So begins 2 weeks alone...

Today is the day the spousal unit leaves for two weeks.
I'm not sure how I feel about this.
On one hand I'm a bit excited about two weeks "to myself."
On the other hand I'm nervous about two weeks as a single parent.

But it will be over too soon, and I'll find myself wishing I'd spent the time differently and gotten more things done that are difficult to get done when everyone is home.

Work is not going well.
There's just too much to talk about there, too much to say...  but when the boss doesn't care that the Office Manager is creating a hostile work environment...  what are you gonna do?  When one has been told to "not complain about anything or anyone" how is anything going to be fixed?

The answer to both of those questions is "find a new job."  Once the spousal unit returns from his sojourn to the future I'll be stepping up the search and firing off my resume like I'm unemployed.  I've reserved the right to quit - on the spot - with our without a new job, if things get too bad.

That two hour long panic attack I had last week resulted in rumors about my having troubles at home.  No one has asked me, no one has confirmed this, the assumption is being made, someone started the rumor, and it's made its way around the clinic.  The best part?  The only reason I'm even aware of this heinous defamation is because the one person who has been forbidden to speak to me told me.

So many labor board violations it's not even funny.

The spawn and I have many plans for the two weeks that it will be just the two of us.  We'll camp out on the air mattress in the living room and watch movies before bed.  He's going to be very sick on Monday and unable to go to school.  We're going to the movies, out to dinner and even have the pleasure of attending a baseball game.  He'll get to spend time with two close family friends and both of my parents as well.

Today I have a list of things to do, and a small stack of other things to do on top of the list...  it's kind of sad when your list has be found by completing the stack of tasks first.  But it's honestly the only way I can make sure all the things get done.  Stack them on top of the list and dig for it.

All the fucking great things

You know what's fucking great?

I'll tell you.

Getting sick as fuck the day after you get home from vacation.
When your spouse doesn't care that you're sick... until you flat refuse to do a god damned thing and then they're only mad because they have to do dishes.
When your boss allows favoritism, sexism and who the fuck knows what else kill morale... and employees start leaving like fleas on a drowning rat.
When someone you used to respect commits a felony - on camera.
Coughing.
Coughing is fucking awesome.
Being sick for so long post vacation that you've been without weed for so long that all your joints are starting to non-function due to pain and the nerves are firing off at random times more and more frequently and more and more intensely every day and every attempt to medicate leaves you coughing and crying because you HURT TOO BADLY TO CURL INTO A FETAL POSITION.
Have I mentioned how fucking awesome coughing is?
Coughing is the BEST!!!
Waiting 2 weeks to get the food you're craving - that's fucking great.


So I've been great.
Just fucking great.
But I think I've almost beat this cold and although it was pretty grim for a couple days I never did lose my voice.  An over-abundance of caution and extra dose of FUCK THIS GOD DAMNED PAIN I SWEAR TO GOD AFTER 20 YEARS YOU'D THINK I'D BE USED TO THIS SHIT means I've not developed a URI or pneumonia so that's amazing.
I need to pluck my eyebrows, shave the AMAZING amount of hair off my upper lip...  or give in and to into public in drag - can I pass?  Can I pass?

The answer to that question is YES.  YES I CAN PASS WITHOUT EVEN REALLY TRYING AND IT FREAKS PEOPLE THE FUCK OUT.

Come to terms with it.
Genderqueer and here to stay but don't, oh dear gods don't tell my husband because he'll deny it and get offended and THEN HE'LL GET PISSED OFF!!!!  Oh what the fuck did I marry?

My ten year old spawn literally asked me today why I didn't divorce his dad?
I had to tell him that I do love the fucking asshole, but it's mostly financial.  I don't want to spend my life working my ass off... and that may be selfish but I enjoy spending time with my kid and have no desire to turn him into a latchkey, move hundreds of miles away from my entire family so I can afford to live... cause where we at right now it wouldn't happen and we'd be living in the car...  the car I wouldn't be able to pay insurance on so I couldn't drive and...  yes.  I do love my husband but sometimes I wonder myself...

WHY AM I HERE?

