Serene of the Oakland Serenes

Feeling pretty self-involved today, so what better way to pass the time than to post to the In Great Detail thing. I believe I left off at #16.

( Day 17: Your favourite memory, in great detail )

( Day 18: Your favourite birthday, in great detail )

I haven't done an IGD post in a while. I plan to spend the day on DW, catching up with people and making posts. Please forgive me if this results in a cluttering of your lists. I'll use cuts any time a post gets longer than a paragraph or so.

( Day 15 – Your dreams, in great detail )

Day 13 – This week, in great detail

Hmm. It's Sunday, so shall I share last week with you in great detail, or tell you my detailed plans for this week? The latter will be easier on my limited brainpower, so let's go with that.

Monday: Up at 6am. Work 7:30-1:30; come home and make the salted-caramel ice cream I didn't get around to making this weekend; hang out with wild_irises in the evening; bed by 10pm.

Tuesday: Sleep in (until probably 7ish?). Go to Kaiser and get blood drawn. Go to stonebender's to hang out and work on blog posts; go home; rent Zipcar; pick up the kid from the airport around 7. Try to get to bed at a decent hour.

Wednesday: Up at 6am; work 7:30-2:30 (team meeting at 10); participate in a psych study at 3; go home and work on the blog. Bed by 10.

Thursday: Up at 6am; work 7:30-2:30 (meeting with grandboss at 8); go home and rest; bed by 10.

Friday: Up at 6am; work 7:30-2:30 (grant meeting at 10); go home and make schmaltz and chicken stock and chill the chicken meat until Saturday morning; then crash, or stay up all night, depending on how I feel.

Saturday: Sleep in; make knaidlach soup; have people over; goof off the rest of the weekend.

Day 11 – Your siblings, in great detail

I have three siblings: a sister (actually, half-sister) who's four-and-a-half years older than I; and two younger brothers, three and six years younger.

About my sister, the less said by me, the better. She's the mother of wtfpotatoes and Munchkin The Elder.

The older of my "little" brothers is super-smart, very funny, and a much-sought-after finance wizard for car dealerships. He goes into failing dealerships and turns them around; it's really kind of impressive. He's been married around 17 years to a really nice woman, and they have eight great kids. I am sad that I don't see more of them all; I feel like I've given up that part of my family ties by being bad at visiting and keeping in touch. Then again, they're devout Christians in a pretty evangelical way, so my life isn't a comfortable one for them to be around a lot of the time. *shrug* Anyway, I love my brother a lot, and there were times in my youth when he was my closest friend. He's sharp-tongued, hardworking (70-80 hours a week!), and an odd mix of devoutness and worldliness.

My baby brother is the sweetest, and doesn't even mind being called "baby brother", even though he's approaching 40. He's a big teddy bear with a lovely wife and three kids. He gets along with EVERYONE. He was the peacekeeper in childhood, and even though he took my dad's leaving the hardest, he's managed to develop a really close relationship with him in adulthood. He is a cable installer, and he moved his family to Washington state so they could afford a nice house in a good school district. He's stubborn, loving, and an inveterate fan of rap music since before we knew it was called that.

Day 09 – Your beliefs, in great detail

This is one that would take dozens of posts, were I to go that route. I was planning to spend my furlough articulating this stuff, in fact, but life took over. But I'll try to give the "in somewhat less great detail" version here. It may get long, so how about one of those cut thingies?

( Read more... ) Well, it didn't end up being that long, because I stayed general and didn't talk about specifics like abortion, gun control, and buttsex, but I'll keep the cut tag. :-)

Day 07 – Your best friend, in great detail

I have several "best friends", because for me, "best friend" != "friend who is the one true bestest of them all", but rather "friend who means to me what I think people mean when they say 'best friend' about one person".

It's probably not surprising that a poly person has many best friends. Some of them are people I don't talk to much these days, like piglet and lcohen, but whom I would do anything for.

The three I have most contact with are my mom (whom I talked about in detail on Day 03), and my two partners, about whom I am happy to talk in great and glowing detail whenever I have the chance.

My partners are stonebender (Guy) and james_huber (James). The challenge here will be, I think, talking about them without talking about myself in connection with them.

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Guy is a fierce advocate for all flavors of underdog: economically disadvantaged people, people with disabilities, lgbtqi people, and so on. He is very aware of the inequities in the world, and very good at articulating their complexities in an impassioned, intelligent way. He's a huge science-fiction fan, and reads almost nothing else, though he likes history and plays, as well.

Guy is the oldest of four children, and was born with a severe, progressive disability. His parents could have institutionalized him, and were encouraged to. That's just not the kind of people they are; they raised their four kids together, and Guy grew up more independent and confident than anyone would have believed back then. He graduated from UC Berkeley quite a while back with a theater degree, and he's a great person to see a play with, because he can let go and enjoy it, AND pick it apart intelligently afterwards.

Guy is funny and caring and remembers the little things. He is friendly and warm and eager to make people feel comfortable and at home. He is also anxious and depressed a fair bit of the time, and easily feels guilty. Also, he apologizes a lot, but it's as much a verbal tic as anything else.

He's a near-carnivore, a fan of live theater, the Procurer for the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award, the Board Secretary for the Center for Accessible Technology, and a proofreader for Bookshare. He thinks he's a lazy bum who never does anything, but he's wrong.

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James is probably the smartest person I know personally, and I know a lot of smart people. He's also probably the most introverted, though he's not unfriendly. He's funny and kind, and when my kid needed a place to live, he instantly gave up his privacy, quiet, and space to give her a hand.

James is an endearing mix of curmudgeon and humanitarian. He doesn't have that much use for spending time with people on a daily basis, but he thinks everyone should look out for each other, and he puts his money where his mouth is: he doesn't make much money being a telecommuting programmer for a small e-commerce company, but every single time someone asks him for a handout, whether it's a family member or a person living on the street, if he has the money, he gives it away.

