Starting Over, Unrepentant Sinner!

In short, push did come to shove, did come to being too drunk to stand, did come to nearly having the police called for noise complaints, did come to a much lower self-esteem than initially started with accompanied by scarily absolute feelings regarding mortality, and things ended.

The following weeks have brought me to B-town, a mere 25 minute drive from W-town, but the differences are dramatic, let me tell you what, though granted,  some of these are psychologically conjured out of blissfully altered state of mind. I live in a creepy old duplex half that makes weird noises and is perpetually drafty, with the two cats and the two snakes.  All the taps drip, and a poltergeist runs around knocking shit over (like the felines) and creeping me out.  It also likes to drink out of the cat’s water dish for some reason. I am the proud new owner of a Co-op share (number 26331), I have bird feeders, and live in a town with 22 churches (more on that later). I DO stuff.

I honestly couldn’t be any happier than I am right now, unless Unicorns existed and we could domesticate them into seeing-eye animals. It’s only been two weeks, and I feel like my chest can expand completely. I can sleep entirely through the night without moving once, even with the variables in cat-sprawl that map the quilt at bed time.

My job still rocks. My co-workers have twisted senses of humour, and my expendable income, despite my heavy-ish rent price, has doubled, now that I’m not spending it on shit I don’t care about.

And Tempest? I got to keep all my books.

Live! The roiling walls of infestation country

Fact: When a female bed bug and a male bed bug have their “special” couple time together, he stabs her randomly with a huge spear of love and leaves a scar. Take note of the potential for metaphor here.

I didn’t end up fleeing our house last night after A. phoned about an infestation of bed bugs that his lover the harbinger had discovered we had. For some reason, as gross as the prospect was, I felt some need to stick around and monitor infestation progress or something. I also had some loose ends to tie up very early this morning with supply teaching, and had to alert the land lady to our situation.

I didn’t sleep well at all last night. I had nightmares about being sucked dry by a bogeyman composed of roiling cohesive bed bugs, and nightmares about them hatching their plans, and eggs, and infection. Every single noise I heard last night, was bed bug related. I had psychosomatic urges to scratch my skin at every little twinge, perceived scuttling and odd sensation.

Added to that, is the stress that this whole thing represents. I don’t think it will be that bad, but the prospect of fumigation makes me worry about the cat and the snake immensely– especially the cat. I was already leery of leaving our ant traps lying about, and now, deadly toxic spray! Now includes residue! I sent Hannerz home with my grandparents last night, and I have a feeling she’s going to be there for a while. I need to find someone to take care of the snake though in the meantime.

And then there is the cost. The land lady cleverly revealed this morning that the lease cites we have to pay a fee for pest removal. My understanding is that they pay the bulk of the cost and do all the arranging, but that’s the extent of it. The cost itself is $195, which isn’t completely awful, but when coupled with the fact that beds need to be replaced, it’s a headache.

This whining and bitching marks my re-entry into the blogosphere Fin!

human behavior

So much has gone down, I don’t even know where to start. Luckily, it hasn’t been that drama filled (unlucky for you?).

Going to my brothers a few weeks ago was, as predicted, almost enough to make my head fall off, because it was just that bizarre for the whole four days that I was there, but I have since gotten over that with the help of some strenuous counselling via the friend units.  On a related note though, I really realized that there’s no way in hell (in HELL) that I would want to be a single parent. That man is totally going down with me, whoever he is, because babies are a lot of work. Even if they walk and could (technically, but not advised) feed themselves, as well as garble out some sort of communicative form, they are still a lot of work. I also realized that motherhood is a slippery slope into OCD if you let it. I have this thing about my hands being sticky, or my feet being sticky…after about two days of walking on mashed nutri-grain bars, I cleaned it, and in cleaning realized that “ahh…I understand all the anal features of motherhood now.” Now that it’s clicked, I’m going to have to figure out how to not wash my hands to the bones when I have dirty gross adorable kids.

As for my niece, she’s doing awesomely. She screams and giggles a lot, and also has a pet sheep now, named Suki, who I also took care of while I was there. Suki + baby =  a handful, 24/7.  The sheep was the brainchild of my brother whom I have officially surmised entirely lacks foresight.

“What do you mean you bought a lamb?”

“The baby likes it. It’s SO cute.”

Baby anythings are cute, come on…. And he was not the one who watched the giggling one year old stick the goat poo in her mouth a little too late. The baby also likes dog food, goldfish that have sat on the floor for days (the floor is akin to a food cache for her), funny fuzzy white things, mashed nutri-grain bars (re: food cache a la hardwood), and cheese. Goes nuts for cheese, big time.

