Today: February 26

Today:

It is two weeks until I am out of my terrible job.


Today:

I should have had a job interview, but as is the habit of the universe it was rescheduled just as I was completely prepared for it.

That interview is now in two and a half weeks, on the day I am scheduled to start the new job I don't want.

This new job is a job of desperation, which is what most of my job offers are for,
and I wonder if accepting it was the right thing to do, or if I should have held out for the customer service position that was also a compromise, but a compromise with a chair and a better paycheck.

It seems I am always in this position,
and I always take what is offered "now" rather than waiting
and am left wondering "what if" I had waited.
Taking the offerings of "Now" is what put me here, in a fast food restaurant instead of the temp pool at the university. Money and position now instead of the gamble for better later.
Granted, the last time I had fewer options, with a checking and a savings bled dry,
and two kids to support with sketchy financial assistance.
The financial assistance was a cruel joke, then, and little more than a memory now,
but now I am in a better place. I have a paycheck or two coming, money in the bank, and a few more interviews lined up.
I still have those two kids though, and they need stuff. Pretty soon my daughter will be borrowing my jeans, but until then I have to do something about the plumbers crack exposed by hers.
So I took the sure thing.
Again.

I will go to the second job interview anyway. It is at least at a different time.
It can't hurt, right?


Today:

I medicated a rat. Again. Not a euphemism.

Today:

Arin and I turned "Bob" the tiger moth loose today.
Bob, who has twice convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt he was dead.
Bob, who has laid eggs in the glass bowl without the aid of a mate.
Bob, the mystery.


Today:

I went underwear shopping without leaving my apartment.
Assuming Victoria hasn't played musical sizes with my favorites again I will have new cheek-hugging cotton comfort within the week. The standards and then a couple with stripes, just because.

Today:

I brought home the gift from the foreign student at work.
She is one of my favorites, and I wish she had a better grasp on English, or I had a better grasp on Thai.
It is a tote bag she brought back from Thailand because I admired hers a couple of years ago.
Hers was baby blue with cowboys and bucking broncos on it, and she said she couldn't get the same pattern, and I said she didn't have to get me anything at all but she insisted, and when she went home over the winter break she remembered.
She was right. It isn't the same. It is pink and slick and shiny and has frothy coffee drinks advertised on the outside and looks like it is made of candy.
It is nothing at all like I'd ever have purchased for myself,
and I love it.
It is one of the hundred ways the foreign students have extracted me from my comfortable place.
It is a reminder that if I just go of certain expectations I might invite brighter, shinier things.
Even if they are pink.


Today:

I am sipping Earl Grey and dodging phone calls and wondering how to become independently wealthy when I'm not cleaning hospital water fountains. I would like to think I have the skill, but when I look at so many of my truly talented artist friends who work hard at their craft and still struggle, I don't merely entertain my doubts, I stand on my head and juggle for them.
I mean, I think maybe I could do it if I could find a niche, but the world is pretty well explored and I fear I don't have much that is new to give.

I will have to be brilliant.
More than brilliant, I will have to be lucky and blessed
and hope it is my time.

Part IV - The Worst Part is the Silence

"I guess we just don't have anything left.

Huh. No, I guess we don't.
Click."

Then comes the silence,
but this time the silence is your ally.
It's the silence that allows you to accept what has just happened.
It is silence in the face of the panicked ringing of the phone that's still in your hand.
It is a silence that seems like hours instead of seconds, and you are afraid to break it because you can't be sure this is real and you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if it is, this is the easy part.

At first you don't trust the silence because it has not always been kind.
This all started with silence, remember?
First came the subtle discrediting of your inner voice, that took the things you knew as wrong and made them right, or maybe it was the other way around. You're not sure, anymore. Your inner voice could try to talk sense to you, but nothing you had to say worked on him. Those aren't arguments, they're discussions; no one is yelling, right? You aren't wrong, you are a liar. You didn't make a mistake, you're incompetent. You can't defend your point because your point is indefensible and not just because you don't like to...
"discuss" things.
You can't even be sorry because that's not acceptable either.
If you were really sorry, you wouldn't have done...
whatEVER the hell it was you did
in the first place.
Your silence became your best back-handed defense,
when you would have preferred a baseball bat.

The silence of his voice,
that was the calm before the storm.
Sometimes it meant that he was content, full of cheeseburgers and curly fries and ranch dressing, watching while John Wayne just "Pilgrim'd" the shit out of everyone, spanked his woman and started another bar fight at top volume on that huge. fucking. TV.
Other times it meant that he was watching you, and he was thinking, and the more he would think the more COMPLETE INSANITY he would think OF and the angrier he would become before you even knew what was happening.

