Thursday, September 25, 2014

I really don't have anything clever to call this...

...so here we go.

Lately, I have been feeling like my house is a metaphor for my life. It is cluttered, cramped, disorganized, unruly. There is ALWAYS something I have lost, and no matter how hard I try, no matter how many days I work until I am cranky & exhausted, I can't get it together or stay on top of it.

Y'all, I have HAD IT with losing things. And losing random things. We have 1/2 of any number of toys of the kids', we have 6 out of 9 gears for Baby J's gear toy. I have 1 out of a  set of 2 shirts. I can't find my senior pictures, the folders where the 2013 financial information is, the ticket stubs from the first football game of the season.
It fills me with an angry resolve-a "fuck this, fuck that, I am going to FIND this shit if it fucking kills me" sort of resolve. And I walk around angry, grouching at anybody who makes the mistake of talking to me. Things always appear, they always have, but the process is an angry one.

And of course, spending time cleaning, organizing, tidying, sorting, etc. being the neverending process, I think about how much time I am spending with Baby J. Enough? I think so. I feed him and play with him and do stuff with him. Take him places. But always that fraction of Mommy-guilt creeps in... "am I doing enough?"

Then of course I remember Alex & Bub being babies. I worked nights when Alex was a baby so I spent all day with her. I didn't work when Bub was a baby so I got to be home with him. I remember taking care of him, but not playing with him as much as I remember playing with Alex or the way I play with J now. Let me tell you... thank God for digital photography. I have thousands of pictures of my kids in all stages of life-and I can look at them any time I want to. So little effort, so little time spent in order to have the pictures... having a digital camera and a computer to look at the pictures is one of the technological advances I am really and truly grateful for.

(Let me interject here-if you don't already... BACK UP YOUR DATA!! It takes no time at all to burn a DVD or copy things onto a thumb drive.)

Hmm... where to next? Money. Money sucks, y'all. If you didn't know that Jason lost his job in May, well... he did. It appears they replaced him while he was out on FMLA and then when he came back afterwards, found "reasons" to write him up and summarily fire him. Fair? No. Right? No. Did they do it anyway? Yes. So we have been subsisting on unemployment compensation for the last 4 months. Comes to a whole whopping $13000 a YEAR. Do the math. It is by the grace of God and knowing our landlord well that we still have a roof over our heads. He is a blessing. He's a jerk and I complain about his lack of doing ANYTHING, but he's a blessing now, so I guess I oughta shut the hell up. We have just enough to squeak by-my parents have helped us with big things-and for that I am grateful and blessed. I will never be able to repay them in their lifetime unless we win the lottery, so I hope they will be satisfied watching us pay it forward and take care of our children if and when they need us.

To wit... we have decided that if our financial situation does not incur a drastic change by the beginning of 2015 we are moving. Away. We can keep just existing here, squeaking by, providing a mediocre life for our children. We have to do more, do better, be better so they can be better.

I am tired of being good, feeling like I am trying to do good, being honest, forthright, helpful, productive in my own way, etc., just to feel like the universe is continually shitting on us. Enough is enough. I am tired of the light at the end of the tunnel being an oncoming train.

Monday, August 4, 2014

Horrible People

There are some horrible people in this world. And I'm not talking scary-horrible (Hitler, Bin Laden), but just regular, run-of-the-mill horrible. The people that know they are bad people-mean, rude, self-righteous, self-serving and they don't care. The people who always have to be having a worse situation, day, week, month, LIFE than anybody else-and whenever someone else says something about a tough situation they are going through, these horrible people have to chime in with the thousand ways their lives are more awful / disturbing / time consuming / difficult / draining, etc.

(I give some leniency to horrible people that either are aware of it and trying to change or those people who are oblivious and don't know they're being horrible)

But this is about those folks we all encounter that make you turn away and go "good Lord, you are a bad person!"

A few days ago, I reposted one of those meme-things that said something about how bad it is to be right about someone being a bad person; but the person has everybody else snowed, so you are the only one who knows how truly bad the person is and you tell people, who don't believe you and then you later spend a lot of time telling people "I told you so." This goes with that.

In the following (dangling participle), I put the word "friend" in quotations thusly, because the person to whom I'm referring is incapable of really being a friend. She is friendly to people only as far as it serves her own purposes, and then only on the surface. When she is done with you, she makes no bones about cutting off communication without a second thought or an explanation, and also has no problem tearing you apart to anybody who will listen.

One of my good friends posted earlier that she was having a tough time with something. A "friend" of hers commented on it and rather than just give support, went on for quite a while about her own personal issue, and concluded the comment with "well I'm sorry I just clogged your feed with my own personal drama, but...". The HELL you are. Here's the thing about making a comment like that on someone's post on something like FaceBook-if you realize what you did, and you are truly sorry, there's this little button in the upper right corner of the "qwerty" section of your keyboard... its called BACKSPACE. How about you F'n use it?!? But no... because that would be the right thing to do and wouldn't give you any room to emphasize the ways your life is more terrible than anybody else's, and the stuff you have gone through is worse than anything anybody else has gone through. And here's another newsflash, Sweetcheeks... maybe your life is SO much more terrible and difficult and draining than anybody else's because of the choices YOU made and the things you brought on yourself. But wait... that couldn't be it... because nothing is ever your fault.

My continuing hope is that either she stops being a horrible person (not likely) or the rest of the folks she has snowed realize what a horrible person she is and she doesn't get anymore of a chance to hurt anybody else with her behavior.