One More And Then I'll Sleep

Okay, so Friday there's this movie coming out--"Wicker Park"?



JP and I lived in Wicker Park. I am tempted by that fact alone to go see this movie, which otherwise looks like an unutterable suckfest.



We lived there in 1995, and even then, it was starting to get overrun by faux-hipsters weaned on Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville. There's an intersection in the real W.P.--Milwaukee, North, and Damen--which was so packed with poseurism that we avoided it whenever possible and referred to it as the Intersection of the Damned. (Unfortunately our favorite pawnshop was just a few buildings away from that intersection, so we saw more of it than we wanted to see when we needed our fix money.)



I'd be entertained to see what nine years have wrought in the portrayal of our old neighborhood. I've already seen what nine years have done to the neighborhood itself; that's a post for another day, though.

A Thing I Really Hate

You know how when you eat too much hard candy, you get a bump on your tongue and it really hurts?



I ate a Tootsie Pop today. Just one. And I have THREE bumps. And they're really, really painful.



I have now completed my allotted ration of whining for the day. Thank you.

You Had Your Chance, Zorn.

Eric Zorn is a Chicago Tribune columnist.



Eric Zorn has a blog.



Eric Zorn's blog has a blogroll, mainly of Chicago blogs. Not all blogs on his blogroll are political or news-based; some of them ain't even all that good, IMHO. (And at the moment, his blogroll is inexplicably down. This only slightly alters the utility of this post.)



Eric Zorn gives many, many shout-outs to bloggers he reads.



At the end of his blogroll, Eric Zorn says something to the effect of "...if you have a blog that you feel should be included, send an e-mail to me at..."



I have sent several e-mails. (June 23, June 29, and one more which was sent from a different addy and subsequently deleted.)



I have not been included, despite several "oh, yeah, I'll add you"s. (I don't mind not being added--I mind being TOLD that I'll be added and then not being added. The "busy journalist, I forgot" excuse flies--ONCE. Not three times. If I suck, tell me to my face. At least then I can use that for street cred: "My blog is so out-there that Eric Zorn refuses to add it to his blogroll!" I take my credibility where I can find it.)



Furthermore--I now have over 1000 hits in one hundred and eleven days. So even if I DO suck, and even if many of my hits are because I typed "Karshner triplets" in a post and am thus one of the top 10 results when you Google those words, I'm still a blog and people still read me--for whatever reason.



I am hereby de-listing Mr. Zorn from my Blogroll.



I don't care that he doesn't care, or that he won't notice. That matters not a whit to me.



It's the principle of the thing, goddamnit.

Sneaking Up On One Thousand Hits

Remember when you were about seven years old and on a family trip, and your dad told you that the car was about to roll over ten-thousand miles (or thirty-, or fifty-, or a hundred-thousand?) Remember leaning over the back seat and watching the odometer go from 9999.9, very s-l-o-w-w-w-ly, to 10000.0?



Well, everybody, lean over the back seat--we're coming up on our one-thousandth hit!! Not bad, for a blog that's only been out in the world since May 11th. (I would like to thank Anonyboy, Ursus from Standing Bear, and Katie from Serial Blogonomy for their links--and Anonyboy gets special props because he clued me in on the two magic words which have been responsible for an unbelievably high percentage of my recent web traffic!!! And Kevin at the CTA Tattler has given me more gratuitous mentions than I know what to do with--every time I'm pissed-off that LJ has the car and I have to take the train, I think "yeah, but there could be a good blog post in here too!")



You guys rule!! Everybody watch the odometer.....

Newsflash, People....

Open reminder to the American media, since you desperately seem to need it:



(Read carefully, please. I'll use small words.)



THE...MTV....VIDEO....MUSIC....AWARDS....





ARE...NOT....NEWS!!!



News is when something IMPORTANT happens. If you can drag an iota of real importance out of Outkast, Beyonce, Usher, D12, or Britney Spears, I will personally eat an unwashed article of my own underclothing.



JEEZ, people!!!

The Acme Of Foolishness, Part Two

From today's Chicago Tribune: Mitzvah Envy



You have absolutely, positively, GOT to be fucking KIDDING me.



I wish I was Jewish so I had a TRULY valid reason to be outraged by this. As it is, my outrage is more for common-sense, I-have-to-grow-old-in-a-world-populated-by-these-pampered-little-bastards reasons.



If I ever find myself in a conversation with a person who is talking about giving their child a "faux mitzvah", I can very nearly guarantee that the conversation will not remain civil for more than one sentence after that plan is revealed. And the one sentence will probably be something like "With your head so far up your ass, how do you talk on your cellphone?"



Give me a fuckin' BREAK, people!!!!

The Acme Of Foolishness, Part One

Riding home with Mom today, I saw what has to be the dumbest car-decor fad since the "Calvin pissing on the Chevy/Ford logo" sticker....



...Stick-on bullet holes.



I'm all for making a statement; however, the statement that these folks are making--namely, "someone shot at my car"--doesn't necessarily seem to be worth the energy. I mean, what--is it now chic to have bullet holes in one's car? If so, isn't it fake and suburban to just stick bullet-hole stickers on it, rather than going into a neighborhood where you might actually EARN your bullet-holes?



Jeez.

Spam Title Of The Weekend

"SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: dunk college girls get nasty!!"



Looks like someone was a little bit dunk when they wrote their subject lines.

Whaaa...?

From Reality News Online:

"The combination of fentanyl and alcohol has been referred on the club scene as a "Las Vegas Cocktail" in the suddenly-burgeoning prescription drug black market. Six to eight months ago, the "Las Vegas cocktail" was a blend of OxyContin and Soma, a prescription muscle relaxant. Now, the "cocktail" has morphed into a combination of Soma, Viagra and Fentanyl--a raspberry-flavored lollipop that delivers a narcotic commonly considered to be 80-100 times more powerful than morphine. Add a little cocaine, as is common, and you have a potentially lethal concoction that Detective Paul DeAngelis told the Las Vegas Mercury, "will (a) keep you up all night and (b) probably make your heart explode." DeAngelis is a Southern Nevada Pharmaceutical Narcotics Enforcement Team member..."

Now, the little siren on my ex-junkie Drug Enforcement Bullshit Meter is going "woop woop woop" as I read this.



Let's look at what they say is in the "cocktail".

1. Soma: A prescription muscle relaxant. Depressant.

2. Viagra: Prescription to keep horny old men horny. Stimulant.

3. Fentanyl: Opiate-based painkiller--MAJOR depressant.

4. Cocaine: Well, cocaine! Stimulant.



According to this, technically, cocaine is an "extra" in this mix--not always present. So what we have here are 2 major respiratory/cardiac depressants and one stimulant--but the stimulant isn't a "traditional" stimulant.



I have a great deal of experience with opiates. Anything as powerful as they say fentanyl is would knock your ass out. Something that powerful would counteract almost any stimulant; unless you took about a ton of cocaine, there's no way this mix would "keep you up all night," as this DEA pawn puts it...As for "making your heart explode"--again, unless you're just POUNDING the cocaine into your nostrils, the fentanyl's gonna win.



If you read the whole article, though, it doesn't say the guy took soma, cocaine, Viagra, or anything other than fentanyl and vodka. Again from experience: a bad idea. Nevermind the rest of it...if you combine any substantial quantity of opiates with any substantial quantity of alcohol, your ass is just dead--and it really doesn't matter WHAT the hell else you mix it with. (I once had to call 911 on Tim, back in the early days of our roommate-hood, when I was still getting high; he talked me into sharing my fix but neglected to mention that he was on the far side of a six-pack at the time. He did his shot, and it took about 20 minutes before I realized: he wasn't nodded out, he was slowly turning blue. After the paramedics came and hit him with the Narcan, and once we were at the hospital, he actually bitched me out for saving his life. Tim is SUCH a drama queen.)

