my boring life story

So I guess it’s St. Patrick’s Day. After everything I’ve seen over fifty years, I don’t think leprechaun and luck and kiss me, I’m Irish anymore. I think drink til the snakes come back, because going Catholic was not Ireland’s finest hour. It was a huge step backwards, in fact. Especially for Ireland’s women.

I can say that. Technically, I think I’m Catholic. Infant baptism, y’know.

Anyway, I’d love to see St. Andrew’s Day or even Burns Night become events as major as St. Patrick’s Day here in the States. The Scots contributed at least as much to American culture as the Irish did, if not more. But most Americans hear “Scotland” and go “ew, haggis”. Not very helpful.

P.S. I am not wearing green. And unless you want to draw back a bloody stump, you can just deal.

—

My laptop’s touchpad and clicker buttons are developing a fault. Probably for the same reason I had to superglue my O keycap back on. The computer itself seems to be fine — quite the achievement, considering what we’ve been through together — though apparently Windows 10 has something built in to start nagging me when the install reaches a certain age, because it’s doing that now. “How to tell when it’s time to get a new computer,” and like that. Shut up, Winblows. Anyway, this is not a reason to get a new laptop and fucking good thing too, since I can’t afford one. I may be able to drum up a USB keyboard and mouse, which will do in a pinch and should be relatively inexpensive. I might as well get used to needing peripheral devices for a laptop anyway, considering they aren’t building DVD drives into laptops anymore. This is like selling new cars without wheels built on. Makes no fucking sense.

—

I have long been plagued with visible upper lip hair, for which I blame being brunette and also French. In the past ten to fifteen years I have grown additional hair on my face which at least is relatively-unpigmented, very fine fuzz, but it looks a bit like I’m trying to grow a beard. I shave it when I remember. I would really like to get one of those mini facial epilators. It will hurt but it’ll work, the results will last longer, and I won’t have to replace blades ever again. But I say all that because recently I was shaving my mustache-shadow when I noticed something annoying. I have to use a magnifying mirror because middle-aged eyeballs, and as I was shaving I noticed I had a LONG nearly-unpigmented hair under my nose. Fucker must have been a good half-inch to an inch long. I haven’t seen a hair like that on me in years; for a long time there was one at the top of my left tit almost to my armpit and whenever I’d see it, I’d just yank it. (That one was a bit thicker than Under-Nose Hair and more like two or three inches long.) If I ever get that epilator I figure I will just trot it out about once a week and let it run amok over my face from my cheekbones downward and out to my ears. Fuck it. There is sure to be something in its path I want removed. I can’t even laser most of that shit off. It’s not dark enough. Also, holy SHIT lasering is expensive. And it doesn’t even always work on darker hair.

I know I lecture basically everybody about how it’s okay for women to not look completely different from men and to not remove body hair if we don’t want to. I just don’t want this on my face. I recognize some of that is a response to living in a woman-hating culture. Facial-hair removal don’t pick no one’s pocket nor break their legs, so whatever.

Oh, and for the record, I try to say woman-hating instead of misogynistic or misogyny whenever I can, also woman-hater instead of misogynist, because that’s what it means and if I don’t say it in Greek, people can’t mentally hide behind the smokescreen of not speaking Greek. They have to face what the fuck they’re doing in their own fucking mother tongue. I wish the so-called feminist groups would use language the same way: to confront, not to comfort. They spend too much time ball-palming. I don’t give two shits whether men like being reminded of how hateful they are to us. I want to make them stop. Pointing out what they are doing to us is the first step in that process.

I admit it’s probably a lost cause though. I think we have wasted too much energy telling men to stop hurting us and we have not spent enough energy building institutions and protections that could bar them from hurting us or at least cushion the blow or properly heal the damage. To be fair, though, some of that is just not fucking having the resources, since one of the hateful things men do is deprive us of those. “But you didn’t work hard enough.” Fuck off, Dick-Owner Who “Earns” $130,000 A Year Typing Words On A Fucking Screen And Having Fucking Video Chat Meetings. We’re trying to save lives here.

Well, we’ll see. Obviously, none of this will get sorted out in my lifetime. Which is now probably more than half over.

What a cheery thought.

—

Humana, which administers my Medicaid plan, has this incentive thing where if you make certain kinds of appointments and do a couple other things, you earn points which you can cash in as gift card balances. The available gift card options are limited. Walmart is pretty much my lifeline now and that was one of the options, so that’s what I got. At last count I had sixty-five points which so far I have cashed in as two $25 Walmart gift cards. I still have a fifteen-point balance and I should have another thirty points on the way.

I used the $50 in gift cards to go get supplies for my colonoscopy prep and also some more hangers (I am very fond of velvet hangers, as they don’t take up a lot of space and the clothes FUCKING STAY ON) and a couple other personal things. The only thing the cards didn’t pay for was the bag of hard butterscotch candy, which I already knew they wouldn’t (it’s one of Humana’s rules, for some reason). I have no idea why hard butterscotch candy was on the allowed-foods list for my prep, but it would have literally been the only thing I could have eaten which would have felt like actually eating solid food and I love butterscotch (I do anyway, but it also reminds me of my maternal grandfather, who I miss a lot), so fuck it. Probably I will end up sharing some of it with Carrie after this is all over if she likes butterscotch. She is forever foisting off candy on me, so fair’s fair. (Gummy cinnamon heart candies. Mmmmm. Gummy candy.) That wasn’t even two dollars I had to cover out of my own pocket, either. The whole prep-shop had been less than a dollar more than the gift-card total and then the bag of candy was very cheap.

If you have never had to have a colonoscopy, at some point you will get to that age. Here’s a suggestion for you: Don’t buy your liquids already liquid. Get the powders and then mix that shit at home. And forget finding premade Jello that ISN’T red or purple or orange. Once in a while you might get lucky but for the most part, for some reason, the powers that be have decreed that what kids really need is lots of red dye in their systems. Don’t ask me why. I just live here. But if you get the powder, you can find lemon and lime and even this weird blue shit in two or three different flavors. Didn’t nobody tell me I couldn’t eat no blue shit. I’ll just eat it earlier in the day, probably for breakfast, and then there won’t be much room to complain on Tuesday, probably.

But anyway, the powders are cheaper, I meant to say. Even if you could find yellow and green premade Jello, powdered everything is cheaper and lighter to carry and not such a pain in the ass to gather together. Made the shopping trip a lot fucking easier.

I mean, I’m gonna have a pain in the ass regardless. But let’s put that off ’til my actual appointment. At least then I’ll probably be asleep and will completely not care.

—

Dad’s been banging himself around a bit. Several days ago I heard a noise quite like a fall when I was still in bed, but he shouted something about the dresser in his bedroom and when I peeked around the corner, he was standing upright and putting his robe on. The bruises appeared… not more than three days ago? Since his fall in early February, his right pinky finger went a bit weird, and I haven’t asked him about it lately but he seems to be getting along okay. I offered him the doctor twice and he said no twice. I can’t make him get medical care if he’s still awake and alert enough to object and there’s no emergency. They’d have to declare him incompetent, and that would open a whole new can of worms.

—

I’m really close to the cancellation date on the car insurance again. Probably I will be able to Uber and fix the problem. We’ll see, I guess. I don’t want to make Dad pay for it again if I don’t have to. I also have at least two and probably three domain names up for renewal this month. Debating whether to let a particular one go. Don’t panic, Rory fangirls. That’s next month. I can tell you’re still visiting the fan site so I’m letting you know so you don’t jump to conclusions. But if you would like to help me keep my nose above water, I still have a GoFundMe. I wouldn’t say no.

