my boring life story

This isn’t just a good breakup song. (Where are the men who think like this in a breakup?)

It’s a little too close to home in other ways.

I just saw a Facebook post that reminded me of this. I used to own a magic lighter.

It was a green Bic, and I’ve never been a smoker but I’ve been an incense aficionado pretty much my whole adult life. I could not now tell you when I actually purchased said Bic, but I’m pretty sure I was still married at the time, which would place that somewhere between 1995 and 1999. Also I got it right before Bic started childproofing all their lighters.

That sucka lasted… God… I don’t even know how long. I was using it the whole time, too. I am pretty sure my daughter existed in the world by the time it ran out of fuel, and she was born in late 2004. Matt knew about it, let’s put it that way. We used to joke about my magic lighter with the everlasting fuel.

By the time it died we were living in the house he bought. I wound up replacing it with two other Bics. Childproofed, natch, though by then no one was in any danger from them — Thea doesn’t seem to have had the firebug phase that her Uncle Doug had as a child.

I really would rather have a Zippo, but I’ve held off. I want a cool one.

Had a nasty migraine today. They never seem to be as painful as I’ve heard other people complain about theirs being (I’ve had a couple humdingers in my time but generally, I mean) but the fact of being in “just enough” pain for hours and hours, plus the other symptoms one gets with a migraine, just saps away at you. I’m still not okay, just better. In the early hours of this I was all “WTF?” and then saw someone on Facebook querying about their East Coast friends and my brain went “oh, a hurricane” and I was even more disgusted. I don’t always feel those, but I feel them quite often. Could do without, honestly.

Checked back at some point with Uber from yesterday and my last couple runs were nice surprises, both topping up their tips and one in a big way, so I had around thirty bucks sitting there waiting for me that I hadn’t had available to insta-deposit last night. The week was still shitty, but that was because I skipped a day because my guts were doing weird shit, including the weird shits. Not sure what that was about. If I’d had that extra day and had started yesterday earlier instead of at close to 4pm, I probably would have hit the $400 benchmark. As it is, I’m at gold pro status until the end of next month now. It doesn’t take long to rack up points on the weekends.

I have been redoing my home page and arranging things better. Now it’s all in front of my stupid face and I have to work on it, don’t I, or else it looks stupid all linking to empty websites. I haven’t added Gynepedia there yet, but I will soon, and I need to start working on that too. I’m wondering, actually, whether I might not be better served making that my work-from-home thing (which I would do in addition to an actual job, though hopefully only on a temporary basis) rather than trying to learn a whole new skill when I’ve already got plenty of skills, just nowhere to direct them. As it is, I will need to learn some new things to be able to build Gynepedia to its full potential. I want to do some of the cool shit Wikipedia does on their own front page. Those features aren’t native to MediaWiki, so I would need to learn how to build them. But, one step at a time. If I can at least get the stupid thing functional and start making it useful, that’ll be a good start. Finally. After literal decades wishing for it.

(There’s a similar thing someone else is doing called “Feminist Wiki” but [a] I came up with my idea first, in the late nineties; [b] that site’s run by a man; and [c] I do not intend to make my wiki feminism-themed, though feminism will be included since obviously it’s a women’s thing. I want the wiki to be representative of women from all walks of life, not just the ones currently favored by Western academics with an axe to grind. Half those fuckers don’t know what a woman is anymore, anyway.)

God, I’m exhausted. Fuck if I know why. Didn’t do shit all day.

Reba’s still at it, liking my Facebook posts. Jesus fuck, woman, I’ve tried to add you as a friend how many times now.

I once ran across some instructions on how to make sloe gin from dried sloes. Big man makes sloe gin and I was like, well, I’ve heard of this but had no idea what it was, wonder what it tastes like? Can’t get the fresh ones so this is my other option. Can also make it sugar-free, which I need to be moving more in the direction of anyway. I’m mentioning this because I wanted to make a note to myself to maybe try it soon. It’ll depend on how much a decent gin costs. I know a couple places to go look. That’s not likely going to be a thing I can do until after I move, but it might be nice to have for later. I forget how long it takes to do its thing and become fully flavored.