"White Trash", Defined

Regular readers will know: I love me some NASCAR. I'll admit it; even though it brands me forever as an undercover hick, I'll admit it.



But even I have my limits.



Apparently, this morning, TWENTY-SIX couples were married on the start-finish line of Bristol Motor Speedway. Not just one pair of wackadoodles--TWENTY-FREAKIN-SIX. That's an entire fifty-two people not playing with a full deck, so to speak.



Worse--a bunch of them, judging from the video, were Mark Martin fans. The #6 shirt would definitely not be my choice of wedding-wear....I mean, seriously--on your wedding day, would YOU want to be wearing a shirt that says your favorite driver is the Viagra spokesman??

Block Party Day

So this morning we slept in til about 1:00...which was cool, and which led me to believe that maybe LJ's not deliberately ignoring or neglecting me--that it's just a question of schedules. It was nice, anyhow.



Then we got up. Today's Block Party day--apparently not just on this block, as I found out when I walked up to the grocery store on Madison to get some Pepsi. Every block from Jackson all the way up to Madison is having their block parties today as well--I wonder if there's a tacit agreement to do it that way, in order to minimize the overall effect on commerce. If there's one day a year when nobody hustles on five blocks, that's better than five days when nobody hustles on one block each, you know?



Around 2:00 they fired up the music. My luck, the DJ is stationed on Len and Phoebe's porch--next door. (I love the music...well, most of it. I'm about sick of Usher's various "Confessions", and no matter WHO R Kelly is singing to or about, he skeeves me righteously. I'm sorry, but a man who's suspected of having sex with teenage girls should really, REALLY not refer to himself as the "Pied Piper of R&B". That's just ICKY, folks. And all the women-hating and women-are-only-good-for-one-thing music kinda pisses me off...especially when I see little girls of not six or seven years old mouthing the words to the non-sanitized version of "Slow Motion", which includes the immortal lines "If you're gon' be hardheaded I'll make you get up off me..." and "That outside dick keeps these ho's sick..." Nice. Real fuckin' nice there, guys. My philosophical objections to the content aside, I like the music.) It's loud but not intolerable, and my windows are open. However, I think when the NASCAR race comes on tonight, I'm either gonna close the windows or put on the closed-captioning and READ the race as much as watch it.



I sat out on the porch for a while, watching the guys play basketball, the little kids run around, the neighbors tending their grills. The lady who just moved in next door--the matriarch of what has to be one of the worlds' largest extended families, judging from the thirty or forty litle ones running around at all hours--was overseeing the barbecuing at her place, and she waved to me and brought me over to the fence.



"Hey baby! You ain't got no charcoal over there?" she asked me.

"No grill, either," I told her. "And no food to put on one, for that matter..."

"Well once we get goin' over here, I'll fix you a plate. Matter of fact, I was gonna send you one the other night, but you never did look out your window..."



And a couple hours later, damned if one of the babies didn't knock on the door with a foil-covered plate full of food. Ribs, spaghetti, hot-links...I managed to get barbecue sauce all over the entire front of my shirt, and it was so good I nearly licked the shirt clean too.



Can I say, I LOVE THIS BLOCK???



Once I get some groceries in the house on Tuesday, I'm gonna make a few batches of my famous caramel corn and bring it over, for the little ones. They may be loud, and they may keep the oddest hours, but I like this family. (Now if I could only pick up on some of their names...I am SO bad with names.)

Free Willy--Lock Up Everyone Else!

Okay, now, y'all are just getting too goddamn weird for me.



From the Seattle Times:

The attention-hungry whale created a sensation in the small town, where he showed up at the local dock after separating from his birth pod, perhaps as they migrated north from Washington's San Juan Islands. He quickly became a nuisance as he bumped against boats, trailed fishermen and even pushed one boat away from shore when its occupants tried to paddle in. Two people were prosecuted for petting and harassing the animal, and others reportedly tried to pour beer in his blowhole and brush his teeth.

Italics mine, you weird-ass motherfuckers. You see a whale and the first thing you think of is "Hmmmm....Maybe what he REALLY needs is some Rolling Rock!! C'mere, lil' Orca...."



(The one about brushing its teeth is almost as bad, nearly--do whales HAVE teeth? I mean, there's nothing they need to CHEW, is there?)



I'm just really disturbed by this, on some very fundamental level I can't even begin to explain.

First Gary Coleman, Now This

From today's Chicago Sun-Times:



"WHAT A 'FACT': Remember Lisa Whelchel -- best known as the snotty rich girl Blair Warner on the old TV sitcom "The Facts of Life"? Well, she's grown up to become an evangelical Christian author who advocates "hot saucing" in disciplining kids. For those who don't know, this involves putting stuff like Tabasco sauce on the tongues of kids who either do or say something bad."



See, in NON-evangelical-Christian homes, this is called "child abuse". (But us lib'ruls are the ones who are dangerous to children, right??)

Speaking of "Savage Love"...(A 'TOO MUCH INFO' Post)

So--like apparently quite a few others today--I found myself reading "Savage Love" in the Village Voice. (For the uninitiated and those who might be prone to clicking thoughtlessly on anything underlined and blue--"Savage Love" is a sex-advice column and has been known to cause loud startled gasps and uncontrolled giggling. You've been warned.)



The topic of the latest column is "childhood misconceptions about sex". And goddamn, it's hilarious...but, like everything else, it got me thinking.



I've been--I'll admit it--lost in resentment of my upbringing for a few days. Mostly I'm angry at the narrowness of the world in which I was raised, and of the opportunities which were made available to me. I mean, christ--not to brag or anything, but I was a smart kid--like, scary smart--scores-off-the-chart smart. But somehow, in the name of religion, my parents seemed to systematically thwart every academic opportunity for me from the ages of five to fourteen. But that's another rant for another day (which may come up reallll soon, owing to the fact that I just got my yearly salary letter and my raise was..."insulting" covers it pretty well.)



I have to give credit where credit is due, however. One area in which my parents got my education right--or at least, right-ish--was on the topic of sex.



They HAD to tell me--there was nobody else to do the job for them. I'm an only child, so there were no sibs to tell me. My mom stayed home during my grammar-school years, so--no babysitters to give me the low-down. My nearby cousins were all much the same age as me, and the girls were prudes, being the children of my mom's narrow-mindedest sister; the boys, who were at the older edge of our age bracket, didn't deign to associate with "the babies"--so there were no extended-family opportunities to hear anything about it. So I was left with only one avenue to learn about sex--my parents. And though my mother had (most reluctantly!) told me the bare biological facts about where babies came from, the details--along with the mystique--were things she wouldn't even begin to discuss. A tiny, tiny bit of this might have been embarassment on her part; more, I think, was a theological objection to any notion that sex might actually be -enjoyable-.



My parents were 41 when I was born; they'd married not quite a year before my birth, the first marriage for each of them. (My mom claims she doesn't know whether my dad was a virgin when they married, but she swears she was.) Most importantly, they were both old-school, pre-Vatican-II Roman Catholic. They'd been raised that way, and neither of them ever expressed, in my hearing, the slightest disagreement with Church doctrine. I went to Mass every Sunday--the only excuse was a 3-digit fever or projectile vomiting--and my parents saw the relaxed sexual mores as the worst of all the signs that our society was decaying.



Well...."parents" is not entirely accurate. My father, as he did in many situations, stayed out of the way and deferred to my mother. Mom was the one with the outspoken religious beliefs; Dad believed, but kept it to himself. My mother was the one who constantly bemoaned the sordid sexuality of all the music I listened to; my mother was the one who, when I was seven years old, made me write a letter to the local ABC affiliate demanding that _Soap_ be taken off the air--I had asked her what it meant to "come out of the closet". And I was in awe of my mother, really; scared of her, desperate for her approval; so I learned to see my curiosity as something I should be ashamed of.



