Saturday, October 30, 2004
Hello, all. I don't know how I did with the office cleaning gig: at first, she seemed to like me, but by the end of the night, it was, "Well, I'll work with you for a few weeks", and when I asked what that meant (context: hourage) she didn't reply.
The next day, Friday morning, I get something from the Post Office in the mail. It wasn't the politely-worded rejection I anticipated, but rather an invitation to interview this Friday, at 3:15 p.m.. Night work, six days a week, ten bucks an hour. I guess my record wasn't much of an issue, nor the tattoos the application asked about. (I recall being told by several job-coach types that interviewers weren't allowed to ask that sort of question; on the application, I replied that I had five on my upper body, all small and easily covered. I hope no one asks to see them.)
I don't know about this--I'll have to cogitate on it, and pray for the sort of wisdom that to date has escaped me. Good boss (kind, seems to have led an interesting life), bad pay? Sucky circumstances (on feet for four hours a stretch; no moving about, no peeing, no pseudo-uppers that make me want to pee), good (for now, excellent) pay? Cool hours--five p.m. to whenever, that being about twelve midnight--versus a real, possibly depression)-inducing eleven-hour grind? (And if I am asked about my mental health history, nothing further needs to be said.) Eleven-hour nightly grind? Well, I'm wondering if my night-owl personal isn't more of an affectation these days, something I throw forth to establish myself as seriously different, one of those tortured creative types who takes menial nighttime jobs when they can get them, for the purpose of avoiding (truth: being messed with by) people. I kinda hope that whatever I did that caused the cleaning-company woman any reservations can be amended when I work next.
It is weird around here without the dog. The other three don't seem to miss her, although I suspect that like a Calder mobile touched by (something) the dynamics of their dogdom have been subtly deranged by her passing. (Don't have time to word-search; ma will be in to cut me off pretty soon.) Caught Ma telling Sara, the small but elegant Alsatian, that she was oh so pretty, but not her girl. Ma looked this alpha female in the eye--Sara was emoting for some attention--and said she wasn't "her girl". And I guess there is no place-taking, no substitution, for a loved one.
Beulah, sensing a wave of arthritic pain, would heave and scrabble to her feet, stand head lowered, eyes cast upward, registering the wave and seeking analgesia in the touch of any hand--Dad's, mine. There was no scratching the bone-spurred neck, no clapping the haunches. A person could scratch her sleek seal-like head, and for this old dog, that was enough until the morphine.
Only so much a loving one can do. My ma has long been able to give injections, and long willing to hide Beulah's diazepam and narcotic--I have my opinions here, and my truth, which was yes, I'd thought about getting hold of either or both to dose myself into sleep, but I don't believe I would have done so if I had bothered to look for, and find, the dog's medications. My mother administered these substances as needed; sometimes, one shot of morphine and a doggie Valium would be enough to send her into 24-some hours of sleep, from which she would emerge, seemingly much better. Today, this remains on her mind: would one more round of analgesics have done for three more months? I get how these questions can be vexing. To date my losses have been vocational/material/emotional, as in losing jobs/things/objects of infatuation. I was made fatuous by things and events that don't stand for much in the end. Today, a sweaty October Saturday and November lurking, I can offer only sympathy. I haven't done this yet, not really.
So, Beulah--there is negative space where she would have been this day. The other dogs frame her. As she offered her alpha status long ago to another old dog, True, and then rowdy Sara, anyone who cared for had to let her outside alone. They were simply too rough. The two other females would ride her and she would take it, although the little spaniel R.D. was pretty much benign. Sometimes she wouldn't come in for my father or me, she'd simply stand there wondering, as some dogs can do, if it was safe for her to go in: only my mother, her alpha caretaker for thirteen years, had the power to reassure her that she would not be accosted by the others.
In an understated way, little Beulah--a dense-packed fifty pounds of black Lab--was smart. Mother says that she was a show-off, a clown, up until about two years ago, carrying objects diverse as left-about slippers and newspapers around, the glint in her suggesting something metaphysical to her ken, an awareness that she was engaging, entertaining, a good egg, a pretty girl, a scamp. Extend a hand to grab whatever she had in her mouth, she would duck, again seal-like, and run off.