I also want to get a camera. Despite all the stupid emotional baggage attached to my DSLR, I cried when I sold it. The camera on my phone is hot garbage and even though I intend to replace the phone, I just want something I don’t need to be attached to my phone for general photography purposes. Doesn’t seem to matter how many megapixels a phone camera’s got, anyway, because the photos still turn out weirdly flat. Bit like the old film point-and-shoots. Disappointing. Someday I’ll have a DSLR again but in the meantime I’d like something in between in terms of photo quality. In the meantime, I should play more with my film SLR. Though I’m not sure what quality photos it will turn out at this point. It could use a refurb. I may be able to get that done here in town. I know where to ask. Though, as long as it will keep taking photos, I’ll content myself with that. A refurb’s going to be pricey. Might even cost as much as the stupid camera I’m wanting to buy. Because of course it would.

Dog barking again. What on earth? Is between 10 and 11pm just their Going Potty For The Night time? I forgot dogs have to do that. It’s been a while. For all I know, that’s Ghost barking at a rabbit. He does that.

Today, Uber Eats seemed determined to place me in Delaware* as much as humanly possible. It was a little weird being back in my short-term temporary homeless stomping grounds. One of my delivery customers was just a few blocks away from the shelter.

I’ve been thinking for months that I’d like to stop by both the state trooper station where my trooper probably is stationed and also the veteran services office in downtown Delaware to say hi and thank you to people in person. I didn’t want to do it until I had something solid to report and, well, I keep kicking my own supports out from under me so things are never going to be perfect and I might as well just get my ass up there soon. Probably will take something nice for them. Might even bake it myself.

Dogs are barking like nuts right now. It’s after 10:30pm. I just heard the landlord yelling at them, so my first thought’s probably not it — he seems probably as okay as he ever is under these circumstances. Who knows what it is, then. It’s not me. That’s all I know.

Reba liked one of my Facebook posts again today and Doug is now following me on Instagram. This is all well and good, y’all, but where the fuck were you when I was homeless? Being happy I’m not staying in your house. Camper, in Doug’s case, last I heard. And why is Reba glad I’m not staying with her? Because I don’t do things exactly the same way she does them. This isn’t even like me living with the troll who never cleaned unless he had someone to impress and who constantly smelled bad. This is just minor differences that get blown up into World War Three. So believe me, I’m glad neither of them bothered with me but still, the “love” and “concern” are a tad hypocritical now. They could have at least said, “hey, we see the difficulty you’re going through and we’re thinking about you.” Hell, Doug could have sent me some fucking money. HOW many hundreds of dollars has he essentially stolen from me now? Pay up, fucker. I’m gonna let him stew for a bit and then make him unfollow me again. Someday, he might even get the hint. He’s a tad thick, though. Not holding my breath.

[edit] I forgot, Reba called me while I was in the homeless shelter. Like, we literally had a whole hours-long conversation with me pacing around the kitchen. She never came out and said “I see you’re homeless,” though. She probably knew, but she didn’t come out and say so. I had to tell her. The only reason I think she probably already knew is she almost never calls anymore, so for her to finally come out and attempt it when I was at my lowest is suspicious timing, to say the least. I guess that counts for something. Even if it was still her acting like we were talking about nothing more consequential than the weather.

Still expects me to see her as my real mom, too.

What can you do.

—–
*Delaware town, the county seat of Delaware County, in Ohio. Not the state of Delaware. I’ve confused people with this before. Charming little town. Sometimes I think about actually moving there.

It is taking everything I have to not announce it on social media, but today while I was out and about delivering food to people who don’t tip enough, I got an email from the hospital system where I applied to be a janitor (sorry: “environmental services associate”). Took one look at the subject line and thought, “Nah, they’ll tell me they filled all the positions or I am not a good fit.” Well, guess what. They want to call me next week. So I’ve sent them my phone number and availability.

I’m a little confused, in retrospect, about how they didn’t have my phone number when I’m pretty sure it’s on the résumé I uploaded buttttt… whatever. Them fucking off with details could be a bad thing or it could be a good thing. We’ll just have to wait and see.