But just because she wouldn't tell me anything more than the egg-and-sperm basics of human sexuality, that didn't mean I didn't still want to know. There had to be something more to it than THAT--otherwise, what was the big deal?



Fortunately, the answers were fairly easy to find.



My father was a packrat. He kept -every- piece of paper that came into the house; there were boxes of mail in the basement with postmarks from the year before I was born. He kept his office down there, and between the cast-off furniture, the boxes of mail, and the shelves and shelves of books, it was a maze of tunnels and mountains, full of pathways--perfect for hours of roller-skating and daydreaming. It was my favorite place in the house, and during the summers I'd spend entire days downstairs. It was during one of those days that I found...The Shelves. I don't remember the titles--other than "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask"--but the content was...educational, to say the least.



Years later, JP and I would talk about our sexual beginnings, so to speak. "How old were you," he asked me, "when you had your first orgasm?" He was amazed when I told him: I was nine years old. (I couldn't have named the sensation, nor even described it--but honestly, it didn't take the chapter on "Sex For One" for me to figure it out: after a couple of the more-descriptive passages on other topics, nobody needed to tell me to rub the bits that were tingling. It wasn't exactly rocket science.)



Though I enjoyed my new hobby, it left me with a theological problem. See, according to my old-school pre-Vatican-II Roman-Catholic upbringing, masturbation was a mortal sin. In fact, one of the many Catholic magazines my mom subscribed to went so far as to say that if you masturbated, it resulted in the loss of one's virginity--morally if not biologically. So before I was even old enough to make my first confession, I had a mortal sin on my conscience. Quite a few of them, actually--not just enjoying myself, but thinking about enjoying myself--reading about how to enjoy myself--thinking about reading about how to enjoy myself....oh, it was quite a death spiral I was stuck in, that was certain. I was going to hell in a basket for sure.



Not only that, but there were practical issues involved as well. I was convinced that, although I had told no one, there was one person who could take a single glance at me and know my dark perversion, and that person was: The Doctor. Though I was a healthy child, even a healthy child has that periodic encounter with the medical profession--the yearly checkup. I was absolutely certain that the doctor would know, instantly, that I had this sinful habit--and that she would unquestioningly tell my mother, who would punish me in some way so awful that I couldn't even begin to imagine it. So every time I knew a checkup was coming--generally right before the beginning of the school year--I would make a resolution: no more of THAT for a month before the appointment. Okay--no more for two weeks. Okay, seriously-- if I gave it up ONE week before, she wouldn't be able to tell...would she?



I never did have much willpower.



As it happened, though, I got busted on the books long before I ever got caught on the self-gratification. (Come to think of it, I was NEVER busted on that. And an unexpected benefit of my obsessive secrecy: years later, when my first boyfriend and I finally had sex, we found that we could do it even with parents in the same house--years of practice had enabled me to have an orgasm in absolute silence, if needed.) My mother asked me what I was reading in the basement--I think she must have had some idea, since it wasn't the sort of question she would just idly ask for no reason. I told some preposterous, obvious lie. A few more questions and, cornered, I answered truthfully. I got the hellfire-and-damnation lecture, true enough...but I don't think it even came CLOSE to the one my dad must have gotten for having those books in the first place!!!



(In hindsight, those books told me more than I needed to know...see, my father was ALSO an underliner. So even if, these many years later, I could concoct a feasible excuse for WHY, exactly, my father would have owned two shelves' worth of "how to spice up your marriage" manuals, that excuse would be nullified by the underlinings--which, I realized early in my adult life, laid out my parents' dysfunctions VERY clearly. This is the best thing I can say about what I learned through my father's underlinings: they gave me advance notice of what my family dynamics might lead me into. It's useful information, though I try not to think too much about the details, lest I be moved to nausea.)



I never have gotten quite over that fear of being ratted out by doctors--the fear of hellfire left me long, long ago, however.

Why I Stopped Being A Poet

Village Voice article



Would anyone care to translate this into Non-Pretentious?



Here's a sample:



"In a post that asked "Is this paradise?" Gordon presented unmanipulated spam containing the musical observation that "Any sky can of, but it takes/a real foulmouth to nearest antimony over." Five points if you hear e.e. cummings's "anyone lived in a pretty how town," 50 if you hear the torqued splendor of Clark Coolidge's "Solution Passage."



Now, I'm a fan of spam poetry. Some things I am NOT a fan of, unfortunately, are academia, reductionism, and self-importance--all of which this article gushes in bucket-loads.



And then it stops even making sense, at least in any language I've ever encountered:



"Flarf began in 2000 or 2001 when Sullivan entered a deliberately offensive poem in a scam poetry contest. ("I got fire inside/my "huppa"-chimp(TM)" is, possibly, the only quotable passage.) From id-stoked overhearings more than a little derivative of Bruce Andrews's "I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up" ("If pods could talk—so, how/about a sperm-a-thon?"), the movement made the switch from finding to seeking when Gardner (Sugar Pill) went to Google to see what the deliberately misspelled "Rogain bunny" search would yield. Gardner explains: "If you have a Googled/cut up poem that still has most of its social filters set too high, it may be interesting poetry but it's probably not flarfy." "



To which Gladys replies: "...the FUCK???"



Anyway. It's almost time to go home, so I'm gonna leave that crap-a-roni to you, readers, and go read Savage Love.

Apropos of Nothing (hit Refresh for new ones)

Giving Junkies A Bad Name

http://journalofajunkie.blogspot.com



Why do I object? She:



1. Quotes the Cranberries' "Salvation". Of all the bazillion anti-heroin songs out there, this is the most obvious, the least subtle, the least artistic of the lot. It might as well have a tagline at the end that says "sponsored by the Office of National Drug Control Policy".



2. Refers to things she does not like as being "gay" (or the emphatic, "ultra-gay".) This is a peeve of mine on many, MANY levels, but for the most basic explanation I refer you to my Kurt Cobain post.



3. Refers to herself as a "Juggalette". (A "Juggalette", for those of you who have been blessed enough not to have encountered this information, is the female form of "Juggalo". A "Juggalo" is a fan of Insane Clown Posse, a pair of individuals whose followers actually have the gall to dignify them with the appellation "band". My problem with that use of the term is very simple: A true "band", boys and girls, has one qualification which Insane Clown Posse does NOT possess, namely: A "band" does not suck massive pustulent donkey balls. (Well, except for Rod Stewart's 1977 touring band...and that was more a lifestyle choice than anything else....But as usual, I digress.)



4. Is sixteen years old. If you're going to fuck up your life, have the decency to wait til you're self-supporting to do so.



5. Is more self-absorbed, and has the least-deserved sense of her own superiority, of almost any other blogger I've ever read. I have no problem with the usual belief system that adults are stupid--some adults ARE stupid, yes. As are some teenagers, most notably those who think no one in the world knows as much as they do.



Despite the promising title, I won't be going back to THAT blog anytime soon. (And I thought MY blog was needlessly self-indulgent.)

For The Record

I really, really, REALLY, REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY do not want to go to work tomorrow.

Too Much Chicken!

I know several things about myself. One of them is, no matter how good my intentions, I will probably not cook a serious meal on a Monday night.



Having thawed a chicken Friday morning, I knew this meant one thing: that chicken required my attention today. And LJ, who is pretty easygoing about 99% of all possible things food-related, is adamant on one point: chicken is FRIED. Baked chicken, in his opinion, is "not done". (Baked to within a degree of being inedible carbonized chunks, no matter--it's still "not done". Since I, personally, am a veritable FOUNT of food-related quirks, I can indulge him on this one.)



