Namaste, Bitches

I managed to move up my urologist appointment, mainly because I told the scheduling nurse that the X-Ray technician said the kidney stone was a staghorn calculi. So today, I got this voicemail saying that since I had not gotten my x-rays done yet, the urologist was canceling my appointment, and to not call for another appointment until I had the x-ray in my hand. What. The. Fuck?!

The urologist I picked is going to be away for two weeks in August, and just trying to get in to see her back in April or whatever was like parting the Red Sea. I probably won't be able to be rescheduled until sometime in 2010.

On Monday, I'm going to call the office, pitch a fit, and find a different doctor - maybe one who isn't so fucking popular.

I read a post on the pagan forum that actually got me riled up & forced a reaction out of me. And I posted my reaction. And now I feel all stupid for letting it get to me, especially since I am not affected by it, nor do I know anyone who is affected by it (and if I do know someone affected by it, they've kept it quiet and personal).

It was a discussion about female circumcision. It wasn't even the fact that there are countries and cultures that practice female circumcision that got me riled up, but someone said that since these people had been practicing this for centuries, we who opposed it were wrong because these people didn't know any better & the opposers were infringing on their cultural rights. Someone else said it was like getting mad at a blind person for not knowing what the color red was.

It got under my nails like bamboo splinters.

I also had a bit of a revelation. I bash Gardnerians from time to time, mainly because I'm an ass. I read something on the 'net the other day about how 'Gardnerians just don't get it...' and I've been re-reading Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon so it got me thinking. Gardnerians may not get it (whatever it is), but without Gardner, most of us wouldn't have gotten it at all, even the Gardner-bashers (myself included). There is validity in Wicca, simply because it has gotten people to think in broader terms than most of the past 1000 years or so have allowed people to think. Gardner threw stuff out into the public light, and some people found it and called it good. Others found it & called it garbage. Some found it & called it dangerous. But it got a lot of people to open their eyes a little wider & take off the blinders. Honestly, how much of the stuff about witchcraft and magic would be on the internet or the bookshelves today if it wasn't for Witchcraft Today?

(Dude... I wish I'd had teh internets when I was a witch... I just found a website that lists the books in Gerald Gardner's estate... Gerald Gardner's Library)

I am seriously angry right now. If I had any money I would not go home tonight. Rob's lucky I'm broke. Generally I ignore or tolerate about 99% of the crap he & his family generate but this time, it's just kind of crossed the line of what I will & won't tolerate. I have even put up with his general pissiness over the past couple of days - I think we both had cabin fever yesterday because we spent it sniping at one another, but I can give as good as I get. I don't ask a lot from Rob - vacuum, put some dishes up, give the snakes fresh water and treat me with some modicum of respect. Don't attack me because I'm the only one sitting there.

Rob's mom bought another house, which I don't care about. She originally said she was planning on having Alex live there. Hey, it's her carpeting & walls & crap for him to fuck up. This morning she called Rob & wants us to go look at the house because now she wants us to take it since it's smaller than the house we're in & have Tania, James & Alex take this house. Which would be fine, I mean, after all it's virtually rent-free and we're charity cases, but I have some specific reasons as to why I do not want to move to this particular house.

For one, it's closer to his mom & dad's house. I don't want to live closer to them. Especially since living closer to them also means living farther away from my job, the doctor, the post office... I mean, yeah, we live in a crappy-ass ghetto, but we're also a block from Lake Mead & everything is on Lake Mead. We hardly use any gas whatsoever in running our errands. We've reached a truce with the scorpions for the most part. Another thing is just the move itself. Rob's mom cannot ever let anything like this be done in a leisurely fashion... No, she wants to rent the U-Haul trailer at the butt-crack of dawn and have everything moved by noon & the truck unpacked & returned by 3pm. Which is fine if all you're moving is an appliance or something, but not an entire household of crap.

When I called Rob on my lunch break, he said 'Mom wants us to go look at the new house...' and I interrupted him with an emphatic, "No! I do not want to live closer to your mother!" He then replied, "Well, if you had let me finish my fucking sentence..."

Oh, by all means, continue.

A good part of me just wants to call him back & tell him to not pick me up from work, but I don't even have bus money. And where the Hel would I go, anyway? The library? A bar? I can't even go to the gym because I think I owe them like, $80 or something along those lines. I've really got to start socking some cash away here & there for just these kinds of occasions. I would call him back & tell him exactly why he is about <___> that far from me not coming home, but I'm at work & I'm not bringing drama into the cubefarm. I guess I'll just have to wait for the car ride home.