Before I left, there was a story that occurred that I’ve already told countless times. Guaranteed hilarity, and unrelated to babies- just ask me if you want to know. It is called the “I ain’t the criminal here sir” story.

As for being out here at the Crane, it has been pretty enjoyable so far. I have news that the covered wagon will be escorting me back to Deadmonton on August the 7th though, which is not close enough, and yet not far enough away. I do like it here a lot, as much as I might bitch and complain about it. My mom keeps me pretty insanely busy with random chores and menial labour or “errands”, but even those I’ve quit fighting and have been finding a lot of meditative qualities to them. Although, she certainly doesn’t seem capable of doing the same as I’m more like my dad in this regard. 

I’d love to say that I’ve been filling all my days entirely with things that I love to do, like writing, or art, or reading, but I haven’t really. I mean, I have been doing all of those things to various degrees, but a lot of time is spent in the sun, in the water, in the boat, visiting folks, visiting with the cats, walking the cats, smoking, drinking and general tomfoolery. A couple of old friends are out here at the moment, and thus, drinking and smoking has increased. Funnily enough, it hasn’t been stupid drinking, just drinking and visiting. I haven’t gotten drunk since I got here, but I’ve been drinking all day just the same. It’s the space between drinks I imagine, and the activities. Or the lack thereof, maybe.

See also, how to make Beergaritas, which are just as redneck as they sound, as they will kick your ass at one o’clock and give you a slight hangover by 6 pm:

1 mickey of tequila, one can of lime-aid (blend), with lots of ice (blenderful). Add three Coronas into a pitcher and gently stir in. Fill cups half way with other three Coronas left over, and top up with tequila/lime-aid/Corona mixture. 

I’ve also been doing other things like fiddling with my camera a lot. Lightening has been a guaranteed for a lot of nights out here, so I’ve been working on perfecting timed exposures and other techniques and getting lots of pictures of the general wilderness and fun.

Sewing coveralls has grown tolerable also, and my mother and I have worked out a system more beneficial to us both: I play iPod super loud, and she doesn’t talk to me while using an industrial machine, while assuming I can hear her at all, and then getting mad when I don’t reply. It sounds like a helicopter blade rattling a window pane at close range.

In other exciting news, my dad also taught me how to drive the boat, and pull skiiers, wakeboarders, tubers and the lot. He was really impressed at how quickly and well I picked it up, and now prefers my pulls to my mom’s.

“No whiplash! Excellent!”

In areas of the opposite sex, I can’t say that things have been going as swimmingly. They’ve actually been really bizarre. The fire fighter, while a nice and interesting boy had some not-so-great ideas on what we should be together: that is, I’m not good enough to date possibly, but good enough to have a casual S-E-C-K-S relationship with. [1] Actually, it’s interesting because the odds of me getting laid were good in the city, but have doubled since I came home. There’s this really convenient line that’s been used on me twice now in the last week and a half [2], and I say “convenient line” when I really mean, line of convenience, because, wouldn’t it be oh so convenient if I was to say, “OMG, like, me too! Lets go to your house so we can have s-e-c-k-s, because I’ve always dreamt about it!”  

On an unrelated tangent, you’ll notice that I’m making fun of the speech patterns of the people I live around that are my age. If you are watching TV with them, and they here people on TV talking like that, chances are they will snort and say, “pbbbt, that’s city-talk.” No my friend….it’s YOU. And me, I won’t like, lie.

Right. So, I won’t disclose the rest of my fun fun time in man-land here, but it’s been all right. Ultimately, I emerge on top of the situation and react accordingly, albeit with the fire man I was genuinely pissed for a good half a day. I mean, there are plenty of skanky girls in this town already to service his man-member.

As for other men…I have been using (reluctantly and still with much failure) a certain notorious dating site for shits and giggles, but really, nothing has come of it so far. Being in the country certainly helps to dissuade the men that are just huge dinkfaces though, which is nice. This said, I’m still just not feeling the man thing at all right now.

Screw you…man.  See y’all in a bit.

[1]*COUGH* Sohecouldlosehisvirginity *COUGH*   

[2] “I, like, had the hugest crush on you in highschool, you know?”

A plague on words.

I’ve been begrudging that my computer has been running really really badly for the last couple of weeks. Confusingly, my browser in particular keeps taking little leaps back in time. Today, I was utterly dismayed to find that all of my “new” bookmarks and whatnots are completely gone, replaced by bookmarks that I haven’t deemed necessary or interesting since my second year of University when I put them there. Combined with this confusion, I notice that my wallpaper has changed. I also seem to have a halting and annoyingly 90’s-esque familiar ocean-floor screensaver that I know came from a free site with strobes flashing all over it. Probably it came from some of the spyware that I had to eliminate from my PC last week for the first time in four years. Paying my bills? Annoyingly slow, because all the cookies are deleted. Repeatedly. Caches? Gone.

