For the past few months I’ve gone back and forth on bailing on this cooking club. For some reason the prospect both interests and terrifies me. I don’t know what my problem is, but I’m pretty sure it’s a deeply seeded as any of my other issues. I know I’ll be fine once I get there. How can you go wrong when you obviously have a shared interest with these strange people? I don’t know if it’s so much that I’m anxious about being social as I am about being away from Fruit on a Saturday night. I know logically that she’ll enjoy her time to herself. I know it’s good for us. I just can’t shake this horrible anxiety I get over it. I had the same thing with my ex, and delving even farther back, I felt the same way as a kid. But, it made sense when I was a kid because my mother was irrational. She’d tell me to go and have fun and then bludgeon me when I came home for having had a good time. I wanted to spend the night at friends houses and when I did, I had such a horrible anxiety attack that I would often end up being sent home anyway.
So, I’m forcing myself to do it…and I’m going to ignore that irrational voice in my head that tells me these clubs are stupid or Fruit thinks they are or that something bad will happen if I go. I’ve been tasked with making the soup and dessert. I’m going to make the pumpkin orange cake ahead of time and ice it when I get there. I’m probably also going to have a bake a few other things to keep us from eating said cake before the time comes. The soup sounds like it’ll either be really good or really bad. It’s kind of a spin on borscht…which I’ve never had…consisting of pureed beets and potatoes among other things. I’m already starting the pep talk in my head…beets are sweet…you like sweet. I’m actually a little excited at the idea of trying new recipes with other people who like to cook or are gastronomically adventurous. I know that Fruit likes that I cook, but I am always afraid to subject her to something she may not want to eat…or completely ruining dinner altogether. My Fruitpie isn’t very adventurous when it comes to strange fruits are vegetables, and I’m not when it comes to strange meats or anything with a potentially nauseating texture. I’m trying to broaden my spectrum of acceptable foods, though. I want to be the kind of cook my kids remember fondly…and not like my dad who threw out his mother’s forty year old Le Crueset (before it was LC) dutch oven because she had seasoned it with her cooking…or my mother who would sneak us fast food before going to my grandma’s house for cornish game hens. I don’t remember my grandmother cooking anything else…except maybe stuffing on thanksgiving and “westerns”. The latter were actually really good. They consisted of ground beef, egg, parsley and some seasonings, and I vividly remember being equally fascinated and repulsed as she mixed the raw concoction by hand and tasted it to ensure proper seasoning. I would ask, “Grandma, how can you eat that?” and she’d say, “You’ll understand when you’re older”. Sadly, the thought has entered my mind when mixing my burgers, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I make the sauce to taste first and extrapolate from there what it will do to the meat. It’s much less nauseating that way…and Fruitpie likes them.
I’ve made my grocery list, and should probably go get the goods before it gets too late and I put it off. I really want to be prepared…and not the dumb kid who thinks she can cook. I should probably take my pills, too…because I think I must be building a tolerance. These voices are getting hard to ignore again and I’m starting to feel a little crazy.
One of the headlines in Press Enterprise today was…WEATHER UPDATE: Aid Quality is Yucky Today. Apparently, so are our professional writing skills. That aside, it really is nasty out there. When I walked Fruitpie to her truck this morning, the moon was an angry orange through all this smoke. It feels like the whole state is on fire.
My laptop has been hosed for days, and I can’t seem to get it fixed. I officially fucking hate Vista. It was a pain in the ass to begin with, but now that there are system file problems, I can’t reinstall them the same way as XP. There is no I386 directory, and reinstalling from the CD will quite probably wipe out my other files and applications as well. At this point, though, I’m not sure what choice I have. I need to be able to work, and this is just not working. I have been disabling services on startup to try to determine which is the offending process, but I just don’t have the patience and the error log has been most unhelpful. Goddamnit Microsoft, I have so many better things to do than try to fix your fucking operating system.