I used to get peeved when my mother called me "Beulah". For conglomerate reason, there are tears as I type this. I was being paid a high compliment there, and looking for the Alzheimer's in it, my mother's, even mine. Foolish human.
Having lived most of my life in Philadelphia, I was not there to hold the six-week-old puppy, nor watch her swim into adolescence. My mother sometimes rues that she was spayed, as the little dog was the last of thirteen in her litter; Beulah's lineage was impressive, the high quality of her dogness sufficiently convincing, that Ma would've decided to breed her around the age of seven and keep the runt. Beulah was the runt, a running, jumping, bush-climbing advertisement for her kind.
(This never happened, which is where I'm going to leave it today, all of this to be later gathered and pillaged for the useful idea, the meaningful turns of phrase, on which I can either further elaborate, or edit to poem or essay form. My time on this computer is up; yeah, time constraints strangle the impulse, but I can't say anything about that today.)
Odd, the dingy and pillowed sky against the still-green grass and the psychedelic yellow leaves. The trees know something, and the horses know too; they don't know they know it, but I don't know it either, so--
Later. My tooth hurts.
ch (and could somebody give me some easy advice on how to link up with other blogs, both here and elsewhere? thanks in advance)
Thursday, October 28, 2004
Sometimes, I don't know. Yesterday, a librarian overextended the limits of her job, erased most of my fine, and allowed me to check out four books. One of them dealt with new approaches to BPD, and another, statistics. For dummies, of course--I just wanted to see if I could get hold of some of it on my own, b/c I've had two classes in the subject so far, and both instructors allowed the classes to cheat their way through. I'd also like to get hold of a pre-calculus for dummies--all of this, of course, in preparation for yet another WAIS--I generally don't do that great on that particular test. I'd thought of trying to get hold of a copy from the university's psyhcology department, and sort of memorising the thing, so I'd come out real smart, you know, so smart that I had to go to college once again. B/C my education to date is pretty much useless.
I don't know how to link to other bloggers here. It all comes back to the time thing, and my probably ADD'd inability to get through the instructions. (Yeah, I could print them out, but I have been proceeding through this present universe with no money. How about that? I've stopped trying to run minor scams on two basically generous ppl--usually about medication I have already purchased, with my folks' little monthly stipend--so I usually do not have much but chump change on hand, and not enough of that to print out a page of anything. If I could print those instructions out, and grovel for some quite time and space, I might be able to do it--link up with other bloggers--and get on with this task of tearing down my narcissistic traits in a somewhat unnarcissistic manner.
Wishes aren't horses, though, and that's sad.)
--Just overheard this little junior librarian blow off someone with whom he was conversing on the phone, something about wanting to continue the interaction, but having to help "someone" who was standing in front of him. I guess dealing with certain types of callers--those who never shut up, or ask idiotic questions, and then want to get personal--can wear a fellow down. Pity those tech support folks working with English-speaking clients from across the pond and over the mountains. My ma has a computer. Rather than bring my dad into the picture (retired computer scientist; hates computers), she stays on the phone with those ppl for hours, sometimes. She's nice to them, though, and they probably think they're making good money. I understand that a Chinese individual with an American PhD would get about twelve bucks an hour in their native country, doing whatever doctorate-level computer people do. So the techs over there might get, maybe, five, with an associate's or bachelor's degree.
Guess I'll have to run away somewhere else.
I know I'll never use that local library at night, or after whenever the kiddies get home, again. I was wrong to rant against Mexican kids in general--I guess they're about average on the dis scale--not giving a hoot about anything but themselves. Realising this, thinking it, whatever: Lord, I feel old. They're just being kids; though I was an aggressive non-conformist in both the visual and written senses, I never saw fit to act up in the library when I was their age. I've always respected the institution, and really do grieve the day when libraries were almost sacred places.
