zeptember

I felt crampy this morning, so I took 600mg Ibuprofen before work.

George arrived around 11am, so I took 600mg more.

I left work around 1:45pm today. Light cramps had begun by noon, but mostly, I was falling asleep on the phone and I wasn’t comprehending the customers anymore due to both the daze that sets in before the pain, and all the Ibuprofen I’d taken.

It really started yesterday - I was really tired all day, and I hadn’t taken any Ibuprofen. I got home and took a short nap, and lounged on the couch for most of the evening. No energy whatsoever. I had to force myself just to do the dishes.

All the way home, the pain threatened to grow worse, but never did. Just slight pain continues along with feeling verrrry tired. But yet I’m restless. The restless part is always annoying. I’ll pace the house. Sit down and get back up. Lay down and toss and turn before getting up again. Just can’t get comfortable. That’s part of having george for me.

When I got home, I thought I’d just fall down on the bed and sleep. That was the only thought on my mind the entire drive home was to fall face down on the bed and sleep. But once home, there was the restlessness.

The house is 66°F (18°C). Outside it is 56°F (13°C) and sunny. It feels warmer outside because of the sun.

The other part of having george for me is the freezing. For the past week and a half, I’ve gone to bed with three blankets and a fucking HAT. Yes, a week and a half before george is normal for my body temp to be so low.
And now that he’s here, I’m wearing full body pajamas with footies AND slippers AND my fucking hat. In the house. I’d be wearing gloves, too, if I could type in them. Too bad I don’t have any fingerless gloves.

The other thing that I hate about george (I could go on and on) is the Hunger. I’m STARVING. I’m craving all kinds of things. I’ve been coming home and having gluten-free brownies for dinner for nearly a week, now. No matter what I eat, it isn’t what I need or want. So I push it away, searching for what I REALLY want. But I don’t have or can’t find what I want, so I stay hungry.

Aw crap. I think the pain is really trying to set in, now. I know I won’t be back to work tomorrow. At least my boss had advance warning and knows of my health issue.

Time to force myself to lay down for a bit. Perhaps I’ll try to read a book my friend loaned me. She found the book to be hilarious, but I haven’t been able to get into it yet - it’s not doing it for me. In fact, it’s reminding me waaaay too much of the Midwest in general, and a certain Appalachian family in particular. But it’s not just the Midwest or Appalachia that has people who act like the characters in Sellevision. It’s all over the U.S. and it’s big and ugly and scary.

By the way, the book in question is called Sellevision. I get to see Sellevision in online format every day at work when I provide customer support to people selling stuff on websites hosted by the company I work for. People are selling horses, puppies, cars and parts, real estate, psychic readings, shoes, religion and porn. Those appear for some reason to be the big categories, and many of these people are located in the Midwest and Deep South. All their stuff is crap, and all these people are new to the Internet trying to sell their crap in 22pt Arial font with blink tags and other “effects”.

I wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, only to realise I’ve just emerged from dreamland where I’ve been troubleshooting someone’s website. Again.
I wake up for work with the same type of dream several times a week.

So maybe reading that book is a Bad Idea™.

Yeah. I’ll find another book to read for now.

October 16 (starting weight): 154lbs (70kg)
October 23: 153lbs (69kg)
October 30: 152lbs (69kg)
November 6: No weigh-in due to george
November 13: Forgot to weigh in
November 20: 153lbs (69kg)
November 27: 152lbs (69kg)

Due to george, depression and holiday feasting in the past month, my weight hasn’t changed much. I’ve still not cut cane sugar from the diet, although I am doing well keeping corn syrup and refined sugar out.

I’m still happy to not be weighing 184lbs like I did seven months ago. Keeping gluten out of my diet has proven key in keeping that weight off, but has not kept me from my depressions, as I had at first declared to be cured from.

The culprit in my last really bad fall into the pit was Oxycodone, which I had taken at a doseage of 162mg once per night over 3 nights. That week, I had the breakdown. I looked up side effects - CNS depressant. I was already on my way down due to job stress. The oxycodone thrust me under water and held me there, flailing. I’ll never take that shit again. I’ve always known I was overly sensitive to pharmaceuticals outside of Tylenol and Ibuprofen.

Several people have pointed out to me over the last few months that genealogy seems to be really important to me; Kahleida has said it in this journal’s replies, and other friends have said it to me in person.

