Getting A Life

Various and sundry or, An Update

I apologize profusely that I have not been writing regularly. I’ve been feeling very blocked lately and it’s been something of an effort to even write in my personal blog and I’m not doing very well with that either. This represents me making a conscious effort to put something here today that is more substantive than bragging about my Google ranking or reporting how much I weigh. Hopefully the logjam will be removed soon.

Site design and content issues
I really, really need to work on these. The logo looks amateurish and the pages are outdated and the latter don’t really say what I want them to say at this point, either. I am not sure when I will be able to concentrate on working on this stuff so if the appearance of this blog annoys you, your patience will be greatly appreciated. I haven’t gotten any complaints yet, including links from other blogs saying stuff like “Wow, get a load of how much this blog sucks,” but maybe my readers are just polite.

Health issues
I still have no self-control about what I eat. OK, that’s not entirely true. I have some control, but not enough. Some days I keep my eating fairly low-carb, and others I don’t. It doesn’t help that I feel like I’m being sort of swept along with someone else’s day, like I live only to wait until they get off work and then according to their dictates. Even my grocery shopping hinges entirely on them and I’m kind of sick of it. But this is one of those aggravations I just have to live with for now, and I don’t think it entirely explains why I can’t seem to stay on plan, even a half-assed plan.

Housing issues
Still sort of apartment-hunting, although I feel as blocked about that as I do about blogging. I’m afraid I won’t be able to get a place, which makes it really dumb that I’m not trying hard enough, which guarantees I won’t get a place. However, rumors that landlords are tightening their standards around here are not helping my mood any. Yet one more reason to roll my eyes every time I hear someone complaining because they bought too much house and now they have to rent because the bank foreclosed. You’re taking my potential home, dude–I can’t buy a house at all. Cry me a river.

Money issues
I have at least caught up my cell phone bill and still have $300 in the account of the $400 I got last Wednesday, and most of the $100 decrease was due to catching up the cell phone*. I need to plow through and catch up as much else as I possibly can today, and somehow manage it without spending all my laundry money. Sigh.

I just checked out a whole bunch of library books about starting and running a home-based business. I remarked to my little girl’s dad that I don’t know why anyone buys chintzy e-books off the Internet that tell them maybe one-millionth of what they need to know for a tenth of their rent money when they can just go to the library for free. He reminded me that our library system probably ranks in the top ten of United States public libraries and maybe even in the top five. Still, there’s interlibrary loan. And of course, just because we check out books doesn’t mean we’ll learn from them. It’ll be interesting to see if I find the time to glean anything useful from these books before I have to return them.

Meanwhile I also job-hunt but… yeah. Still hung up about putting my daughter in preschool. I think at this point that if I do it, it’ll be Waldorf because at least they won’t treat her like a miniature computer on legs. And the only reason I’d do it is at least she could be around kids and get a lot of playtime in, and not be hung up on the TV all day. It wouldn’t be because I thought it was her only option for getting an education, like so many parents seem to think. But it’s my absolute last option, and I’ll hold out as long as I can. I’m also hung up about not being employable. It doesn’t really matter at this point whose fault it is; I’d be just as unemployable after four years’ unemployment due to disability as I am after four years opting to stay out after years of job-hopping and impulsive behavior. (I.e., quitting at the drop of a hat because I didn’t like working somewhere.) What matters is whether I’d be able to pick up the slack if something happened to my little girl’s dad. Yes, she’d be entitled to Social Security**, but it wouldn’t kick in immediately and we could be evicted in the meantime.

There’s also the point that I still need to pay off my debt and start working feverishly to ensure that I’m not destitute in retirement. Hello? McFly? *knocks own head*

Relationship issues
Something… interesting is happening. I do not wish to label it for fear that all is not as it seems, but there’s also the point that the last time I was this mistrustful about this particular person, I lost him for thirteen and a half years. So I’m trying to be patient and hang loose and just wait to see what happens. I’m better at this than I was even five years ago, so I suppose there is something to be said for extreme relationship adversity when it forges you and makes you stronger. But I’m still not totally OK with the way things are going. We’ll just have to see how they play out.

I do know that he called a week or two ago and my little girl’s dad was here and didn’t even tell me the phone rang (it was one call out of many, so ultimately it didn’t hurt anything, but still), and my little girl’s dad has said a few other things that make me wonder what his take is on this whole situation. So I may get to deal with ugliness soon. On top of that I had a mean jealous streak about five miles wide in the immediate aftermath of his and my breakup, exacerbated by post-partum depression and worry that he was going to abandon our daughter like he abandoned me. It meant that every time I saw a woman being friendly to him online, I got snarly at him about it. I’m pretty sure I’m going to hear about this any day now, even though the situation is different. (And it really is. That’s the sad part.)

