Nearly Speechless

I remember, when I was younger, reading about an invention that automatically tore paper towels off the roll, saving that tiresome wrist motion involved in...you know, actually tearing off a paper towel by hand. I remember thinking "That's ridiculous!" wondering what they'd think of to automate next.

Well, now I find this: another manifestation of the Automated Conscience.

The kosher phone is stripped down to its original function: making and receiving calls. There's no text messaging, no Internet access, no video options, no camera. More than 10,000 numbers for phone sex, dating services and other offerings are blocked. Rabbinical overseers make sure the list is up to date....

Some saw [mass-market cell phones] as a non-threatening convenience. Others believed the sophisticated phones offered an unhealthy freedom: the ability to download pornography or allow young people to make furtive contact with the opposite sex -- which is highly restricted in ultra-Orthodox society. The conservative magazine Family called the multitasking new phones ''a candy store for the evil impulse.''

The rabbis' solution -- find a cell phone that's only a phone.

''They saw the future and were frightened,'' said one of Israel's most prominent attorneys, Jacob Weinroth, who was asked by the rabbis to approach Israel's four main cellular companies with the idea of the pared-down phone. ''In 10 years, we may have commercials coming over the phone. Maybe gambling, dating. The community wanted to keep the cell phones, but not allow this commercial world to enter their communities through them.''

Maybe it's just me, but I find this symptomatic of one of the major problems with humanity these days: rather than using our OWN powers of resistance, we expect to live in an environment devoid of temptations. And if we can't generate that environment for ourselves, we demand that the government or outside agencies create it for us. This seems to be a particularly fierce need among conservatives, who want everything that offends them to be censored. "WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN???" they shriek, all the while ignoring the option of teaching their children to resist temptation. This cry for censorship, whether governmental or otherwise, seems to be a tacit admission: We can't make our children live up to the standards of behaviour we expect. Therefore, everything we disapprove of needs to be stamped out to compensate for the ineffectiveness of our teaching. To me, if you don't think you can raise your children to abide by your beliefs or to live up to your strict standards of behaviour, maybe you shouldn't be having children in the first place.

To me, inventions like the "kosher phone" say more about the people who believe their families need such a phone, than about the degeneracy of the culture as a whole. These people want to live in a hermetically-sealed Disneyland, where all those scary dissenting ideas just don't exist. Rather than forcing themselves to stretch their minds by considering these ideas, or to stretch their souls by resisting the temptations around them, they want to lay back and bask, serene in the knowledge that everything that might require mental or spiritual effort from them has been banished to the darkness. It's the cultural equivalent of the automatic paper-towel tearer-offer, only instead of fat wrists, it risks leaving behind a legacy of weak resolves and untested determination. If you've lived all your life in a little box where you never had to resist temptation, what happens when you find yourself in a situation where you HAVE to exercise some crucial moral judgement? If you've never had any practice with the small things, how will you be able to resist the really big ones? When the time comes, thirty years from now, when you're the CEO faced with the decision of whetherto dip into the employees' pension fund, wouldn't it be better to have had the opportunity to resist temptation in the guise of an Anna Kournikova screensaver?

In the story above, an attorney says this of the rabbis who demanded the new temptation-free cell phone: "They saw the future and were frightened."

To them, I say: Yeah, join the crowd.

Thoughts on a Sunny Thursday, Continued

This is SO not what I want my life to be. I find myself daydreaming, lately, of a farmhouse in Wisconsin, with big airy bright rooms and grassy fields all around--where I can leave the windows open at night and hear the crickets. Don't get me wrong--I still love my city--but I really need to get away.

I want my house back. I am tired of running a Motel 6, complete with amenities--towel service, mini-bar, and technical assistant to put your personal ad up on BlackPlanet.com. I am tired of LJ's friends, and I am unspeakably tired of Tim's cats--oh, I never DID blog about THIS development.

