Some of you may know (if you follow me on Facebook), that I pinched a nerve in my back about three weeks ago. It still hurts, but generally only in certain poses. It usually wakes me up after 2-3 hours unless I go to bed with an ice pack, which has its own dangers (hate waking up with a soggy bed). The problem is mainly stiffened muscles, and only exercise really loosens them up until they clench again. Sitting in front of the computer and typing for hours on end is really not the best pose for me, but not much I can do about that.

My arm only really hurts when I lean in certain directions, basically when I sit and lean forward- eating, food prep, (er bathroom)… So last night I couldn’t clean and dice more than 1/2 the potatoes for dinner. I asked my mother to finish for me as leaning forward to get the skin off was like a white hot spike being driven into my armpit. She cleaned one potato and then cut herself. My stepdad finished.

My mother says to me as she takes the knife, “I’m in pain all the time. You don’t hear me complain about it.”

Because you know, I’m just such a whiny bitch.

I made the entire meal on less than three hours sleep, and I just needed help with the potatoes. WTH mom. I even emptied the dishwasher and refilled it with dirty dishes, despite the pain. I didn’t complain then. I didn’t ask for help. I know she worked all day. I worked all night. By rights, I shouldn’t have even got out of bed until 2pm, but I was up by 10:30. She also harps on me about taking medicine for pain, back, head, whatever. Apparently I take too much (at the prescribed amount as written on the bottle), while she takes just enough for her self-diagnosed “arthritis.”

This is the reason I stay in my room with the door shut… so that I’m not a bother to anyone. She knows this. I’ve told her this (twice)… that I stay to myself because I don’t want to inflict myself on others, and yet she still says things like this. My siblings don’t get this treatment; nor does my stepdad. She makes excuses for them.

My brother… he’s manic depressive. No, wait, he has Asperger’s. No, he’s clinically depressed. Before that, it was something else again. He’s on his meds, he’s off his meds. He’s self-medicated… It’s his friend’s fault. It’s never his fault. Mom takes care of his finances, his SSI because he can’t be trusted to do so. She buys him food to supplement his foodstamps. She runs herself ragged on his behalf despite being depressed herself. He gets kicked out of one apartment/house, and she finds him another. What will happen when she dies, she wonders aloud? I guess it will be your job to take care of your brother, she says. (Not if I manage to run away it won’t be!)

My sister… is pregnant again. She’s had two miscarriages, an abortion for a tubal pregnancy, and lost one baby to leukemia. And that’s awful. I made dinner last night basically so she would have something good to eat because we all know she doesn’t eat right, and she and my nephew eat more fast food than is reasonable. I’ve been told for the past month that she’s sick, can’t eat, is tired all the time. We take my nephew so she can sleep (because apparently I don’t need to sleep despite also working nights). I really sympathize, even if I don’t think she should have another child. I worry she’s going to lose this one too, but that’s her choice. Must have caught my sister on a good night last night the way she packed it away though. Not that I’m upset that she’s eating. I know I’m a good cook, and I’m glad I could entice her to eat if she’s been feeling sick for as long as my mom says, but if it were me sick for a month (as I have been with my shoulder/arm), then I *know* I would not be getting the sympathy my sister receives.

My stepdad is a roofer, so he hasn’t been working since winter started. Which means he’s completely obnoxious with excess energy. Cleaning the kitchen and living room once a month is his idea of being considerate… because the day to day mess he makes… his clothes and shoes in the middle of the floor, the food-gunk left in the sink to harden into cement… is of little consequence. Otherwise, he just sleeps all day and then makes rude/nasty statements which he thinks are funny. He routinely hurts himself at work, as I’ve been told anytime I grunt or whimper with unexpected pain from a movement that didn’t used to hurt at all. Sorry to call attention to myself. I’ll just try to button it in the future.

I have tried to bring this double standard to my mother’s attention, but apparently I am selfish. No matter how much I keep to myself, knowing I won’t get any sympathy from anyone, the little bit I do say is met with indifference and contempt. My stepdad says it was my choice to get a night job and therefore I shouldn’t be upset that my nephew doesn’t let me sleep. To some extent this is true, but considering he doesn’t have a job at all until spring, I don’t think he has room to criticize. If getting a job, any job, is that easy, why is he wearing a hole in the sofa with his fat ass. I’m sorry I can’t sleep through an earthquake like him. I really wish I could.

