Finding Myself

I was getting ready to make dinner tonight. I opened a can of soup and spilled 3/4 of the can all over the counter and the floor.  At a different time in my life, I would have cussed a blue streak about it and been very angry/upset.  Instead I just laughed to myself and said “Good thing I have more than one can of soup!” and then opened up a second can of soup and heated the whole mess up.  Yeah, it was two different kinds of soup. They tasted just fine together.

In the moment that I spilled the soup, I could have chosen to be angry, which would have accomplished nothing or I could clean it up and make my dinner.  It got me thinking about choices.

I know that in my life, I’ve felt many times like I really didn’t have a choice. I had to take a particular course of action.  There weren’t other options.  But when you’re faced with doing things that don’t appeal to you or things you don’t particularly like, your choice comes in how you respond to the situation.  You can be angry about it or (the opposite end of the spectrum) you can cheerfully accept the path you must take (which isn’t always a really genuine way to feel about something you don’t like) or you can “put up and shut up” until you have the option to do something to get you off of that path.

Sometimes doing the right thing isn’t the path we really want to choose.  It’s uncomfortable. It’s not what we want.   Again, this is where you can choose to maintain a positive attitude or you can choose to be miserable about the situation.  And it’s not easy to feel “ok” about doing something you don’t really want to do.  It’s even ok to feel a bit disgruntled that you aren’t getting to do what you want to do.  Remember when you were a kid and your parents told you that you couldn’t stay up late to do something you really wanted to do and you felt angry and like they didn’t understand that whatever it was you wanted to stay up late for was important to you?  Guess what? A great deal of adult life (at least mine) has been facing that very same situation.  I don’t WANT to have to clean the bathroom, but it needs to be done so I have to do it whether I want to or not.  I don’t want to spend my money paying bills, I’d rather go out and have fun, but I have to pay the bills or I will lose the place I live and lose my ability to sit at my desk at home and blog.

Anyhow, I feel like I found something out about myself tonight and I actually feel good about it.  I may finally be finding myself.  Not just the person that other people see, but the real me.

 

 

I want 3 nights of lost sleep back!

I’ll be the first to admit that the apartments I live in are far from “luxury”.  We are on, I think, our third management company in as many years.  And they seem to go through accountants like hookers go through doses of penicillin.  What irks me, though, is their incompetence leads to me being erroneously called out as a deadbeat.

Every few months, I get a delinquent notice from the accountant.  It shouldn’t faze me, but it ALWAYS upsets me.  I pay my rent and utilities on time (most of the time EARLY) and in full every month and yet, I’ll bet there are a dozen delinquent notices languishing in my rental file.  Each and every one of them an error on the part of the management company.  And I am willing to bet that if anyone ever calls them for a rental reference, those delinquent notices will be mentioned (without a word about the fact that they were ALL errors).

Friday, I returned home from work to find the latest notice stuck to my door.  All the invoice said was “Previous balance” and an amount.  It had my address from before I moved three years ago.  The city in the return address was spelled incorrectly and it directed that “Balance need to be pay inmmediately”.    No indication of what the invoice was for and, of course, no one in the office on the weekend can tell you what it was for.

The accountant called me this morning and told me it was a past due notice for utilities.  Now, the Past Due Notice was DATED the 11th. The utility bill “due date” was the 14th.  I PAID the utilities on the 13th.  Yet, on the 11th, I was sent a PAST DUE notice.  When I mentioned that the utility bill due date was the 14th, she said “oh, yes… hmmm, I do see that here”…  Maybe, just maybe, you should have looked at the due date BEFORE you sent a “Past Due” notice.  Just a thought.  She said she would make a note in the system that the bill was paid even though the check wasn’t cashed yet. ARE YOU SERIOUS? I don’t even GET the bill until the 12th, I pay it on the 13th but you’ll be magnanimous and mark it paid even though the check hasn’t yet been cashed?  So, am I supposed to be able to prognosticate the amount due before I get the bill (and the bills vary drastically from month to month) and pay it a week or two early to avoid a past due notice that is dated before the bill is even due?

She asked, before we hung up, “is there anything else I can do for you”?  No, because you can’t give me back the three nights of sleep I lost being angry and upset about this.  What you can do for me is not bill me erroneously anymore.  What you can do is provide me with a WRITTEN apology and put it into my rental file.  If you can’t muster up an apology, at least a written acknowledgment that you were in error and that I am NOT the deadbeat you seem dead set on portraying me as.