I put in a good day on the delivering. Fridays are always a little weird because you would expect people to order a lot, and you can get some good orders in if you are lucky enough to catch pizza or sushi requests, but it’s kind of a toss-up. But I kept going for long enough I should have pulled in about $80ish for the day when the tips catch up. Meanwhile having to deal with app glitches. If this job does happen it’ll be not a moment too soon. I want to be able to quit doing this and I want a new phone. (Uber Eats isn’t the only app it’s been chewing up and spitting out sideways. Grumble.)

Well, I might want to quit this. We’ll see if I can manage to keep doing it on Saturdays at least. It doesn’t take long to rack up 100 “pro” points and that’s all I need to keep being eligible for free tuition. Of course then I’d have to deliver that one day a week, work forty hours at my regular job, and also study? Eh… I dunno. Maybe not such a great idea.

Anyway. It’s a Merge Dragons! special game weekend again and all I ever do is repeat myself and I’m sure it’s boring. Lemme go do that and eat some more pizza. Let this feel like an actual Friday for once.

So I have done some delivering this week, after spending a month depressed and not wanting to do anything. And that was stupid, by the way. I had a decent amount of money in reserve and if I had just started driving, I’d have been able to save some more money up and I’d have been better off. This is a longstanding pattern and it worries me. Or I should say, there is one part of me that stands around worried at my general behavior and another part of me that just wants to die, but hasn’t got the guts to follow through with it, so behaves self-destructively instead because no one gives a shit what happens to me anyway. I actually verbalized to myself yesterday, for the first time ever, that if I could guarantee I would die immediately and in zero pain, I’d just do it. Go crash my car into something at high speed, maybe. If I could guarantee I’d die instantly. And I can’t guarantee that, so I’m scared to try. I have no problem with the idea of being dead. It will not matter to anyone. What I have a problem with is the idea of suffering. Being profoundly disabled with no one batting for me AND being aware of my disability and my situation would be horrible.

Even if I bought a gun I could not guarantee it would be an instant death. Plus, that would make a lot of noise and upset people because OMG Someone Has A Gun but my actual departure from a state of living would not be worthy of note. But hey, I upset people by just existing so why would I want to increase that? I’m already in the doghouse. Nah. So that’s not an option.

Though I’m tempted to acquire one at some point and just hang on to it until something happens and I know I won’t get better. Because at that point maybe I could at least inflict a serious enough head injury that I wouldn’t know I was being medically neglected and whatever else. If, y’know, I did not actually wind up dead.

ANYWAY. Thought process. Such as it is.

But there are lots of reasons I’m miserable: some of which I can’t control, like the situation with my daughter, and others of which I can control a little bit, like my living situation. Maybe if I improve the living situation, I’ll feel better about the stuff I can’t control. I don’t know, but as I haven’t tried it enough yet, I probably should attempt to find out. It’s no fun being miserable even if other people do think I enjoy it. They also think men can be women, so consider the source. I need to find reasons that being alive is okay. That’s probably the other big reason I haven’t sincerely tried to not be alive anymore. I’m not ready. Some parts of life are still good. I still enjoy things sometimes.

So! I’ve tentatively begun applying for jobs again. The idea is to find something where I’m least likely to screw up and get fired. Fear of that was a big reason I left Quantum. I was tired of feeling like I was being set up for failure. I want something relatively simple where I can look at my work and objectively say I did it right without needing a QA division to gaslight me. I have applied to be what amounts to a hospital janitor, and we’ll see if I hear back. I will probably apply at a grocery store or two in the same general geographical area, just to see what happens.

I doubt I will still be in this apartment past November. It may be they’ll let me renew the lease, but I doubt it. If that’s how things fall out, I want to move back to Clintonville.

I don’t know why, but I like Dublin. It’ll be weird leaving; Dublin has more or less supported my remaining alive for most of the past two years. But I also like Clintonville, I miss Clintonville, and the particular place I want to look at first as a possible candidate for an apartment is below $700 a month. There are a couple other places in the same general area that still fall under $900 a month. We’ll see, but hopefully the under-$700 place will have an opening and the deposit won’t be insane.

