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Friday, November 25, 2011

the terrors of being female in a male dominated society

   It seems that every landlord I get tries to get away with some wicked task that they barely ever get called out on.  I'm good and tired of the landlord getting me coming and going.  All they really are after is putting you in the poor house without giving anything of much value back.  When I had to move out of one place because he was selling it off to his nephew, I was the one who got evicted,  not the crazy witch upstairs whose kids came down and pissed all over my front doorstep and took off with my cell phone and video camera and every piece of gold from my jewelry box.  But when I went to call her something, after her unfriendly party goers at 3 am decided to threaten to put my shovel in my head because they were asked to move their cars from my part of the driveway.  I had to show up in court six times to answer to her bald faced charges of calling her a name.  So since she had her four or five kids living there with her before I came and since so was her maniac boyfriend whom she fought with incessantly, I was the one being forced into the street.  But that didn't matter, they came the night before my case worker was moving me and made me move all my stuff out onto Main st in the night, throwing away the balance of my stuff where people picked through my stuff every which way and in the end I lost stuff.  But they had the gall to put a new lock on the door in front of me and take the balance of my cash from my wallet in the process.  Terrorizing me and putting me up against four of their family members at the same time.  After I had to put up with months of letting the real estate brokers show the place twice a week in order for his nephew to buy the place and put his parents into my apartment.  And to top it all off, I was paying and extra $100 a month under the table to the dirty .....!! So when I went to legal aid to get my money back, they made me wait for 29 months and because I needed to get the money before Christmas, I had to settle for half of the settlement.  
      Then when I went to the new place, it was so small that I had to stack things one on top of the other in order to not put my stuff out in the hallway.  What a crap headed woman beater the next landlord was.  He not only then put me into a two bedroom because I had my son with me, but we had blown out windows there for the first two months in the place.  Where the nuts in the town could climb into the living room or kitchen windows off the roof, and they did just that. One day, I wanted to take down the old curtains and put up new, as the thing that was there was a complete rag.  So when I went to wash them in the laundromat, I came home to an open front door, which I had locked when I left, the kitchen light on and the window wide open.  Then on another occasion I was sitting in my living room, while all of a sudden a horrendous sound came and my window behind me started to come ajar.  Meanwhile I was scared but kept my head long enough to run  over to it and shut it before he got in.  I don't know who it was, but I remember a bunch of Spanish men working on the roof and leaning in my window to get blown from the fan since it was summer.  That place was mighty scary.  There was a nice whore bar directly across Broadway from there, where these half dressed mu chacha's would traipse around at 3-4 am and make a ruckus.  I had a birds eye view out my living room window.  Notwithstanding, that ___ came to me and wanted sexual favors from me.  Only according to him, every woman should ogle after his Italian whatchamacallit.  Forcibly so.  So when I tried to contact the authorities, they shirked it off looking at me like I was some sort of a criminal.  So with full trepidation, I had to listen to the three maniacs with their music blasting off every weekend from downstairs.  Meanwhile, their ____ of a mother would yell at all hours.  They plugged into my cable for playboy channel raising my bill by another $180.  So I had to call the company in order to get it deleted from the bill.  But in the meantime, they sized up the apartment for the kill.  When all was said and done, they had done away with all the rest of my precious jewelry along with the camera I had bought but not used yet.  Nonetheless, I was threatened by the  section 8 office that I had to take care of the floor in the second bedroom, well, that is what the landlord called it , but I had to manage to sleep in the living room and give my son the bedroom as there was no space in the second bedroom.  So it took around $150 to buy the tiles myself and put them down after I had to remove three layers of years of stuck on linoleum tiles that were so filthy you couldn't see the bottom of them.  So in the process I wrecked two pairs of my pants. 
  Then to put insult to injury, the bathroom floor caves in at 12:30 midnight.  Then that Italian stallion was mighty angry that I called the  town building inspectors out.  While the floor was rotted, they managed to have some local fix the cement in on top of the rot.  While the bathtub surround was so slimy puke color with a nice big tare in it.  I asked him to get paint at least so I could cover it over,  and after the dead mouse was left under the stove for about 10 days and was stinking me out.  He comes in and says " I don't smell a thing, if I move this stove out and there is nothing there, you are going to have to pay me to remove the stove.  What a kaniver, or should I say cheap __x-!!O-Fxgf__!  On top of which he had the nerve to take me in for a section 8 conference with the express proposal of having me being taken off my section 8, with his horrifying wife, she was another one for the records. Alot of other things happened  to me there that I won't get into today.  But needless to say, they do and try to get away with all kinds of things.