So this afternoon I did the whole chicken-cutting-up thing--an interesting task, with my three square feet of counter space (that is neither an exaggeration nor a typo) and questionable motor skills. And then I did the whole making-broth-with-the-scraps thing, and the mashed-potatoes thing, and the seventeen-gallons-of-hot-grease thing...



And once all that was done, I locked Foof-cat in the back bedroom--she's a food-snatching machine--and sat down with my plate piled high.



TOO high. I feel as though I've been inflated. But DAMN was that some good food. The only thing that disappointed me were my biscuits--not flaky. I think the butter was too warm or something.



You know what the worst part of all this is?



Now--even though I feel like I could explode--I STILL wouldn't turn down a bowl of Heath Bar Crunch, were one to materialize.

Correct Answers, Disingenuous or Otherwise

Against my predictions--after all, it was 2 PM, he'd spent the previous 2 hours holed up in the Guy Cave, and he'd come down the stairs fully dressed, keys in hand--but The Conversation actually DID take place today as I'd hoped. Of course, in typical fashion, it lasted a whole ten minutes--and for us, THAT was verbose.



However, it yielded better answers than I was expecting.



The first question--about whether he'd be willing to be the second set of hands for my more-ambitious home-improvement projects--was easy. I expected wary agreement--which was pretty much what I got. (LJ does NOT agree to anything unless he knows exactly what he's getting into.)



The next one was the one I was dreading.



"So let me ask you something else...." I said. "If I didn't have this house, would you still be with me?"



Predictable as the sunrise, his answer: "Why you ask me THAT?"



I told him my thoughts about the house--about how, if I can't get this situation resolved with Bob the Asshole Plumber, and if I can't find a way to otherwise get something done as far as fixing that ceiling, how one of my options might be to just cut my losses and sell this place. "And my question is, if I have to do that, are we still together? If the house goes, do you go with it?"



Here is where I was forced to face the possibility that my guy may be...well, a little bit obtuse.



"Well, yeah." (long pause) "I mean, I'm not goin' back to the crib. That's done. It's all fucked up over there." (His family's trials and tribulations have been the focus of most of our longer conversations lately--having moved out at precisely the moment at which his family began to drive him purely insane, he's in no rush to go back.) "But...what, you mean if you sell this house am I gonna still live with you?...I'm not sure what you're askin' me. What, we gotta stay together to be together or somethin'? "



"I'm askin', if I sell this house, are you still gonna be with me?"



(Pause.) "Yeah...why wouldn't I be?"



One of the things I love most about this guy is that he seems to take for granted the premises which I question most profoundly. Not just yeah, I'll still be with you if you sell the house--but yeah I'll still be here--why do you even ASK me questions like that? sheesh. And NOTHING rattles him. I can leave him the list of bills for the month, ending with an "outgoing" number at least a thousand dollars higher than the "incoming" number, and all he says is "You still worryin' about THAT?"



The longer I'm with him, the more I wonder: are our problems really my problems? Is most of the stuff I see as a "relationship problem" really just the effect of my own previous bad experiences, coupled with traits of LJ's personality which I'm not used to (even after all this time)?



It's possible. It's VERY possible. But one thing's for sure: apparently I don't have anything to worry about...



...well, unless you count the kitchen ceiling. (As I said to LJ: "You know, I really don't want to be the one who goes through that bathroom floor...I really don't want you to be the one who goes through the bathroom floor...Actually, it's one of my personal goals to have NOBODY go through that bathroom floor.")



I almost didn't try to start that conversation with LJ--but now I'm glad I did.

Blogs That Suck

Now, normally I am an undying proponent of free expression, of blogs in general, of all things creative. Truly I am.



Which is why this irks me so thoroughly.



Doesn't Blogger have rules against crap like that? That's not a blog--that's a series of related ads.



I'm hoping this isn't the start of a new trend--but knowing human/corporate nature, I'll bet it is.

Systematic Dismantlement

The Conversation will be happening tomorrow, if all goes well.



I text-messaged LJ this morning (from the bus, on the way to the clinic): "hey--tomorrow morning i want 2 talk 2 you about some house stuff--plans & shit--so save me some time, ok?"



The "plans" include the following topics:



1. Part of the reason Bob the Asshole Plumber got his hooks into this house in the first place is that, though I'm extremely confident of my abilities when it comes to home repair, I am NOT confident about my ability to do everything singlehandedly. (Have you ever tried to hang a kitchen cabinet without a second pair of hands? Neither have I, nor do I plan to try it.) So I want to ask LJ--if I needed his help to do some repairs and shit, provided I had everything ready to go by the time I asked and didn't ask him to sit there and do nothing while I putter around, would he be willing to help me? (A "no" answer will not be taken too well--though it may be a while before I would express my displeasure.)





2. The next question will have two purposes: "If I didn't have this house, would you still be with me?"



The first purpose--the one I'm going to admit to--is this: one of my options in regard to this clusterfuck of a house, quite frankly, is to sell it, cut my losses, get myself a nice studio apartment in Rogers Park, put my large appliances and shit in storage, and regroup for a year or two. And I want to know if that will mean losing LJ as well.



The other purpose--the shadowy one--is to lead into another area of discussion. If he asks--as he always does--why I want to know such a thing, I'll just tell him: sometimes it feels like he's only here because it's better than living with his parents. I feel like a roommate, not a girlfriend. We never go out, and though I know all his friends, he still keeps large parts of his life to himself. And I don't plan to live like this indefinitely. If he can point me to a good reason that it has to be like this now, and a general timeframe as to when it might improve, I'll gladly listen; otherwise, I have some decisions to make.



Either way, as I see it, I win. It -will- suck, though; I honestly care about LJ, and it makes me sad to see him unwilling or unable to compromise on some things. We're SO GREAT when it comes to the practical things--it's just that he sees every request of mine for his time or attention as something he needs to defend against. I don't know if it was his family that made him this way, or a bad experience with a previous girlfriend, but something has put ALL his defenses up, and he just can't seem to take them down for anyone.



Back to the house, though--I really, REALLY don't want to sell it. I really want to fix it and keep it and stay here. I like this block, I like this neighborhood, I like my neighbors, and I LOVE this house--if I could just get it to a point where it's structurally sound and nothing's going to go horribly horribly wrong. My mom has offered to give me money to get the joist fixed--which I'd prefer NOT to take, but what the hell else can I do?? But even once that's done, there's still thousands and thousands of dollars of work left to do. Some of it is stuff I can do myself--MOST of it, actually, with the exception of electrical and plumbing--and I can LEARN electrical. But as I said above, I can't do it singlehandedly.



(Heyyyyyy...maybe I could use this as an excuse to get acquainted with the cutie next door--"Could you do me a favor and hold something for me?" :::bat bat:::: I mean, c'mon--the guy is adorable. The first time I was talking to him and he was telling me about who all lives in that house, he introduced me to his mother--and he actually TOOK HER ARM and walked her over and introduced her FORMALLY. It was the sweetest damn thing.)



Anyway, I'm just evaluating my options at this point--which isn't much fun, but apparently it needs to be done. If LJ leaves--well, he leaves. I'll be sad, but I'll get by; after all, MUCH worse things have happened to me.



And now--a nap.

Words, Again, Fail Me

Stumbled upon this today....



I am not sure what I think of this blog; my brain is just hanging open right now, with a stupefied expression.



Would any of you care to comment?

Even My Cat Is An Asshole Today

This morning when I got up, I noticed a millipede running around in the bathtub. Since I take my shower the night before, its presence was not a matter of urgency, just one of those "eewwwwwwwww, nasty" moments that everyone runs into occasionally.



I came home, confident that I would be able to take my shower without multi-legged company.



I was wrong. I entered the bathroom and there he was (he? she? hmmmm--no, I haven't yet discovered a way to sex a millipede from a distance, so this shall remain a mystery), rippling his seventy-squazillion legs all over the place in that shiver-inducing way.



