Category Archives: Decisions

Ah, well, at least shit gets fixed now!

Decisions, Love & Marriage

In which my baby left me.

I’ve written this post about five times now but they keep getting away from me so I don’t post them. Can’t find the balance between the part of me that has a lot of grievances and wants to bitch, and the part that knows bad genes aren’t really a fault and endless litigation solves nothing.

The short version is I thought the relationship I was in was going to last the rest of my life, but it didn’t. He lost his mind, turned into a shithead, we had a miserable few years, and then he suddenlyh moved out. It was the honorable thing to do, under the circumstances. Apparently he’d realized he would not or could not stop behaviors I could not live with, and would or could not do the behaviors I needed. And since I really was genuinely miserable he did the only thing for me he felt he could, and threw himself out.

It hurt like hell, of course. I’m still sad. I miss him, and our life, and his presence and voice and hugs and terrible storytelling. But I’m no longer constantly, relentlessly hurt, angry, miserable, unhappy, and afraid. I’d thought for a long time he was depressed and slumming because he could afford not to work for awhile, and though I didn’t understand the episodes I witnessed I trusted he’d tell me whatever I needed to know when I needed to know it.

He never did. (If he had, it would have gone much differently, but I guess he couldn’t.) He always tried, but some shit is beyond trying. And even crazy people have rights; you can’t make them do shit they don’t want to do, or even convince them they need help before they’re ready. To him, if I understand correctly, his worst behaviors are necessary, he has to do them, they’re who he is. In certain states, my rejection of the drinking and lying and baiting is totally reasonable, but in others it’s not a rejection of symptoms but a rejection of him and it hurts too much.

My dad’s been living in an RV for twenty-odd years and was house hunting in the area. I can’t afford to live on my own because I don’t earn enough. So the love of my life and I broke up and over the next two weeks signed all the relevant paperwork, and then on the 29th of May he got into his vehicle and drove away from me forever. I spent two nights alone, then my dad moved in, and two weeks after that became the new owner of the house, and while I did get my heart broken at least I didn’t have to move.

In the twelve weeks my dad’s been here he’s fixed, maintained, or replaced all the shit that you’re supposed to fix, maintain, or replace when you’re a home owner. Faucets work, gutters are clean, furniture’s been repaired, lamps have been fixed. Right now his old ass is doing maintenance up on the patio roof that will hopefully stop it from leaking when it rains. I think he’s too old to be on the goddamned roof, but apparently he doesn’t agree.

The guest room is now my bedroom, and it’s clean and cute and comfortable and just like I like it. The curtains and blinds are open and it doesn’t smell like socks and beer. I’ve been through every single box, cupboard, drawer, and closet in the whole house, dumped a lot of stuff and organized everything else. I have a dresser now. All the holiday decorations are in one place. The office is cute as hell.

My dad is a great housemate. We go to wineries. We read books. He runs the dishwasher, I put the clean dishes away. We have separate containers of milk in the fridge because I work in a literal creamery and he drinks almond milk. He bought the cat a scratching post. One morning I got up to find he’d fixed the flat on my bike for me and I nearly cried because I hadn’t received that kind of help in a long, long time.

For me, this is much better, and I’m extremely grateful and slowly relaxing and unlearning the defenses and preemptive disappointment. I’ve been doing stuff I quit years ago, plucking my eyebrows, the occasional face mask, pedis. I’ve been decorating, redoing the bathroom just for fun. The way you do when you’re not stressed, worried, and miserable.

My ex is back home again, 1620 miles away, and with family so I don’t have to worry that he’s alone. We spoke every single day for twelve years, but now it’s been three months of occasional texts.

Long story short, I’m heartbroken but doing fine.

And now that I’ve gotten this posted, and I’m not in a relationship I wanted but was catastrophically failing no matter what, I might be able to blog regularly again!

Holy shit, I guess it’s happening?

Decisions, Life, Moving

In which we’ve decided to move!

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m not a fan of the weather out here. There’s no spring or fall, just sweltering, muggy summer, and blizzard season.

