Caterwauling

“Don’t want you to see
When pain overflows
Yeah, you’re not my friend.

I still think that we were meant to be
Ooh-oh, lie to me now.
I still dream that you were meant for me
Yeah, why would you doubt?

…

I don’t wanna feel
This heartache and fear
I don’t wanna wait (anymore)
I don’t want to be nice.”

— Elizaveta, “Meant”

Perhaps the only good thing I have to say this week is that I realized I could live without someone. Might not ever get over them fully. But, truly, I think my heart started to feel something again.

Or maybe that was my loins. Yeah, that’s definitely it.

Either way. *shrug*

I’m starting to realize that I take too damned long to make a decision. I lost out on my dream car because I was A) waffling because of the financial commitment, B) distrustful of shithead salesmen and C) listening to pseudo-psychic Mom who wondered whether there were something wrong with the car.

My dream house is still under contingency. I got in touch with the shithead realtor to inquire whether the potential renters’ pending application had been approved and to thank him for keeping me in mind if not. He’s another idiot I wouldn’t trust with someone else’s rent check. But alas, it’s my own fault that I didn’t follow up on my first inquiry sooner.

I have another “thing” I’ve been agonizing over. And really, if you don’t go after things, you don’t REALLY have a choice. My choices always seem to be the result of “I over-thought it and totally missed my shot and now it’s someone else’s.”

I got to thinking about when I took my first Florida job. The agonizing, oh, it was painful. But I rationalized (after breaking my brain) that even if it sucked, at least I’d live in Florida. So, some good came from it. Again, after coming to that conclusion, I felt I’d be OK no matter how it turned out.

So, I’m impulsive on a lot of things but man, I lose out on all the big stuff that I have to justify to myself seven ways to Sunday.

The same is true with matters of the heart. I love to follow it but I always find myself screeching to a halt and being frozen in time on my tip-toes so I don’t cross whatever line I see. Mom says it’s thanks to someone special who led me on and let me down when I fell.

“I’m not asking for sympathy (oh)
Cause I know what you need me to say
Thanks for what you have given me (Take it back)
I will always remember you watching me walking away, hey.”

I like to think that good things come in time … that other things don’t magically come together if they’re not meant to. But maybe they only come together when you take steps toward making them happen.

In any case, I fear I’m about to lose something else due to obsessing about it instead of just DOING it. And as always, I only have myself to blame, if I blow this one too. …

The elevator doors unexpectedly opened on the fourth floor yesterday as I was heading out.

A girl with a huge dog and a big smile said she’d catch the next elevator — she was still waiting for her boyfriend.

I burst into tears just before the doors fully closed.

Damn hormones.

I thought about how it would feel to say that. To know there was someone I could count on … someone waiting for me and looking forward to seeing me. To take for granted the most-basic thing on the entire planet. I bet she’s one of those girls who’s never gone a day without a man in her life.

I can’t understand why my life is so different from everyone else’s. Why I can’t just have a normal boyfriend and a normal job and a normal existence.

Look, I know normal is boring. But I was built for extraordinary and I haven’t gotten that yet, so maybe I need to aspire to something a little more attainable in the meantime.

For the “Scandal” watchers among us, you probably appreciated Olivia Pope’s missive at the end of this week’s episode:

“You have nothing. You have a pile of secrets and lies, and you’re calling it love. And in the meantime you’re letting your whole life pass you by while they raise children and celebrate anniversaries and grow old together. You’re frozen in time. You’re holding your breath. You’re a statue waiting for something that’s never going to happen. Living for stolen moments in hotel hallways and coat closets and you keep telling yourself they all add up to something real because in your mind they have to but they don’t. They won’t. They never will. Because stolen moments aren’t a life. So you have nothing. You have no one. End it now.”

I put it on Facebook because there’s a particular character in my life who needs to see it. Maybe a few, really, but one in particular who has made themselves at home on the periphery.

But the more I read it (to the point of memorizing it), the more I see my Buddha-statue self in it.

A terrible character from Mom’s past apparently now lives one county north of us. (The post wasn’t for him.) Their 14-karat fuckup of a relationship is the very reason I am so damaged when it comes to the opposite sex.

So these days, I find myself with a small but significant cast of characters that, if you combined them into one supreme individual, I’d have mostly everything I wanted.

