblige. It was a very strange experience, and it left me realizing how much I didn't know about Mom's life. There were dates missing and I'm sure there were some important episodes missing, as well. I sent a rough draft out to all the siblings, hoping they would be able to fill in whatever holes I had left. We shall see this week what comes in from them.

Back at the Times-Press-Recorder in Arroyo Grande I was informally in charge of the obituaries, so I sort of know how they should read. I did, however, try to avoid "passed away," "went to her reward" and "went to be with Jesus" in lieu of just saying "died." I think honesty is best, even if it's blunt. When the final draft is ready, perhaps I'll include it in a future blog entry.

Cousin Robin has headed back to New York to work on a new play. We got together for lunch last week at the Bowery in Hollywood and had a really good time. It's been tough for us both losing our respective mom and aunt in the last few months. I'm glad I got to see her before she took off for the Big Apple, and I'm so jealous of her for having work back there. But my place is here right now and I have things to get done to move life forward.

The one thing I can say has come out of all this death is that I've gotten back in touch with the Ballard side of the family. Beth was out for Aunt Kit's memorial and stayed at Mom's with Steve and I (and later my brother Steve and his family). She left the day before Mom died, not because she chickened out, but her ticket was for Wednesday and mom happened to hang on until Thursday. Also, Tom Ballard, who lives in Washington, is on Facebook and I've had some communication back and forth with him. He has an amazing collection of antique radios. When I was a tween, I had a crush on him, and I don't think I've ever told him that. He was like a theater superhero to me and is one of the reasons I went into professional theater back in the 1980s.

So positive things are emerging from all the death. I know that sounds course, but I'm getting far enough along in my mourning that I have a perspective about it. I know neither Mom nor Kit would want us to dwell too long on the sadness. And, let's face it, you have to get used to missing people who die. Mom's birthday was Saturday (Oct. 17), and I thought about her all day long; not in a teary way, but just missing her immensely. I think I was in my 50s before I actually knew her birth date. I always thought it was Nov. 16, for some reason. I'd call and wish her a happy birthday a month late, and she never seemed to mind. Even when I wrote the obituary, I had to double-check her birth announcement just to make sure I was right.

Goldie, the Moms' dog, is being adopted by Pete and Deb Star, family friends who will take very good care of her and love her a lot. Their son, Owen, used to come over to the Moms' and they paid him to walk her several times a week. Come to think of it, I paid him for the last week he walked her because everyone else was out of the house at the time. And, you know what? I don't even want the money back from the estate.

Right now I'm waiting for life to fall into its new pattern, one which will be emerging soon. I'm hopeful about the training grant, and I think that going back to school and focusing on new horizons will be a really good thing for me. I look at the calendar and see the holidays coming up. What a strange and different thing they will be this year. Everything's evolving forward, moving into the future. Where else can it go?

Movements Feel Good

What a shitty summer this has been: June brought unemployment; August, Aunt Kittie's death; October, Mom's death. I don't know about anybody else, but I'm reeling.

It seems to me that I get unemployed just when everything else hits the fan. Back in '98 I lost my job, the house, broke up with then-boyfriend Matt and moved into the attic at Johnson Avenue, sharing the house with the moms. It took me nine months to find a job back then, but it led me to the Hollywood Reporter and the best career move I've ever made. Then the Nielsen Company bought up the conglomerate that owned the Reporter and things started going downhill fast. I survived four rounds of layoffs in two years, but got caught up in the fifth. And when I took a look at the job market, design jobs in publishing had vanished (I've seen three in L.A. in the last four months).

But now movement. And it comes just as the first rains of the fall/winter season have arrived. I've been working with EDD to land a WIA grant for retraining in Web design, since those are the only "publication" design jobs out there. And this week I began the research to make formal application for the money.

As an applicant, you're required to research and visit three schools that are approved by the program to provide instruction. Today I went to New Horizon in Burbank, which has a really great program that's only about six months long. Tomorrow (Wednesday) I'm going out to L.A. Valley College to check out their program, which runs a year and a half (though I think I could probably test out of a good nine months of that). Thursday, I'm off to an all-day seminar on resumes and interviewing techniques provided by Foothill Training Center, the one-stop shop in the San Gabriel Valley (where Pasadena is) for EDD. Then Friday I'm visiting ICDC College in Hollywood (can anyone say "Hollywood Upstairs Medical College"?) to check out their program.

From what I know, I'm leaning toward the New Horizon program; not only is it the shortest one, but it also provides testing to become an Adobe Certified Expert, which is kind of like an MD in the Web world (Adobe writes all the programs used in most kinds of graphic design).

So, hopefully by the end of next week I will have the application process completed and then it's just waiting to see if I land the grant. I think it should be a no-brainer, since the WIA program is designed for people who are displaced from their previous employment by technological advances: I fall into that category very nicely. It pays the tuition and costs for retraining and provides continuation of unemployment benefits during the training period. This should help me make it to the other side of this scummy mess we shall come to know as the Summer of '09.