My mom dismisses anything I say about how she treats me. I’m only human. I feel pain, just like everyone else. I can’t help but think I’d get more sympathy from my own mother if I was an absolute stranger. She likes to bring up how she “does things for others” because it’s “just the way she is,” but what about me? It’s not like I ask for much. In fact, I ask for less than anyone in her life. I don’t routinely borrow money, make messes she has to clean up, or take up her time. When I want to spend time with her, I have to make an appointment which she writes into her date book and even then it’s often preempted by plans she makes with one of the others, or one of the others is invited into our plans. I’ve mentioned this to her as well, broken down in tears over it, but it’s “all in my head.” I’m supposed to be the stolid one who needs little in the way of maintenance. I’ve never claimed to be perfect, but apparently I’m the second coming and therefore I don’t need the support she lavishes on the others.

Sometimes I wish I could move faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar away and never speak to anyone in my family again. Just disappear off the face of the earth and stop being the unappreciated bedrock that keeps my family’s drama from imploding. It’s not fair that I’m treated like this. I’m only a year and a half older than my sister, but my mother treats me like I’m not even part of the family sometimes. If there’s an emergency or someone needs money, she finds a way to help them out, but if I need money or her time, I should suck it up. I can’t count the number of times I’ve loaned her or others money, but if I need it, I’m SOL. Money is just money, and I don’t care about it in general, but as a symbol of my family’s concern about my welfare, it becomes evident that I care a lot more about their well being than they do about mine.

I am so tired of being treated like a fifth wheel.

I’m thinking of writing for Suite101 and hopefully earning some extra money in the process if their ads are to be believed. Below is a review that I’ve polished up. I originally sent it to someone in an email and never posted it anywhere. Since they ask for a writing sample at Suite101, I’m sending this to them and figured some readers here might appreciate it as well.

Continue reading →

OK, I know I don’t really post here any more. I’d like to say it’s not “you,” it’s me… but Xanga… it really is you. What the heck is with all the sex sites lately? I mean, maintain some standards! Is the rating system now moot? If my new bot “subscribers” had bothered to go through my archives, they would have seen that I identify as an asexual, therefore “friending” me and subbing to me serves no other purpose than to tick me off and write a post like this one.

Now I don’t have anything against sex. In fact, I think prostitution should be legalized for health and social reasons, but you know… if I do a complete about face and decide I’m not asexual any more, I’ll look for you, sex-bloggers. You don’t have to come looking for me!

This is probably one of my biggest beefs with modern society. Sex serves a purpose, which is procreation. In ancient times, it was considered a holy act. There were temple prostitutes. Sex had a function and while lots of folk probably engaged in it, and still do, for recreational purposes, I find our hyper-sexed society just this side of depressing. Everything is sex. If you read some sociologists/psychologist, even death is about sex (thank you David Carradine for driving that one home). What absolutely irritates the hell out of me is the denigration of sex to base commercialism. There’s just something even more sleazy than normal about taking a perfectly natural animal activity and making it about money.

And speaking of animals, how is it a species that is supposedly so much better than our animal cousins is so mentally bound by something as mindless as sex? Christians are so fond of claiming that we are better than animals, masters of nature, defined by our intellect not our base animal instincts… how is it that so many Christians are hypocrites… clergy molesting children, Christians with porn addictions, Republican Rightwing fearmongers who are outed as gay? We’ve allowed sex to become equivalent to money and therefore power which makes it a “thing” to be manipulated, not a holy experience or means to regeneration.

This devolution of sex into something which can be bought and sold (yes I know I support prostitution, but that’s because people will do it anyway. Might as well regulate it to prevent sickness and abuse), is an abomination so far as I’m concerned. Porn is such an issue because of our double standard of selling sex while at the same time saying “it’s bad.” Consenting adults should have a choice and be able to seek out what “gets them off” within reason (without harming anyone or thing), but in the same breath, I am sick and tired of having sex shoved in my face. Grow up humanity. I don’t need to see your kinks. If I feel like getting a few of my own, I’ll look into it myself. You don’t need to spam my email with offers, bot me to death on my blog, or sling sex at me as a means of selling your merchandise on tv. Like as not, any sexual overtones will only serve to turn me off of whatever you’re trying to sell, so get back to me when you evolve a bit.

We can talk about stuff.

The trouble with outsourcing your customer service (VERIZON) is that when a customer calls with a problem, even if the CSR (Customer Service Representative) speaks English, their accent leaves much to be desired. If I have to ask him to repeat himself more than once because his English is sub par or I can’t understand what he’s saying, then there’s a problem.The only highlight was when he slipped and told me that the tech would arrive August 4th. August? Ummm, no. I think I’ll take my business elsewhere if I have to wait eleven months for a fix.