I've got a poem, or bits of one, forming in my head. My ma's old Lab, Beulah, was put down last week, and Ma has enlisted me to compose a poem in her honor. What's coming is this: I am, unfortunately, called 'Julie'. (The name calls up cheerleaders. Enough said.) Mother often confused the two of us, calling the dog 'Julie', me 'Beulah', and sometimes, a horse, 'Reverie', would enter the mix. At one time, this actually annoyed me. I automatically ran the equation 'dog' equals 'dumb child', 'sycophant', a few other things, and when Ma called me by the Labrador's name, she was invalidating me. ('Invalidation' was a big buzzword in the treatment of borderline people at that time.) When she called the dog 'Julie', this operation reversed itself, and I didn't find that cute either.) What a selfish and humourless creature I was. I'm presently lacking words to bring the sweetness of this confusion to text, but there is a small warm well of tears at the ready. Ma's taking this really hard: one of my local cousins, who would die in 1995 in a motorcycle accident, had found Beulah, the runt of someone's littler, and told Ma about her. I never saw Beulah as a pup, but Ma adopted her when she was 3 months old. I know she was love, unconditional and pure. Puppies affect me like that, but what I need to write isn't about me, and I need to keep that in mind.
Last night, after losing my books at a prayer meeting (gearing up for a Christ-based recovery initiative), I returned to the apartment and all I could dredge up, among the dishes and clothing mounded on the floor, was that it was a soft and heartfelt honor to be called by the name of a dog. (I work like this. Things pop up, flash, and fade unless one is equipped to catch them. Bring on that chip, computer scientists: something that can implanted, and its information somehow jacked into, and downloaded to be edited for everything. Or something like that. When she was healthy, that dog would gallop like a horse. One of my ma's first minis was all white, pure sugar white, and somehow, Beulah got out of the yard and into horse space, where the little gelding jumped her--not what anyone expected. No one was hunt, but two animals and two adult humans were pretty surprised. A yolky summer sun, the only suggestion of moisture against an otherwise expanse of dead grass and dirt. The sky?--a sky's a sky, unless it has towered into grey convolutions of energy, its underside like the belly of the brain. One of my favorite fictional characters, Larkin from M.S. Bell's 'Waiting for the End of the World', liked to lie on the tar roof of his Brooklyn tenement and stare into 'gradations' of sky. As a child, I attempted something like this, glaring into nothing until atoms began to form and shimmer, then clot somehow for less than a moment, and fall into further nothingness and away.
Just got my warning. As always this sort of thing can jam The Process pretty much like a good sh*t can block the toilet, or hair, the drain.
Wish me luck. It's been a long time since I've worked, and I need the proper approach to this cleaning thing, and Im scared, as usual, of fucking up yet again.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Okay. I have a trial job. Cleaning offices of high-powered people. Bathrooms, but usually no kitchens. No benefits. Lots of physical work, which I have been anticipating: the poor woman's liposuction I would very much like to be on that show ' The Swan', BTW. Lots of face work, all toward the end of tightning up certain structures, growing lips, and not ever having to wear makeup or pick chin hair again, until the need reasserts itself and I grovel in large public. And boobs: 36 B's , teardrop shaped, scarless. Botox alone would take twenty angry years away for six months. I can, or should be able to, afford that much.
You know how much time can be spent tweezing chin hairs? Certain hormonal factors exacerbate their growth--poor liver function has a hand in there somewhere,, but I won't go into that right now--and I can't predict those, so I go to bed on Tuesday, basically hair-free, and awaken the next morning with about thirty pluckable hairs, none of these quite alike. Some are coarse, gratifying to pluck; they feel kind of chewy as they come out, and perhaps I will explain this likeness, and perhaps I will not.
Some are roughshod grey, some silver. These tend to assert themselves right below the jawline, and in order to remove them, one must tug on the skin. This is not a good thing--as one grows old(er), one's skin stops rebounding against insults such as tugging half of one's neck up and into view in order to be plucked and grow back again, seemingly as they feel like it.
And the three others--there had better NOT be four. The long ones, genetically driven from about sixteen or so (or whatever the point a person notices and begins to care about such things): you have to displace your neck skin about a quarter of its circumference to get at some of these bastids, and yeah, there's gratification as they are removed, and dropped in a little pile of offenders. You, I dunno, but me, I count these things. I usually get around twenty, and it takes me a quarter of an hour to do this, fifteen minutes of stretching skin that needs no further mangling at all.
It would take about two hundred dollars to do this by laser. I'll have to check into that.
I have no zits right now, although this is always open to change. I love zits, especially the encapsulated ones--you can take an Exacto-knife (basically, a scalpel), and feel the little 'pop' as you draw a small and fine but bloody line across the surface of the sac that holds the good stuff. Everything sterile, now, or as sterile as you can make it: your skin, your gloves, your instrument, the precinct of the zit (a cyst, technically, but who cares? This is fun.)
