04 December 2023

I got through the day okay, even got a decent amount of sleep though it had to happen earlier than I’d hoped, because about 5am or so I just couldn’t stay awake anymore. But I got laundry done, some dishes done, etc., and got out the door with plenty of time.

I get there and at first I’m not sure what I’m seeing. It’s not the main Carrier facility — it’s a special “postal mail solutions” outfit, and it’s in a building shared with another company.

The parking lot was TINY. There was literally nowhere to park. All spaces were filled. Cars spilled out into the access road and lined the FIRE LANE. Where you are not supposed to park, ever.

I was early, but not terribly early and I thought, What the fuck? I mean, clearly people found parking because all the spaces were taken. I had gotten no instructions on where to go if there were no spaces left, however. I didn’t want towed, I didn’t want vandalized, I didn’t want my car hit by some idiot who couldn’t navigate a parking lot. Some of the cars looked quite the worse for wear as it was.

I was already having second thoughts with all the having to prepare because there was most of nothing we could take inside and my period is starting. (For those just joining us: mine gets really heavy two or three days out of the week and at this point I can’t predict when those days will be, only guesstimate when the week will happen. I have fibroids, which are the main cause of the problem. Actually diagnosed. Seen on an ultrasound two Decembers ago.) I was already not sure they would even let me in with the cargo pockets on my pants. Stuff they said to me in orientation made me wonder about that, but I had nothing else in which to stash a spare pad and a few wipes. And now no place to put my car.

After my previous experiences with this agency and the app, my overall impression is “they have no fucking idea what they’re doing and I’m sure to be a casualty when something else goes wrong.” I noped out of there. I will figure out something else.

—–

The one good thing that came out of it was there were these room-darkening curtains in one of the cabinets in the dining room, and I set those up in the bedroom. Not properly; I don’t really have good tools for putting up the curtain rod, not if I value my hands. (They like to swell up if I have to use a lot of torque with them. I have no idea why, but this has been a problem for literal decades.) But there was also duct tape or some similar kind of tape in the cabinet, so I used that. Will I have to clean the curtains later? Probably. Do I care? No. This was the darkest I’d been able to get a sleeping place in almost two years. It’s really nice.

Did I mention there are also glow-in-the-dark stars on my bedroom ceiling? That’s always kind of cheery when I go to bed.

When Thea was little I used to fantasize about taking some glow-in-the-dark paint and painting stars on her ceiling as little dots and doing the actual constellations. She had a ceiling fan and I had a feeling I’d get started, do about a quarter of the job, get tired and quit, so it never happened.

It’s just as well because that’d be one more thing I was bitter about now. “I wore out my fucking shoulders for you and you just throw me away?” I mean, I was the reason she had anything resembling her own bedroom too but NEVER MIND.

—–

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to just love again. I don’t even mean a romance, though that too. Like, at all. Ever.