2002-03-11 ± 8:10 p.m.
goddamn those half japanese girls do it to me every time...

when there's too much swimming around in mi cabesa...I lose the ability to write clearly or well.

I fly home tomorrow at 7:50am. I think that I am excited. I should be excited. I'm going to see my family. my close friends. the man I love. and yet I feel quite equivocal.

lately, as I've begun to think ahead further than the next 6 months, I've also started to think that this denis and me thing could be forever. I was clued in to the fact that he felt the same last weekend when he called me as I was eating a hastily prepared pasta dinner...hearing the uncharacteristically downtrodden tone of his voice, I moved to my bedroom thinking he was about to profess his love and confess that he could no longer stand to see me merely once a month...but this was not in fact the case. he had just returned from cleveland where, during a dinner with his parents and his aunt and uncle, he was answering questions about me (they've yet to meet me...only due to distance...he's met my folks a few times)...which, somehow on the way to questions about marriage led denis to remind his parents that he did not believe in god and that furthermore he was not going to be married in a catholic church or have his children baptized. eruptions rivaling pompei followed...his aunt and uncle quickly fled as his mother wept for her future grandchildren...sure to be born horned and grow to be damned little devils.

I should stop here to explain that denis' parents immigrated to cleveland from croatia and are still very much rooted in the folk-mystical-catholicism of their childhoods. being semi-literate immigrant parents to a physics degree holding soon to be lawyer, eldest son has proven difficult for them to handle.

now denis and I have a few familial things in common, in that our fathers are both machinists and that we both brought home the first college degree in our family...this did much to spark the connection that we initially felt.

But my parents are virtually clueless when it comes to having "expectations" for their daughters' futures. My sister and I weren't baptized at birth and were allowed to attend church (or bible school or jehovah's witness conventions) with our friends and essentially let to make up our own minds about such matters. This arrangement grew out of my father's distaste for religion (growing up in the mountians of west virginia as the grandson of a southern baptist preacher) and my mother's questionable allegiance to the lutheran church she had been raised in (losing a brother in vietnam, another to an aneuresm, and a mother to cancer before my mother was 12 left her with a lot of god resentment). I've read the bible...there's some good stuff in there...but, as I can not accept it all, I've stuck to my vow of consistency and accepted exactly none of it.

denis and I are on exactly the same page when it comes to religion and god and science and nature...but this whole family thing has me pretty freaked out.

his mother can't understand why he doesn't think it's important that he find a nice catholic girl and now that he's informed them of his decision not to be married by a priest and not to subject his children to the church...I'm dreading the day I have to meet his parents.

and that sucks.

because I feel that knowing all of these things beforehand is only going to make me nervous and pessimistic and lead to an even worse than normal first impression.

but back to denis...

he was seriously down because his family was so hurt. he was seriously battling internally...asking himself if it was cruel to ignore his mother's wishes (he absolutely worships his mother...but in that "I need to take care of her" and not that "she knows all" sort of way).

I feel so sorry for him...but empathy is not possible here. I can't imagine being in this situation with my folks...being the traditionless mutts that we are.

I've written a lot so I'll stop.

what's love got to do with it? - 2004-09-29
noquierosoyabogada - 2004-09-21
I do not aspire to be cast in a lawyer joke - 2004-02-10
update - 2003-11-04
girl...you'll be a woman...soon. - 2003-08-12