And to just add to the screamingly obvious conclusion that I’m about to come to, no, I’ve never looked at porn on my computer, but today is the first time I’ve caught someone in the act, on my computer. Reduced screens and guilty looks. So the fucker has been “covering” his tracks in the most fucking annoying ways possible, assuming that I give a crap.

I am not a technophile by any stretch, but it bothers me SO much, and I didn’t realize that it would. However, perhaps I took it for granted that there would be respect that I give to other people’s machines given to mine. So, I think tomorrow, the lad and I are going to have to have another talk, because he is so fucking banned man. Password set.  Yes this sounds mean, but it’s all fun and games until I lose every single writing project that I have yet to back up because of a computer illiterate 20 year old.

And yes, new grievance, old dilemma. The age difference thing is really starting to get to me, and it’s really starting to weird me out. In regards to everything. It’s the twelfth today, so, 19 days to go.

Funnily enough, we’re getting along a lot better this week, other than the computer thing, than we were last week. Albeit, this comes from a lot of me finding things to do that leave him out. Also mean. I am hoping it drives home the point to him of what we discussed last week though. We discussed that I am hideously unhappy with the whole thing, that it isn’t his fault that I’m not happy, it is mine. And…this is actually probably about 65% true. So, we agreed that we would part ways at the end of the month, and I’m hoping that goes well, but part of me knows that he really doesn’t get it. This has been concreted with the insane amount of effort that he’s been putting forth around here lately to appease me, that actually just makes me feel worse. Because I know he’s trying to change my mind, and I know that it’s going to take more than just doing the dishes out of turn twice to get me to recall that whole thing about not really wanting to be with him.

I just want it to be over. I am good at being complacent. Actually, annoyingly so, but this is such a fucking test. On the good side, no passive aggressive tendencies have reared themselves yet. Just assertive aggression. That’s quite a change in my books. Complacency doesn’t really jive with assertive aggression, but …if it makes sense, I mentioned before that he’s weirding me out, and I think the reason it weirds me out so much, is because I feel like I’m in this damning psychologically flea-ridden awful role of massively Freudian proportions. The lover becomes the mother. And that’s so gross. If this is what it’s “like”, fucking count me out, big time.

That’s not a good place for an extension cord.

So, I’m listening to Matt Good right now, “Oh be joyful”, and thinking, I haven’t updated my iPod for an amazing and somewhat depressing five months. I should really get around to that. Or, I could just listen to the right ear phone, rather than the usual “left”. That seems to always screw with me if I need a change in music, because I hear the “other half” of things. Anyways, point is, I’m not finding that I have legit reasons to be joyful.

I could be joyful, because I have a boyfriend who is indescribably joyful, but that indescribability is hard to keep at the top of the floating layers in the cup sometimes, as it often becomes submerged in the other layers mainly consisting of the substance called confusion and a lot of doubt. Doubt being the most viscous, usually sits at the bottom of these quandries, but my glass is getting good and shaken lately. What a fucking weird analogy. I haven’t actually sat down and written anything in a while, so maybe this is more for myself than my “devout” readers, but I’ve got a disease, and it’s making me suffer in the daytime, and that disease, that dis-ease, is words on the brain.

Much like water on the brain, it causes uncomfortable pressure build-up and confusion. Not knowing up from down, left from right, and etcetera. Maybe that’s what love is, now that I think of it. Water on the brain promising an aneurism of orgiastic glee.

The boy causes me to conjure up many thoughts of doubt. In fact, if I were to sit and regard the whole thing for the negatives, it wouldn’t look so good at all. Actually, I should say it doesn’t look good at all, because I have done this. But yet, I can sit in his arms and feel like as long as I’m there, everything is ok, against all odds. Everything about him is severely “against all odds”, and yet, I’m still putting money on it. It’s so extremely unwise, that initially, when our status changed from a terrible phrase, to “significant other” [1], I was extremely reticent to tell anyone. A lot of this had to do with a worry about being judged, a lot of it had to do with people confirming my worst thoughts about the whole thing (my own judgements?), a lot of it had to do with people thinking less of me. Most of all, it bothered me because I couldn’t explain it. And truthfully, I still can’t, but I’m at least happy (weirdly) with this aspect of my life, so I’m choosing to just let it be right now. Whether or not this continues though or not, hinges on a lot of other things that have yet to unfold.

I was talking about this with a co-worker the other day, and she told me that she’d only ever had one other relationship, with her husband, and this relationship with a woman now, was only the second relationship she’d ever been in. She’s having a hard time right now in it, because they’re both really stressed out, but she also said, “I’m still trying as hard as I can to make it work. You have to work at these things, you know?”

