Category Archives: Admissions

Bootstraps are a myth

Admissions, Spiritual

In which I had an epiphany about interconnectedness while drinking a dark mocha latte breve.

Was just over at the coffee shop with a pile of stuff in front of me.

This pile of stuff:

That’s a fountain pen, traveler’s notebook, my prescription glasses, a mason jar lid and ring, an instant camera and nylon/pseudo-leather strap with plastic connectors, a mason jar filled with a delicious coffee-and-dairy beverage, and a saddle leather jar holder. I don’t need any of them to survive; they’re all leisure-time trinkets, except my glasses, which correct a defect, and without which my quality of life would be much lower.

One, look at my pseudo-retro, analog, reuse/recycle aesthetic! (Apparently I do sorta have a style, even if it only applies to crap I take to coffee shops, and not how I look or dress!)

Two, I can’t produce ANY of these things. Not a single fucking one. Not to these tolerances.

I don’t know how to make glass, let alone glass suitable to use for canning. Nor do I know how to turn hide into fine leather (I could probably produce something rough and crappy), although I could cut leather and I can sew… but I can’t make knives or needles or thread.

I don’t know how to make fine paper, or build machines to print on it, cut it to perfect size, and bind it. I don’t know how to produce metal charms or even elastic cord. I have no idea at all about any of the thousands of steps required to create that camera: the plastic body, the battery, the lens, the instant film itself.

I could make a camera strap from cloth, I suppose, but most assuredly don’t know how to create nylon or faux-leather or little plastic connectors. I don’t know how to grow cotton, spin it, and weave it into cloth, either.

I don’t know how to grind corrective lenses.

I couldn’t even build a fountain pen from scratch. Although I do understand the concept, I have no way to make a nib, and what would I make the feed from? Carve it out of rubber? I don’t know how to produce rubber!

I don’t know how to grow coffee. I don’t know how to grow or process cocoa for chocolate. I have no dairy experience whatsoever, though I could probably milk a cow and Pasteurize the results. Probably.

The mason jar lid and ring: pretty simple, in concept. Punch out of metal. But I don’t know how to make metal, nor build a punch.

All of these items represent the intelligence and cleverness of other human beings. All I did was buy them.

All of these items require a functioning, interdependent society to exist. I doubt there’s any single person on earth, now or ever, who could build all the tools and technologies needed to create these items from scratch.

All of these items, after they came to be, traveled to me on roads, in trucks, in ships, in airplanes. The fountain pen is German, the notebook and camera are Japanese. A couple of the metal charms are from India. The phone I used to take the picture was designed in Florida and South America, and probably manufactured in China of globally sourced components. The image was transmitted to the cloud through a series of pieces of network equipment produced who knows where.

Point being: there are no self-made people. Even if you developed self-discipline early on and studied hard, you still used infrastructure and knowledge and technologies made by others. You may have made the best of what you were given, but you were given it. You do not live alone, no matter how much contempt you may have for others. You cannot live alone; the world is so profoundly intermeshed that isolation is a joke concept. Even if you were to fuck off to an island, you’d travel there in a ship or plane, and arrive with fucktons of technology in the form of clothes and tents or radios or cooking implements to aspirin.

And here’s what selfish people miss entirely: you do owe for what you’ve been given. It’s your duty to contribute to the society that produced you. You have to make sure there are roads and schools, hospitals and firehouses, municipal water and opportunities for not only your kids, but all kids. And adults. Straight and gay, sick and well, theist and atheist, conservative and liberal, smart and dumb, good and bad, lazy and driven.

Some people are smarter than others, some people start several laps ahead. Some people find a path and follow it doggedly, and achieve whatever goals they feel are worthy of achieving — whether that goal is to master photography or law or illegal drug trade or dance or French baguettes. Some don’t. Most of us achieve mediocrity and don’t do much beyond consuming resources, and the best that can be said about us is that while we don’t really contribute to the sum of humanity’s knowledge, we’re not actively evil.

The reality is that all people depend on others for everything, even if they like to pretend their unique existence somehow earned them their indoor plumbing and refrigerators and automobiles and the medical breakthroughs that kept them alive long enough to even have opinions about what other people do or do not deserve.