Meanwhile, I need to do more things that make me feel better too. I have some cleaning to catch up with in this place because it sat idle for six months before I moved in and the previous occupant hadn’t made much of an effort. I keep meaning to start drawing again and I keep choking. I want to make a bunch of stretch bracelets out of my bead collection and finally get that moving out of my space. (This is THE time of year to be trying to move handmade stuff. Please please let me not wait until fucking February.) I should work on my photo collection some more, even though that gets painful — right now the complete lack of order on my hard drive is one of the things sapping my energy. And so on.

You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to write this stupid post.

Oh, and, let’s see. Had that conversation with Elizabeth on the 9th? Still no email about the electric bill. Raise your hand if you’re surprised. [sits on hands]

I should probably also add a postscript about Kay, Matt’s mother. No word there. I wouldn’t have gotten mail, but no contact on Facebook either. So that’s not a thing that’s going to happen. I wonder if any of these assholes know what it’s like to be hated for no reason. I wonder if they would care.

Carrie sent a message through Instagram today with pics of Dad. I guess this is the better of the two; they’re almost exactly alike.

He’s recently had a valve replacement in his heart. That bandage on his arm looks like it may be in the same place as the artificial fistula they created for his dialysis so I’m wondering if he’s getting that now too, but didn’t ask.

I sent Carrie a photo of myself back. She passed it on to Dad.

Not sure at this point if I’ll reach out. I doubt it matters.

Knock on the door today. It was Elizabeth wanting to know what’s been going on with me; she’s noticed my car’s home a lot. Standard vague (on my part) talk about the general situation, blah blah, her promising again to tell me what I owe on the electric bill, blah blah, do you need help with anything I’ve got connections, blah blah blah-say blah. Okay. Thanks.

It sounds like at some point she’s going to want to move relatives in here again. She can’t do squat until the lease is up but it feels like I probably had better start planning. The good news is that I know a couple places that won’t charge me an insane amount for deposit, so once I’ve paid rent for November whatever money I make that month can go toward the move, whether or not I get my deposit back from here. I have to start planning now, but it’s doable.

I’m a little tired of people though, even when they seem to mean well. Look. Just because I wound up homeless does not mean I’m a child who needs her every move scrutinized. I am forty-nine years old and a free woman. What I do is no one’s business, not even if they read about it here; I graciously allow you a look into my life but I do not grant you ownership. If I ask for help, fine. If I don’t ask then I’m coping, so leave me be. I paid my rent for September. Be happy you got it. And if you don’t start telling me what I owe for the electric I guess you can content yourself with taking it out of my deposit. I don’t need this. Stop it.

Not that she’s really been following me all that closely but that’s another thing. No consistency. I never know what’s going to happen from day to day. Okay, that’s not quite accurate. I’ve gotten consistency, and the thing she’s been consistent about is the not following up. I give her a pass because she has a terminally ill husband and has to cope with that and about fifteen billion other things, but that is the only reason I give her a pass. People who act like flakes but then assert moral authority in any way are just so goddamned cute.

In spite of it all, I kind of like her. I like it here too but let’s be real: if I like or love something, that means I can’t keep it.

It’s just as well. I want to go somewhere where the rent’s lower, the bills come in like they are supposed to, I can actually get my mail every day, and I can trust that the parking area and the driveway will be shoveled timely if it snows — and that’s another thing. I still wonder about that. It’s kind of terrifying, actually. That driveway is really steep and it’s only one lane. What happens when it snows?

I think I will take up the schedule I initially planned to follow a month ago before I descended into depression: Tuesday to Saturday driving. We’ll see how it goes. If I can pull in $400 a week gross, that’ll be something; I want to do better, but I can’t guarantee that will happen.

I do need to find a job because I’m not sure I would be able to get a place on the strength of my gig earnings alone. I could literally be earning the amount they want and they might still say no. Inner Brat is fighting that with every fiber of her being because I don’t fit in anywhere.

Warehouse jobs: I’m fat and weak and it’s not fair to my co-workers for me to use my job to “get in shape.” And I have always been slow, even before I got fat.

Call center: I am good at putting on an act but I do not give a fuck what your problems are and like as not they’re at least two-thirds your own fault. Take some basic responsibility for yourself and quit bothering me. (I have never actually said this, but you can bet I was thinking it.)

Retail: Quit fucking up my store and quit trying to rip me off. I see you stuffing those jeans down your pants.