Living in Uptown is kinda cool in that there are art stores and coffee shops and diners and bars and bookstores all within a few blocks, but it’s also very loud, never dark, and pretty expensive. We’ve had two bikes stolen from inside our locked apartment building. And there was that episode with the goddamned fire extinguisher, too. I mean, it’s city living.

But we’re not really city people. We don’t take advantage of concerts or museums. We don’t bar crawl or see shows. We barely even go out to eat. We’ve been to two Twins games in five years.

We haven’t put down any roots or made any friends. We’re just here for his job, and that’s it. Nothing else ties us to Minneapolis. I’ve been getting Meetup emails for years, but everything I’d like to go to is always when I’m at work. I never did find a band.

They, his job, sent him to Illinois for half a month, and when he got back he said he hadn’t gotten pissed off at all driving around Springfield (pop. 115k), but since being back in Minneapolis he’s just been aggravated. Hates his commute. Said he’d like to go live in a smaller town. Didn’t much have a preference of which smaller town, isn’t really interested in moving back to Michigan, knows I’d like to go back to Washington state.

So. We’re moving across the country when our lease is up at the end of next month. I’m so fucking happy I could scream!

Plan right now is to get rid of/sell our furniture because none of it is particularly fine or worth hauling (except, hopefully, the microwave cart, which is really cool, and the bedroom mirror, which is also really cool), box up the remaining stuff (clothes, quilts, towels, hobbies, kitchen, and a prodigious amount of electronics: I’m estimating about 800 pounds/40 boxes), and either tow it or have it shipped, and drive to Walla Walla. Crash at the ancestral pile for the time it takes to get jobs. Live in the Pac NW again!

Well, “again” for me. He’s always lived in the Midwest, being from here.

Have a social life again! Have family force us to show up for Easter brunches or whatever! Go to open mics. Rent a house with a porch (I mean, on the one hand I’d love to live with G’ma forever, but on the other, one does like having her own kitchen, and S. definitely likes his privacy). Buy a bicycle. Find a new couch!

Truth be told, I want to live in the side apartment, with the tiny gas stove and the patio with the steel furniture, but my brother’s still living in it, though he does speak constantly of wanting to leave.

I want to get a part-time job in a tasting room. If I can sell cheese, I can certainly sell wine. I want him to find a nice job in Walla Walla (fingers crossed we don’t end up in Pasco or Spokane) with banker’s hours and holidays off and the easiest commute ever.

Suddenly my To Do list is MASSIVE. Move across the country in two months! Egad!

We’ll be taking a lot of trips to Goodwill in the next eight weeks.

I need to go post some furniture on Craig’s List.

Image Hosting

Decisions

In which this is a pain in the arse.

I’ve been using Flickr for image hosting since 2006, and have nearly 14k pictures there.

They recently announced they’re moving to a for-pay model, and even though I do like their photo editor, I don’t know that I like it enough to pay fifty bucks a year forever when I could get an image editor for Windows and edit locally before uploading.

I used to pay for Pro with them, but then realized it didn’t provide me anything — I’m not a professional photographer and didn’t need the stuff that their Pro accounts came with. All I ever wanted was hosting and the editor. Which are now fifty bucks a year. Ugh.

Well, I already have free hosting at both Google and Amazon, so even though their image editors barely function, well: they’re free.

So I’ve enabled auto-uploading from my phone for both services, and now need to figure out how to make desired images public and find a plug-in to show them here.

I’ll miss Flickr, though. All the titles and annotations I’ve written over the years, the various vacation and holiday albums, all the links from here to there. Once they start deleting my images next year, hundreds if not thousands of images will break and I doubt I’ll ever care enough to fix them. (Not to mention the various CC images linked elsewhere, all those will break, too.) Sigh.

Aaaaaand I have my name back. Legally!

Decisions, Spiritual

In which I’m finally rid of my married name!

I decided recently to get a passport. No real reason. I don’t have any travel plans, but one never knows — and I have the money just now so what the hell. Maybe I’ll get to India before I’m 50.

passportToday I went to my second appointment with the passport lady at the post office, and I gave her a bunch of paperwork and money and she made me re-do my work about three times, which is impressive considering it’s only a two-page freakin’ application and I’d already done it twice and I have a reasonably high IQ.