It makes me think there is some wisdom after all to setting up a certain distance between unmarried parents so that each can have their own life. Although if things had gone sanely and smoothly during the pregnancy and after, even if they had still resulted in him and me not being together, I think I would feel a lot better about the traditional visitation routine. But my daughter was too young for that kind of thing anyway. Babies and toddlers need to be with their mothers, assuming no abuse or neglect is going on. They’re not ready to visit with an absent dad for more than a few hours here and there until they’re at least three years old. Still, she’s three now.

And yet I hate it when she’s not here. I feel completely wrong and lost and don’t know what to do with myself. I mean, I do find things to do, like clean house, but the place is empty and I feel empty too. And I’m hardly going to send her off just so I can date or whatever. So it’ll be interesting figuring this out.

OK, I guess I had more to say than I thought. Let’s hope it is not another week before I post again.

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*My cell phone is my primary phone and I have no landline. In fact I had my original landline number ported to my cell phone and completely switched over back in 2006. It would be a better deal to have a bare-bones landline and DSL rather than a cell phone and cable Internet–assuming I didn’t use much long distance. These days, unfortunately, I have to use long distance if I want to talk to anyone besides my little girl’s dad, because most of my loved ones and some of my best friends are not online regularly or don’t write well. So as long as most of my conversations take place on nights and weekends, I think I’m still saving money.

**Oh, but Social Security is just a failed retirement program and we should replace it with the stock market. Whatevs. *eyeroll*

Being a thirtysomething

I recently joined a Flickr community for thirtysomething-aged women. I found a nifty little message thread there: Things I did after I was thirty that I didn’t do when I was twenty. Something like that. (I’m not reading the page as I write this, and my memory retention isn’t the best lately.)

Reading all those accomplishment lists makes me think of why I started this blog in the first place, and what it is supposed to be about. I am both envious and hopeful, even as I am almost halfway through my thirties now.

Of course I also think “getting a life”, like “personal finance”, must be defined by each individual undergoing it–there is no one overarching set of definitions for what constitutes accomplishment. So it’s interesting to see how other women define it, especially as I haven’t worked out all the angles of what it means in my own life.

Some progress, some setbacks, some tentative plans

Well, I survived my first day back low-carbing. I even got a handheld mixer so that I could make oopsie rolls (see The Lighter Side of Low-Carb in my blogroll for details), so that I don’t have the excuse that I miss bread. Hahaha. I always seem to have eggs and cream cheese around and we discovered a sale on cream of tartar at Kroger a while back (a big deal, as it’s usually pretty pricey), so I’m set. I am not in ketosis yet and I have no idea when it will happen; if I hit the three-day mark and the ketostix aren’t changing color, I’ll move more in the direction of a “fat fast” to see if I can kick things into gear. I have macadamia nuts, cream cheese, eggs, and mayo, and I can get avocados cheap. Bring it.

I will also be on the lookout for frozen cauliflower, and possibly stocking up on zucchini at the end of the summer because it can be frozen and both make good pizza crusts and all manner of other things. Veggie pizza crusts? Yes, and far healthier than the wheat variety.

My spending, though… is entirely too far out of control. It’s been so bad I am afraid to tabulate everything up into GnuCash. I already know I started out with $400 on Wednesday and now am down to below $200, actually closer to $100. Not a one of my regular bills has been paid yet. I didn’t even put any of it into my checking account yet. WTH? I know I am living close to the bone, I know I have a moving day coming up soon, and here we are. Some of it was buying fast food. Some of it was the sushi I got Saturday, knowing I would be low-carbing yesterday. And some of it was supplies to deal with the stupid cat’s peeing on my carpet. And it doesn’t help that my little girl’s dad has not taken us grocerying, nor that now he has to replace his passenger-side front car window because one of the downstairs neighbor’s idiot friends broke it. (That’s our guess based on events Saturday night, but I’d also guess we have a 99.9 percent chance of being correct.) But the whole situation is just making me nuts. I can do better than this, so what happened?

However, I got a piece of mail from Chase Friday or Saturday inviting me to start a checking account with them for a $100 bonus. And I may just take them up on it. I am also supposedly going to get a $200-plus refund from the IRS from 2004. (Now all of a sudden I’m incredibly paranoid that I actually did file that year but didn’t print out the return. I’d been doing them through H&R Block’s free online service for a few years there. Aaaaargh…) But the thing is that both of those would be extra money. I am not supposed to be looking forward to possibly getting them now to make up my stupid shortfall.

