June 2005

romantic slump

07:32 6/30/2005

It's an internet romance so I'm not supposed to take it seriously I guess. Furthermore, it's my own fault for trusting someone over the net, right? ~sigh~ That doesn't change the fact that I grieve. Just because I've loved more often than most folks doesn't mean I loved shallow either. I love deeply and it hurts deeply every time it fails. It's my fault for being so stupid to trust, or pick (I have a selection? where?) badly, or??? So I deserve to hurt. Well any way you shake it, I've got nobody to talk to about how things are for me. It's all just whining anyway. And what would anyone say? It'll be alright? I can do better? Move on and find someone else? There really aren't any platitudes I'll believe in. When I first fell in love with Dan, some ignorant slut laughed at me, said "only losers seek love online." For this to turn out so badly, it vindicates those nasty words and stamps me, yet again, a loser. But hey, I already knew that. It's been evident my whole life that I'm not one of the winners. From being picked last for teams at school to being dropped over and over from job after job because I just didn't fit in.

I think of Dan all the time. I think of him when my dog smiles. I think how sad it is he'll never get here to share it with me. I think that over every wonderful thing I see, how much it sucks he won't be here to share it. It's like he died but he didn't die, he's just an addict. Addictions are such jealous mistresses it's pushed me completely out of his life. If I whine hard enough I can get a couple hours of his time twice a month. That's not a relationship. This is the man I wanted to marry. And if his last bottom involved nearly dying and nearly winding up in jail, will it be worse this time? Will he have to get jailed or killed this time to end his addiction? And if he did actually kick the booze and became one of those insufferable AA people with their slogans and preaching, would he be someone I could love and live with?

So I feel like he's died on me. It is as though someone has sprinkled wormwood in my soup, tainting everything with a bitter edge. I am thrown into a depression whereing I start and end each day in tears and often fall to tears throughout the day, doing my best to think shallow and choke them back when people are around. That's not often, mind you, I really am a very alone person.

It's funny really, I've agonized over how I'd tell Dan goodbye and now I realize I don't have to. First of all, he's just gone and faded away on his own without my doing anything at all, even though I've tried desperately to stay loving and supportive even through my own hurt feelings and frustration. Secondly, what's to say good bye for? I've no intention of getting suckered into romance again. I've said THAT before but for now I know I'm going to be pushing away anyone stupid enough to hit on me. They're all addicts or bums anyway, some are both. That's the only kind who's ever been interested!

I really don't know what to do with my life. I didn't know before I met Dan and I still don't know. I can't make it on my own. I've tried and tried and I only manage to limp along, everything slowly degrading. Dan made a huge difference in my life. I was able to replace and repair things and get some things to make my life a little better but now, as he leaves me and turns to his own little world of fog and haze and confusion, I'm $6,500 in debt and can't live on what comes in. I really don't know what I'm going to do. Cut back on food I guess. I am so goddamn miserable these days it's unbelievable. If I didn't love my pets too much to kill them nor abandon them, I'd be plotting suicide. If I could figure a way to rehome them where they'd enjoy the level of care I offer, I'd be plotting that. As it is, I'm just passing time hoping something good happens.

achoo

19:44 6/18/2005

This has been a week worthy of record. I spent so much time running around trying to get places before 5pm that I couldn't rest when the cold hit. The cold caused by delivering papers in the rain and getting cold. Today I'm enforcing a stay-home day. First one since..... Uhm, last saturday I think. Seriously, been run off my feet.

Monday I think I did errands, not sure what the hell I was doing, it's a blur. Tuesday over to Gaynolds for some work on the moped. Work that was successful, we got the moped's lighting working. I had a burnt bulb though. Gaynold said come back tomorrow and we'll tighten that loose chain.

By this time I knew I had a cold coming on but I was still rushing breakfast, just eating some rice and boiled eggs when I should have been eating garlic and stuff. Wednesday, same thing, rushing around, spent 2 hours looking for a taillight in vain and bought some LEDs to build a new bulb system. Went to gaynolds finally, late, and got turned away for being too late. Built 2 LED units that fit neatly into the bulb sockets and function beautifully and sealed them in with silicon. I expect them to outlive the bike.

Thursday, again, off to run some errands including booking a road test for the bike so I can ride at night. Then to gaynolds for the chain tightening and to show off the new taillight solution. I think I impressed him, but hard to tell since he'd never let you know. Men are usually either too expressive or they're complete assholes I think. Either they never shut up about it, or they don't give any clues at all about anything.