Yeah, that’ll happen. It seems to have been buried under all the requests for elective mastectomies.

Okay. Off to bed.

Well. This was an interesting day.

So, I got up and went in for my colonoscopy consult. And first off, the nurse who checked my vitals put the blood-pressure cuff on my lower arm. I am fifty years old and never in my fucking life has anyone put the cuff there and that includes when I was donating blood. I have NO idea what that was about. The nurse remarked that my BP seemed high and I said yeah, the cuff hurts, and she didn’t seem overly concerned after the second read so maybe that will all get sorted out. I have no fucking idea.

But otherwise it was uneventful and I went on to McDonald’s after that because I hadn’t so much as had any coffee yet (I’m not a morning person at the best of times, but we just went back to Daylight Savings Time and I lost an hour), so I got one of their bacon cheeseburgers and fries and a caramel iced coffee. Let’s just say Wendy’s has nothing to worry about from either Mickey D’s or Burger King when it comes to bacon cheeseburgers and we’ll leave it at that. More importantly, I got a call from the hospital right around then. It was the hospital wanting to schedule my preadmit. It so happened they had an opening after my consult but before my diagnostic mammo at the hospital.

Well, okay then.

Got my preadmit (and EKG; I’d been worried about heart stuff but the EKG seems to think I’m fine) and then they walked me to the mammo department. There had been talk of me getting an ultrasound after the mammo if they couldn’t clear things up with the mammo. Well.

So I got the initial diagnostic mammo of my errant right tit;

Then that wasn’t enough so they ROLLED MY RIGHT TIT in two different directions to get more pictures;

And then that wasn’t enough either so it was time, apparently, for the ultrasound.

So I’m thinking hey, no big deal right? Ultrasound’s pretty much nothing unless you get a transvaginal, and then it depends.

Well.

It was just as bad as the mammo. Just from a different angle.

In the end I came very close to the MD who read all the mammos and breast ultrasounds coming in to do another ultrasound series herself, but I guess she was happy with the tech’s images. But she did come in and speak with me directly.

So guess what?

I have to have a biopsy now. Of two sites in my right tit, if I remember correctly.

I thought, “Oh shit, surgery,” but turns out it’s just a needle biopsy. They won’t even conk me out for the procedure; they’ll just numb the area a whole lot. I am expecting it will still hurt. I remember how my c-section went. I suppose I am just going to have to cope.

So. Since the last week of February I have had: two primary care visits, two mammogram visits, an ultrasound, and a colonoscopy consult. Coming up before the end of March, my actual colonoscopy next Tuesday (not tomorrow but next week) and then the biopsy the Monday after that.

And we still haven’t gotten around to my fucking fibroids. I’m waiting for everything else to settle down before I go down that road.

And let’s not forget I am on metformin now.

sigh

Now, I’m still not worried about the tit. Far as I know there’s been no one in my mom’s family with breast cancer. If it has happened, whoever it was has been an outlier. And most of the time when a mammogram finds something, turns out it’s entirely benign. I’ve known this for literal decades.

Except… it’s me. So I’m not assuming things will turn out well. I’m not worried, I’m just not optimistic.

We tried optimism. That is why I am in my current mess.

Lesson learned.

I’ll update you when I know something. Dunno when it’ll get uploaded, but it’ll get written.

—

Observations:

Apparently, hospital administrators don’t give a sweet shit about making mammography suites hospitable to their usual patients. Apparently, it takes breast cancer charities to do that. Everything nice in that waiting room had a breast cancer charity’s name on it. Whatever.

Apparently, women getting tits squished are, like, five or something. Pink flowers on the mammogram machine (they use a stick-on flannel-like “blanket” on the platform to make it more comfortable). Pink-wrapped lollipops in the waiting area. Insert huge eyeroll here. But I suppose their hearts are in the right place.

Oh, and know how they know where your nipple is when a mammo is basically a specialized x-ray and a nipple is soft tissue? Well, they put this specialized band-aid across your nipple with a metal dot centered over it.

And do remove it when you’re done. If you forget it, it’ll make you itch later.

P.S. The staff at the American Legion hospital in Crowley are super nice. Absolutely stellar. Had a good experience overall even with the physical annoyances. 10/10 would recommend.

Even Dad told me later that when he went for his ass-spelunking, same facility, they gave him a bowl of grits when he woke up and he said it was the best grits he’d had in a long time. Good hospital food? Shet yo mouf.

—

What do I mean by we tried optimism?

Most of the stupid situations I got into, I went into them wide-eyed and happy and hoping for the best.

That began breaking down when I got pregnant with Thea. By then I had seen for myself that what I had hoped for was not fucking happening. When you get pregnant is a really bad time for that to happen. And when a woman’s going through that, the worst thing her man can do is double down on what’s making her feel unsafe in the situation — but that didn’t fucking stop Matt, did it. And face it, he was never my man anyway. The whole fucking thing was a scam.

So I’m like, fuck all y’all. Take that Pollyanna shit somewhere else. I’m taking it one day at a time, and I’m not believing in anyone but me anymore. And I have a hard enough fucking time with that.

If shit goes wrong, fine. Then it’s going wrong. I’ll deal. If it goes well, yay. What will be, will be.

—

But, I’ve got The Waterboy and Kindergarten Cop to entertain me. I guess the movies they repeat over and over on satellite reboot to new ones at the beginning of each month? We’ll see.

If I have no other reason to get a job, I really need to get a DVD player.

One more snag with Minecraft. I still can’t play it. I think I know what the problem is, and it is not a lack of capacity to play online. But apparently when I thought I had updated the software, I had only downloaded the upgrade, and it still requires an internet connection to install the upgrade. What the actual fuck. Okay, fucking pick one. Either I have to download an upgrade file or I have to be connected to the internet to install the upgrade. THERE IS NO FUCKING REASON TO HAVE TO DO BOTH.

Nerds. Feh.

It’s not a national crisis. I will get it did probably tomorrow. I will take my laptop with me when I go to Crowley, owing to that big gap between my ass-plumber consult and my boob-squishing redo. Crowley is the Acadia Parish seat and they’ve got the main branch of the Acadia Parish library system. Should go pretty well. Might get a card while I’m there. Definitely will get the fuck online and clear this up.

—

Rafael, the neighbor across the street who bought Dad’s old mobile home (sniff… I loved that trailer), is back from the training thing he was doing out of state, so Jodi (our landlady) brought him over to look over the back porch. The wall is rotted on all three sides. Rafael figured out there’s no kind of flashing on the top edge of the wall to redirect rainwater away from underneath the siding. He’ll fix it. I don’t have a timetable but that’ll happen eventually.

Since Jodi was there anyway I asked her about the floor around the laundry area and bathroom. I mentioned that I have never heard Dad complain once about the water bill and that it seems to have been consistent over the last few months, so I’m hesitant to say it really is a leak. She says it just gets really wet under the trailer and I said well, that makes sense because I’m pretty sure the floor was in a little worse shape when we had all that rain. She’s talking about setting up some kind of concrete dam around the outside edge of the trailer so that water doesn’t get in anymore. I was unclear whether that would be done with bags of concrete or if an actual thing was going to be built. I don’t care which it is as long as neither Dad nor I falls through the floor. It’s her damn trailer and if it turns out it was some kind of leak after all, that’s mostly her problem. Dad has adequate savings for relocation if my car doesn’t keep having problems and Lord knows we know at least a few guys who could help with the heavier stuff. The only real question there is how a landlord elsewhere would deal with me living with Dad if I don’t have regular income at that point. But this is rural Louisiana and it may not be that much of a hassle. I can’t see us leaving, though. Dad likes it here too much.

