If I do this one right, I’ll have begun it 45 minutes after midnight, I’ll write a little bit, I’ll go to bed, I’ll get up later, and then I’ll add more to this post. Whee!
I just had to mark the occasion because I was sitting here writing a thing for my Substack when I noticed movement out of the corner of my right eye and there was this fucking green bug on my shoulder. I had a bad moment until I realized it wasn’t a stink bug; then I had a worse moment when I realized it looked something like a tree roach structurally, but it was smaller (not small, just smaller) and also prettier because it was the color of a katydid. Except I don’t think it was a katydid. I need to look up the developmental stages of tree roaches.
Anyway. I am sorry to report I murdered it with the flyswatter, being that it was soft enough to do so. I have reached this weird stage in my life where I don’t automatically want to murder all bugs anymore, but most bugs in my living quarters are fair game. Sort of. I absolutely refuse to open the door to outside at night unless there is a damned good reason, but I wish I could just point a magic wand at them all and zap them outside, where there is more food anyway. I suspect they come in here more because they can avoid most of their predators than because we have any real kind of a smorgasbord for them.
A miscalculation on their part, of course.
I will say that if it’s a spider and I get to it before Dad does (he sprays them! what the fuck? They’re squishable!) and I can actually catch it AND if it is daytime, spooder goes outside. I was chummy with some eight-legged ladies in the Dublin apartment because they were helpful and caught bugs that were buggin’ me. Kitchen Window Spider got relocated outside before it got too cold to catch things, simply because I didn’t want her webs in my face when I washed dishes anymore. Window Tunnel Spider in the living room disappeared before I got up the nerve to help her; she was bigger than KWS. But I’ve caught… two here so far? Those Little Caesar’s dipping cups with lids are so useful for things like that. Easy to wash, too. I have a small collection of them which I guard jealously. (Dad’s already noticed them and is curious. He likes his random containers, does my father.)
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Phone and hosting are paid. I actually had enough money to do it and I still have twenty bucks in the Uber account. I’m really diggin’ having money immediately after a delivery run without needing to take extra steps. Also, yesterday (the 27th) I got the oil changed finally. No, I have not gotten it done since just before I moved back down here. Yes, I’m a moron so feel free to point and laugh. I get the punchline because I happened to be looking for an oil-change place on a Saturday and in Jennings, most of them are closed by 1pm if they open at all. Not Walmart. I never would have thought. So I went over there and it is WAY CHEAPER to get it done there than at Take 5, which was my usual vendor back in Ohio because I didn’t have to leave my car. And I got the tires rotated at Walmart too, which they charged for and which Take 5 never does. WITH the tire rotation I STILL spent less. It was close to $70 before sales tax, less than $75 with the tax. With high-mileage synthetic, mind you, same as always. Alllll righty then. Nice to know for next time.
However, it looks like ONE OF MY FUCKING BRAKE LIGHTS IS FUCKING OUT AGAIN. Or so they said on the form. I need to get a bulb and then have Dad check for me before I go replacing something I might not need to. It will not bother me to have a replacement bulb in the glove box if it turns out someone hit a wrong button when they filled out the work checklist or something. It’s that passenger side again. But I looked at the bulb and it seemed fine. Normally they get discolored when they burn out, the same way an incandescent household bulb does. Could be it’s still out but the bulb is not the problem. If the socket has finally failed, I’ll be pissed.
I’ll also be able to earn the money fairly quickly — turns out I can bring in $100 in three days if I’m industrious about it — but it’s the principle of the thing.
I think I’ll look on YouTube soon to see if I can suss out how to change it myself. If I can do it myself, fuck it. I would be able to just buy the wiring harness but it doesn’t seem like anyone’s selling that for my year, make, and model anymore. If the complete taillight comes with a harness, I’ll be good to go.
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I keep meaning to take down the GoFundMe, not because I wouldn’t appreciate more help but because I’m at a point where I can earn pretty regularly now. But I hadn’t gotten around to it yet, and then yesterday I got a notification of a donation. I am not going to say no to it. I’m so broke I can’t pay attention. What I had to cover the oil change was from Dad. If I figure out how to move that $20 to the Uber card, I’ll be starting off with $40 and maybe can actually get my insurance paid on time, probably. Due date’s this coming Thursday. I think they’ll expire of shock.
That will depend on whether I actually want to drive before Thursday. I don’t get charged a late fee, and they don’t cancel my coverage until the absolutely very last deadline on the 21st. I am a bad, bad woman, but I also want to do something besides tear up my car all the time.