Preppers and isolationists like to think they could be dropped into the wilderness and not only survive, but thrive. That’s bullshit. It’s a rare human being who could create, even with access to abundant natural resources, clothing, shelter, and safe and healthy food, let alone knives or cast iron pans or medicines or instant cameras. Most people would die of exposure, injury, starvation, poisoning, or illness. And rather quickly. Because it’s fucking difficult to live outside a functioning society. And that’s really the only definition of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps that matters; anyone within a society benefits from it, and owes their success to everyone else.

And this is the whole point of society: we share our contributions, and rather than struggling to eke out a subsistence existence, we can just go buy flour, in a store, easily reachable by sidewalk or bus or car, to bake our bread with, or, hell, we can just bypass the entire bread-baking learning curve and buy it already made. I mean, consider something as simple as a loaf of bread: even if you understand all the steps from plowing to planting to growing to harvesting to drying to grinding to mixing with water to baking, can you, personally, yourself, perform all those steps? Can you design and build a plow, a scythe or harvester, a grinder, a peel and an oven?

Sure, probably. Maybe. But God, how much time it would take, merely to make your own bread. Now imagine you also have to make your own cloth and design and cut and sew and mend your own clothes. And locate/harvest/slaughter/process and preserve all your food for winter. And ferment your own booze for drinking and sanitizing. And build your own house. And collect and store your own water and fuel. Now you’re indoors, clothed, warmed, and fed. But that’s it: no life of the mind, no entertainment or distraction or hobbies. That’s what you want if you think you’re an island, that’s what you want if you loathe other humans.

To my ex-husband’s girlfriend, on why I didn’t reply

Admissions, Soapbox, Whining

(NOTE: I found this post in my drafts folder, it’s actually a couple of years old; apparently never published it. In it, I say I don’t care what she thinks, but then I wrote all these words, so I guess I did! Sometimes I’m full of shit, yo.)

In which my ex’s girlfriend posted a picture on Instagram of the deck on my old house, finally FINISHED, after all these years! It looks fantastic!

Dear my ex-husband’s girlfriend,

Thank you for your inexplicably bitchy comment on social media. You appear to misunderstand “snark.”

Having had no meaningful interaction with you (beyond clicking the occasional Like button, or sending you Christmas cards) for the past ten years, your apparent rage — coming, as it did, out of absolutely nowhere — rather upset me and hurt my feelings, as you and I were good friends the last time I saw you.

I’m guessing that you’re mad because I used a picture you took, in one of my many stupid blog posts about my stupid feels about my stupid marriage? This picture-stealing happened, according to my archives, seven years ago. (It took half an hour of paging through old posts to even find the post you were probably talking about.)

Apparently you tried to communicate your anger at the time by unfollowing me on social media, I think? I’m sorry to say that I didn’t even notice that you were “done” with me, because, seriously, who pays that much attention to their ex-husband’s girlfriend’s sporadically-maintained Instagram account?

Technically, I did not “steal” your image. You’d posted your images publicly, on Facebook, on the internet, where anybody on earth could see, use, download, or link to them. I’m sorry it made you mad that I used one, but I didn’t even think about it, really. I mean, nobody even reads my blog but Stanley and my parents anyway. Plus, it was a picture of my house.
Continue reading To my ex-husband’s girlfriend, on why I didn’t reply →

Spring

Admissions

In which Minneapolis twitter is enthusing about “Spring,” but, having lived somewhere better, I can state unequivocally that what passes for spring here is a weak-ass attempt at what can be a glorious season.

“Spring” here is brown and ugly. You can only tell it’s spring because of the slightly sweeter air, and the sudden return of birdsong (which happened about 45 hours ago).

Nothing green wakes up until late April or May because the chance of a killing freeze—it was 25F overnight—is too great.

I took this picture about an hour ago:

That’s crap. Not only is there still snow in the shade, but it’s both ugly and below freezing.

Meanwhile, friends from my hometown, which is even higher in latitude, are posting pics like this:

Spring 🌱🌸☀️ #WallaWalla

A post shared by Horte Coleman (@lovelyhorte) on

Minneapolis is nice, I guess, but goddamn I want to move back home.

Uh, when did this happen?

Admissions, Ink, Play

In which I have thirteen inks!?

Baker's dozen

Well, this is my fountain pen ink collection. I don’t think I realized I had so many!