Rafael came back by later because his outside water spigot wasn’t working. We’ve got water, so he left mystified, but not before asking if he could borrow a pack of Marlboros. I obliged. Dad recently bought two cartons’ worth, most of it is still there, and Rafael says he’ll pay Dad back tomorrow but honestly I don’t think Dad’s going to care. I’ll tell him, I’m just not expecting any issues. Rafael helps Dad a lot.

—

Oh god, I am finally remembering while in front of my computer.

I have a whole lot of archives I want to add here. That’s all digital. Something I never talk about online, however, is a handwritten diary I used to keep. It wasn’t any great desire to keep a secret, I just never thought about mentioning it when I was at a keyboard. I picked up the book in a pharmacy right when I was about to leave Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1999 with Sean, right after Mike’s arrest. It was this gaudy thing with pages about 8.5″ x 11″, yellow paper and an abstract flower pattern on the cover in pinks and whites and greens and yellows. (There is at least one photo of me in existence where I have it with me.) I have tried before to keep a journal of some kind in a blank book. This was the one time I filled the fucking thing from cover to cover instead of quitting after, like, five pages. Handwritten. In ink. It was amazing.

I still have it. One thing I have never managed to lose.

I won’t have it for long after I transcribe it here. Dad has a burn pit.

I seem to recall a lot of delayed adolescent angst (I was twenty-five and should have been more grown), and not everything there needs to be added here. So what I want to do is transcribe the important shit and then close that door. It’s long past time.

Weirdly, it will be less work than moving digital entries here will be. A LOT of my digital stuff was not in WordPress and so I probably can’t just import it. Even if I could, there’s bound to be a lot of noise and crap that I will have to go back in and edit out. Faster to just do the work offline in plain text files like I do with new journal updates and then have it all ready to go next time I’m online. But the files I’m taking the information from contain multiple posts, and so are often very, very long with a bunch of extraneous crap in between such as likes and comments. (We had likes and comments before Facebook, y’all.) So it’ll be tedious. Which is why I’ve never finished the job.

—

I have a lot of mess I need to tidy up, in fact, as far as mementos and photos and that sort of thing. And I don’t want to pass any of this on with no explanation or description added. That’s just irresponsible. One of my regrets where family is concerned is refusing the big gallon Ziploc bag of family photographs Aunt Norma offered me last time I was at her house. I didn’t want to be greedy. I should have been greedy. I don’t suppose I will get another chance; she has dementia now, and who knows what Uncle Boo’s going to do with everything when she goes. But even if I’d taken the bag, I wouldn’t have been able to make sense of all of the photos. As it was, one of the photos I did take may be a photo of my grandfather as a toddler, but if it is him then the wrong year was written on the back, and there is no other information. I can’t leave a mess like that for my kids. If they even want anything from me ever again. So I need to start sorting that shit out. I am not getting any younger.

—

Speaking of. I need to put together some kind of packet in case I’m found dead or something. After everything that’s happened, I’m not expecting anyone to give a shit that I’m dead or to do what my final wishes indicate unless there’s a legally-binding will so directing them, but if I don’t at least make the attempt in lieu of a will before I can get that done, my kids will definitely be left with nothing. If they never want to deal with me again they still may be curious, at some point, about my side of where they came from. I have zero problem with giving them that information. I just have to make sure it will actually happen.

I’m so morbid. Fuck middle age.

Twenty-five years now since Sean left me. Just making a note of it. I started out getting sad at this time of year and then would just sort of notice it and now, well. I don’t know. I think I remember what day it is every year, and that’s about as far as it goes. Emotionally blunted. Happens sooner or later with these things.

I would say at this point that there are valid reasons for both my kids to be angry at me, but the problem is that the reasons they are angry at me are not the valid reasons, they’re something else completely. Misplaced anger. Bad aim. I don’t know what to do about that, so I haven’t even tried. I’m not sure Sean’s really angry at me at this point, anyway. Indifferent might be more like it. At worst, indifference on the surface with some old anger deep down that’s rusted so much it doesn’t have much function anymore.

But all that’s just a guess. And fixing old hurts is a two-way street.

I’m a hypocrite, anyway. I haven’t talked to Mom since December and I’m not sure if I will. It’s less being angry at her than just plain not trusting her, and I’m not sure what either of us would get out of it in any case. I can’t understand her speech two-thirds of the time, she doesn’t understand me at all (maybe my speech, but certainly nothing else), and I don’t like her husband. No idea why. Just a bad vibe. Then there were the alleged drugs (she has never confirmed, and that may only be a rumor), the selling the house and the land it was on after telling me I would inherit both, the abandoning me on Christmas after promising to pick me up at Dad’s and thereby forcing me to spend the whole day alone since I had no car at the time, the promising me her van that she wasn’t driving anyway (I didn’t ask, she offered) and then coming to take it back without prior notice nor an explanation (and I had a small child I needed transportation for), the not telling me about Mawmaw’s death until weeks or months afterward and then sending me a nasty letter when she discovered I already knew and was very unhappy about not being notified, the stealing money from my brother Chan’s kids, and the not telling Chan about his father. And now acting like Chan’s just a bad son instead of reacting in a understandable way to her mistreatment of him. And those are the things I know about.

So maybe not so much a hypocrite. And I just get angrier at my situation when I consider the differences in the two. I couldn’t help being too poor for a lawyer when my in-laws stole my son, and it turned out he was safer with them anyway (considering I was dating Jeremy at the time what with his issues that I found out about later, considering my status as a single mother still young enough to be considered fuckable and I was too easy a target for psychos in general), and that’s saying something because Bob, my then-father-in-law, was a raging alcoholic. Even my efforts to stay in touch with Sean were as likely to be returned to me unread on some bullshit pretext as to actually be given to him. And the worst thing I did where my daughter was concerned was not being structured enough with her education, but last I checked there were two adults in Thea’s life that whole time and one of them was too busy fapping on the fucking internet with all his fucking girlfriends, or whatever the fuck he was doing. No one wants to hear this because this whole culture is built on blaming women and especially mothers for everything, but I’m one fucking person. I can NOT do everything myself. If I have no support from society, I’m getting exactly nowhere, never mind with kids. I don’t mean everyone else paying my way or any bullshit like that. I mean society acting like I matter as a human being and acknowledging that I have needs that should be met, and not just after I’ve kissed everyone else’s asses enough, either. We have a BIG problem with this, and not only because it affects me. Just seeing how a young mother of a three-year-old was treated at the homeless shelter when she got seriously sick was a huge eye-opener. You people are all a great big pile of shit, and it is entirely by choice. If you want life to stop being shitty, you have to make different choices. Do not dump it all on me, or on any other individual woman, or on women as a group. We are ALL in this together.

“I was a single mother with five kids and I did everything myself”

You had help left and right and you’re too arrogant to admit it now. Your “friends” secretly hate you. Fuck off.

Anyway.

—

I was mistaken about my Minecraft game. I don’t know what the fuck happened, but I was at the library yesterday and I opened the app and updated it and logged in, and now everything’s fine and I can play offline again. Given that it is updated, it’s probably a good idea to start a new game instead of trying to play the current one because version updates mess up the existing maps. I stand by my general complaint about software trends from the previous post, though.