For now, I am going to work on getting my blood pressure and pulse rate back to something that resembles normal.  Until the next error (which I know won’t be long in coming…)

More insulted as each moment passes…

Tonight was just a weird night… went to Walmart and saw something that was “People of Walmart” worthy, then at PetSmart saw WAAAAYYYY more of a woman’s thong panties than I ever wanted to see (the poor clerk turned very red and said “ohhhhh myyyyyy”) and then, the icing on the cake (ironic that I am making a food reference) I was in SuperTarget with The Dude and a guy in a wheelchair, missing a leg and carrying a PACKAGE OF COOKIES basically told The Dude and I that we were fatasses and that he had been blessed to have been “saved” by a gastric bypass (he was still roughly the size of John Candy).  He said something about him having been over 500 pounds and now was down to 300 something.

Was I supposed to be inspired?  Was I supposed to burst into tears and beg for the name of his surgeon?  Am I supposed to vow to never eat again?  Was I supposed to die, on the spot, of embarrassment?  What was the expectation? What is the proper response? Am I supposed to just brush it off and act like nothing happened?  Why do people think it is ok to do something like that to another person?

This isn’t a friend or family member… this was a COMPLETE STRANGER who was a fucking HYPOCRITE (insult my size whilst holding a 20-pack of Chocolate Chip Cookies = HYPOCRITE).   I wasn’t standing and contemplating a sheet cake, for fuck’s sake, I was looking at on ONION.  At the point that the exchange took place, the only place in the store that I had even BEEN was the produce department… is it REALLY fair to judge a complete stranger to the point where you feel the need to approach them and call them a fatass? (Not the word used, but it was insinuated/implied)  Especially when you have no clue what I am even buying on this shopping trip and maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t even shopping for myself.

So, I am going to put this out there to The Universe.  If you have something unkind you’re thinking about someone, even if you think you should approach them out of “concern” for their situation, just DON’T.  If you don’t know how a stranger is going to take what you are saying, then KEEP IT TO YOURSELF.   This includes things like the pregnant woman smoking or drinking what you perceive to be a glass of wine.  Keep your pie hole SHUT.  Guess what, I will bet that whatever it is about us that has you wanting to comment so badly is something we already know.

And a note to the guy with one leg in the wheelchair holding fucking COOKIES… I smiled and walked away from you. Because I CAN.

Won’t someone think of my manicure?

I was happy when I moved into the apartment I live in now because after 3+ years of not having a dishwasher, I once again was living somewhere with a nice, built-in dishwasher again.

A week ago Sunday, the dishwasher stopped doing what its name implies it does.  In their INFINITE WISDOM the apartment complex I live in will ONLY accept written maintenance requests and they (in)conveniently are open after I go to work in the morning and close before I get home in the evening meaning that the only chance I have to go and put in a maintenance request is on Saturday.  Which I did this past Saturday (1 week AFTER the dishwasher had ceased doing its job).

Of course, it isn’t an EMERGENCY so I didn’t expect them to have someone out on the weekend to fix it.  But they didn’t come today, either ( well, if they DID, they left not a trace of having done so).  Who knows WHEN they will come (or, quite frankly IF they will come).  Which leaves me wondering how long I will need to continue doing dishes by hand (I am thinking, at this point, that I will need to break down and buy a dish draining rack).

I’m not crazy about having people in my apartment whilst I’m not here but I am LESS thrilled with the prospect of having to continue doing my dishes by hand.  I’m not at all thrilled at the prospect of having to hound them about it to the point of needing to take a day off of work.  My only other choice is to call a dishwasher repair person, take a day off work to let that person in, pay the million six dollars they want to charge to fix it and then try (and I know I will not succeed) to get the apartment management weasels to reimburse me (I mean, for the love of all that’s good, they can’t even get it through their thick heads that I pay my rent and utilities to them, on time, in full, EVERY MONTH and that I can PROVE that I have done so and that I am not the least bit intimidated by them.  It doesn’t help that I am minority (from a racial perspective) where I live and so I am sure I am ” that uppity gringo puta” to the office personnel but structuring your business, which relies on people paying their bills, so that the people who have to pay those bills have to take time off of their jobs (and therefore lose money) to talk to you about any issues is just insane.

And, yeah, I might like to move but I can’t afford to do that right now and I suppose that you get what you pay for… which in this case is sporadic hot water and dishpan hands!

Priorities

We all have our priorities in life… we decide daily what comes first, where things stand, how to allocate our resources. All fine and dandy if you make these decisions and they have little impact on anyone else (say you live alone or run your own company).