He ignored me while I was sick.
I asked for things and he never got them for me EVEN THOUGH I WAS SICK...

The best, or worst really depending on your point of view...  the best was that on Tuesday I asked for 2 things for the spawn's lunch.  I ASKED FOR TWO THINGS FOR OUR CHILD'S LUNCH.  Not for me, for our kid....  and he didn't get them.  He forgot.  He forgot even though he went to two other places after he came home.  He forgot even though he could have gone out and gotten them at any point...  he forgot on Wednesday too...  and Thursday he forgot and by Friday it was a fucking moot point because the spawn and I were making due and it was all good but the whole fucking point is that if you tell me to ask you for something when I need it...  and I ASK FOR SOMETHING FOR OUR CHILD and you fucking ignore me...  THEN WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK DUDE???  Saturday he asked if I still needed him to pick those things up... those things for the child's SCHOOL LUNCH THAT I ASKED FOR ON TUESDAY.

No.
No I didn't need them.
By this point I'd gotten paid, and would be going grocery shopping the next day.
So no.
I got them myself.
Thanks.
But no.

WHY AM I HERE?
I didn't want to have a kid.
I'm a parent.
I didn't want to get married.
I'm a spouse.
I didn't want to buy a house.
My name is on a fucking mortgage.

I'm living someone else's dream...
...and they wonder why I'm depressed.

habitually developing a spousal complaint issue

There's this annoying pattern I'm facing and I keep trying to break out of it...  but I never really seem to be able to.  Part of why I decided to create and make effort to maintain this blog is to help me break these habits that I don't want anymore...  accountability, tracking, etc...  also, sometimes articulating them makes them more real, increasing the reality makes beating them that much easier.  Personal demons and all that.

Every week I spend my days off getting done ALL THE THINGS and when I go back to work on Wednesday I have this great sense of accomplishment.  I'm going to keep up with all the things and do the minor daily maintenance so I don't fall behind.  When my days off come around I'll only have to worry about the housework and some laundry-instead of all the laundry.  I can spend some much needed time out in the yard and start getting the big things done, the little things that lead to the big things, I can pull this house together and start taking the images in my head and making them reality.

But then I spend the week getting further and further behind.  With the eight hour work day and the being gone 11 hours a day for three days and then 9 hours on another day.  The unhelpful husband who literally spends an entire day sitting around to the point of having a sore back...  despite the glaringly sedentary life he already leads and the constant lamentation about his weight gain and the difficulties he's facing in trying to get the weight off.

It's Monday morning and the spawn is at school and I'm sitting here with my second cup of coffee.  I've been up for 2 hours and have plans to get much accomplished today in the hopes that I can spend a significant portion of tomorrow working on (and perhaps hopefully finishing) one of the ongoing craft projects.

However I'm rather limited on how much I can accomplish before the spousal unit arises.  His alarm is set to go off in about nine minutes, but I'm sure he'll hit that snooze button repeatedly and wake up much closer to ten...  then bitch about how he needs to get up earlier.

He loves to give me advice on how to deal with emotional and hormonal things he has never experienced...  but when I try to give him advice on how to re-set his clock he blows me off.  It's more than willpower - I've worked weird hour shifts for years at a time.  I've had to re-set my clock three or four times (not counting college) and all the years we've been together he's had erratic sleep patterns...  and I keep trying to explain to him that focusing on better sleep habits may be a better answer to his insomnia than this addiction to anti-depressants...

But what the fuck do I know?\

That aside I've learned from experience that if I get up and start making noise, turn up the music and get to work cleaning he'll wake up sooner than ten because the noise won't let him sleep.

It's retribution for all the mornings I can't get back to sleep because of his snoring.  When you partially awaken to roll from one side to the other (four cats in bed-don't mess with them) it can be a bitch to slide back into deep sleep when your spouse is snoring right in your ear.

Enough bitching about the spouse, that could go on for hours and hours and hours but I love the son of a bitch so that's that.

The point I'm trying to make here is this:  I'm going to bust my ass today doing all the things, and tomorrow I will hopefully have adequate time to devote to the next big thing on the big list and perhaps even take care of the secondary project list which is 5-15 minute tasks.  I'd like to get these balls rolling... and not let them roll back down the hill every week when I go to work.