—

I now have two appointments on Monday rather than just the one about the ass-plumber. After that I have to go over to the hospital in Crowley and get my right tit squished again, and probably also an ultrasound after that. I need to impress here that I am not worried yet. I read up on what the scan results diagnosed and it can happen due to poor positioning sometimes. They didn’t actually see a lump, just this outcome can sometimes indicate a lump that is hard to see. Even if they do find a lump, chances are excellent it will be benign. I have no breast-cancer history in my family that I know of, and that tit has given me zero trouble. If anything, I like it better than the left one because it is not quite as big. That was true even before I had kids. If I ever win the lottery, I am getting the fucking things rebuilt, and they WILL be the same size when the surgeon’s done with me.

(No implants though. Not if I can help it. 99% chance that I can help it.)

Have taken three doses of the metformin by now, I think? Maybe four? Not sure. All I know is, physically I feel a little better than I’ve been feeling. I did a fasting sugar a day or two ago and it was still in the 150s (mg/dl), but it had been in the 160s the previous time I had checked, and that was on a good day. I suspect that if I can successfully transition to low-carb at minimum, if not actually keto, I’ll see an even bigger improvement.

I have been shopping, at any rate, for a new glucose meter and the whole shebang. I thought perhaps Amazon might have decent prices. I was not disappointed. I am doing that reluctant thing about spending right now — I did order some B12 and that should be in the mailbox tomorrow, thanks to Amazon doing Sunday delivery, but I’m afraid that if I get carried away with spending I will run into some stupid fucking crisis — but if I start up with Uber again the way I’m seriously considering, I’ll definitely order a kit. The ones I’m looking at also come with control solution, which will be helpful. Meters are not super accurate anyway, but control solution will tend to catch out the ones that are actually fucked up. I need all the advantage I can get. I suppose I’m at war now.

—

I got to go to the library yesterday because I was in Jennings yesterday because Dad sent me on an errand yesterday to buy him some fucking alcohol. I feel like I wrote this already and I probably did, actually in WordPress while at the fucking library. I am not sure. I will say that I had an odd moment while in the checkout line where I wanted to make myself look less like a fucking lush (it was two 750ml bottles!!!) by remarking that I was getting it for my elderly father, and then I realized that if I said that, I would probably get in trouble for buying booze for someone else. If that ain’t a surreal fucking situation. Hey Dana, would you like to develop a reputation as a drunk to save yourself being arrested for possibly purchasing booze for minors? Oh, sure, fuck it! I was getting bored anyway!

The funny thing with his drinking these days is that at least some of it goes down the sink because if he doesn’t finish a drink and then needs a nap, when he gets back up he dumps it because the ice has melted, the Coca-Cola is flat, and therefore the drink is nasty. I mean, they’re nasty anyway. I tried a smidgen of his Early Times last time I lived here because I had discovered I like Scottish whisky (I don’t call it Scotch unless in a conversation with Americans whose degree of knowledge about booze is unknown to me or clearly lacking) and I was curious how his Kentucky bourbon stacked up without the Coke added. What do you know. The Coke was why I had always found it nasty. I was never a drinker at home as a teenager, but there were a couple times he offered me a sip, once after I was in a minor school-bus wreck that had nevertheless left me a bit rattled. Y’all, don’t add Co-Cola to bourbon. It does not improve it. That said, I wouldn’t go buy Early Times on my own. Number one, if I remind myself it’s cheap, I might drink it faster, which would help no one, least of all me. Number two, he’d totally steal it. I am about 80% convinced he did that when I had what was left of my Balvenie with me and moved in with him last time, but I don’t think he liked what he tasted. Or didn’t want to get caught, since he hadn’t asked. Either way.

I just don’t drink here generally. I don’t get sloppy anyway anymore (we’re talking more-than-half-my-lifetime-ago “anymore”), but one of us has to stay sober.

Oh, right, my original point. Point is, at least he’s not drinking every single drop of said booze. Small consolation. With the previous bottle he put at least a third of it down the sink because he was exhausted after we went to Crowley and spent the next day napping more than not. So it was a couple swallows and then back to bed and then back up later to find a spent nearly-full glass, thus having to dump it out and start over, then soon needing another nap, lather, rinse, repeat. I can’t say I’m sorry.

But if he’s feeling better, things could get interesting again. As it is, I thought maybe he fell a couple days ago, but it must not have been serious because when I peeked around the corner he was standing upright and putting on a robe. Haven’t seen any new bruises either.

—

Been thinking for a long time about a certain guy obsession of mine, speaking of mind-altering substances. I’ve touched on this before and I will again, without naming him. I mean, since I got obsessed with him (and I do NOT mean that in a Fatal Attraction sense, more like an autistic-hyperfixation or teenage-crush sense), he’s allegedly gotten married so he’s not a good infatuation target anyway. But the more I look at the overall picture the more I wonder if he’s on something, or suffering the aftereffects of same. I saw a comment about him on a YouTube video to the effect that in his young-adult years he was known around town as a raging cokehead. I have more recently (a couple years ago?) seen a comment on Instagram by a disgruntled woman that he was very rude to her in a restaurant and accused her of stalking him. I have also read his responding to an interviewer in Singapore who asked him where he would sail his boat when his most famous show was over with a, “That’s my fucking business,” and then there’s the way we’ve heard from at least two restaurants he’s visited that he has a wife, once quoting him as having mentioned her, but he still will not publicly state he’s gotten married and is generally very secretive. I’m not gonna go out on a limb and say he’s an asshole, there has been plenty of evidence that he is not (for whatever that’s worth), but his suffering aftereffects or current effects of cocaine use is not off the fucking table. Paranoia is a side-effect of nose candy. Being secretive is a symptom of paranoia. That he used to be a lot more open about his life and now is not is another huge red flag in this direction. Progressive damage over time.

No one wants to hear that. He’d be fucking pissed (off) if he knew I said it. He will just have to cope because any capacity I had for sympathy or understanding about this shit got burnt out a long time ago. Users and addicts cannot expect sympathy from people who qualify for Al-Anon membership. (If we’re still capable of it, great. If we’re not, don’t expect it.) If he’s still using, that’s a choice and entirely his fault, not mine, so don’t shoot the fucking messenger. And the effects of his use A-ffect other people, so don’t act like it’s “private” and “victimless.” (If his wife’s not using, she has to cope with him using or cope with the aftereffects if he’s no longer using. If his wife IS using and he is too, he’s reinforcing her habit and it will be harder for her to quit. Do we in his fandom actually care what happens to his wife? I was under the impression we all did.) If he’s stopped using but it fried his brain in a certain way and he’s still dealing with those aftereffects, maybe it’s time he understood that he’s suffering those aftereffects instead of accusing people of stalking him when we ask simple questions like “are you married, big man?” That’s not a question that normal people are afraid to answer. Even famous people are not.

More to the point, since this is my diary, not his? I’m rather irritated with myself. I’m a loner myself and so I found his solitude and his quirks appealing. Why do I always glom onto the weirdoes? Women can be weird and it not mean anything nefarious but in my experience, weird men are always hiding something dealbreaker-level-stupid or awful. Will I learn anything from this? Fuctifano. I’ll probably keep crushing on him a while. The ONLY defense I have for that is I know nothing will come of it. But this better be the last fucking time. I can’t do this anymore.

AND he’s a heavy drinker. As if that isn’t bad enough. “Oh, it’s okay, he’s Scottish.” No, that does not make it better. Thanks for playing.

—

I’m generally going through a bit of bleh. I don’t mean to sound like it is a huge crisis. Just generally, my brain is going “why the fuck are other women my age living in decent houses and driving decent cars and… well… look at me”? There is no single answer, and while I carry plenty of the blame, there were plenty of “pain points” where people around me could have treated me like a human being instead of like a criminal or like a dumb farm animal and the outcome would have been very different.

