Month: November 2023

Because I can’t seem to find my peace for very long without something coming along and kicking the ant hill.

Okay. For a while now, the case on my shit-class Samsung Galaxy (it’s the A class, and a low number, not a high one) has been sort of falling apart a little bit. It’s a cheap case, and I had dropped the phone a couple times in the past several months, so I didn’t think more of it. Just made a mental note that I needed a new case soon.

So I got the case, and it came in yesterday. So I go to put it on in the car before I even go anywhere. (I tend to have small items shipped to Whole Paycheck because it is almost literally a straight shot from the apartment and I don’t have to have Amazon come up this steep driveway just to give me tiny things. Rather save that for larger packages.) And I notice it doesn’t seem to want to snap all the way into place on one side.

So I go about my business, do some delivering but the pickings are a bit slim, because I wanted some food money. Had it been busier my greed would have kicked in and I might have pulled off an $80 day, but that’s not how things went down. (I just got another 40% off coupon in my buyer account for that same service, too. Really bad sign.) And I get back to my apartment and I’m dithering around and I go to pull up my phone screen and… it gets WEIRD on me. I had to poke at it a bit, worry at some buttons, to get it going. The really weird bit was that with the new case, the buttons had initially worked better so I’m already halfway on alert. Then I get into the menu and like half my apps are zerged. They’re the ones I moved to my mini SD card. Which I now cannot see in the system or access.

Okay…?

You get to the micro SD through a tiny side drawer, and I’m not sure what I was doing wrong but I got the case off and stuck something in the drawer-latch hole and… nada. And as I’ve got the case off I look at the back of the phone again.

“Is it supposed to be curved like that?”

I had sort of noticed that when I first changed cases and then it slipped my mind. I couldn’t remember what the stupid thing had looked like when I bought it; that happened in late ’21. Two years ago, basically.

But I’m starting to wonder if I can possibly just take the thing apart to look at where the drawer’s supposed to be, so I go look up YouTube videos for a how-to, and then…

…I realize the “curved” bit is right where the battery is supposed to be.

Holy fuck.

Did some more googling: Samsung phones are known for developing swollen battery.

FUCK.

Probably this was why the old case had been cracking, too: the drops I’d had started the process and the swelling kept it going. It was a shit case, honestly. An Otterbox will try to make allowances because they actually made an effort with the materials. Mine was. Though now I knew why it wasn’t going absolutely all the way on properly.

I’ve done some research. I don’t want another Galaxy. This was my third-ever one. The “good” Galaxy phones burn up battery too quickly. The bad ones… well. I have been complaining about the low RAM in this even-fails-as-a-doorstop device for two fucking years. The battery was, for once, the ONE demonstrably good thing about this piece of shit, and now that’s what’s failing me. We are not going to go this route again. It’s Pixels from now on or something of that ilk. I’ve heard good things about Pixels though. Also they’re one of the phones that supports my delivery app. I WILL be checking to make absolutely sure when I get the thing bought, but we’re proceeding on the assumption that that will work out. If it doesn’t, I’ll figure out something else.

Also, it’ll have 4GB RAM instead of half that much. Still not great, but 100% improvement from before.

Meanwhile, it is my understanding that swollen batteries are safe for phone use for a time, but that charging is dicey. I am at least not letting the battery drain down to zero, which is hilarious because my dad used to advise me to do that, but it turns out this type of battery is MORE likely to swell up if you do. (Is there ANYTHING my father has ever advised me to do which is actually fucking legitimate? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) But I worked out a basic fire-retarding precaution to take at night when I’m sleeping, and I just need to get this earned over the next couple of days. I literally have the phone and case in my shopping cart at Amazon. It’s an older model, but hopefully it checks out. I will clear it, or not, when it gets here.

…

So when I took that contact-center training class at Columbus State, one of the perks was they gave you a $250 stipend if you got employment as a result of taking the class. I did, earlier this year. Filled out the form I was supposed to fill out for the stipend. Got fuck-me games played with me by some doof who works in that department and who doesn’t seem to know his own departmental procedures. I tried. I was mostly polite. He finally sent the check. With my name misspelled. I sent it back with a letter advising him not to bother again.

Well, I finally got my mail from Elizabeth dating back to July. I thought, I bet there’s another check, because that ass [Columbus State doof] never listens to anything I’ve got to say. It was a bit like dealing with Matt, actually. I was right. There it was.

With a little note on it that advised it was only good for ninety days. It had been issued 02 August of this year.