Also, while I’m not a Nationalist by any stretch, I think if the majority of your customers are in the US, the majority of you jobs should be in the US. It’s not even a race thing; it’s just common sense. Cheaper or not, if your customers and your employees are separated by an ocean, how comfortable do you think your clients feel about getting their problem fixed when something goes wrong, and they have to call up someone they can barely understand. If I can’t understand your CSR, how certain am I that he understands me? Not at all.

Even their tech guys are outsourced to separate companies, albeit local. The guys that come to fix whatever problem you have aren’t even actually Verizon employees. They’re contracted through another company. Since I’ve also had the misfortune of calling their payment line upon occasion and gotten a Latino CSR, I’m reasonably certain that they outsource some of the CSR jobs to Mexico as well as India. So let’s just say that the chain of command between the techs, the CSRs, and the actual people in charge of Verizon is very convoluted indeed.

Anyway, in May when my contract is up and my modem is mine to keep even if I drop Verizon… let’s just say I’ll be in the market for a new internet provider and I’ll be asking pointed questions about the locality of their CSR jobs.

So about three months ago, my step-grandfather was at work and broke his back trying to move something. Only they (the workman’s comp doctors) insisted it was just a slipped disk and instead forced him to go through a month of physical therapy before he finally went to a real doctor and was told he had a broken back. At the same time, he was told he had terminal (stage 4 cancer) and was given 6 months to live. Then they gave him surgery for his back. Why give a man with stage 4 cancer back surgery? Seriously.

He died on Friday, which all told is for the best. He was in a lot of pain.

Now I am not a doctor, but I am certain that

1) Workman’s comp were completely out of line with their insistence that his back was not broken and therapy would fix it. Had they been doing their job, it would have been known that his back was broken and he would not have suffered for a month until he was so debilitated that he couldn’t get up from the chair in the living room even to use the bathroom. I have no say over what happens, but I feel they should be sued for emotional distress at the very least. There was no reason to put him through that misery. Like as not they would say the cancer was a pre-existing condition that caused his back to break, but regardless they had no right to put him through that kind of needless suffering.

2) The hospital did needless surgery on him knowing that with stage 4 cancer, a broken back was the least of his problems. They gave him 6 months, tops, so was the surgery necessary? I think not. I think they did it knowing he was going to die in a few months, so why not get more money out of a dying man? In fact, I feel that the surgery and physical therapy at Good Shepherd hastened his demise.

3) He insisted on going to Good Shepherd for his physical therapy after the surgery because he regularly donated to them. While he was there, he basically sat in a chair all day, ignored by the staff. His condition worsened, as we learned later because the cancer was eating away at his brain, but I’m sure the bed sores didn’t help matters. In fact, I’m sure that they only put more of a strain on his system as did the surgery itself.

4) Once he was returned to the hospital, the nurses took pictures of his sores, most likely to ensure that they would not be blamed for his condition. His health deteriorated even more until he finally came home. But earlier in the week, a nurse called everyone in the family and basically made it seem like he was dying in minutes, making everyone scramble to get there. In the end he was brought home to die in hospice, but the nurse who called was out of line in worrying everyone. He died Friday, so he wasn’t quite that close to death’s door.

Anyway, any regular readers of my webnovel… there’ll be no posts this week as I don’t feel much like writing, and the funeral’s in the middle of the week.

So I’ve been working for two weeks now at the -Mart. I have nothing bad to say about the place beyond the normal complaints I would have concerning any job for a major faceless corporation, namely they think everyone in their employ is an idiot. You can just assume I work for the -Mart of your choice. It’s all the same to me, or them, or you. At least, I see no difference between one or half a dozen other Mart-like businesses.

They’re seriously not giving me enough hours. Two nights a week is enough to mess up my sleep cycle, but not really enough to pay the bills. It’s a lot of work, a lot of running around the store, crouching and standing… it’s good exercise. My legs hurt every day after I’ve worked. I like it. I’m glad I’m not stuck behind a cash register making inane conversation with customers who could care less.

The only complaint I have is with the woman they have “training” me. There’s really not much training going on, but only an idiot or a monkey would need to be trained to read labels and shelve accordingly. My issue with this woman, we’ll call her X, is that she’s a raving Christian. I don’t have issues with Christians normally, but this woman’s attitude equates to a “hostile work environment.” It’s not just that she’s a Christian, but that she’s a Christian hypocrite, proud of her ignorance, and belligerent about things she really knows nothing about. She doesn’t know I’m a Pagan and I’ll certainly never tell her, unless I plan on leaving my job soaked with holy water or crucified or don’t mind the entire town turning out to egg my house. It’s not like I wear jewelry that would make for easy identification. I can’t wear jewelry… my skin doesn’t like it.