I've started doing the chores in the morning - but that really increases my morning crankiness.  I fucking hate it.  But I hate coming home after work, exhausted and hungry, just to spend another hour busting my ass before I can eat or even sit down.  I keep reminding myself of this - and it's making the morning tasks easier.  But I'm still not being consistent.

Laundry.  I try to get it all done before I go to work so I can time and do loads during the week without letting it all build up again.  But no.  Even if I do the laundry it just sits in the dryer until I need the dryer and then I have a backlog of shit to fold and people are running out of things because I'm not putting laundry away.  I know a lot of it is habit development...  and I'm working on it.

One of my biggest peeves is that the boys will take a lazy day...  and yet when I want a lazy day it's incredibly difficult unless my husband is occupied with friends or meetings.  He has his lazy Saturday and then wants to do things on Sunday...  spoiling my lazy day.  Sunday is literally the only day that I don't have to wake up at six, and that's only provided I don't have anything going on.  Superbowl parties, rounds at work, sometimes I get one Sunday a month - and I want to do NOTHING which he manages a couple times a fucking week...  but I can't.  I can barely take a nap that lasts longer than 45 minutes without being rudely awoken and then scolded for being pissed off about it.

I may use the vacuum this morning for more solid retribution.
Yesterday was fucking ridiculous.

spousal unit bitch fest

There are a lot of things I hate talking to my husband about.
Generalized statements, or examples cannot be used.
You have to be specific and you can not use absolutes.

If you say, "You never put your shoes away."  He looks at you, raises his eyebrow, and in an incredibly defensive tone says, "NEVER?"  You literally have to come to him with fucking numbers...  "Okay honey, in the last 58 days you have only put your shoes away twice...  so it appears as though we have a shoe putting away problem that I'd like to address"

He thinks he knows what I'm going to say, and therefore does not wholly listen to me.
He will interrupt me to ask someone else a question and carry on a mini-conversation while I'm talking...  and this is often done when I'm relaying important information or answering a question that he just asked.
Comparative analogy is completely lost on him.  It's like he doesn't have a BA in English... or write for a living.
He interrupts me - constantly - yet is deeply offended when I interrupt him...  even when he is taking an obscenely long pause in between his sentences.  I am not the only person who notices his long pauses, many of his friends have commented on them as well.  The problem I face is that he interrupted me and I'm going to forget what I wanted to say so as soon as I get an opening I shove it in there.  When he gets mad and says he wasn't done, I tell him I wasn't done either and he should have let me finish before he started...

Deeply apologetic.
Which would mean a whole lot more if the disrespect weren't constant and completely unnoticed.

You'd think, all these years together and all these times I've called him out that he'd at least be putting some effort in, or that he'd have made some improvement...  but nope.  Not at all.
I, however, am growing less and less tolerant of it every day...
...and somehow this is starting to be a problem.

So he's in a work meeting in the dining room...  even though he has an office in his man cave with a big fancy desk he bought that he never uses...  and because he has to talk loud and our house is small...  he may as well be here in the room with me.  Gods forbid I get those dishes done...  but yesterday he worked from home and when I came home from my late shift at work and stood there doing all the dishes he was super apologetic for not doing them...  and tonight, when I was pissed off about something he had the gall to ask me if there was anything he could do to help...  while I was standing in front of a sink full to the fucking brim with dirty dishes.

So yeah.
I'm just ready to have him not be in my presence for a couple of days while I work through the lovely perimenopausal PMDD symptoms and rampaging murderer and happy girl child.  But he wants to get "frisky" tonight...  like I'm a fucking puppy.

every morning

Every morning I spend time on social media and news sites.
Every morning for the last 9 days that time online has become all consuming.
I spend more time and energy keeping up with what's going on under the new administration than I spend doing things I enjoy.
Not that I don't enjoy killing trolls.  Because I really, really do.  I love killing trolls and am becoming exceptionally good at it.  I don't care if this makes me bad. I don't care what impression I'm making.  I see falsehoods and ignorance and I have to speak up.