Halfway through the procedure, the passport lady decided they’d probably reject my application because the name on my driver license did not match the name on my divorce papers well enough. She suggested I go update my driver licence. And could I maybe possibly do it, like, right now, since she’d already put my passport application on her transmittal and she had no idea how to remove it and the paperwork has to go today?

A driver license. Before three o’clock today? Sure. What the hell. I’ll try.

So off I went to the DMV on my bike during my lunch hour. (It’s all downhill, so the ride out there was pretty okay.) I walked in the door and I kid you not: there was no line! None! Talk about support of nature: I got help immediately, which has literally NEVER HAPPENED IN THE HISTORY OF THE DMV. The mild glitches (they had to delete an old expired license from the last time I lived in Washington, plus I very nearly flunked the vision test) were neatly handled. (Note to self: get new contacts.) Less than an hour later, with my name all changed and a new temporary driver licence in my purse, I rode back to the post office. (It was all uphill.) I stopped at Taco Bell, about halfway, for a tostada because I was hungry. (Did I mention it’s all uphill?)

Continue reading Aaaaaand I have my name back. Legally! →

Walla Walla, WA vs. Portland, OR

Decisions, , ,

In which I just checked my voice mail.

I have an interview tomorrow afternoon for a helpdesk position at a “medical facility” (probably a clinic, but maybe a hospital, I don’t know because an outsourced IT company is actually doing the hiring). The pay range is $10-$14 an hour, DOE, which is about right for Walla Walla. The two guys I’ve emailed with so far, though, seem like really great people.

The job posting suggested that people without degrees or certifications need not apply, but I applied anyway and they called me back because YOU DON’T GET COMPUTER SCIENCE DEGREES FOR TEN DOLLARS AN HOUR, not even with a high unemployment rate. Plus I also said I was studying for my CCNA, which is true in the sense that I looked at the books the other day, and false in the sense that I haven’t really studied in weeks because that shit is boring. I love networking, but they’ve somehow managed to jargonize and sterilize the material to such an extent that I can barely stay awake the length of a chapter.

It’s amazing. Really. Because I’ll read pretty much anything. I’ve read the back of my shampoo bottle at least two hundred times just because it’s there: THAT’S how boring the CCNA manual is.

But tomorrow’s helpdesk interview is not all that’s happening this week on the job front. Oh, no, it isn’t. A famous tea company also received an application from yours truly last week, and they’ve just called and left a voice mail asking if I can come in for an interview.

They’re in Tigard. Tigard, Oregon. Tigard, Oregon, the suburb of Portland. I haven’t called them back yet because my brain is broken. Sure, I could borrow my brother’s truck and zip over to PDX, crash the night at 80’s, and then pop over to Tigard and say hi to these lovely tea folks… but what if? What if what if what if? What if they actually hire me?

Li’l thought experiment here: could I actually manage a move to PDX? I don’t own a car, so I suppose I could just grab a Greyhound out there, crash with various friends, and take public transportation to work while looking for a roommate on the bulletin board at the local Whole Foods. I guess the dog could stay here with G’ma? (INSERT GUILT TRIP HERE OH GOD I LOVE YOU BINDU.) I could come back and get the rest of my shit later, once I make friends with people who have cars. Not that I have that much shit. Hell, I don’t even own dishes. Actually, I really don’t own enough shit to set up house. I have no furniture. No pots and pans. I’d probably need to rent a furnished room.

To take TriMet from, for example, 80’s house to the tea store in Tigard, though? SIXTY-SEVEN MINUTES, and it costs nearly five bucks. To be at work by 8, one would have to leave at 6:30, which means one would have to get up at… YE GODS. Early, yes, but not impossible.

I’d need enough money to survive until my first paycheck. I probably don’t have that, not since I’d be eating out and taking the bus for two to four weeks. Probably no way to borrow, either, since all my relatives are also broke.

So, um, yeah. It’s a definite maybe. Whatever that means.

Gawd. Should I call back? Or just pretend I never got the message? ARGH.

Don't mind me, I'm just trying to figure out what to do with myself.

Decisions, Work,

In which I flail around a bit more because apparently I’m a bit of a moron.

When you’re fourteen, you go to high school. That’s just what you do; everybody knows this. When you’re eighteen, you go to college. After college, you go to work and strive to pay off your student loans.

