Oh wow. It’s 2pm as I start this, I’ve been awake since around 8am, and I only just now remembered it’s Matt’s birthday. Fifty-four years wasting my good air on this planet. Happy Failed Abortion Day. Hope you’re run over by a truck.
It’s also Dawn’s daughter Kimi’s birthday though, so that redeems it a lot.
Two days ago my connection to the cellular network went from Tenuous to Completely Fucked, so I went a whole day flying blind. I can’t do much with what connection I get here anyway. For instance, I’m on the back porch right now writing this entry, and I tried to hotspot my phone a little bit ago, but the signal isn’t strong enough and frequently drops. But I rebooted my phone yesterday after a day of no signal whatsoever (mostly because Dad got a text message during my blackout time and so I thought, Well shit, the problem’s got to be on my end then) and lo and behold, that did the trick. Something got scrambled somewhere. I will never know what. So now we’ve gone from Completely Fucked back to Tenuous. Yay.
Anyhow, so I finally was able to update my Gmail inbox and I have already gotten a response from that cruise ship company. It’s a no. I knew it would be a no, but if I hadn’t applied anyway I would have spent the next year hating myself for not trying and wondering if I could have done it, and I have better uses for my time, like hating Matt. Anyway, they didn’t say why it was a no. These assholes never explain why they think you are better off dead than working for them. (You think I am being dramatic. Must be nice to live in your delusion.) But here are a few possible reasons.
1. They just plain didn’t like my résumé. If that was it, solidarity. I don’t like it either. Not that I can improve it when no one but the occasional exploitative yo-yo with piss-poor management skills will even hire me, but never mind.
2. They required hospitality to be one of the skills in my Indeed profile. I’ve never worked for an employer that was specifically in the hospitality sector, but I’ve practiced some of the relevant skills in other jobs, so I crossed mental fingers and fudged it. Obviously that didn’t work.
3. They asked for my height and weight in the application. Ostensibly this was something to do with maritime regulations and load-planning. And that could have been the truth. It’s possible. I figured it also might have to do with the free uniforms the employees get. But it’s equally possible they wanted to weed out the lardasses and just didn’t have the ovaries to say so. Consider me weeded.
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If you’re curious, I’m five foot six inches and the last time I weighed, which I think was in December, I was around 250 pounds. I may have put on another ten pounds since I got here. It is not inconceivable.
Particularly as last night Dad suggested, out of the blue, that I check my fasting sugar today with his glucose meter. I don’t need my dad monitoring my sugar numbers and anyway, I will fuck up his data if I do that. He doesn’t know I have my own meter. No reason, I just didn’t feel the need to announce it. The strips expired in December, but I figure they might still be mostly accurate. Anyway, it’s long past time I set up a new-patient appointment with my primary care provider in Iota. I’ll try to get that done this week.
But, I thought, Oh, he’ll forget by morning, but I’ll still check my sugar on my meter, because after he suggested that, I checked my postprandial from supper and it was in the mid to high 200s! Around 250 mg/dl on the left hand and then, a few minutes later, 290ish on the right. Now, glucose meters are allowed to have a margin of error of about fifteen percent. That’s a big margin. And these are old strips, and who knows what the fuck all. But given the way I felt at the time after eating spaghetti for supper, I knew my sugar was high whether the meter was going to be accurate down to 1 mg/dl or not. And previous to eating supper it had been pretty low, which I can also tell by feel, and I had felt like shit. It just wasn’t a good day for me healthwise all around.
And I was right. He did forget.
Weirdly, I haven’t been getting the heart palpitations as much. They had been a real problem for a while. I won’t say they have completely resolved, but I’m a lot more comfortable at bedtime than I had been there for a bit. But it’s another thing I’ll ask about, because I need to make sure I don’t have atrial fibrillation or something like that. I’m a walking time bomb and we have to find out where the fuse is. Fuses are. There are probably multiple.
Honestly though? My dad has some weird kind of eating disorder and is trying to impose it on me. Mom has had one all my life too, but it comes out in different ways in each of them. And the main way Dad’s manifests where I’m concerned is he cooks me an assload of food and then criticizes me for eating it. And he is very fond of throwing leftovers out when they are still good, which drives me insane because I am very against wasting food. Which has made my life difficult when I’ve been trying to eat in a healthy way and then someone else in the household wants to waste something unhealthy that I like to eat. I will whole-ass eat a kid’s leftovers to save them from going into the trash can even if it tanks my blood-sugar response. So I suppose I have some kind of disorder of my own.
We’re about to possibly start wrasslin’ over the grocery-shopping because the only way I am getting out of this is to be consistent in good eating, and the only way I can be consistent is if I’m not the only one buying the food, which I pretty much can’t afford to do anyway. Right now I’ve got $50 in Walmart gift-card balance thanks to Humana and another $15 I can add in there, also from Humana, but if I spend that on food I’ll end up needing $65 for something else at Walmart three days later. No good. So it’s time to manipulate the grocery list. Dad will live.
Or, y’know, whatever. Figure of speech. I’m not feeling particularly Pollyanna today.