The mourning continues for the two swell ladies who filled my life for so many years, but there's also progress on the personal front. I don't think Mom or Kittie would want me to dawdle, no matter how sad I'm feeling over their departures. More likely, they'd kick me in the ass if I tried to waste time right now.

And one big thing is different this time around: I'm a married person and I have a husband who is really supportive of me and loves me deeply. Things have been rocky financially (though not desperate), but our relationship is going strong.

Steve's doing well. He's pressing his boss to take him back full time (he was cut back to three days a week while business was slow, but the last two months have posted nice profits), but the old gent is hemming and hawwing. I'm feeling really hopeful, though, because the old guy realizes they can't do without Steve. What's more important, his wife knows it, too, and she seems to be the only one that can push him to make a decision. And she really likes Steve.

Is being married and going through all this any different from being domestic partners and going through all this? You bet your ass, it is: Because my mother died knowing that I have someone who exchanged vows of commitment with me before witnesses; that we took one another's hand in matrimony, not simply filled out a contractual form that was notarized and validated by the state; and because my friends and family know what marriage is. And so do we. It makes the intolerable tolerable until things get better.

So why don't you straight people stop knocking it?

Such Devoted Sisters

On August 11, I wrote of the loss of my Aunt Kittie and my memories of her. Tonight I'm writing about the death of my mother, Paula, on Thursday, Oct. 1.

If you didn't know them well, you might not know that Mom and Aunt Kittie were as close as sisters can get without being twins. And while they spent their middle decades raising families and creating careers, their childhood and their retirement were spent together.

When my father died in 1990, Aunt Kittie had recently retired, and she moved up to San Luis Obispo to help with his caregiving. After he had passed, Mom invited her to stay on and the two sisters lived together, naming their shared home "Hag Harbor."

On Labor Day weekend, just weeks after Kittie died, Steve and I went up to Arroyo Grande to visit. It was ostensibly to get out of the fire zone for a time, but I also wanted to see how Mom was doing. I had worried that, like an old married couple, when the first one died the other would not be far behind.

On that visit, Mom seemed OK with Kittie's death, but I think she was denying or cloaking the loss she felt. Mom often said she hoped she would survive Kittie, because she was worried what might happen if she weren't there for her sister. So I wasn't too surprised when my sister Kittie (named for her aunt) called me on Thursday, Sept. 24, and explained that Mom had been in the hospital and that things didn't look good. "They think her lungs are shutting down," she said.

Aunt Kittie's memorial was being held on Sunday, Sept. 27, so we had planned on going up the coast in any case. When we got there Saturday, Mom was sitting in her chair in the living room looking worn out and barely speaking above a whisper. On Sunday, we had a wonderful memorial for Kittie, but everyone was asking where Paula was; surely she wouldn't miss her sister's memorial. During the memorial, my brother-in-law David slipped away and helped the home health nurse move Mom back to a hospital bed in her room. He returned after the formalities were over, and we let close friends know the situation.

The family that came to town for the memorial stayed on, and my brother Steve's family arrived from Wisconsin on Tuesday. His daughter Amanda is a healthcare professional and was a godsend, both for Mom and everyone there. Mom was medicated and as comfortable as possible, and we all felt much better knowing someone was there who was not only family but skilled in hospice care.

On Wednesday, Mom's breathing became very shallow and she was nonresponsive. Thursday afternoon, about 1:30, Amanda came out to the patio where the family was sitting and announced that Mom's breathing was going. Ten minutes later she could no longer find a pulse, and Mom was gone.

I told myself I was not going to write about this right away; I was going to give myself some time to collect photos and organize my thoughts, but I'm just not willing to do that. I may visit this experience again in other posts, but I have to put it down here now, because seeing the blog published will help me make this a little bit more real. Certainly, there will be things about her I will recall now and then for the rest of my life. I just hope the memories don't come with questions, because she's not around to answer them anymore.

My sister Kittie and her husband Dave have been absolutely the most fabulous, greatest people to Mom and Aunt Kittie over the past several years, especially when health problems limited the sisters' ability to get around. Kittie and Dave live just a few miles from the Moms (as Paula and Kittie were known in our extended families), and their presence as helpers was a reassurance to us all. It's not only that they were there to help, but also because the sisters had a habit of going into the hospital for something and never bothering to tell anyone.

Kittie and David were our touchstone to Hag Harbor. And, ever the accountant and stage manager, my sister is a master of planning, organization and confluence. Her husband Dave is a genius in the mechanical realm, so the sisters were in good hands whenever the couple were there.

it's early in the morning and the therapeutic value of this writing has been depleted. Now I'm just looking forward to sleeping in my own bed after this weeklong vigil. Obviously, there will be more later. But the saddest part of all is that, when I write my blog, I write knowing Mom will be reading it, so I write to her. But I see no reason to change that.