Fuck it. I’ll try anyway. Worst they can tell me is “no.” So I set up the mobile deposit.

Well, so far Chime seems convinced it’ll go through. So the app told me after a few minutes. I don’t believe it, but we’ll see by the 15th. Meanwhile I need to get this fucking phone thing sorted so I don’t have to play so much catchup this month. Last month sucked ass.

If it turns out Chime was wrong and the thing bounces, I won’t even tell the doof. Moving on. Tired of the drama. Oh God fucking forbid, I asked for something that at the time I was entitled to. Y’all run get my smelling salts. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE. One of these days you’ll actually NOT throw a conniption fit when I advocate for my rights, and I won’t know what to do with myself. It’s not like I’m nasty about it, at least at first. What the fuck. I don’t fucking know.

…

I spent today restringing some stretch bracelets and making more, and tomorrow if I get up early enough and have good light, I’ll list a bunch on Etsy. To think I was grumbling that I could not move my Etsy Seller app over to the SD card. WHAT THE FUCK WAS I THINKING.

Oh, and recently I had moved a bunch of files off my phone. Someone was looking out for this big fat idiot. There were more on the SD, and hopefully they weren’t wiped. I’ll find out if the new phone works out, and then I can use brute force to open the old one and see what’s what. I have what I call a mini-SD extender that looks exactly like a normal SD card but has a slot in it that you put the mini SD in. Lets you stick the mini SD into a normal SD slot for a computer to read it.

I don’t think the Pixels take mini SDs. I may subscribe to Pro on Flickr again just to have someplace to put things. At least I almost never use my phone as an mp3 player anymore. No way in hell will I have the space.

Sigh.

I’ll link to the stretch bracelets when I get them listed. At this point I can still catch up the month but I’d like to have something in reserve. If I can even keep it there. You know how us Poors are.

…

Okay. I have a question. Who the fuck’s visiting me from Canton, Georgia and Albuquerque, New Mexico? There are some other places I wonder about too, but those are regular customers. I have no idea why. If you’re on my Facebook, holler. It’s weirding me out a bit.

All righty then. I need to finish a bracelet and then it’s off to bed. But first, more root beer. Mmm. Root beer.

Oh gosh, where do I begin.

1. Sometime in between the last update about Dad and now, Doug got a hold of me again to tell me Dad was back in the hospital. Apparently Carrie went over to his place and he was in bed with a bloody nose. Upon further investigation it appears he fell and broke his nose and was still conscious but did not use his Life Alert. (For those of you who don’t know, that’s a remote thingie you wear as a necklace and if you fall, you can click a button on the remote thingie and it will alert whoever you set it to alert.) Doug immediately went to “Dad really is trying to kill himself” which was not at all abated by Carrie’s informing him that Dad had just bought two new bottles of bourbon. He had had a bottle and a half remaining the last time previous to this that he went into the hospital. Less than two weeks had intervened. More like less than one but I could be fuzzy on that by now so take it with a grain of salt. Still not helping Doug to know about that.

Part of me wants to call Dad up and chew him a new asshole. 75% of me knows it will accomplish jack shit. And forget me moving back down there. Then he’d resent me monitoring his drinking habits. Or not monitoring, if he was hoping to have me back down there as an excuse to quit. Either way, I can’t win, and the sad part is that a win for me would have been a win for him too because who exactly is at war here? Shouldn’t be anybody, I would think. Jesus fuck.

(Familiar theme. A win for me with Thea would have been a win for Thea. A win for me with Matt would have been a win for Matt. Why are people such jackasses about this? I don’t go around wanting to hurt people as my default state of existence; if what I’m wanting for you sounds disagreeable, it’s time you looked at your own propensity for self-harm. For five fucking seconds could you let go of your pride and let the Wookiee win? No? Well suffer, then. I’m done. This is just too much fucking effort to expend to accomplish exactly fuck-all.)

2. My former stepmother’s brother, Dale, called two nights ago. First time I’ve conversed with him since about 2005-ish. I think? Might have been longer. We were never in regular communication anyway, but if he and Reba were getting along pretty well, I’d hear from him more often. So anyway, this time I was out driving and I get this call from Mississippi. I’ve been getting a lot of bullshit spam text messages from organizations that don’t know what a woman is anymore but nonetheless want women to have the right to choose; it’s election season, we’re about to vote on whether to amend legal abortion into the Ohio constitution, and a strange number could be anyone, really. So I let it go to voice mail. I am pretty sure my voice mail announcement says to text me instead of leaving a voice mail message, because my voice mail doesn’t work for shit 90% of the time and I prefer texting anyway. Thus. I will say this for him: he follows instructions. At least sometimes.