By now I was distinctly sick, sneezing a lot, coughing moderately (which is a lot for me, I'm an old pot smoker and learned to resist the coughing urge years ago). I think I went grocery shopping that night, or maybe it was wednesday night, it's all so hazy. Used the bike trailer. It was raining and hot.

Friday I had a doctor's appointment for prescription checkup as well as needing to get some errands done regarding computer ills. I'll get into that in it's own paragraph! First time I've gone to the doctor sick, LOL. At the doctor I made the mistake of mentioning my ongoing depression. It's always a mistake because people expect you to explain your depression which leads to focussing on it and weeping and getting more aware of why you're depressed without actually resolving it. Dr. Wong is such a deeply caring human that he can't help himself caring and it just resulted in more tears on my part and concern on his.

Why am I depressed? What, you mean besides being 41, broke and lonely? Would being stressed about money and having serious computer problems for 2 weeks count? (that I'll discuss later). Ok, that doesn't do ya? Here's the clincher, my fiancee is an alcoholic and he's deeply involved in the disease right now. Lost in denial and alcoholic haze. He's unable to get it together even for a whole day anymore. He can't operate a phone or a computer most of the time, although he makes excuses why (the denial thing again) and insists that's not it, he's in a “mood” or tired, or just felt like sitting with his guitar. I know better. I know by the kind of conversation he manages when he manages, once a week, to be online with me for 20 minutes. Yes, 20 minutes a week is how much time he can get together for his future wife. And when I try and call him on it, he says I'm the sad one. ~sigh~ I don't suppose it'd be any less grievous if he had cancer. I figure, I can be single and lonely and waiting for a man who may die before he can get here, or I can be single and lonely and heartbroken and hopeless. What would you choose? I know some people actually think there's a third option of moving on and finding a better man but let me assure you, I don't attract men better than this one. I'm not what most men are looking for in a woman. I attract men who are fucked up. Many a substance abuser has been after me. Unemployed men. Crazy men. I even dated an anorexic. Heck, the one I had a marriage license with was a glue sniffing pedophile! I did date one guy who only mildly overdid it on dope and beer but he was a workaholic and commitment phobic, self declared even!

So go ahead, assume I'm closing the door on Mr. Wonderful but I think Mr. Wonderful is inside the alcoholic who's swimming steadily to his doom and I just keep hoping if I wait long enough something will crack and he'll do whatever it is he has to do to get back in remission.

So yeah, it's been a shitty fucking week.

Now the computer things, yeah. Fun stuff. The computer, for the last couple weeks, corresponding with the arrival of my new 2nd hand cassiopeia e-125 pocket computer, my computer has been spontaneously crashing. I still don't know if it relates at all to the sync software for the cassie or not. The computer would lose video display and then freeze very shortly afterward. Upon restart it'd be unable to boot. I learned to use the recovery console but that didn't fix the problem. Only re-imaging the drive from backup worked. I lost my storage drive completely unfortunately. Some of that stuff I grieve the loss including 3d objects from activeworlds that I won or paid for and hadn't yet installed in my world. Nothing for me to do however. It's gone. So I spent a lot of time with the PC down, it kept crashing every 24 hours or more often. When it crashed while I was asleep doing nothing with it I finally concluded it can't be a software malfunction. Someone suggested the drive may be going and I concluded he was probably entirely correct and determined to inflate my credit card still further by replacing it. Meanwhile I was offline. My PC had spinrite working on the hdd for 40 hours then more utilities trying to straighten it out, none of which saw any errors. I though I'd use the cassie to get online, see what it can do. Couldn't establish a connection however. So friday's errands involved purchasing a new drive while showing the guys at the store my cassie then finding someone who could get her to dialin. I did find someone at Horizon Computer Solutions who went in the back with me to work on it and solved it, free of charge! Sadly cassie's surfing functions are too rudimentary at this point to be worth much. Furthermore I can't get free access and my DSL only includes 5 hours a month of dialup. I'm working on acquiring applications for internet use on it. I'm thinking maybe I'll see if I can set things up so I can phone here to this computer and either get online or use VNC for remote computing with it. That is likely to be unbearably slow though. Better to use dialup networking. I'm so sick and tired though I'm just going to let it sit for now.

The crowning touch of the week is Rosita died last night. Or yesterday, I'm really not entirely sure. Been running around so much I haven't kept a good eye on her. Seems she quit eating and drinking and wasted away. Poor little thing. She just wasn't a breed of bird who ever should have wound up in a cage in a foreign country. At least her last days were here instead of in the store. I buried her today under the roses. She was so pretty.