But that’s not even most of the bleh. I mean, I can’t change any of that. Most of the bleh is “Okay, how the fuck do I improve things from here without tripping myself up again?” Never mind that 99% of the time I apply for a job I don’t get it; most of the time they ignore me and once in a while they reply back long enough to say sorry-you-do-not-meet-qualifications. And it’s not like we’re talking rocket surgery here. Even when I do get something I am not suited for it, apparently. And this is all doing my head in because duh, I need more money.

But fretting will not fix anything. I need to get my ass in gear on the things I can do. The end.

Happy International Women’s Day. And Women’s History Month in the USA. The only history month more ignored is probably Native American in November.

In honor of the day, I got a call from Crowley. It’s the hospital there, same system as where I got my mammo in Jennings, and they want to redo my right tit. I am at the library and this was a reminder that I hadn’t checked my results, which I found out had come in this morning but couldn’t actually open them in the app. Very annoying. Nevertheless. Left tit is fine. Right tit needs re-imaging. The issue is sometimes caused by poor positioning, so we will see if that was the problem.

I already have an appointment in Crowley on Monday, that one to arrange the Roto-Rooter up my ass, but that’s at 9:30. The mammo appointment is 1:30. I suppose I can spend time at the library or something until it’s time for the second one. Absolutely no point driving home and then back.

I’m in Jennings because Dad wants me to buy him booze. Not with my money, obviously. I agreed only because (1) I wanted to go to the library anyway and (2) I’m under his roof. I don’t need this to be a reason he starts agitating to kick me out. I don’t really think he will — he just bought a chest freezer! — but you never know with him.

Fasting sugar this morning was, I think, 159 mg/dl. Still too high but not as high. That was with just one dose of metformin and I did have too much carb last night. We’ll just have to see how things go.

Okay, so I went in to my labs followup today and it’s about how I expected: I’m officially diabetic now.

I don’t remember the exact hemoglobin A1C number but I think it was 7.2. It was definitely over 7. I think it is supposed to be less than 5. Given that I was pulling fasting glucose of more than 150 mg/dl, typically 160 mg/dl on my better days, this was absolutely no surprise.

The clinic is prescribing metformin for me. Picked that up today too and took my first dose with supper. It could be placebo effect, but I took it between 3pm and 4pm and within a couple hours I felt a little better already. (I have not felt good once since coming back here. I have felt bad and I have felt less bad and I have felt kind of meh. I think I’m a notch above meh now. Hey, that’s progress.) The other option was one of those weekly-injection metabolic drugs everyone’s so excited about right now. All I can say is I’m old enough to remember fen/phen, and anyone who takes five seconds to google knows how that turned out. We’re not doing Mounjaro or any of that nonsense until I see a LOT more data on what those drugs do to people. Metformin has a long history as a relatively trustworthy medication as far as diabetes meds go. Even Dr. Atkins used to recommend it, and he didn’t like diabetes drugs. I will need to take supplemental B12, but that’s not difficult or expensive and as an Old Fart In Training, I probably should be on it anyway. And for the record, I already knew metformin depleted at least one B vitamin, and I’m not happy that medical providers still aren’t telling us about that. Everyone reading this please do me a favor and start advocating for your own health, and not just by reading fucking mommy blogs, either. If you run across a claim about something, google it and look at the mainstream medical sites and study abstracts on the subject. See where people agree and where they disagree. If you don’t know what a drug is, look it up. If you don’t know where a body part is, look it up. If you don’t know what a disease is, look it up. It pisses me right off knowing how often doctors and other providers (mine’s a nurse practitioner) leave patients in the dark. It may not even always be on purpose. The blind leading the blind.

My cholesterol isn’t great either but I was pleased to note the only number they seemed to care about was my LDL, which is currently in the 170s (mg/dl). They didn’t try to put me on a statin today but I am supposed to go back in a month and they might try then. Nope. Either I am getting my LDL down before then or I am telling them no, I’ll try niacin and maybe garlic but I am not doing statins. If they really stress out about that I will suggest a calcium score, which is a better indicator of cardiac risk anyway, but I’m betting Medicaid doesn’t cover it, even though it’s cheap as far as tests go. But we’re just going to have to clash on that one. I’m too weak already and statins cause muscle damage. They also fuck up the brain, and I don’t need my brain fucked up. It’s the only one I’ve got. No prosthetics possible.

I really want to see my full labs but I still have to figure out my patient sign-in because I don’t think they have sent that to me. Providers think, “oh, I will tell her the total cholesterol” or “oh, she just wants to know LDL” and I’m here like “what is my particle size?” I’m such a dork. But this is stuff that is quite useful to know. Even if it’s not in the labs they did, there may be other numbers that point to it. We’ll see.

I really need to get back to animal fats too, and I really should consider going gluten-free again. Sounds like a non sequitur, but my numbers are better eating that way. Dad swears by soybean oil. It’s horrific. Also, I don’t know if I can manage keto with Dad being the way he is, but I’m willing to try if I can get on a good multimineral. The idea of winding up in a major electrolyte imbalance does not sit well with me. I don’t need keto flu and I don’t need muscle cramps. I’m good. Honest. But in the meantime I can still do lowER carb, and maybe make it so that most of the carb I do get comes from veggies. I used to do pretty well with things like carrots and beets. We’ll see. I’m thinking I may have a lot of sheet-pan meals in my future. Dad’s willing to buy the meat and we have a chest freezer now. And he ought to get a kick out of it if I’m eating more veggies. He nags me about that sometimes. The hypocrite.

Oh! Forgot to mention. My blood pressure is not brilliant, but it’s like on the high end of normal. 128/88, I think? Something like that. I was very surprised. As with my blood sugar level, I can tell when my BP’s elevated and it is not a good feeling. (A different not-good feeling than having high glucose is, though.) At this point it seems to go into the stratosphere when I am in a lot of pain or when I am under a lot of stress that I can’t possibly resolve. But I don’t seem to have white coat syndrome. That’s fine. My pulse rate wasn’t that brilliant either. I need to start exercising. That would be half the battle for both these issues. Will I? Probably not. I have never been my own best friend.

Weirdly, they didn’t prescribe me a glucose meter or strips. Hi, it’s not enough to tell me to eat differently and then put me on a drug. I need a strip prescription! I don’t think I can even get OTC meter strips with the Walmart gift cards I got from Humana, because it is a prescription item. I can’t bring in even $200 a month right now without a lot of luck. Strips are beyond me.

If anyone wants to know why we do not have diabetes under control in this country, ask me. That’ll be three hours of your life you’ll never get back.

I wonder if Amazon has a store-brand meter and strips that are cheaper than Walmart’s. No meter brand that I’m aware of is as accurate as we need it to be anyway. As long as I can ballpark, I guess.

OH. Also forgot. The dietary advice was interesting. It was suggested I cut way back on carbs and emphasize protein in my diet. Well gee whiz. The times they are a-changin’. So I guess we have that going for us, then.

Another interesting thing: I got onto the MyChart at the hospital in Jennings (American Legion) and my ER visit from December ’21 is still there. I can’t figure out how they got to “fibroids” when part of the ultrasound results says they couldn’t really see distinct tumors. They saw some on my cervix but apparently of a different kind. I also forgot to ask about that today, AGAIN. I’ll double-check but probably I can go to a specialist without a referral. Let me get through this nonsense about the colonoscopy next week and then we’ll see, one way or another.

Oh, and I really should add Dad’s medical appointments to my Google calendar. I have Carrie’s unavailable weekdays there, at least over the next month, and now I need that one more thing. I do add my appointments to Dad’s paper calendar on the fridge and he has already expressed appreciation for that. We’ll see how it actually works out.

