So I sold out.

I put ads on this blog. Why? Because I am fairly broke and because anything would help and because I trust that 99% of you come here to read my posts, not look at ads for anti0-aging remedies. (That does NOT mean you shouldn't click on those ads if you like what you see).

Let's see... other happenings... I threw away all the angry fat clothes I accumulated when I was several sizes larger due to extreme stress. Please note that this statement does not imply that I m now a size zero. It merely suggests that I am smaller than a baby rhino and am getting healthier. Take what you can get. I certainly have to.

HMMM. In other news, I joined APOCALYPSE! APOCALYPSE! Facebook this week after years of intense pressure. No, you can't find me on facebook because you don't know my real name. Maybe all this therapy will help me get over my internet anonymity issues and we can all be together, names, faces, and all.

To make up for all my perfidy, here is a picture of me naked. Too bad it does you so little good.

Love, love.

Now this is right

I talked it over with my surviving female relatives and, while noting the opinion of avitable, we agreed that retail lingerie is the right thing for me to do.

Who else but me could appreciate and sympathize with the issues common to those blessed with largesse?

and who can forget this photo??



Jeez I look almost flat chested in that one. Need to find more photos.

Oh My Heck

So much has happened.

And yet nothing has really changed. I am the same underemployed college adjunct as I was and I have gathered no steam on the Phd front. I have only the most filmy vision of the future.

What's interesting is my total conviction that although things are not so great financially right now, they will get better. The getting better might be greatly facilitated by my getting off my ass and finding an additional job - but something (probably irresponsibility) is preventing me from taking that course. Something else seems... pending. I have started writing again suddenly, and it is not just a meandering trickle of over emotionalized clap trap about my hurt feelings or my wounded sense of entitlement. It is ever so much better than that - but I am not ready to share it yet. Soon.

I have missed you all. What happened? Well. What happened is that for a long, long time, this blog was fueled by a narrative. A story. A bad and terrible story, yes, but people want to know how it ended. Now that it has ended, good heavens what is left for us all to say to each other.

I really like to think that there is more to say. There must be more to say, because I think about you all so very much. Sizzle. LizB, KateP, LAS. All of you. But no one more than Adam Avitable. Adam, honey, I am trying to get my shit together and be a good friend. I am narcissistic and complicated and downright fearful that if you really knew me, you'd pass. But these are no excuse for my rudeness, and regardless of all other considerations, I adore you and your blog. And did I mention you?

The end.

What happened to me?

A lot has happened. I lost my job, and that turned out to be a good thing. As it turns out, I hated that job, and I don't miss it. I miss the paycheck a lot, but for $3126 per month? That much pain? Not worth it at all.

I have also been doing some, oh, mental and physical inventory in an effort to somehow get myself back to where I was before the Recent Unpleasantness*.

Guess what? At the moment in my life when I thought I was the most plain and dreary looking, I looked like this:



I was so terribly insecure. I actually thought having those hips made me fat. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. So not funny.

How are you?

* That whore my father married has sold our house, and moved back to the old neighborhood, and gee it's a good thing I don't have that horrible job anymore because she has been lunching with my former coworkers and telling them what a terrible person I am to have "done this to her." Whatever could she mean?

I am an idiot

I was thinking in the shower today. (Naked! Naked!)

I am an idiot. Here's why:

1) I have a hard time drinking water and breathing at the same time. Seriously. I turn blue.

2) I can make out with a guy and like, have his tongue in my mouth, but I'll break up with him if he expects me to eat off the same fork. That is SO gross.

3) I am afraid of the sound of toilets flushing in the dark. But ONLY when it is dark out.

4) I cry EVERY SINGLE TIME I watch the episode of LOST when Charlie dies.

5) I watch LOST.

6) Oh my God.

7) I am totally fine with how fat I have gotten, yet I won't wash my hair more than twice a week because I don't want it to get "damaged". UH... could I be more damaged... like... everywhere else?