Eventually, you meet someone and form an alliance that involves bodily fluids at the least, and generally laundry and motor vehicle titles as well.

If you’re a breeder, you then proceed to breed. The expectation is so pervasive that you probably take a few stabs at it even if you don’t really want to. It’s just what you do.

After that it’s less clear what’s supposed to happen, or when, until the age of 65, at which point you’re supposed to be able to stop working. Beyond accumulating objects and thickening dramatically about the middle, there really isn’t a very clear action plan for people between, say, 30 and 65.

Hi! My name is Mush, I’m 41, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing!

I’m freaking out because I’m divorced with debt and no assets, and I have no job, no savings, no retirement fund, no car, no belongings, and no health insurance. A quick look at my UI paperwork confirms that I am mere months away from becoming a financial burden on my family/society. I have a lot of debt. I have no great skills or talents beyond a quick mind and a decent singing voice, and neither of those things have ever particularly made me much money.

I guess I’m supposed to be working a day job, engaging in hobbies on the side, and saving money for my old age. Sadly, I am not particularly good at this, and require many and varied vacations to keep me sane.

I am of a generation that thinks it should be happy more than responsible.

Right now, I’m having a crisis. I’m wondering if I should move so that I can find a day job… except that I don’t really want to move. Hell, I don’t even really want a day job – I want income. I have friends who fill my head with talk about doing music for a living. I have the idea that maybe I’m not finding a day job because it’s time for me to make money some other way. I have years and years of exposure to alternative ways of thinking that tell me sometimes it’s important to follow happiness rather than logic. I also live in a culture full of self-indulgent fuck-ups, so I have to consider that maybe the happiness-before-all-else approach lacks depth and creates debt. I also have a heart full of doubts about the kind of person I actually am because it seems to me that if I were the kind of person who lived in the city and gigged a lot, I’d already be doing that and clearly I’m not. I haven’t lived in a city for a looooong time. Honesty compels me to admit that I want to think of myself as a city girl, but I am not, in actual point of fact, able to call myself a city girl. Anyway, blah blah blah, I need to figure out if I’m going to stay here or go somewhere else, and to that end here are some bullet points, because who doesn’t love bullet points?

I should stay here because:

  • I can afford to pay off my debt and travel. Well, when I have a job, that is.
  • I’m in a good band, with good gigs lined up. I’m gaining recognition.
  • I have friends, family, community.
  • As the childless spinster in the family, it’s basically my duty to be here for G’ma.
  • There’s no good reason to throw out the life I just spent the last three years building.

I should move away because:

  • There’s no work here.
  • There is greater chance of doing more music in a major metro area.
  • Challenge. Pace. Exposure. Art! Culture!
  • The life I’ve built here is common and can be duplicated pretty much anywhere, really.

I think that I don’t want to move away, but I can’t tell if I sincerely don’t want to move away or if I’ve convinced myself of the overwhelming difficulty of doing so and/or the likelihood of my failing to accomplish anything but abject poverty and fatigue.

In other words, am I failing to appreciate what I’ve got here? Am I romanticizing city life?

Yes, and yes. I’m playing four blues festivals this summer, and I’m meeting lots of great players as I get around more. I can get any old job if I have to, and it’s not like I’ve ever really been career-oriented anyway – if I was, I’d have a better skill set by now.

In the city I’d be bitching about loneliness, commute times, and constant poverty. Cities are fun when you vacation there; when you live there it’s high rent, late busses, and so much social churn that it takes a great deal of time and effort to meet the right people. You’re working 40 hours a week just to cover rent and utilities and your fucking debt settlement program, and you find that every week you’re a little more tired and a little less likely to go out and meet musicians. (When I lived in San Francisco, everyone I did meet, on those rare occasions when I had the energy to go out, was just trying to save up enough money to move away.) If you lack discipline, you end up buying all that cute shit you see all over the place to pad your nest with, and you never take another vacation again. Five years later, you still have no equity, no savings, and you could have stayed in your grandmother’s attic for $150 a month and at least gotten to play some blues festivals. Your boyfriend is still a stoner because all of your boyfriends are stoners, you’re like a goddamned stoner magnet, and don’t forget that wherever you go there you are.

