What do you call it when your foot is deformed and one of the bones is right under the skin and it hurts? Like there was a callous over it but it shifted or rubbed itself out and now it's gone? Yeah. I have that. I keep prodding it and remarking on the pain. It hurts like fuck when I prod it, so I prod it again.
I'm now permanent in the office I wanted to be in, over on K street. No more will I wake up at night in a cold sweat, having dreamed that the Mother Ship (aka, the Main Office) will use their top-secret tractor beams to take me away from this office and assign me to answer phones in the Head Honcho's office for eternity. No more will my petty tyrant ex-supervisor oppress my freedom to have black nails with sparkly stuff so that I can be cool. No more will I have to eat the toxic cafeteria food and greet people who make me wish that I owned a semi-automatic rifle and a death wish. Look for me standing in front of my building, smoking. Because I can now take a smoke break whenever I damn well please.
You know, I have a problem with all the smug, self-righteous bitches out there who are so fast to say, "If he did that to me, I'd leave him in a heartbeat." Yeah, fuck you. Fuh-uck you. If you said that, you've probably never been in that position to begin with. It's astonishingly easy to be strong and all when it's an exercise in theory, and your emotions aren't involved at all. It's also astonishingly easy to feel superior when someone tells you their problems, because it isn't as though they're gonna tell you about all the good stuff unless they're a smug little bitch like you.
Fuck you. I've heard that too many times in the last few months, and I'm continually surprised by the amount of respect I lose for people when they're so fast to utter it.
I had to come to terms with this when I was talking to my friend Dalin. She's six months pregnant, which is only adding to the problems she's having with her husband. They had a business together (she sold out her half to another partner because she didn't like the stress it was adding to the relationship), and they're very broke. He was in prison for 7 (!) years for armed robbery, and there are hints that he's done things that were worse, more violent. Not that he's offered Dalin any violence, but the thought still lingers.
He robbed the convenience store because his ex-wife had put them in deep debt; the result of this is that he's obsessed with money. He goes through Dalin's bank statements and hides money from her. When Dirk and I visited them in July, he came off as a middle-management jackass who needed to get over himself. Dalin told me that he got his GED and his Waste Management Certification whilst in the slammer -- before that, he'd dropped out of school when he was 13. So they're poor and bickering and expecting a baby, and they really got married far too soon.....
But Dalin is trying to persevere, because she does love him, and they are expecting a child, so I have to bite my tongue instead of saying, "Leave him. You can live with us. I wouldn't stay in a situation like that." I've been in situations that others would consider intolerable, but I've persevered. Maybe she can, too. I hope.
I don't know very much about misery. I was utterly miserable for a few weeks earlier this year, but I got over it. If nothing else, I tend to be emotionally resilient. But lately I've felt like one of those experimental animals with electrodes hooked up to their pain centers. Suddenly, something in my head is zapped, and I want to make things hurt. It burns, it dances, it feels good in the worst way I could ever imagine. I'm not emotionally healthy anymore. I've been burdened with too much knowledge and I don't know how to purge it from my mind. Darkling thoughts about the things I could do if I was given a chance.
I just didn't bother paying last month's electric bill. I got sick of having to argue with Aaron about it as though he doesn't use up at least a third of the facilities, and I got sick of him trying to worm out of it by paying the cable bill, so I just didn't pay it. It's in everybody's name, and we're supposed to be dividing up the bills equally, so he can damn well pay his part. When this month's bill came in and he was astonished by how high it was, I told him that it really didn't matter to me if the power was shut off, so he'd better get used to the idea of dividing all the bills by three instead of trying to leave the more expensive ones for us. He gave me the money last night.
Lately I've been hating everyone.
But yesterday was a special day. You see, Joe's moving to Texas at the end of this month, and he still owes us money. Well Aaron, in his supreme idiocy, was attempting to hold Joe's bass as ransom for this money, and refusing to let Joe come over to work out a way for Joe to pay us back. This was counter-productive, to say the least, because Aaron was talking to him online and Aaron is semi-literate. Since he couldn't sound like anything but the utter retard that he is, he just kept saying, "You'll get the bass back when we get our money." Except that the spelling was worse. Joe threatened to get the cops involved, which is where I felt compelled to step in. I mean, the simple fact is that the fucking bass belongs to him. I'm not going to be a party to this sort of shit. If he fucks us over, fuck it, the money's gone anyway.
So, I talked to Aaron, who was adamant in his refusal to even let Joe come over to talk about it; as though Joe would overpower us and take his bass back, leaving our broken bodies behind. When I attempted to show him how futilely stupid he was being, he said, "Possession is 9/10s of the law," except he didn't spell it like that. I cannot even begin to recreate his creative spelling of ‘possession', but I will tell you that it involved the letter c.
Well, wrong, especially when Joe has not only the receipt, but the credit card statement with the purchase of the bass on it. And when you throw in the fact that I definitely wasn't going to testify that the bass belonged to anyone other than Joe, we had a problem. But Aaron refused to see that, and got mad at me for inviting Joe over.
I got home and found that even Dirk was going to be an ass about the whole thing, so I tried to leave before Joe got there. I bitched a lot, but Dirk wouldn't let me leave, and I was horribly disillusioned by how predatory they were being about the whole thing. Sometimes I don't like them very much. I mean, yes, he owes us money, but what's the harm of discussing things?
Well, it was a different story when Joe came over. Not one harsh word was uttered, and they worked out terms, and Joe got his bass back. And nobody was angry with me, so no harm, no foul.
Did I mention that I'm having the Chinese symbol for ‘honor' tattooed on the back of my neck? This will be later, when I have the time and the guts.
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Dirk and I could really use a new T.V. set, so if you aren't already a member of StartSampling.com go here to sign up, and please put skatterkat in the ‘referred by' box. If you e-mail me and tell me you did so, I'll try to work out a way of sending some frog erasers your way.
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