But reality being what it is, I have the single guys whose hearts are either elsewhere or guarded, the not-so-single guys whose hearts spend a little time over here but their assets are elsewhere, and basically not a one doing anything to sweep me off my feet and keep me all to himself.

I want it all. I deserve to have it all. I just wonder if, because I don’t actually BELIEVE in having it all, that’s why I don’t and probably won’t until I change my outlook.

I just saw my mom attract one asshole after another all my life, and the one who lives nearby now was the only one who appeared when she was taking care of her sickly parents. Now that she’s thrust the very role she ab(w)hored onto ME, now I can’t meet a guy worth a good god damn who is happy to have a live-in mother around. (But so many of them have kids — which, ugh — but at least kids graduate and move out at some point.)

But I made a friend recently who not only lives with his long-term love, but her father lives with them too. Now THAT is a man.

So I have recently acquired the hope that there is a good guy out there who WILL take on my parent, too.

I wonder how different life would be, were my grandfather still around. Today would have been his 87th birthday. My plan was always to send money to mom and him so they could live so much better than the miserable, meager existence that he always portrayed as more-fabulous than it was.

It’s funny. Everyone always tells you to have faith in God. And I do. And when it comes to problems, to give them up to God and go about your life.

But having a sickly mother on my hands for six and a half years, I’ve given her up to God and tried to get about the business of paying the rent and hoping He’d come through with her. I mean, God turned His back on us with my grandfather’s shoddy medical care. Perhaps He might help mom out to make up for it?

This family has been doomed, it seems, to a pattern that just won’t break. I refuse to succumb to it. But it’s hard to do anything about it when you spend your days and nights chained (sometimes willingly) to what pays (most of) the bills instead of trying to figure out how to break the chains of sickness, illness and living at the poverty level for the only person left in your life and the only one who really DOES give a damn about you, no matter what.

Are you there, God? I’m not sure what — or WHO — else I have left to give up for Lent and I don’t know what difference it would make. But whatever it is, I’d do it in a second if that meant we’d finally see Your work in our lives.

Today was so stressful, it felt like a workday.

Got up early to go look at a house I’ve been lusting after. The listing agent on it never called me so I called a realtor friend and asked her to hook me up with a showing for the 3/2 villa at X price point on the water. I said it was a gated community so I’d meet her at the gate.

She calls me at five till the appointed hour to see where I am. And says, oh, there’s an ungated entrance — use that.

Hmm. I’ve driven by this thing a million times. Everything is gated down there.

I said, where is this entrance that is ungated?

She gives me an intersection.

There are no intersections ON THE DAMN WATER.

Turns out that there is a complex with the same name and apparently same setup and price, completely on the other side of town.

That’s where she was.

*headdesk*

So I find the listing agent and hunt his ass down to get to see “my” place. He picks up and he’s either asleep or in mid-fuck … I can’t really tell. He says he’ll call me in a couple of hours when he gets to the office.

Fast-forward exactly eight hours and I get a call. He’s just as idiotic-sounding as he was earlier. Tries forwarding me to his “partner” who, gee at six o’clock on a Saturday isn’t at her desk, which he apparently can see from where he’s sitting.

He hangs up on me three times and finally calls back now (8 p.m.) to say OK fine he will help me himself.

So the unit I loved? Under contingency. Someone else is applying for it and getting it.

He tells me to text him my e-mail address. I texted him the fact that I e-mailed him on February fucking 16th from this e-mail address. Meaning, if your DUMB ASS had gotten your shit together last week, this could have been MY HOUSE.

Oh I am so bitter I cannot breathe.

I work my ASS off so that everything is perfect and every ass is adequately kissed or slapped or whatever their fancy is. And then this idiot just lets me fall through the cracks like I am not worthy of the wonderful things I deserve in this existence. And he sounds like he’s rich — asked me if I wanted to rent a house he personally owns for the low price of $3,000 a month.

Fucker mouse.

Something better will come along. God if I keep saying it long enough, you will bring better things along, right? Or if these are the better days I was promised, just tell me and I will END IT NOW.

I don’t even want to talk about the rest of the day. But if this is how the latest Mercury retrograde cycle kicks off, you can find me under my damn covers for the next few weeks.