I did what any red-blooded insectophobic human being in a house alone would do: I went downstairs and woke up White Cat. I scooped him off the sofa, carried him up the stairs, protesting ("Prrrt? brrrrrp?? mrOOWWWP???") and dropped him in the tub.



He prodded the intruder, casually, with one languorous paw; he touched his nose to its thorax, then jerked back and took another paw-swat at it....



...hopped out of the tub and walked off in search of something to eat.



Bastard.



I was left with no recourse; I turned on the shower, put the flow setting on "drown millipedes", and chased the ugly little critter (the 'pede, not the cat) around the tub with a heavy stream of water til it was motionless. I then tried to water-bomb it down the tub drain, through the little metal hair-catcher thing. That attempt was a miserable failure and I ended up using the cardboard toilet-paper tube to fish the limp, furry corpse from the top of the hair strainer, to be flushed down to the dampest, scummiest circles of multi-legged Hell.



White Cat is sitting on the sofa, looking immensely pleased with himself--as though he'd actually DONE something to resolve the problem. So much for the predatory instinct.

Asshole Comment of the Day

So today, in the process of having my time forcibly spent for me by members of the main IT department--I told them "I can't spend today working on this project" and they said "You have to, and even if your boss says you can't, OUR boss says you have to, even though our boss has NO authority over you, your job, or your boss, and has no idea of your workload, your tasks, or their relative importance..."



Anyway, in the process of having them spend my time for me, I had to go pick up a disk from Stan. Stan is the department IT director--no authority over me, but we're supposed to be cultivating a closer working relationship between our IT department and theirs. Whatever. Stan is also the guy with whom I had this meeting. So he's not necessarily my favorite person, though I still thought he was a decent guy.



Til today.



Stan does a lot of woodworking, see, and he's building his own house. It was pretty well-known that he was having problems selling the old house, so I asked him how it was going, and the conversation turned to my house. I told him the story, with an eye towards getting some advice or something, from someone whose judgement in such matters I respected.



So as I'm telling him the story, I'm telling him about the guy who sold the house and how shady he is. And I said "I think maybe what happened was, he saw that it was all females--me, my realtor, the mortgage originator, my mom--and didn't see any men overseeing the process and thought 'aha! easy target'."



He gives me this LOOK and says "Well, Gladys, I don't buy that. I have a very feisty wife, and you know what she would say if she heard that statement? 'The only women who are taken advantage of, are the ones who ALLOW themselves to be taken advantage of.'"



To which I managed not to reply: Spoken like a woman who KNOWS she has a man to defend her.



What I did say was, "What would you have done differently, then? I did all my homework--had an inspector, who missed a lot of stuff--I got an FHA mortgage so it would have some sort of safety net..."



The conversation turned to inspectors, contracts, insurance, etc; it ended shortly after. But the more I thought about it, the more his comment rankled.



I will gladly admit that I have allowed myself to be taken advantage of in certain ways in the past. Relationships come to mind, the current one not necessarily excepted. And yes, faced with people who tell me that they need something from me--flexibility, forgiveness, cash, whatever--I am quite likely to give it to them even when it's not in my best interest. I admit these things; my past, particularly my upbringing, has led me to believe that I have to EARN people's love, respect, affection, whatever--that just being isn't enough. Whatever--that's a psychoanalysis for another day, y'know?



But in the matter of buying this house, I did not ALLOW myself to be taken advantage of. I did my homework. I had a buyer's agent. I shopped around for the best mortgage, the one that was most likely to protect me in case something went wrong. I had a home inspector, who was recommended by MY agent, so there was no chance that he was in the seller's pocket. I asked questions. I made demands through my lawyer, in writing.



Denise, the mortgage originator, has been in on these problems since the beginning, because I've been trying to find financing through her for the repairs I need to make. My agent has also heard all the stories about what's been happening with this house, and each of them has said, in essence, the same thing: "Well, we tried to warn you against that house..."



Um, no.



What you tried to warn me against was that NEIGHBORHOOD. Denise did tell me, as did my agent and my lawyer, that they knew the seller by reputation and by a couple of prior encounters; all they told me was to "be careful" in my dealings with him. And so I was--I got the FHA mortgage and the home inspection because of that.



When the house was appraised before the closing, Denise said something that made me think. She said the appraiser told her that "the rehabbers could have done a better job with some things" and he wanted to know if I was absolutely sure about the house. I SPECIFICALLY ASKED her "What did he mean by that?" Her response was "Well, I mean, the neighborhood--he mentioned that there was some drug activity and stuff..." and I said "Is that it?" She said that he'd said there were some cosmetic issues, and I said "But did he say anything serious about the house, or the structure, or anything?" and she said NO.



Then, when I talked to my agent, she said something about the inspector trying to warn me about this house. Well, see, I have the original inspection report. If that was a warning, it was a weak-sauce warning. The inspection deals with a very few major issues--the water heater, two joists in the basement, the basement steps, and some issues with the garage. All the other issues were things like "doors don't close fully" or "GFS outlet over sink does not reset when it should." The major issues were addressed with my lawyer, and they APPEARED to be repaired the second time through--of course, since my inspector never returned my calls to come back for the second walkthrough, I missed a few things like the "new" water heater was actually several years old.



My mom, of course, was so fixated on the neighborhood that she wouldn't have seen a thirty-foot hole in the roof; besides, she's never bought a house in her life. She moved from her parents' house into my dad's house, which he'd inherited from his mom.



So: all these alleged "warnings" had nothing to do with things that were actually WRONG with the house--or if they were supposed to, they were made so obliquely that I didn't hear them as warnings. If everyone would have shut the fuck up about the neighborhood and focussed on the house, maybe they would have seemed like warnings--I don't know. I DO know that nowhere on paper does it say anything about the leaky roof, the bad joists, the substandard plumbing, or any of the ridiculous shit the seller did with the furnace and the chimney liner. NOWHERE does it say a word about that.



But because the professionals I hired to protect me didn't protect me, and anyone else who might have had any misgivings about the structure of the house kept silent, somehow I "allowed" myself to be taken advantage of.



Fuck THAT. I'm sick of people looking at me like I'm an idiot, when the reality is that I'm NOT. I try to do things the right way, but somehow I get screwed every time I try to trust someone to do what they're supposed to do. Even LJ said as much--and that didn't make me feel any better, either.



This really sucks. I feel like an idiot--and since my intelligence and capaability are the main things I can reliably hinge my self-esteem on, this is not a good thing.

I Hate The People I Work With

The clucking was extensive, as predicted. For the most part, everyone thought Tasha was an idiot; any truth in her statements was lost--and for the record, there was plenty of truth.



But that wasn't the worst of today.



They're moving the computers from the other building--at my behest, because I wasn't going to have another deal where stuff disappears from the storage closet and I get blamed. Once was plenty.



Well, I told them to put everything in the conference room, and they did--including a bunch of crappy old machines with big orange tags that say "Please Throw Away". And I'm told, at about 3 PM, that they need that room tomorrow and I have to get those computers out of there. So I did--or rather, I tried to. No sooner did I get someone to help me, than there she is--Gramma Busybody, Noreen. "Don't we have to wipe those hard drives?"



EVERY SINGLE TIME we have disposed of computers, she has done the same thing. And if she had a scintilla of technical knowledge, I might take her seriously!! But she heard about something in the media, somewhere from someone about some way to maybe take data off hard drives--which a) no one would bother to do, since these machines are old, broken, crappy, useless, and (most importantly) HAVEN'T BEEN USED TO STORE SENSITIVE DATA. She has no idea what "wiping a hard drive" is--only that someone says you ought to do it, and if someone says you ought to do something, then of COURSE that means she's in charge of making sure it's done.