8) Speaking of idiotocity, I put SEVEN different things on my face each day to prevent aging. I am going to be FORTY in ten days. Ten days, people. The bell has rung.

9) I am forty and I still have daddy issues.

10) I am forty and I still count fat grams and calories (note how little good it does me).


Anyone else feel stupid today?

(I love you).

Nina

Are we getting anywhere?

Is this any better? I think it looks pretty awful, but I am used to the dark and storminess. Is the red doing anything for anyone?? The white background?

Also: I believe that novels, like all essays, should have thesis statements. My current working thesis:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.


The quotation comes from the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. If Jesus really said this, and I hope he did say it... uh, Jesus you are absolutely correct. If you don't give what you have, all that havingness will come back and bite you square in the ass. Destruction is certain.

Another note: thinking about writing the book has been fun because WOW have I done great work in the area of being angry and blaming others for everything. Since I take comedy any way I can get it, I have been getting lots and lots of laughs making notes for this book. Let me know if you want special tips in the area of blaming others or feeling viciously and sadistically persecuted. I have special skills in these areas.

I love you just because you are you, but also because you are beautiful, and I can't help myself (and because you show up here and read about my badness).

Love,

Nina

Liar

There is a commandment somewhere on the tablets the anthropologists can't manage to find. It says (reportedly): don't lie.

Oh.

Eek.

I lie all the time. I do it to protect other people from truths I fear people cannot - or should not have to - handle.

Sometimes I lie because the truth would break the hearts of people I love.

But I also lie to make money. (I have two jobs and neither employers knows the other exists).

Other times I lie about where I am going (Kate doesn't need to know that I am going out at 9pm for a cheap bottle of hootch because I can't sleep and oh dear God please tell me that in heaven, everyone sleeps, all the time. Please? Thank you).

My lying concerns me. It is true that I can go to confession and bore some sweet old priest with a list of all the times I told my brother I was really feeling fine, and thank you for asking, when the truth was I was sharpening my knives and looking for a way to commit the deed - and still look pretty in the casket.

But we - the priest and I - would be there in that hot and uncomfortable cell for a long time if I gave all this information. And sometimes I think to myself: how terrible for the priest who has to listen to people's sins.

"Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been three months since my last confession. Twice I drank a bottle of Night Train and ran naked through Cooper's Square. Nine times I interfered with myself while thinking of Anna Nicole. I hate animals and children because they are loud and smelly. I rarely bathe and I have not flossed in a year. Oh! And I got fired from my job for drunkenness and something they call sexual harassment. Bastards! Is that their sin, or mine? Okay! That about covers it. What's the penance?"

Where was I?

Oh. My lying. There has been something (lately) that I lie about all the time, to everyone. Even to Lindsey.



Sometimes when work is slow and I have the inclination, I go to Woodlawn - all the way up there in the Bronx. There, I sit in the cemetery (it's a big one). Because my parents don't have graves, looking at those of other people gives me peace. I do not know the people buried at Woodlawn, but I wonder who those people - all those people - are. And I hope they don't mind that I come and sit with them, even though my visits are for my own benefit - that at best, their resting places are a proxy for the graves of my deceased parents.

It is not a sadness thing. I don't go up there and cry or cling to a stranger's headstone. But I do spend hours and hours there. I sit and think about there people buried there, and I wonder who they are, and I ask myself if I could talk to them, what one thing they wished they had done differently before it was all over.

My mother, who went out with real style, said on her deathbed, "I wish I had worried less and laughed more."

My father probably said something but I'll never know what it was. I wasn't there. But I can damn sure tell you what he would have done differently, and if you have been reading my internet diary this long, you know, too.

But that was not my point.

Lying. I lie far more than my conscience allows.

How much lying do you do? Do you have regrets? And if lying is ever legal, when? why? how?

Waiting, part two

My cat is on my bed exactly where I placed him last night. The food and water is untouched. And my cat is dead.