—

Oh, Christ. The Republicans are yelling at Biden in his State of the Union speech. He’s giving back as good as he’s getting, but it’s all ridiculous. Even the people up there who are more like the adult in the room still don’t know what the fuck is going on and just want to suck up to campaign donors and the idiots who don’t know what the fuck is going on but still want to fucking vote. “Let’s save the environment by making electric car charging stations!” CARS ARE ANTI-ECOLOGICAL. ALL CARS ARE. EVERY ONE.

And he still doesn’t fucking know what a woman is.

And he’s still acting like that Hamas attack in October was somehow worse than what Israel has been doing for more than seventy years, including their current assault on Gaza.

Also, fuck the middle class. The middle class is the reason the poor never get a fair shot, BIDEN.

“First senator to be kissed by the president” WHY THE FUCK IS HE DOING THAT AND WHY DO YOU FIND IT NORMAL

I’m pretty much at the point of never wanting to vote again. None of these fuckers represent me anyway. It’s fucking useless.

(I don’t hate people with speech impediments or anything, but I feel like being well-spoken and CLEARLY spoken ought to be a requirement for elected office. Fucking mushmouth. Don’t come at me about Trump. He’s fucking worse. I still don’t know what covfefe is.)

—

We are two days away from the day my ex-mother-in-law walked out of my former stepmother’s house with my son in tow; I would not see him again until the following year, and saw him only once more after that, the month his sister was born. This will be the 25th anniversary of my losing him. Literally half my life ago.

(It’s also his father’s birthday. I’m sure that was complete coincidence.)

March used to upset me much more than it does now. This stuff really does scab over. At some point I suppose it will do that for my experience with Thea, too. I used to have this vague notion that getting over these things would somehow diminish my humanity. I think now it’s more a feature than a bug.

I don’t know that I will ever stop being angry, though, at all the people who think women who can have babies are just dumb animals to harvest of our offspring. It would be bad enough if only men felt that way. Too many women are betrayers in the name of propping up their own egos. This has to stop.

—

I found out recently that my Minecraft game got updated and now I can’t play it offline. I had that ability not even a month ago and now… poof. This overall trend is really pissing me off. If it’s not turning a solid install into a subscription service, it’s removing offline capability. This may come as a surprise to all the privileged shitheads out there, but not everyone can get online at home 24/7. Also, if I’ve fucking paid for fucking software, IT’S MINE. If you do something to make it not mine without refunding me and I didn’t violate terms of service, that’s fucking stealing. A child could understand this.

I wasn’t playing Minecraft all that often and so I’m not as pissed off about this specific incident as I could be, but I’m not thrilled either, and I’m wondering what techbros will fuck up next. They don’t give two shits what the end user wants. They’re just sitting around wanking and typing random keys. I shouldn’t be surprised Matt gave me so much grief. Birds of a fucking feather.

I suppose at some point this is probably going to turn me into a developer if that starts to be the only way I can have my own fucking software. That was why I learned HTML and CSS in the first place: the available website development applications didn’t cut it for me. But if I did learn this stuff it likely wouldn’t be for pay; they want to replace real, normal, sane employees with troons and AI anyway. Still, it’s a good set of skills to have. I would be useful to the feminist movement, probably. More of us need to become tech-literate. The techbros are one of our most militant enemy groups. Not our fault they can’t get laid. And yet.

—

I’m having one of those moments again where I want to natter on endlessly. Can’t tell, can ya.

I need friends here or something.

Got the mammogram done today. Fun! Apparently it’s supposed to be 3D, too. I wonder if I will be able to look at it from my MyChart. We’ll see. It’ll be several days yet.

Called the doctor’s office and sure enough, my fasting sugar triggered an A1C. It’s not in normal range. The lady I talked to didn’t have the results right in front of her and then when she went to get them there was some weirdness with the phone. Tried calling back and the line was busy. Ah well. I’m going in tomorrow at noon to see about that.

I’m figuring my cholesterol will be fucked, too. I am fine with a total around 200 mg/dl no matter what the drug-happy quacks think but I need numbers on what is specifically going on. I will NOT be getting on a statin. I don’t think she is going to like me very much. Haha.

Caught up a whole lot of stuff here at Carrie’s. It’s getting late enough I should probably get off here. One of Carrie’s granddaughters is here with a mild fever (I am staying the hell away from her) and I’m in Stanford’s usual chair. Best free it up for him soon.

I have thought some more about managing my schedule and I’m not 100% wedded to doing Uber on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Frankly I’m not more than 5% wedded to it because there’s too much travel involved. I actually made progress back in Ohio when I moved to Dublin because it was very easy to start my delivery day from there; that’s where I did most of my delivering anyhow. Go where the money is, is my motto. But I’ve regressed now. I have to travel over twenty miles to get to the good stuff AGAIN. And the good stuff might not even be there.

But based on previous experience it’s a fair bet I could expect to do pretty well on Fridays. Probably on Saturdays as well. That might be when I do it. I don’t know yet.

Today started out kind of shit. Was puttering around in the kitchen when I looked up and there was a big fat tree roach on the kitchen wall. I have found through dealing with about half a dozen others that it helps to use both brands of roach spray Dad has on the utility table in the kitchen. Just one by itself doesn’t really do anything, or not fast enough, anyway. The problem is they get stoned on the way to getting dead and tend to wander around the house falling off things until they finally die. The longer they take to die, the more likely they wind up going where you do not want them to go. And I don’t want to send them outside. Then they’ll get eaten and poison something I don’t want to poison. No bueno. Two sprays it is. Then when the little shit’s dead, it goes in the trash.

And now I’m in my room typing because we got hit with a big, if possibly temporary, thunderstorm that I did not want to be out in with my electronics. It’s 1pm now and I’ll probably go to Carrie’s in a bit but for a while I wasn’t sure that was going to happen. Anyway I’m sitting here minding my own business and suddenly hear rustling in plastic behind me on the shelves. And then buzzing. I still haven’t seen what it is and I cannot pinpoint the exact spot the noise is coming from, and now it’s died down, but there I go with another fucking bug to deal with. Joy. I’m not sure which is worse, another roach or a wasp. We’ve been getting plenty of the latter on the back porch, and my room’s direct line of sight to the back door, which we often leave open if it gets warm enough. But the buzzing could simply be something beating its wings against plastic — it doesn’t have to be a buzzy bug. And roaches are much more likely than wasps are to hide in stuff. I really don’t want to know. Hope it dies before I have to see it.

I don’t get why people LIKE living here. Between this shit and the humidity and fucking hurricanes, it’s very inhospitable. I suspect we only still have a viable human population here because most of them are too poor to relocate and at some point, someone invented air conditioning. It is not like the north in regards to the latter. Broke people have a/c here. They make a/c happen. Even if they only use it on the very worst days.

I also fully appreciate the irony in me having a generally pro-nature stance and then being freaked out by this shit. I am actually not freaked out by all bugs, though. I don’t know what it is about tree roaches — Germans, sure, because they actually breed in your house, but tree bugs are just visiting. I hate them anyway. I cannot explain it. I hope we ALL know what it is about wasps, though. Stay the fuck outside and leave me alone, I got no problem with those. Step into my hive, we’re gonna have a problem. It’s no worse than what they’d do to me if I stuck my head into a hornet’s nest. Let’s be real here.

I also have a theory that tree roaches don’t like rain. I don’t know why, but we tend to see them most often when it’s been raining outside. Like… you’re tree roaches? Take shelter in a tree? Do not come in my house and freak me out? I don’t get it.