It seems that even meeting new people, I drift towards genealogy eventually. I always tell something about my family. It seems I’m always telling stories of my mom’s family (the Appalachian side) specifically.

The weird thing is, I loathe that family.

But therein lies the story.

As mentioned in my last entry, in childhood I spent nearly every holiday with my mother, my eight aunts and uncles, their spouses and children over at Gramma and Grampa’s house in Detroit. That is the Appalachian side of the family.

Southerners are typically proud people. They are proud of their large families and their ancestral homesteads. From about the age of 11, I was given an oral history of our family. I began writing it down by age 14, and I’m still writing it today. We have family dating back to 1730 in the Virginias, with as yet unconfirmed reports of Scottish origin.

And now, the story:

After roughly 45 years of living in Detroit, Gramma and Grampa decided in 1987 to move back home to Kentucky. The grandchildren were heartbroken and wailed because we’d miss Gramma and Grampa. The adults however… something was wrong. Some of us older kids could see it (I was 15 years old at the time), but we could not understand it.

Two years later, Grampa died. I was 17 years old by then, and so shell-shocked by the news of Grampa’s death, combined with the zombification of being a freshman in college, also combined with the fact that I was working nearly full time, that I shut down emotionally. I refused to go to Kentucky to see Grampa laid to rest. I just couldn’t accept that he was gone. I’d just seen him in June of that year. I didn’t want to see a corpse. So I didn’t go, so everything must be all right. Right?

What I was about to find out was that everything was NOT all right. And I was about to learn what it was that had been curiously WRONG with all the adults in the family.

Mom decided I was now adult enough to be let in on what our family was really like.

The nine sisters and brothers had been fighting since Gramma and Grampa moved to Kentucky - fighting over who would get what when their parents died. They knew their parents were moving back home to die, and a few wanted to start planning out their inheritances from the word go. The rest of the siblings however were horrified at such talk while their parents were still alive. My mother was in this second camp.
So for two years as I approached the last of my teen years, still as naive as a child, I had no idea that my family could have ever been trying for a “Hatfields and McCoys” type reputation.

When Grampa died in September 1989 (just months after my high school graduation), the family got downright nasty with each other. They argued over who would take care of Gramma, now. She insisted she was just fine on the family farm in Kentucky, despite never having learned how to drive. She had her neighbors just down the road to check in on her, she said. None of her kids would listen. SOMEONE had to take care of her, they argued.

Within a year and a half, with Gramma’s health now waning (mostly due to isolation and missing her husband and kids), the debate once again rose. This time, people talked retirement homes! Gramma would have no part of that. But none of her kids were willing to take her in to live with them. Most of her kids had on average four kids of their own, and Gramma didn’t want the noise, bugger the fact that she basically wasn’t invited, anyway. My mom offered to take her in, but Gramma refused. By this time, I’d moved out of the house. But Gramma still cited the fact that my mom was too poor to take care of another person, which was true.

Finally, Gramma relented to her oldest daughter M on condition that Gramma move to Florida where the daughter lived. The eldest of nine, M’s children were full grown and out of the house. Well, mostly out of the house. Except for D, whom I’ve mentioned in this journal before.

The moment that Gramma vacated the Kentucky farmhouse, the war was on. I was finally clued in to the details of the argument that had been raging for years: to ensure escape from poverty for the whole family, why not strip mine the property? This idea was put forth by the eldest of Gramma’s kids, who happened to be an accomplished car and house salesman. He’d buy a shitty car or house, fix it up cosmetically, and sell it for much more than it was worth. Hell, I think he’s still doing that today. He wears gold chains and rings and always has a toothpick sticking out the side of his mouth. He’s the very image and stereotype of the slimy con man.

Several of his brothers and sisters liked his idea, and that’s what began tearing the family apart even before Grampa had died.
Now with Gramma out of the farmhouse, the war was on.

While everyone was screaming at each other, Uncle B, the second eldest boy, snuck down to Kentucky and holed up in the farmhouse with his wife, her kids, and several guns.

Over the years, there’s been several gun waving showdowns at that farmhouse between the two eldest boys, but never any violence. Death threats? Oh yeah, still to this day. But no all out violence.

Gramma lived with her daughter M for about 12 years while her son E tried relentlessly to have her sign over power of attorney to him so he could strip mine the land “for the family”. Gramma heard about how E would make trips down to Kentucky to harrass and threaten her other son B, who was by now diagnosed as dying with Emphysema.

