hollye83:

Favorites. #WestWing

Toby’s face in that last frame.  Awesome.

(Source: bartleting)

I just wish that Margaret Mead would have gotten credit for this quote in the episode.  

(It’s on my business card and one of my favourites.)

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If you want to get a sense of my Dad, watch the above West Wing clip, especially the first minute and a half, and pay attention to Martin Sheen as POTUS.  They even look uncannily alike, even down to hair colour, hair style, clothing, and mannerisms.   That is, if Martin Sheen was 6 feet tall.  

Even the entire way he dismisses Leo is startling similar.  POTUS is hurt, and you can tell, but he accepts it easily, knows the truth, they’ve already had the discussion, and moves on, because there is no point in going over and over it.    

In my Dad’s case, it’s a matter of living with someone who rehashes the same argument for days, weeks, months, years, and, even on occasion, decades.   When you live in an environment like that, when it becomes habit, and you know an argument is imminent if you say anything, because everything except for a small select words that elude you are the wrong things, so you realize, it’s best not to say anything at all.  If you grow up with those two examples, and you’re rebelling, you just say it, to start the fight.  Sometimes, you can’t even help yourself, the anger just spews out of you, like a geyser. There’s very little understanding, and a lot of retribution for that eruption.  No matter how long the last nerve has been picked or you’ve been in pacifying mode.  

You live life in defensive mode, waiting for the next attack.  As you mature, and move away from the situation, you guard yourself, because you never know what you’re going to get hit with, especially with personal revisionist history.  The last time I dared try to even explain, I was told I wasn’t the “good daughter”, because I constantly fight back, whereas my sister, who just tunes my mother out after a certain point, was the “better daughter” because she agrees with my mom - all the time.  (This was in the middle of this past month.  The “bad daughter” title is passed back and forth between my sister and a part of the way we deal with this, is to laughingly let the other know when we’ve been handed the “bad daughter” title and tiara and the other has, by default, moved into the favourite daughter spot.)   I walked away when the word “compromise” was uttered and met with a face as if I had just called my mother another “c” word, which, I should add for clarity’s sake, I’d never, under any circumstances ever do, but you can surely see my point, because no, I am not using hyperbole.  

You deal with things the way Martin Sheen as POTUS does - quickly, easily, without an unnecessary derision, because, for most of your life, you’ve been hit with every little thing you’ve ever done badly thrown in your face at the exact moment when it can cause the most damage, the most hurt.  Getting rid of a 16 piece china set, for one example, four years prior that you never picked out, was not purchased for you, has a dated pattern, and you did not use in over fifteen years of ownership, yet had to lug around is reason to warn you sternly not to get rid of your future Christmas present, which turns out to be something that means the world to you, and is vastly more portable.  You learn how to do it for retribution, when pushed far enough.  You don’t want to do that, because you know how it feels… and, though you can be angered, because you’re human, you forgive and try to forget easily, because that’s how you adapt.  

When you live your life with a dominant figure, who picks fights, in order to cause unhappiness, you learn that fighting is pointless and destructive.  You get over things easily and do so because it’s necessary.  You’re not allowed to be angry or hurt.  You’re not allowed to discuss or resolve.  You are not allowed to cry.  Ever.  You want, more than anything, just peace… just a peaceful existence… with compromise… where you don’t have to walk on eggshells, knowing that no matter what you do, one is going to crack.   You don’t know how to have a safe disagreement, because those words don’t exist in your formative years.  You learn that it takes two to have a fight and they scare you, because if you have one, another’s around the corner… waiting… haunting…, in which you will hear horrible things about yourself, which you believe to be true, because you hear them too often.  You are constantly under siege.   When you can, you duck and cover and wait for the mortar rounds full of destructive words that poke holes in you to just stop, because that’s the safest thing you can do.  It’s honestly the only thing you can do.   Especially when you’re living through a situation in which all the eggshells have to be crushed, and the response is a continual barrage of mortar shells, that sometimes engages in collateral damage because no matter how you could argue otherwise, that’s a proportional response.  (That’s why this is coming up a lot… it’s on my mind… and, the “move” (still ongoing) isn’t going very well, at all.  Two and three-quarters of the big public storage units filled with “stuff”, and the peace talks are hitting a snag with a room full of Christmas “stuff” that one party wants to fit into five storage containers and the other party wants to keep completely, even though the last time any of the decorations were used was easily 10 years ago and many of them are a fire hazard.  They’re also hitting a snag with the assumption that everything that has gone into the storage containers will be going into an already bursting full house, that somehow, the laws of physics can bend magically on this one spot on Earth.  Oh, and all of the luggage MUST be kept, even though it’s well over 20 years old and though one party would welcome trips, we can’t spend money on fun or frivolity, because that would be, you know, a waste of being unhappy. And that’s just the past four weeks, it does not cover the past six months.) 

I’m trying to deal with this - all of this, right now, and I don’t always know how, so I write and vent, but try not to do it so much because, while venting is good, I can go into a cycle and just work myself up into the destructiveness that has imprisoned my mother.   I tell everyone my greatest fears are snakes and deep water, but higher than that, is becoming imprisoned in a world like my mother’s - where I become someone that can’t let go.   So, sometimes, people think I let go too easily, only, I do it out of an intense compassion.  I don’t want to make anyone ever feel like I’ve felt.  Not like that.  It’s a trait I’ve picked up and used in the past, and I know that about myself.  I ache for every single instance in which I’ve used those traits.  

…Anyhow, I saw this yesterday and thought, “Woah, Martin Sheen is impersonating my Dad… for vastly different reasons, but God, that’s uncanny.”  

Rewatching the West Wing (because I don’t do that often enough)… and I’m on Season 2.  It was the best season of any television… ever.  No lies.  The episodes in that season are among some of my favourite: the Stackhouse Filibuster, Galileo, Noel, Ellie… the introduction of Ainsley, who wasn’t on the show long enough, imho, the episode of which this gif is from… 

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whendoiturnbackintoapumpkin:

Abbeysode of the day (1/57): 1x07 ‘The State Dinner’

You know, one of the things that happens when I stay away too long, is that you forget that you don’t have to power to fix everything. You have a big brain, and a good heart, and an ego the size of Montana. You do, Jed. You don’t have the power to fix everything. But I do like watching you try.

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