I got matcha yesterday for the first time in a long time. Beaucoup Blends in Iota has matcha lattes. I don’t think they quite grok matcha though. They do a decent job with it. It’s not quite as flavorful as what Kung Fu Tea sells in Columbus, but it’s pretty good. But the young lady who sold it to me was politely confused about me not wanting any flavor shots. “Just sweetened is fine,” I said. She asked me to taste it before leaving to make sure I actually liked it. Yep. It’s good. Thanks. Haha. The only matcha I ever had with any other flavor added was the sesame matcha that KFT sells. I think it would be a stretch too far to suggest that flavor option to BB’s staff. I doubt it would sell very well.

But! I am happy to note they have diabetes-friendly tea drinks. And if I want to self-harm with starch, they also have boba. It’s expensive compared to KFT’s but I doubt they get many requests for it. Though I could be wrong on that score. Walmart, of all fucking things, in Jennings now carries boba tea kits. You could have knocked me over with a feather. One of them is even matcha flavor. Maybe it’s catching on. But if I don’t do boba I still have lots of options. Looks like their smoothies are okay for me too.

…

Yesterday Dad and I went to Super One because the day before yesterday, Dad went out and bought a small chest freezer. So now there was nothing for it but he would have to get meat to fill it. Well, half fill it, anyway. Didn’t get too crazy.

Had an unpleasant moment in the deli section (and I use that term loosely; this is south Louisiana, after all) where I suddenly went dizzy. It wasn’t BAD dizzy, but if it had kept up, I wouldn’t have been able to drive us home. I didn’t fall over or anything though. And it was for just a few seconds. I half wonder if it wasn’t something I was smelling in the general area. Something chemical going on. I hope I was actually smelling something and not hallucinating it relative to the faintness. You never fucking know.

I hadn’t had breakfast. Something else I’ve been going through, and much more than that one dizzy spell, is I get full sooner than I used to when I eat, and if I persist and eat more after I’m not hungry anymore then I feel sick afterwards. And we’re not talking five Big Mac value meals here. We’re talking fairly normal, especially by American standards. I am not sure if this is coming from me having been used to not having much food for two years or if something worse is going on. I’m already pretty sure my gallbladder has shat the bed. I’m wondering if it’s possible it might not be the gallbladder after all.

Nurse practitioner’s office called today and the lab results are back. Phone had no signal when the call came in so I got the voicemail. I have to be in Jennings tomorrow for the mammogram anyway so I might as well call them back then. Something else to worry about. This IS a small town and maybe they just call everyone when test results come back even if it’s to say the test results are fine, but in my experience no news is good news. They are going to find a high fasting sugar. Minimum. I bet my cholesterol is tanked too. They better hold on to their britches because I am not going on a statin. I have enough problems and statins can mess up your muscles and your brain, neither of which of mine are at peak anymore (the muscles never were, in fact). Do not want. Niacin and garlic capsules are not out of the question, though.

And of course there’s going keto. I bet just doing that will improve things a lot. I will add on the garlic and niacin, or possibly a good full-spectrum B complex, just for extra insurance.

Let’s just hope there’s nothing else going on. Not that they can tell everything from the labs the nurse practitioner ran for me. She did say she’d run an A1C if the fasting sugar came back high so I’m half hoping that’s what she wants to talk about because I want to know what it is. Otherwise? God, no more bullshit. I have had twenty-five years’ worth of bullshit. I deserve a break. I DESERVE one. Goddamn it.

Everything did indeed go down today but should be back up by now. When I write these entries sans internet connection and then upload them later, I usually timestamp them 23:59, but I’m actually writing this at nearly 11pm, and I got this sorted out hours ago.

It was a Facebook friend. I put out the call asking if I could borrow $35 from someone on-list. Paying it back this coming week should have been no problem if I can run some food deliveries. Cindy responded and informed me that the $40 she sent is a gift and that I deserve it. I have no idea why I would, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I may plead temporary insanity and repay it anyway. That will depend greatly on how this upcoming week goes. Or I could just take the blessing for what it is and get to work on paying my insurance. Which will be late again — it’s always due on the fifth and they allow me about twenty days overdue before they’ll cut me off — but if I play my cards right it’ll be less than a week late this time, which is much better.

Hey, so next month it could actually be on time! Wow!

Doug is now following my Substack. He has mentioned at least twice since the festivities started last fall that he doesn’t have the whole story on me and Thea, and if that wasn’t a big ol’ hint then I don’t know what is, and I meant to write out the story on the Substack anyway, so two birds with one stone. I guess he finally got around to reading it? I must have sent the link to him two or three weeks ago. I also know he’s busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, so no offense taken. Someone in the family could stand to be fucking listening to me by now. No one’s really wanted to up ’til now. Might as well be him. I guess we’ll see how that goes. It will also be fantastically ironic if it goes well. He was always the one getting pissed off and punching me when I ran my mouth when we were kids. Oh well.

Dad wants to go out and buy a small chest freezer tomorrow. I will not be the one driving him, since no way in fuck is that thing going to fit in my car in its original packaging. It might have fit if taken out of said packaging, but no one wants to wrestle with that in a parking lot. We’ve got the spot in the house picked out and everything. I half expected him to stick it in my room, because that’s the room it was in when he had one before, but he owns a shop vac now that he didn’t have last time and probably ruled it out for that reason. Fine with me. It gives me some wiggle room. I’m using that tray table and a folding chair (this is probably the one thousandth time I have mentioned the fucking tray table) as a desk setup now that I can just fold up when done with it and put it out of the way. I could get a real desk at some point, but I dunno. I actually like having the extra space. I don’t feel so hemmed in.

I think every day about how shit my diet is and how I can finangle it around to be better. That’s going to be a work in progress for a while, and mostly in my own head. Maybe having the freezer will help, I don’t know.

I have to talk about this and I haven’t wanted to. One more thing to not stick on the social media. Speaking of food. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on with me. I used to have a decent appetite. Even the last time I was here at Dad’s I had a decent appetite. That is shot now. Kerblam. I can eat, but if I’m not careful I end up feeling stuffed like a tick, and it is not a pleasant feeling, and it doesn’t take much food to get there.

Probably my gallbladder has kicked the bucket. I fit the demographic: fair (if they mean skin), fat, and (over) forty. The nasty feeling seems to most often coincide with higher-fat meals? I need to pay closer attention to that. I certainly get the runs after higher-fat meals, which is another sign. We’re not talking better regularity, we’re talking almost have to tape my ass cheeks together to make it to the bathroom. Not every time, but often enough to be notable. So yeah, could be gallbladder.

It could also be something much, much worse. I’m not in any abdominal pain and other than what looks like rosacea on my face I think my color is okay, so I am not going to try to borrow trouble. Nevertheless. I am aware of possibilities. We’ll leave it at that.

I still miss Ohio. Mostly the missing comes out as clear visual memories of driving around town, or visiting some of my favorite haunts. I am not allowed to want things, and I want to go back there, so that probably means I never will. I certainly can’t do it before I’ve got decent income. And at the rate I’ve gone, if I do go back I might wind up having to buy a house or something. I don’t know if there is some kind of registry landlords use to tattle on tenants the way banks have ChexSystems to tattle on check-bouncers. And is it a real eviction if it happened during the month-to-month period? I never should have taken that fucking apartment. I should have stayed at InTown Suites in Dublin. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. If I’d had just a little patience I could have gotten into that place over on Broadmeadows and been paying more than $300 less rent a month. And that would have been my utilities, probably. And no one sticking their nose in my business as long as they got paid timely. It wasn’t like the sticking the nose really helped anything.

