Campfyre Stories

This is a fairly typical exchange at my job:

Me: There’s a problem.

Them:  Problem?  There’s no problems here.  Don’t start trouble.

Me:  No, seriously, there’s a problem.  We need to fix this or it’s going to be a serious issue.

Them:  What’s a serious issue?  Don’t cause problems.  Stop making trouble.

Me:  I’m not causing any problems.  The problem already exists, I’m just pointing it out.

Them:  No you’re not, this is how things are supposed to be.  How they are supposed to be is how they are.

Me:  Ok, I understand how things are supposed to be.  Things are not as they are supposed to be.  Can we fix this?  It’s causing other issues.

Them:  What issues?  There are no issues.  Show me what you’re looking at and stop causing trouble.

Me:  [shows the problem]

Them:  Crap.  That’s a problem.

Me:  That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.

Them:  I’ll see what I can do.

Me: *bangs head on desk*

It all started out with so much promise.  All the makings of an exceptional story were in place.  I had the opening line and the events that would lead me to a story unlike anything that had been told before, but somewhere along the way I got lost.

I can pinpoint certain adventures that I could have had, but missed out on, for whatever reason, but those specific moments can’t explain how I got where I am today.  Everything in my life, until recently, were the stuff that grand adventures are made of.  Those missed opportunities can’t account for the life I lead now – mostly solitary, rather lonely, unremarkable.

I’ve made no lasting mark on the world.  I’ve had my moments of internet infamy and possibly, in dribs and drabs, my 15 minutes of so-called fame, but, at 33 years old, I can’t help but feel that I should have done more by now…  that I should have done something noteworthy.

I never wanted to be famous.  Fame is a sucker’s game and, for most, just leads to hardship.  Not that I’m afraid of hardship, I can’t be, having experienced so much so far.

My mother always told me that I could do anything I wanted with my life.  I believed her and my childhood dreams of the future were grandiose.  I would be the first female president of the United States; I would be an attorney trying cases before the supreme court; I would be an actress, making movies of great social and political import; I would be an activist.  I am none of those things today and I don’t think I would want any of them.

My early life was rich with adventures and characters, the like of which I will never experience again.  No, that’s not right.  My entire life until recently has been rich with adventures and characters.  Even a simple bus ride would lead me to an exceptional story, prompting cries of “Oh, come on, I don’t believe that.”  The better people get to know me, the less likely they are to disbelieve, since most of them have experienced some of the bizarre stories that accumulate in my life.

Recently, though, all that changed.  No matter where I went or what I did, nothing happened.  I know, for most people, this would be no big deal, no change to their daily routine, but for me, it’s disturbing.  Simple things like the erratic behavior of mostly even-tempered cats keeps me hopeful that maybe, just maybe, I haven’t lost my life in interesting times, but the longer I go without a good story, the more I worry about it.

I used to write all the time.  If it wasn’t the blog it was stories or poetry or songs or letters or something.  I don’t do that anymore.  I don’t have much to say.  I used to have adventures, but now I go to the same familiar places and do the same familiar things.  Almost to the point where I’m no longer interested in many of them.

It doesn’t feel like depression.  I’ve been there before and this isn’t the same thing.  I think that, somewhere along the line, I’ve become unremarkable.

To me, that’s the worst thing that could happen.  The idea that “you are unique, just like everyone else” is one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.  Some people are amazing and create or explain or impart or somehow stand out in a crowd.  I know I used to be one of those people, but I don’t know if I am anymore.

Maybe it’s just a hiatus, but I work my job, day in and day out.  I do as much as I can, but there’s never enough work to really keep me busy.  I cook dinner for my teenage son when he’s home and we fight about stupid things that teenagers and their parents fight about.  I see movies with friends, I play poker from time to time, I visit my family, I take pills to manage my medical condition and visit doctors as needed.  That’s it.  That’s my life right there.

Now I know that I pledged to focus on my health this year, but somehow that’s come to mean that there’s nothing else going on.  My adventures are gone…  I don’t meet new people except those at medical facilities, which doesn’t count.