Then another bomb dropped. The family found out that M’s son D had moved in with M and Gramma. Everyone in the family knows that D is a Hepatitis C patient. The family went berzerker again, and several siblings united against M.

When Gramma died of CHF in 2003, some in the family began rumour that perhaps M had murdered her, AND the warpath for the Kentucky farmhouse was rekindled.

That year, I joined my mother and her siblings, as well as a handful of cousins, in the trek to Kentucky to bury Gramma.

On the day of the funeral, my mom and two of her siblings secretly arranged for B to show up at the funeral home to pay his respects before the rest of the family showed up. Meanwhile, my brother and I had taken it upon ourselves to try to coax B from the farmhouse and go with us to the funeral home. We were sad not to find him at the farmhouse - only to learn later he was at the funeral home.

After the funeral in the church, the family drove in procession out to the holler, and we watched as Gramma’s sons laid the casket into the fresh grave on the neighbor’s property up on a hill from their farmhouse (which is officially registered as a family cemetery and holds several of our family as well).

Once finished with that, several of Gramma’s kids decided to go to our farmhouse just down the road and pound on the door til B came out.
My mom and a couple other siblings protested this, and told the rest to leave their brother alone. My brother and I talked about going and standing between our uncles and aunts to prevent violence against Uncle B, but our mom pleaded for us to stay out of it, so we reluctantly did.
Besides, we heard that Uncle E was packing a gun. Things were really getting ugly, now.

The story we heard was that the few who did go to the farmhouse beat on the door and yelled insults until B finally opened up, whereupon his siblings stormed the place, and E waved a gun in B’s face.

Ever since then, the second oldest daughter (J) and the oldest son E have taken turns making threatening calls and visits to B as his health continues to decline. J and E have both repeatedly threatened to buy an RV to set on the property, since per the will, each of Gramma’s nine kids is entitled to five acres of the land, and so these two claim that they only want to set up a homestead on their rightfully inherited piece of land…and then taunt “so we can start strip mining.”

The last I heard, E successfully petitioned enough siblings AND paid off the local court system (it’s fairly easy to do in Southeastern Kentucky to this day, especially if you’re good on the friendly Southern style, the arrogant male stereotype, the sales pitch and double-talk like E is). In paying off the court system, he changed the inheritance from saying each sibling is entitled to five acres upon their mother’s death to saying the last sibling standing gets all fifty acres to do with as they please.

Meanwhile, several siblings complain that they never did see any inheritance money at all from the proceeds of the house in Florida, or of what money Gramma had left at death. They accuse the eldest daughter M of having squandered it.
That, on top of the long-standing complaints that M was skimping on sending out yearly cash payments to her siblings every time Kentucky government issued a check to Gramma for the natural gas they’d been tapping from the family farm property for decades.

And then, through all this, M gets saddled with her own grandkids for about a year. This is another side drama that’s been going on for 12 years. Her HepC son had married a woman and had two children by her. Then they split up. The woman gets chronically ill with Fibroids or something, and dumps the children on her ex, who can’t take care of them because he’s a severely ill HepC patient who’s also mentally ill. So he dumps the kids onto his mom. She takes care of the kids for up to a year and a half at a time before their mom demands her kids back again with scarcely a thank you and defintely not ever any sort of reimbursement or gift. It’s more like she shows up with law enforcement in case M decides to refuse her the kids!

Now, ask me if I know if any of the financial rumours and accusations against M have truth to them. I will answer honestly - I just don’t know. I thought I knew. I thought I was on M’s side. But after all the stuff I hear even from my own mom these days, and the letters I’ve gotten from M these last few years, I have to say I’m DEFINITELY not on E’s side. But I just don’t know if M is being financially honest, either.

And with this very long story - constantly being told in parts here in this journal and orally to friends and aquaintances - here is where I admit to why I am so strongly drawn to genealogical research: I want to be able to love my family again and feel family pride and kinship again. And I can only do that on paper as it were, wildly fitting puzzle pieces together like some crazed recluse locked away in solitude trying to make sense of the world.

My secure warm world that I had trusted for so long was shattered in my first year of college. Within two years of that, I forsake my Baptist Fundamentalist upbringing, which was so strongly tied to the Appalachian family.

I was very angry at the family, and angry at my mom for all the Christian fundamentalist lies. Everything I had ever known to trust could no longer be trusted.