The hues I have are these:

Grey, horsetail brown, tundra green, teal, damson purple, rouge opera red, black, violet, apple green, orange yellow, rose pink, lavender blue, and syrah red.

The syrah and the tundra are both subtle and muted, and look great together — would be amazing for Christmas cards.

The J. Herbin inks are cheery and bright. (I haven’t tried the perle noire yet, but I expect it to be a true black rather than a grey, based on the swatches I’ve seen online.)

The Diamine grey is really light with an extra fine nib, so I’m going to put it in a pen with a broader or even a stub nib. Imagine it’ll look antique.

I love the horsetail. It’s an amazing, rich brown. It’s probably my favorite color; it and the syrah.

Haven’t tried the teal yet; need to clean a pen! Bought it to put in the swirled teal Wancai Mini:

Moonman Wancai Mini

(I also have some cartridges—a couple colors I purchased, and the rest that came packaged free with pens: black, black brown, black blue, blue, and red.)

I was just surfing for fountain pen inks, but I guess I don’t actually need any more! And I certainly don’t need any more fountain pens, but I have half a dozen cheap Chinese ones arriving next week anyway.

Okay, everything’s just getting weird now

Admissions, Health, Work

In which I vent about the strange side effects of surviving for five decades.

I’ve been unusually healthy most of my life, I think.

Always felt robust and fine the majority of the time, barely even noticed my body. Had one surgery, wisdom teeth out, and a root canal. A ganglion cyst on my left wrist that cleared up on its own, as they do. No major broken bones or ER visits or in-patient hospital stays, or anything, really, beyond colds and flus. Have never had a regular GP my entire adult life.

I’ve felt truly fucking miserable, yes, but save the puke-inducing pain of a prolapsing uterine tumor it was always the mental pain of panic/anxiety rather than genuine physical malfunction.

Well, now my whole body is turning strange and foreign!

I have actual pain, low-level and fairly frequent: feet, knees, hips, and back. Usually from strain or extra activity, but sometimes just because I slept or moved weird. My hands have ached since I started banging them around at the cheese shop, and now I find it hard to squat during a 6 or 7 hour shift because it actually hurts to stand back up.

My hands and lower legs swell, especially at work (but also in a fairly predictable way throughout my cycle these past few years), and I now wear compression socks.

Today I walked home from work just past four o’clock — it’s a five minute walk, about two blocks — and, even though it’s mid-September, it’s 91F and humid and very sunny. The side of my body that was both sunward and exposed/not covered by my dress is burnt. Burnt! In five, six minutes! My left forearm and the outside of my left hand, and my neck and upper shoulder on the left side are red and hot and sunburned!

I mean, I do have very oily skin, and I’d just been working food service for seven hours so I’d been perspiring and was additionally covered with mist and damp from doing dishes, but damn! I used to tan; had to be out for hours to burn.

The other day I thought I had had an allergic reaction to some cucumber-aloe facial mist, but now I wonder if it might have been a reaction to the sun? I sat in the sun outside the coffee shop to write in my notebook, and was dark red everywhere the mist — and the sun — had been when I got home. (I rinsed off in cool water and the red cleared away, but now I’m not so sure it was the mist. I really don’t want to develop allergies; they sound like a pain in the ass.)

Aging is so, so strange. Total lesson in non-attachment, having one’s reliable, rarely-changing body come up with new and strange ways of being. I remember the first time my lower legs and ankles decided to swell up toward the end of my cycle (it was in my early 40’s), how freaked out and distressed I was at the idea that Something Was Very Wrong; now I’m used to it, more or less, I guess, but it doesn’t look particularly attractive.

And now instant sun burns? Really?! What the hell.

I’m also slowing down! I’d rather get up earlier and plod through my getting-ready-for-work process than haul ass through it, and I never thought my Type A ass would ever turn into such a person. And at work, well, now I’m glad I’ve always been focused on efficiency because I need that efficiency more than ever now. I find it hard to really rush, at least in a sustained way. (Most of my cheese shop co-workers are older folks, thank God, because I don’t think I could keep up with a bunch of 20-somethings anymore, and MAN is it fucking weird to say that.)

Being lazy and maybe working a bit slower than one should or could: that’s a decision. Now, my very best rush, when making sandwiches, for example, is not what it used to be, even if I do have a big cup of coffee in me. I have a hard time hauling ass like I used to, because I end up dropping shit or being messy and also I don’t really have the energy or ability to fully do so like I once did.