When the contractors called me and told me that the windows would be ready in about a week, I e-mailed Tim (because I didn't have his phone number) and told him that he needed to get his cats out of my house, because I was having work done. I also told him that I was pissed because he hadn't contacted me since New Years, even though he'd said back then that he planned to have an apartment the first of February. (I didn't care that he didn't HAVE the apartment--I just wanted to be kept up to date on the plans, and I made that clear.)

A couple of days later, I get a voice-mail from Tim. Among the highlights: "Well, I didn't know that you were having work done on your house!" Of course you didn't know, asshat--you didn't call for TWO MONTHS. "And I didn't know that you didn't have my number..." Not that it matters, but it's not MY responsibility to check in with YOU--you're not the one who's doing the favor for ME, it's the other way around!! And all of this is being said with a definite attitude of incomprehension at why I might possibly be annoyed. "So I'm really confused about this e-mail, and I've been really busy, and..." Don't be confused: I'm angry. You didn't call for. TWO. MONTHS. I have had your cats for a YEAR AND A HALF now, and I am tired of them, and I am ready to take them to the pound. Is that clear enough? Not confusing? "...So give me a call when you get a chance."

I still haven't called him, because I still haven't calmed down enough to be able to have a reasonable conversation with him. Nor do I have the time, emotionally, to listen to his ranting and raving about his life and all the obstacles it's presenting him--obstacles which are largely of his own creation, if he would just look at his actions critically. And HOW could someone not understand this very basic premise: If someone is doing a favor for you--an ongoing favor which requires more than a little of their time, effort, and energy--it is a very, very basic tenet of good manners to keep in touch with that person, no matter how "busy" you allegedly are? ESPECIALLY when, in the past, you have had no problem calling them collect, or at work, or in the middle of the night, just because YOU needed something from them??

I am DONE with Tim. I am beginning to see why people become jaded and stop doing things to help their fellow human beings--because of people like Tim, who mess it up for everyone. Right now my main goal is to have all interlopers--both two-legged and four-legged--out of my house before the summer is over. I need some peace, and I need to feel like my house is my own. Right now I have neither of those things.

Thoughts On A Sunny Thursday, Part 1

Sometime between the dawn of commerce and now, a transformation has taken place in what "work" means. And I don't know when it happened, or why, or who thought it was a good idea.

When did "work", used as a noun to denote a place, become synonymous with "ill-ventilated, windowless beige spaces"? Who was the first employer who saw a bland, fabric-covered tan wall and thought "THAT's what I want my employees to see every day!"? Why is it legal to not see natural light, some months, for days at a time? Who were the first group of employees who acquiesced to this environment, maybe thinking "Oh, it's only temporary," or "Maybe some plants will brighten it up"? How did it spread, and when did it become an expected condition of employment to subsist for eight hours a day in a space smaller than the average bathroom?

I've gotta get out of here.

Dreams

I've been having especially vivid dreams lately.

The contents aren't really important, and most of them I don't entirely remember (though I do try to write down some of the most interesting ones), but I do have one overall impression: In my dreams I am always defending myself. I am always explaining my actions and my beliefs, as if they're not worth having unless everyone agrees with them. And in the same breath I'm apologizing.

In short, my dreams are remarkably like my real life.

I've realized the difference between the Gladys who walks through life now, and the one who was with JP so many years ago: The old Gladys was complicated and loved it, reveled in it, flaunted it. This Gladys sands down all the complications to present a smooth, unchallenging surface, so that people will love her.

Except in doing so, I find that I no longer can love myself.

LJ is going out of town, possibly for an extended stay; on "business", as usual. I can't wait. I want peace, quiet, a place to myself. When he gets back, I'm thinking about telling him what I've discovered to be the truth: I'm happier alone. There's no point in being with someone who doesn't know me, who doesn't want to know me; who says he loves me but won't touch me; who won't touch me but doesn't mind taking money from me. When I hear the pimps-and-ho's songs on the radio? I think of me.

"...but me i aint no pimp
i just love to borrow
paper from a fat bitch
a ugly bitch
a model..."