And it just goes to show that conventional wisdom does not always apply. Some of us find it far too easy to spend money whether it’s cash or plastic. Not to be totally flippant, I’m just trying not to spiral into beating myself up unproductively.

I’m still poking around, as I always do, trying to figure out increasing my income. eBay is still pretty much a wash. I need to find books through the library to figure out how to do it better if I’m going to try and make it a decent income stream. I found a great one at Barnes & Noble but couldn’t justify the price. Trying to get it used might be a mistake as well because eBay is constantly changing how they do things. We’ll see.

I might start making art trading cards out of some of my photos and selling them on eBay or Etsy. If they’re meant to be sold they are technically referred to as ACEOs or Art Cards, Editions and Originals–ATCs are supposed to be for trading only. Anyway, I found a photofinisher that does wallets in 2.5″x3.5″ instead of 2″x3″, and for dirt cheap. I can pick them up at Target, so I’m going to try that pretty soon. Worst case scenario, I’m out less than five bucks. Best case scenario, I can have a lot of fun and make some decent money while I’m at it.

Otherwise, there are several places around tha intarwebs that I’ve picked up a few cents here, a few cents there, and I need to buckle down over the next several weeks, get each account up to the minimum dispersal balance, get my money out of them, and shut them down. It is just too much time and energy sucked up for too little reward. Amazon’s MTurk program is one example; Helium is another. I simply do not have the time to sit around typing and clicking and hoping to be paid well, only to find I earned pocket change.

As for a certain person that I wasn’t sure I wanted to communicate with again, I’m thinking we’ll try a phone call, if he’s still amenable, and we’ll see what happens from there. I have misgivings about being anything but a long-distance old Army buddy to him, but if that is all there is and it goes well, I would rather have one more person in the world wishing me well than one fewer. And if I had lived by that philosophy all along I might be a much happier person today.

Where I’ve been lately: burying old ghosts

I have really been letting this blog go slack lately and I apologize. I know I don’t have that many readers in the first place, but at the rate I’m going that’s hardly going to change for the better. Know that I am still here and at this point I have no intention of letting this blog die.

It’s just that sometimes I get caught up in personal drama and it diverts my energies away from more positive ends to become a Sucking Vortex Of Doom™. And that’s what’s happened in the past several days, I’m sorry to report.

I think I mentioned here several weeks ago that I had signed up for an account at Reunion.com and discovered that someone had been looking for me, and that upon plugging a certain person’s name into Google and locating him at Classmates.com, I realized I had been searched for by an old lover and Army buddy. (OK, I might not have gone into that much detail on who he was, but now you get the idea.) So I left a message for him at Classmates and about two weeks ago, give or take, he left me a response.

I was actually pretty excited at first. Now, when we got involved back then it was not under the best of circumstances, but that was pretty much the story of my life at that point (in fact, it was the story of my life until fairly recently where “romance” was concerned), and I figured that with thirteen and a half years of life under the bridge, anyone can change in that amount of time.

If only.

It’s a sad, sordid tale, and if you’re really curious I suppose you can go dig up my personal blog and read it for yourself. The main point is, I think, that being faced with the possibility of seeing him again disturbed what emotional equilibrium I’d managed to achieve and sustain for the past several months–again, where “romance” is concerned–and it rattled me to the teeth. I am someone who gets all sappy and schmoopy and miserable and depressed when it looks like I am about to be rejected in some way. I thought I had grown a bit beyond being this kind of person but I found out otherwise in this particular situation and it was an unpleasant realization to say the least.

(I know it’s normal to feel disappointed when one is rejected. I go well beyond simple disappointment, I’m afraid. We’re talking endless obsession coupled with self-loathing and constant second-guessing of myself, him, his motives, my motives, what it all means, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum et ad nauseam. It is disturbing to watch, and even more disturbing to experience.)

I suppose I achieved some small victory, however. I found that I could accurately assess the situation for what it was, call him on his shit, cut the “reunion” short and cut off all contact with him–and I’m more or less OK in the aftermath. Considering that I used to face situations like this by making all manner of excuses for the guy’s behavior and then pushing myself very hard to change my own desires and expectations to make myself more appealing to him even at the expense of my own self-worth (which, of course, never works–even the biggest schmuck can smell the lack of personal integrity a mile away and is repelled by it), this is progress.

If I could now evolve to the point where this sort of episode doesn’t hurt anymore, that would be better still.

The only question now is whether I keep his old photos or consign them to the circular file, I suppose. I think I’ll keep them. I haven’t been disrespected, lied to, or taken for granted yet by a piece of paper and I don’t anticipate it happening any time soon.

Sometimes I wish the Law of Attraction would just go away.

