A handful of pictures that live in my Dropbox folder found their way onto Google+ for people to browse at their leisure. I had no idea these images were up there, let alone set to public – so imagine my surprise when someone started commenting on one. There’s nothing more I love than someone being creepy all over me – guys, does that ever work for you? Am I supposed to be touched that this random stranger is so curious about my breast size; maybe even flattered? I’m a little out of the loop on this whole “flirting” thing .. is this where I offer the happy ending?

I haven’t had much luck catching up on my missing sleep, but my therapist blamed all my problems on all of you guys and also gave me some little tricks to try tonight. My brain refuses to shut up and let me drift off, and I’m worried that I’m giving myself a complex about it. I’m so worried about my NEED TO SLEEP that I  can’t concentrate on anything else .. which then keeps me awake with the thinking. I can’t even fucking NAP anymore, which sucks so much because I looooove napping. It’s my favourite thing after Diet Coke and orgasms.

Last night I had this really awesome plan to go to bed right after dinner .. but then my brain woke up, and I was full of inspiration. I ended at my working working until almost midnight, which did little for my brain health – but on the other hand, my portfolio is half done. I’m worried that it’s a little plain, but I can focus on the pretty after the content is up. I haven’t really touched it today other than to tinker with the name servers and domain pointiness, but I might actually have the whole thing done by Friday. Hooray! I am barely functioning, but I sure am productive!

Speaking of complexes, I’m hyper aware that I am boring as hell lately – sorry about that. I’ve been skipping posts because I’d rather say nothing than give another dull recap of my day: didn’t sleep. drank diet coke. did laundry. YEAH! I mean, today I went shopping and treated myself to some ridiculous in the form of purple ruffles, but that isn’t anything to write about. I do have half a rant brewing, but I need to check my archives to make sure I haven’t written about it already before I throw myself tits first into outrage. At the moment, I’m in some sort of hellish limbo – grateful that I don’t have to go outside into the frosty cracks of this cold snap unless I absolutely want to AND that my inability to sleep isn’t more than a pain in the ass instead of costing me sick days, but stuck in the tedium of the job hunt and eating all the banana bread. No one wants to read that, and I certainly don’t want to write it.

So, sorry. If I can actually sleep tonight and tomorrow, I may just have to take myself on an adventure to shake things up a little.

Oh, one more thing: in therapy, in between remembering every single mean thing each of you ever said to me, we talked about goals. Several different professionals are asking me to make a list of my goals and dreams and what I want to be when I grow up, so I’ve been thinking about it .. and I’ve realized there’s a running theme in everything I long for: freedom. Huh. Wonder what that’s all about. I’ll think on it some more, but hopefully not while I’m lying in bed desperately trying to fall asleep.

Then again, maybe it’s just this:

I can’t help but feel my complete inability to sleep is somewhat getting in the way of my life, as it is very difficult to do anything at all when your brain train refuses to stay on track and you’re staggering around like you ought to know all the best sea shanties on the waters today.

On the upside though, I am now completely caught up on what’s been going on in the Marvel Universe since I stopped reading comic books in 1990.

My week is off to an inauspicious start, which is directly tied to this delicious insomnia. I have a goal for the week, which is to get a portfolio of my tech writing work online. Today was supposed to be the kickoff of my Week of Productivity, but it’s hard to convince others that you’re awesome when you can’t think – I am fairly certain my molecular structure is beginning to break down because I am so .. whatever this is. It’s not good. Can I get a do-over on my Sunday night?

I need to leave the house. I don’t trust myself to drive on an hour of sleep, so I’m just going to walk to the gas station for Diet Coke. Finishing the last of it last night at 8pm in an attempt to force myself out of the house today might have been a good idea when sleep was still on the agenda, but right now I kind of want to punch Last Night Kimli in the box and steal her delicious juice.

Man, how about that House of M story arc?

Inevitably, talk turned to my job hunt. I answered truthfully – I’m pursuing a number of different leads, some more promising/interesting than others. Mom was quick to jump in with some good advice for me: TAKE THE FIRST THING YOU FIND OR YOU’LL BE HOMELESS!

I’m beginning to think my melodramatic tendencies were a learned behaviour.