You know how Mulder in the TV series The X Files spends his entire existence searching for the little green men who took his sister from him in childhood?

Well, I’ve just realised that Genealogy is my little green men.

Knowing that now on a conscious level actually quite depresses me.

You know how Rowan forsake her family for science, only to be drawn back into the Mayfair history by Lasher in Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour?

Well, I fear I’ll somehow be pulled back to my aweful family, just like Rowan was to hers. The ghost will get me sooner or later, quite possibly through the genealogical research that I’m so drawn to.

And yet, everyone has a story. Everyone has something they live for. My boyfriend has his band and music, for example.

I guess I have genealogy. But am I doomed by it or can I hope to transcend my feelings of betrayal and abandonment, lies and deceit?
And can I transcend these things soon, so as to live the second half of my life in peace? Can I allow myself to find new warmth and security and truly feel safe and loved?

That story has not yet been written.

Today was such a wonderful day, spent all alone with my man.

We slept in, made breakfast, slacked off, and then created our very own feast, which was enjoyed by 5pm.

We baked cornish hens rubbed with a mixture of wheat free soy sauce, sesame oil and fresh garlic.

We made real potatoes and mashed them with soy milk and gluten-free butter.

We baked a pumpkin pie (we got the pumpkin out of a can though, and bought premade frozen pie crusts in tins. Perhaps next year we’ll not be lazy on that front!). The pie crust has wheat and yeast, which I can’t have, so I just eat the pumpkin out of it. Works just fine for my taste buds and tummy!

We whipped up some heavy cream, vanilla extract and confectioner’s sugar for our very own whipped cream.

We enjoyed our meal with a savory bottle of red table wine that we purchased last weekend in the Livermore wine valley.

And we watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

I had too much dairy today (not supposed to have any) but the stomach gurgles are worth it. I made an exception today. The dessert was SO good!

I’d been wondering for a few weeks why I had a desire to make a feast on Thanksgiving Day, when I am against what the state-mandated holiday stands for.
Back in 2002, I created a cheesy site which ranted about U.S. holidays. I never got to finish the site. Left off was my rant about Thanksgiving Day, but I know I still feel similarly now as I did then about it. Similar but not the same. Back then I was all about protesting things.

It’s the California that creeps in and makes one start protesting and whining. When I first moved to California, a green sheet of paper arrived with our phone books. The green paper contained a list of companies one should boycott because they were in some way EVIL.

It only took me a few months to be won over to this mode of constantly protesting unfairness and evilness of corporations and establishments. I was already pissed off at organised religion, so why not carry that vitriol to other areas?

Then, in 2000, I began dating the man I’m still with. That year, I found out that he took issue with my refusal to enjoy Thanksgiving and Christmas - especially Christmas.

I’d caved on the Thanksgiving thing and went with him to our friends’ houses for “orphan Thanksgiving” (gathering of friends who have no family locally, who have disowned their family, or who would rather spend that year with friends instead). I convinced myself to just not argue, to just go with it and be merry with friends. That worked for the most part, especially when we themed up the day with White Trash type foods for example.
But I still felt dirty.

While I’m on the subject of holidays, I want to rant at the fact that before Halloween was even over this year, the Christmas decorations were already being displayed in other parts of many stores, or even being displayed right behind the Halloween displays, such as in the case of Target stores. There you are, turning the corner to go down the next aisle to peruse more Halloween stuff (Made In China!), and then to your horror, you realise you’ve stumbled into Christmas Land.

In bloody fucking OCTOBER!!

The corporate bitches need to go down. And China owns us, have I mentioned that? Most of the crap you find in Target was Made In China™.

And yet, I bow. I consume. I am filthy. The Halloween dishes were so cute.

But turning the aisle and seeing the Christmas stuff, that’s just too much. There has to be a point where I can declare ENOUGH and stop spending my money and fueling this bullshit. I must stop being such a weak ugly Capitalist American.

The first two years of our relationship were rocky when it came to Christmas.

My man had grown up with fond memories of Christmas, and loves getting and giving presents, and seeing the smiles light up peoples’ faces during that time of year.
I told him we can gift one another throughout the year - why do we have to tie it to THAT day? That Christian-owned day?