Women at the bottom

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Keeping Family Together






Image from http://www.padrefoundation.org
  Sometimes I think my work as a mother is never done.  It would be nice if the kids were smiles like these are.  But unfortunately, being a mother, and especially a single mother is a job that is usually facing one situation after another that you have to try and solve.  So if you think it was hard before you have kids, wait until the thereafter.  Running this way and that to make it to the next game and the next class.  My mother was always out driving them from one thing to another, and I wouldn't have known what to do without her help through those many years of keeping track of the children.  But alas, I failed at that too, I didn't know during the time my sons were traveling the half of the places that they had been to.  They apparently have been all over this nice country of ours, unbeknown-st to me.  My son Shawn, was always the fearless wanderer and showed up in many a strange place.  Deciding that the best route from which to see the country was through jumping freight trains around .  He wound up at the Rainbow gathering in Florida, where he slept out in the woods and listened to music with his traveling pal Naomi.  Or going to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. He was a nomad and made me very aware that I couldn't partake in his rampant treks through the ravages of the world.  He wound up in abandoned buildings down in N.Y.C. with a large group of runaways who inhabited the streets of New York.  Getting down and dirty and apparently setting a fire to one place they had stayed, one of the girls of the group felt that was the way to deal with not losing their possession, what little they had.  I personally never tried these kind of travels, although I remember Shawn saying to me that I should talk, that I must have done some crazy stuff as a kid too.  It's amazing when things go unsaid, the kind of total presumptions that children come with. 
    No one every gave us a street map for child-rearing and the one's that did, I wouldn't have wanted to follow any way.  Sometimes I wonder if my children ever were really aware of the kind of freedoms that they have been afforded in growing up.  Although they can hate you when they're living through it all, I'm sure there are some families that they wouldn't have liked to have been born into.  In the scheme of things, it is very difficult when people try to compare me to other families.  My eldest daughter moved out practically in her pre-teen--early teens.  She spent the better part of her life over at her classmates household.  And each of them have gone through the "you didn't live up to our expectations" syndrome.  I'm always under the gun for scrutiny.  Things get really sticky with five children at hand.  And each of them is going in a different direction and each of them has a different agenda.  Between managing a household with 2 dogs, 7 cats, two turtles and a cockatoo, things got pretty hectic.  And Shawn was on the Gymnastics team when he was younger, he really had the physical capacity to do great things.  He learned very quickly and could master what was being expected of him pretty well.  Larayna, my youngest daughter became an excellent singer, she had the voice of a nightingale.  But as time wore on, so seems to be her interest in voice.  If you say to her that she should pursue it, then she complains that you're all telling her what to do.  And none of you know what it is that she really wants to do.  I guess it's true that I resented people trying to make up my mind for me as well.  Sometimes you just have to let them live their own lives, or else you'll be sorry later.  My mother has a yen for telling other people what they should do.  So that is a beef that I've had with her for a very long time. But there is very little about my past that I guess my children really understand about me.  It's strange, something I remember clearly that my elder son, Toby said to me when he was younger, he asked me if I was a hippie.  I don't know what instigated that question, but it always struck me as strange.  I never thought of myself in any classification.  But other people seem to think mostly in classifications.  I don't like that about our society.  I think that classifying a person is a very antagonizing way to manipulate a person downward.  It's like you need to be looking down on them in order to build your own persona up.  I don't like that about people, I personally find it offensive. 
    I just wanted things to go smoothly, but no matter how hard I tried to make that happen, I wasn't going to win.  Life was filled with difficulties and riffs between each one of the children on a daily basis. They talk about sibling rivalry, well my kids were at the top of the crop in that arena. I had to pull Toby off Liam many a time.  Liam, my middle son was always the quiet one.  But all the same he got around.  He has wound up with more friends than the lot of us.  I find it very strange that things can go from one extreme to the other in a matter of a few years.  Life with five kids is just like that.  You always have to watch out for the latest news from each child.  It's a balancing act.  But Liam, being slower than Toby, his elder brother, has since graduated with his Bachelors degree in English teaching, and who knew he would become a teacher.  Well, he hasn't actually done that yet.  He's playing music with his band; he plays the drums, and well I might add.  But I just think that whatever floats their boat is what they should follow.  As I was raised to believe that each person is an individual in their own right.  And that you can't mold a human being into something they're not.  Or force them to do something they're not ready to do.  So in the meantime, when Liam graduated from high school, they gave him an award being the only student to leave that school who was going onto a four year school.  He was in the remedial program, and he was very proud when he graduated.  Well after what we had been through with them, we were also when each of them had graduated. 
   Life seems to be a series of trials and in the long run, when you triumph over the barriers that are put in front of you, it is even more rewarding.  So along the way, we come up with those bumps and bruises, but when we pass through that next level, we remember all the sweat that has gone into all that time and we have still prevailed.  That is the most exciting feeling.  When Shawn graduated from his program, he couldn't have been more excited.  The pictures that we have of him on his graduation, he was grinning from ear to ear.  Things just seemed to come together for him at that point.  But after he moved away from home and tried to set up his home across the country, out in Portland, Oregon, he failed and wound up getting put in jail.  The problem was that since he was from out of state; New York, they treated him much more harshly than they would have a local.  So he has had a long series of hardships while becoming accustomed to the living situation in jail.  It really has been difficult from this end too, hearing these horrendous stories of what has been happening to him at the hands of the jailers.  They apparently are as harsh as the movies present them to be.  Although if you look up on their website, they make sure that everything looks like they are doing everything in their power to help out the inmates.  That seems to be the farthest thing from the actual truth.  The harshest set of circumstances, including my son having someone shot right in front of him and having the blood spatter on him.  It is always astounding to me how other people seem to take advantage of innocent people and make scape goats out of them. 