It’s one thing when people realize that when they really want something, they are more likely to notice the presence of that thing in their lives, or to discover a way to get that thing. I’m totally OK with that concept. I don’t think it takes physics or intervention from God (although I will not rule out the latter), but it’s a nice, neutral “law” that doesn’t seem to hurt much of anybody.

It’s another matter when someone uses the Law of Attraction to blame themselves because they were assaulted or abused. And I’ve seen this happen. And it’s frightening and sad all at the same time.

Frightening because if enough people blame themselves for abuses and assaults instead of blaming the abusers and assailants, the latter will have free rein to do whatever they please. People who do harm should face consequences for their behavior, not have it swept under the rug because some power-hungry Noo Wage writer idiot came up with new language for victim-blaming.

Sad because people who have been attacked deserve better than to spend their lives beating themselves up a second time for something that never should have happened to them in the first place, REGARDLESS of whether or not they asked for it.

Moral, ethical, GOOD people do not beat, rape, grope, assault, drug-into-oblivion, lie to, cheat on, neglect, or abandon other people. If I left out any bad behaviors there, mentally insert them for me. Or add them in the comments. I don’t care. They apply too. Good people do not do these things*.

On the rare occasion a good person finds themselves with a raging case of cranio-rectal inversion and does one of these things anyway, that good person will stop themselves performing the act as soon as they realize what they are doing, and they will go out of their way to make amends. But they should not expect anyone to trust them ever again.

Meanwhile, if you really want to grow as a person, please do not use the Law of Attraction against yourself. And if you see one of these idiot goo-roos using it against someone who does not deserve to be treated that way, speak out against them, LOUDLY. There’s a reason the major religions rail against false prophets, and it’s not just fear of competition.

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*You will notice I didn’t include homicide. If someone’s about to kill me and I have the chance to kill them first, you better bet I will do it, and I think “good people” have a moral and ethical obligation to save themselves from harm where they are appropriately equipped to do so.

In which I ponder using goal-setting online tools

I am seriously loving Joe’s Goals. Just seeing the little widget in my sidebar is reminding me to take my vitamins in a way that pretty much nothing else was doing. Taking my vitamins every day = far happier and more stable Dana. My weight may not make me look like I’m starving but I sure must be malnourished in some way.

I’m looking at 43 Things as well, pondering how I might use it along the same lines. I had some goals listed there but they were pretty broad, wide, and vague. So I’ve deleted them and we’ll see what I put there in their stead.

I’m thinking I might take some larger goals, break them down into component parts, set up the component parts as goals in 43 Things, track the components in Joe’s Goals as I do them, and I’ll know I can mark them off as done in 43 Things when I’ve done them consistently for the required amount of time and marked them on Joe’s Goals. Make sense? Yes? OK.

So now I get to figure out what to put where. That’s the hard part. It seems to me as though I’ve managed to get through 34 years of life without being particularly important to anyone except my kids, and if I haven’t done anything special up until now, what in the world am I supposed to do from this point on? OK, I probably shouldn’t live my life for everyone else but me, but I was The Smart Kid™ growing up, and Smart Kids™ are often given the impression by their families that they should Do Something™ for the world since they’ve obviously been blessed with so many gifts themselves. I was not immune to the pressure, even as I ducked around it quite a bit. So that’s still hanging over me now.

(Actually, the belief that Smart Kids™ should submerge their own needs and desires in favor of Doing Something™ for the world on account of being So Gifted™ is not limited to the families of Smart Kids™. It’s kind of annoying, too, because you don’t have to be a genius to fix longstanding problems–but people who were never labeled as Smart Kids™ have somehow gotten it drilled into their heads that they can’t do anything that spectacular, so they foist off their share of social responsibility, with many an ill result.)

So I should probably just maintain my focus of trying to fix what’s gone wrong in my life first before I try, erm, expanding my reach to do other things. It’d probably work out for the best.

Money-tracking and self-examination

For most of my life I have had a serious avoidance problem. If something looked too difficult to tackle for any reason whatsoever, I would put off dealing with it for as long as humanly possible. If I could put it off so long that I no longer had to deal with it that was even better, no matter what the cost to other people in my life. And I haven’t kicked the habit, either, if you could call it a habit. It still dogs me, and I’m still suffering the fallout.

I think that part of it comes from… not being sure how to deal with a given situation? Not feeling equipped to deal with it? Something like that. I think I’ve hit it somewhere in the vicinity of the problem, anyway–or there is more than one problem involved. Starhawk has actually written about avoidance, although I am not going to get into a whole lot of what she says here–it’s 3:30something in the morning and digging for books on the shelves would wake people up, most likely. I will share that she saw avoidance as coming at least in part from perceived or actual powerlessness, and that having the tools to cope with a problem makes it far less likely you will avoid trying to solve that problem until it blows up into something unsolvable.