I feel surprisingly emotionless about it... so far. I keep telling myself that I have cleaned up my last sand dollar of cat puke. I keep telling myself that he will never scream at me again and again and again for no reason. I keep telling myself that he was old and that he was tired. (He was). Also it had to happen someday. And he was (obviously) suffering (last night, anyway). But I still feel like shit.

Should I have taken him to the vet last night when I realized he wasn't breathing right? Should I have gotten on the cat boards and hoped that cat fanatics on the west coast had an answer? Should I have been done something other than shove food and water at him? What could have saved him?

Well, whatever the case may be, he is not saved. I have stressed tested him and he is most assuredly not living.

As I write this, he is just where I left him on my bed last night, and yes, I know that is a violation of something or other. I'll have to take him to be cremated today (isn't that what I am supposed to do)? But right this minute, I am just waiting until I feel up to putting him in a duffle bag and taking him to the vet. Let's hope I get that going before the flies arrive.



Bon Voyage, Cathead. I loved you. I liked you. I wanted to feed you to other, foul-tempered animals.

But mostly I loved you. (You were darn cute).

Love,

Nina

Then again

I don't want her to die. What a hateful thing to say. And not what I meant at all.

What I am resenting is that no one in my entire family is willing to confront her except me, and frankly I feel that since I have already told her off, I am no longer obligated. I should get to log off this problem.

Except that I don't, but for a different reason. It is a reason I don't like at all.

The reason is that forgiveness is a problem, and it is not a tiny little irksome fly in the ointment kind of problem. It is a genuine fat ass issue. And thinking about the issue has brought to my attention a certain defect of character that I can no longer avoid confronting.

I suck at forgiveness. For years I just didn't do it at all. People who wronged me got cold and stony irreversible nothing from me forever and ever and ever and ever. I did more than just hold grudges. I completely removed offenders from my life. (This is the reason why so very many of my ex-boyfriends haunt me for years after we break up - often well after they have married other people and had children and the whole show. It is because they hurt me and I shunned them and they feel... like... crap. As they probably should. Oh I am sorry. I am digressing. Let me stop that.

Oh wait just a little more digression. Please note that I still shun people who hurt me and I defend my right to do this because I don't think there is anything in the bible that says you have to let people kick you in the face twice. There is that thing about turning the other cheek but I think whoever put in the bible should have left it out. I hope it wasn't Jesus. Was it Jesus? Ugh).

Back to my story. One fine day, I made a great stride, a breakthrough in the forgiveness area. I was reading a book about the last words of Christ and some incredibly smart person pointed out that there is more than one way to take this one thing that Jesus said. Here is the thing:

"Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

At first glance, this just looks like forgiveness muckity muck. Nothing special. However, if you look carefully at the grammar of the sentence (which is exactly the kind of thing I like to do in my spare time), you will see that the word "for" in this case could be translated as "because". When one reads the sentence as "Forgive them, because they know not what they do" or even closer to today's vernacular "Forgive them, because, seriously, if they knew exactly how bad the thing they are doing right now was, WOW. They would SO not do it." Jesus put things with more elegance, even when in terrible pain. He was... well. Let me just get back to my point.


So I got much better at the business of forgiving because I got to apply the idea that the people who were kicking me in the face simply wouldn't do it if they were aware that they were hurting me so very badly. And so then by that logic, well, of course I could forgive them. No one who knew they were being such a total ass hole would behave in such a way, so obviously they were under the influence of a terrible portion of ignorance - a portion so enormous that I could even feel kind of sorry for the person who kicked me in the face.

So now I can forgive people. Some of them. The ones I can find ignorance or error with, the people whose real intention wasn't to kick me in face.

But her?

She knew. And my dad?

He knew too.

And they both did it anyway and I can't forgive them. And that is likely to be the biggest spiritual problem of my entire life. Good thing I got to it this early. If I live to be 100, I might maybe work it out. But I am not hopeful.