So my helper and I go out and carry 2 computers and 6 monitors out to the dumpster. I come back in, all hot and sweaty, and of course the subject has been dropped and I get back to work.



Oh, wait--that only happened in a parallel universe where things actually went RIGHT.



I come back in, all hot and sweaty, and immediately THREE OTHER PEOPLE besides Noreen start giving me shit about "oh, you're gonna get us in trouble" and "hey, when you go to jail can I have your truck?" Stella, Maude, and Delora all start telling me "oh, you can't throw stuff away--didn't you get that e-mail?"



Okay. Now, as it happened, I did--but I didn't remember it, because we didn't have any computers to dispose of and we had already gotten rid of all the old ones, or so I thought. So the e-mail had kinda flown under my radar--I'll admit it.



But by this time, I was so fucking pissed that it didn't even MATTER to me what the e-mail had or had not said.



See, here's the thing. Noreen is CONSTANTLY questioning my professional judgement. It pisses me off beyond all comprehension; further, it wastes catastrophic amounts of time. With the amount of stuff I have to do, I can't afford to pacify some interfering old bat who has no knowledge of what it is I actually do, and resists any of my explanations as to why her misguided notions do not apply in a given case.



Thus, I've learned to ignore her--because I don't have time to do otherwise. What pissed me off most about this situation was, in this case she actually HAD information that could have saved me a bunch of work--but because she's constantly deluging me with irrelevant information, I've had to learn to shut out her commentary. If she didn't talk so much about things she didn't know about, things that aren't even her business, I might actually LISTEN when she had something useful to tell me!



Furthermore, when she feels like she's not being listened to, rather than dealing with it appropriately--either talking to me directly or talking to my supervisor--she brings in still MORE unrelated people and discusses my transgressions with THEM. There was no reason at all for me to have to answer to Stella, Maude, and Delora--ESPECIALLY the first two. The first two don't even know what a hard drive IS, let alone why it would allegedly be bad to throw one away.



As it turned out, the e-mail wasn't so much about wiping hard drives as it was about EPA regulations, which was fine. The problem wasn't that I was wrong--it was how it was handled. I called Amy and told her "I'm really tired of Noreen constantly second-guessing me." She was concerned about how I'd "missed" the e-mail, but she acknowledged how it "might be frustrating" to have Noreen constantly second-guessing me. (Ya think???)



I ended up having to go out to the trash and haul two computers and six monitors back into the building--by myself, since my helper had left during the brouhaha. I put them in the basement, since they just HAD to be out of the way--and then I left. I wasted an hour doing that crap, and I've got a TON of stuff that was WAY higher-priority than that. I could have stayed late--sure--but not after that.



If I was feeling REALLY ballsy, I'd stay home tomorrow and say I hurt my back lifting all those heavy monitors.

:::snort::::

And the award for Best Spam Subject Line I've Gotten All Summer:



From "Credit Connection": YOU ARE PROBABLY ALREADY APPROVED



Jeez, looks like even the spammers have seen my credit report!



(The runner-up for this category is the one about "forced to taste their own rear!" I mean, c'mon now--how many people would find that concept sexy? More importantly--how many people would find that concept sexy enough to cause them to part with their credit-card number?)

Farewell and Goodnight...WOW!

Tomorrow at work is going to be OUTRAGEOUS.



See, my boss Beverly just called me to get some help with a computer problem (yeah, that happens a lot) and said "Have you checked your e-mail recently?" Figuring I was about to get skewered, I said "um, no....not since Friday..." and cringed for the inevitable repercussions...Instead she just laughed, and said "Tasha wrote a nasty e-mail."



Tasha's last day was Friday. She worked in the Revolving-Door House--the house led by RuthAnne, which has seen at least 15 people quit over the past two years--as opposed to the house I work in, which has lost three people in that same time period. Just the week before, Joseph, who was Tasha's officemate and one of my closest buddies at work, had HIS last day. (Admittedly, he's only leaving because his boyfriend got into Harvard Law and Joseph's going with him--but he wasn't sorry to leave, I can tell you that!)



So--as you might imagine--the absolute INSTANT I got off the phone with Beverly, I checked my work mail. Beverly had said "Well, she didn't mention YOU, specifically, but she mentioned a bunch of OTHER people...." so I was expecting the worst...



My imagination did not TOUCH what was actually there. My imagination, in fact, was not even in the same ZIP CODE as what Tasha actually wrote. I mean, that girl threw DOWN.



First of all, she cc'ed everybody. She cc'ed people who used to work there and quit; she cc'ed someone in HUMAN RESOURCES, for god's sake. (This is a huge employer, but somehow the HR people seem to know an awful lot about the ins and outs of our little 40-person department--because we have so many problems.) She cc'ed TOTAL STRANGERS--I think they were friends of hers. But the list was enormous.



Second of all: what she wrote.



Oh...My...God.

She ripped on so many people. (The fact that she was right in most cases doesn't hurt.) She voiced the same criticisms of RuthAnne that everyone has been saying for the longest--that she has no management skills, that she can't handle employee conflicts, that she never gives encouragement. She ripped on Nancy, the marketing person, saying she runs to Beverly every time there's a conflict and has no creative skills at all; then she talked about some "bully" who gives the silent treatment--I THINK that's Joanie, but it's not entirely clear.



Essentially the whole message was "Goodbye and good riddance, and I feel sorry for those of you who are staying..." Beverly sent a message in response, saying that "constructive criticism is always welcome"--which just made me giggle, because of course it's NOT.



The real fun, though, will be tomorrow. I can already hear the clucking of thirty-seven agitated hens, and a couple of pissed-off roosters.

Bob The Plumber Catapults Into The Asshole Hall of Fame

Ohhhh, THIS is a good story, boys and girls.



Bob the Plumber and Dave the Guy Who Knows What He's Talking About came to the house about two weeks ago to look at the ceiling. (For the uninitiated and those who don't want to read back: My kitchen ceiling, also known as the floor of the bathroom directly above, has a slope of about 3 degrees south-southeast. This is because the howling fuckwit, the individual who "rehabbed" the house and sold it to me, left all the structural problems and covered them with fresh sheets of drywall and a new coat of paint, and called it a "rehab." The main structural defect thus ignored was one of the main joists, the one that runs under the end of the bathtub; the old toilet, previously stationed right above this joist, had a slow leak and caused the entire east end of the joist to rot away. This--as you might imagine--is never a good thing. The entire floor has dropped a good 4" at that end, and the floor above can't be levelled til the situation is resolved.)



Anyway. Bob and Dave said "yeah, we can do this, let us talk about this and get back to you tomorrow." (Again for the uninitiated: "Tomorrow" is the only day on Bob's calendar. It can mean anything from "next week" til "three months from Wednesday"; the only thing it does NOT mean is "a period of time within the next 24 hours.") So, after the obligatory fourteen days of "no, we haven't had a chance to talk about it yet, but I'll get with him and I'll call you back tomorrow"s, on Friday, I called him from work.



Here's the gist of it: Oh, Dave will fix my joist all right--for $1200-1400.



Okay, I say. Since I've already paid you $3900, and you haven't come near doing $3900 of work, we can just re-allocate that, and we'll have to leave some of the other stuff out.



"Well, see, I can't do that," Bob tells me. "And I knew you were gonna ask me that, but I just can't do that."



"Why, exactly, is that?" I ask, already knowing why. At this point, small red spots have started floating in my vision.



He starts babbling about "Jim screwed me over" (Jim is his former partner) and "I'm not responsible for the structure problems in your house" and "once you get the structure fixed, I'll do the rest of the work you paid for."



I say "But I can't GET the structure fixed, because I don't have $1200 to pay, because I'm paying on the loan I took to pay you FOUR MONTHS AGO."