He’s a year younger than Dad and he’s going through that time of life we all get to look forward to where our friends are dropping like flies. He’s a Vietnam War vet and so are a lot of his friends, so the dropping like flies is particularly tragic and gruesome. It is probably far too late to put the inventor of Agent Orange on trial for crimes against humanity, but that doesn’t mean I don’t REALLY want to.

I’m not sure what else this was about, only want to mark that it was weird. Two notes:

[a] At one point I offered to pass his info on to Doug. He doesn’t think Doug will want to talk with him. The reason he thinks Doug will not want to talk with him is because years ago, Dale made a pass at Moriah, Doug’s ex-wife. I was not clear on whether she was an ex at the time. All I know is Dale says she flirted with him, so he reciprocated. Doug was fairly peeved about it, Dale said. Okay, if they were already broken up, I suppose it depends on how soon after the breakup it was but I suspect this was more “Oh EW, Uncle Dale, she’s young enough to be your daughter” than any single other issue, really. But if Doug and Moriah were still together at the time, or were only recently split up, YEAH, there are going to be issues. And dude? She’s young enough to be your daughter. AND she’s mother to your great-nephew and great-niece. Jesus Christ.

(And don’t think it didn’t cross my mind, between that and some other things he said, to wonder why he wanted to talk my ear off for more than an hour. I mean, he knows I’m not related to him. They think they are so mysterious, but at the end of the day they all follow a fucking script. Well, you stay down there in Gulfport, m’man. Fine by me.)

[b] I have long been suspicious of Reba’s current husband, Rick. Some things Doug told me about how Rick treated him years ago, and my own observations of Reba’s and Rick’s dynamic together, got me wondering if Rick wasn’t a tad possessive of his wife. Controlling, maybe. Now here comes Dale telling me Rick “fixed” Dale’s motorcycle in such a way that it would have killed Dale to ride it. Dale knew enough to understand what he was seeing when the “repair” was completed and got it to his personal mechanic, thereby dodging a metaphorical bullet. But he hasn’t been around Rick since, from the sound of it. Yeah, solidarity. I don’t want to be around Rick either. The little bit of time I stayed at his place in the month after I got Mike arrested in ’99, it felt like camping out on a minefield, never mind walking across one. If Reba’s favorite hobby was nitpicking everything I did, Rick raised it to a goddamn art form. Using Reba as his mouthpiece, mind you. I don’t even want to know how he’d be if I went back there.

(You wonder why I never turned to family after I walked out of Dad’s house this last time. Oh, my sweet summer child.)

…

I have been seriously lax on some hobby pursuits lately. If you’ve noticed, don’t worry: I’m aware. I am in this weird place, mentally, where even though I feel better over time, I still feel bad too, if that makes any sense. I have enough trouble managing my time but if I’m depressed, forget it. Everything gets overwhelming. I have had a LOT of “what’s the fucking point” moments in the past six months in particular. I don’t know where I go from here.

It’s weird. My life falling apart two years ago was horrific, BUT, I needed the kick in the ass to start standing on my own two feet. It was well past time. I hated losing nearly everything to resale shops and that fucking clown, BUT, my life was too cluttered. I have no idea what to do with my life, BUT, it’s become clear I was too willing to let others direct me and I forgot to figure out my life for myself. I’m poor, BUT, by most metrics my life has actually improved. Even my driving is a hell of a lot better. You should have seen me when I first started doing it for a living after a long, long time not getting around much because either I didn’t have a car or I was too broke. The sheer number of near-catastrophes I had. I have no fucking right to still be here, I will tell you what. [knocks on head] But now I have a much, much better mental map for where things are in town, and I am much more competent at getting there. Life is so fucking weird.

But there is still this inner brat that wonders why the fuck I ever do anything if it’s just going to be in a vacuum. To be fair, no one gave a shit what I did when there were still people in my life, either, unless they thought they could get something out of it. So I don’t know why I give half a fuck whether anyone notices me now. It’s just going to be more opportunistic fucking ingrates after my very last-ever available fuck to give. The growing season’s over, y’all. Move on.

Holy shit… I squeaked in under the wire.

So I got the $300. I had enough other that it all pushed me up to about $890, and then I discovered I had a bit more in tips from deliveries which pushed it up to $900. Like I said before, I could do $70 in a day and then use $30 of my SpotMe.