"...standin' on the porch drankin liquor
drunk, smokin weed ...
that's why i stay in a girl ear
to keep that p**** wet
so i can get paid
and relax in tha shade
and say fuck a 9 ta 5
cuz a n**** tired of slavin'..."

Man, that's not me, he tells me. That's just music, he says. And it IS just music, true; I'd be a hypocrite if I pursued that line of thought too far--but:

Okay. Look at it like this. Alice in Chains' "Would?" wasn't the reason I started taking heroin--but the fact that I liked the song quite as much as I did could be used as evidence that I wasn't against heroin as a concept. So what am I to think, exactly, when LJ turns up "Poppin' My Collar" every time it comes on the TV or the radio?

Nah, that's not me, he tells me. But somehow every morning I get up and go to work, and every night I come home from work, and somehow I pay all the bills and somehow when he needs money he has no problem coming to me. And somehow, even when things don't work out financially the way I expect, he takes for granted that I'll still live up to financial promises I made him even if it puts me in a bad spot, but somehow when I need money I know there's a good chance I'll be out of luck, and regardless, I'll come to him all apologetic over even $20.

Dr. J says I need to set better boundaries about money. But how can I set better boundaries when I'm convinced that's the only reason he even bothers with me at all?

He says he loves me. I long ago gave up hope for love on my terms, but this isn't love on anyone's terms--well, maybe Three-6 Mafia's. I don't know what this is, but I know it's killing me inside, and love isn't supposed to do that. I don't know how much of what I'm feeling is because it's actually TRUE, and how much of it is because I clearly don't love myself very much--but in the end, does it really matter? If I tell him to leave based on some fiction inside my own mind, does it matter why I feel better when he's gone?

I don't know how I'm going to do it, or when. I'm a coward, really, about these things. The last person I broke up with, I never actually broke up with him--I just stopped calling, and eventually he drew the right conclusion. I know I won't go home tonight and just make a decision and end it; that's not my style. But I do know that I'm looking forward to Friday, when he hopefully goes away for a while; and maybe by the time he gets back one of two things will happen: either I'll miss him, or I'll have the strength to tell him that I want to be alone. Maybe. In the meantime, though, I'll enjoy my peace and quiet.

Where Credit Is Due

Since my entire last post was a massive bitch-tacular, I feel I should bring a note of Happy into the mix.

The People's Energy thing was really weighing on my mind, especially since once all the other bills were paid, I had about $5 more for the next two weeks than the gas company was demanding. Now, I can live frugally, but I haven't yet figured out how to eat and get to work for fourteen days on $0.36 a day. (If anyone has, please let me know--I'd be profoundly interested!) What's worse--they were refusing to put me on a payment arrangement, claiming that I'd defaulted on one back in January. (For all I know, I may have--I do know that I didn't pay them in January, much to my surprise--but I've also paid more than half of the balance in the past month, so they should see that at least I'm TRYING to pay them!)

The part that was scaring me worst, though, was that they were threatening to disconnect me this coming Monday, the 20th. Now, I'd faced this threat once before, and I'd been assured by Eric Zorn that a higher-up from the gas company had said they CAN'T disconnect anyone between October 31 and March 31st--but the collections representative clearly said "There is an order for disconnection scheduled for the 20th of this month." That's a direct quote; pretty unambiguous, wouldn't you say?

So I e-mailed Eric Zorn and asked for the name of the woman he'd talked to, the one who'd said "no winter disconnections". When he sent me the info, I was reluctant to call her--what right did an insignificant little customer have to take up the time of a major People's Energy official?--but thankfully I got over it.

She was VERY surprised to hear what the collections agent had told me about disconnection, and she assured me that no, they do NOT disconnect gas for non-payment before April 1st, EVER, no matter how "cooperative" the weather has been. She promised to get to the bottom of THAT, and from her demeanor, I got the impression that some heads were gonna roll.

Then I told her that the collections people wouldn't let me on a payment plan, because they said I'd defaulted on one in January. She promised to work something out for me, and a couple of phone calls later, that's just exactly what she did. I was given til the 31st to pay $200, and then they spread the remaining balance out over 6 months. It was like "No problem..."--like there was nothing to it.