Rob & I hashed it out last night. I told him, straight up, using words I don't normally use: 'I want to stay in Las Vegas until I earn my Associates so I can finish at the same school I started with and I don't have to worry about credit transfers and fiddling with my student loan application'. I also told him that the one thing that makes me honestly happy is money. I would be happy if we had more money. Since he keeps asking me if there's anything he can do to make me happy, well, go make money. I would be happy if we had more than $3 and a quarter tank of gas to get us to Friday. I would be happy if I didn't have to put off paying bills to pay other bills. I would be happy if I didn't have to ration food supplies or go hungry all day because I can get a free meal (if you really want to call it that) at the EDR... In fact, I might actually be ecstatic.

So that's pretty much it: we're here til I get my degree or give up, whichever comes first.

I solved a complex math problem on my own after working it over for a week. It came to me in the shower.

If you have 27 tables and 94 chairs, and you need to figure out how many tables have 2 chairs & how many tables have 4 chairs:
All the tables have 2 chairs (duh)
2 chairs X 27 tables = 54 chairs used up. 94 chairs - 54 chairs = 40 chairs leftover. To make a table have 4 chairs, you need 2 more chairs per table, so 40 divided by 2 is 20. So 20 tables have 4 chairs, & the other 7 have 2.

I've also been brooding lately. Thinking about why I have no direction, why I have such a hard time setting goals, why I don't know what I want to be...

No one in my life has ever helped me set those big goals. No one has ever given me any guidance or direction. Whenever someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, when I was a little girl, I'd say either a truck driver or a paleontologist. And I knew the difference between archaeologist & paleontologist, too. I could spout of names & descriptions of dinosaurs, when they lived, where the fossils could be found, etc. all day long. I still love dinosaurs & prehistoric mammals, I think I probably always will. I had a blast out at the La Brea Tar Pits last year - I think one of these weekends when we have gas $$ I'm gonna talk Rob into a road trip out there. But I digress... anyway, my parents always told me "You are smart and you can be whatever you want to be, just stay in school". My teachers & various other adult figures that drifted through my life from 3 years to 10 years gave me the same kind of reply. But no one ever really 'cultured' my primary interest. Oh, yeah, I got dinosaur toys & models & books, but I also got general animal & science books & toys - all that kind of stuff. None of my toys were ever 'just' toys. It all had some kind of developmental goal behind it.

So then I went to Penny... gods, what a bitch. Penny didn't think very highly of a 10-year old fat kid who wanted to be left alone, who wanted to live in the library & who wanted nothing more than to read all day... Penny was derisive of knowledge & anyone who displayed intelligence. So I just stopped talking to her about anything. I just sat in silence til she passed out drunk when I could read, or I volunteered at the library after school & on weekends so I had an escape. Yup, 11 years old, walking to the library on crutches & spending 4 hours a night shelving books & doing odd office work. But I met Ann, ye old Hula Rat, and she was actually interested in a little kid w/a big brain. But once again, she was just wowed & a teenager, too, so I had a friend, but not really a mentor.

So then to Aunt Liz & Uncle Ernie. Uncle Ernie liked that I could hold my own w/philosophy & world religions - he could pull me out in front of his intellectual & philosophical friends & they thought I was the coolest thing since sliced bread. But Aunt Liz got tired of me not wanting to be a debutante & put an end to me spending weekends w/Uncle Ernie at the University coffee shop. They didn't even really put too much emphasis on me going to school, but they at least supported my band things.

Jody & Terry - Hel's bells. They were so busy trying to not act like 'mom' that they forgot that I was 15. I was mature, but also clueless about the future. I never thought I'd live past 18. And once I got that trustfund, I was easy money. They put their hands out for cash, but not one person said, "Hey, why don't you go to school? You could be making bank by the time you're 25."

Yes, I'm independent. I can be very hostile if someone tries to tell me what to do & I don't like it. But no one ever sat down & really talked to me about my potential. No teachers, no school guidance counselors, no AA/Al-Anon/Al-Ateen mentors, no therapists, no psychologists, no friends, no relatives. Not one person. Sometimes it's fine & dandy to tell someone "You can be anything you want to be", but sometimes it's better to say, "Hey, go to school now & become a paleontologist" or "Let's set up some kind of housing & go to school to become a mortician" or even, "Hey, if you start now you could be a ____________________________"

I think that, should any young aimless person ever find themself at the mercy of my advice, instead of doing the ego-boosting "be all you can be" speech, I'm going to ask them what their interests are & run with it.