I saw a great Tweet yesterday that said:

“Sometimes we’re lifted to a place and we see ourselves again.”

I took a screenshot and put it on Facebook for posterity.

Not that anyone has lifted me up lately, except my momma who continues to tell me — of jobs and men who cause me stress — “You don’t need them, honey.”

Except when it comes to one man, of course. But that’s probably never going to happen and here’s why.

I went out last night with two of my guy friends. And I had SO MUCH FUN.

I only had time to join them for a drink, although I stayed for three and I got a big fat parking ticket because I didn’t buy enough time … THIS ON TOP OF THE $41 I HAVE TO PAY THE COUNTY TO KEEP THEM FROM SUSPENDING MY LICENSE BECAUSE I DIDN’T FINISH TRAFFIC SCHOOL WITHIN THEIR TIME FRAME.

But my God. Conversation and laughs came so easily. That’s the way it should be. Not dancing around topics that nobody wants to cover. Not suggesting things to do and basically getting the Grumpy Cat “NO!” and not much else other than the occasional “someday.” Not getting ignored/blown off because they don’t feel like being social.

Anyway.

I worked over 52 hours this (holiday) week and everyone was SHOCKED when I left at 5 yesterday. (Hey, I got a good invitation for happy hour, and I had plans for after it.)

It was cute, though, how many people stopped me on the way out to comment. But in a good way — that, holy shit, yes, you ARE human! You deserve to see that glowing orb in the sky called a sun.

Of course, I’m thinking, hey can you let a girl escape and go have fun after 5 for a change? We can pick this up on Monday. 🙂

So, yeah.

I guess what I’m typing is that I don’t have to solve all the world’s problems and frankly I don’t WANT to. I just try to give my best and can only hope others are doing the same but not to get too disappointed if they aren’t.

And what I’m also typing is to stop listening to Mom when she tells me to chase somebody who needs a friend but can’t admit it. GUESS WHAT — SO DO I. I do the chasing because I need a friend, too. Not because she wishes something would work out between us.

It all kind of reminds me of this exchange on “Scandal” between Olivia and Edison:

Olivia: I want painful, difficult, devastating, life-changing, extraordinary love. Don’t you want that, too?

Edison: Love is not supposed to be painful or devastating. Love isn’t supposed to hurt, Liv.

I’ve been Olivia all my life. But maybe Edison has it right.

In any case, I had fun last night and that’s what I really want to take away from this delightful shitpile of a week. 🙂

I drove to work feeling good today. We were off on Monday, but I came in anyway and put in my first-ever eight-hour workday. It’s amazing what you can get done on your own.

Before my 8 a.m. arrival today, I’d put in 42 hours already. Not that I’m looking for a pat or even an acknowledgment, but it’s more like a small congratulations to myself for busting my ass to keep things as on-track as I possibly can. Even if it always seems like I’m behind, I know I’m producing higher-level work at a higher frequency than most.

Anyway, while I was driving, I had a flashback to an interview I had back in 2011. I was desperate for a job and nervous as hell as I waited for my interviewers. (I didn’t get the job.)

I remember watching all the employees come and go, not just from that company but from others that inhabited that building. I was so jealous that they had jobs. And so irritated at how many of them looked absolutely angry or defeated or just plain dead behind the eyes.

I would have traded my life for any of theirs that day, just to know a paycheck would be arriving.

My day started off well enough today — thank God I stayed late last night to prepare for another super-busy Friday. But alas the specter of MORE WORK, and more work that doesn’t fall into my area of expertise, gave me that tired feeling that I saw on all those employees’ faces at that other building.

Alas, at a moment like this, I whip out my gratitude journal and simply thank God that the next paycheck is coming on schedule. And my mood will have been significantly improved by then. And that, unlike those others I saw impersonating zombies at the other building, I can find my grace.

I’m glad that no matter how trying some situations or days may be, I’m still a thousand times better off than I was then. I was a sad, desperate girl who completely flubbed the interview because my confidence had only been tied to compensation in the past.

No job, no worth — self or otherwise.

Even though right now I’m having a small moment of weakness (retrograde seems to be starting a day early — just because I got everything prepared last night doesn’t mean it’s coming together easily today) to deal with, I’m still in an overall position of strength. And I really do thank God for that every single day of my life.

