Caterwauling

It’s 1 a.m. and I’m here with Terror and Rage for our nightly threesome.

I can’t be in such physical and emotional pain, and be so exhausted, and have Mom so sick, and have my apartment complex giving ME a complex, and have both cars in the shop, and have credit card fraud, and have another working holiday weekend, and basically be tap-dancing on the line between pulling it together and running screaming, and not march all Virginia Woolfe-style into the ocean.

I know I have to raise my vibration to live the life I want. But how bad do things have to get for you to finally live in the kind of denial that’s supposed to attract all those good things to you?

But no time to wallow. On to the next meeting.

The thing with granting yourself peace, it’s just like cleaning or eating right.

You can’t do it once and be good for life. You have to make the conscious choice to do it every single minute of every single day … or at least enough to make your body or house inhabitable, but on a cognitive level.

What I have loved about the type of job I’m in, is that I bond with top experts. They do their thing, I make them look better. They fuck up, I cover it up. I earn their undying gratitude, and we all live happily ever after. Whenever I need a favor, I gots the hookup.

And then there are people who suck the air out of the room and who throw you under the bus and back up over you a few times while never acknowledging how many times you lifted up that same bus and helped them out from under it.

I’m not looking for a parade for all I have done for them. God knows it doesn’t work like that. But escalating every little thing to crisis levels and trying to make me look like a slacker in public? Deserves a nice hot cuppa “shut the fuck up” dumped all over their pointy little heads.

It’s already hard enough most days to scrub my butt and toss on some clean scandalous gutchies. Pantyhose and makeup on top of it means I’m REALLY trying hard to keep it together. And to constantly be on the defensive is really, really messing with the inner peace I only catch fleeting glimpses of.

Karma may be a bitch, but I’m here now and I can be a MUCH bigger one. In case anybody missed THAT memo.

Peace out … the window once again.

One of my amazing customer service reps told me a story about a customer who called in this morning to cancel a subscription.

The man has terminal cancer. So when it comes to using our product going forward, he said, “What’s the point, really?”

My friend said, “I wish you peace.”

The man cried.

I did too, when she told me the story.

I’ve never heard a better reply to such terrible news.

Peace is what we all want, really. Although we can’t grant it to others, it is something we can gift to ourselves.

Today, I grant myself peace. And I wish you the same.

I cannot stop telling people about Gabourey Sidibe’s Ms. Foundation Gala speech.

Some highlights:

1. Why on earth do we ask her how she’s so confident and not, say, maybe someone whose self-assurance IS puzzling?

The last time someone said to me what a “pretty face” I have, I told them all of me is pretty damn rockin’, from the inside out. Fuck people and their backhanded compliments.

Yes I want to have a perfect body. But that isn’t in the cards for me right now. It never was and may never be. So I’ve worked on my MIND. My HUMOR. My HEART and SOUL.

That’s why I don’t settle for the first boy who says hello. I don’t feel that I have to be grateful that “someone” looked twice at me. Plenty of people look two and four and five times. And not just in horror!

I can’t tell you how many times I got picked up at SunFest. Maybe it was the walking-down-the-street-eating-a-banana portion of the program.

Or maybe it was the dancing-because-the-spirit-moved-me bit. Or maybe it was the fact that I am having a good time wherever I go and not, say, sucking in my gut and shrinking from the world because someone may think I don’t deserve to be living in it because of some “rules” that someone else has made THEM live and think by.

2. So if you ARE the smartest person in the room, why are you always expected to be a shrinking violet and fit in with those who aren’t?

I don’t think I am better than anyone. But if you called me for a reference on most of the people I’ve met in my life, I wouldn’t want to be associated with them. So, I don’t want them as friends because, you know, guilt by association and all.

And it goes back to a theme about which I have pounded the table for the past 13 years that I’ve run this blog — why on EARTH do I have to be nervous about lesser people’s CONTROL over where I live, how I work and the way I spend my precious free time?

I’m sorry — if any of them had all the answers and were living the dream, I’d be taking notes. Otherwise, don’t try to erode my greatness in order to elevate yours.

Am I the smartest person on the planet? I think I rank higher than many. I just don’t have to open my mouth to constantly try to prove it. I love Gabourey for owning it that, yes, she really was awesome and therefore destined to BE SOMEBODY.

3. Dance at your desk anyway.

Her story about being excluded from the school party, but enjoying it from afar anyway, means a lot to me because I do dance at my desk.

So what if everyone else has an opinion of you that’s lesser than yours. If I have learned anything in my near-40 years, it’s that you can’t please anyone, any of the time. Might as well please yourself.

And in those 60-second bursts of booty-poppin’ (oh yeah, I go there), I have more self-confidence and glee and most of all FUN than I ever have in my whole entire life.

It’s just a shame that it generally takes NOBODY WATCHING for life’s best moments to happen.