So here's my question: Why can't all the employees be as helpful and polite as Elizabeth Castro?? Why do so many of them act as though any minor request on the customer's part is an insurmountable hurdle, an affront, an interruption and a nuisance?? What's so hard about "Sure, no problem, let me help you?" Or even "I'll see what I can do and get back to you?" Why do you have to go to the top of the hierarchy and pull rank on people, just to get something as simple as an accurate statement of company policy? Why is that so hard?

Needless to say, at least SOME of my animosity towards the gas company has abated. But again--why does it have to be so complicated in the first place?

Regardless: Thank you, Elizabeth Castro. I'm grateful for your help.

Things That Are Currently Pissing Me Off (Updated!)

A cross-section of what's currently honking me off:

People's Energy is at it again. Despite their alleged "policy" that they don't disconnect customers for late payments from November through April, and despite the fact that I've paid them nearly $500 within the past 30 days, they are threatening to disconnect me unless I pay them $441 by the end of the week. "That is our policy," said the collections woman, when I pointed out that it is still March, "but we have waived that policy since the weather has been cooperative." So what--we have a few nice days, and suddenly it's anarchy?

I have heard nothing from HUD. Meanwhile, the roof which before I moved into this house, was certified as "sound" and "containing at least 3 years of useful life" has been removed and replaced. According to the contractors, the layers of old roofing were about 12 inches deep, and all the rafters beneath were bowed downward due to the enormous weight of the accumulated wood and tar. The roof of the addition was completely rotted and so, in addition to new gutters and downspouts, in addition to the new roofing material, I have had an entire new underlayment, and FOURTEEN new rafters. But somehow HUD doesn't think this case is worth their attention....At least someone's benefitting from it; there's a guy outside as I type this, picking through my dumpster for wood to burn.

I have heard nothing from Tim. My new windows will be delivered within two weeks, and those cats need to be GONE. I am not going to attempt to spend the entire duration of the window removal and replacement making sure that dumb-ass Cassidy doesn't launch his portly ass through one of the openings--I'm just not. It's now going on eighteen months since I had these cats thrust upon me, and there is no end in sight. I sent him a rather bitchy e-mail pointing out that I haven't heard from him since NEW YEAR'S, despite the fact that he now has a job and an income. I am fed up with him, to say nothing of his stinky cats.

My mother, my cat, and I all have colds. Mom's got it the worst, followed by Whitey; I've just got a sore throat. But Whitey's vet is all the way up in Skokie, which means a long Saturday morning ride to find out why the big guy is all sneezy. Poor kitty. And poor Mom, as well; a "little" cold isn't so little when you're nearly 77 years old.

I cannot personally bitch-slap Jack Johnson. I have, in the past, liked exactly one of his songs--"Sitting, Waiting, Wishing"--but any tolerance I had for the man evaporated the other night as I pulled into a parking lot and heard the chorus of one of his songs. Let me make this perfectly clear. "Bubbly toes" is not a phrase that should EVER enter the mind of a normal adult male, at any time, for any reason. Much less should that male then formulate an entire SONG around this phrase. I realize that my focus on this fragment of the song is perhaps unnatural, but seriously. Bubbly. Toes. What the hell were you THINKING, man???

Chloe Dao still won Project Runway. This continues to be a big WTF for me. That pink dress doesn't get any uglier the more you look at it.

That covers the bulk of the stuff that's making me mad at the moment. Thank god for reality TV, fleece blankies, and vanilla milkshakes.

Updated! because I discovered/remembered two more:

I am now OFFICIALLY sick. Hacking, snorting, snotting, the works. Minor fever. Dammit, I do NOT get sick, and this is TWICE in one season that I've picked up a cold from this diddly-danged office and its horde of pathogen-bearing cubicle-squirrels!

