Posts tagged personal

girljanitor:

This post seriously gets under my skin. My mother was a hunter. I spent the first four, four and a half years of my life in mostly abandoned family farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. Not only did my mother hunt and kill animals for our daily food, she also taught me traditional gathering (berries, arrowroot, greens) techniques. We did not sow (lol); the farmhouse used to have cultivated fields but they’d long gone fallow by the 1980’s.

I lived a traditional hunting and gathering lifestyle.

The nearest neighbor was my uncle who lived in another isolated farmhouse about 2 miles away. As for animals on the farm, we had mostly hogs, and a bull we put down (it was tasty) after it badly gored someone. We also bartered for larger game, since my mother didn’t have the patience for deer hunting most of the time. She and my aunt used to spend a rather frantic week in the fall canning, stewing, and preserving fruits and vegetables (which led to a few feuds over ownership of the resultant products).

By the time I was school age we had moved to LA, where we continued to often barter or receive gifts of game. My grandfather taught me to fish in the ocean, and my love of mackerel hails from those days. As an adult, I made many meals from wild boar meat, which makes super tasty sausage. One of my favorites was beans and rice with boar sausage-my partner at the time had several relatives who hunted. We also ate various snake meats and desert rodents.

I also have the knowledge to dry many different kinds of meat, and used to buy a lot of fresh and smoked fish from the wharfs in Long Beach. After moving to Florida, game and wild plants became less a part of my diet although alligator meat sometimes found it’s way on the table. Wild caught fish was easier to get and cheaper than many other places.

Now that I live in Central New York, I once again have access to various game meats, especially venison.

Here’s the thing. Food is traditionally for me a spiritual and sacred thing. Cooking and eating and hosting are sacred duties for me, and creating and teaching in return for meats and foodstuffs is one of the few connections that remain strong in solidarity with my culture and traditions.

The Lakota connection with hunting is legendary, and people still hunt on the plains with bows to this day.

The Lakota people make sure that protected hunting grounds stay in balance with regard to canceling certain hunting seasons when necessary, and expanding others when it is advisable.

I myself am no hunter. I’ve never even touched a gun. As a two spirited person any gender role is open to me, and to barter learning, storytelling and crafts for game is honorable and right.

So self-righteous, ultimatum-delivering vegans can go piss up a fucking rope.

(via genderbitch)

I really hate being right most of the time.

Tending towards cynical and being right really sucks. Especially when people you care about are hurting and you couldn’t do anything to prevent it.

There is no solace in being right about shitty things.

that I don’t drive. Cause I’m ready to tear him a new one.

Don’t hurt my sister. I will fucking END you.

my spouse came out to her father. And his basic reaction was “yeah, and?”

::massivedeflationofanxiety::

An old family friend, a contemporary of my late grandmother’s, had a massive heart attack the other day. Her family chose to remove her from life support yesterday and I should be attending a funeral sometime this week.

I have known Jeanette my entire life. I love her deeply. I’m not saddened by losing her. I’ll miss her, especially at Folk Fest, and I’ll always think of her fondly, and how readily she accepted my family and all our queerness. But since she had her stroke when I was 17, I feel like I’ve been prepared to say this goodbye, almost anticipating it. She meant, means, a great deal to me, and I’m not looking forward to her funeral.

I guess I feel the worst about not feeling worse. I feel guilty for not being sadder. I don’t know why I’m not mourning harder. I’m still not ready to face the fact that my Dad’s best friend recently died suddenly and painfully from an illness that had not been detected until way too late.

Maybe I’ll feel worse when it becomes really real. Maybe I don’t feel worse because I’ve already had too many punches lately.

(Don’t feel obligated to respond to this post with condolences. I think that might just annoy me right now. I appreciate the sentiment, I just don’t want to see it, if you don’t mind.)

Its an astounding revelation, that your mother doesn’t like you very much. I’m in denial of it a good deal of the time because it just seems so stereotypical.

Its unavoidable, though. Its ridiculously painful. I look at my baby, my sweet little child who annoys the hell out of me sometimes but who lights up my day regardless, and I remember the day when I was 11 when my mother told me that while she still loved me, that she wasn’t “in love” with me anymore. I remember all the arguments where she spent the entire time accusing me of things I would never do, and equating being willing to admit when I’m wrong with being “unreliable.” I think about how she is still convinced that I talked my spouse into transitioning and how everything I have ever been has been for attention, and all of my emotions are either irrational or calculated. I think about all the things she told my spouse I was when I was out of the country and how those things almost ended my marriage. I think about how she congratulates my spouse for “supporting” me and “putting up with” me. I think about every offer of help that has been pulled back after I’ve committed to needing it and every emotional rollercoaster that resulted from rejecting her help. I just can’t comprehend it.

Maybe it has something…everything to do with the fact that she felt obligated to have me. She’s as much as admitted that she wouldn’t have been able to do the type of parenting I do because she didn’t want to be that involved with me.

I don’t doubt that she loved/s me in her way. No, that’s a lie. I think she thinks she loves me. That’s not the same thing.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I hope that some day I can stop letting her live rent-free in my head. I’ve dedicated to essentially maintaining as little contact as possible, so that should help.

infiniteadventure:

Under any circumstances to anybody.

(Source: alextheokay, via lucypaw)