I’m one of those people who is always accumulating information. I’m a little more selective about what I share, since I’m a straightforward kind of gal and people like to repeat what they hear (often with their own embellishments).

I’m super-selective about with whom things get shared. Sure, I will test people. It’s usually soon enough that something gets back to me. And if you only entrust one or two people with something, well, that makes it easier to figure out who’s been flapping their yapper.

Now, that said, I rarely say anything I wouldn’t expect to come and bite me on my pudgy pork-roast ass. If I say it behind your back, believe me, I’d say it to your face. One would hope, however, that folks might use a little thing called discretion and let a girl say her piece without using it to make her life more-difficult.

But every once in a while, you let your guard down … or let it down again … and you wonder why on earth people who claim to be in your corner like to let others into your space. Uninvited. Not for sympathy or anything but maybe for them to one-up someone else with what they know or what might get them, if not ahead, then maybe a little notoriety.

I cherish my relationships. Even the fake ones. And I hate having to move yet another one into that category.

Worse still will be the texts, e-mails and other surreptitious mentions (or overt ones, depending on the source) who will want to know *who* and *what* inspired this post.

And the way I see it, if you have to ask, just … don’t. I already know. And so do you.

I’ve said it before but trust really is the trickiest currency of all.

Another friend came to me with good news today. I’m thinking it’s more than my turn to have some of my own. But … what?

Here’s quite the opposite, in fact:

Just got a notice from the county that they’re going to suspend my driver’s license for supposed non-payment of a ticket that they didn’t even have the courtesy to list.

Look, I speed. The worse things get, the more I speed. And I have paid every last dime to this wonderful county that I owed them. Usually within a week of receiving said tickets. OK, so I didn’t do my driver’s ed course. But I paid for it. Can they take away your license for that?

I tried to take the course. But when I finished reading the instructions within two minutes, I got an error message that I was supposed to spend five minutes on that page and to go spend my remaining three minutes reading the fucking instructions.

That was the last time I bothered logging in.

Fucking government.

Gee, if they take away my license, I won’t be able to drive to work anymore! Which is where I get most of my tickets anyway. Hmmm.

In any case, clearly the county government sucks as much as the state. I hear Gov. Rick Scott refused funds to set up the ObamaCare program down here, so the feds are going to have to build it for us. What a fucking dick. Why can’t someone suspend his ability to drive so he can’t go ruin our state a little bit more, every day that he arrives at his office?

The folks at BlogHer issued a Valentine’s Day challenge to write a love letter to someone or something — whether you’re happily (or otherwise, I’m sure) coupled or happily (or otherwise) single.

I did get a Valentine this year from someone unexpected. It made my week. It really did. The people I expected would at least wish me a happy day from their safe distance, well, yeah. But for someone out of the blue to think of me and even send a card? Mind. Blown.

In any event, I’ve been meaning to say hello to my Someone — that nebulous being I’ve never met or maybe I have and just don’t know it yet. So, here’s a belated love note to him.

Dearest Someone,

It’s another year closer to our happily — if not ever after, then happily for what I hope will be a good long while. Because we deserve it.

It’s another year in which we are learning and growing and maybe even growing more frustrated that our paths haven’t yet crossed in a significant way, if at all.

I am confident that, even at our age, we’re still enduring some growing pains … and that we aren’t ready to build an eternity on an unsteady foundation of job stresses and other turmoil that we would probably be taking out on each other if the universe had put us together during this critical period of both disappointment and, with it, the enlightenment that follows.

As such, if you find yourself in the “ready to give up” mode that pops into my brain a little more often than I’d like to admit, please don’t. I’m still here, learning about the types of people and characteristics I do and don’t want in my life … and how to be a better person myself.

While I often say I’ll free up my evenings and holidays for when I have someone for whom to free them up, let’s face it. I don’t know how. As such, I (albeit weakly) remind myself that I’m not at a place right now where I CAN’T bring home the stress of the day. And you don’t deserve that.

While I know you’ll be able to make me see the world with clearer, and certainly happier, eyes, I do know you wouldn’t love me right now as much as I know you would otherwise. I look forward to being in a place where I can switch off the world and focus solely on you.

I imagine you face some of the same challenges, and that you also like me fill your rare free time with as many friends and adventures as you can to keep your emotional heart as healthy as you know how.