Something is missing.  The element of the unknown, perhaps, or maybe it’s something I’m doing wrong, or not doing anymore, or…  I don’t know.  I think, if I knew, it wouldn’t be missing anymore.

I spent most of last year and some of the previous years feeling broken, and I was.  I don’t feel like I can use that word anymore to describe how I feel.  That broken feeling is gone and this is something different.

I feel unremarkable.  And I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way before.  I’ve always felt like I was someone exceptional, someone who was a good person to know.  I was the person who almost always had a joke, who always had “a story to tell you”, who could find an adventure in anything at all.

I don’t know where all of that went, but right now it’s lost.

I wish I knew how to get it back.

To quote Robert Frost, "Good fences make good neighbors." 

Have I blogged about my terrible neighbor?  I’m not sure if I have, but she’s AWFUL.  From the day she moved it, she’s been nothing but trouble for me.

The saga begins the day after my birthday, when she moved in.  Our first encounter was over my recycle bin.  The city gives you one for free if you call them, but I guess she was too lazy to do that.  When I leave my house on Wednesday mornings, I bring in the recycle bin and leave it in front of my door.  When I got home that first Wednesday evening, my recycle bin was FULL.  Not just full, but full of non-recyclable materials, like ceramics and cookware, and it was placed directly in front of my apartment door.

I rang the neighbor’s bell and explained that this was not okay and that she needed to get her own recycle bin.  "Oh, I thought we could SHARE," she said.  No, I explained, I need to keep the bin in the kitchen and could she please remove her (non-recyclable) items from my bin?  "Oh, it’s just until garbage night," she said.  Well, garbage night was LAST NIGHT.  "Oh, well, it’s just a week."

In a passive-aggressive retaliation, I moved the recycle bin in front of the stairs, blocking access to HER apartment, rather than to mine.

She bought some Rubbermaid tubs and decided to use them for her recycling.  As of a couple of days ago, she was complaining to the landlord that the recycling people were stealing her bins, despite the note written in masking tape on top of the lids to leave them.

She’s an idiot.  Not only are the recycling people NOT stealing her bins, they’re so lightweight that they blow down the street.  There’s no address written on them, so no one knows who they belong to.  I’ll be damned if I’m going to go chasing after gray Rubbermaid bins at 6:30 in the morning, in the opposite direction from my walk to the bus stop, but I’ve seen them down the street.

The landlord explained (as I had in the past), that she could call the city and they would BRING her a free recycling bin, but first he was subjected to her complaining about how I wouldn’t share mine with her.

But that’s a minor matter, for all the paragraphs it took up.  A larger matter is the fact that she is constantly yelling at black people.

I know, this sounds weird, and at first, I wasn’t entirely sure about it, but it’s true.  She yells at black people, exclusively and often.  I thought that she just yelled at her friends, who almost all happened to be black, but then I started noticing her yelling at the guy who offered to shovel our walk after a major snowstorm, the young man who wanted to get us to change utility companies and the elderly pastor who was soliciting donations for his church’s youth group.  She did NOT, however, yell at the white people who came to the door, or into the house, for any reason.

I kid you not when I tell you that her unnaturally high pitched voice causes the nearby dogs to howl whenever she yells, and she yells a lot!

And that’s not even the worst of it.  The worst part is the drama of the door.

We live in a two-family building, and have a shared front door.  My last neighbor and I noticed about 2 years ago that if the door isn’t securely shut, it opens, despite the lock on the doorknob.  The only way to make sure that the door is fully shut is to lock the bolt on the door, which my current neighbor REFUSES to do.

I’ve confronted her several times about not locking the door.  I’ve explained that if the door isn’t locked by the bolt, it sometimes comes open.  Living on the first floor, I consider this a safety issue, since, if someone were to come in our open door, they’d go for my apartment first.

She refuses to take me seriously on this matter.  Her reply has consistently been that she ALWAYS locks the door, unless she’s right in the vicinity.  If the door is unlocked, it must be Spawn…  "You know how irresponsible teenagers are."

