Namaste, Bitches

I did the bad thing this afternoon (actually, it was around noon) & drank a large caffeinated coffee. I feel far more chipper than I have since March, but now my chest hurts & I'm jittery. Common sense is telling me that coffee was out of my system by about 6pm, but...

I've been thinking about the Thing From the Bottom of the Ocean. Now I'm afraid that when I go to sleep, I'm going to have The Dream again, where I'm in the empty theater & the curtains open to reveal a huge glass window, like in an enormous aquarium. On the other side of the glass are cliffs, immense black cliffs, with water pouring off them. And the water behind the glass begins to rise and I get that sense of something rising with the water, at great speed. I get the feeling that it eats whales for breakfast, and that it's very old and barnacle-and coral-encrusted.

It's got my back up.

Our truck's driver-side door latch broke. It's been broken for a couple of weeks now. This truck was probably either a repo or it's been side-swiped, but it runs & we like it, so we've been trying to fix problems instead of buying a new vehicle. Anyway, Rob's folks go to a Ted Wiens auto center (on Rancho or Ann Road, I can't remember which, but if you're in NW Las Vegas, find a different service center...) & the mechanics over there have them pegged as rubes. Everytime they take their car or our car over there, something else is wrong with the car/truck aside from the problem we need to get fixed. The past couple of times we've taken the truck over there, the head mechanic (his name's Chris) tells Rob's folks that the tie rods are going to break any day & cause us to die in a fiery explosive roll-over wreck on the highway. (I've been trying for years to get them to find a different service center, but I'm a girl so I don't know shit about automobiles, even though I've helped various people over the years rebuild engines & change tires & change oil & worked on semi trucks & have had MOPAR vehicles in the past, whatever). Rob's been dealing w/these guys all morning & he's already pissed off at Ted Wiens' because they want to charge us over $600 to fix the door latch. They were also saying they would have to replace the entire handle... (These are the same bozos who deliberately broke a couple of lug nuts when we tried to have them align the front end of the truck - which didn't happen anyway because we've got different alloy rims on all the tires & to get four matching rims would have been like, $1000) Called the Ford dealership (which is a last resort) & they had the part in stock for $60. Went & got the door latch, Rob installed it. So he gets home & goes to bed. Around 6pm, his mom calls & wants him to go over to their house first thing in the morning so Rob's dad can look at the tie rods because she's been obsessing all day about us dying in a fiery explosive roll-over wreck when the tie rods suddenly break. So Rob throws his phone across the hallway & storms off to take the truck over to his folks tonight to prove to them the tie rods are fine. This is like the fifth or sixth time he's done this since we've had this truck. Rob's dad can hardly move right now - he had a nasty fall about two weeks ago - but he insists on trying to climb around under the truck while it's up on the jacks.

Sometimes I wonder how Rob's mom has survived all these years w/all her fears... she had a panic attack over our dishwasher when they had that GE recall over the rinse-aid dispenser. I don't even use Jet Dry or any of that crap because honestly, I've never seen it make a difference in how my dishes look after they've been through the dishwasher. So my dishes are spotty, bfd, but they're clean. She's been going apeshit ever since this whole contaminated Chinese dog-food episode, trying to find out which human foods contain imported Chinese ingredients that might possibly be contaminated (I just stay away from all the novelty Asian candies that Sheung-Yee tries to foist off on me... it's easier for me now because I can wave my hand at her & say "Diet!"). Last week the whole sodium benzoate thing came out & this morning it was Albertson's Moran ground beef full of e. coli.

The only thing I am afraid of is the closet monster. But the only thing the closet monster can do to me is scare me. Same goes for Pazuzu, who lives in the fireplace. The worst Pazuzu can do to me is make me hide under a blanket on the couch, petrified to go to my room, because the hallway's dark & there's a closet monster lurking in there. Okay, yes, I am afraid of mosquito-hawks. But they look like aliens & tried to molest me while we lived in Louisiana. I'm also afraid of vinagaroons, because the ones I've encountered have been bigger than my foot. I'm afraid of alien abduction, too. I'm not afraid of serial killers or becoming a victim of kidnapping & torture & rape & dismemberment because fat people are too hard to kidnap. If I lose weight, I will have to deal with the possiblity of that fear. But... if a serial killer kidnapped me, they might just find out I can play their games better than they can. I've done a lot of research... (and I get off on inflicting pain as much as I do receiving it). Aliens scare me more because they have teleporters & weight doesn't matter in that context. I have this dislike of seeing people getting their eyes poked at & their hands & feet crushed or maimed, but I'm not really afraid of it happening to me. I think it's leftovers from my own eye surgery & cutting my fingers off at various points of my childhood, & having my dad threaten to cut my toes off one time when I got frostbite. It makes me seriously not want to watch Hostel or Hostel II, though, even though that type of movie is usually at the top of my to-see list.

I'm not afraid of death. It makes no sense to me to be afraid of something that will happen to everyone eventually. Every living thing eventually ceases to exist. Why fear something that is obviously so natural? To my poor alligator brain, it makes more sense to be afraid of the boogeyman than of death.

I'm not afraid of change. I just don't like being inconvenienced and uncomfortable. Life is, generally, inconvenient and uncomfortable. Granted, there are degrees of inconvenience and discomfort, and for the most part my life is just inconvenient. I've been getting unwanted overtime at work. At 7am the only thing I want to do is go home - not stick around for another hour because my supervisor is too 'busy' to check my freaking report that has been sitting on his desk since 5am. If this shit keeps up, I'm bidding off the weekends. Alea likes OT, she can have it as far as I'm concerned.

I am so lost, and I keep telling Rob to leave me alone about shit, but he just kept hammering away last night... The move, what I want to do for the rest of my life, what would make me happy, where would I be happier... He came very close to making me cry last night. I hate crying. It is useless & fruitless & makes yer eyes & nose swell up.

I've already come to the conclusion that me ever becoming a mortician is a dead end. There's just no fucking way. But how do I refocus myself? I've got this horrible feeling that time is just running out for me. I need to decide what I'm going to do with the rest of my life... but I hate what I'm good at. I loathe it. And the idea of going to school to officialize that which I am really good at but absolutely abhor appals me... But it's really coming down to the wire. I have always been the Lady Who Waits... waiting for time, waiting for money, waiting for Rob, waiting, waiting, waiting. And growing old. By this time, Rob & I should already have our house, have a decent car, be putting money away for eventualities. Not living paycheck to paycheck. Not hanging by a thread, not solely dependent on the goodwill of his parents & my employment. So I started thinking about taking a portion of our soon to be emptied savings & going to school, forcing myself to actually complete a semester or two... but Rob doesn't want to stay in NV while I get a degree of some kind... but I'm afraid that we're going to be here next Summer, and I'll still be waiting.