He goes on, more of the same, and I am so enraged that I have to get off the phone. I tell him "I am not happy about this, and I have to go think about how I want to handle it, so I will call you back."



I go home and talk to LJ, who has been telling me for about three months that I need to take this guy to court because we're living in a construction zone and this guy is dicking us around with his "tomorrow"'s. I've wanted to avoid that--I understand that people have emergencies--but now I find that LJ was RIGHT, and I get to admit that, eat crow, and feel like an asshole. (To his credit, LJ--although he said something along the Axis Of I-Told-You-So, also said he hadn't wanted to rub it in so he didn't say as much as he wanted to while it was all going on. It wasn't that he was right that pissed me off, anyway--it was that I was wrong!)



After talking to LJ, I did a little note-taking about what all had happened. (I think best on paper; in fact, one of the great quotes of my college years was spoken by my best friend T, upon seeing my Notes On A Fight With My Boyfriend: "This is GREAT! You're mad in outline form!!") And I came up with three options:



1. Bob makes some arrangements with Dave to pay him for the work he does, and that's deducted from the amount I've already paid; then once Dave's work is done, the balance of that money is applied to whatever needs to be done, til it's gone; or



2. Bob pays me back the $3900, minus the cost of the work he's already done--the chimney liner, the soil pipe, and the bathtub (but not the shitty tile job, and not the "work" Bob's son did, which will have to be un-done for the joist to be fixed)--and we call it quits; or



3. This goes to court.



So I called Bob on Saturday to give him this information.



This, should you wonder, represents an absolute pole-vault into the Asshole Hall of Fame. His salient points were as follows:



a) he "didn't know the floor was sloped so bad." (BULLSHIT. He had WORKED on that floor; he had WALKED on that floor; and two of his employees--both Jim and Jay--had attempted to FIX that floor. Not only that, but the bad joist has been exposed since BEFORE he took over that job from the previous contractors. If he "didn't know" something, it's because either he didn't WANT to know, or he was not told by his employees--which means he had no business offering to fix it if he didn't have all the information.)



b) He is "not responsible for paying for fixing the structure" of my house. According to him, the person I SHOULD be mad at is the guy who sold me the house. (I don't disagree with EITHER of those points. The point is, he has been paid $3900 and not done $3900 worth of work. If he can't complete the work because of the condition of the house, then he owes me that money.)



"But why did you pay him in advance, anyway?" (Yes, I heard all of you out there saying that. And I can see you all, too--you've got something on your nose, by the way. Eeww.)



Here's the deal: When they told me what all the work would cost, I went and took out a loan and had my mom cosign. They told me they would roll the cost of my water heater--the first thing I'd called them for--into the loan, and that I'd have about $650 left over because of that. Once I got the loan proceeds, I paid him in advance-- because he told me that they (he and Jim) couldn't complete the job unless I gave them money for the materials. And of course, NORMALLY they would be able to buy their own materials, but see, there was this guy they did a job for? And he stiffed them on a $5000 check, and it bounced, and they can't seem to track him down to get the money. So they really NEEDED me to give them the rest of the money (I had already paid them a good amount, trusting that the work they had done was sufficient to cover what I was paying) so they could finish the job. In fact, when I told them I didn't have the money (because they'd told me I'd have $650 left, I'd paid some extra bills), Bob got really pissed at me and told me they needed that money or they wouldn't be able to do any more work. So I borrowed MORE money, this time from my mom, and paid them the extra.



That was when their partnership fell apart. I should have known right then and there that I was about to get screwed. But Bob assured me that he could do all the work, if I would just be patient with him...



My patience has come to a crashing, screeching halt.



Anyway, Saturday's conversation did not go well--he talked over me, his voice was raised, and it ended when I told him "If you can't do the work, you need to pay me the money for the work you haven't done." He told me "Once you get your structure fixed, I'll do every penny of work, but I'm not going to pay for the structure of your house." I told him I don't expect him to, but since the structure can't be fixed right now, since I don't have the money to do it, he needs to pay me back the money I've already paid for the work he's not going to be able to do. At that point HE told ME he was ending the conversation and "taking a time-out", and he would call me back. He hasn't called back yet, and the more I think about it, the more I think I'm just going to go ahead and take him to court regardless. His work habits and work ethic does not instill a great confidence in me.



The lesson for today, boys and girls: DON'T EVER deal with contractors unless they have sufficient cash-flow to buy materials for the job without being paid. DON'T EVER pay anyone in advance for ANYTHING.



What an outrageous clusterfuck this has become.

Comment On A Comment

A couple of posts ago, Katie made the following comment:

"Wouldn't it be better to be alone than to be questioning and wanting all of the time? I think so, but that's just me. There are other, better men out there, that just might pop up when you trust yourself more. "



You'd think so, wouldn't you.



Here's the problem, though--or actually, several:



1. I'm pretty sure he's doing what he THINKS is the right thing. I think he really believes that the man's role is to earn money, and that's how he shows his love for his woman...by being a good provider. Today I even said to him, "you know, I'd rather have you spend more time here, and make less money--I'm not with you for the cash." He didn't believe it.



2. (This is the big one.) You mention "trusting myself more". Wellll...The problem here may be that I trust myself too much, and the rest of the world too little.



See, here's the thing: I am not an attractive woman, and I don't make any particular effort to BE attractive--because I'm actually just fine with myself as I am. I'm clean, but I don't bother with makeup (I hate it); my main hairstyles are "ponytail" or "not ponytail"; and I dress for comfort, not for fashion. I already know that if I start fussing with my looks--hair, clothes, makeup, whatever--that if I DO get a guy based on that, eventually he'll be disappointed when I go back to my actual, comfortable, no-makeup, t-shirt-and-jeans self. (And I will go back to it--I always do, no matter how motivated my original intentions.)



And I've come to believe--just from my own experience--that no matter how "different" they seem, every guy is focussed on those superficial qualities, to a greater or lesser extent. I blame it mainly on this culture we live in--from the age of about 5 onward, every heterosexual male is immersed in the myth that their women should look and act like porn stars. And no matter how much a man proclaims to care about a woman, if we can't keep up that level of image intensity, they get bored--and they either leave, or they stay and cheat.



I am amazed by this. I'm amazed because, first of all, this is NOT how I operate. I have a certain set of standards as far as who I'd like to be involved with--but they're very BASIC standards. The only one that has to do with appearance is that I like guys who are taller than me--but since I'm 5'6", that's not difficult. Other than that, I want a guy who believes sorta on the same level as I do--no neocons!--and who doesn't have any overt psychoses, weeping sores, or restraining orders. Job? Not necessary, if he doesn't expect me to take care of his bills. Ambition? Not in the traditional sense--I'd rather have a dreamer than a corporate-ladder-climber any day. Intellect of some sort is great; a sense of humor more evolved than bathroom jokes; the ability to carry on a decent conversation. But that's IT. That's the extent of the demands I'll put on a guy.....Well, that, and he has to be not disgusted by me. That seems to have been the sticking point lately.



But as long as the guy fills those few expectations, and isn't a blatant jackass, I'm generally pretty flexible. 5'7" or above, not Republican, disease-free, minimal baggage, doesn't vomit at the sight of me. Not a tough list of requirements, you'd think--and it's not because I'm selling myself short; it's just because I actually ENJOY being with someone who might not be what I'd instantly expect.



I used to believe in myself. I used to believe that I was attractive just the way I was. I was viciously disabused of that notion by CR as he packed to go move in with his next victim...he told me I was "boring" and "lousy in the sack" and he'd "rather fuck anyone else" than me. He delivered this information in a very calm, matter-of-fact way, like he was telling me my hair was brown.