I refused to budge for two years. I’d CRY when my man gifted me, because I’d told him for months - no gifts. So I didn’t buy him one. And he’d buy me one. And the guilt would take over. And I’d sob. And he’d explain that he didn’t need a gift in return - that it’s not about that. That seeing me be happy at receiving a gift is what mattered.

But why on THAT day??

Finally, after the second year, we came to a truce. He would respect certain things about me, and I would respect certain things about him. One of the things I had to accept was that he preferred to celebrate Christmas - not as a Christian event, but because as a child, he had such fond memories of the day, because he’d get so many presents, and then two weeks later was his birthday, and his parents would get him MAYBE one gift, and bitch about all the money they’d just spent on Christmas.
So in effect, he’d turned Christmas into his birthday. He traded days for the gifties. This is how it was now. And he liked all the sparkle and lights and the general feeling of that time of year. So I caved. We made peace. I cracked my carefully forged armor open and shined a light into the depths, and forced myself to remember my own happy Christmases.

I drew upon the childlike glee. Children don’t know or care about the religious aspects of Christmas. They only want presents and in some cases, the family gathering. I know I loved getting together with my 40-odd cousins at Gramma and Grampa’s house after a day of tearing through my presents and playing with my new toys. Seeing all my aunts and uncles - EIGHT of them with spouses and children - we were our own country it seemed! All my blood, all together with Gramma and Grampa, feasting all evening and being silly.

I drew upon those memories in my truce with my man, and began to allow myself to participate in Christmas Day again. Not for Christians. Not for religion. For my man. For the sake of our relationship. True sacrifice for love.

So it is also with Thanksgiving. I draw upon the same family memories - gathering the clan at Gramma and Grampa’s house for an all day Southern-style feast. That reality won out over the lies taught to me in school about such a day.

I know I can have a feast any day of the year. I choose to continue having feast day on Thanksgiving Day again out of sacrifice for my love.

Have I mentioned he’s completely athiest? There ain’t no sacrificing for some Christian principles, here. The guy is athiest. He just happens to like certain foody and gifty days, out of long-standing tradition tied to the same day that Christians get all crazy over.

He’d probably say that it’s not HIS fault the Christians like that day for their agenda - he just wants to hang with friends and have some great food.

Still, every year I’m torn. Should I not participate because it’s the point of the matter? Am I reinforcing the status quo even though I’ve stated I don’t believe the same way as They do?

But man, today was a GREAT day. I got a free day off work. I don’t care that it was unpaid (because temporary employees get screwed out of holiday pay). I had a free day off work and spent it with my honey. And we had frickin AWESOME food ALL DAY.

It’s not MY fault that other people feel the need to believe in a myth about some cracked Protestants and some Native Americans getting along swimmingly in an all white settlement called Plymouth, Massachusetts.

… so I was listening to Suicide Machines on the way home from work this evening….

and this was reborn.

All these damned things buzz around in my head - mostly related to file organisation and genealogy - things that I really need and want to work on.

Then I get home after an hour and a half drive from work, and I need to wash dishes and fix dinner and prepare tomorrow’s lunch.

Then after spending 9 hours in front of a computer, I sit back down at the computer.

And then I forget what it was I needed and wanted to work on. Then the task becomes an overwhelming chore.

Now my back and neck hurt even worse.

9:09pm Edit: I took a nice hot shower to loosen up my muscles. It worked on my neck and back, but then my left calf for some reason felt the need to tighten and want to charlie horse. It’s still really tight and hurty, but has not charlie horsed, yet.
WTF? I’m falling apart!

Maybe this is the start of it all, then. Maybe I’ll just wake up tomorrow and find I can’t walk and that my spine has cracked, too. It could secretly be what I’ve wanted - to just fall to pieces all at once, and then wink out. It’d certainly be a release from all the years of mental illness.

And yet, I write this with calm collectedness instead of sobbing madness. I still have hopes and plans and goals even with wondering if my secret wish could come true.

Eh, it’s nothing.

Back on October 29th, I wrote, “Oh and as of yesterday, we’re officially in Mercury Retrograde. I need to watch my tongue and my attitude, my spending habits, and my tendency to overshare during Mercury retrograde. Pay attention, zept!!!”

Well, I failed in the spending habits department and my tendency to overshare department.

Mercury went direct yesterday, and we happened to be out wine tasting. I spent $126.79 while we were out.

That was uh, my grocery money.