James is what I would call an atheist; he's not that hung up on what people call him. His website, which is moderately famous and in the middle of an upgrade, says "Philosophically I'm an atheist and a humanist with slight pantheistic tendencies."

James is also the oldest of four kids. He works for his brother, and I get to hear his very entertaining side of hours-long conversations they have on the phone every day. He's also really, really funny, and keeps me laughing all the time. If you poke around his website for a while, you'll see what I mean, but he is also really quick with a joke or pun, though he often says it so softly that only I hear it. He's an excellent roommate, a mellow guy (sometimes to the point of timidity), and tends to put others first to his own detriment, though he's getting better about that.

Day 05 – Your definition of love, in great detail

I'm not being avoidant when I say I don't have one. I have ideas about what love means to me, but whenever I've given some kind of definition a try, I've decided that I'm okay with an "I know it when I see it" approach to this particular question, although I don't mind geeking about it.

Some things I think about love:

Love isn't enough to make a relationship on.

The kind of love I feel toward general humanity (the kind piranha calls "Hare Krishna love") is different in both intensity and quality from the love I have for actual people.

For me, New Relationship Energy goes away; love doesn't go with it, but intensity does. This is a bug, not a feature, to me, but it's probably best for my productivity and calm.

I have been known to say "I love you" too soon, before I was really able to tell the difference between NRE and love, or for other suboptimal reasons. But I don't really regret it, because I do love just about everyone, to varying degrees, and I'd rather love too much than too little.

My mom is 4 years older than my dad. They met in a bar; he was in the Navy, and she had a toddler. Not at the bar or anything, but she had one. He married my mom and adopted my sister, and they never told any of us (my sister included) that she wasn't his, not until they were divorcing and my sister was 18.

Mom essentially raised us by herself, because my dad was out to sea most of the time. He was gone 9 months out of the first year they were together, and she had to schedule me to be induced in order for him to be around when I was born.

They were SO happy when I was born. My mother danced when she found out she was pregnant with me. And my parents adored me, even though my mom and I had a difficult relationship throughout my childhood. I was mostly a good kid, and they both seemed to like me.

My dad's a brilliant, sanguine, musical guy, and he's fun to be around, but difficult for me to engage with on any kind of deep level. He's VERY tall, and Cute-poet-chick used to call him His Gigantic Dadness.

He gets along much better with my brothers, and has a very close relationship with my baby brother, who has always tried hardest to keep ties with dad. We sometimes half-jokingly refer to the dad of our childhood as "Uncle Dad", because he would come home long enough to give us presents and play with us, then go out to sea again. For a year when I was 6 and 7, they were separated, but again, they didn't tell us that. We just moved in with my aunt, and they told us he was out to sea.


The was never a time in my childhood when dad didn't have a bunch of books on how to strike it rich -- in stocks, in commodities, in real estate. He also collected geeky things like princeps puzzles, books on cryptography, and all manner of games and wooden puzzles. It's disappointing to me that we no longer get together as a family to play board games. Those are some of the fun memories of my childhood.

He left my mother overnight when I was 13. One day, they were happy, then he went out of town for some medical help and met a nurse. He fell in love but didn't tell my mom that's what happened. He still has a story about how he left her because she wouldn't come out to Bethesda and work on their marriage. It's bullshit, but we all have our stories. My mother is not an easy person to live with, and he had been on shore duty for two years after being accustomed to lots of time away from her. The new woman probably looked easier to him. I don't blame him for going after his bliss, but he kind of was an asshole about it. I'm pretty much over it, but it devastated my mom.

My mom's a brilliant, hyperenergetic, hardworking, loving woman with a vengeful streak. You do NOT want to be on her bad side. She's also obsessed with thinness: I've never known her not to be on a diet, and I've always known she thought I would be better, more successful, and more loved if I were thin. I think it genuinely hurts her that I'm not. I was around 8 when she put me on my first diet, and I remember several attempts of hers to bribe me into losing weight, or to shame me into it.

But she loves me fiercely, takes care of me (both emotionally and financially), and genuinely likes and gets along well with my partners. She did not get along as well with either of my wives, and I'm not sure how much of that was personality stuff and how much is that they don't have penises.

I talk to my mother nearly every day, multiple times a day. We check in in the morning and before bed. I know what she had for dinner tonight and what she's planning on having tomorrow. I email her doctor for her when her shoulder is acting up, and I carry a debit card that draws money on her bank account for when I run out of grocery money.

I talk to my dad rarely, and because I'm uncomfortable on the phone with everyone except my mom and my partners, he thinks I dislike him, but I don't. When we get together, we usually watch TV together and talk about his job, which I think is cool: http://richardvannoy.info/

He's also still working on getting rich: http://www.southwestsolarsolutions.com/

My mother never remarried, though she lived with a couple of jerks along the way. She's seeing someone now. My dad married a wonderful woman (even my mom likes her) around 15 years ago, and they are good for each other. I call her the Non-Wicked Stepmother.

Found out about this from hobbitbabe and it's just my speed. Because, um, I'm self-involved. Yeah, that's it.

( In great detail... Questions are below the cut, one a day for 30 days -- I would LOVE to see your answers, as well. I'm going to tag them all 'IGD'. )

Day 01 - Introduction

My name is Serene Vannoy (or if you're part of my family of origin or the IRS, Sandra). I am a happy, middle-aged, polyamorous woman. I love my day job at the local university, but I love and fiercely guard my at-home time, as well. My family is large and loving, and my latest project (The Mom Food Project) celebrates the act of feeding the people we love, which may be the one defining thread of my entire life.