Or maybe not. Maybe you move to the city, get a job, meet awesome people, and have a gig in a couple of months. Maybe you’re so engaged and challenged and invigorated that you don’t actually just hole up in your apartment when you’re not doing your day job, maybe you finally blossom because you have access to the things you need. Maybe you finally meet a nice vegetarian Hindu boy, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Maybe it’s rural and small town living that makes you so weird, and your gut desire to get back into the city is a real impulse and not a daydream and it’s just a goddamned shame that it’s taken you this long to even be able to seriously consider it.

Being alone means that nothing keeps me anywhere; I could try anything I wanted.

Of course, there’s the question of where. Portland? Seattle? Chicago? DC? New York? And the question of how much: I don’t have any savings right now. I could probably move to Portland on a couple hundred bucks. New York would require, what, fifteen hundred minimum? Not to mention that not all cities are created equal; after you’ve been to Chicago and New York, most left coast cities barely qualify for the description.

Except I don’t think I want to move. I want to go on an extended vacation, but I can’t afford to because I don’t have a goddamned job.

And then there are the things I know about myself: I’m not particularly driven. When I have the time, space, and resources to do stuff, I don’t do it. One can only blame lack of stimulation so much before she has to admit she’s fucking lazy by nature. Right now I’m not getting my CCNA and I’m not working out and I’m not playing guitar and I’m not writing and I’m not meditating. I didn’t do those things when I was a housewife, I didn’t do those things the last time I was unemployed and had free time, and why would I be any different somewhere else?

But there’s no work here and I need a job! I have bills to pay!

Gawd! I am having such a hard time figuring out what I want to do, and where I want to do it. I couldn’t possibly waffle any more than I am. Why do I have to be such a fucking Libra all the time?!

Quitter.

Decisions, , , , , ,

In which I bought treeware.

For my birthday, I quit smoking.

On my lunch hour, instead of smoking I went into the bookstore and bought myself The Eyre Affair, a book I’ve been meaning to read since it came out eight years ago.

Birthday book!

I mean, what the hell, right? It is my birthday, after all, and at least in this format G’ma can read it when I’m done.

Then, still wanting something – namely nicotine, which I was not having – I went into Starbucks for a hot chocolate. And they gave it to me for free, since it’s my birthday! Cool, huh?

In other super awesome news, dad’s taking me (and my brother) out for a birthday dinner to T. Mac’s after work tonight. How lucky am I?

It's fortunate that I actually enjoy total emotional chaos.

Decisions

In which I tell you about my recent TOTALLY ACCIDENTAL hard left.

While I don’t have a 5-year plan [I’m sure my toilet training was as flawed as anyone’s, but I have managed to avoid being completely anal], I do have a half-assed 2-year plan. Half-assed because it involves nothing more epic than getting out of debt and maybe becoming a flight attendant for cheap airfare – it’s not like it’s the most coherent 2-year Plan ever, I admit – but it did pretty much involve me being totally. fucking. single.

For at least a couple more years.

Not that I was planning to be celibate or anything, but after the marriage I have just had it with the entire concept of coupledom. The idea that it could ever be even remotely attractive to get into a situation in which another human being could have any reason to feel like it might be okay to just to call me and ask what I’m doing, let alone possibly have even mild expectations of any kind whatsoever regarding my time, inclination, affection, or fealty… well, it just made me freakin’ gag.

I’d decided that the trade-off wasn’t worth it. I’d rather be alone and give up the benefits – hah! cuddling? nagging? someone to take out the garbage? – of ‘being with’ someone in order to maintain the things I require: freedom, privacy, and total fucking autonomy… because I’m more than willing to get my own needs met but I’ll kill myself trying to meet someone else’s when they don’t mesh with what I have to give. Sure, such a situation means you gotta do everything yourself and you miss out on a few nice things, but those nice things aren’t nice enough to make it worth it. I play well alone, so fuck letting anyone think they deserve any part of me I don’t wanna give for free.