And anyway, is anyone else as sick of this subject as I am? I am so tired of it. I am tired of writing about it and I am sorry for continuing to dwell on it. The fact is, I am mentally better all the time. It just doesn't show here because it's hard to write about being happy or feeling better because everything is fine over here posts are pretty boring and I am pretty sure that is not what you come here for. Is that what you come here for? I don't even know.

Whatever your reason for coming here, thank you for reading.


Love,

Nina

Time again

What happens next?

Seven months after moving into Bob and Kate's Asylum, I have been thinking a lot - probably more than is healthy for a girl like me.

Everything I assumed would happen in my life did not happen, and a whole lot of other things happened instead. Let me assure you that this is not whining; it is a simple statement of facts.

I wanted to graduate from college without having learned anything temporally relevant, and for the most part, I succeeded. Byron, Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath - cool. I even composed a performance art piece during which I extinguished candles on various parts of my body. (I got an A on in that class).

I am not constituted to solve world famine, genocide, dirty terrible people of other cultures were the jurisdiction of other young idealists. I just wanted peace. Green grass. Leafy trees, waterfalls, smiling babies. This makes me a lightweight. Morally speaking, of course.

And of course, because on the very best of days, God thinks I am fit for... what? a spittoon? I find that I am the person my family and my therapist believe is responsible for confronting the evil of Erika. Why? Because of everyone in my family, I was the one most injured. Also, because no one else in my family wants to explain it to her because it's all so very untidy and Gosh, what to say? So Nina should just do it.

Normally I am up for a writing project, especially if I can be vituperative and profane.

But this time? This time... internet, I confess that I simply would not know where to start. I just want her to die. But before she does, I want her to know perhaps for the first time, what she did to me, my family, and my father, the love of my life.

Crazy train? I'll be at the bar.

Love,
Nina

The good corkscrew

This won't be one of those posts where I make an effort to make sense or hope for coherence. I just have not been available lately, even to myself, for reflection. So I am just going to start typing.

I have been lowering the amount of the heavenly sleep inducing medication that induces sleep but also causes serious metabolic problems for 8 - 9% of patients. Go ahead and infer that I am in the 8 (or 9)% of people experience serious metabolic problems due to the heavenly sleep inducing medication. To be fair, it also caused most of the other harmless but still irritating side effects, so I am certain, even if I never sleep again, that cessation of this particular (heavenly) medication is necessary.

Speaking of heaven, I am not going to get in. Lately when I do sleep, I have dreams that are definitely going to prevent my admission into anything like life after death paradise. I am not even sure they take people who have these kinds of subconscious constructions in limbo. Curious? Well, I suppose I intended to arouse curiosity. I either have raunchy, perverted, vivid and scandalous dreams about sex, or I have dreams about exacting bloody and merciless revenge on... certain people. In my defense, I will say this: aside from that one real life incident where I might have kissed that man who was (and is) in every conceivable way grossly inappropriate, I have been a perfect gentlewoman with regard to sexual behavior in real life -- for like, a huge number of years now. Five? Six? I don't count anymore. Nuns would pretty much behave the way I do, (aside from that one real life incident where I might have kissed that man who was (and is) in every conceivable way grossly inappropriate). And yet due to the perverted things I make up in my brain when I am unconscious, I am totally screwed. EXCEPT TOTALLY NOT. How is this fair? Feh.

Which brings me to this: you know you have a bad relationship with alcohol when you have two corkscrews, one of which works really well and doesn't annoy you - and another that is too sciency and doesn't work very well and annoys you consistently - and the one you really like? You keep that one on your desk. Where you spend 16 hours a day. The other one? Hell if I know. I think it is in the kitchen. Somewhere. Maybe. But boy, howdy, I know where the good corkscrew is.

And how are all of you doing? Have I told you that you are beautiful, and I love you? Have I said so lately? Let me do so now: you are beautiful and I love you. Thank you for reading.

Things to say later

Stay tuned for a real post tomorrow featuring:

a) drugs

b) the baby Jesus

c) emotional violence

d) more crap about the baby Jesus

e) me realizing how full of crap all this really is

I just can't write today. Stop by tomorrow.


