You Are Here. You Probably Ought To Think About That.

So, um....yeah.

WackyWackyWerld, aka Gladystopia, has done some of its expected and usual things. Tim has been playing Floor-Hopper, rotating between my living room floor, his friend Chuck's living room floor, and whatever it is he sleeps in at Squeaky's place-with-the-roommate. But that pool of potential stopping-grounds decreased by one the other day; apparently between the two of them, they decided that the remaining thirteen days on Squeaky's lease with the hell-roomie were just not worth the effort. (Apparently this woman--the roomie, not Squeak--is a wee bit of a beeyatch. I don't know her, and I've experienced enough time with Squeaky to be aaalmost inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt because: annoyy-ying!--but seriously, there are some birds that just don't fly, as in "you agreed on $400/month for rent on a room the size of a small pantry, but in mid-lease you demand $500/month instead, 'for utilities'." I cannot imagine how many appliances one would have to run to rack up $100/mo in utilities, but I'd be willing to bet they wouldn't all fit in Squeaky's room. It's pretty clear to all three of us--Tim, the Squeakster, and myself--that Wee Beeyatch is trying to use Squeaky's living situation to pay her OWN past-due bills. Which wouldn't be a problem if it had been agreed in the beginning, but you just can't change terms like that. So in this case, painful as it may be, I'm gonna have to side with Squeaky.)

They have been trying to find a place to live. They have been failing rather spectacularly, thanks to their combined lack of/abysmal state of credit. And last night, when I was on Facebook, Squeak IMed me to ask if she could just stay here for a while.

Now, who the hell would I be to turn a pregnant kid out on the street? (Yeah, yeah, I know--someone perfectly within her rights to do so. But sometimes just because it would be acceptable to do something doesn't make it seem right--and this, to me, is one of those cases.)

And I actually kinda like having Tim around, if we're being honest. He's a neat freak; he does housework; and when I'm not hiding out in my room (which I do when nobody's around, as well, so that can't be blamed on the two of them either) we have a lot of fun. It may not be the most equally-balanced friendship in the world, but...Look. It's fairly clear to me that there's a good chance I will spend my "golden years" having to look out for myself, in the absence of any husband or children or extended family to count on. I'm not as okay with that as I wish I was; I have to admit, seeing all my grade-school classmates on Facebook, married and procreating, with sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law and a string of family stretching out the door, I feel like a failure at living. Mostly I can combat it; after all, in the absence of JP, this is my choice. And if it's not my favorite choice to make, I do recognize that it is the fairest choice for everyone concerned; looking back over the past few years, the things I liked about everyone I dated have been the things that reminded me most of JP. I never thought I was comparing, but yeah--I was. And I still am; it's unfortunate, but there it is. Everyone's better off this way.

But anyway: if I'm not going to generate a family, and since I don't have an original family to speak of--there's me, there's Mom, there's my dad's sister-in-law and her sister, and my mom's youngest sister who lives a billion miles away--and that's the lot of them, unless I want to count my mom's other two sibs who send her anti-Obama wingnut e-mails ten times a week, and I abso-freaking-lutely do NOT wish to count THOSE two, nor their spouses nor their spawn... anyway, since THEY're not there for me, I've got to create my own family. And I guess this is what I'm doing. Tim is like the irresponsible little brother with a good heart and not much in the way of sense; Squeaky's the little brother's bedraggled girlfriend who shows up pregnant one day. There ARE less-fucked-up or not-fucked-up-at-all people in my life; Debbie, for one, and Firefly; Debbie being a wee bit more fucked-up than Firefly (okay, actually a lot LOT LOT more, but since it's not her fault and hasn't completely compromised her ability to make a good life for herself, it's not so bad.) And honestly--let's just get to where the bear crapped in the woods now--seriously, who the hell am I to judge someone else for their fucked-up life? My record for keeping a job is not-quite-five-years; I'm stuck in an entirely different decade than most people currently inhabit; I've got an incredibly warped perception of time, and thanks to the illustrious Ms. China White, there are large blocks of my late 20's of which I have no recollection. I am in DIRE need of a really excellent grief counselor; I'm constantly harassed by the thought of the afterlife, and wondering if I'm living right--constantly moving between "there is a heaven, so I better get my shit together" and "there's nothing, so believing in some grand reunion is foolish denial of the truth". I have no house; I have no car; my credit is fucked to a high degree (although at least THIS time I'm in good company, and can blame no one but myself....oh, and the subprime mortgage industry); I am now officially Completely Miserable in my job, but I've also come to realize that I will probably be Completely Miserable in ANY job which requires working for someone else, or accepting arbitrary orders, or acting in ways which don't make sense to me--in other words, any job anywhere at all. I can't even start a relationship, let alone sustain one, and I've given up on the possibility of anyone ever finding me attractive again. So again, I ask: WHO the hell am I to judge anyone ELSE's life?? Mostly I want to run away and do exactly the things I want to do, nothing else; buy my little farm and put a "Baked Goods For Sale" sign out by the road, and spend my mornings baking and my afternoons in the barn doing all manner of art--pottery, and glasswork, and painting and quilting and writing and crochet (and maybe even learn to knit, even though I've never been able to get both hands working at once so far). And at night, just lay out in a hammock slung between two trees, and pull a sheet of mosquito net over me and go to sleep. It's not that I want a simpler time, exactly; I want a time that's MINE, where no one is controlling me but me, and where every action moves toward a goal; where rules make sense and exist for a REASON, and don't change randomly at someone else's whim. I want to live an orderly life--not a life without chaos, exactly, but a life where I UNDERSTAND the chaos. Honestly? Right now, Tim and Squeaky are the least of my worries.