Then there’s also the questions of genes — how much of my experience of aging is just how this body is programmed to age — versus the decisions I’ve made: everything from vegetarianism to never being particularly physically active to partying to smoking for 31 years. Like, if I’d eaten a different diet and worked out, and never gone to Dead shows on LSD, would I still have these cankles? I’ll never know, since this body is the one I live in and there’s no control body to compare it to. But I do wonder, though.

Anyway, I don’t think I’m dying or anything, but I’m more aware of the body than I’ve ever been because it does stuff now, stuff it never used to. It reacts to the world in sudden and mildly alarming ways! It swells up, gets tired, aches, gets varicose veins (!), gurgles, and wakes up four times a night for no fucking reason at all. I think I’m getting a mole on the back of my left hand (?!), and probably age spots. My skin is thin and odd. My right eyelid sags. I might need a dermatologist for possible nascent skin tags on my throat. I may be too thin-skinned to do dishes at work without gloves; I suspect it can no longer tolerate the industrial soap, sanitizer, and bleach.

It’s just weird, getting older. That’s my whole screed: it’s just weird.

In short, I’ll be turning 50 in two weeks, and I totally feel it!

Update: So I’ve put a wet cloth on my burnt neck and after an hour and a half in the air conditioning the red’s nearly gone?

Personal evolution

Admissions

In which there’s a thought.

You know, if you’ve found some old post here in which I’ve said stupid shit, please feel free to ignore it.

Over the course of keeping this blog, I’ve thought a lot of stupid shit, and I can almost guarantee that whatever it was I eventually got over it.

I used to be anti-vax and pro-homeopathy. I used to think shit about feminism and transgenderism I no longer think. Various opinions and feelings and thoughts about a lot of things have evolved. I’m a work in progress.

In other words, I’m too lazy to dig through seventeen years of posts to update or correct things I was thinking through; most likely, if I’ve written something dumb, I’ve gotten better since then, because I’m always learning. And writing out long screeds helps me to do that.

Cheers.

March

Admissions, Introspection, Life, Panic & Anxiety, Spiritual

In which there’s a blog post! Because I still blog! Occasionally!

Fat:

On a diet now, again, again-again, started weekend before last. Basically a combo of calorie-counting and slow carb. Haven’t had any pasta or baguette, pizza or flour tortillas, but have had a couple of potatoes. Mashed last weekend, and roasted tonight. They do have vitamins and minerals, after all, your potatoes do.

Doing the tiniest little exercise routine, but doing it daily! Have a couple of old wine bottles filled with water for weights for curls and arm lifts. Weird thing is that squats are easier when fat; something about balance, I imagine? It’s the smallest exercise routine ever, but it’s 100% more than the nothing I was doing before!

Have already lost a full inch of my thigh and breast measurements, and a quarter inch off my ankle. Maybe more, but I’m only measuring on Sundays. Don’t happen to own a scale. Feeling distinctly better, even. My feet look less like dead fish! More energy, even!

Sol:

The light is getting better, of course, as our gorgeous planet tilts the way she does, but it’s still in the 20’s here with absolute piles of snow all over. The weather doesn’t matter much to me, as I go weeks on end without leaving the building, but I love that it’s still light out now when I sit down at my desk to login for work at five o’clock.

Employment:

Work is, well, stupid. I work for a call center who contracts with cable company, very large. Many employee-facing policies are, for the most part, absurd, and the produce of management who apparently have little to no idea what’s really happening on the ground, and their training videos are absolutely cringeworthy corporate bullshittery trapped in a past of long-term employment and employee-employer loyalty. Their flagship software suite is forever being updated to be less useful, constantly rearranged to make it harder and harder to deliver service to their customers.

Most of what I do is secretarial. In the main, my job is comprised of clicking Next and copying and pasting blurbs. Once in a great while I have to think, briefly, about a customer’s issue and actually solve a problem, but mostly? I just follow a flowchart. Any competently produced piece of software could do 90% what I do (they pay me for that extra 10%, I imagine). Fucking Alexa could do what I do, were it tied into the appropriate data.