I love you. For reals.

Whatever, already

After hauling boxes and enduring the sneers of the entire staff of my building, I decided that I am going to take another week to move my remaining possessions over to the new house. I have to work and it's unavoidable, as is the chagrin of my building's entire staff if I don't sneak my remaining possessions out in back packs and duffle bags. I can only do so much in a day, and after the unbelievable stress of the last two weeks, I just can't deal with any more - any more sneers, any more boxes, any more nasty cab drivers and certainly not any more work terrorism.

I don't know what has happened to me - I used to be able to just roll with whatever came my way. The person I have become has a brain like a chicken wing and the nervous system of a rabid monkey. I have to slow down, or I will be left with nothing but the paper slippers at Belleview and a handful of medicine that no longer works unless I take three times the maximum daily dose.

Having said all that, let me apologize to all the people I have let down in the last few weeks. My blog has not been fun to read and I owe other obligations to people I shall not name - you know who you are... and I have no excuse for myself except the above chicken-wing-monkey situation. I'll be my old self again someday. Try November, maybe.

Love,
Nina

This... is crazy

There is no way a person can move over three days and then also work three jobs at the same time. And yet this is what I am doing. I have to be out of my apartment by, um, tomorrow. I have packed and packed and packed and packed, and yet there is still more crap to be unloaded and dealt with. It's unbelievably stressful, and yet I must do it and damnit, I have deadlines at work that I have to meet and I can't blow them. So with one hand I am grading papers and with the other I am stuffing books into boxes and taping them shut and trying to figure out how to get this stuff down the service elevator, into a cab and down the street without violating the building's rules, which state that no one can move anything after 5pm - which is the only time my friend with the big SUV can help me move my stuff. It's a total clusterfuck. I can't cope. Cutting back on anxiety reducing drugs at the same time? That's not working out at all. I find myself either staring at the bottle of xanax and weeping - or taking them and then merely crying. The stress, oh lord God, is too much.

Lisa at Clusterfook recently posted about self-revoking her Whining Card, but she is a stronger woman than I am. I am whining. I will post again and hopefully I will not be doing even more of it.. the whining.

Love,

Nina

Google Goggles.... they may have a point

Recently, Gmail introduced a feature called Google Goggles and I think it may be a good feature. If I had use of it last night, I might not have accidentally hit send when I wrote the following email to my step mother. If you are not up to speed with the disaster currently afflicting my family, the short version is that my dad died in July, and a few months later, only though directly requesting the information from my step-mother, did we learn that my father had left her his entire estate. Why does this upset us so much, oh, only because the entirety of the estate was amassed before he ever met or married her - and because his will entirely disregards his first marriage of 35 years that resulted in 3 children who are now utterly disinherited. Adding fuel to our ire is the fact that all three of us incurred enormous charges for plane tickets, rental cars and hotel rooms in the last two years that have left us all completely broke and in debt, where before he had cancer, we were all debt free and had plenty of savings.

The email I sent last night was in response to one she sent me suggesting that I should take over the bill for the storage of some of my mother's furniture - items my dad kept in storage for many years with the promise that I would have them once I was living in a situation suitable for those items. I see that in the future happening round about... never. So after having spent a week filled with disgust and rage, and having all kinds of people tell me to calm down and blah blah, I drafted this email, intending to never send it, and OOPS. I did. Ready for this?


E-Since you have inherited every piece of property, monetary, and real, my perspective is that you have inherited also my furniture and also my mother’s. The bill is in my father’s name. Can you reap the benefits of my father’s estate without taking on its responsibilities? I think not.

I have asked you twice for the information that would give me leave to take on the bill you have sought fit to shirk upon me, while you languish in the benefits of my father's estate. You have not provided that information. That said, if you wish to make a gift of my what was previously mine and my mother’s, you should at least make known to me how I am to take upon the fees associated with the property.