And if from this you take the conclusion that my work is really screwing with me, please accept my applause for your excellent deductive skills. Last evening, upon walking into my apartment, I unleashed such a storm of profanity and invective regarding my boss--touching on issues including--but not limited to--her ancestry, her sexual practices, her hygiene, her mental state, and her predilection for inter-species mating--that even Tim, who has heard me at my peak, was surprised. It would have been one of my proudest moments of vulgar inventiveness, had I not been SO DAMN PISSED-OFF at the subhuman stinking pustulent piece of ....Oops....there I go again.

(Yeah, I know--what made me so mad, right? Let's just put it this way: When I am reprimanded for a violation of a policy --a violation which involved an interval of TWO MINUTES, against a policy which, although I was told in the beginning that it was perfectly acceptable to do what I did, has apparently changed, of which change neither I was EVER informed, nor were the two OTHER people who perform the same task...I do NOT remember EVER seeing, ANYFUCKINGWHERE in my job description, "reads minds/displays psychic ability". That was NOT in the qualifications, and so to be reprimanded for what is essentially my failure to read that crazy-ass whoreslut's degenerated parasite-raddled mind...

I am perfectly calm, now.)

Seriously, though, I am never going to accept a job working for another female boss. I told myself that when I left Other Place Where I Used To Work; my resolve was strengthened by Ill-Fated Short-Term Employment; but I needed a job so badly, and I thought there was going to be a buffer zone between myself and her (and there was, til they demoted Best Boss Ever--I should have started slamming out the resumes right there and then)...It's not a mistake I'm going to make again. I don't care HOW desperate I am...it's NEVER worth it.

Oh. And then, after all this--Squeaky asking for a place to stay, ElMo (which is what I have dubbed The Crazy--I have my reasons!) giving me nothing but shit because I couldn't read her mind, and a bunch of other crap into which I haven't even gone--after all that, last night the phone rang: After seven years, CR's been put out of the girlfriend's house. (Short form: She asked him if he loved her; he gave an honest answer. Next sentence: "Get out of my house!") He's trying to work out how to get a place of his own; even though apartments are SUPER-cheap there, so are wages, especially when he can only get 25 hours a week. I was really impressed, actually, with most of what he said; seems like all the things I said so long ago, about standing up and being a man and living on his own, may have sunk in after all. Seven years late, mind, but any progress is good progress.

And that, my friends--all those bits of wonder, and an exploding toilet too--is what my little life is made of, right about now. Strangely enough, I'm almost happy; there's something to be said for realizing that you are no longer willing to be crapped on for the privilege of drawing a paycheck. Obviously I've gotta hang on til the economy gets itself together, but that's okay; the important thing is KNOWING it's not forever, that I'm not going to let it be forever, and I'm not going to spend the rest of my life scared of some bitch's opinion of me. That's no way to live, and even if I have to do it temporarily, I do NOT have to do it permanently. I may not be able to see the light at the end, but at least now I recognize that it is, in fact, a tunnel I'm standing in.

Summing Up Everything You Need To Know In Two Words:

Squeaky's pregnant.

Truncated For Your Health

Either I am a rotten blogger, or I have the most boring life EVER.

I am on 100% Supreme Autopilot, mostly. The wildest things have gotten in the past month was last weekend, when Tim and I had plans to go visit a friend of his who has totally wanted to meet me, allegedly, for some very long time; potential-boyfriend noises were being made, unless I'm completely over-interpreting things. I haven't even MET this guy; haven't even SEEN him. We're at that point of the party, folks; not QUITE "desperate acts based solely on the fear of dying alone", but getting there. Getting VERY there. And then the same weekend, out of the clear blue, CR called me and told me he was coming into town and wanted to see me. As in, "see" me. Which I thought was one HELL of a lot of nerve, coming from a guy who quite thoroughly eviscerated my self-image re: that topic as he left, but I didn't say so, because: see above re the current state of the party. All options are being kept open at this time. (Well, NEARLY all options. The guy at work who has a crush on me, the one who stinks so bad that even after he leaves, his actual CHAIR continues to stink; HE is not on the open-options list. Nor is Tim. So: All non-nauseating options are being kept open at this time.)

And so the weekend came, and the rain was so rainy and the snow so snowy and the weather so Chicago-in-March-y that we cancelled the gathering at Tim's friend's place; and then CR counted his money one more time and decided he couldn't afford the trip after all, but didn't tell me that til Monday, when the game of phone tag finally ended. So basically the weekend was a washout, which was really no problem for me; I slept. A lot.

I've been playing around on Facebook a lot lately. For the longest damn time I had exactly one friend on Facebook, and then Tim and Squeaky added me so I had three, but then Squeaky de-friended me as part of some revenge plot on someone or another--no, don't ask, it's just not worth it. So then for a while I had only two friends, but then one day I used that "Find people you know" tool, and it turned out that one of the few grade-school people I kept in touch with was also on Facebook. So I added her, and in her profile was "Our Lady of Visible Discomfort Grammar School, Class of 1984." And there, in one place, was...everybody from my class, mostly.

(I'm stopping here; though I've actually written QUITE a lot after this point, I'm going to hold off posting it til I see whether I might feel a little less self-pitying sometime soon. The same old shit, mah peeps--the "why" and the "what now" and the blah, blah, blah. If you want some of that, there are all sorts of morose old posts of mine to read, but right now I'm even making mySELF a little sick.)