Well, I started nice and early. That helped a lot. So what I actually got up to was probably $80ish, which meant $20ish needed to come from the SpotMe. So I stopped and got the money order, and then I left it in the usual spot with a note for Elizabeth, and then I went back out because I had pretty much no food worth speaking of and I also had two out of three blips left on the final quarter-tank of gas. Car-car and I both needed to eat. Nothing for it. I got far back enough out of the hole to spend $20 straight, not SpotMe, getting it into the gas tank and then went back into the hole a little bit getting food. I still have eight or nine bucks cash so I’m fine for breakfast tomorrow.

Got back here and, uncharacteristically, Elizabeth was outside. I damn near hit one of the dogs but she wasn’t upset — they will tend to be impulsive and I think they’re still also upset over Pat. Doggos are like little kids in that way: upset = acting out. Anyway, E said that her family members who want to move in aren’t going to be able to until after January. So we could do it month to month until then? I said. Yep. So I have a place for two more months. Well, three if you count this one.

Oh, and I had been wondering for months where the fuck my mail went. She’s got it. So none of that’s lost. I had left the key she’d given me with the rent when I left the rent in our usual spot, and I included an explanatory note. So she knows what’s up. I figure it’ll be near the end of January by the time I actually get any of it, but who knows.

I have some leads on jobs that I need to follow up in the next couple weeks but we’ll see. Failing anything else, if I don’t get lazy again I can just aim for $50 a day five days a week to save toward rent and do pretty well and then after that, who fucking knows. I don’t know. I’m playing it by ear.

Nineteen years ago.

I remarked on Instagram today that probably one of the biggest reasons my daughter has shut me out is I have her entire childhood between my ears and I know what and who she actually is, up to a point (I don’t “own” everything she is — she owns herself, and she also operates under her own power and initiative), and therefore I am inconvenient to have around because she wants to pretend none of that happened. I did not also mention there that that is a common tactic of young people who think they’re trans, and that sort of thinking is also why they call it “deadnaming” when you refer to them by their birth names. They literally believe they have become a different person, which is odd when you consider that they also claim to have finally uncovered their true selves. Well, kiddos, that would mean you were the same person all along. You can’t uncover what isn’t there. Make up your fucking minds?

Being in a support group on Facebook for parents who’ve gone through this has been illuminating. I had read enough accounts of rapid-onset gender-dysphoria girls up til I joined to understand some of what was going on, but I had no idea how textbook these kids are all being. Of course, each individual kid fancies they are being original. If they only fucking knew.

…

I have been running into some right rotten bullshit on Uber lately. First off, Uber can’t take “no” for an answer when they offer me some bullshit job and I refuse it. I thought I was a contractor? Then I have a right to say no. I cannot fathom what they are thinking, other than maybe they want to inflate my refusal percentage. It wouldn’t surprise me. Then there was the guy who accused me of having someone else do my deliveries when he ordered from inside a secured facility that I could not get into and a security officer offered to bring it to him. Yesterday, I got a customer who ordered a trunkful (as in my car trunk — and the car is a Hyundai Sonata, so that is not a small trunk) of groceries, including heavy items containing liquid, and I didn’t know what I was getting when I went to pick it up, and she lives on the second floor and was home and did not offer to help, and neither did whatever man was talking with her behind her door as I labored back and forth. She at least had the good grace to top up my tip. Then today, I had one who didn’t like how long I took, even though it was the restaurant’s fault for not being ready when I got there, and who didn’t like how they filled her drink, even though they filled her drink and I had nothing to do with it. So she downvoted me and took three bucks off my tip. Probably killed the whole thing, actually, but she couldn’t take what Uber paid me. And that was a twofer call, and the other customer had to wait longer than she did and he gave me five extra dollars. It is really hard knowing that you are good at your job and that most of your customers like or love you (at least for ten seconds at a go) and then having to contend with assholes like this and having zero recourse. I can’t block them even when they lie. I can’t downvote the delivery experience anymore — and from my end the delivery experience was fine, anyway. But I can stop picking up from Shawarma Bites, because this was not the first time they made me wait and I’m not going to leave myself wide open for more problems. I’ll get problems anyway, but when there’s a known vector, why not rule it out from step one. So, thus far, I have blacklisted Café Istanbul, Dave’s Hot Chicken (oh let me tell you about Dave… I’ll tell you about Dave some fucking time), Walmart, and now Shawarma Bites. Who’s fucking next? I hope no one, but believe me, there’s lots more where you came from. Bring it.