I see this new administration creating within the American people something all the Obama haters could never accomplish.  Distrust of the government by the American people in record numbers.

Never, an all the history of our country has there been such high numbers of people who disapprove of the president.

What troubles me the most is the man's complete and utter inability to understand why he is disliked-despite the fact that it's right in front of his nose every time he picks up his phone and opens the Twitter app.

That alone is proof of his psychological instability.

I can see why some people would agree with some of his policies.
I can not see why so many people agree with so many of his policies.
Granted, their numbers are not large - and dwindle daily - but I still have a very hard time accepting that so many Americans are still unable to understand that he possesses qualities undesirable for the leader of a nation.

I do not understand why no one seems to care about what is going on in the South China Seas.

If he truly brings this country to war - people will die because he's a selfish pig.
Some of those people will gladly go to their deaths fighting for something they believe in because their eyes are half open or they're blinded by their love of an unattainable ideal built on a foundation of fear, racism, sexism and lies...

As a scholar of history with a working knowledge of politics and a logical mind

I'm absolutely fucking terrified.

thought I lost the computer

Thought my computer had completely died on me.  If anything it spurred me to get my ass in gear on the stuff I have sitting around waiting for me because...  one of the projects further down the road is to backup everything on the computer.

Yes, I'm bad about that.  Incredibly so.  But I'm a fucking work in progress and right now the only thing I want is a pint of ice cream.

It's been a long and exhausting day.  The house is clean, I pulled out the vacuum and cleaned all the floors.  The rugs are drying but I can't hang them outside because of the weather... rain and sun then more rain then the sun...  it's totally bi-polar.

On the whole topic of the computer it turns out I just need to uninstall Mozilla and move completely over to Google Chrome, which is fine, I've been in the process of that for awhile so it's not like it's a huge ass deal or anything.

Dinner is almost ready and my back is killing me.  The last load of laundry is in the washing machine and I've managed to complete everything on the list today.  I just need to brush my poor arthritic cat who can't bathe himself and I'm down to simple personal maintenance.  like that pint of ice cream.

I get one more day off before I go back to work...  and I honestly hope that this week doesn't feel like a waste of my time, like last week.  I hate going to work to sit on my ass and do nothing.  I know some people like getting paid to do nothing...  but I have better things to do and I'd rather be doing them.

But I've got a lot on the books for tomorrow, so I'm gonna pull that out and go over it before dinner...  maybe I can get one or two things done tonight...  maybe.

don't alienate the white woman

You are so beautiful, and you are so intelligent.
Twenty something of Latin and Scandinavian descent...
You've spent your entire life in the Southern United States...
You've come out as bisexual, and have even begun experimenting with your gender identity.
You worship old gods, some would call them dead.

You need to stop stomping all over cisgendered white women.
You have to.
You're killing your allies.

This fight is not for or about people of color, immigrants, or the LGBTQ community...  this fight is not for the disabled, it's not for the women...  it's not for the veterans or the poor or any other individual community.  This fight is for every single one of us.  Maybe it took more, maybe it took longer, maybe it took this final straw to break the collective backs of white women across the country because we're more accustomed to holding our tongues and holding these burdens?

Did you ever fucking stop to think about that?

No.

Look at the history of WHITE CISGENDER WOMEN in America and tell me we haven't been, and are not still being, oppressed.  We were oppressed before the slaves were brought here, we were oppressed on the fucking boats, before the existence of the Native Americans was even known.  We were oppressed before we came here...

You say don't compare the struggles of the Irish to the struggles of the African.
Read your history little girl.
Your white cisgender female friends aren't riding the coattails of their minority counterparts.  Every advancement in women's rights and equality in this country was not because of a woman of color or a woman of the LGBTQ community.

Read your history little girl and understand that the group longest oppressed in this great fucked up nation of ours is not you - it's us.  WOMEN. PERIOD.  No qualifiers.  Just the presence of a fucking uterus.

This goes back so far that any division within our ranks is despicable.
We are oppressed all over the world.
We were oppressed by our own men before the knowledge of other races existed.
We were lower than slaves, then the same as slaves, then perhaps slightly higher...  property?  Yes.
We are women.
That's all that matters.