So I don’t think it is any great coincidence that I’m finally getting up the courage to take a hard look at my finances, right about the same time I’ve discovered the personal finance blog community and observed other people taking a hard look at their own. Not only do I have their example to show me that I’m not the only fool who got herself into this kind of mess (and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible :P), but in reading what they have learned about personal finance and also gleaning my own information from various books, I’m finally becoming equipped to deal with finances effectively. And I must know this on some level or I’d still be avoiding the bills.

And as I walk through the process of doing this it seems like random old bills are popping up and clamoring for my attention so I can finally get around to paying them. And that’s fine. For instance there’s an old dental bill for my daughter’s care from last year; there’s almost thirteen bucks left to pay on that account and my little girl’s dad’s insurance covered the rest. Why it never got paid in all this time I couldn’t tell you, but it will not kill me to take care of it now. For another example there’s the tuition I took on to get that associate’s degree in accounting that I never finished; my debt on that one has increased almost forty bucks since I last looked at it a few weeks ago. I duly noted the increase in GnuCash and moved on. I’ll tackle that one when I can, and in the meantime I can make sure I know what I owe them. It’s the most I can do right now.

It’s just weird that a few months ago, I didn’t want to look at any of this. I had some vague notion of wishing I could get my debts paid off but I really did not understand what that would entail. Now I’m looking at it and it’s not nearly so scary. Well, the scary part is being faced with all of it with my piddly present income. But that’s it. Otherwise it’s just numbers, and we don’t have debtor’s prison anymore so there’s not much the numbers can do that hasn’t already been done to me.

Another interesting aspect of this is looking at my assets and income sources. Like, here’s my assets list in GC right now:

A2 Hosting affiliate balance: $14.85 (Thank you, whoever that was!)
Cash on hand: $21.61
Google AdSense balance: $1.40
Helium balance: $0.46
Kemba Checking: $56.92
Kemba Savings: $40.00 ($5 of that unavailable due to share in credit union)
MTurk balance: $1.39
MyLot balance: $2.55
Postage stamps: $5.41 (Yes, I keep track of this–it is still money!)

Total assets: $144.59

I don’t have anything in PayPal or RevolutionMoneyExchange at the moment because the PayPal debit card is still d-e-d as far as I know, and RME doesn’t have one attached to it, so any money remaining in those accounts is useless to me unless I move it into checking.

Now, this invites another kind of self-examination. I have a sort of low-grade war going on in back of my mind vis-à-vis time spent versus money earned for my trouble and effort. At the same time I have to admit that at my present income level, even pennies here and pennies there beat the hell out of no money. I also have to admit that no matter what I chose to do to bring in extra money, I’d start out making a pittance. Can’t avoid it. On the other hand, I suspect I’m not going to bother with a couple of these activities for much longer because they’re really getting pointless. MTurk, for instance, is a joke. I really think some people just get off on waving doggie biscuits for those of us who need money and aren’t coming by it easily enough. “Hm, let’s see… I know, let’s ask them to do something totally time-consuming and utterly pointless and then pay them a pittance for their trouble.” God help me if I ever move into a position to pay someone as an employee or a contractor or a random “mechanical turk” worker and wind up that stingy, is all I can say. Helium may wind up being a similar wash because there doesn’t seem to be much payout unless you’re very, very lucky. I’m not even going to bother linking to MyLot. OK, it’s easy pennies and I link to it in my sidebar, but I don’t have that much time to spend on message boards.

I think I would probably be a lot better off focusing on something that’s had decent payout for me in the past and just ramp that up to full volume and see where it takes me. I’m having good luck with blogging so far, at least in terms of back-and-forth with other bloggers and some amount of affiliate income, so I’ll continue this. I would even if I weren’t getting paid, frankly, because I enjoy blogging. I have a few other things in mind, though, that might also be fun. Whatever I wind up doing, I intend to continue tracking how I’m doing financially so I can call bullshit on myself at the earliest opportunity if something I’m doing is leading me nowhere fast.