Hit the bloody area with a couple of four-by-fours (otherwise known as gauze, but free if you happen to work in a medical setting) drenched in rubbing alcohol and wrung out. This is gonna sting some. That's okay. Once the bleeding pretty much stops, keep a couple of four-by-fours at the ready, and place them over your fingertips once you have established where your incision lies, and where the areas of tension on the underlying sac reside.
Squeeze gently. No good stuff? Adopt another approach, again pressing on the sac as gently as you can. If you can't get the pus flowing after three or four tries, well, it's time to bring in the toothpaste (teabags, with their tannins, work equally well--we need some astringency here) and the triple antibiotic, hopefully now in gel form (haven't done this for awhile--busy with heart/lung transplants and bypasses and that sort of thing).
Apply a fingertip's worth of toothpaste to the whole zit. Let it dry; slap a Band-Aid on it if you must go out, because walking around with blue goo on your cheek/forehead/chin is gonna look a lot weirder. Anyone wants to know about the Band-Aid, you: bumped into a door; burned yourself with a curling iron; cut yourself shaving; the cat scratched you, almost got your eye.
When you get back to where you came from, very gently--and with a sterile cloth or gauze pad--remove the goo. At this point, hit the thing with a small wad of antibiotic. The petrolem base of this stuff may cause the zit to rise again. Or it may kill it as you sleep. Try not to mash it into your pillow.
The next day, take direction from the zit, but above all, do NOT apply ANY kind of heavy foundation (i.e., makeup). Makeup is NOT sterlile, and will make you appear silly, trying to hide that monster zit and all. Instead, cover it with 2% salicylic acid gel--available at your nearest RiteAid, wherever--and if you feel you need the little bandaid, go.for.it. And do not touch the skin formerly, you hope, known as a zit, ALL DAY LONG AND INTO THE NIGHT.
Into the night, again wash the thing gently and pat dry. Put more salicylic acid (you can make your own by pulverising ordinary aspirin, and mixing it with something--I forget what) gel on it, and take your butt to bed.
Eventually, it will clear up, maybe leave a wee scar. And maybe I should have prefaced this discourse with this warning: if you have olive, or darker, skin, you might want to think about this procedure, because it could backflash on you--keloid--and you will be left with a horrid, tumerous mass that begs you to remove it yourself, again, and this sort of thing can get expensive. Can involve real surgeons, and their real fees.
More DIY surgery? Sure. Next session. I have received my 10 minute buzzkill, and IMHO, this distorts any kind of process you might want to attempt, all by itself.
Me? The mane cries out for Freisian extensions.
God, those guys--and gals--are almost too beautiful to behold.
And how about this, before I forget: there was this nasty-sick young girl at the main Home Away from Homelessness who was sucking and blowing snot, and coughing into fists, and then unfurling those to use as fingers on her computer. I was someone who never really LIKED to wash my hands, unless there was something that came out of someone else's body on them. I thought that the more peeled the skin was, the better chance that something creepy would crawl on in.HAS ANYBODY HEARD OF FLU SHOTS?
I'd had half a mind (but no money) to get in line, tell the person with the needles that I was HIV+--registered in another state some years ago--and would you please stick me because I had no insurance (true enough) and could not afford to get really sick with something like the flu. But the nascent moralist in me argued that if I tried such a thing, surely I would be caught and dragged into the news if not exactly the jail, and I would never get health insurance again, regardless of how many fancy degrees I'd racked up.
Then some old old old person who should've died at, say, 90 instead of 108, would get a shot to the something--try finding muscle on that chicken. Better yet, some poor soul with a skin-chewing trach, a couple of IVs, contractures of everything useful that can do so, a GCS score of 0 and a goddarn bleeding and fungated FEEDING TUBE in their stomach--had a bad stroke at 65 and has been kept alive, evidence being that they can still SHIT, by well-meaning family members until it is clear that his organs could not be sold for cat food--better that guy or gal get the flu shot. And one for the parakeet the well-meaning family gave him thirty years ago-the one he's never lain eyes on, let alone heard sing.
here comes the alien, this time out my ass.