(probably the biggest annoyance of all) The Worst Commercial Ever. Can I confess something here? When there's nothing else on TV, or I'm between shows, or I just want some background noise, I've taken to changing the channel to the new "Sprout" cable offering. Sprout is a channel that shows nothing but PBS kids' cartoon shows, 24 hours a day. And I LOVE me some PBS cartoons. Yes, yes, I know that's odd for a 35-year-old woman, but I find them comforting somehow. They're full of the lessons I was never taught: believe in yourself, it's okay to make mistakes, stand up for what's right. They make me happy, and damn, I could use some happy. But there is a fly in this ointment: The Commercial. The Commercial is played about 15 times in the course of an evening, which would be irritating even if it wasn't the Worst Commercial Ever. The Commercial is for Huggies, and it features a little blond-haired baby boy whose thoughts are given voice...and the voice they're given is that of a half-drunk, muscle-bound, steroid-addled lunkhead frat-boy. The first words of this commercial are enough to send a bolt of hate-inspired adrenaline up my spine and send me scrambling for the remote: "UhhhOOH yeahhh, DIS is whut I call a DY-purr..." It goes on from there. "Hey moooom, can I git a personal trai-nur?" God. HATE. The voice is so exaggeratedly dumb, so intentionally annoying and STOO-Pid, that it sets my teeth on edge every time I hear it. I want to go to the ad agency responsible for this travesty, find the "creative" whose concept this was in the first place and the executive who gave it approval, and knock their heads together so hard their ears stick. I want that cute little blond-haired baby to grow up and sue Huggies for defamation of character, pain and suffering, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and win enough money to put the company out of business forever. For every time this commercial is shown, I want to dump a hundred used Huggies at the doorstep of the Kimberly-Clark executive offices. That's how much I hate this commercial. (I'm apparently not the only one, either; I mentioned it in passing to my mom the other night, and she said "Oh, I HATE that commercial!" So I guess it's annoying across all key demographics. Great job, Huggies guys...)

I think that's it for now, but by all means, feel free to add your own!

Okay, Now I'm Sad.

I loved "Press Your Luck"; it got me through many hours of babysitting as a young teen. So it made me very sad to read this story.

(However, it has also made it very difficult to leave the very obvious "whammy" reference untouched.)

Spring (Admittedly False)

Even though I KNOW it's barely mid-March, even though I KNOW it'll probably snow within the week, or freeze, or whatever, that is doing exactly NOTHING to blunt my enjoyment of the absolutely GORGEOUS weather we've had this weekend. Even the thunderstorms have been gorgeous. If my USB hub was working, I'd upload pictures of my crocuses, which have been poking their heads out for weeks now and which have now flowered--they're close to the house and get all the warmth that seeps out, so they're a few weeks ahead of the real weather.

The plans on the house have been finalized, and I have to say I'm a wee bit disappointed; all I can afford this time around is the new roof and new windows. And I know those are HUGE things--thirteen custom-made windows especially--but I'll admit I was hoping for something more tangible--something pretty. I guess that will have to wait til the next trip through. I -am- going to repaint the bedroom, though, once the new roof is in. And I think--LJ be damned--I'm going to make it girly. Every time I go to Target, when I go through the bedding and housewares section, I'm drawn to the Shabby Chic stuff--eyelet and flowers and pretty things. When I visualize my future, that's the sort of house I see. (Actually, when I visualize my future, lately I'm living in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, or a house like the lake house my friends and I used to go to when we were in college. But that's another story--as much as I love the city, I don't think I'll be a city-dweller for my whole life.)