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Last time I went to Lafe. for deliveries, which was Friday, I started out nauseated. I don’t know why but I have an idea. There was this weather front approaching and I had headaches off and on for two fucking days, Nausea Day being Day Two. Nothing hugely major but enough to be miserable. I bet the nausea was related. It used to be I’d get what the migraine people call “visual prodrome” before a nasty one, but that seems to have stopped years ago; I really hope the nausea is not a new thing that sticks around. New-old thing, because once in a while my headaches in my twenties would make me puke. Whatever. Do not want. Go away, nausea.
(It did, this time, but let’s hope it never comes back.)
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It’s now 7:30pm, haha. Everything else up there ^^^ was from like 1 this morning.
Neighbor guy who replaced my starter a while back has erected (because this is such a Public Display of Penis) a gigantic TRUMP 2024 flag on his front fence. I am not exactly surprised, but if he thinks I’m going to take any bait about politics he’s going to be in for a snoozefest. I am here in Acadia Parish to lick my wounds and maybe have time to recover, at least economically. There are people here I really like, but practically speaking I don’t give a fuck about anyone here except to the extent they are making decisions about whether to help, trade with, or employ me. (Carrie might be the one exception. Might. Jury’s still out.) Hence the not wanting to get into debates. I suppose it’s a kind of lying — oh hell, of course it is — but this is the usual kind of lying I get up to doing, 95% of the time that I ever do it, and I always hate it. But I am also philosophical. If what they want is for everyone to be afraid of them and to lie to their faces, they’ve got it. If they want people to trust them and to want to have conversations with them, they have to stop supporting assholes like The Donald. Don’t feel left out, y’all. I’m just about at the point I don’t want anything to do with Biden voters either. He does have some advantages over Trump, but that’s such a low bar. He’s still trouble since the first thing he did in office was include “gender identity” under the defintion of sex and then stump for perverts in dresses, and I’ve fucking had it, and I’m not supporting any of those clowns anymore.
Anyway, neighbor guy’s girlfriend brought over barbecue yesterday. It was all right. I’ve had better. Dad crowed about it but Dad’s happy if you coat anything in sugar. He’d never admit it, but that’s what it is. It was nice of them, anyway. I don’t know if they know Dad’s political implications and I won’t be asking. Though I have not pointed out to Dad any of the times he’s groused about Trump that back in ’17 when he visited me in Ohio he had said something about being glad Hillary Clinton hadn’t won. Which means he voted for the asshole in the first place, and isn’t that fascinating. I’m pretty sure it was the January 6 attack that put him off. I wonder when Americans, and particularly American men, are going to get it through their thick heads that someone who hates large parts of the country is going to eventually hate them too. The rest of us are the canaries in the coal mine and a whole lot of us are on our backs on our cage floors now. Pay attention, dumbasses. You’re suffocating.
Dad keeps talking about barbecuing, even bought a combo smoker-grill for the purpose, but stone cold facts are that he may never complete a grilling out there again. He’s made one serious attempt, had to quit halfway through from sheer exhaustion, and had me roast it the rest of the way in the oven to get it done. I need to start teaching myself how to use a charcoal grill. That would thrill the shit out of him, and it’s a useful skill. Though people are going to start thinking I’m a weirdo, because I will probably opt for wood chunks instead of charcoal briquets most of the time. Did you know there is actual coal in the charcoal briquets sold for barbecue grills? Between that and all the fucking sugar you see in most “barbecue” meat dishes, it’s not the meat killing us, y’all. And the added sugar is an even worse problem in restaurants. I’ve watched enough Guy Fieri (how many fucking shows does that man have? Good thing I like him) to have figured that out by now. It’s no fucking wonder all that restaurant food fucked me up back in Ohio, not that I’m in much better shape here.
Did you see the way I glossed over the “Dad’s last barbecue” thing? Yeah, me too. I’m trying not to think too hard about it. It is strictly day to day here. One day he seems mostly not in crisis, the next day he’s in the hospital because he needs more baking soda in his drug regimen. (This already happened. It is not a new thing. I’m telling you this because one or two of you might actually be people I know and I don’t want you freaking out.) Tomorrow, who knows. I am making no predictions about anything. He could fail to wake up tomorrow, he could last another five years.
I’m not much better off. I have this theory about middle age. Starting at age forty you run through a kind of biological gauntlet. From about age forty to about age sixty, we start dropping like flies. Those of us who make it to sixty can reasonably expect to get to seventy or seventy-five at least. This is not a hard-and-fast rule. OBVIOUSLY some people die in their sixties. But as far as Sudden Deaths What No One Saw Coming, ages forty to sixty tend to be prime season for those. And you always find out there was a cause, even if the nitwits writing obits claim it was “natural causes.” No, Brentley, we’re not supposed to die at forty-five. This isn’t the Stone Age, and not everybody died at forty-five even then. Lots of us made it to seventy. It’s just that far more of us back then did not make it past age five, which skewed the life expectancy stats.