Hola. I am the only farking adult in this place, this place being Little Mexico: The Library. Loud, loud and lacking utterly in respect for anyone outside themselves. Did Mexico City breed THIS? I can't deal with it. This kind of environment makes some ppl want to do certain things to others, namely charter a really big plane or 200 and send them the FUCK back where they came from. Some of them are getting the hang of being American Junior Whore, however, these three right to my left, except they can't/don't/won't speak English. (No, little pussycat, you are no Hennifer Lopez. Whatever gave you THAT idea?)
If America has done this sort of thing to these ppl, then a lot of it's our fault, and the rest of the blame lies with them. I suppose it's been like that for every kind of immigrant who's had the pleasure of crawing up the collective asshole since, say, 1492. I'm a wee bit Cherokee; the rest is drinking high-test malt and picking taters somewhere. So maybe ten percent of my ass deserves to be here (isn't that usually the case?)
It's been growing, all right. And I cannot listen to this shit any more. I had been having a good day up until about five p.m. Then it all started to rain shit. And if Vanessa has not rematerialized out of Little Dogpatch (this, understand, is Big 'Patch. D Patch. Fucksington. Whatever; you do get the idea that I am not liking it here one bit, am beat to shit and sinking on this diet of lard and quicksand, and yeah, even though I'd have to take myself with me, unless something really spectacular in time travel came along and I could fix myself before I went bad, I'd rather be in some rainy Philadelphia right now, oil and water mixing as rainbow, sitting in a basement dank with sandalwood incense and a couple of well-kept cats, having located a couple of stray guitar players to play 'Misty' for me.
Funny how shit goes from okay, like oh so happy to be out here looking for yet something else to eat my brain, wanting to work myselmy soul to bed, thinking of three jobs, four jobs, hell, FIVE--and coming into this third world junior whorehouse/child molestarium (by the looks of things, Juan Valdez was trying to molest Hennifer Lopez, neither of them over twelve) and getting as dementedly pissed off as I have. I'd wanted to register on-line for a security position, temp-to-hire and hiring twenty as of this afternoon, and logged on to this computer to find out this company wants a Resume, which I a) don't really have, and b) wouldn't know how to save if I did, which would mean that c) there would be no way to find the thing and slice and dice it, or whatever the directions said, to the company. I hope Boy understands that I may have to go out there my own damn self, on the bus, to fill out a more usual application, or really think about a new resume for him to type up and send out to the place. He uses wizards--that's how good his ass is--and not for room spray either.
Oh God, I've NEVER disliked any one group--okay, maybe the rich--because a small segment of that group as a whole--Mexicans, gay males, the Bush family--was rotten. But tonight everybody is rotten; I feel about as rotten, and need to get back to the house, and will be ready if one of these uber-punks tries to jack me for my groceries.
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Well, the math wasn't that awful--520--but has doubtlessly been getting worse. Although today I understand things like decimal points, percentages and the uses of geometry in determining shortcuts (sometimes through ppl's lawns, past their pit bulls and lawn jockeys), and how to estimate how much markdown PLUS an extra 40% off is gonna run me for yet another American shirt made in China, earrings, something or anything at all if I have the money to buy it.
It's possible that a person could get shanked in one of these places: Who you think you mouthin off to, (female dog)? You aint talkin to MY kids like that, nuh-UH. They not YOUR kids, so you just get the (bad word) AWAY from us, hear? No gringa hoe gon' talk to MY kid like that. (Short woman, short arms, shiv in taller woman's side. She has penetrated the tall one's liver, it seems. The shiv breaks, and paramedics are called.)
Must be the times, doing their thing. I used to love the silence of a library, any library, from the those in our largest city to the dusty, wax-smelling, old-sunlit-autumn middle school places. Hiding among geniuses. Maybe that was it: trying to pass myself off as a book. Ducking down to snort speed in the carrels at Temple. Nobody talking loud, no cell phones, no nasty signs of eating. No large blue naked thighs. Too bad Picasso wasn't around to see that--if he truly hated women as much as his biographers and critics did, he might have painted a blue something yesterday, and I'd have hung it in my hall of dreams.