Customer service: Thirteenth Amendment. Try asking me for assistance without coming off Condescending Piece of Shit. Thanks.

Everyone: Buys into gender identity. I can’t cope with that shit and I shouldn’t have to. Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to have 51% of the population subjected to being mocked, sexually harassed, invaded, and pushed out of their rightful spaces just so some man could get a boner in public? Oh. Men. Right.

There’s nothing out there for me! It’s just humiliating yourself in the name of not even being able to make rent. What the fuck are we doing? It’s all so pointless. I have to keep reminding myself I need to fake it for a little while yet so that I can get stable. Because if I think I’m stable now, I’m fooling myself. Again. Am I not tired of this yet? I should be sooooo tired of this by now.

…..

In other news, I got the spark plugs replaced in the car. Let me tell you what mechanics do: They have a specific service they do for a specific system in the car, and then they charge you extra on top of that. So I went in to get the plugs replaced and scheduled, specifically, a spark plug replacement. What’d they do? Charge me separately for the spark plugs. Which should have been part of the service I already scheduled. A month ago, at a completely different auto shop chain, I scheduled an oil change. What’d they do? Charge me for the dirty oil disposal, which should have been part of the oil-change service fee. I cannot begrudge having access to a garage and qualified mechanics, but I can’t even get paid enough to be independent doing half the jobs in this town which are allegedly “important” work that people “need” and here we have these clowns double-charging me for something they were going to do anyway. I may come off a “Karen” here (and I fucking hate that term) but I’m so not like that in person, and I could have been. But the plugs are replaced and the car seems to be running better. I can feel good about that, at least.

I’ve been going back and forth about how to administer my online presence forever. And that just sounds full of myself, doesn’t it? But I know full well I turn up in Google results. It is an inevitable consequence of having an unusual name. (I am the only person on the planet, to my knowledge, with this first-and-last-name combo. The one person who comes closest has -ova at the end of her surname and is located somewhere in Kazakhstan. Of all places.) I might as well not be a passive victim in terms of what shows up. If my own stuff isn’t on page one of the results, am I even trying?

Be that as it may. I probably have ADD* or something. I can never get my act together on how to organize it all.

But in my current situation it’s as if I have all the time in the world. I may as well get some work in on resolving this issue.

So! There’s no point having a blog on my real-name homepage. It’s redundant. I think I will just make that into my own version of a “linktree” — all the cool kids have those on social media now — and then have this be my regular blog which I will link to from there. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to link to from that site and what I want to link to from here, because they may not amount to the same thing. I think I may make my homepage business/work-friendly and then save the personal shit for here. Someone obviously can still get here from there, but they’d have to make the effort and I didn’t think it was possible for people to get 500 times as lazy as they were even ten years ago, but here we are. I’ll take my chances.

I’m going to add my real name here though. I didn’t want to for years, but I never want to get to the point where I’m not telling my own side of the story. Everyone else gets to tell their bit if they want. I want my side always out there, for as long as I’m around to tell it. It’s only fair. If people still write me off after hearing my side of things, well, that just tells me who they are. Weeds out the assholes. No great loss.

I am debating whether I want to continue with Substack, too. It’s not that I don’t consider it a potentially worthwhile endeavor, but I don’t know if I have the attention span to be a really good longform writer, and short form doesn’t get my point across. Though honestly, I could be a brilliant writer and it wouldn’t matter because most people refuse to read. You have no idea what it’s like to have abilities that you can’t express because it’s tossing pearls at swine. And even pigs are smarter than this lot. Tired of it. I swear to fuck I am not a snob, at least not in any malevolent way, but how many times do I have to keep running into this before I finally stop kidding myself about what it is? I watch people misinterpret one another all the time, sometimes on purpose to be dicks, so of course they’re doing it to me too. I cannot figure out why they waste their time like that, but dealing with it is an exercise in perpetual frustration. I need to find something to do with my time that brings out my happy. Got plenty of grief already. Need to balance it out.

Anyway so. I’m working on all that, and the sooner I get it set up the sooner I can pursue things that bring out that happy. Right? Right.

Onward!

—–
*They used to call it ADD or attention deficit disorder; now it seems everyone has ADHD, with the H for “hyperactivity.” Those who have ever known me in person will be amused at the thought of me being hyperactive. Let’s just leave that H off in my case.