Of course, this just riles me up.  There’s no response I can give her when she attacks my son for something SHE is doing wrong, so I have let it go for the moment, but about once a month, I bring up the issue again.  The last time we had it out over the lock, she claimed it was Spawn leaving it unlocked…  while he was out of town,  visiting his girlfriend.  That’s some feat, to unlock the door from out of town.

But last night it came to a head.  I got home from my regular movie night at 9pm to an OPEN door.  Now, I don’t mean slightly ajar, but the door was swinging in the breeze.  This is the third time in a week the door has been open, although the previous two times it was just ajar.  I lost it.

Instead of following my gut reaction and banging on her door, I called the landlord and told him the fullness of the saga.  That this had been going on *since she moved in* and that she was consistently blaming it on Spawn.  Spawn isn’t even with me on Tuesday nights, so I know that he didn’t leave the door fucking open.

The landlord promised to come over and talk to her about it, stressing the safety issue.  He also said that if she wouldn’t claim responsibility and tried to blame Spawn, yet again, that he would put an automatic lock on the door.  I think that won’t actually help, though, since you have to close the door SECURELY for a catch-lock to actually serve its purpose, but he also told me to call him whenever that door is open again.

I didn’t call this morning at 6:30am when, upon leaving the house, I discovered the door unlocked yet again.

But I overheard them talking last week.  It’s mid-month and rent is due on the 1st (but no later than the 5th).  He was asking her when she was going to pay her rent, and she said she didn’t know…  "Excuse, excuse, excuse, it’s someone else’s fault and, by the way, FyreGoddess is a terrible person who won’t share her recycle bin."  (Seriously, that was how she ended her "I can’t pay my rent" speech to him.)

I’ve been living here for two-and-a-half years and, while I’ve been late with the rent a couple of times, it’s only ever been a few days past the deadline (usually because I forgot to put the check in the mail).  I rarely complain unless there is a major problem and am friendly with the landlord.  She, on the other hand, is a terrible person, yells at black people, complains about things that are none of her business, is late with the rent with no ownership of responsibility  and refuses to follow the most elementary of inner-city living rules.

I think that I’m not the one who will be looking for a new place to live in 6 months.  If I am, it will be because I can’t handle a neighbor this awful.

I’m really getting sick and tired of hearing "It’s not your fault."  I KNOW that it’s not my fault, but it doesn’t change the fact that things are going very, very badly wrong.  "You’re doing everything right."  Yes, I am, and yet, STILL things are going wrong…  things that I have to deal with and attempt to manage.

I’m not going to be unemployed, but I’m still losing my current job.  The fact that we didn’t get the contract is what sucks about this situation and the fact that people (in a position to influence the decision) are saying how amazing and fabulous I am at the job I am losing does not actually change the suck factor of my losing my job and having to learn to do something new.

I want to be angry, but there’s no one to be angry at.  I feel upset, but there doesn’t feel like a reason to actually be upset, since I’m not actually going to be negatively impacted by this.  In fact, the timing of when I stop doing what I’m doing and start doing something else really couldn’t be better.

But, for fuck’s sake…  I finally got to a point where I not only like what I do, I know all the people I need to know and have made an impact and polished my reputation.  Now I have to start all over again, doing something else entirely.

It’s all okay, though, because it’s nothing about me.  It’s not my fault and I haven’t done anything wrong.  I guess that’s supposed to make me feel better?

See?  This is why I don’t wear white if I can avoid it.

So I went to dinner with Slockin on Saturday night.  Dinner and beer was the plan for the evening.  Spawn decided to stay home, play God of War and order pizza.  Now many, but by no means all of my friends have at least one story of me doing something incredibly dumb.  Sure, I mean, they’ve all heard about the time I fell in a hole, or when I locked myself out of the house with no shoes on in the middle of the night, in the dead of winter, or when I fell off a train, or any number of stories that make people laugh when they hear about just how stupid I can be.

Yeah, so dinner.  And beer.

It would make me feel so much better if I could blame the beer.  Being drunk doesn’t make me clumsy, nor does it actually make me stupid.  It certainly impairs my judgment, but sometimes I don’t even need alcohol for that.  We ordered, we got a beer a piece, we chatted, dinner came.  The ketchup on the table was in glass bottles, and I don’t have a whole lot of patience.  I know about the trick where you smack the 57 with your hand or the handle of a knife or whatever, but I find what works best is just to shake up the contents before pouring and it comes right out.