I’m going to spend the day cleaning, but I haven’t been able to work up the energy yet. I’ve had a late start and so much has been on my mind lately that I’m just crabby and over sensitive. I got another email from my dad the other day saying, “One quick question. Will you consider helping your mom when I’m gone? Just curious “. What a fucking drama queen. What the hell does he want from me? Fruitpie asked where he’s going…and while that made me laugh, I can’t help but be newly annoyed with him. He probably sat in his office agonizing over what he could do next to spark dialog with me…however heated. There are so many angry one liners I can throw his way, but I think it’s best to ignore his jibes. It’s too tiresome to read into what they’re not saying…and having had to become so proficient at it in my younger years has been seriously detrimental to my relationships as an adult. I find myself dissecting everything anyone says to me and it’s just unhealthy. I couldn’t even count how many times Fruitpie has said, “Did I say that?” to me over how I perceived her words or actions…and while my response would be, “You didn’t have to” there is really no way for me to know what is the reality of the situation. It seems that those conversations always lead to an angry end, and while she is long over it, I am left stewing for hours as I over analyze the situation again and again in my head. We’ve had so many misfires the past few days…and I don’t know if it’s the season, the wildfires or just me and my hormones. I haven’t been able to help feeling depressed again lately…and on the highest possible dosage of my anti-depressant, I’m not sure what else to do. I know there is something more that is bothering me, but I can’t seem to be able to find what it is. It seems a little hopeless when even I can’t get through all of my layers.
Fruitpie has been wanting me to pay attention to the news for quite some time. She’s been turning it on in the morning, so I generally overhear it while I’m making her breakfast and lunch. Unfortunately for her, it’s not the political stuff that catches my attention…that stuff just depresses me. It’s the absurd news that seems to stick in my mind. I think the most amusing today was the piece on vaccines being recommended for government aides attending NASCAR. I understand needing to be immunized when traveling to other countries, but is this the first act in recognizing the south as a foreign land as well? Have they finally developed a vaccination for redneck? Can they prevent one from catching a case of “banging yer cousin” or “Pregnant with ma niece”? Perhaps there’s been a revolutionary breakthrough that will inoculate one against a nasty case of stupid.
The other crap that caught my attention was more volatile than the rest. There was yet another spot on school shootings, and they always point out, surprise surprise, that the shooter was a “troubled teen”. How fucking stupid and irritating. Of course it was. Why would a happy, sitcom style teenager shoot up a school? I can’t tell you how many times I daydreamed about beating my classmates, teachers, and family members to death. If I had been happy, that certainly would not have happened. Why are these people so fucking stupid? Did they completely lose touch with their own teenage years? These are probably the same people who tout that those are the best years of your life. One could not pay me enough to relive my childhood and adolescence. These “authority figures” act like they’re so concerned and understand children so well, yet they completely miss what they need to do to help. They praise the “good kids” and shower them with love and attention while the “bad”, “weird”, “troubled” kids who do things to try to win the same treatment are admonished for it. They’ll say, ‘They’re just asking for attention. Don’t give it to them”. That might work for a three year old, but when a young adult who appears morbidly depressed does it, WHY would you ignore them? There was this story yesterday about these outdoor “tough love” camps that two kids died at. One was because they severely neglected and berated a kid who was complaining of pain and fatigue. It turned out that he had a bleeding hernia or ulcer or something and subsequently died a few weeks later. The other was about this family who sent their clinically depressed, suicidal son to a “therapy camp” because they didn’t know how to help him. They ended up treating him the same way and he hanged himself. While the camp folk were at fault, the real dumbass of the year award goes to the parents on that one. Did they expect that the camp would beat that depression out of him? Did they really think that sending him away was the right thing to do? Do parents really become THAT stupid when their children are of a certain age? It’s like my father telling me I was too young to be depressed. He was a dumbass anyway. They used to go get tarot readings every week for a few years, starting when I was about twelve. Once they let me go in with them and the woman offered to do mine, too. His answer was much the same…that I was too young to have a relevant reading…that I couldn’t possible ask for or wonder about anything as important as an adult would. Funny how a kid that age wouldn’t have any kind of future to wonder about when their whole life is ahead of them. Letting me have that would’ve made significantly less sense than a forty something going weekly to see if employment or riches were in his near future. Ugh. I hope that kind of stupidity is just an aging heterosexual boomer thing. Otherwise, kill me at forty.
I spent all morning plugging away at an impossible query. I hate when I can’t figure something out, but I decided to call it quits after lunch. Another report request landed on my lap shortly thereafter, and I was able to nail it within half an hour. Somehow that totally validated my earlier frustration.
I’ve been keeping myself busy…and I think that I’m finally over all that emotional drama from earlier this month. One of my first shrinks told me that the healthiest thing I could do is stay away from my parents as much as possible. I think I’ve officially given up trying with them. For real this time. It’s just not worth the aggravation, and I dare say I’m getting too old for this shit.
