Campfyre Stories

I was sick with the flu for a week.  Just about when I was getting better, my niece Moon wound up with the same flu.  I know that my mom has been trying to work at their soon-to-be new house every weekend, so I volunteered to spend the day with Moon yesterday so that they could still get work done, but she could just take it easy.

She came by around 11:30 and we had a breakfast of apple pancakes, then watched cartoons.  She doesn’t get to watch much tv at home, and she loves that I have cable.  I wanted to take her apple picking, but I know that I wasn’t all that energetic by the time I hit the point she was at and, since the sky was threatening rain, we decided not to do that.  Instead, we did a quick grocery shopping and haunted a couple of dollar stores.

She’s so much fun to go shopping with, even if it’s just at a dollar store.  We found a box of personalized pens.  Very cool pens, actually, that just happened to be personalized.  She started going through the box, asking, "What does this say?  What about this one?  What does this say?"  She’s starting to learn to read, and tried to guess that since one pen said "Lydia", all the "L" pens said Lydia, but it was the Kristen pen that most cracked me up.

"Auntie Fyre, what does this one say?"
"Kristen."
"HA!  That’s a silly name for a pen."

We tried on all the halloween stuff and talked about what was cool and what was silly.  We put a quarter in the gumball machine to watch the bells, whistles and converyer belts.  We bought silly, little dollar store things after an hour of just looking at what was available.  It was a blast.  She even ran into an old classmate of hers from dance class.

Often when Moon and I spend too much time together, we make each other a little crazy.  She likes to push my buttons over and over again, but yesterday was not like that at all.  She helped me cook, told me *exactly* what she wanted for dinner.  She was pleasant conversation and a lot of fun to be around.  She stayed until 8pm, which was completely fine with me.

When she left, she was as polite as can be.  "Thank you for having me over, Auntie Fyre.  I had a really good time."  Well I had a really good time, too.  And I had a day of not dwelling on all the crap that seems to surround me pretty often.  It was a really wonderful day.

But the truth is that I can’t care anymore.

My life is falling apart.  That’s the bottom line of it all.  It’s been a slow collapse for the past, I don’t know how long, but now I can see that things are really just falling apart around me and I don’t know how to fix any of it.

Everyone seems to think that they know what’s going on and why I’m, apparently, unbearable to be around, but every single one of them is completely self-absorbed in their thinking.  I’m not even allowed to talk to very many people about what’s actually going on because they are so much worse off than I am, and have no problems telling me so and why.

My son thinks it’s funny and appropriate to call things "gay" or to call people "faggot" and that’s not bigotry.  Having told him that it is, in fact, bigoted to use those words in those ways he decided to stop using them around me.  He still uses them when he thinks I can’t hear him.  I make no difference in his opinions of pretty much anything at all.  As a result, I now just pretend not to notice when he talks about how very disgusting fat people are and how much fun they are to mock.  My pain would do one thing and one thing only, cause him to say those things when he thinks I can’t hear him - essentially behind my back.

At 16, he’s developed a martyr complex.  No one has ever had it worse than him.  He refuses to pitch in around the house, save for the bare minimum of "one productive thing" a day, choosing the simplest of jobs, but to call him ungrateful is hurtful and untrue.  He asks for money regularly and takes it as a personal affront that I don’t make enough money to just throw money at him whenever he asks.  Despite how permissive a parent I am, despite the things I do for him and the concessions that I make, I’m always the bad guy, and there’s nothing I can do to change that perception.

My living situation is terrible.  My landlord makes promises to fix things or to upgrade things that need replacing, but he doesn’t actually DO any of it.  He’s far too busy catering to the squatters upstairs who should have moved out 6 weeks ago.  Every night I fall asleep listening to the neglected dog behind me, whose owners leave him out for hours on end, even when it’s below freezing outside.  In the front, I am subjected to blasting crappy music and little kids screaming "nigga, nigga, nigga".  I want to move, but I don’t have any money right now.  I can’t afford it until the spring at least.

I also have to buy a car.  My mother seems to think that it’s because they are moving 30 minutes outside of the city that I’m 100 different kinds of upset about it.  I don’t particularly want to buy a car, it’s going to be a stretch to afford it, but I don’t care that she’s moving.  The problem is that if I want to visit and not be completely trapped there, I HAVE to have a car, otherwise, there’s no telling what kind of schedule I’d wind up being on.

Friends.  Ha.  What friends?  There was a time when I had a lot of friends and could find something to do most nights, but now my friends are few and far between.  Not to sugar coat it, there are several people whose company I don’t particularly enjoy anymore, but for the most part, my friends have moved away and I have yet to meet anyone new.  People I used to have things in common with aren’t interested in me or are too wrapped up in other things, I don’t know.  I don’t want to guess.  It doesn’t even really matter why, it’s just how things are.

I don’t even know what to say about work.  For the most part, it’s boring and unchallenging.  On the other hand, though I do an exceptional job by all measures, I don’t get paid nearly enough.  I don’t meet people, I don’t talk to people, I don’t have any social interaction through my job, which started well before I became a remote worker, so the only thing I get out of it is a paycheck, and I’m struggling to get by even with that.

But I’m not allowed to talk about those things, because everyone around me is so wrapped up in how bad off they are, that things can’t possibly be bad for me…  my circumstances are better, or so they think.

It’s getting harder and harder for me to function.  I can’t think of anything that I can change that would make a difference.  Sure, get a new job or find a new apartment, but neither of those things are feasible.  I cannot change either of those things right now.  If I had security deposit, I’d move in a heartbeat.  If there was a job that would challenge me better than my current one does, I’d take it.  I don’t know how you change things when everything that needs to change costs money I just don’t have.

Last night, someone told me to buy a lottery ticket.  Maybe I will.  It’s not like I can’t afford a dollar (or even 5), but I don’t feel like that’s enough of a change to really make a difference.  Her argument that winning the lottery would be the change that makes the difference can’t be argued, but…

So, yeah.  If you wondered where I was, why I haven’t blogged, what’s going on…  there you have it.  I’ve been trying not to fall apart, and mostly losing the battle.