I had an appointment with Dr. J yesterday, and she finally suggested that I think about antidepressants. She said I seemed very depressed--more than usual--yesterday, which was true; I've had a very rough week, emotionally, and there's no easy explanation for it. Even my dreams have been more vivid than usual, and not necessarily in a good way. I just feel really...OLD, and behind the curve, personally and professionally. Even though I don't regret the things I've done, I've just been wishing I could go back and start all over again, like at birth--with a different set of parents who could see all the options life had to offer, and who would be equipped to teach me that. I don't think my parents ever did anything because it was what they WANTED to do; it seems like they made all their major life decisions because they were "supposed to" or because they felt they didn't have any other choice. And no matter what they SAID to me about "you can do anything you put your mind to", their example was markedly different. Dr. J asked me yesterday if maybe I'd created a script for my life where I saw myself as the victim; I said I don't THINK so, and if I did, it was certainly not a conscious choice and it's definitely something I want to change--but also, a lot of these things have to do with what I was taught about myself when I was a kid, and when you're a kid you ARE a victim, really. You're subject to the whims and ideas of all the adults around you, and frankly, I feel like the adults in my life let me down in many ways. Sometimes I feel like I'd have turned out better if I'd hatched out of an egg. I don't blame my parents--they had their own baggage to deal with--but there were a lot of other inconsiderate, rude adults who I'd like to go back in time and have a word with. Aunts and uncles, coaches, Girl Scout leaders, teachers--all the people who are supposed to watch out for kids and help them develop--a lot of these people let me down, even made things worse.

And yes, I'm an adult now; and yes, it's my place to overcome all these things and steer the course of my own life--and I try to do that. But lately I've been wondering what I might have become if I'd gotten a different start; if I'd learned to believe in myself and trust my own abilities and instincts, if I'd been given some idea of the opportunities that were available, if I had been allowed to stand up for my own opinions instead of being taught that I was the last one to consider, that everyone else's ideas and wants were more important than mine--I wonder what I could have accomplished by now. I wonder where I would be if I hadn't made some of the stupid decisions I've made with money, giving things to people to get them to love me because I'd absorbed somehow the belief that it was the ONLY way they ever would. I don't think of myself as a victim, or at least, I TRY not to; but I feel like I'd be so much different, so much better, if anyone had let me believe that I was important and worthwhile.

Anyway, I agreed to try antidepressants; however, to get them, I have to make an appointment with my primary physician, since Dr. J doesn't prescribe, apparently. (I can never keep track of which doctors can prescribe and which can't; it's like the difference between stalactites and stalagmites. You know it's probably easy to remember if you have the right trick, and you know that SOMEONE knows the difference, but you also know that "someone" is not you.)

I hope the medication helps, anyhow; I'm especially tired of having no motivation to get anything done. Especially when there's plenty I could be doing, it seems like a huge waste of time to not feel like doing anything.

I'm A Dork

...but I am hooked on this game. It's updated once a day, and it's gotten to the point that it's the first thing I do when I sit down at the computer in the morning.

My best time (not to brag) is 43 seconds. (I won't mention my worst.)

Prrrrrrt?

Okay, it's now OFFICIALLY official:

I do not understand "fashion".

Granted, my sartorial choices illustrate this fact very accurately, but hey, who knows--I could have been an eccentric artist type hiding my light under a bushel--you know, Vera Wang in an oversized gray sweatshirt. Right?

Well, last night proved it, if further proof was needed: I don't get it. I don't understand how a team of non-blind individuals can look at this collection and find it superior to this collection or (especially) this collection. (I couldn't STAND Santino through most of the show, and I thought some of his designs were just scary, but the first half of the finale totally redeemed him in my eyes. Furthermore, his final collection is absolutely GORGEOUS and I couldn't believe the judges were so dismissive.) I thought based on the final collections alone, Santino came in first, Daniel second, Chloe a distant, DISTANT third. Her collection was all shiny and poofy and unwearable--who WEARS that stuff? Seriously. Look at the pink thing on the first screen--Who on earth would wear that grotesque, puffy, oversized Mylar ballon of a dress? In PUBLIC??

Throughout Project Runway I've repeatedly liked the worst-reviewed designs, or the ones derided as "safe" or "boring". Invariably, the highest-ranked looks have just left me scratching my head--how would you WALK in that? wouldn't that ITCH? The only designer whose stuff I consistently liked was Daniel, and I thought for sure he was going to win it. And even though Santino spent most of his time being a butthead, based on his final collection, I would have been happy if he won it. But CHLOE??? I liked a couple of her outfits, but this last collection was just awful...or at least, awful from my point of view, which is obviously untrained and clueless.