I told her that I didn’t really know that, because I was pretty used to just running away if things were taking a questionable course. This was post-status change of the relationship, but I still had this odd realization that maybe this boy was the first time that I was actually just letting go and going with it, as opposed to double-digits of relationships that I’ve been in and ended at the cusp of an unfavorable change in affection. And it has been me that has ended these, 9/10.

All in all, this could be something I deeply regret and will make bad jokes about sometime in the future, but I am trying, bearing healthily in mind that there is a difference between trying, and beating an attempt to death.

The boy actually hooked me up with a very temporary job opportunity last week, in other news, that was very interesting. I have some landscaping experience, so he took me to the company he works for (after telling them of my experience and gaining their approval). It’s a notorious gig, known for the daily cash pay-outs and the colorful characters that work there. And really, it’s a total gong-show. I could go on for paragraph upon paragraph on the inadequacies of the whole place, but I won’t. I got my money, I’m done, and I actually had a pretty good darn time getting it too. After the first two initial days of absolute soreness, it really didn’t bother me to trim for ten hours. Actually it’s kind of nice once you get into it. If I had more time, and hadn’t missed my last day at work before my spring session, I’d probably go back. I’m still banking on my job opportunity as Safety Watch though.

That is supposed to be the job that carries me through the summer and gets me to some point of financial preparedness [2] for getting a real job, and possibly having to move with very short notice. I have been getting the initial chore of getting a real job done…real slow-like. It sort of freaks me out to look for a job, but I’ve been noticing lately as I slowly get my shit together, that it has started feeling really good to do all that, as opposed to hideously frightening. Because when I sit down and think about it, cocky as it sounds, I know that I can do extremely well by any school that hires me, and there’s no doubt in my mind about that now. Neat, and wildly optomistic.

Here’s the rub. It seems like things are shakily ok, but in reality, it sort of feels like a dream. I have become somehow, one of those people that is still sitting in a rocking chair with narrowed eyes gazing in the distance, shotgun in my lap, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

One of those shoes, is a wildly confusing dynamic with someone I know best embodied by this diagram. It worries the hell out of me. I wish that friendships were more simple sometimes, but at the same time, complicity is something I treasure in that context. I should thus know by now that with complicated friends…there is good, bad, downright confusing, but for now, I fret like a useless toad.

And useless toads were a-plenty last Friday, as my parents and I went on a road trip [3] to Drumheller, specifically to bring me to Reptile World. We also went to Linden to visit relatives, but that was fairly minor, I think, in the grand scope of the trip. It all started when I foolishly decided to tell my parents that I was a) incredibly broke, and b) incredibly stir-crazy. I made an idle threat about hitch-hiking out of the city (as some of my friends have done before, and been crazy successful at) to Mexico. I basically mentioned the wrong city, thinking about one of my favorite Simpson’s references, and since Mexico is my Mom’s current phobias [4] she sort of freaked out.

This is where you learn a little more gross detail about me that you didn’t know before. She freaked out, and in a very wierd phonecall later that week, my Dad declared that we were “going on a road trip”, and “it’s for you, where would you like to go?” It wasn’t for me, it was like this really weird attempt to give me fake autonomy on the way down to visit his Uncle in Linden. And so the farce went, my mom cramming herself into the back of the truck cab (if you’ve met my mom, you know how silly it is to cram an Amazon into a small space). I was to be the Navigator, and they jokingly called me ‘Greta’ after their GPS in Germany. So, I navigated us down to the south, feeling sort of uneasy and stupid the whole way down, but still managing to have a pretty good time. I do really like hanging out with my parents, so it isn’t hard to have a good time travelling with them (all my travelling, has essentially been with them to some degree), but admittedly, it was a little forced, a little coddling, and of course, throw in “eccentric”, because that stupid devil black cat came along too. Nothing says my family like walking a malignantly evil black cat through a park in the middle of desert. I mean for the love of groceries, there were children around.

“It’s time we started treating you like an adult, so you should sit in the front seat,” burns my 24 year old ass so bad. This is something that has been a bone of contention with my parents and I before. But I’m in an awkward position about it as well unfortunately. It’s a strange game. But I got good pictures. Of oodles of reptiles. Be ready for teh fantastique.

More later. Must sleep.

[1] I saw this officially on paper today, signing it at a registry for a new birth certificate for him. Right above the option for marriage license. You know, “Groom’s last name”, “Bride’s former/same last name”, “place of marriage”, etc. It ignited crazy Las Vegas thoughts, and I was extremely weirded out afterwards.

[2] Definitely not feelin’ that at the moment.

[3] Wait for it…there’s a segue.

[4] “Have you heard about ALL those DEAD Canadians in Mexico??”