April 2007 Archives

me to kristin, on pet food recalls and my head exploding:

holy crap. I have her on dry nutro during the day (now I'm reading
about "meal", ew) and a can of natural balance at night for dinner.

are you okay? are the cats home, or at the vet, or improving? :(
I'm so sorry they got sick. I feel like every day, I start to think
about the state of the nation, bullshit government (like the attorney
general thing, along with a billion others), global warming, childhood
obesity - it's almost overwhelming. it is overwhelming sometimes. I
don't quite know where to put it.

and the reply:

Your paragraph below is almost word for word the blog entry I keep writing and deleting because it seems too dark to post. I feel the same way, and am frequenlty overwhelmed into paralysis.

Wellness is a brand of food -- they make canned food and dry food. They have a canned food that's grain-free and a dry food that's also grain-free (called Core). It should be safe from most recalls because they use human grade ingredients (you could open the can and eat it with a fork and it would probably be better quality than McDonald's). Also because if it's grain free, there's no chance of contaminated wheat, corn or rice, which are all under question at this point, Nutro included. You should be able to find Wellness at any decent pet supply stores (not Petco). If not, you can order it online. It's very available here, so I
imagine it's similar there.

"frequently overwhelmed into paralysis". seriously! every single time I am positive that I'm alone in my head, that no one feels like me, like I'm the exclusive owner of this brand of crazy - I get a big brick in the face from somewhere in the universe.

I've just had this impending sense of... doom? uneasiness? I don't quite know the right word for it, all of those apply. it's like the ghettos are getting darker and the rich are getting richer, like in a soylent green kind of prognosis. beautiful expanses of landscape dotted with mega-mansions, and that's only going to get worse. erratic weather patterns. plastic (and animals) in animal food. "meal". "by-product". murders, psychopaths, masses of youth with no direction. being an anorexic with a big coach bag and a fake tan is not a thing. being a... writer, or a photographer, or a dressmaker, or a massage therapist, or even a politician - it's a thing. it's all flooding in now, childhood obesity, dulling out life with drugs, meth addicts, global warming, corrupt government, hero worship, stupid television, just buy more stuff and you'll be okay.

funny, you stop using credit cards - I stop using credit cards - and come to the shocking realization that I'm not even making enough money to support myself, let alone to be going out and compiling more debt and buying frivolous junk. and then I start seeing things how they are, the divisions and the inconsistencies and the tarnish that just won't come off. and I get scared.

so I stand at the crossroads. in these realizations, I can go conform to the man's wishes and go work for yale or some other mega-institution, get a perfectly nice desk job with benefits and work for fourteen dollars an hour, and do the same thing, day in and day out. forty hours a week, just to get by, and a bunch of clothes that are seemingly bizarre, uncomfortable shoes. I was on this path when I started to put together my resume, polishing, being a little bit honest. putting it out there, what I want, cursor blinking impatiently:

Objective. what the fuck. what I came up with was: To obtain part-time administrative or clerical employment with a local business that I can grow with from the ground up, while continuing to pursue an education and maintaining my contribution to the local art community. it might not be what you're supposed to write, but I wanted to be honest, you know? I wanted to catch the eye of someone like us who would want someone like me to work for them. and then I realized, that objective, is exactly what I'm doing working at koffee. only without the part-time supplemental income part. and I went to them, and told them my realizations, and within a half hour the owner of the story was having a meeting with my manager to create a position for me. what they came up with, among some other options, was to give me a dollar an hour raise and put me to work revamping the whole bakery system. this being based on the fact that I went from a corporate environment (kind of) to an entirely foreign atmosphere, and went from crying on the second day to almost being able to run the place in about six months. and I'm not just talking about making lattes. how the business works, why it works, how to participate in management - I mean, it's not rocket science, but it's not for everyone. so I would pick up the extra hours I need right now working shifts, and doing orders and taking care of all the stuff I do now, and on top of that we would rip the whole bakery apart, put it back together, revamp the menu, do research, create recipies, and all this stuff, with the possibility of doing catering or whatever down the line.

now, running or opening a bakery was one of the things on the I Might Want To Do That When I Grow Up list. and I can't afford to go to culinary school, or any of that. so, is this an opportunity to seize? or am I selling myself short on pay? do I go take the corporate job to have the life and opportunties I couldn't if I didn't have money? I've tried it, a few times, and I've always come up short, always been disappointed. so do I try something else? do I do it just for now? my head screams for security, and my heart is like, it's just the summer. you can re-evaluate then. because in my mind, taking this job means having no pension when I retire and I have to eat cat food and can't afford my medication.

no, I am not exaggerating. this is what it's like to be me.

the other good thing about doing this is my track record: how I've done it just doesn't work. I've drifted from company to company, looking for something that just isn't there. I don't want to spend forty hours a week doing something I hate. I guess I would, and could, if I had to - but should I give this a shot? is it a waste of time, or a door that's been flung open that I didn't even know I had? another upside is the flexible schedule, allowing for school, mental health time, whatever. but will I be able to afford to go to school?