Wrote this in the parent group today:

—–

Coming up on the two-year anniversary of when I left my daughter’s house. She was insisting she was either non-binary or a boy and her father decided that was a fantastic time to start a new relationship (we weren’t together, just co-parenting, but he replicated his old pattern of sneaking around behind my back and he always zeroes in on a new situation and ignores everything else) and frankly, I was the odd one out. I knew even then that I would have no allies to back me up in trying to keep her from harming herself. Even her therapist had bought into it. And it’s horrible living in a place where you know you are no longer welcome.

The thing that sticks out to me is how they both went straight into silent treatment. I wasn’t allowed to talk about what was wrong with the situation anymore because they simply would not answer me. She probably wouldn’t have come up with that tactic herself, so I’m pretty sure her father suggested it. We all did communicate about some things for a while after I left but after he signed the car over, even that died away.

I ended up homeless earlier this year. They knew. Neither cared, apparently. I wouldn’t have asked for a rescue, but some expression of concern might have been nice.

I have to own up to my end, I’ve been angry and sweary. But I’ve also given them lots of openings to engage with the issues and asked questions and raised concerns and… nothing. It’s been we are both going to act crazy and/or unethically and we are going to completely destroy your life and you don’t get a say in it at all. I refuse to shut up and be polite when that is going on. The only reason I’ve gone pretty much silent from my end is because there isn’t any point. They’ve both made up their minds that her fantasy and his ego are more important than me.

He is on my permanent shit list. I had had this vague notion that when she was grown we’d come out of this as friends or at least cordial but he couldn’t even give me that. Nearly twenty years of “I love you” and “I’m glad you’re in my life” and then as soon as his long-ago ex decided she needed to get out of California he turned it right off like a switch. (She quit her job almost as soon as she got here and they got married at some point so yeah, don’t tell me that’s not what it was. He makes $130k a year at least and has home equity out the yinyang [the house has doubled or tripled in value since he bought it]. He can carry them. She knows it. I hope she dumps him at some point and if he thinks I’ll even entertain a conversation with him after that, well, buckle up Buttercup.)

Daughter, I don’t know. I come from a background of familial abuse and alcoholism and most of the physical abuse was from my brother and so I know what young people are capable of. I am not ready to make up my mind about her. If she’s too much like her father and what’s happened so far is a sign of things to come, though, there won’t be any hope there. First question she had when I told them I was leaving was “Are you taking the cats?” She’s told her therapists I’m a “conservative Catholic.” (Anyone who knows me in person would laugh themselves silly, and I am only Catholic by a technicality, which I already explained to her.) I complained to her when I lost my room in January that serial killers get treated better than I’ve been in this situation — free room and board! — and she remarked that if I was comparing myself to serial killers, that doesn’t look real great for me. I think that was the last time we talked. I’m not sure there will be another.

Meanwhile my best friend since age 8 or 9 has decided that my misery is all because I obsess too much about the trans thing. The fact that an 18yo young woman has been on testosterone for six months and has been using a binder and will probably opt for an elective mastectomy doesn’t faze her at all. The weird thing is she’s a social conservative but then, I’ve been telling people this is not a leftist movement. There’s room within conservatism to accept it for what it claims on the tin even if a lot of conservatives don’t. So I’m not wholly surprised. But it’s getting to the point that I could be talking about a completely different thing and she’ll start in on me with the “quit with the trans stuff” again. I am not sure how much longer she’s going to be in the picture, and I hate to say it, because in a lot of ways she’s been really supportive of my general situation. But she’s a social worker. If she has any sense of responsibility for people’s health and sanity whatsoever then she should be working harder to understand this issue than she is. She is very head-in-the-sand about a lot of things that matter: not only is she uninformed, she delights in being uninformed and considers it the morally superior position. Not even kidding. It’s one of the few areas where we clash. And now it’s gotten personal for me, she’s making it all about my feelings as if my brain is faulty instead of being concerned about my daughter’s welfare. Red flag. She has a 9yo daughter, too. I don’t even know.

Sorry to vent. August has been hard and September isn’t shaping up to be much better.