There is the silence of people who are going through it just like you.
They are women who went to school with you, women who went to church with you, women who worked with you. You bump into each other at the grocery store and on the internet, but you are alone and they are alone, all of you and your muffled inner voices.
You can't help them or they you because no one believes this could be happening to anyone else. You won't know about them until much later. The strong ones who manage to get themselves out, and you will wonder how many more haven't made it, yet.

You do not know now that for months you will bounce from couch to couch and spare room to spare room, that you will borrow money from your parents for a deposit on a miniscule apartment, or that you will have to give up your job and most of your "friends."
You do not know the lengths to which he will go to get you back.
You do not know he will play your family (or he will try) against you,
and then he will use you against them.
You don't know how low he will sink.

And it is low.

You don't know, and it is better that way, because what you haven't gotten yet that is that living with HIM...
has made you tougher than you know.

Part III - How Do Women Stay Married to Jerks?

"You bide your time.
You have to."


You realize, now, you are married to a jerk.
You've known it for some time, but you've just come to grips with it,
so what do you do?

I mean, you've tried to obey "the rules" but the rules always change.
You've talked about counseling. You've even scheduled the appointments,
but as he's mentioned, you'll be the only one going because you're the problem.
You're out of ideas, hope, and quite frankly, not only do you not love him anymore,
you've stopped giving a shit.

For a while, escape is a fantasy, and you fantasize a LOT.
None of the scenarios are particularly appealing, but some are slightly less...
unpalatable...
than others.
The least awful is the hope that your spouse will leave you.
You hope that they will fall out of love with you.
Little do you know that this has already happened
and they're still around because, well, you're reliable.

You plan, and "one day" becomes your favorite time.
You make plans while you wash the dishes, while you weedeat the yard,
while you're stuck with him on the couch watching another fucking John Wayne movie. 

Your spouse loves John Wayne.
You have learned to think of John Wayne as the root of all evil.
You begin to wish posthumous harm on John Wayne, his entire family and all of his fans.
You want him to come back to life so you can push him in front of a bus because if you have to watch one more gods damned John Wayne movie and listen to your spouse go on about how much he'd love to live in "those times" (presumably those times being the ones when you could spank your woman for talking back to you and then go off and start a bar fight for, well, for no real reason at all) and then watch him hunch up his shoulders and do that stupid walk and laugh that stupid laugh and talk through that unlit cigarette (and you just now realized that he probably unintentionally as much as intentionally modeled his every move on stupidJohnWayneandhowdidyounotseeitBEFORE!?)
and where was I... ?

Oh.
John. Irritating. Fucking. Wayne.
Is probably a whole separate post.
Gah.

So. You make your plans. You will get the two of you out of this hole because he's not going to do it.
Except that since the reason you're in the hole is he won't hold down a job and is always around.
You're spending too much time putting out fires to properly fix the wiring.
Your plans become for YOU to leave.
But not now.
When the kids are older, that's when you'll do it.
Or when your grandma is too senile to realize you're getting a divorce
or when he finally does something in front of someone that you can take to the police.
When you can put a little money away (hahahahahahahaha....) for gas and an apartment.

You finish your college degree. In between jobs. In between kids. In between crises.
You fight and scrap for it, too, because he will think of every reason for you to not do it.
You will tolerate his suggestions that you are not really going to classes but are instead having a torrid affair, like you do when you go to the Hardee's drive through window (at his request to get his food) or out to pay the phone bill or to the library or anytime you are out of his sight for more than five minutes.
You fight until you can't. You start agreeing to things you don't agree with just so he will shut the fuck up for a minute and let you get on with things. You apologize for things you aren't sorry for. You learn to say the right words and dance the right steps.
You do what you must.
Until one day.
You have.
The thought.

The thought that you've had a thousand times except this time it's real. 
You've kind of shocked yourself with this truth.
You really ARE going to leave.
It really IS a matter of time.
It's going to happen.
You just don't know how, or when.
You aren't ready for active participation yet.

I don't know how it works for everyone, but I had that "last straw" moment.
I mean, I'd kind of checked out of the marriage already anyway. I kept going through the motions because I didn't know what else to do. I had helped him, pushed him, into another job that he hadn't yet managed (but was trying like hell) to get fired from
and I will remember for as long as I live,
that long distance cell phone call,
when, from over two thousand miles away,
I heard the words that were designed to guilt me into apologizing for being in the bathroom or whatever when the phone rang, when I wasn't sorry that I was still in the bathroom when he called three more times in the next two minutes,

"I guess we just don't have anything left."

Huh. No, I guess we don't.
Click.

Blergh. Morning.

6:06 am:
There's already an epic battle for the universe going on in my living room. Or honor, or tiny animals in plastic eggs, or whatever it is anime characters are fight about these days.
Too.
Early.

