Month: September 2023

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.

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.