Well I suppose you can chalk me up to being at-risk again. I never completely stopped being there, of course.
Got a message from L saying “please don’t talk about my personal life on Facebook, I need to be out of the public eye.”
The offending post? Mentioned Neighbor coming over and them being in video meetings. No mention of specifics, organizations, purposes, or anything else. I don’t even call them by name in my posts.
Gasp.
If she thought that was an invasion of privacy, then if she sees this, she’ll shit. So, I am going to remove the link from my real-name homepage and play dumb. I’m also going to change my posting nickname here, but it’ll take a while for the Google search propagation to change, so I’ll remain high-risk until it does.
But there is still a risk she’ll find out some other way. So I’m going to play dumb, be business as usual, and then when I get enough money saved up, make plans to leave. I don’t know yet where I will go, but the longer I have until she melts down, the more time I will have to figure it out and the better off I will be.
I like it here, but not enough to put up with people shitting themselves over things I am not actually (effectively) doing. If I had more of an emotional investment, I’d care more, but they’re doing their level best to ensure I never achieve that. Not my problem unless I can’t get my shit together before everything blows up. It is not a whether, it is a when.
It’s like you assholes out there in the universe don’t know I learn from my experiences.
—
Also set my Facebook to totally friends-only. I also added the following to Restricted status, meaning they can see my public shit in their feed but no friends-only posts: L, Neighbor, S, and this lady from Neighbor’s and L’s organization who friended me after I applied to go to next month’s event. I’ll look things over and decide who else to restrict as I go. There will probably be at least a few more “victims.”
Trust is earned. That’s one lesson I haven’t learned up til now. It’s time I did.
—
I suppose that was a kick in the pants I needed. Just rearranged my starting tabs in my Chrome browser. Facebook isn’t even there now; I left a pinned post on my profile set to public that if anyone wants to talk with me, I’m on Messenger; if they want to know what I’m up to, they can visit my real-name homepage. I predict most of them are not going to give two shits and I’ll never hear from them again. They are welcome to prove me wrong. Of course, they won’t.
I had done a course on Coursera, which isn’t saying much because it was a free course and pretty short, but it was the basics of Microsoft Word. That sent a certificate over to my LinkedIn profile. I think what I’ll do for the next little bit is focus on getting the rest of the Office Suite basic courses done, and then I am strongly considering paying $59 a month, if I can avoid getting kicked out of here, to do the health information IT support module. With Neighbor paying me $400 a month to do some scutwork for him (I don’t mind it, even now), I should be able to spare $59. I hope. I’ll just get the module done as quickly as I can, I guess. And I’ll set everything job-search-wise to indicate that I am looking for a related job in the Columbus area. Someone’s got to bite, you would think. I have medical records background already. It may be from a long time ago, but that’s like riding a bike. The module will get me up to speed on EMR and that’s really the last piece I need because I’ve done level-two internet support before too. If I have to go on and try to get some kind of other IT certification after that, so be it, but I’ll hold out and see if some employer will pay for it for me. That seems the wiser route.
I want to go home. Only way I’m going home is if I have a decent job waiting. I’ll happily live in an extended-stay again if it means I can get out of here. I don’t hate it here and I don’t even hate L, but I know how this bullshit ends and I don’t want to be here when it does. And I’m homesick anyway. Let me be somewhere I know. Please. Besides, I know how to protect myself from bugs now. And if I stay in a better extended-stay — say, in Dublin maybe — then there’s less chance of them in the first place.
We’ll see. I have a bad habit of saying I’m-Gonna and then not Doing.
—
Well, let’s at least see if we actually hear from Neighbor tonight. The way things are going, who fucking knows. As it is, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to get in my paid time on the scutwork job this week. I could do it all tomorrow, but L and I are also supposed to check in for the weekend event. I also need to go to Walmart, which I will only be able to do if he actually pays me tonight. No real reason to think he won’t, but these people are (I say this with some amount of affection) fucking flakes and I never know which end is up with them. I still have caffeine for the next few days, at least, so that’s not a problem. But I hope no one was expecting me to give them money at the event if he doesn’t pay, because that’s not happening.
Well, if he pays me, I’ll get over there kind of early tomorrow and get the scutwork done. Normally he likes it spread out over a few days, but I won’t have the few days without transportation, and I don’t even know what that’s going to look like; no one’s talked with me about it. “Oh please go to my event” and then I’m supposed to levitate and fly there? I’m sure the fuck not walking. So unless that’s all been worked out, this week I’m going to do the scutwork all in one day. They will all live. So will I. Whatever. I may not be able to make the run to the dump, but I’m sure that’ll come up in conversation.
As much as he talks to L over text or whatever throughout the day, he could drop me a line once in a while about shit like this instead of saving it all up for Meat Day. He could, but he doesn’t. Fucking flake.
—
I just looked up the house on Sharon Avenue for the first time in months. It sold in January, apparently. I had thought someone was flipping it, because the last person who had bought it put it on the market just as I was leaving. Well, unless flakey cosmetic work looks more sound than it used to, the flooring sucks but a lot of the rest of it is really nice. I love what they did with the bathrooms, except the basement bathroom sink is fugly. And they knocked out the wall between the kitchen extension and the dining room, which I had sometimes thought needed to be done. And no more carpet on the first floor HALLELUJAH. I don’t know why they recarpeted the second floor. Bad call.
It’s just so sad. That was us and now we’re gone. I’ll never forgive that motherfucker for setting everything up the way he did. He should have left me and the girl in that apartment and left us the fuck alone. She and I were a family. It was fine. To hell with him.
I need to press forward and build something new. Can I do that if I go back there or will I be bogged down in everything that makes me sad? But I need to be somewhere familiar. I need to be somewhere I know. And somewhere I’m not likely to run into hostile people. I don’t know how I reconcile this.
Well, we’ll see how the job thing goes. I see from my searches that there are still apartments there which are not insanely expensive, and some of those are even in not-so-scary parts of town. I’ll figure this out or I won’t.
—
It’s after six and Neighbor still hasn’t messaged me that he’s even leaving for pickup. This is going to be a late evening.