Anywayyyyy… So I’m still working on my paperwork now and again. I got my file box finished. Yay! I want to make sure this shit is sorted in case someone has to deal with it over my cooling corpse. Hell, the first hanging file in there is labeled IN CASE OF DEATH. My letter to Thea’s in there. If I ever make a will, a copy of that will go in there too. What a joke, right? Like I have any assets. Right now the car could probably pay off my student loans if it really is worth six grand. That’s about it though. But I probably should set down some instructions for how I want all that shit dealt with. And I definitely have to set down instructions for leaving anything whatsoever to Sean. He’s not legally related to me anymore and wouldn’t get squat even if I had squat. Which I don’t. He’ll probably get photos if he wants them. I can’t fathom him wanting anything else personal.
Oh, and I fired a shot against a major vexation in my past: I still have a lot of the back-and-forth with Cheryl, my former mother-in-law, about the divorce and about my son. It is all now in a hanging file labeled something like IN-LAW BULLSHIT/ 1999 TO EARLY 2000s, allllll the way back to the back in my file box. Congratulations, Cheryl and Angel Bob. And before you think I’m complimenting Bob, google “Doctor Who Angel Bob.” Creepy old fuck.
Anyway. I got new underwear yesterday after two and a half fucking years. I used to like Hanes okay but when I took these out of the packaging, I immediately wondered how long they’re going to last. They look cheap and shabby. We’ll see, but I wanted some that I haven’t bled on, because… still, since February, no periods. I had some spotting in probably February and maybe early March but nothing to write home about. Also, I think I might have had six pairs of underwear left and they were all falling apart or close to it. So let’s start over fresh. I’m not so confident about my reproductive status that I wanted white underwear, though. Nope. All black. Old habits are hard to break. I would have gotten more of a color range had any of the mixed-color packs NOT had one or two white pairs in them. No such luck.
I’m still using what you’d call “underwear protection” but it’s Poise pads now. I am pretty sure my pelvic floor is trashed, plus ladyplumbing tends to be slightly leaky now and again no matter who you are. I might make up a set of cloth pads to use instead. Nothing I’m going to worry about right now. Poise is comparable in price to the name-brand menstrual pads, I think. We can talk environmental stuff but me changing how I do things doesn’t matter if 3.9 billion other female people aren’t. Or some portion of them, anyway. Meanwhile, it feels so much nicer with the Poise than it did with those heavy-day fucking diapers. Whew.
(And no one playing gender-identity games with pee pads, either. Ever notice that?)
I AM tempted to take up sewing my own underwear. Out of tshirts. It’s a thing I’ve mulled over now and again for a few years, because there are designers who sell patterns for that. It’s as good a use for tshirts as any because too many of them wind up in the landfill, and the resulting product will likely be better-made than what I just bought once I figure out what the fuck I’m doing with knit jersey fabric. And they can be whatever color I want. Bonus.
Oh god, I just rambled on and on with this entry. Sorry. It’s the not really having anyone to talk with. There’s Dad, yes, but first off he’s really hard-of-hearing and I am not a voice-raiser unless I am really pissed off, and then only sometimes, so raising my voice at any other time stresses me out because I half-consciously associate it with conflict, so I tend to forget to do it. No, not on purpose, but I know that’s what’s going on. Secondly, what also stresses me out in Dad’s particular case is the way everything has the potential to be a fucking lecture. And I never know what will trigger it. Nothing is off the table and it really, I guess, just depends on his mood that day and what’s been on his mind… and it’s that much worse if his take on the particular subject is asinine, which all too often it is. (I mentioned a couple things he said one of the more recent times I visited Carrie and she marveled because, as she put it, “He’s smarter than that.” But I got an idea he’s like that with her too because there was ZERO surprise in her voice.) If I haven’t said before that I don’t think this is dementia because he was like this when he was younger too, there you go. So I do not look to my father for conversations overmuch. I have reason to believe he finds that frustrating, not because he has a burning need to Be In Conversations all the time — he’s where I got my introversion, he most certainly does not — but because, I guess, he sees it as a failure on my part because I’m a fuckup so I’m supposed to be going to him to find out how to stop being a fuckup. I would rather just avoid that whole minefield.
So I do. And I don’t look for conversations with anyone else around here either because, well, the sum fucking total of my life experience tells me to not trust people. So you get to see me babble here.
Anyway. I need to make a new to-do list while I’m still thinking about stuff. I could write it here, but I wouldn’t read it again, probably, and I wouldn’t get like two-thirds of it done and then I’d look like an absolute fanny. Let’s give that a miss.