The language in which you have addressed me in our most recent emails has been so insulting that I am certain that no benefit can be gained by any further talk between us, save this disagreeable business of who is to pay the bill for your furniture. If your desire is to make a gift of the furniture in storage, please enable me at once to take on the bill. Otherwise, you can, as I am sure you know, dispose of your property in any manner in which you find gives you pleasure.

-N


HMMMM... rash, no? So is this

a) funny
b) disastrous, and I should apologize
c) right on and who cares?
d) hell with it - just move on

What do you think?

Belately, my dear mother

I must confess to the world (or, the four people who still read this blog) that I went to work on Friday wearing no undergarment (save an ill-fitting bra).  

My sainted mother, who would have killed herself had she known she could have raised a child such that the result would be thus, would have turned 65 yesterday, had she not died of breast cancer at 52.  For all to see, my beautiful mother:

There was nothing else I could do, under the circumstances. I hope my most indulgent mother will forgive me for the insult to both her character and mine, as I found myself without any resources to prevent such an un-ladylike showing. If it were not for my pale, blond, an uninteresting feminine area, such a crime against civility and decency would have been impossible. And for those genetic factors, I must thank my mother, the fairest creature that ever walked the earth. Shall we see her again? Yes, we shall:



Will she ever forgive me? Shall I endure my remaining days in shame? I shall not. I think my sainted mother knows the hearts and minds of her children - and knows under what treachery they now suffer. I may be to kind to myself, yes. I find myself with few others that would be as kind to me as she was, and so I soldier on, knowing that on a better day, I will fulfill both my debt to decency and civility as my mother taught me. That day that was Friday, October, 10th, will be disregarded.

Belately, happy birthday to you, my sainted mother. May you always have those who remember you in their prayers.

Black Magic Marker - or pantless?

To cap off my week of work insanity and general turbulence, I had to be prepared to have one of my classes observed. If you do not work in the teaching industry, let me just say this: being observed is terrible. You can really prepare for it because, duh, it's just the same job you always do and the real wild card is the students - who on any given day are in any given mood and always surprise you, whether you have a colleague sitting in the back of the room watching your every move or not.

So yesterday, since I was just about driven out of my wits by the extent of the work piling up around me, I tried to beg out of the observation by sending a polite email explaining that blah blah can we just do this next week? His answer: no. His schedule was fixed and blah blah see you tomorrow.

Well, well, well. ___________.

So I worked and worked and worked yesterday and did not stop until it was whenever, and I have no idea when I went to bed but I awakened at 5am after several surreal nightmares. I showered and picked through my laundry bag looking for something suitable to wear during my observation.

It was then that I observed, to my horror, that half my laundry was not in the bag - and since this were true, the other half of my laundry had to be downstairs in a dryer. For the past 48 hours.

So I ran downstairs at 5 in the morning, braless, barefoot, and a degree of unhappy just one degree shy of the degree of unhappy I achieved when I discovered that some unkind person had taken my laundry from the dryer and tossed it into a cart with someone else's wet laundry - and that the entire mixture had become sour with mildew in the interim.

The concequences of this laundry error were dire.

I had two choices of things to wear that would be acceptable: one, the suit I wore to my father's funeral, which had been crumpled into the bottom of a plastic bag for weeks, since I advertantly set my handbag down on some recently disgarded chewing gum , and without realizing it, lifted my handbag into my lap, ruining the pants of the suit with a splotch of gum the size of a sand dollar. In order to wear this suit, I would have to shake the wrinkles out of it, pretend it was not covered in cat hair, and use a black magic marker to disguise the gum. (I know most people would not consider this an option. Sadly, I would).

The second item I could potentially wear was a pair of buff colored linen pants with a pale pink shell with similarly colored sandals. Perhaps a bit summery for the time of year, but presentable. But this second choice had it's own issue: the near see-throughness of the pants. Only by wearing absolutely no underwear - MAYBE a flesh colored thong - could one ever wear these pants out of the house. I quickly realized that since I own no flesh colored thong and certainly would not spend the entire day I was to be put through teaching observation hell with a thong up my crack - even if I did happen to possess such a garment, the only way to make it out of the house in this outfit was to go commando.