My direct employer is, as far as I can tell, very broke and very struggling. Stock value is a downhill slalom since 2013. I’ve been there two years and have seen various functions removed or outsourced, and have never had a raise, plus, well, I sense that peculiar kind of urgency failing companies exude.

But they did, at least, move me off phones into a chat pilot! Chat is better, by a lot of markers, than getting screamed at by infuriated customers, but management has the chat platform software set to feed us as many as three chats at a time, so it makes it impossible to deliver excellent, or even good, service when it’s busy.

Not that it would be overtaxing to chat with three customers at once; could do that easily if the goal were just to fix things, solve problems, give the people what they want. No, it’s the required logging/documentation and abysmal tools we’re also using that make it a nightmare.

It’s been busy lately because a lot of the team are out for a variety of reasons: illness, internet outages/weather, time off. Oh, and because management can’t seem to figure out how to stagger breaks and lunches on the schedule. It’s a disaster, when five agents all go to lunch at once, and your team’s down to a dozen.

Received my tax refund so I currently have more in savings than half of America. I’ll use the bulk of it to see Amma this summer, of course, and am contemplating what else I might want. Set of sheets, maybe, or a new office chair, since this one is sprung.

Input:

Bought some old treeware vedanta and have been doing daily readings of the Yoga Vasistha and the Bhagavad Gita. Only takes a few minutes but I’m really enjoying it; does help to keep the head right.

Have also sucked down a few fiction novels this year, after hardly reading at all last year. Spend a shitload of time watching streaming TV at my desk in the evenings after work, which is fine, but after all my years being pro-reading and anti-telly I feel rather full of it.

The Dread:

Still suffering from anxiety, but (knock on wood) haven’t had a full-blown panic attack since Walla Walla last September. Although, hmm, my anxiety is so bad, and has been for so long, that maybe I now consider what I once would have called a full-blown panic attack just “anxiety.” I’d probably be on meds if I had to work outside the home, but I’m just so resistant to the idea of going to get some, for some crazy fucking idiot reason.

Actually, I know the reason: the idea of going to the doctor for anything but the flu gives me anxiety. I’ve been meaning to go in for a checkup since I got insurance, but I keep blowing it off because WHAT IF I’M DYING. It’s batshit, I know, but hey. I’m batshit. I often sit and twitch for hours while I’m at work. Cool with it.

The Boy:

The relationship is solid and wonderful and the best I’ve ever had. I don’t deserve it, but hey, there you are. God is good.

The dead fish:

I made a delicious dinner tonight: parmesan encrusted salmon, oven roasted potatoes, cabbage gratin, cucumber salad, and homemade tartar sauce. I used a lot of parmesan! Here’s an unflattering photo:

IMG_20180309_164728

Deleted.

Admissions, Life, Soapbox

In which I posted this on Facebook on a friend’s long piece about the Ansari thing and consent and #metoo in which she’d specifically invited thoughtful response, but then somebody immediately (so immediately that I sincerely doubt they’d actually read it) responded with “Jesus.”, as if I were so profoundly wrong they just couldn’t even, and it made me feel anxious because I’m probably not sex-positive and feminist enough for some circles, so I deleted it and am posting it here where no one will read it.

I think we collectively have this weird belief that sex is:
A. GREAT
B. always fun and satisfying
C. super meaningful and important.

Personally, I think it’s ridiculous to expect that sex, alone of all human experiences, will always be great and fun and satisfying, or to believe that the quality matters much.

Even pizza can’t stand up to those expectations! Sometimes you get a burnt one or they left off the olives you really wanted or you’re not in the damn mood for pizza. Nothing is *always* great and fun and satisfying.

Sex isn’t even that important. It’s like elimination: it’s a problem when you can’t do it, sure, but there’s no need to obsess about your bowel movements. That’s weird. Stop it. Nobody cares.

Successful sex is sex that results in conception. The subjective experience of it doesn’t matter, even if our species does have sex for thousands of reasons that are not about conceiving and are specifically focused on the subjective experience. But really, the drives that cause sex are “for” procreation, and there’s really no promise it will be physically or emotionally enjoyable, and especially not every single time.

It’s also true that because there are so many reasons for doing it, it’s likely that your reason and your partner’s reason may not line up.