I was willing to dismiss that as the ravings of an asshole, until LJ went down the same road. He hasn't SAID it, of course, so I have no proof--in fact, at one point several months ago he said something about how his previous girlfriends always seemed to think he wasn't interested, but it was really just that he was more focussed on other things--namely, making money. But I don't know...



Actually, THAT, right there, is the problem in a nutshell: I have NO idea what goes on in that man's mind. If he expressed his thoughts a little more, I would be nowhere near as paranoid as I am. Sometimes I'm sure I'm fine; other times I'm sure I'm the biggest annoyance in his life. And I know--at least, I THINK I know--that if that was actually true, if he really was sick of me and bored, he'd leave; he doesn't seem like someone who has the patience to stay anywhere he doesn't want to be. But then that other voice pops in--the one that says Why would he leave, even if he can't stand you, when he's got it so soft? I remember CR saying the same thing one time--in the middle of an argument, I told him that since he was still THERE, he obviously wasn't THAT miserable with me. His reply will probably be the source of self-doubt for the rest of my life, every time I do anything for anyone....He said "Of COURSE I'm still here!! You pay the bills, you give me money, I can do anything I want--who would give THAT up???? Even if they WERE miserable, who would give THAT up???"



It might be better to be alone, yeah. But I'm 34 years old, and though I have a pretty realistic perception of my chances from this point on, I'm just not ready to concede just yet. I've already pretty much resigned myself to my eventual status as the Crazy Cat Lady Down The Street, but why jump the gun?

I'm Not Dead. Really.

I'm still here. I am just swamped, beyond any reasonable definition of the word, at work. More this weekend, but here's the nutshell:



LJ's still around. I don't know what I'm going to do with him; he's very hard to stay mad at. Terrence is still calling, still interested, still persistent. I wish LJ was HALF as interested--but then again, I told Terrence straight off: "The main reason you're still interested is that you haven't got me yet. Once you get me, you won't want me anymore." He didn't deny it, either.



Sometimes, I really hate people.



Mostly I'm just catastrophically tired, though.

Whatever Happens Now

I haven't -completely- given up on LJ. At least, I don't think I have.



I love him, more than I can really express. But....Well, see, there's this old Motown-type song that CR used to play..."Take care of your homework baby/ If you don't, somebody will..."



There is no longer any reasonable explanation for his continued neglect of certain areas of our relationship. He's obviously bored with me, which is fine--really, I'm used to it by now--but what I can't accept is this: if he's so bored that he won't fuck me anymore, shouldn't he just LEAVE??? Instead of staying here rent-free, paying only the car note (on the car which he drives at least 75% of the time)? Instead of pretending?



I've tried to talk to him about it. I have a hard time articulating things like that--especially since CR!--but I've tried. He listens, but he says nothing--no reaction, and I can't have a conversation when I'm the only one talking. I've tried notes; as I've mentioned before, THOSE just piss him off. And the other night, when he left not five minutes after I'd walked in from work, I sent him a text message--something to the effect of "It really bothers me that we don't get any time together and that you don't seem to mind it at all."



Two minutes later the phone rang, and when I answered it, his reply really said everything that needed to be said: "What NOW???"



That was last week, before I wrote that other post, and though I thought about what it must be like from his point of view, I am still hurt. I've tried to rationalize it all for so long, but the fact remains: I am being used. I am getting nothing and giving everything, and I have no voice here.



For example: A couple of days ago, I had the truck and LJ was watching his nephew, so after work I picked him up in Maywood. Before he drove me home, we stopped and picked up a couple of his friends--Marcus and some guy I didn't know. While we were picking up the others, LJ got a call saying it was okay to drop his nephew off, so we went back to the house; he went in to tell his sister something, leaving me and the guys in the idling car. At one point, Marcus got a cell call, and the guy I didn't know asked me to turn down the radio. But it was how he asked that got me; he reached forward out of the back seat and touched my shoulder.



Just that little touch gave me goosebumps. Not because I was attracted to the guy--I couldn't even tell you what he looked like--but because it was more contact than I've gotten from anyone in a long, long time. I am an affectionate person. I need a lot of touching--and LJ is not a toucher. And it got me thinking.



I love LJ very much. But it's becoming obvious to me that I am never going to get the things I need out of this relationship. I don't know if he CAN'T give me those things, or if he WON'T--I used to think it was that he didn't know I even wanted those kind of things, but I've asked as much as I can ask, in as many ways as I can ask. When CR left me, I promised myself I was never again going to have to beg any man to touch me; well, here I am again.



Well, today I put an ad on AOL, stating exactly what I'm looking for. And I tried to text-message Terrence, but his cell phone isn't working and the only number I have besides that is his work number. Terrence still calls me once in a while, and every time he calls he tells me how he wishes he hadn't let me get away. I like Terrence, but I don't quite trust him--hell, I don't trust any man to want me, after this. He'll quite likely get bored with me too. But I'm willing to enjoy whatever happens with him, until that inevitable day of boredom comes along.



I'm not kicking LJ out; if that's hypocrisy, well then, I'm a hypocrite. But I'm not the one who's bored with HIM. I was--hell, I AM-- perfectly willing to stay with him. But I'm not going to spend the rest of my life celibate, especially when I've tried to find out what the problem is, and can't get an answer. I would change things, if I knew what needed to change--but he won't even tell me that much. I have done everything in my power and still I'm ignored. Should I put him out? Maybe. I mean, I don't think I'm asking for too much.



But then again, I'm not a man. I know I'm not much to look at, but I know lots of ugly women whose men still love them--and still want them, too. I think maybe I had my chance at happiness, with JP, and when he died I lost that--all of it. He was the last man who listened to me, who was proud of me, who accepted me the way I was, who understood me, and who wanted me. I never took him for granted, but I was stupid enough to hope, after he died, that there might be someone out there who would want me again.



Instead, here I am again, in just about the same situation I was in with CR. I'm coming to understand that, whatever may have been his motivation in the beginning, LJ is now only with me because he likes the situation. He lives rent-free, comes and goes as he pleases, answers to no one, has meals prepared for him, has no demands made on him, and can have anyone over whenever he pleases. He couldn't do that at his mother's house; anywhere else, he would have had to pay rent and take care of himself.



That's fine--after all, my bills would be the same whether he was here or not--but it's a lot to ask me to be faithful to him when he won't so much as touch me.



At least I know where I stand, I guess. But I'm not going to just sit and take it--not this time.

Bloggus Interruptus

I apologize for the short hiatus.



LJ and I pretty much careened up to the edge of the precipice of Breakup, due mainly to my own messy emotional state. I think we're okay now...not that I can ever tell, with him...but at least he's willing to speak to me again.



But here's a hint: don't ever, EVER EVER combine opiate withdrawal, sleep deprivation, job stress, and mild PMS. Just don't. It's a very bad idea. Believe me, I know of whence I speak.



Actually, a little more reading on the process of withdrawing from methadone has sorta helped me to recognize what's been going on. One of the side effects of withdrawal: "emotional lability". Basically this means you're all over the place--calm and rational one minute, crying the next. And ohhhhhh boy, does THAT sound familiar.



Well, here's the thing: Right now, I can't take that. I am not gonna spend the next three months riding the Mood Swing. I'd never survive it--I'd do something stupid, I can nearly guarantee. So last night I re-altered my dose back to 20 mg. Slept like the dead--I don't think I even rolled over or shifted positions from 1 AM onward--and woke up fairly calm.



Of course, THEN I came to work. But somehow, work just pisses me off; it doesn't usually UNHINGE me the way relationship problems do. I wish I could learn not to be unhinge-able...but I suspect that would be asking for a lot. Growing up in my family, the whole dynamic revolved around being emotionally destroyed if someone was unhappy with something you did. If their anger didn't demoralize you enough to change your behavior , it was because you didn't love them enough.



Poor LJ--nobody should have to put up with THAT.