I was looking at Fark.com for this area, and since I couldn't actually get in, I tried out each category. In the men looking for men, found someone I knew (of) from AA, to which I haven't gone back for almost a week. No money; no drinkee, and that's all right. But this man is someone I posted about here awhile a pretty long time ago. He has a congenital deformity I've seen in the flesh exactly two other times. He also works with choirs of young boys, and this could be troubling, for the conglomerate index and middle fingers of the only hand that can play anything at all with have come together to resemble a penis. Apparently, he fancies himself quite the man-eater. I hope that is where he leaves it. I'll give him this: he must be a regular man of steel to have gotten through junior high school, the cruelest three years of the malformed, internally and ex-, adolescent's life.
In my readings on narcissism, I found that pre-narcissistic children are often highly unusually fearful of mutilation as well as death. I was like that, and still am, to some degree. Having worked with them extensively myself, I no longer fear the dead. Not having actually known them for any quality of time was a help, I guess. But I do fear mutilation--there was a news clip on yesterday morning, examining what gravely injured soldiers back from Iraq must go through. One of these persons was a young woman, slim, bright carroty hair, who had lost an arm. She was on a PT mat with a bunch of men, all of whom (in the clip, anyway) were hiding their disabilities from the camera. I understand an arm's not a good thing to lose, if one must lose anything at all: completely freeps one's sense of balance, destroys--until the same abilities have been relearned other places in the brain, and have been developed to their natural execution--all of the things a person can do with her dominant hand, and, perhaps most traumatically, cannot be hidden with trousers, a sock and a shoe.
Me, I couldn't handle either alternative. Spinal cord injury--only if my present bodily functions remained in place. Not walking would be a hit across several dimensions of my being, but I think I could adapt to it, given time. I'm a bloody narcissist, then. You won't have to worry about me when they--he--starts drafting single old ladies and sends them off to get blown to shreds by an enemy--never MIND how vicious--we basically made for ourselves. What shreds remain will take care of themselves.
In addition to being scared of horses, GWB seems to have lost a whole lot of explosives. And "most of America" has confidence in this guy? It looks like it might be time to move.
don't fence me in
Monday, October 25, 2004
How right you are, U V. I hate ellipses, and other crap I'm sure I've mentioned here. And if these youngboys with their nasty cologne and bad coughs are gonna sit here and talk, it's on.
Or not. They left--the library is turning into a gaybar, seems--and if they must talk, I must leave. Of course, they're hardly alone: the old man who runs this lab is pretty loud himself. The adolescents who hover about one terminal, each with her own input, are pretty loud themselves. Saturday, at the local branch, these two boys, about eleven or twelve, sat beside each other, chatting with each other on the computers, and with girls who knows where, and punching each other on the arm. I told the library assistance about their antics; it took him awhile to get over to their stations, and whatever he said didn't work--they kept it up, and I left. That was a lose-lose: you don't discipline other ppl's kids, and had I tried, I might have gotten shanked or something. It's like that. And that's the WAY it is.
I did what I was supposed to do today, all that trash and trivia I went on about yesterday. I got my unattractive self up at five-thirty a.m., and didn't attempt to contrive a put-upon appearance. Not only is Job Boy kind of irked with me, still, he has an abysmal command of proper English. I don't want him going NEAR another cover letter/resume of mine. Even if I have to learn to do them myself. After all, I've been out of college for about fifteen years, maybe more. I worked my first job three and a half years, was fired, and basically had no reason to create anything formal-seeming again.
Here in the Commonwealth, we have this Jobs weekly, and it appears to be absent one copy editor: multiple positions were advertised--forget for what--and this phrase appeared: "commiserate with experience." Commiserate, eh? **** YEAH I can do that. I'm real good at complaining. I went on to show this to Job Boy, asking him to spot the error (which I had accidentally circled) and was a tad puzzled--far as he could tell, there wasn't one. I think I presented myself as joking--at least I hope I did--but he was not amused. Job Boy insisted that "commiserate" meant "about equal to".
I had to wrack my brain and spell "commensurate" for him. He replied that that was he meant--"about equal to." Oh, well. Thus is the quality of my most visible "handler".