so, I do nothing. well, I'm picking up more shifts at work, while I can, and then I get to decide in about a month what I want to do. I almost feel like I have nothing to lose, like, fuck it, let's give it a shot. it will pay just enough for me to get by if my mom's house sells and my debt (except for my car) is gone. I can toss a summer, six months, a little piece of my life, to see if this is something that works or not. I can't buy a house or any of that stuff anytime soon anyway.

and did I mention, one of the only things I wanted from my mom's house was the kitchen aid mixer? and that I love to bake?

it's time for a nap. stay tuned.

vvb

so, this is my mom's house. more accurately, a for sale sign, in front of my mom's house. see that door there in the background? I feel like if I sit there long enough, and stare long enough, or if I look away and look back right at the right moment, that I'll see there standing there in the windowpanes. my grandmother would watch as we drove away, and we'd always beep as we went down the road... and of late, my mom had started to watch us - or at least me, but us I'm sure - drive away too.

as I say this, there is much beeping on the road down below our apartment windows.

it's empty. emptying out. just big things like a table and a couch and a piano, and three big oak hutches that make up an entertainment center. think of the house where your parents live now, or the last time they moved... only now, instead of rearranging or packing or wistfully poring over old photo albums from the back of a cabinet, make it feel like it all got ripped away and that you're kind of in a shrine. only it's not good sometimes.

I tried to stay there for a while, on the couch, it was silent, and good for a minute, and then suddenly I had to run out. the couch where I've napped and stayed and cried and loved and talked from, across the room where both my parents have sat. since they set up the living room like that, it had stayed that way forever (since). all of a sudden it's all uncomfortable and different and scary. she's gone, it's an empty house, already like it's someone else's because it's just not hers anymore.

a confession of sorts, I have decided to go back on wellbutrin. I've been off it for a couple of months now (3? 4?) and I just need to rule out whether or not it's going to help. I know, I know, this is going to take time and it's going to be hard and I can't go looking for it to be all better. I know all of that, and I'm stating it as such because so many people are so quick to tell me that as an alcoholic, I will be prone to look for a quick fix. fine. I don't want to not feel anything or not go through whatever the hell it is I need to be going through - it's just that I want to come out the other side of it without putting a shotgun in my mouth. which, I'm not going to go like, do, or anything, but I've sat here on this futon (that hurts my back) in between screaming, yowling fights with raf and heaving, debilitating sobs and think about it sometimes. not about killing myself, but about how I used to think about how when people tried to kill themselves, that it was so sad, and that if they jsut would have hung on and waited it out, that how they felt would have changed at some point, because it always does. and how they could have looked back and been like, damn. good thing I didn't kill myself. and now, I understand how it's not like that at all.

I'm so sad. all the time. and when I'm not sad, I'm so fucking angry I can't even see straight. at everyone. about everything. I've got a fuse shorter than my pinky-toe nail and believe me, it's an itty bitty little nail. finances are straightening out, mostly because of the house, and as all the debt is suddenly about to loom to a close, I realize how little I really need. stuff-wise. money-wise. it's all bills bills bills all the time, and in another six weeks or so it will just be the apartment and the car. and like, groceries and stuff. amazing. so an end to that is a relief, but it's like the last get out of jail free card, like, ever. like like like. who gives a fuck.

the movie of the last week in hospice in my head is starting to, very rarely and with much mental force, starting to be replaced with better images. like someone said with my dad, eventually, the death won't be the thing you remember all the time. you won't forget, they said, but it won't be the automatic thought. I had this dream, a few days before she died, and she was holding me, in a hug, with my head on her chest (more of the expanse under her neck than her actual chest, like, the bone part, which was always kind of tan and warm) and she had on one of those soft nightshirt things she always wore, just so, so familiar and right, and she was holding me in the spot I always was, and she was just like, I have to go soon, you know that, right baby? and I was all, it's okay mom, I love you, and it wasn't sad at all, and it's just a couple of fractured moments, like when you wake up and then fall back asleep for a little while and everything is brief and vivid and you wake up like, wow, I just had these weird dreams... it was like that. only I woke up, and I could feel her, the softness of the shirt and the warmth of her skin and the breastbone and the way she would just hug me like that, holding me for a second, to this day. I always got into the hospital bed with her, always. and I kind of couldn't at hospice, so I pulled the recliner chair up close to it and it made it like I was there in the bed, kind of.

part of me is like, feeling all of this is healthy, and it is, this is the right part. the coping part. not the part where I want to break up with raf and jump out the window, that's not the okay part, and it's hard because I don't want to pull away from the part where things just take their course... but it's just horrible. I do okay for a few days and then I can't really leave the house much, if I have even close to nothing to do I come home and just lay down. domestic stuff is easy, like cooking mostly, but everything else is like this chore that I can't bear to handle.

I'm writing all the time, in my head mostly.

there's some stuff that's good that I'll go dig up. stay tuned, I guess.

vvb