Today I am wearing my surfing bear t-shirt, and it makes me so happy. I paired it with my brown Dockers and my brown Chucks, with a grey hoodie just in case it gets arctic in my office (it often does). However, I do have a window, and opening the blinds seems to warm everything up nicely. I also think I have a fever, which helps…. no, seriously. At Alert Logic, I used to pray for the days my period was coming because with all the fans and the need to keep the equipment cool, there was no day that it didn’t feel like 50 degrees in that bitch. A fever was just the ticket to make me happy without complaining, even though I still needed a hoodie and several layers underneath. It’s always weird when you have to carry your winter clothes in your backpack in Houston because you know the air conditioner will freeze you out. DSI is not that different, but like I said, a window helps, even though it does look out over the junk yard next door… but there are also a lot of trees, which makes up for it a bit. As long as I’m warm, it could look over a nuclear waste dump.
I am hoping it will be a while before we hire someone else in ops, because I really like having my own office. It’s huge, enough to put in a conference table if they’ll let me, which would be nice because I could change positions, like taking my laptop over to the table and sitting in a different chair. If I can’t get my own conference table, maybe I’ll try one of the benches outside. We have a picnic table in the “backyard” that might be perfect.
Oh, and check this out. I was here by 8:50 and the door was unlocked. #smallblessings
Tonight is dinner with Pri-Diddy and I cannot wait. Any time we can spend together before she has to leave is golden. I just want to hug her and squeeze her and call her George…. but not too tightly, because she has a stomachache. 🙂
In other news, I feel like I’ve really had a chance to exorcise my demons where Argo is concerned, and I have healed so much just from staying away. I feel happier than I have in a long time, because the fight is o’er, the battle won… even if I lost, because the win was not fighting anymore. God, how I wish I had ended it before it became a thing with Dana, but at the same time, if it hadn’t been Argo, it would have been another individual friend as opposed to a couple friend that would have set her radar off. I have to remind myself that anyone who wouldn’t let me have friends of my own was trying to control too much. I am sure that I gave Dana every reason in the world to be jealous and angry, but I wasn’t trying to… just trying to be as honest as I possibly could, because I thought talking about it would help instead of hurt. Dana does not have the same story that I do, but she went through something similar when she was single, so I thought that she’d be the first person to understand that words carry weight, and feelings happen because of them. She did, up and to a point, but her past did not carry nearly as much weight as my present…. and honestly, that’s ok.
I needed to be single again… not because I was taking off after Argo to see what might happen, but because I was so worried about Dana that I couldn’t worry about myself…. and ditto for Argo. Taking on their “stuff” allowed me to ignore my own problems, to the point that one day I decided that I’d just had it. I cracked. I couldn’t get a new patient appointment for three weeks, and I worried that my situation was so dire that I wouldn’t make it that long… and in the end, it was Argo that gave me the strength to see it. She said “why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you?” So I called the number on the back of my insurance card and it just so happened that I’m originally from Naples, Texas, and the person on the other end of the line was from Mt. Pleasant. She’d had a time in her life when she was just as depressed as me, and me being who I am, spent part of that phone call comforting her even though I was the one in trouble…. just like I did with the billing lady. She’d also been as depressed as me, and *she* asked *me* to pray for her. So, of course, me being me, I feel like this depression is going to kill me and here I am in the hospital taking care of THE BILLING LADY.
It turned out to the be the right thing to do, though, because I haven’t gotten a single bill from Methodist hospital. I know this because it doesn’t matter where you move on earth, the billing people will find you. If Osama bin Laden had taken out a loan from Sallie Mae, we’d have caught him a lot earlier. You think being a high value target is terrifying in the CIA? Wait until you’ve defaulted on a student loan…. which I never have, but I’ve heard so many horror stories that I think most of the people that work there are calling from prison. #nojoke
Speaking of which, I need to fill out a FAFSA for University of Houston, because Howard does not have a political science department, and none of my hours will transfer…. although before I check that out, I need to check out the junior college around here because there’s a couple of classes I haven’t taken that will be much cheaper there, like “Intro to Poetry.” I took “Intro to Poetry” in summer school once, and I had an A+ in the class when my professor dropped me for missing too many classes. At that point in my life, I’d never been so angry, but there it is. In summer school, you couldn’t miss more than three classes, and I was sick. Not that the professor cared. Seriously. An A+. It was a “fuck me running” sort of moment, and I am not prone to violence, but if looks could kill, she’d be dead and buried. It’s also good that Volfe wasn’t standing next to me when I used the k-word. 🙂
At this point, I don’t even remember her name (Melanie Jordan… funny how that just popped up).
I really can’t write poetry to save my life, but I can analyze the hell out of it… and I can write a paper in 20 minutes flat if I really know what I ‘m talking about. My last paper on a poem was about Diving into the Wreck, about which I had *A LOT* to say. It was a 500 word essay, and I ended up writing for 15 pages and having to edit it down.
I wish I still had that paper, because I can’t think of anything I’d rather read right now. Anne Lamott says that you should write the book that you wish was out there…. and while it seems egotistical to be comforted by your own words, she’s really, really fucking right. Perhaps that’s why I read my blog so much. It’s the words I wish were already out there for me to find. if I go back far enough, the things that are happening are happening to someone else.
And I can forgive someone else.
Please pray for me. This is such a hard time. Saturday, Dana will be 41, and I won’t be there to help her celebrate. Dana and my mom have the same birthday, so there will never be a time in my life where I forget. Holidays are the hardest, and my heart is still beating… p,q,r,s,t,u… over and over and over and over and over. But that doesn’t mean it hurts any less.
Amen.
Stories That Are All True 