Friday Roundup

I’ve been slackin’, but here’s what I’ve got:

• MasterYourCard tells us about 5 Steps to a DIY Lifelock, referring to the company that promises to make you virtually identity-theft-proof.
• Social Marginal talks about planning for your future without relying on Social Security. I actually have no issue with Social Security as it was intended to be: a safety net in case you find yourself suddenly destitute. (It happens.) But lots of people seem to think it’s a retirement plan and they’re going to wind up in a lot of trouble. Just the fact that there are a lot more people in my parents’ generation (the Boomers) than in mine (Gen X) is a recipe for trouble; they get their Social Security checks from my generation’s Social Security taxes. Anyway, this is promised to be the first in a series, so keep an eye out for more.
• Antishay Ventenne talks about what she does for a living. I like being inspired by people who don’t make their living the usual way, as “the usual way” hasn’t worked out for me very well and would work even less well now.
• brip blap continues his 31 Causes of Failure series with Cause of Failure #5: Lack of Self-Discipline. These are from Napoleon Hill’s book Think And Grow Rich.
• Lynnae at Being Frugal posts lots of frugal tips to survive a recession.

Messages from the universe

I have a really bad habit of hanging on to things long after I should have let them go. Not by anyone else’s standards, but from my own point of view, since I would know better than anyone else when it is time for me personally to let go of something. Anyway, I did a dumb thing the other night: I went looking somewhere I had not looked in over a year to see if the dust really had settled. I should have stayed away.

On the other hand, I got another pretty clear message from the universe, or God, or who/whatever, that I was right about that person to begin with and that I should probably stop worrying about it and feeling guilty about my part in things. My philosophy is that a lot of so-called sins are easy to fall into through lack of boundary-setting, and so one’s participation in them is sometimes passive. For instance, an opportunity to commit adultery might more or less fall into one’s lap. But thieving is always an active sin, as in the thief must make an active choice to steal and then seek out the coveted item(s). As such I hold thieving to be a more serious sin than most others a person could commit. (I’m not letting passive sinners off the hook, just paying them a little slack because people don’t always actively seek out wrongdoing, and setting boundaries and defending them is not the easiest thing for some people to do.)

As you might have guessed, I found out that a person with whom I share a long history of drama and heartache is a thief on top of everything else–by her own admission, and in a tone which said that she didn’t consider stealing from me to be wrong. And I had a lot of doubts about my part in things with her, and I still think I was a jerk and behaved immaturely in some instances. But considering that her household was always a lot messier than mine and I never once got the impulse to steal anything from her, I think it is telling that she bragged about taking something out of my apartment and that she used the fact that my apartment was a mess to excuse her behavior. And it wasn’t something minor, like a bookmark or a nickel. It was an inkjet printer.

So I’m just not going to worry about it anymore. I had suspected for quite a long time that when she put on a public show of caring about me and wishing me the best that it was just an act, and that her behavior indicating that she didn’t care how she behaved or how that affected others was closer to the mark in terms of her true character. Now I know that is true, so as far as I’m concerned, all bets are off. I feel sorry to a certain extent for the people who are in her daily life now, but at least one of them has known her since 2002 and ought to be savvy about her by now, so too bad for him. The rest of them will have to find out how she is sooner or later and it probably won’t be a fun experience. But that is not my problem anymore. Frankly, it never really was.

Unfortunately, though, I still have to associate at least a little bit longer with two people who were close to her, and one or both of them knew she stole my printer and neither of them told me. They then had access to read of her boasting about the theft, and still said nothing. She didn’t have keys here, so one of them would have had to let her into my apartment in the first place, and this after she had not set foot in the place for almost a year and had written me off as not worth her time (so she had no reason to be there to begin with). So I’m looking askance at my association with both people and wondering when the other shoe is going to drop (or another one–we’ve been suffering from footwear avalanches around here for quite a while now), and also wondering exactly why I should trust them to tell me what the weather is outside, much less in matters like helping me care for my daughter, which both have expressed interest in doing.

Haven’t done what you’d call getting a sign from the Universe about that, and I’m not a paranoid schizophrenic who reads signs in everything she sees and hears–it just seems like I get a clear signal every now and again as though something way bigger than me is clocking me upside the head and yelling, “Hey STUPID! Yoo-hoo! Lookie here!” In this case I haven’t got a whole lot of good alternatives, at least not as far as I can tell.

However, I have gotten more signs about the feasibility of staying in this neighborhood another year.

The first was what for all the world sounded like a semiautomatic, or more than one, going off in the alley behind my building early yesterday morning. I had already stayed up late and gone to bed after 3am; when the noise went off I had not yet gone to sleep, although I had begun to drift. Thea jerked and snuggled close to me, my heart started racing like mad, and after that I couldn’t sleep at all. To top it off, she had gone to bed early and after the noise happened she gradually woke up and stayed that way. So I was well and truly screwed.