Boy that went off on a tangent. I want to go home. The end.

I told Carrie I’d be sticking around. I probably will have to. I can’t see any way this gets better. I’m treading water, and one day I will drown. And everyone will say I was no-account and deserved to drown, and they’ll all get on with their lives like I never existed. What’s the fucking point, anyway? We just get ground under in the end and it makes no fucking difference.

But if I find some way to go back, I probably will. At least there will be more to do. Want to know why rural people get so hateful? They’re fucking bored. There’s work, and it usually sucks, and then there’s nothing at home but crap food and fucktarded TV shows. It’s no wonder drug use is epidemic down here. If you can’t change what you see, hell, change how you see it. But that doesn’t work terribly well. So it’s be ragey at everyone because at least it gives the brain cells something to knock up against. They gossip and backstab for the same reason. It’s really sad. I don’t need to be caught up in this mess for the rest of my life. I want to do actually good and fun things with my life. Thanks anyway.

“Rural people are hateful?” you ask. “I thought Southerners had good manners.” Oh, sure. They are old pros at covering it up. You are better off with a rude New Yorker. He’ll still get your car unstuck from a snowbank in January.

In other news, I’m starting to want to try to date again. God, no. I look like shit and I am completely poor. But I think about it anyway. It does not help that an ex-boyfriend of mine lives down here, probably less than thirty miles away. It’s a good thing he’s married (he met her after we broke up). Incentive to avoid him. Because I think that if I did try to look him up and if he weren’t married, it might actually get somewhere. Just as well. I think if we’d stayed together long enough he would have eventually found me ridiculous and ditched me. They tend to do that.

Not too big a mystery why I’d rather moon after Scotsmen, innit. A whole ocean away and completely inaccessible. Keeps me out of trouble.

Okay. Bedtime.

By the time I get this up, the three of you who ever read this thing (who the fuck’s in New Mexico and Arizona?) will have noticed an outage. The reason the outage occurred is that I didn’t have enough money to pay the hosting bill. It started out at around $25 a month and then, over the past two years, was raised twice so that now it’s about ten bucks a month more expensive than when I started. To say that I am irate about this is to utter the understatement of the year, but they are also a competent hosting service, so I haven’t wanted to drop them. Also I have never moved all my domain names to them since I left Bluehost four and a half years ago, and the idea of having to move domains from two different services to yet a third one is mildly irritating. It will also cost money, which is why I haven’t finished yet. I stopped having reliable money a little over a year ago and, starting a little over two years ago, too much of my money was spoken for.

(I’m still bitter about the way Dad acted last time I was here. Had he backed the fuck off and let me figure things out, I would have been able to start my own income and things would have been okay by the time Matt stopped sending support. When I think of that lost nine thousand dollars I could have used to maintain my fucking car and save up for emergencies, I could cry. Or that’s an exaggeration because at this point I don’t really feel anything anymore except vague calm and mild irritation. I’m so fucking tired of everything. Fuck it.)

ANYWAY. I have been thinking about starting up the delivery driving again. I will very likely have to drive to Lafayette or Lake Charles to do it, but we’ll see if Jennings or Crowley would work. I won’t have to drive six days a week, either. Technically I really only need to earn about $300 to $400 a month, $200 to keep up with the gotta-pay bills and another $200 for random expenses. I can do that in like two days a week if there are enough orders or big enough ones. No problem.

Will it fuck the car? Probably.

Know what else will fuck the car? Me having no money and then normal car-aging shit happens.

Besides, this will get me out of the house and then Dad will be like “oh, she’s doing something” and maybe things will stay chill around here. Because they pretty much are. I’d like to keep that going.

I’m thinking I could do a schedule of Monday-Wednesday-Friday either being at Carrie’s or going to the library, and then Tuesdays and Thursdays Ubering. I reserve the right to have weekends off. Or, if Tuesdays and Thursdays are too dead, maybe Thursdays and Saturdays. Whichever.

I will probably hit the library more often than I go to Carrie’s. I will be starting up the proofreading course again and I need quiet. Bad enough I will likely be distracted by social media. If I also have to hear the television, that’s not going to help.

I’m not announcing anywhere about the proofreading course. I want room to fuck up and fuck off and stall without anyone hassling me about it. Also it’ll be a laugh to see Dawn ask me occasionally when I’m going to start it up again. (Love ya, Dawn. Not that you read this.) But I’ve thought about it and this is the thing I’ve got in front of me, already paid for, that would let me develop an independent, portable business. I still want to do artsy shit and write, and I am (mostly writing, as it actually pays), but I’d like my whole life to not depend on that stuff because you can’t maintain an independent voice or style when your paycheck depends on the maximum number of people liking you. That is how art turns into crap. I’m already not where I should be, developmentally or careerwise. Let’s not.

The portable bit is especially important. It’s a remote thing I can do without constantly being on the internet (I only need to check my email sometimes and maybe get to a place with a better signal for file uploads and downloads — not a big deal) AND it’s something I can take traveling. I want to travel. If nobody wants me around except when they want me to do something for them, I might as well do whatever the fuck I want. And I really, really want to see Scotland before I’m too old to go.

I might also want to do some kind of nomadic thing back here stateside. I don’t know what that would look like yet.

In other news, I am finally getting medical attention. I have established with a primary care provider, I have gotten a long-overdue tetanus shot (grumble… my shoulder has a painful knot in it two days later), I am scheduled for a mammogram next week, and I am scheduled for a consultation for getting a colonoscopy the week after that. (The consultation is week after next. We’ll see when they want to go up my butt. I have already sorted out with Carrie when she’ll be available because I can’t drive myself home, and that’s in my Google calendar in case I forget.) I think we glossed over the uterine fibroids issue a bit, but if my PCP is not the person for that, I am pretty sure I can schedule GYN appointments without her referral. So I will do that too.

It’s another reason to put less emphasis on getting a Real Job. Nothing I would qualify for at this point in my life would be flexible on scheduling for doctor appointments. The Uber will be. Nothing I can do about that because you fucking clowns out there don’t want a humane working life for Americans, and especially not for American women, and MOST especially not for POOR American women. So, whatever. I refuse to care whether I am living up to the standards of people who don’t give a shit about me. It takes too much of my energy and I have less to spare than I used to.

In still other news, I’ve learned that the Scottish comedian I have mentioned in previous posts here is due to perform in Houston, Texas in I think May. I’ve looked over the scheduling for several of his U.S. tour dates in other parts of the country and I should be able to expect a ticket price of around $30. If I can figure out lodging, and I might want to set it up for the day prior and the day of, I might go ahead and pounce on that. I might ask Carrie if she’s interested in going, but we’ll see. I want ONE cool thing to do this year. I never do this shit for myself if some guy isn’t paying for it. There will be no guys paying for anything anymore. Not counting Dad, and I wouldn’t ask him. If I can earn it ahead, I will. If I sell that Sandor drawing, I really will. G is my consolation prize for big man being married. I do not need the object of my whatever to be tall. Just as long as he’s taller than me. He is. By about two inches. He also will not find me in any way interesting, but at least there’s a meet-and-greet. Should be fun. He seems like a cool guy.

Okay. I need to, like, fix food or something. And then maybe draw? I don’t know. I think I mentioned here that I got a folding tray table at Walmart a while back. I got a folding chair after that, so now I can set up a temporary desk in my room any time I feel like it, and it’s easy to store away. My social worker at the homeless shelter last year called me resourceful. Yes. Sometimes I am. I look forward to a day when I don’t have to be anymore unless I want to be. Probably won’t happen.