I am tired of being handled. I really don't know if I could be as good at handling myself--now, now, get hold of yer mind--as I seem to think I might be. I have narcissistic traits, which are said to have developed at some time up to eighteen months, when I experienced some sort of "rupture" from my mother. I know what that was--she got mastitis and took me off the tit. Or so she says, and I spent the rest of that time, up to eight years, misprocessing additional slights from peers and authority figures, such as teachers. I had some wretched teachers. See? I am devaluing others to mask my fundamental convictions of inferiority. I used to tell ppl that the first time I got a B--forget in what; probably something having to do with math--marked a certain jumping-off point, for I never really studied again until I got to nursing school. Actually, I have studied a bit, and rewritten papers, and done scary poor on the spatial relations/mechanical reasoning sections of certain scary tests. Some conflation went on there, with me scoring off the charts on verbals and patterns, only to be brought back down by the math.
What I mean is I wasn't that great. So some of my narcissism might be fading. Moreso than the borderline thing, the narcissism seems to be what has gotten in my way with regard to working relationships and the like. (But it's said that most narcissists are male. Set theory? Well go right the help ahead.)
I have declaimed myself as non compos mentis, but not enough so to have not noticed this: There is a slim section of new books to the left as you enter the library, and behind this, a marble table and two chairs. There is an ordinary trash can at the end of the third stack. I go to place some trash in it, and as I look up and around for some reason, I see this woman with ash-brown hair and downflowing cheeks, reading something. She has her feet up on the marble table. I see that she is wearing a puffy-looking dress. I see her thighs, fat and nearly cyanotic, pale. I cannot help myself: I look a little further, for there is no way I am going to see this, absolutely not--a rash bush of ash-brown pubes peeking shyly southward. Yes, I did. I saw that, and lived to write that awful sentence about it.
I go commando, often. I have on pants of some kind, leggings, when I do this. In a dress? No way. I would happen over a steam grate (do they have those here?), and a moist gust of air would rise up, and reveal me as no vamp, no Marilyn, no negligent 'ho. Just me as I am right now, and I don't want anyone to see that.
Calling my faithful six--hello, hello!
c h
Saturday, October 23, 2004
oooooOOOOOOOHHHHHHhhhhhhh. iiiiiIIIIIIIIIiiiiii get it.
Get what?
Never mind.
I don't know how to stop the machinery of self-destruction that has come down on me like some tragic exoskeleton--I don't know how to make it go away. I know must of the tricks, yes, but only as they might be applied to others. Last night, took 300 mgs of trazadone, ate more than I should have/less than a real binge, and went to bed around ten p.m.. My roommate is around this weekend; last night, I wasn't happy about this, b/c I had plans that were in effect until I heard her come in behind me. I made polite inquiry. She told me she had her son today. This just happens, not on a regular basis, so I didnt have much of a reaction, although I like the kid. He's smart, funny, engaging, and thoroughly primed to blow in a few years if what Vanessa has told me is correct.
I woke up--naturally, having vowed last night to eschew the evil, EMF-warping alarm clock at all costs--at six a.m. Still dark out, which I like, but will become an hour lighter in about a week or so, I think. (Funny: while I understand daylight savings time as a mesh of antediluvian constructs that has no place in a 24/7 society, I can't tell you when it begins. All I know is, Nov. 2 is closing hard, and that those of us in North America who are at all able must vote. That means dead ppl, imaginary people, identity-thieving felons--they must vote, that is, to remove GWB from his narcissistic warmongering dais, for anyone would be better than he. Anyone who has slurped up the monies and connexions, which pretty much leaves poor people out of the running. I know a genuine genius and formal liberal--the two conditions have no necessary relation either way--who is this year voting for the man because
because
because
he promises to do away with abortion. Well, I guess she has somehow missed all of those dead Iraqi/Afghani infants and children, and women harboring Iraqi, Afghani, and American--uh-huh--fetuses, and the families of all of the formentioned life forms. Those remaining to be killed exist in the shadow cast by the anti-abortuary Bush. Now where I should have a stance on abortion, I don't, or it is at best variable, loosely articulated. That said, 'Bush' is yet another euphemism for 'colostomy bag'.(Oh those concrete-thinking crazy people. Lions and tigers and Bruce Hornsby.)
And at six-ten, I took some more trazadone because I just did not want to have to consider anyone who is not in my position. And I went back to sleep for another four hours, only at ten, the usual annoyances of the neighborhood were well in place, so I got up. Vanessa's daughter, a freshman in college, was there, with a little dog, a miniature Jack Russell terrier. They're popular as barn dogs in this region, and very much attention-disordered. Vanessa doesn't care for dogs to stay indoors. I don't know why, but she was willing to put up with this one, and I was glad that she did. Plus, she had cooked expansively as I slept for the second time, and invited me to eat with them, which I actually did. I haven't yet thought seriously of bingeing.