…

Additional Uber gripe. Was dropping off at the Extended Stay America on Tuttle Crossing and there were a couple guys loitering outside the front door when I went in, and when I came back out and speed-walked past them towards my car, one of them called out to me like, “Hey.” Fucking really? No. Keep that bullshit to yourself. Even if I were up for getting attention from a guy — and if your initials are not RFM I’m fucking not, thank you very much — I’m not gonna decide that on the basis of some fool on a Thursday night with nothing better to do than stand around talking about whatever with some random other guy outside an extended-stay hotel. Because we all know why you are here, and it’s not travel.

But I have to be philosophical for a sec — thanks to my looks being gone, I guess, because my age really isn’t all that obvious, I could count the number of times this has happened on one hand. Probably actually one finger. In two years. Not too shabby really. It just threw me because it’s been so long since it last happened.

But I’m not full of myself, no. These assholes are never actually interested in me. Even Matt wasn’t, and Matt wasted two whole decades of my life. (So did I, but they were my decades. They were fucking well not his to waste.) Men who pretend interest where there is none are fucking trash. End of story. At this point if you pretend interest I assume you’re out to ruin my life. Again. Go home — or to your ratty little weekly suite — and wank. Asshole.

…

So we thought Dad had had a brain bleed again this second time in the hospital, but turns out they might have been seeing old blood from the original bleed, and I’m not sure how the fuck that happened if they suctioned it out like I thought they were supposed to? I dunno, but I rather thought they’d do that. Maybe I’m mental. (Shaddup.) And I found out in all the back-and-forth that he’s had a Life Alert subscription for a while now, so that’s good. But he was offered the veterans home and Doug’s place in Oregon after this mishap and turned them both down. We all know why. The veterans home wouldn’t let him drink and he’s got reason to suspect Doug wouldn’t either. (I think Doug said he’d go along with Dad’s requests, but I could have misunderstood him. Nevertheless, who knows how that would turn out. Dad doesn’t know either, and that’s the problem.) So it comes down to Dad caring more about the bourbon than about his kids, which is no surprise because it’s been like that all along.

I mean, I get it. I have health issues I could have gotten on top of at least 10 years ago and I still haven’t. If I don’t rein this shit in I’m going to be the helpless old person kept alive only by pharmaceuticals and unpleasant medical things, but have I changed my ways? No. Am I proud of that? Also no. So I can empathize, up to a point. I’m not 100% sure Dad even cares. Like, does he comprehend the situation he is in, or does he have his own weird little spin on it? Because I heard about his shenanigans with “quitting smoking.” I’ve seen the way he talks about various situations and issues. Dude not only marches to his own drummer, he’s got a fucking accordion instead. He’s on his own wavelength. I am not sure he understands the problem. I think he believes he understands the situation and that it is not actually a problem but everyone around him is calling it a problem so they can pick on him. I am not sure anyone is going to be able to get through to him. I do not know why someone obviously intelligent would think like that, but there it is. I have long suspected the man is autistic, actually, and Mom probably is too, and I got a double dose which is why I was such a weird little kid. Are any of us going to get help for it? Also fucking no. How do you set up an IEP for a grown-ass adult? Where would you even begin?

So there aren’t any good answers, so my dad’s probably going to be dead in the next five years and I’ll be dead shocked if it isn’t in the next five months, and I’ll still be the bad guy for talking about all this out where everyone can see it, because making me into the sacrificial goat is sure gonna fix Dad’s health or raise him from the dead, uh-huh. You bet.

…

I got the books sold. Talked about that several entries ago. With everything I’ve made so far that I was able to keep, I’m $100 short and tomorrow’s the last day of the grace period. But! I have a $35 Spot Me on my Chime account. I need a couple bucks for a postal money order or a couple more bucks for two Meijer money orders. Either way, I only need $70 tomorrow to get it done. If I can’t start early and make $70 on a Friday, I might as well throw in the towel.

[knocks on head]

So it’s get to $70, stop, buy the money order, take it over there, text Elizabeth to let her know it’s there, then get my ass back out there because I’ll need food money ’cause I’ll be muthafucked if I’m gonna have fucking canned pasta for supper again. I’m thinking that hibachi place I picked up from on Henderson the other day. The place smells AMAZING and that shit will feed me for at least two days. Oh my GOD. YES. And maybe bubble tea. I think I’d really like that too. If I can’t get them tomorrow because I left it too late, I’ll get them this weekend. It will be amazing. You just wait.

Okay. Bed. Shit to do tomorrow, lawds yes.