I applaud Gabourey. Not for any other reason that she made me laugh and cry and feel free to love myself as much as I possibly can. And I’d give anything to meet more people like that — like myself — in this world.

So Evil Landlady 4 told me she would be HAPPY to terminate my lease today.

I kind of went a little nuts defacing my rent check. I’ve had it with her antics and made it a point to have my roaches tell her so in illustration.

She FLIPPED and left me two insane voicemails. In. Sane. I mean, incriminating herself in every possible way because she admitted what a jacked-up place this is. She accused me of all sorts of shit that isn’t true. It was awful.

Here’s the thing. They only pay attention to me when I’m paying them. They usually lose my “honey do” lists that I submit with that check. So, I’ve been doodling ON the checks for years. I guess it was the “hunnit fiddy” I wrote in the “payable” line that got them. Who knows.

I was talking to a young friend about performance evaluations over my career. I was saying how it’s really hard to hear how much YOU SUCK from people who, well, live in glass houses.

The thing is, you can’t do much if you still want to get paid. You let your heart break for a while till the pain either goes away or becomes so immense that you find enough alcohol to fill it.

At a place where you say pay a couple grand a month for the privilege of being ignored, lied to, laughed at and otherwise fucked with … yeah, no. It took them sending me a “YOU IN VIOLATION” notice (their grammar, not mine) for having a goddamned welcome sign on my door that NOBODY SEES, and I Lost. It.

I can’t get around dealing with obnoxious drivers when I’m in the car an hour and a half each day. I have to deal with working as much as I can and not being able to produce enough.

I also struggle with what a dear friend used to call a “Magic Pot of Jobs” (i.e., as if one existed) — only mine is a “Magic Pot of Candidates” who do not actually exist even if we want to believe they are out there somewhere with the unicorns and the leprechauns and the talking puppies sliding down rainbows.

So while I’m busy failing everybody for about 13.5-ish hours of my day and that’s not including the landlady, forgive me for saying something out of turn that was born out of sheer frustration.

I mean, yes I want out of this lease. But on my terms, not hers.

I replied by e-mail, because I do everything in writing when it comes to this place, “It was unprofessional of me and I will be happy to issue a new check. My emotions got the better of me with the recent letter you tacked on my door. You are doing a better job than your predecessors and I appreciate your efforts.”

Let her be the hysterical one.

And if I get tossed, well, I can’t say I wasn’t heard. Which is my biggest complaint across all areas of my life — I get pushed to the limit, I scream and then they think I’m the crazy one. Considering HOW MANY times this pattern has played out in my life, you’d think I’d find a different course of action …

“You stole my sanity
Now you are the enemy
Are you sure you wanna play this game?
Are you sure you wanna play it?”

— Daughtry, “Traitor”

Saw Daughtry last night at SunFest. I showed up for The Bangles’ set at 2 p.m. (fucking fantastic) and stayed the whole time till he took the stage at 9 p.m. And OMG, fabulous.

Anyway, the lyric above stuck in my head in a way it hasn’t in my casual listening to his newest album.

I realized someone declared war on me a long time ago, and only now did I realize, hey, how many times do you really think you can dick around me with me and I’m just going to keep squirting lube in my ass to make it more-bearable?

It sucks when friends become the enemy. But it sucks far less that I spied it with my third eye a long time ago and, really, it was just a matter of time.

It’s been a while since I declared, “Fuck me and I will FUCK YOU BACK.”

It kind of feels good actually.

Even though I have no idea how to win at this juncture …

Also from the “should I say it or not say it” files, I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday with a specialist. Like, one I’ve waited more than a month to see.

I called to confirm, since no one called me, and they said oh thank God you called. The doc is out sick and the other assistant quit and she jacked up the files on her way out the door.

So, we rescheduled. And my regular doc’s office called with good news — a specific blood test came back without any abnormalities.

Mind you, all I’ve been hearing is “rare,” “atypical” and “never saw that before.” So, “not abnormal” is like saying, “heebie-jeebie free.”

So here’s the thing. I JUST DODGED A DEATH SENTENCE.

Read that again. I’m not free and clear, by any means. But I. Am. Not. Facing. A. Terminal. Illness.

I didn’t feel like I ever was. But, we had to rule it out.

So while I wasn’t surprised, I had that moment of, “Well, Goddess, what are you going to do with this ‘second chance’ on life, girl?”

Well, indeed.

I went back to work.

Later I thought, “Couldn’t have done that with a death sentence. What would you have done, Goddess, if that call had a different message?”

Probably would have gone back to work.

I’m sure we’ve all played the game about what would you do if you had 30 days to live. I have many entries on that very concept that I’m too lazy to look up. I’d want to cash out my savings and go to Europe.

In reality I’d have to work every last minute of my miserable life so I could leave Mom with a little something. It wouldn’t be enough. But it’s all I could do.

And so, I’m glad I get to choose a different outcome. Eventually, anyway.

I tell ya. Being between “not dying” and “not living” is a weird place to be …