blasts from the past
Yesterday evening was sucked up mostly by the Braeburn Condos General Annual Meeting, which had originally been scheduled for March, and was finally done over Zoom, since no one knows when the fuck life will return to any semblance of normal again in the face of this pandemic. Cases are skyrocketing all over the country right now; they are increasing in Washington State as well; people are beginning to say even the states that did lockdowns best and earliest began to reopen too early and I'm beginning to wonder if Washington will wind up backpedaling into Phase One again.
Anyway! The bright side of doing it the Zoom way was that, apparently, we had more Braeburn resident participants than we ever had in any of our in-person meetings at the church across the street. I think that can most likely be explained by how many people are still working from home, so many more people just happened to be around than otherwise.
There was still the same bullshit as usually comes up, though, particularly from this woman named Mary who no one can stand and who, although her outrage represented very much a minority, sort of formed a coalition of about ten like-minded residents who felt the Board was negligent in fixing an inner garage gate on the West building off 14th Avenue. She has always been obnoxious, bordering on belligerent, and I can't stand her. Trouble is, she had some valid points in the end—although the Board also had many valid defenses, which never got brought up during last night's meeting to counter her assertion that the Board's "inaction" about this garage door should render all current Board members "disqualified." Jesus fuck, if this woman is so unhappy with how things are run here then why doesn't she move?
Well, it seems her actions spoke for themselves: Shobhit is on the Board, and he ran for re-election along with two other people running, so three people running for two open seats. Shobhit had to defend himself specifically against Mary who accused him of being deficient in recording her many appearances to object at Board meetings, in the Meeting Notes as Secretary. In the end, it seems people who voted liked what Shobhit had to say more than they liked Mary's behavior: he's still on the Board.
Another Hot Button Issue this year is the usage of condos on the property as AirBnB units. This one guy named Phoenix who has one such unit, and does not actually live on site himself, appeared both to defend his use of AirBnB (poorly, but that has little bearing on his right to do it) and to run for the Board himself. I think his deluded defenses for allowing frequent turnover into our supposedly secure building, particularly in light of a pandemic, is what ultimately prevented him from making it onto the Board. And by that, I was relieved.
I was also relieved just when the whole stupid meeting, which was scheduled for two hours and ran another half hour beyond that, was finally over.
I didn't watch any TV last night, as I then retired to the bedroom to do some work on transferring home video clips of Mom to digital. I got one bit from one tape recorded last night: Christmas 1999. I have no actual photos from Christmas that year, only home video, so once I can separate the videos into 10-minute segments that Flickr will allow me to upload, I'll finally be able to add an album for that holiday to my Christmases collection from over the years.
I really had no memory at all of this Christmas from 21 years ago. I found myself wondering: where the hell did I even stay? After going home for the summer between my Sophomore and Junior years of college, I swore I never would again. I must have stayed with Christopher and Katina at their house—now that I think about it, I'm almost certain I did. The entirety of the video is in Christopher and Katina's living room, and I do know for certain I never did stay overnight in Mom's house after she and Bill were married in 1997.
It's been interesting watching all these old home video clips of Mom, so far. When I assemble them all as clips into a collection to share online, I need to be careful to be as flattering to her as I can be. I'm already seeing some stuff in these clips to indicate how, honestly, in many ways she was kind of a shitty mom, especially around the years of my young adulthood, when I came out in 1996, and she and Bill married in 1997, and I'd say over the five or so years after that. Only since I started making the effort to go visit them at their house in Wallace starting in 2003 did my relationship with Mom even become tentatively stable, and from then until the end of her life, between the two of us I was really the only one who made any real effort to keep our relationship alive at all.
In spite of all that, my aim is to make a video that still honors her, and represents her in a fair but kind way. But, that intended final result is a little different from the unedited footage I am looking through in these early stages of the project, seeing sure signs right there onscreen of her negligence as a mother. It's starting to bring back some of the resentments I thought I had long gotten over. And what point is there in dwelling on them at all? There's hadn't been any point even when she was alive, particularly after her first stroke in 2014. It would be even more pointless now.
I guess on the upside, I only have to get through a few more tapes with sporadic representation of Mom in them, until the years she lived in Wallace, which in terms of my relationship with her were better.
[posted 12:20 pm]