And that works really well.  When the cap is actually secure on the bottle.

Which, of course, it wasn’t, because really, what the hell kind of story would "Had dinner, nothing eventful happened" make?  A rather lame one, I think.  Although, getting covered in ketchup and not realizing it right away is not particularly an experience I would seek out.

So, yeah, all down my arm, all down my neck, all down the front of my shirt…  thank goodness the waitress had brought us a stack of extra napkins when she brought our food and that I had ordered a glass of water.  Also, that I hadn’t shot ketchup all over the people at the next table nor gotten it in my hair, which really wouldn’t have been tragic, but it would have been pretty gross and hard to deal with.

I dipped the napkins in the water and wiped off as much as possible.  Took off my necklace and watch and did the best I possibly could without having a clean shirt with me.  Slockin is just about the best person to do something this stupid in front of, since he didn’t point and laugh and, in fact, helped to clean off the jewelry that I had thrown on the table in disgust.  Once I was out of danger of dripping ketchup, I went to the bathroom and did what I could.  He totally lied to me when I came back and said "Hey, you clean up pretty good."  Which is true in the sense of dressing up, but not so much in trying to clean ketchup off a t-shirt.  It was appreciated nonetheless.

The longer I am friends with anyone, the greater the chances that they will witness, firsthand, something that has been labeled a "[Fyre] move".  I think that half my friends only keep me around for the entertainment value and the stories they can tell on me.  Probably that’s a good thing, because if they weren’t at least amused by my bonehead antics, no one would ever go anywhere with me.

My world is currently divided into people who are my friends and people I hate.  There is no middle ground and there are no shades of gray.

That is all.

This is proving to be a very difficult week.  I mean, ok, Tuesday I smashed my thumb with the hammer.  That sucks, but I’m pretty accident prone, so it’s not really surprising.  Then my "fixed" bed woke me up by crashing to the ground on Wednesday morning.  I wound up working late because my projects were exploding.  Yesterday more projects exploded and it was all so bad that it gave me a raging headache that started around 1 and didn’t end until probably 8pm.  I also wound up working late again. 

I was in a foul mood when I got home and had a raging headache.  Spawn, being very understanding (and knowing not to poke the bear) made dinner, so I ate, took a hot bath and went to bed early.  And just as I started to fall asleep, the phone rang.  Girl said "Oh, honey, I’m sorry, go back to sleep" and despite my best efforts, I laid awake for a good 4 hours or so before that was even possible…  woke up late and rushed enough to not have time to pack a lunch or eat breakfast.

So before I left work I set up the coffee pot.  Our regular guy who gets in early and makes the coffee is on vacation and I guess I’m next in line for doing it.  Since we’re not supposed to use the tap water, it takes a while to fill the pot with water from the cooler, so I went ahead and did that.  I figure, this will make the whole thing easier in the morning.

Yeah…  it would have, except that some people (and I know who they are), at some point after 5, when I left, decided to make 2 pots of coffee and then leave half of each pot sitting out.  They also left all their cups in the sink and grounds, creamer and sugar ALL over the counter.  So I wash out the coffee pots.  I fill the one with water.  I go into the drawer to get the filter and the coffee and there are dry coffee grounds ALL.  OVER.  THE.  DRAWER.

If I came home to a mess like this, Spawn would hear about it at a very high volume.  If it wasn’t Spawn’s doing, I would probably chase the cats around.  Coming into a mess like this at work, there’s very little I can do.  I’m pretty sure I know who it was, but I can’t prove it, and the emails from high up have gone around about not leaving messes like this for other people to clean up, but it makes no difference.  It’s also not a pleasant way to start the day…  come into work to no coffee and someone else’s mess, which you have to (at least partly) clean up in order to have coffee at all? 

And it seems petty, I’m sure, but it’s just one more craptastic piece to these 4 days and counting.