And these Vocational Rehabilitation people, well, they have played both Bait and Switch and Why Should I Trust You. So they have found reason not to trust me, with a scant 100 bucks' worth of K-clothes, and I guess the best 'solution' to the foul feelings engendered to date is this: I will pick my battles with discernment and lessons learned from these kinds of things, and make do with what I have, dressed in ashes, fat and a frown. Of COURSE I was going to rip you off. What the heck were you THINKING? ALL poor people are like that!
mother had to put her old Black Lab down yesterday afternoon. Sad for me? Worse for her; had the dog for thirteen years. I wish I could have seen her one more time--we've all known this was coming--but this wasn't going to happen. Ma hinted that she would like me to write somethng for Beulah, as I had done for two childhood dogs (I was fourteen; rhyme came more easily). I'll have to let that suggestion have its way with my brain. Pet Sematary Graveyard at Top of Hill Three Dogs and One Horse and the Ghost of One Who Lived--my mother took a jar, enclosed Beulah's first collar and a few deflated words, and she and Dad buried her on her bed in the graveyard, more correctly filling in the pile of dirt that awaited--
going to cry again, and i didn't even know the dog that well--
--more slow parade
Friday, October 22, 2004
I did it again: failed to get up, even though I had set the alarm clock for six, seven, then ten o'clock (save me, please, from this shrill braying fool in the office next to this computer bank--she's supposed to be working, and this ain't no comedy club). This had nothing to do with drinking, for I could afford nothing to drink. I simply took 300 migs of trazadone, ate a bit but did not binge, then fell asleep around eleven, filled with proper intentions and not a whole lot more. See, I know where this road goes--I will be tagged as uncooperative by this Job Club Boy, who, incidentally, asks that we Clubbers be there Monday morning at NINE. aaAAAALLLlll-righty, then. Yeah. It's a can-can, win-win, sure-thing-I'm-ON-it situation. Yeah BUDDY. (I plan on showing up in that one pair of jeans of mine that still fits, wet, if clean, hair, lugging a black bag full of clean, if wrinkled, clothes, a curling implement, and what little makeup I still own, and about five little cans of Starbucks-with-an-extra-something, this purchased with my Food Card.)
(Note: I am oddly enthusiastic about making points. It's sort of like performance art, but I don't think Job Club Boy would get that one.)
(Note to note: I could actually WEAR the clothing that would certainly become wrinkly later, but leave the hair, etc., to the hour or so it would take to arrange it all in a non-offensive manner. A more reasonable alternative, no doubt. However, were I to decide to do THAT, I would probably still be warmly abed at ten, eleven a.m..)
I know that this place does not serve coffee to consumers of their ill-defined services, and though this policy ticks the stuffing out of me, I can't do much about it, except buy cans and cans of that 300% overpriced coffee, all courtesy of this great nation. Do the math? No, I think not, not today. In order to do this crap, I remain defiantly dependent on several old, not-great ideas. There may be other options to those, but I'm not equipped to use those today, either. Think the weekend will change things? No trip to the parents' hilly acreage; no foals, dang it. NO FOALS. I'm going to have to be there at that shoddy little duplex, by myself, I think, which opens up a lot of opportunities to eat perhaps a month's worth of food in 48 hours. The roommate, Vanessa, isn't going to be there, not that she comes out of her spiderhole much these days, but she is a limiting influence on the exercise of other, somewhat more disagreeable opportunities, on which I will comment no further right now.
I feel scattered, and though this word is one I don't much like, or use if I can help it, overwhelmed. And what you just read is about as close as I can get to what's really bothering me let alone what I might do about it. I don't know if I am really that easily distressable, or if I have decided to play the role because it's all I have known to date.
I could have seen my therapist today, but, again, stayed in the smelly bed. I did leave her a message--best I could do. At least, I think.
don't feed me--i have a convoluted and delicate intestinal tract, and moreover, am ill-equipped by nature to vomit, and sometimes i feel like biting. can't say why.
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Dang. Meant to say, "dressed in ashes."
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rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
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