Part II - Why do Women Stay Married to Jerks?

"...By the time you figure it out, by the time the vitriol has been turned on you,
it is often too late. You have kids. Or aging parents. Three quarters of a college degree.
A shared livelihood. Whatever. You are in a compromised position where his entire social network overwhelms yours because he has slowly but very systematically cut you off from your friends, family, co-workers and replaced them with... him.

Maybe you believe that he will change. He did promise...."


But that's not all.

There's the "shame." You that wonder if it's your fault, especially when you have someone telling you it's your fault, and so there is the anvil of failure just hanging there, over your head, waiting for you to lose your grip on the rope.
 
You think you're too far in. You have been part of a pair, and never mind you're the stronger half of a broken, limping, barely breathing pair, there is the part of you that wonders how you will do it all by yourself. Where will you live, how will you pay the bills? (Yes, you know they aren't being paid now, but that's going to change any minute now. It WILL, this time.)
How will you extricate yourself from his family, his remaining friend, your joint checking account?
What about the dog?
The emotional toll of just thinking about it is costly.

Then there's the paperwork.
You can't afford a lawyer.
Hell, you can't afford either of your mortgages or your electric payment,
how do you expect to pay for legal representation? 

There is the part of you that wonders if you will be that one case in a hundred where the court sides with your awful ex.
Not so farfetched a theory as One. Might. Think...
 
You don't want to go crawling back.
To your friends.
Let's face it, you've treated them badly.
Yeah, you've done it out of cowardice with a touch of altruism.
You know you can't keep a rein on his mouth, you know how he is, and you don't want to subject people you like to that.
You don't want to have to be apologetic on his behalf later, so you don't go anywhere with him,
and God knows you can't go anywhere without him.
So you just stop seeing people you care about, with a lot of excuses and little explanation.
Sooner or later they stop calling.

Then there's your family...
Your "normal" family.
And by normal I mean your dad.
Mr. Calm, Cool and Collected, even when you wreck the car. Okay, not so much when he's fixing the toilet, but no one's perfect.
Your mom. The sweetest woman you know. She loves British humor and introduced you to Billy Joel. She is nice to everyone and will offer you tea and sandwiches Until. You. Crack.
Your sister. Even though you tried to kill each other on a fairly regular basis during your childhood, she's okay now. You share a love of heavy sarcasm and Joss Whedon and chocolate. She's got good kids. Your brother-in-law is not too bad, either. He makes a mean sausage-gravy-and-biscuit breakfast.
Your "little" brother. You used to smack him on the head and how he's a foot taller than you, but instead of getting revenge he talks to you about nerd stuff. Batman is the tie that binds.

You don't want them to worry. You don't want them to interfere. You don't want your ex to drag them down to his level. That's his specialty, but you won't let him turn your family into a pack of snarling, howling, revenge-bent werewolves.
You have enough to deal with without having to sneak them handcuff keys in their prison birthday cupcakes.

You bide your time.
You have to.

Part I - Why Do Women Marry Jerks?

I have been asked how girls fall for the wrong guy,

or, more specifically, how I fell for the wrong guy.

I wrote a blog post about it. Liketohearit?Hereitgo... (Only works in David Alan Grier's voice.)


An asshole will be nice to you. At first.
His asshole-y actions?
They will be directed at people you don't really know, they will involve family or friend dynamics you don't truly understand, they will be muted or even seem somewhat justified at the time.
(It takes all kinds, right? This is how they handle things? I guess?)

It is only years later when his family stops talking to him and friends get fed up and stop coming around that you realize that, no, it wasn't your imagination, he really was being a hateful prick.

Your parents were normal.
And by normal I mean they weren't always sniping at each other and making each other feel horrible. Talking meant talking. There were no volleys of insults or subtle degradations. No one needed thick skin. They were nice to each others friends and families. They surrounded you with love and other people who loved you.
You were raised in THAT.

You cannot believe such people as your new guy and his lot exist outside of Lifetime TV or episodes of COPS. 

By the time you figure it out, by the time the vitriol has been turned on you,
it is often too late. You have kids. Or aging parents. Three quarters of a college degree.
A shared livelihood. Whatever. You are in a compromised position where his entire social network overwhelms yours because he has slowly but very systematically cut you off from your friends, family, co-workers and replaced them with... him.

Maybe you believe that he will change. He did promise.



Other stuff.

Are You Chicken?

My neighbors have been cackling for two hours.
Cackling.

Like, if Popeye had decided against being a sailor and had instead gone into chicken farming, and he lived next door with his (loud) chickens, and he thought his chickens were really hilarious,

that is what it would sound like.