Rob got stuck w/his mom & dad at the car shop today, & they started grilling him about going out to eat, either at the Goulash Pot or this new Polish Buffet. Well, I've been on this low-to-no carb diet under the shrink's advisement that it will somehow provide a miraculous cure for my depression, because as you all know, we as a society are so addicted to white processed sugar and flour that we can't see past our own dietary habits to a new enlightened future... Anyway, obviously I am horribly resentful but still willing to deny myself the funnel cake that IHOP is now selling. Bastards - they would pick NOW to hock funnel cakes. I love funnel cakes. They are one thing that makes me happy (now I have 4)...

So anyway, Rob is hesitant to tell his parents that I am going to a shrink, even tho I don't really care... and he's trying to come up w/all these excuses as to why we won't be able to go out to dinner w/them for about 2 wks... He ended up telling his mom that I was on some kind of carbohydrate diet, so she jumped all over that - what diet is it, why am I on it, who recommended it, etc. & so forth. Now if she asks me, I'll tell her straight up "My shrink wants me to try it to see if I feel better". Rob totally missed the most obvious lie: "Her doctor wants her to try it because she's fat". When I told him he could have said that to his mom, he just stood here w/this dumb-founded look on his face - it never occured to him.

The thing about this whole no-carb thing that is getting to me is that all of a sudden, what I eat has become this huge, all-encompassing, focus in my world, when before what I ate was the least of my concerns. I fed myself when I was hungry. Now that I have no empty calories, I am hungry every 3 hours. It's like I'm constantly eating Chinese food or something. All I can think about is ice cream, funnel cakes, cookies, cereal, cake, pie - breakfast around here has been shot to Hel for me... no doughnuts, no waffles, no pancakes (and I had just bought this big-ass jar of apple sauce to go on said pancakes, too). Baked potato w/a crispy skin, sour cream, butter & green onions, all salty & fluffy... onion rings at the EDR, which is about the only thing those people know how to cook right...

It's driving me up a wall, I still feel like shit, Rob made me cry at dinner last night because he's been hammering away about moving & money for weeks & even though I told him twice to drop the conversation, he kept going... I called Jody to ask if anyone up at the ranch happened to be unloading any p/up trucks or campers & she started giving me the 3rd degree about moving to Washington (Oh, Seattle's all slums right now, do you have a job lined up, what about housing, what happens if you move up there, really like it and have to come back, what if it's Oregon & Louisiana all over again...) All I called about was trucks. Why the Hel does Jody give a shit anyway?
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Capricorn Horoscope for week of July 7, 2005

Sometimes we have a strong sense of what our destiny is calling us to do, but we don't feel quite ready or brave enough to answer the call. We need a push, an intervention, a serendipitous stroke--what I call fate bait. It's a person or event that awakens our dormant willpower and draws us inexorably towards our fate; it's a thunderbolt or siren song or stage whisper that gives us a good excuse to go do what we know we should do. I suspect that you, Capricorn, are about to meet your fate bait.

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SACRED ADVERTISEMENT (I left this in because it smacks of truth and beauty)
"I’ve been practicing radical authenticity lately," my friend Brandon told me. "I’m revealing the blunt truth about unmentionable subjects to everyone I know. It’s been pretty hellish—no one likes having the social masks stripped away—but it’s been ultimately rewarding."

"I admire your boldness in naming the currents flowing beneath the surface," I replied, "but I’m curious as to why you imply they’re all negative. To practice radical authenticity, shouldn’t you also express the raw truth about what’s right, good, and beautiful? Shouldn’t you unleash the praise and gratitude that normally go unspoken?"

Brandon sneered. He thought my version of radical authenticity was wimpy. I hope you don’t. As a budding lover of life, you have a mandate to be honest in both ways.

Boy o boy, did they piss me off Saturday at work... and I was sitting there desperately trying to remember the 'Nam Myoho Renge Kyo' mantra, or the Om Padme Om... anything, anything to calm down a little... and all I could remember was the Kali mantra.

Later, after I did calm down a bit, I found it highly enlightening that the only mantra I could remember while pissed off was one involving Kali.

I have been a veritable domestic Goddess the past couple of weekends. How sickening. I made blueberry muffins this morning. Someone should probably shoot me & put me out of my misery.