The weekend is here!

Today I am feeling a bit more human as I look forward to rejoining the human race this weekend. In an hour or so, my best friend from Louisville is coming and we are going to my Saturday am Al-Anon meeting. Then we are going to do some service work for said meeting, cleaning up and out our meeting place to get ready for new Al-Ateen meeting that will start this Wednesday. After this is finished, I am not sure what we are going to do, but hopefully it will involve me at least looking at yarn - although I really should NOT buy any, as I am knitting only sporadically at the moment, and possibly something in a lunch type of thought. I am all for the Indian food, it has just been difficult to find any really good around.

I do need to remember that being social exhausts me to no end, and that a little time with people can seem like an eternity, so I don't overdo it. Then I will be counterproductive.

Feeling frazzled.

This was an interesting week. I have been running around like crazy and feeling that I did not get much accomplished. I did make meetings every day but tonight. Monday in Versailles, Tuesday and Wednesday in Frankfort and Thursday with Tim in Versailles. I have met some wonderful and interesting people who seem to just be trying to do the right thing one day at a time. That has been invigorating.

I have found myself feeling ill again. And having less patience with my children. This is not good.

So I have worked some more on answering my step questions, tried to chill out and meditate and basically think about what I am doing and how I am acting towards others.

It would be easier if others thought about these things too. Some people do, some don't. I am letting go of that.

And I also had a good make-up with a friend of mine who had been disrespectful, and he was big enough to apologize first. Thank goodness for that. He is one of my most loyal friends, and it would have been sad and STUPID to let a political argument ruin that. But I was going to let that happen. He is smarter, so he offered the olive branch first. I gotta let go of licking my wounds to get on with my life.

Also finding myself isolating again. There are friends of mine that I *know* have offered me nothing but unconditional support and my depression and sickness has prompted me to isolate from them, to not make the effort to go see them or spend time with them. One or two of them has called me on it. One is coming down tomorrow and making me join the human race and another has been kind and made gentle prompts, so I am going to do my best to be a human and interact on Sunday. My friends need me as much as I need them, and my isolating has basically screwed both sides of the equation.

Anyway, minimal writing occurring. Hoping to get some reading and writing done this weekend. Went to the library today and got a mystery, so I can read and relax (read, escape) this weekend with that.

Ongoing...

Well, the illness issues that I have been plagued with for the last (almost) 30 days are not going away. So I go to a new MD tomorrow.

Life goes on.

So taking a page out of the book of recovery, I am going to just try to live today, and let tomorrow take care of itself.

A morning ruled by Tara

And I don't mean the female Buddha, the avatar of compassion. I mean the cute yet willful three year old that runs my world. And the world of those around her. She clings to my arm as I write this, in utter dismay because I am not surrendering the MacBook to her and her pbskids games.... I disappoint as a parent too, apparently.

Well, I am feeling both panic and more calm since I made the decision to take the job... Maybe I won't hate it as much as I think. It's not as if I haven't worked jobs I have hated for years. It is more what it represents, I think. A surrendering of dreams, of giving up what I want for what is needed by the passel of humans I live with. At times like these, my weirdness really comes out. I, for example, would be perfectly happy to work a job where little or no human contact is needed. Yet everything offered to me, everything I have a snowball's chance in hell of getting, is a human service type of job. I am wondering why - or even who - convinced me that I was a people person when I was getting my formal education. It was probably me. Damn. No one else to blame that one on.

Oh well, another day, another 50 cents. I have to work the Frankfort job today, and then try to get to a meeting at noon. At some point, I get to pass on the happy news to the job offer folks. And then I will have an idea how my life needs to shape up in the immediate future. As in, I will have to force myself to go to Lexington - a town I'd rather just shop in, never mind I was born and raised there - a minimum of five days per week.

This should be interesting.

Just when I thought it was safe not to make a decision...

I got a second job offer today. And this one is more along the lines of what I had asked for, at least salary-wise.