Sunday, November 20, 2011

What is ownership?

  When I think about the things that I went through when I had my children, I wouldn't want to relive it.  Since I was a single mother going to give birth, they tagged me and in such a terrorizing way.  They hit me with papers that said I was abusing my baby before it was even born.  How can they know that?  They just do it by rote and pick on mother's because they are delivering babies on medicare.  Why should we have to stand for this kind of utter harassment?  There should be a law against all the tricks they pull off under the sun.  Since people are still in desperate straits, they should be held to face the law.  But all the bad guys seem to play above the law.  What's good for the goose isn't good for the gander in their eyes.  I don't know why some people can get the top treatment, while others have to suffer along.  It's such a drag when people make your life impossible and then go around tagging you for no good reason besides some really green jealousy or some other miserable purpose.  I just don't see how they get their jollies that way.  But some people actually seem to.  Did you ever wonder how come your friends aren't acting like your friends?  Like it's too much for you to expect them to treat you like a decent human being.  I think it isn't going to far to say that I have had numerous friends, but I can't rely on a one when the chips are down.  Isn't that the pits?  Because my usual is when the chips are down.  So what's the use in having them as friends.  They are definitely not what they are cracked up to be.  And when you really need help to accomplish something, then your no good.  You're good enough to use for their benefit, but when it comes to your benefit, their hearing is out the window.  It all doesn't add up, unless you want to notice what a nightmare is developing around you.  And you have no control over it and you can't stop it from coming on.  The only problem is that you are a victim in the big picture of things.  It's just too sad and the fact that we have been stagnating in the water makes no sense.  Why should the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?  Hoytie-Toytie, and they're at it again.  Why can't we just live our lives in peace and harmoney? When they let go the poet-laureate of New Jersey because of him telling the truth in the actual reading of it, then it's because he hit a nerve and that will not go down too well.  They don't seem to be able to digest anything like that.  It's too bad when people speak their mind, isn't it?

7 Free Web Alternatives to Photoshop - ArtBistro.com

7 Free Web Alternatives to Photoshop - ArtBistro.com

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Go Petition- A good place to get started

<a href="http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/take-the-law-out-of-the-hospital.html">Take the Law Out of the Hospital Petition | GoPetition</a>\
  By using this link, you can get to learn about the latest petition on this site.  I think it holds merit and should be given a second look.  Maybe someone you know has had a similar experience.  I know firsthand that it is much less then pleasant to experience.  The traumatic effects it has on the mother is devastating.  And much worse, there is no one who will go to bat for you when the worst happens.  Try as you may to get someone on your side when the dice land, it is almost impossible to have justice served.  I think that instead of being black listed, the victims of this heinous act of violence against the rights of the poor.  It is a violation of a mother's human rights to have her children removed after a delivery.  It not only tortures the mother, but the newborn also.  And then the family is broken up and it takes a lot of healing to put it back together again, if it ever happens.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Untitled Project

Untitled Project

serenelyshe: Untitled Project

serenelyshe: We share the Holidays together: Untitled Project

Untitled Project

Untitled Project

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Untitled Project

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It's off to gaei Paris

It's off to gaei Paris

Untitled Project

Untitled Project

Off to gay Paris

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I want to go places

   I really dream about living in a castle in Italy or France.  Those are the two most important places to me to visit before I croak.  I think they are better than here because they embrace the arts into their culture.  There the arts are embedded into their every day lives.  And we here are so separated.  We never get the benefit of government support for the arts that France or Italy receive.  We don't treasure our arts.  Yet people talk on end about how much art does for them.  They just don't want to put their money where their mouth is.  It's a sad state of affairs when the culture and art programming are always the first one's to go from school programming.  I hate the fact that we continually have to fight for the bare bones programs that are passed around.  I think this country should model itself after other countries who are doing a lot better with art programming all the way around. 
   Now that the floor has been taken out from under the federally funded art programs, artists are flocking to sights like Kickstarter and FundRaZR.  It's not the ideal, but it's a lot more than our government is doing for us.  In the long run, everyone seems to be talking about the National Endowment for the Arts being folded.  It doesn't make any sense to me in my mind to do that.  But then again, neither does so many things that the government do gel with my mind.   I wish they would run census' on what the public wants to do with the art programming in their community.  I think that they should take models of programs that have seemed to pull things together and model their programs after already tried and true recipes.  There is no doubt, that if things aren't working the way your're doing them, then you have to change your game plan.   And apparently there is a lot of change on the horizon.  Things are going to be different than they ever were.  And so is the economy.  That is without question.  But the question is; is it going to get any better?  Not if we keep on the track the way we're going.   Things need to change but the people in charge need to endorse that change.  I'm sure my grandparents are turning over in their graves.