Also, it’s fine and absolutely okay to not want to have sex, or to not always like it when you do. I’ve had a lot of sex I didn’t care much for because my own “should” [the OP had listed a series of “shoulds” that resulted in her own experiences of not saying no when she wanted to say no, like “you should be helpful, you should be pleasant, you should be enthusiastic”] was “you should be Very Very Afraid of being called frigid, because apparently that’s the worst thing a girl could ever be.”

I feel like half of #metoo is women being disgusted by men’s higher libidos and not even realizing that that’s what’s happening, because they seem to believe that they’re just as horny as men and that they should want and need and have lots of sex in order to be “normal” and “healthy.”

Some women have high libidos, of course, but most don’t. So they’re not that horny, and they’re not driven to take risks to get off, and they srsly don’t understand why anybody would enjoy fucking for its own sake without the context of commitment until they eventually go through a period of super high libido. Lol hormones!

Another quarter of #metoo is women blaming men for not being psychic. When you give 37 “yes, please proceed” signals and one “um, maybe not” and he misses it, it’s not assault. It’s on par with not being able to hear the ticket guy through that little grille in the booth: it’s frustrating and stupid.

The remaining 25% is a heart-breaking gamut of actual rape and assault and abuse, to stuff you’d need a judge and jury and video footage to ever really know for certain either way since sexual encounters, especially for non-dominant partners, is so highly subjective. But most of the hashtag is not proof of rampant sexual abuse: it’s proof of rampant lack of taking responsibility for one’s own choices and actions.

Paglia says it really well in some video I can’t be bothered to look for right now when she’s talking about being in college in the late 60’s in a women’s dorm with a curfew the men didn’t have. She talks about how feminists at that time were saying they wanted to be responsible for their own safety, they wanted the same rights AND RESPONSIBILITIES the men had, to go where they wanted when they wanted, and to accept the outcomes of their own choices. They wanted society to stop forcing protection on them so that they could protect themselves as they saw fit.

I feel that people today, particularly women, have this expectation that they will be safe at all times in all places. That’s just dumb. There likely isn’t a man on earth who thinks like that, because they know there’s a difference, in expectations of safety, that is absolutely dependent on circumstances.

A church is generally safer than a foxhole. A dark alley in a “bad” part of town is generally less safe than a public library during the day. People cannot have an expectation of perfect safety in all situations, and should prepare for different situations appropriately.

Which is to say, if you’re a girl at a frat party dressed like a whore, your expectations of sexual safety are going to be different than they would be if you were at home with your friends. (And clothing does matter. A business suit says something, a cassock says something, a gimp suit says something. Insisting that deliberately dressing in a sexually provocative way doesn’t have intrinsic meaning? Is ridiculous. It signals sexual availability. Period. Full stop.)

So we need to accept responsibility for our decisions and our actions. Yes, there are actual predators, and they’re absolute rat-fucking bastards, but they’re the exception and not the rule. Most of #metoo is people putting themselves in harm’s way and blaming the world for it. Most of the stories are stories about failing to self-protect on a variety of levels, from physical to emotional, being disappointed when there are bad results, and blaming “the patriarchy.”

My unpopular opinion is that having a disappointing or uncomfortable sexual experience is generally not harm, but believing that it is harm causes a great deal of unnecessary emotional suffering.

It’s like getting a burnt pizza. It doesn’t matter. It’s not a big deal. It’s not going to affect your psyche unless you decide to freak out about it. There are gradations of trauma, and a lame fuck is not going to give you PTSD unless you have a bizarre and unrealistic set of beliefs about the world owing you absolute safety and happiness at all times no matter what you do.

Yes, there are definitely problems in the sexual sphere, obviously, that society should be — and is — conversing about, but I feel that we really need women in particular to accept that with freedom comes responsibility.

I mean, you can’t drink a bottle of wine and blame society because you’re drunk, and you can’t blame society when you find out that fucking isn’t love and you feel icky walk-of-shaming home in your little black dress the next morning with your 4″ heels in your purse.

You put yourself in that situation, you made those choices, you ended up with the so-frequently unfulfilling and disappointing results. It’s not society’s fault that you made a string of choices that didn’t produce the results you wanted, it’s not the patriarchy, it’s not sexism: YOU did that because you’re free to do so, nobody stopped you, there’s no chaperone, there’s no taboo, there’s no longer any shame in the walk of shame.