Because, you see, the truth is that I? Am an idiot. The Ex never asked me to quit gigging or doing shows or going to satsang, but I did. At first because I simply chose him above all else, and later because it seemed to make him sad if I was away all the time and I felt like I’d committed to taking him into account, but the end result was that I starved and became a creature that neither of us liked to be around… Of course there’s more to it than that – don’t even get me started on the fucking laundry baskets – but the point is that regardless of how it ended up that way, I put another’s needs first and suffered hideous consequences… and decided therefore to NOT DO IT AGAIN. At least not for a long while.

Yeah. Um.

Well, shit.

It seems I’ve met the male version of me. Dude talks as fast as I do, thinks as fast as I do, does pretty much the same thing for a living that I do, cracks me up, gets my jokes, likes the movies I like, makes perfect cocktails, swears like a longshoreman, makes love like a raunchy angel, and manages to be gender-balanced in a mirror of the way I like to think that I myself am: he’s butch without being a neanderthal and nurturing without being creepily sackless. In short, heart and groin and brain seem to all be functioning in tandem. Holy shit.

The conversations we’ve been having to a one possess for me a certain otherworldly quality, because he is pretty much always in the midst of saying something I’ve never heard an actual man say before. It’s like every imaginary guy I’ve ever controlled in my head has accidentally escaped into the real world and turned into a single person while still following the script I use in my fantasy life. It’s freaky, and not just in its own right but because of the timing, too: I keep telling him he’s a bitch for being early (“I was going to be jaded for another two years”), and he tells me to fuck off because I’m late (and since he’s 3 years older I do have to give him that one).

It makes me snot up when he says shit like, “You’re hungry? I’ll go make you some food,” and he, like me, has had such stellar taste in the past he’d never even had a decent back rub until a few days ago. We’re like rescues, cowering and abjectly grateful for even the most basic kindnesses. We’re dorking out on merely being nice to each other and if I wasn’t one of us I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near us with the way we’re lettin’ our dork flags fly. And I feel… (five points to whomever nails the lyrical reference in this sentence) like someone owes me, after the shamefully basic shit I didn’t get (I have never understood why people treat their lovers worse than they do strangers), and an offer to simply do something nice for me makes my brain stall out for 12 seconds.

So, yeah. Okay. Perhaps, on reflection, it isn’t the institution of couplehood itself so much as my inability to choose well, or maybe its just an issue of simple timing, but I find myself gacked out because I DIDN’T WANT TO DO THIS YET but it’s so easy when you’re not forcing a square peg into a round hole: I have never once edited a single thing that’s come out of my mouth with this man, NOT ONCE. And considering how fast we talk we’ve already covered three months’ worth of material and I have yet to self-edit. Humor, God, sex, past damage, personal growth, responsibility, pet peeves, embarrassing truths, secret aches: not a single thing even made him blink let alone slide off into an other topic because he simply didn’t grok what the fuck I was saying.

Long story short is that I feel feakin’ fantastic, and if I felt any less so I’d probably be freakin’ the fuck out.

And the hand-shaped bruise on my hip is pretty hawt, too. Heh.

The New Five Year Plan!

Decisions

In which I think aloud, as it were. Even though it’s actually typing. (Writing. Whatever.)

Let me admit first that I’ve never had a five-year plan. I’m the kind of creature who takes things as they come, and at any job interview where I’ve been asked, “Where do you see yourself in five years, Michelle?” I’ve always answered, “I really have no idea. I never think that far ahead.”

(I manage to get hired anyway because in spite of my blatantly wrong interview answers I give fantastic interview, you SO would not believe how articulate and friendly I can be under fire.) (Actually, I often answer interview questions totally wrong, like, “I know what I’m supposed to say here, but you seem like you’d appreciate honesty more” so blah blah blah. That way they know I know how to play the game but am choosing not to.) (Or something. ) (It works for me more often than not, at any rate.) (Moving on.)

So we’ve established that I don’t have any idea what I’ll be doing in five years. I’m more attached to a state of change than one of stability, and if I’m brutally honest, I am – or at least have been – more afraid to make statements that would later prove to make a liar of me than to have no plan at all.

So while I’ve never had a five year plan, I do have a new two year plan! This is a work in progress, of course, and these are just the basics I’ve been tossing around, but hey: it’s something. Continue reading The New Five Year Plan! →