Any time you add a person to a situation, the priority matrix shifts to include the other person’s perspective.   Even if you have decided in your own mind that the other person will not influence your priorities or decision making process, it becomes inevitable that, at some point, your priorities will be at odds because there are very few situations in life where a decision made that impacts more than one person will ALWAYS be prioritized by each party in a situation in exactly the same way.

An example…. it’s dinnertime and you are trying to decide what to have to eat.  One person who lives alone can decide that they want pizza with extra garlic on it, order that pizza, eat that pizza and be happy.  Add a second person who may actually be ok with pizza but all that garlic is not so ok because it makes them feel like their breath smells.

So now, one person either has to give up their preferred pizza or two pizzas have to be ordered or some sort of compromise has to be reached.  And this sort of priority shifting happens for most of us on a daily basis, so much that it fails to even register when we’re doing the shifting.

It can be very frustrating when you are faced with someone whose priorities don’t match yours. Further frustrated by different life experiences, people having different things happen in their lives that colour their perceptions, etc.

I’ve spent the majority of my adult life seeking someone who had priorities similar to mine.  And seeking some sort of peace.  After what could be called a fairly tempestuous youth, I wanted to live in an atmosphere of harmony… or at least an atmosphere that didn’t have a bunch of discord.

The conclusion that I have come to is that there is some fatal flaw within me that will not allow me to find the peace I seek unless I walk the road of life alone.  And as the years pass, I find myself facing this fact with more frequency.  It tends to like to kick me when I’m down.

I expect too much. I can’t let go of lofty dreams and aspirations. I can’t just “settle” (no matter how it may appear).  Good is not good ENOUGH.  And that is why there is chaos and disharmony in my life.  Because no one, not even me, can live up to my standards and I am loathe to relax them.  I know what I would do in a given situation… I look at the grim reality and realize that even if it won’t happen, I need to know the worst case scenario in order to be able to ratchet my expectations to something reasonable.  I contemplate doing things that would be ruinous to my quality of life because it would create harmony elsewhere and I just want the discord to STOP.  But keeping up the facade that everything is fine and nothing is wrong is exhausting.

I guess I need to re-examine and shuffle some more and find a way to give myself a rest.  Discord burns me out fast.  I’m exhausted and need to make it a priority to figure out how to fix that.

Have a stellar weekend, y’all.

Stupid Brain!

I’m SUPPOSED to be in bed now.  I was dead tired all day long.  I’ve been dead tired all week long but, now that it’s bedtime I am WIDE AWAKE.  Stupid Brain.

I painted my fingernails green for St. Patrick’s Day but then didn’t take it off tonight so will look like an idiot tomorrow. Oh well.

Not sure what I’m going to do this weekend.  I suppose nothing too exciting. Except that I’m supposed to go to an afternoon gathering with my new friend on Sunday and I am really trying to contain myself about that because it should be fun and YAY! I have a friend and I’m still hoping I don’t blow it because I can be a real idiot sometimes.  Like, um, most of the time.

I need to clean off my desk this weekend. Whoa! Disaster area!

Ok, I am going to force myself to go to bed now.  Hoping I don’t just stare at the wall for the rest of the night.

Tons to get done at work tomorrow. Hope I’m not falling asleep at my desk after staying up way too late. Again!

 

New Friend

So, I’ve made a new friend and now I’m in between the “OMG! YAY!” phase and the “Oh Crap, I’m probably gonna screw this up” phase.

I’ve had a difficult time making friends my whole life. I’ve always been perceived as “weird” or “different” so was always the outcast… not even the kind of weird that had a clique to hang with ( the other “weird” kids didn’t even like me).

So, now that I haven’t had face-to-face friends in, well, about 5 years, I find myself wondering if I’ll be too clingy, too needy, or too aloof (trying to not be clingy/needy and overcompensating in the other direction).

Why, oh why, am I so socially awkward?

It’s not helping anything that I have been functioning on way less than an optimal amount of sleep which means that I am probably overanalyzing everything and will, at some point, be appalled that I ever wrote this blog post…. (Hey! I just remembered that I bought fudge this weekend… fudge will make me feel better, right?)

I should probably go to bed. But I’ve been waking up and having trouble getting back to sleep.

Anyhoo… I hope I don’t blow it. I need a friend. The Dude needs me to have a friend so I stop boring him to death.  I need to have a life but I know myself well enough to know that I will never go out and do things alone…so… wish me luck not screwing things up!