We get a lot of talk around these-here parts about how the neighborhood’s going to be revitalized, but the truth is that what we really need are good cops and an effective anti-gang program here, and we have neither. It’s as if they take all the bad cops with attitude problems out of Upper Arlington and dump them here, and we don’t have enough police, either. (Maybe they send the absolute worst ones to Cleveland and Detroit?) We’ve already had one gun go off next to my building, about two and a half years ago. I know for a fact that one was, because I saw the shell on the sidewalk the next day. We’ve been lucky here so far in a neighborhood where I hear the gangs shoot back at the cops, but our luck is going to run out eventually, so it would be really stupid from a safety standpoint if I renewed my lease for another year.

On top of that I have had almost-constant problems with plumbing issues in this apartment since I moved in, and apparently the landlord’s idea of “maintenance” is to grab random scruffy-looking guys off the street, hand them tools and pay them to come into my apartment, look at the problem, tinker with it a little bit, and leave, and the problem is always the same or worse after they leave than it was when they came in. Except for when they installed a new central heating system, but for all I know they screwed that up too and it just isn’t obvious yet. Although they smoked in my kitchen that time without asking me, so they’re still jerks.

Right now it’s water leakage under the bathroom sink, apparently involving one of the intake pipes (or whatever you call it–one of the pipes bringing in water, not the drainpipe). Maintenance guy showed up yesterday to look at it, said he had no idea what was going on, tightened a few things, told me to call him when the leak happened again (it’s intermittent) and left. After he left, it happened again.

But what is that? A real plumber would come in, look at the problem, go “Hm, I can’t tell where it’s coming from,” and then do something to find out. But I don’t think I have ever had a real plumber come in here in the over three years I’ve lived here. It’s always some yo-yo with a toolbox who would fit in better out on the street corner with a sandwich board.

At this point I’m inclined to just not bother anymore. It’s not my building. Every time I call them about a problem there has to be stupidity and incompetence. And I don’t even like those guys, and I sure don’t want to have to keep calling them back about the same issues over and over again. And if the landlords don’t want to take care of their building, it’s no skin off of my nose. Not my problem. They’re probably just waiting for the neighborhood to turn around so they can cash out, anyway–even if they ruin the building with their negligence, they’d still get a pretty penny for the lot.

So it’s as if both the building and the neighborhood are telling me to get the hell out while the getting’s good. And I hate to do it, because this is the first home of my own I’ve had since I left Memphis in 2000, and this is where I brought my daughter home from the hospital. So far she has grown up playing in this living room. I know a few of the people around here, I recognize people at the grocery store and the laundromat, I mourned the passing of a neighbor who died in a bad way… we sort of belong here.

Only… not. And between the demonstrated lack of support from people who ought to be supportive of us, and the demonstrated lack of suitability of this neighborhood, could be we’ll be making a long trip come July. My mom still needs my help, I’m pretty sure, and my daughter needs to be around my family. At least, some of them.

Stress and worry re: current life situation; braindump

Things are kind of a jumble right now, so I will do my best to impart what is going on in my head without coming off as a complete lunatic–but bear with me, because I might not succeed. (Sorry.)

I have this thing about going along in a fog for a while and not really paying attention to where stuff is falling down in my life. This explains how I got over fifteen grand in debt in the first place and it explains a lot of other things too. Occasionally I go through a phase where the fallout from my past screwups* is staring me in the face. This is one of those times.

So, several things are staring at me all at once.