Daniel, Santino: you were robbed, guys.

Now, if anyone needs me, I'll be matching a striped shirt with plaid pants, or something.

You Like Me! You Really Like Me!

Okay, I have now found my TWENTY-TWO missing comments, and I thank all of you...

...Except Blogger. Because Blogger??? SUCKS.

Dear Blogger: I did NOT, at any time, for any reason, turn on freaking COMMENT MODERATION!!! So WHY exactly you felt it was necessary to tuck two weeks of comments off in the corner so I couldn't find them....

Bad. Very bad. ARGH.

If I knew how to deal with Wordpress, I'd move to my own domain in a minute. But I've played with WP a little bit, and it's WAAAAY complicated. Maybe if I'm feeling ambitious someday, but not at the moment....

Anyway...Thanks for the comments! Stoopid Blogger....

Okay, SERIOUSLY Now.

Seriously, are you all gone?? I haven't had a comment in WEEKS and I'm wondering if anyone's still reading!

I refinanced the Catastrophe last night, with much trepidation; my mortgage payment went up about $300 and I'm really nervous. But I'll be getting the roof, the windows, and the doors replaced, which should bring the energy bills down and increase the value of this rattletrap; and they paid off one of my more irritating bills--the loan I took to pay that jackass Bob the Plumber. AND, it's going to give me a chance to finally get rid of my houseguests, who wore out their welcome long, long ago...even though I love them to pieces and will actually miss two of the little bastards when they're gone. (I will NOT miss Cassidy. Cassidy BIT me the other day.) I haven't heard from Tim since New Years', and I am QUITE pissed that he hasn't called to tell me what's going on with him.

Work has been fairly horrid, and I'm thinking seriously about looking for something else in a couple of months. It's not that I don't like the people, but they continually ask me to do the impossible with no instruction whatsoever, and it's starting to grate on me. If they would give me some training, send me to a class, whatever--that would at least HELP. But it's not happening. Really, I don't want to work for anyone else anymore, which is a sure incentive to get the bakery going, but I'm completely apathetic right now. Doctor J says that apathy is just another symptom of my depression, which she agrees is pretty severe--"when the tears are always that close to the surface," she says, "that's a sure sign that the depression is pretty strong. And when you're that depressed, you're not going to be very task-y." Which is an understatement--I've got no drive whatsoever, which also explains the relative silence of this blog. I'm okay, but I'm not good...and really, I'm not even okay. I'm functional, but that's about it. And I want to do something about it, because this really isn't any way to live, not really. I feel like my REAL life ended in 1995, and all I'm doing now, all I've been doing since then, is just playing out the string. And that's a pretty sorry way to feel when you're 35 years old.

One of the things Dr. J is surprised about is how much guilt I feel about everything. She commented on it when I said I felt guilty because I don't feel the kind of loyalty and devotion to my mother that I think I should. I tolerate her, and I feel like I ought to be much more of a dutiful daughter--that I shouldn't feel like it's an imposition to talk to her every day, or to see her on the weekends. Dr. J said "I think it's surprising that YOU feel guilty, and SHE'S the one who's spent your whole life criticizing and manipulating you. " (She pulls no punches as regards my relationship with Mom; after hearing some of the childhood stories, Dr. J seems to be of the opinion that much of my low self-esteem can be traced back to Mom's doorstep. I'm inclined to be a little more forgiving, but in some ways I'm not sure that isn't half of the problem.) I wish I could feel something else; I wish I could be angry at the things that have happened to me, or sad, or sorrowful, or anything. Instead I've concentrated on making myself as invisible and inoffensive as possible to the outside world, making no demands of anyone and apologizing at every turn for the audacity of being alive. It gets old fast, you know? Feeling like you've got no right or reason to ask anything of anyone, that the best you can hope for is to stay out of the way and not make a nuisance of yourself...That's no way to live.

I just wish I could stop it.