So now I am forced into a corner, and I guess I am coming out employed.

I wanted to use this time to become a Writer and then to go back to grad school in the fall. But we are so far behind in our bills and I have no idea where March's rent is coming from.

So I am going to suck it up and take the job. My soul may die, but my body will have a roof over its head.

Maybe I can be a real writer in my next life.

Ch... Ch.. Changes.... Apologies to Mr Bowie.

I will be making some changes here on the blog in the next few days.

For now I have added some art. I basically want to upgrade the blog so I will be more likely to post here.

When will spring come?

Here in Kentucky there is snow on the ground - albeit just a little - and it is *cold,* Below freezing. I realize it is February and all, but this has been a long winter already and I am ready for spring. Not in the least because it appears my central heat has died. As in the compressor ran all night, and it's still only 55 degrees F in my house. And there will be no money to fix that until.... well, I don't see any money coming in that amount in the foreseeable future at all.

Of course, it is almost noon. I have been awake six hours, reading and ruminating. Drank 3 cups of tea. And basically waiting until Tim wakes up so I can coerce him into going to a notary to notarize the forms to draw out his last 401K from the last job he lost. And then coerce him into completing a job application. He found out a week ago that a place is hiring where he knows someone and may be able to get on, and he has pleaded headache or exhaustion every day for a week to get out of putting that application in.

An Al-Anon principle I am obviously going to not embrace today is *detachment.* But since we got a new electric bill for over $500, I am having yet more anxiety over the money. I have one more paycheck coming in. And then it is famine until the end of March. I am not sure that this is clear to my household.

So anyway, I am going to try to be positive, proactive and put on a damned sweater. The rest has to take care of itself.

The best decision is to make no decision.....

Some days I feel that naming this blog is like writing one-liners for fortune cookies. A quick scan perusal will yield a list of trite bullshitty type of cliches or punny sayings in the list of titles.

Anyway, the angst of Thursday night gave way to some late night viral mental rants, and by Friday morning I found myself so violently physically ill I did not have to make a decision regarding the job or an interview or anything. Because I could not sit up. Quite literally. Now, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, I am able to sit up in bed in again and focus my eyes without the room spinning, and I have discovered a few things:

1. The world did not end without me up and running it.

2. I had a further conversation with the job offer folks and the offered salary is much lower than I anticipated and WAY lower than I am willing to give up homeschooling my kids, my chance at trying to make a go at this writing thing, and basically crawl back into the rat race of stress that consumed and almost killed me.

3. My mental health is simultaneously more precarious and not as endangered as I originally conceptualized it to be. When I step back and just take care of me, I am okay. It's when I try to be the 1950's perfect DAD that it all goes to hell.... Although, I must be pretty damn crazy to think I gotta be the 1950's perfect dad and take care of this entire family on my own, right?

4. I have as much right to be as artistic as anyone else. This includes enjoying myself, expressing myself in knitting, writing, or drawing or painting, no matter how terrible the result.

Thanks for the indulgence. Maybe when the virus or whatever the hell this is clears my system I will be back among the living rather than just contemplating it.

What do I want to be when I grow up?

Today I had settled down to the idea of starting back to grad school for a second Master's degree in the fall and was quite happy about it. I had been called about a resume that somehow had found its way to a company that is looking to fill an administrative position. They called me. Since we are so broke, and on the dole as they say, I felt compelled to attend. Now I am set up for my third interview and it is looking like I very well may get this job. Problem is, it is in the very field that I have been scrambling for years to escape, and my soul may very well die in the process.

How do you choose between personal happiness and feeding your kids?

And I am a bad person because I feel bitter because my husband, taking his six-month vacation, is not having to make these type of decisions?

Priorities....

So far my new year's resolution of writing more has not quite panned out. So here we are, a month later, and I haven't written anything at all of note. So I am working my last weekend shift and quitting one of my jobs to concentrate on my writing. Having done this, of course, I now will have to actually Begin Writing. And that may scare me to death. But then again, everything I do is scary.