* So today I'm sitting quietly around the house. Not having to get out till tomorrow afternoon for work at the theatre means I can get some rest and eat some healthy foods. Wish Dan could be with me but he's too drunk. The last couple times he's tried to communicate with me, including this morning, he's been fixated on picking a fight with me over knowing my ex boyfriends, yet again. He gets hung up on that. Today it was on and on about not having an ex-boyfriend be witness. He means Rick. Rick and Adelia met online and they're good friends and could be a fine couple friend. I get along well with them both. Rick and I had sex for a few months one year and now he's a forbidden person as far as Dan's concerned. I'd like them to witness at our wedding because of the similarities of meeting online. I don't see the point of arguing it when we're not going to be getting married in any near time. He's way too fucked up to be able to do what it takes to move here. He's too deep in denial to realize it. I'm bereft because I really don't know how to get through another winter on my own. I hang onto the promise of a full time job at the theatre but they've been counting on a new building for so many years now. The current one has so many holes in the roof and walls it's a deluge when it rains. The damn building ought to be condemned. Sewage floats up in the washrooms off the sump pump room. It floods with the spring melt every year all over the dressing room, the green room and adjacent offices. It's foul!

I met a woman at the Roastery the other day who said she knew some painters and would pass along my card in case they wanted to hire me for hourly wage. I hope if they do that they don't want too many hours and days out of me. I really don't handle working full time anymore. I need too much time to keep up at home and to decompress mentally. Being autistic sure can suck. Nobody understands why I can't just deny my autism as if it were an urge to go water skiing in the weekday. Like if I didn't give in it would eventually go away. It doesn't though, it eventually breaks me down till I can't think straight, have emotional mood swings and catch colds. Kinda like the state I'm in now after having to go like guns ablazing running errands and meeting deadlines day after day for 2 wks and every night for months delivering the newspapers. No time to wind down makes for a very sick Yolanda. People think I deliberately get sick in order to make an excuse to enjoy leisure they feel I don't deserve. As punishment I'm excluded from human interaction and commerce and scorned as lesser than they.

So why do YOU think I'm depressed? I'd kill myself if I didn't love my pets so much. I came home trying to think of how to fill the house with enough carbon monoxide to do us all in so they're not homeless and I'm out of the picture but then Freddy hopped up excitedly to greet me and I knew I couldn't just kill her because I didn't want to live. That I just have to keep going on, trying to find a way to keep it together because I love her too much to murder her. Same goes for Petey and Sarah and Flora and Toby and even the little birds. I can't murder them just to get out of living any more than I can abandon them for that reason. So here I rest, depressed, lonely, nothing but this Blog to tell my woes to, too sick even to go to the pagan coffee night and joke with people Im still trying to get to know. I wish Dan would get better.

I forgot to record the nightmare I woke from this morning. Seems worthy of record. It was a powerful one in terms of catching me up in it and keeping me immersed. I had to go outside and actually see that my garden was well and same before I could dispell the discomfort.

In the dream I'd replaced the streetside fence with a hedge-topped berm. While I'd been at work during the storm last night someone had come over the berm on bikes. The kind of knobby tired bikes you use to tear up the ground and make lots of mucky paths in the forest. They'd made tracks all over, cut holes in the hedge and trampled the whole garden to death. All the large mature trees were chopped down to the ground and no sign of the wood left behind. The garage had been stolen leaving behind the less worthwhile bits that had been inside stacked yet here and there as if they hadn't been moved or anything while the building and the valuable contents were lifted out as if a giant game of pick-up sticks.

The birds and bugs that found safe haven in my garden were homeless and the place was desolate and tracked up. One could see the the berms on either side of the property making nice vallied borders had been the cause of the attraction, making a fine half-pipe for the bike riders to roll up and down and around on. I kept saying in the dream as I surveyed the destruction and tried to get my bearings on what to do about it and how to fix it and who to tell, that it felt as if I'd been raped.

When I woke up the feeling of utter loss, desolation and sheer violation of my spirit stayed with me. My garden may be as weedy as an abandoned field but it's still my living breathing garden full of life and peace. In it the birds are safe and their babies learn to fly, hopping around the lower branches of shrubs without catly interference. They learn to hunt the many insects and seeds in my garden. The goldfinch sings from the telephone wire while the chipping sparrows reveal the hidden nest by making frequent feeding trips into it's cheeping and chirping center. To see it laid waste, even in dreams, was very distressing.