I have $416 until payday this coming Friday the 24th. Doing a quick budget analysis based on money I expect to receive this payday, and then minusing out all my bills and groceries, I’ll have about $266 left to my name until payday on December 8th.
And I need two week’s worth of pay to live on in January for when I will be out of work after surgery. That means I should be saving $253 per paycheck. And I already missed one payment of $253 to myself. So I owe myself $506.

Note that I said I’ll have about $266 left to my name after my bills are paid from this Friday’s paycheck.

Oh and there’s also the rest of my debt - I owe my boyfriend and my dad money that isn’t there to pay back.

Now, mind you, the weekend spending spree isn’t the issue. After my first paycheck from the new job, I count TEN INSTANCES where I ate out or otherwise spent my money on non-essentials, totaling $193.14.

After the second paycheck from the new job, I count FOUR INSTANCES where I ate out or otherwise spent my money on non-essentials, totaling $184.95.

That’s $378.09 that could have been applied to paying down my debt.

This can’t be blamed on Mercury being Retrograde or going Direct.

This is me. I have a problem managing my money. I’ve known for awhile that I suck when it comes to managing my money. I think that if I had someone manage my money for me, and only give me an allowance every week, then I’d be okay, because let’s get real, I’m thirty-five years old and I still spend my money like a kid in a candy store every week when I end up with money in the bank. I have all these elaborate spreadsheets noting what needs to be spent and where and on what schedules. And then I go shopping or I eat grocery store-made sushi for lunch at a cost of $14.

This has to stop. I’ve been saying it has to stop for years. And yet I never stop it. I don’t know how.
I own and have read the following books TWICE: Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence, by Joe Dominguez, and How to Survive Without a Salary, by Charles Long.

And I tried to get through a quarter of the book Debt-Proof Living: The Complete Guide to Living Financially Free, by Mary Hunt.
I found the book too Christian and couldn’t get past that bent so took the formula “Save 10% of each paycheck” and tried to adhere to that for awhile.

All of these financial management books were recommended to me by friends.

I failed again, however.

Re-reading a book doesn’t help. Nodding to advice doesn’t help. Joining an “overspenders anonymous” type group won’t help because they are 12-step programs, which are Christian-based.

This is more proof that I cannot take care of myself - I need someone to look after me.

During my breakdown last week, I told my boyfriend that since Social Security won’t be there for us by 2041 anyway, I might as well tap into what I’ve got now and have the state take care of me, since I appear unable to care for myself.

But to hand myself over to the state means I have to prove repeatedly that I’m sick. Which means I have to get a chemical lobotomy in the form of psych drugs and live in a nice state-run(down) facility.

I think I’d rather be like the Reagan-era mental patients, and just be put out into the streets.

So, hoping to not come to that, I ask again, what is left for me to do - how can I learn to take care of myself when I’ve not learned this by age thirty-five?
Is that what it means in the traditional sense of being married in my mom’s day and in my grandmothers’ day? That some strong man will come along and take care of me? In this day and age, there’s no excuse for such behaviour. There’s no room for that. Couples are equals, not master and subbordinate.

But what of those of us who are mentally instable and in a relationship?
It’s not fair to the partner to have to take on a parental role.

Round and round my thoughts will go on this subject today.

I was right, I was in the process of bouncing.

Two things helped me along yesterday:
1. The big bossman boosted my confidence first thing in the morning after I took my first call of the day, which turned out to be a real pain in the ass. He said I handled the call perfectly.

2. I went out to dinner with my man, and afterwards, we joined some friends for Pissup Night at our old hangout, which we’ve neglected over the months since the Tiki bar opened.

Yesterday as a result, was full of smiles and laughter, the best medicine as they say.

Today is Friday, so I HAVE to get through the day unscathed so I can enjoy every second of my two days off of work.

This weekend and next may include trips to wineries so we can put our noses in the air, act all sophisticated, and slurp down some wine and port, and finally, mess with the snotty tourists once we are inebriated.
Hell, just our very looks mess with the snotty tourists. But there’s no fun in leaving it at that.

Hm. Looks. That reminds me. I have next to zero vanity photos in my journal posts. What’s wrong with me? I’ll have to work on that. Even some scenic photos might be nice once in awhile - show you where I live and all that.

Yeah. A project. Good. Ok, I’ll get to work on that.

I’m not sure if I’m still at the teetering edge of insanity, or snapping out of it. It’s still hard to tell.