I went home for lunch today and it took quite a lot of energy to tear myself away from the furkids and come back into the office. There is so much work that needs to be done at home, and it’s hard to resist such a warm welcome. No matter how I’m feeling, they can always make everything go away with their wagging tails and full body hugs. I don’t know how anybody could not enjoy having a pet.
I finally forced myself to do some socializing downstairs. My buddy in Marketing told me that my boss is now up her ass, too. I told her that she probably got bored with mine. It’s crazy how the most fucked up people in an organization are usually in leadership positions. I don’t understand it. It’s like the denser and more incompetent you are, the more power you are given. How do stupid people end up in these positions? Last week, the clinical director finally got a proper request in for a new workstation. I told them previously that I could not do anything until a form was filled out and the request was approved by finance. So, we got an email after the approval making an amendment to the software request. It said that she needed “Word and Internet Access”. My boss came over to me in a huff to ask what kind of office licenses we have. I told her we’re covered and she said, “Well, do we have to buy Internet Access or did it come with the office suite?”
I’m not sure where that falls on the Scale of User Stupidity, but I think it’s definitely somewhere between “Excel closes when every time I click this red X” and the user waiting at the shredder for her pages to print.
I finally composed that letter to my father in reply to his accusation that my offer of assistance was an insult. I went over it at least five times before I actually sent it, and felt perfectly comfortable with its content. I didn’t say anything that I feel to be untrue or unfair, and there weren’t any twinges of guilt…which is quite an improvement from the last time we had a situation like this. I told him that he disappointed me by misjudging me so grossly. I think that disappointment is the worst feeling you can conjure in another family member, but it is how I felt. I told him that I don’t find him immature, necessarily, but feel that he has managed his finances unwisely. I told him that there won’t always be somebody to bail him out like our grandmother always did. Then I mentioned that he needs to be taking whatever he is offered, working two jobs if he has to and taking anti-depressants to regulate him. I also said that my mother’s ridiculous idea about unemployment sites existing only to fuel a government quota was absurd.
He replied about how much he used to work…which was before I was born. I don’t see how that’s relevant to his situation now. He said that the ridiculous idea was his…which really concerns me. He said that these jobs are posted by employers who have already filled the position from within. He continued, “I was given the job and told that they have to post it, just to show that they did an employee search. This happened to me a few times, and is neither ridiculous or rare.” Ok…enter logic here. WHY would they give the position to somebody only to tell them, “Woops, we already filled that job.” and blame the government? The only way this would make any sense is if they had interviews and ended up hiring a pre-existing employee…but not giving someone the job and taking it away because it was already filled. That’s just dumb. Doesn’t it make more sense that they decided that he wasn’t going to work out and fired him before he had any time invested and could have received unemployment? He claimed that he is trying to get multiple jobs and expects to start at the bottom…which totally contradicts his telling me that he turned down a position for $14 an hour and replying that he wasn’t interested in the jobs I sent him because he’d need to work TWO.
His grand finale was that he tried taking anti-depressants but didn’t like what they did to his creativity…so he quit caffeine because THAT was making him depressed. His final sentence was that we will revisit this in a few months. I’m thinking of replying simply, “Let’s not”.
I really thought I’d be more upset by his reply, but the truth is that I’m really just sad for him. He obviously has lost touch with reality. It bothers me that these ridiculous things can come out of his mouth and he either really believes them (which is disturbing) or is lying to make himself look better…which is just sad. Either way, I’m glad it’s over for at least a few months. A few months means that the holidays will come and go and I will not have to deal with their brand of crazy.
I’ve been trying to construct a reply to my father for a few days now. He sent me a letter in prime passive aggressive form a few days ago…and after bludgeoning me in the first half, he invited me to some stupid event in the last half. I’ve been stewing about it…thinking I’d get less angry and have more mental clarity. Instead, I just have this underlying anger and resentment simmering below the surface of everything I do. I don’t know why I even bother holding on. I guess I’m just attached to him because he was the saner of the two…and I shouldn’t be surprised that he can so grossly misjudge me.
He sent me an email this morning saying that he did not hear from me whether I would be attending this event. How can he be so fucking moronic? Why would I want to go anywhere with him after the things he said? It’s clear that I need to compose this response sooner than later, I just don’t even know where to begin reigning in my thoughts on the matter. I never should have resumed contact with them.