I am of course about to lose my mind over the loss to our already dwindling finances. I'd like to think that I will become the great American novelist or essayist or whatever, but meanwhile I hope that I don't have to EAT MY WORDS and take another crappy soul-murdering job. Hell, at this point, I am hoping that my soul makes it to the end of this shift.

Scribblings from a month ago....

When one stays up all night and is forced to work third shift, one gets a little nuts.... the following was a musing that came from some part of my bitter brain - bitter because I was being deprived from my true love, sleep, no doubt....


In some ways she was taught that the sky was the limit. In a place where few went to college, and even less women escaped to higher education, she was the third generation of her mother’s family to attend college, second in her father’s. She was the one who lived her life in books, the written word a substitute for human interaction that she had grown to prefer. However, surviving outside the dysfunctional cocoon was going to require savvy that is only gained in action, in navigating the slippery slopes of humanity and its myriad of transactions. Such brokering exhausted her. She could only understand when the foreshadowing of some literary genius cued her into trouble brewing. And people in real life did not often let her know a page or so ahead.

Some clinicians would call this Asperger’s, and perhaps it is. However, she had only her inner compass to go from, and it was dented and spinning at best. She felt that she had nothing in common with them, or anyone, for that matter. Besides, she told herself, my grades are good.

Later in life her mother would try to convince her how well her life was going. At that point she was married to an alcoholic and mother to two children of her own. Yet something was missing from the picture her books had told her to expect. She was working two menial jobs for little money as her husband was fired from yet another job, leaving her holding the financial marital bag. She had a hormone-riddled teenager and a hyperactive toddler for daughters. And her mother stated the difficulties of her own life a generation before: Your sister was always messing up the house, your father was always leaving and probably chasing some women, and you were always in your room with a book. The implicit condemnation being: she had checked out of the land of the living, and given her mother no motherly joy as she was always escaping into a more insular world.

Tears arise. She had to derive comfort and completeness somewhere. It was not as if her family’s homelife was terrible. It was just too uncomfortable with the undercurrent of guilt that she felt at never being what was expected or wanted. Her father had wanted a son, called her his boy. This bookworm was not exactly what either parent wanted.

Later, when her own daughter retreated into the haven of her own filthy room to sketch magna-like anime characters, she understood. She did not try to invade, much. And she was slapped again in the face when she read the plot. Apparantly her daughter’s protagonist is haunted by her own mother, who is jealous of her powers and wants to kill her.

Tears arise again. Is there no escaping this feeling of inadequacy? No relationship she has is not fraught with unanswered demands, unfulfilled expectations, and the many ways she has failed to be the person they expect.

Her grandmother tells her that she herself has never felt depression or any of those problems. Mental illness is a crutch for the weak, a symptom of not having found god. Capitalized in her mind, she is his ambassador on earth, policing the actions and hopefully the thoughts of those around her with his rules and regulations. No eating meat on Fridays, three hours of silence on the Friday before easter, and attendance at mass on every holy day, your confirmation saint’s day and your namesake saint’s day. Everyone is named after a saint. Not all their lives’ plots are romantic or dramatic. And that nefariously cloudless substance, love, is fleeting or a crapshoot on bad luck roll.

Words are just words, she tells herself. Nothing that they say means anything. Encouraged by base intellectual rationalizing, she reinvented her emotions a hundred times a day, yet always reverted back to this victimless crime she called her life.

And a crime it was, as it persisted beyond her endurance day after day. 

There were glimpses of light, in the smile or laugh of her youngest daughter. She had long given up expecting anything but hate-filled glances and demands from the oldest. Every once in a while someone would say something that would make her feel a crack in her shell, a comment of friendship or cconnectivity, nothing she was used to, so it would take her aback when it would occur.

Otherwise the farce continued unabated. Chemical release or relief was sought, and it provided only a weirder canvas for her emotions to be vomited upon.