Random casual sex is normalized, and maybe, just maybe you just don’t actually happen to like it, and that’s all there is to it. Maybe he’s not a creep, maybe you’re not a victim, maybe you just don’t happen to like it. And maybe that’s just absolutely fine and okay.

Just having a little trip down memory lane

Admissions, Life, Miscarriage, Soapbox, Whining

In which there’s The Past.

Here’s me, 16 years ago, standing in my kitchen.

2001

See how rough and unfinished that shit was? The whole place looked like that. It never got better, just worse. It was barely a step above living in a car. (Well, a very large car, with a bug-infested shower, but still, roughly the comfort and insulation of living in a car. Or maybe a super ghetto mobile home.)

That secretary desk, on the left? Was really cool. Wish there’d been some way I could have kept that. It was old and in shitty shape, but it had cubbies and a hinged desk and I adored it.

I feel that way about a remarkably small number of the things that I had in that house and lost. My grandfather’s table. A couple of leather coats that molded. And I did rather like that samovar. My hard drives, the ones he left in a filthy, shitty, open-to-the-elements “room.” But that was later; I digress.

leak

That house was a piece of shit. We never should have bought it. I never would have, except my husband was a professional fucking contractor and said it was a good idea, it was fine, he could handle it, no problem. And, idiot I was, I chose to believe him. I thought he had expertise!

We bought it on contract, and, like fucking morons, we used the same lawyer the sellers used. I don’t think we even had it inspected, because I was home when an inspector showed up after we’d bought it and moved in, and he told us the electrical was nowhere near code and that we’d be fined if we didn’t correct it. (Husband’s solution was to just destroy the entire mud room/porch, rather than correct the issue. Huzzah.)

We hadn’t even been there a month when the roof leaked and a bunch of ceiling fell in. Oh, and then the well-head pole fell over while I was in a hot shower in a literally freezing house.

The kitchen was in the basement and you could see dirt through the cracked concrete slabs of the floor. Cobwebs in the unfinished ceiling. Main bathroom had a countertop on a raw 2×4 frame, cement floors, and unfinished brick walls with no cupboards. Kitchen “cupboards” were the same: just unfinished, open 2×4 shelving with salvaged countertops stuck on by hippies. There had been cloth curtains on the front when they showed us the house; when we moved in, just raw shelves.

Then he tore the already shitty disaster up even more. Refused to fix the decent bathroom on the second floor, the one with walls and a bathtub and ceilings. Destroyed the only decent or useful spaces in the house — the finished attic, the mud porch, the greenhouse.

Oh, the greenhouse, where it was sun-warm in the winter and one could have grown herbs and sat to read!

He covered most of the basement windows with a massive porch he never finished*, so the main living space became not just dirty and unfinished, but lightless as well, and we had an unusable porch!

I mean, he did re-roof the house, which was actually necessary and good, and a lot of incredibly hard work, certainly, but even that was embarrassing as fuck because I later saw him refuse to honor the markers he’d traded for his friends’ hard work on it, because he was honorless and lazy.

It’s not like he didn’t do shit; he did a lot of shit. I realized later that he just did shit he wanted to do. He was good at getting firewood, for example, but he’d spend inordinate amounts of time on it — cutting down whole trees, hauling them, cutting them, splitting them, renting machinery to do so — rather than just fucking buying it and working on the house. He made it so much more complicated and involved and time-consuming than it needed to be; we could have just worked on the furnace, and maybe, I don’t know, installed some fucking insulation?, and bought more propane. But no, he’d spend months of weekends “getting us firewood to heat the house.”

Firewood I had to haul from the barn, in a wheelbarrow, through the snow, half a city block. Yeah.

He did do a lot of work, sure, but he never did what we needed or finished anything. He’d do shit like spend tons of time building a really cool but ultimately unnecessary trailer for the riding lawnmower, or sawing holes in the roof to frame in dormers he never actually completed (covering shit in plastic sheeting for a year is not completing something), or putting in external doors that didn’t actually go anywhere yet and wouldn’t for years.

And then those fucking hippies had the balls to threaten to sue us! They sold us a total piece of shit of a house [caveat emptor], then forced us (well, not us, because I’d bailed just before then, and not him — because he had no money, per the usual — but J., who paid it off for reasons I will probably never understand) to honor the entire mortgage over a decade early!

What a fucking shit show!

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