My biggest issue with X is her language. It’s a good thing she works at night because she’s not fit to be around customers. There are very few circumstances in which I use foul language. Even if I hurt myself, I say sugar or darn. I keep my language rated G, in other words. If she’s not cursing out her philandering husband, she’s turning the air blue with curses heaped upon Darwin or people who believe in Global Warming or even management at -Mart.Whatever irritates her at any given moment is worthy of a ringing string of expletives.

She is impossible to have a conversation with, but at the same time, she talks so much, you can’t not respond without her thinking you’re giving her the silent treatment. There’s no safe subjects with her. She “doesn’t celebrate Halloween for religious reasons.” She “only reads books having to do with Scripture,” but it’s impossible even to have a conversation about Christianity with her without being told I “read the wrong books.” I can’t even express sympathy for her over her situation with her husband, who “logs into chat rooms while she’s in the room to have cyber sex with his girlfriends,” without her jumping on me and telling me I can’t possibly “know how she feels.” I felt like saying, well, he doesn’t beat you, right? So it’s not all bad. There is only her problems, and everyone else; there is no “I understand your pain” and feel sorry that there is nothing to be done. She prefers to wallow in it over being comforted by another.

I get the sense that the others keep their mouths shut simply to escape a tongue lashing. There’s a huge TV in the breakroom. We all take break together, no matter our personal feelings on the subject. She doesn’t have cable at home, but when the TV’s on, we watch what she wants to watch… namely the Country Music Channel. I’m not a big fan of country music, but whatever. I sit and try to read my book, but it’s hard when she’s sitting right next to me, singing along to the music or calling out answers to “Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader.” It’s a nasty sentiment, but… I have a feeling I know why her husband cheats on her. I wouldn’t be surprised if she murders the man one day. She is one scary old lady and though I have not seen her physically violent, I would not be surprised to hear she’d attacked someone… for religious reasons. I have a feeling if she found out I was Pagan, she’d start quoting “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” at me. Despite the fact that it’s a mistranslation of a word meaning poisoner, I doubt she’d believe me since I read the wrong books.

Hey all, I’m back from moping. I found another job that’ll have me, only five minutes from where I live. I won’t say where because I don’t know what their blogging policy is yet, but it’s a “department store” formally known as a -Mart.

I had applied for a loss prevention ad online about three weeks ago. For those not in retail, think “store detective.” I never heard back from them about it, but a couple days ago, I got a call and the lady wanted to offer me a cashiering job. Let’s just say her tone did not convey the idea that she was interested in me working for her company, or maybe she just hates her job, or maybe she was just tired.

To me, cashiering is a death sentence. Standing in one spot, hour after hour, dealing with people and their squalling spawn is NOT my idea of a sanity saving good time. But hey, it’s a job. I agreed to come in for an interview.

In the course of the interview I asked when they put out the stock and when I learned they did overnights, I asked if they were hiring for stock. Long story short, I went back a couple hours later to interview the the stock manager. So I will be working overnights starting sometime after Saturday. I have to go in Saturday for four hours of orientation with “bored woman.” She didn’t even bother to introduce herself. I still don’t even know her name. lol

I’ll make a dollar more than minimum wage, but the hours aren’t guaranteed. It’s part time no matter what, but I have no idea exactly how many hours I’ll get and apparently it will vary. Could be two days a week, could be three or four. I can survive on twenty hours. Twenty-five to thirty would be better.

With all the trouble in the Gulf of Mexico with BP oil and their runaway oil demolition derby, am I the only one who thinks there should be a new classification of crime wherein big business is held accountable for any harm they do to our shared environment? It should be tantamount to crimes against humanity (& Nature) or war crimes, since we’ve waged a war with Nature through our ignorance for almost as long as man has built cities. Regardless of where the slick is being washed ashore, BP’s gusher is not just a monetary loss, but an environmental loss as well. This impacts the ocean’s long term ability to sustain the ecosystem, as well as its ability to sustain us.

I know there are people who think of the ocean as one big septic tank. They dump their garbage and other substances into the water to wash away their irresponsible and lazy attitude, but if the ocean was still capable of sweeping up after us, there wouldn’t be problems with garbage lurking in our waterways, nor would there be spreading dead spots from factory and agricultural runoff.