So I was trying to fix my bed for real when I smashed the middle of my thumb with the hammer.  Stupid little cat came in and distracted me.  It hurts and it’s in a most inconvenient spot.  At least it’s not obviously visible and the only people who will probably notice will be the ones I show, saying, "Wanna see something gross?"  (It’s not all that gross, though.)

And then, this morning, I woke up to my bed crashing down.  Apparently my "fixing" made it worse than it was when it was just cobbed together.  Figures.

I keep talking to (and reading the blogs of) people who bitch about how they gain weight whenever they’re in relationships.  Don’t really want to hear about it, to be honest.  I’m the opposite.  I lose weight when I’m in a relationship (it’s the sex or lack thereof).  Lucky me, you might be thinking, to be fit and happy at the same time…  not so much, though, because the other side of that is fat and lonely, and because it’s hormonal and my doctor doesn’t believe me, there’s not much I can do about it.

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I make really good coffee.  I know this because countless people have told me that I do.  There are people I know who never drink coffee unless I make it.  This is fine.

That said, I don’t make coffee on workdays.  I simply do not have the time in my get-out-of-bed-throw-on-some-clothes-and-book-out-the-door morning schedule.  Even with the timer on the coffee pot, I’m pretty sure I would be hard-pressed to so much as pour a cup of coffee while passing through the kitchen.  So I snooze on the bus ride in and I get my coffee in the office.

And at 7:30am, I like my coffee already made.  I’m not a morning person and as long as someone has already made the coffee, I am a happy camper.  If, by some chance, the man who makes the 7am coffee is on vacation and *I* have to make the coffee, I am surly and grumpy and not very dexterous. 

After that first cup, I like my coffee the way C. makes it.  He uses a pouch and a half and the coffee is nice and strong and yum.  If he hasn’t made that coffee I will either be disappointed in the weak coffee available or I’ll happily make it myself.

Then, around 2:30 or 3 when the fatigue and sleepiness sets in, once again, I like my coffee already made.  Usually I have to make that particular pot because I think pretty much everyone wants their coffee already made at that time of day.

At any other time, I like my coffee free.  Generally this means I will make it myself, and I do make a damn good pot of coffee.  If I’m going to pay for it, I like my coffee pretentious.  Give me a cappuccino, but don’t be an idiot and give me a latte.

But despite all of that, the bottom line for me is, if I have to get up at 6am, I like my coffee already made.  Everything else is just gravy.

I have this overwhelming feeling of being late, most of the time, all of a sudden.

Yesterday morning, I woke up at 4am, took one look at the clock and convinced myself that the clock was wrong and I was late for the bus.  I cross-referenced my phone and freaked out because, in my head, the clock on my phone was wrong, too.  And so was the clock on the coffee maker, and the clock on the VCR was more wrong than usual.

I was up and most of the way ready for work when I realized that, no, all the clocks were not, actually, wrong…  it was really 4am and I could go back to sleep for another hour-plus.  Which I did.

This morning, the same thing, woke up at 4, but I knew that all the clocks in the house weren’t mysteriously wrong, so I went back to sleep.  However, once I got to the bus stop (on time), I again convinced myself that I was late.  Rather, the bus was late…  It wasn’t really late, but in my head it was.  Not only late, but not even coming, or maybe I WAS late and I had missed it.  The other bus that stops at my bus stop came first, so, of course, my bus isn’t coming, I’m going to be late for work.

I wasn’t late for work, despite my conviction that the bus was running later and later and that there was no possible way that I could be on time.

All my meetings have me frantic that I’m going to be late.  I haven’t been, but I have been exactly on time for pretty much all of them…  and when I don’t have a meeting, I still have this nagging feeling that I should be hurrying and that I’m (not just going to be, but already) late for something.

This is very difficult for me, since I am a notoriously EARLY person.  I’m the one who shows up on conference calls 5 minutes early; who shows up to meet up with friends 10-15 minutes early and waits patiently; who couldn’t get a letter of reference stating that I was always on time, so instead got one written to convey that I am never late.  But this isn’t a situation where I’m fretting that "OMG, OMG, I’m going to be ON TIME", I am convinced that I am not only going to be, but am already late for things that don’t even necessarily exist.