Today is my one month anniversary on the new job.

The very week I started the new job, they had a server outage - ALL of their customers were DOWN for 36 hours.

The very week of my one month anniversary, they had a server outage (Wednesday). ALL of their customers were DOWN for nearly six hours with no explanation. The website just kept saying it was due to “unscheduled maintenance”. When I called the network status hotline after I got home from work, I found it hadn’t been updated since 4pm PST. They have us tell the customers that it’s updated every few minutes. I wasn’t able to log into my account until after 8pm.

My first week on the job entailed working 12 straight days for up to nine hours a day after the last outage.

This had better not be the case for the rest of this week. I am NOT looking forward to dealing with the shitstorm that is the result of this latest outage.

I work on average 1 hour to 1.5 hours overtime DAILY because they won’t let people leave without clearing out their inboxes of all support mail replies.

My daily commute averages an hour and ten minutes to work and an hour and a half home from work.

You all wondered how long this would take….. I’m looking for a new job.

If I get another job before the end of this year, I will have had FIVE jobs in one year alone.

Is there something wrong with me? Or am I just attracting the shithole jobs?
Some of my friends have already assured me that it’s not me. They’ve shared some of their horror stories. It’s so sad that so many people… I mean, it’s not me, it’s not just some of my friends. If it’s us, it’s hundreds or thousands or millions of people who go through this… it’s sad that we’re all so willing to line up for the abuse time and time again. This is the greed. This is trying to get by in the United States. This is what Capitalism does to you. No system is right, mind you. They’re all fucked. I’m anti everything.

I feel myself slipping again.

Just in time for the morning commute.

Was awakened crying by a nightmare at 2:40am.

I was being questioned by some Germans about a pair of brown cargo pants. I thought I had given them to the thrift store. I was genuinely surprised when the German SS reproduced my cargo pants and questioned me at length about how I ever came to have the pants and why I got rid of the ‘evidence’. I kept telling them that I’d simply become too thin to wear the pants and had given the pants to a thrift store.
They let me go.

However, my boyfriend was now being held for questioning on unrelated charges. They might torture him. Instead of going on my way like I was told to do, I hung back and began to spy on what was going on. Then they started coming out to the back area of the house - the back yard I guess… with my boyfriend to strap him to the torture table. I quickly dove under the table, which was stupid because there was no cover on the table.

It was one of those moments like when you’re a kid and you think that when you close your eyes tight enough, nobody can find you.

So I laid there under the table, somehow levitated under it, eyes closed. They strapped my boyfriend in to begin the torture. Then I felt MY hands being pried open and little candles stuck between each digit. The woman in charge, who had also interviewed me, lit the candles. I could feel the heat. They were small candles. I felt my fingers begin to burn. She then fixed her gaze on me; she’d discovered they were my hands at the head of the table that she’d reached for - not my boyfriend’s. I opened my eyes. Her eyes were filled with rage. She dragged me out from under the table.

SS men came rushing in while she was barking orders to them and yelling at me in German. I was ordered to be dragged off by my hair. My boyfriend looked on in horror but I smiled and told him something like, “It’s okay, my hair is thick enough, if I just lay on my hair on my stomach, I won’t feel the dragging.” That’s when they grabbed hold of me and dragged me off by my very thick long blonde hair.

I turned over on my belly and laid on the rest of my hair and felt the tugging at my scalp but it was okay. I didn’t get scuffed up from the dragging this way.

I was thrown into the head SS woman’s office up front in the house again. She felt almost bad to have to torture me for what I’d done. I tried to make it sound like I got lost, and got tired, and had to rest. She didn’t believe me.

She began the torture process while someone else looked on. She began cutting up my face. She meant to do something to my eyelid but I twitched and she scraped off part of my left eyeball. She and the onlooker winced. I pulled away and with wide eyes looked around and established that I could still see out of my left eye. There was blood dripping into it, though, and the vision was deteriorating. I looked back at the torturer and said, “it’s okay” and she continued.

I awoke and began crying.

I’d already been crying for four hours on and off from the time I was in commute on the way home from work. Now three hours into my sleep, I awoke crying again from a nightmare.

And yet, I’m going in to work.

We’ll see how much of the day I get through.

I haven’t eaten breakfast yet. I usually require a full protein breakfast before work. I know I will sugar crash at work unless i eat. I don’t feel like eating. I have to leave in 5 minutes for work.