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I think I mentioned Dad bruised up some more a few days after his fall (which, weirdly, he has marked on his calendar even though he wants neither to go to the doctor nor to tell anyone it happened — his landlady Jodi figured it out, but that’s it), and he says the overall bruising mostly doesn’t hurt, but his pinky finger is still not behaving the way it should, and I’m a little more convinced he broke that metacarpal. When Doug and I were discussing the injury, Doug called that a boxer’s break. Apparently men get them a lot for not punching correctly. I can’t see any real deformity though. I thought at first when looking at it that the bone might be slanting too far, but the metacarpal for his index finger mirrors it, so maybe that’s just him. And if he had broken bone sticking out in there, he’d feel it. No complaints at all. Not that that’s a good metric. He does use the hand, though. He just can’t really use that pinky finger.
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So I’ve been following this Scottish comedian on social media because he’s just a few years younger than me, is single, is fucking cute, and I love his sense of humor. And then he was complaining yesterday that he couldn’t see “boobies” on Sky TV for a wank. He wasn’t an asshole about it, at least not in an overall sense. Problem is I hate being reminded that guys look at porn, and I was kind of hoping he didn’t. He has a daughter, whom he mainly raised by himself, and a granddaughter who adores him and all I can think is how the fuck can you see women that way when you’d kill anyone who talked about your ladies that way? But I could ask the same of my father, who has been similarly guilty my whole life. I don’t understand any of you fuckers. I am not saying I’ve never looked at it or that I’m perfect. But you have to admit the situation’s very different with women who look at porn, too. And almost none of you dudes speak out against the abuses in the industry. You have done exactly fuck-all to put a stop to them. You know nothing about these women with “boobies” on your screen. Nothing. They could be trafficked for all you know. They’re just things to you.
I feel even more strongly about that in his case because he’s funny and gorgeous and every time he posts he gets dozens of thirst responses from local ladies and fucking nothing is stopping him from going out on dates and getting laid if that’s what he feels he needs to do. At least then she’s getting a nice dinner or movie out of it instead of humiliated in front of millions of men whose faces she can’t even see and then having her humiliation live on the internet forever. There’s a reason these on-screen women take up drugs and drinking when off-screen. It hurts. Dude, seriously, get some values.
Oh well. I would have never had a shot with him anyway. I’ll keep following him for a while, though. He is a pleasant distraction.
“Oh, you’re just jealous”
You know how stubborn men are about porn and how they refuse to give it up? When did you ever know a man who was that attached to a woman he actually knew in person? (Matt keeping me in limbo for twenty fucking years was not devotion, it was him being a pack rat, like he is with everything.) The porn addiction is a problem all by itself, but also a problem is the fact they’re wasting that energy on being gross and sick when they could be using it to start, maintain, and save actual relationships and they… fucking don’t. If it at least taught them to be good in bed I suppose that’d be about one-fourth a public benefit, but it doesn’t even do that. I can tell when a guy learned “techniques” from porn, and that garbage has never, ever given me an orgasm. Even good oral sex, which has, looks nothing like what they do onscreen. Do not even get me started about choking WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT BULLSHIT. Sorry, fellas. Come (har-har) up with a better excuse. You fucking can’t.
Anyway, a man being an exploitative piece of shit is not actually anything worth being jealous about. I don’t even want to count up how many years I wasted figuring that out. Moving on now.
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I mentioned the other day that I have so far only sold one bracelet set on my Etsy. I might be about to sell another bracelet or bracelet set. I had someone ask me about it on the terf crafting group the other day (it is a secret group — keeps the troons out) and I shared the URL with her. I am trying not to get my hopes up because I haven’t heard anything back. I need to get my butt out to Carrie’s tomorrow and then we’ll see if this is a fault in the Etsy app — some apps pretend I have no cellular signal even when I do — or if it just hasn’t happened yet. I need to upload the new product photos anyway, and probably do some more listings too, if I can get my shit together today first.
It’s maddening. If I had sold the Sandor drawing I wouldn’t now be late on my insurance. I could have also asked Dad for the money, and I might still, but I really want to avoid that if I can. I am too much of a problem being here already, and I know it.
(When Dad was still drinking this last time, he got fairly into his cups one evening and said something about how he is glad he can know I’m safe now. So maybe not THAT much of a problem. But then again, who fucking knows.)
But also I find myself too often frozen at home. It isn’t anything anyone’s said. It’s me being afraid to go out there or ask for anything. I literally could go to Carrie’s or to the library every weekday and sort my shit out if I’d stop being so fucking anxious. But if I could just flip a switch I’d have done it already. And I’ve danced the SSRI boogie. It is the polar opposite of dancing. I am not willing to become a zombie again in a bid to overcome the scaredycat.
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I want to talk more about that but this post is too long already and I have to pee. It is an incomplete set of thoughts, that last bit, and maybe I’ll finish it all later and maybe not. And you don’t care anyway, right? Right. Well then. Off to the porcelain throne. Later.
Pee.S. A little over two years ago, after Dad’s plastic toilet seat broke, I bought him the same wood-core toilet seat I had bought for the main-floor bathroom at Matt’s house. Solid, dependable, rated for 300 pounds. Guess what. It’s still in good shape. 10/10 would buy again.