• I have finally gotten around to doing research on German cockroaches and it turns out that is exactly what I have in my apartment, mostly in the kitchen. They are the main indoor-only roach in most of the world. Many factors seem to contribute to them being here: water leakage from the pipes, gaps around the drainpipes where they go into the wall, other holes and gaps in various walls especially in the bathroom, food bits that get left out overnight and sometimes for days because I hate doing dishes and I put it off, the kitchen wall by the stove being food-spattered but hard to clean because the paint is also blistered and I’m afraid to disturb it because this building’s over thirty years old and I don’t know if it was ever lead-abated, and lots of clutter everywhere, and various cracks and crevices elsewhere not being sealed properly. Oh, it’s a mess. I can only fix some of it, and judging by the condition this place was in when I moved here, the landlords will never do their part.
• Thus I am worried about my daughter’s health in the long run. I actually have considered staying here at least another year because the rent is cheap and when you’re low-income, you are left making these kinds of compromises. She can live with a goopy kitchen sink. She can’t live with, potentially, bugs leaving crap in the bed (I wash the sheets regularly, but still) and carrying in viruses we haven’t encountered before, and some that make people really sick.
• I need a job, even a part-time one, if we are going to get out of here. I have an idea where we can go and we only need a little more income per month to get in there and to possibly have somewhat of a rent reduction from what I’m paying now. We’re already on the Section 8 list but if I were making more money, I wouldn’t need Section 8 and they could go ahead and lease to us.
• I need shoes, I need a work wardrobe (if there won’t be uniforms or casual dress code), I need a haircut, and I need dependable transportation if I am even going to interview, much less have a job by July.
• Alternately I could try to get work from home with West At Home Agent but I hear they are buggers to work for, I would have to work late at night when my daughter is sleeping (because other people might not be reliable to watch her), and the first time a customer on the phone heard her yelling or I had to end my call early, my job would be in jeopardy. She’s three, also, and not quite to the point that she groks “stay in bed and be quiet if you wake up in the night.” To say nothing of if she gets sick.
• I am having little nagging issues here and there with my health, aside from the overweight and the apparent metabolic syndrome, that I would really like to have looked at in the next six months. This includes an issue with my lower left quadrant (abdominal area) being vaguely achy off and on for years now. It’s gotten worse since Thea was born, and seems to intensify when it’s that time of the month, which makes me think I now have adhesions as well as whatever else was going on. Whatever it is, it worries me. I also get edema in odd places at inappropriate times, such as my fingers swelling after I do a load of dishes and then food prep. I would also like to get to a dentist sometime soon, which is slightly more feasible.
• My daughter’s not potty-trained yet. I worry that if I introduce a bunch of changes at once, she will take forever to toilet-train and possibly regress in other ways. We have her in speech therapy as it is for a speech delay. She is also unaccustomed to being around other children on a regular basis. I actually don’t care as much about this as some people might think I should because I believe children should be around people of a wide range of ages, not just shut up with a bunch of children their own age all day, but I know she enjoys playing with other little ones, and I would like to see her do it more often.
• My apartment, aside from the bug and maintenance issues, is a craphole. I swear I do not use over half the items I possess in these five rooms. Stuff has got to go. I keep thinking, “oh, I’ll sell it all,” and that never happens. I need to get this stuff gone on FreeCycle Real Soon Now. And then I need to turn this place upside down with a mop, a broom, lots of rags, a bucket, and copious amounts of all-purpose cleaner. And then the vacuum, and then the shampooer, and then some spot treatments in the big bedroom, and then more shampooer. Bleh.

Weirdly, now that I’ve come out and dumped all of that, it doesn’t look as bad as it felt. And it should feel bad, maybe, because I’m falling so short everywhere in my life. But there is surely some path I can take that would resolve these issues in a way that I could live with. I just wish I could figure out what it was.

Procrastination is a huge part of the problem. Thea being clingy and needing my attention because I’m the only other human being here is another part of the problem.

Hm. Thinking out loud… Maybe if I were to get her enrolled in the Waldorf preschool, because I’ve already looked at the rates there, and because they wouldn’t rush her into pottytraining if she regressed… If I could get the West At Home gig… I could work during the day when she wasn’t here? On top of that, the fact that I was employed and making an income, I could show that to the apartment community I mentioned previously and say, “Look, I have a job, here’s my income now,” and they would only count the income, not what I was spending it on, and maybe they would say “Oh yeah! Sure, we’ll lease to you,” problem solved?

But I would have to bust mah bee-hind. One of the debts I owe is an old phone bill. Get that paid off, call the phone company, get the landline set up (I could probably port my old phone number back), and try to get on with West in the next month or so… then if that falls through, at least I’d be spending less per month on phone service, since I would have had to get the most basic service anyway? Yeah… that doesn’t sound too egregious. I should also be able to get childcare assistance which would be a huge help. I don’t know what it will be worth, but I’ll apply for it.

The cool part is that if I pulled this off, right? I would be living just north of where the preschool’s located–a lot closer than I am to it now. Either way we could get there by bus, but a shorter ride’s better than a longer one.

…Yeah. It feels like gambling, but in order to pull this off, I would have to do it in steps anyway, so if one step didn’t go through, then I wouldn’t have to worry about it all falling down around my head. No biggie. I still have time.

Right, then. I have the money right now to go ahead and make that debt go away. That’s the first step. There will be a delay for the second step as I figure out when my cell contract ends; I believe it is in April, but that’s not long from now. After that, who knows? I could also contact the preschool while this is all going on, to see if they will have any openings this summer.

As for the health thing, I should still qualify for Healthy Families, Ohio’s health insurance program. I have misgivings about how good the care will actually be, but maybe I might get a doctor to listen to me about the lower-abdominal thing if not about the other weirdness. One can only hope.

…Yeah. Yeah, I feel better. It’s always worse when this stuff goes swirling around in my head and I can’t catch hold of it and take a good look at it. Sheesh.

—–
*I’m not sure I would call them “mistakes.” A mistake is spelling someone’s name with two Ls when you are supposed to spell it with one. A screwup is when you make the wrong choice entirely and you go boom on your face as a result.