No “fun” in Funeral…

A while back a friend of mine passed away.  It was heartwrenching as he was younger than I and for the past year or so, we hadn’t spoken much so his being sick came from out of the blue and his death was NOT expected.

His memorial is this Thursday. There are lots of reasons for the delay.  But I can’t be there because it’s 1000 miles away and I am broker than a celibate hooker.  And it wouldn’t matter to him if I made it because he’s dead, ya know?

But then… I found out that my Wasband’s brother hastened his pace to the big Dirt Nap (I can pretty much guarentee that suicide was NOT painless given the chosen mode) and while we were never close… (honestly, we were barely civil and I think it’s pretty safe to say I hadn’t even seen him more than once in the last decade or so) the fact remains that the Wasband and The Girl now have two funereal duties to attend to this week and there’s more than a small part of me that feels that I should be there for that.  Not for me or for the people who have passed but to be there for The Girl.

But, as usual, big FAIL for me in the “nurturing” department.  There goes that “Mother of the Year” award AGAIN.

Up past my bedtime so I will bid you a goodnight.  Be sure to tell people you care about that you care… you never know when you’ll be robbed of the chance to say it ever again.

My Special Brand of Crazy

I am very glad to have a job now but have to tell you that my apartment has really gone to Hell since I started working again and I have OCD just enough that it is negatively impacting my ability to function to be living in the mess that is my apartment.

Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t talking “garbage house” or anything like that, but the clutter is overwhelming and I can’t find things as easily as I should be able to and if I don’t make myself put the laundry away on the weekend, I end up pulling clothes out of the laundry bag (they’re CLEAN, just sortve wrinkly) all week long and I feel guilty about it but just lack the motivation/energy to do a damn thing about it.

I’m getting nowhere near enough sleep but that is less the fault of my bedtime than it is waking up from panic attacks in the middle of the night because I have nightmares about my apartment BECOMING a “garbage house”.  And because there is other stuff going on in my life right now that I have no control over that has me very tightly wound and unhappy.

My mother is coming to visit in a couple of weeks and I am having all sorts of anxiety about how I’m going to get things to a level of clean that will be acceptable to her.  And no, that ISN’T me being paranoid… she’s not the “white glove test” clean freak my Gramma was but she would certainly be appalled if she saw my apartment in its present state.  And we’ve argued about that topic before because when I lived with Mr. ExMan, she came to visit once and the place was in its typical disarray and I got this long lecture about how she didn’t travel all that way to help me clean the house but she was disgusted with how the place looked.

And I MEANT to work on things today. I really did.  But not a damn thing got done and now my motivation has completely left and I feel like I could go to bed RIGHT NOW so I know that not a damn thing is going to get done before I go to bed and then it will be Monday and another whole freakin’ week before I have a second to catch my breath again.

Yesterday was pissed away on worrying about the social obligation I had yesterday evening, grocery shopping, rent paying and preparing for the social obligation (and then ATTENDING the social obligation).  And I waffle back and forth between being pleased to have actually HAD something to go do for the first time in over a year (ok, honestly, it was the first time in about FOUR years…) and being irritated that the whole of yesterday was pissed away.  Also, I was woken up by construction REALLY early yesterday which lead to being tired and grumpy for a majority of the day.

I feel like Sisyphus.  It just never ends.  And part of it is just my own damn Special Brand of Crazy kicking in.  But knowing that isn’t changing anything. Is 6:45 too early to go to bed?

An Open Letter

Dear Construction Workers,

I understand that the management company here where I live hired you to do work on our buildings. I totally “get” that.  But, we need to talk… because this morning you started in bright and early at 7:30 in the damn morning. On a Sunday morning. And even with earplugs, the pounding and sawing was such that there was no sleep to be had.

And then, about 11AM you quit working.  After I was up too frakkin’ early on a Sunday morning and there was really no hope of going back to sleep. And I can only guess that this is some sort of sadistic payback from the management folks for the fact that they didn’t feel that they could give me yet ANOTHER erroneous “delinquent” notice this month.

Furthermore, you scare my cats and upset my chinchilla.  And I wasn’t amused with you pounding my kitchen wall so hard that all of the bottles I have in the cabinets were rattling. Not cool.

You woke me up on a Sunday Morning you Godless Noisy Bastards and I hope you DON’T get paid overtime for this because it was just spiteful. You know it, I know it, the Management Company Weasels know it.

Hate & Pinches,

Me