Those were my options. I had no others. Knowing me so well as you do, what do you think I did? (I'll tell you tomorrow).

Love,
Nina

Memo to Jesus

To: Jesus Christ 

From: Nina, swears-a-lot

Re: Jewishness 

Today, Jesus Christ, I write to thank you for being your lovely perfect self, but also for being Jewish and for making Judaism such an integral part of world culture.  While I realize that after your torturous and unmerited execution, others created a new religion (or, like, hundreds) based on your teachings, if it were not for Judaism and its lovely importance, there would be no such thing as Yom Kippur - and I would not have the night off from teaching, and I would be cramming my face to with Xanax to finish the other work I have to do for my other jobs, work that is so very pressing that I am literally shaking in my chair.  

Regarding other matters, events, and unpleasantness related to myself and my ever shrinking circle of loved ones, I think you know I have some opinions and beliefs that need careful reflection and possible modification before we can speak of them.  (Read: I am pissed.   Why did you let this happen to my family?)  Expect further official communication regarding same at a later date, when my spiritual situation is more suitable for discussion of these matters.

Sincerely (we'll get to love issue later.  Probably much.),

Nina

The pain of chickens

Here I am, up all night grading papers and willing myself not to give up and fail at my job.  

I am, at midnight, still grading, and I click on a submitted paper and find that a student has written a paper entitled "Chickens have a hard life."

Well, I'll be damned.  I had no idea that chickens were suffering so gravely, but guess what?   

I get to stay up for at least another hour and learn all about... the pain of... chickens. 

Love, 

Nina

PS.  Dear Lord Jesus, in another life, could I be a chicken so that I might be merely uncomfortable rather than in possession of free will and a conscience?  That'd be  great.  Thanks. 

Not built in a day

No emails, no phone calls, no nothing.  

We are going to do absolutely nothing until we have conferred with all of my dad's brothers, and the paltry check she says she mailed to my brother arrives and clears.  It's rather like standing around with a grenade all day and waiting for permission to pull the pin and run run like hell.

In other news, I did pack up three boxes and three duffle bags and my friend came and helped me move them to the house where I will be living.  I am maybe going over there tomorrow to help her mom start putting things in order.  I say maybe because she is a little bit less eager to get started than blah blah blah... it's just a hard process for anyone to go through.  If she cancels, it won't surprise me.  I will be living there in a week or so and then there will be no avoiding the person who lives in her house who is there expressly for the purpose of helping her organize and sort out her things.   Hopefully this will go well and she will not end up hating me inside of a week.  At any rate, in very short time I will have figured out how best to help and I will have a place to live. 

Can I tell  you all how surreal this is?  I have to rewrite my whole life, change my entire concept of the world, and at the same time, move into someone else's house and work three jobs and... I can't tell you how overwhelmed I am.  If I thought the anxiety was bad before my father died, this disorientation and the total breakdown of my family and the just crushing sadness of it... well it might be worse.  Or maybe it's better because I am so completely against anxiety.  I am not anxious at all... just so busy I don't know what to do when and all the while there is a voice in my head telling me my father died and we never even said goodbye and he just left me with nothing after I set him up with her and encouraged him to move on after my mom's death.  And that I have been the instrument that caused my siblings to be disinherited and hurt so badly.  And then I am grading papers and people are parading into my apartment two and three and four times a day since it is not rented yet and I am supposedly going to move like... next week. 

Is this a post?  I don't have any idea what I just wrote about but you can read it if you want to and if you have anything to say you can say it and if you think I am boring and self-pitying and kind of jack-ass you are most likely correct.  Starting over when you never really got started in the first place and you are 38 and all you have in the credit column of your life is not being dead yet is utterly surreal.  And that is all I can think of to say today.  

Thank you for reading.