In the meantime, we will continue finding happiness in ourselves so that we can magnify each other. I don’t believe in having someone complete you — I want someone 100% actualized and I want to BE 100% actualized. If we can’t be content with ourselves, then we will spend a lifetime (or however long we are allotted) seeing only the not-so-attractive things in each other with which we haven’t come to terms in ourselves.

So, my dear Someone. I have a lot of work to do, both for a paycheck and within myself. Next year I expect to be able to finally be able to talk with you in person. And, I hope, much sooner than that.

Until then, I’ll be getting ready for that day. I know you will be too.

Love,
Goddess

Just found the cutest house about 10 minutes south of where I am now.

It’s a little higher (about $200 a month) than I want to pay. But $350 less than I’m paying now.

Ding ding ding, could this be a winner?

Depends on whether I hear back from the rental agent, of course.

I ran into my rental-office queen today. She’s been chasing me about my lease renewal and she said she knows I’m unhappy and wants to help me to be happy.

She told me about all the upcoming renovations (*presume I’m making whacking-off gestures*) and how she got rid of the inept maintenance man. I said look, the only cosmetic improvement made to this place in the four years I’ve lived here was when they forcibly removed the Evil Landlady. And who wants to live through construction, assuming it ever starts and actually would get finished — which NEVER happens around this place?

She said we could negotiate on the rent increase. Which, I’m intrigued by and said I’d think about. Because, as I told her, I’m not in a hurry to pay more for a whole lot of nothing.

I told her about the past couple of years, about having the high-paying jobs and then the no-paying jobs and now being in something that pays less and I’m just trying to make ends meet in the same ZIP code.

I didn’t tell her about getting my taxes done today and seeing my 2011-to-2012 income comparison. I mean, it looks great on paper — I doubled my salary over that time frame. But if we look at 2010-to-2011, I made a THIRD of what I should have. So, do your own math if you must, but I’m just depressed in general right now.

This all got me to thinking about one of my best friends from D.C. who hightailed it out of town a few years before I did the same. We used to say that changing jobs was really an exercise in “trading bad for bad.” You exchange one hideous element (i.e., working for crackheads) in exchange for another (i.e., taking home less money). You don’t ever really win — you just count yourself lucky to stay in the race.

In any event, we will leave the “trading the Panic Room for the Boob Bounce House for the Market Outhouse for the Alligator Farm” discussion for when I’m ready to live on the streets.

(It will be a hell of a discussion, though!)

But we will apply it to apartment-hunting today and say, OK, I will give up the Intracoastal views and direct ocean access in exchange for MORE SPACE (read: an extra bedroom to hide mom’s stunning cardboard-box collection) and slightly more money in my pocket.

That’s trading good for good, yes, but it’s a shame you always have to sacrifice SOMETHING in order to get SOMETHING ELSE you want.

I just wish life were less about trading OFF and more about trading UP.

Another week that there’s not enough wine to wash it away. Hooray.

Managed to leave work before 7 almost every night this week. Beats 9 p.m. I’ll take it!

Everybody seems to have good news lately, and I am over-the-moon happy for them about it. And I put it all down in my gratitude journal.

Just … one day I’d like to put something in my gratitude journal that isn’t just thanking God for being good to those I love, or thanking Him for what hasn’t yet come to pass.

I did get a bit of good news this morning. Nothing astounding, but for once I did something for me instead of putting everybody else before me.

Nothing else new. Been kind of isolated rather than putting my problems out there. Made a new friend at work. Not sure who I can trust anymore but too overjoyed (*cough*) sometimes to care.

The same characters are still in my world although their starring roles have been changed to supporting. But every last one of them deserves an Oscar for something, and it’s mostly avoidance of physical presence. (*looking at Topo Gigio*)

I had a revelation yesterday. The moment my life turned to shit was about 17 Valentine’s Days ago, when I worked till midnight, had to postpone dinner reservations three times, and was so annoyed by work and life and him that I broke up with him before the appetizer even arrived.

Seventeen years of working till midnight, lackluster relationships and being strung out on exhaustion and wine. Jesus Christ.

Get me out of this pattern, someone … anyone. This “doing the same thing for two decades and hoping for a different result” is FAR beyond insanity … it’s downright criminal.