Some of the things I’m looking into are more appealing than others, but mom thinks I need to accept the very first thing that comes along or no one will offer me anything ever again. I can’t help but be slightly offended at this line of thinking, because my mother has NO IDEA what I do for a living – how would she know one way or another if I’m hireable or not? I know she simply worries about my mortgage – I think she cares about it more than she does me – but my reassurances that my mortgage is FINE and being paid and I’m in no danger of being thrown out onto the cold, cold streets anytime soon do little to shut her up. I gave up trying to explain things to her and let her ramble on about jobs being hard to find and I need to swallow my pride and take the first job that comes along no matter how terrible a fit because it’s all about sacrifice and bills and money and lottery tickets – but damnit, I didn’t start out listening to my mother, and I’m not about to start now.

Everyone tells me that something awesome will come along; something that will be a perfect fit for my wordsmithy ways and technical wizardry. I want to believe them – it keeps the blinding waves of panic at bay – but when I’m not getting responses from these dream jobs, I start to think mom is right and I SHOULD take the very first thing that comes my way for the sake of my jet set lifestyle and continual home ownership. I’m torn between logic and the dream on both sides of the equation, and it’s giving me a headache. At this stage in my career, I don’t think that my looking for an excellent employment fit is really all that unreasonable – I work so much better when I’m enjoying myself, and it’s not like I ask for very much (other than complete creative freedom when writing dry documentation material). When things were good at my last job, I genuinely had a blast: when writing my recap of 2011, I was amused to see how many posts I made about the work I was doing, and how much fun I had while doing it. Wanting that again is not at all too much to ask .. and in that line of thinking, I want to hold out for a company that will appreciate all the awesome things I can do instead of make exceptions for the weird girl in the corner.

.. on the other hand, the threat of government cheese is all too real and fills me with illogical panic every time I pay the bills.

I’m even torn about the timeline of it all. I’ve been without a job for barely over one month (and most of that month was swallowed up by the holiday season) – surely it’s too early to start freaking out and accepting jobs that fill me with dread and depressions. I did receive severance and qualify for EI if it comes to it – but it’s too soon to worry, right? I still have the luxury of time to wait for the right offer to make itself available to me .. but how long can I keep this consuming panic locked away in a dark place where no one can see it? I don’t even LIKE cheese.

My goal for the upcoming week is to get a technical writing portfolio online. One step at a time, and all that – although now I’m second guessing my ability to do even that. What if my work is horrible and everyone hates it and me? OH GOD

This is why I should never THINK. Thinking is scary!

thinking gives you wrinkles

I was done visiting yesterday around 5pm – about 90 minutes in – but I sucked it up and held out. Getting some food in me helped, as I had once again forgotten to eat. I’d probably be a much better person if I could just figure out a livable sleeping/eating pattern .. I should work on that.

My mother appreciated her lacy underwear, and as predicted, she tried them on in front of me. I do not know why she does these things – I have vivid memories of her shameless public bathroom use; dropping trou when I was in there brushing my teeth or doing my hair – I am just glad that I picked up none of these mannerisms. I know I have enough of my own ridiculous to fill a small book, but she’s got me beat by so much I’m barely in the game at all.

Visits to Victoria aren’t all angsty teenage eye rolling and flatulence (so much flatulence – dear god, why), though. As the only child of my widowed mother, it’ll be my responsibility to deal with her as she ages – so when I’m not floating around in my happy little headspace, I try to look at things objectively and take stock of how she’s really doing. I was given power of attorney a few years ago, so if she ever does discover the internet, I can step in before she meets any nice Nigerian princes who want to share their fortunes .. so that’s good. She seems to be enjoying her retirement and is in pretty good health, but I still worry. She’s a couple of Rubbermaid bins away from being a horder, for starters. She seems utterly unable to pass up any kind of sale – it doesn’t matter what it is; if it’s a bargain she’ll buy it. This leads to her having a lot of really questionable stuff that she tries to pawn off on me when I show up – thanks, mom, but I really don’t need a 3′ high snowman filled with sand to act as a door stopper. No, really. You only paid $2.50? What a deal! No, I also don’t want a series of gift boxes with button on them and a head that sits on top. Only $0.99? How could they give it away so cheaply? Oh, you bought me another set of bedding because it was marked down to $9.99? Yes, that’s a very lovely pattern of dancing zebras, and what an interesting shade of orange it is. Clearance candles because the store was closing? How did you know I always wanted my home to smell like Ocean Sands?

I’m grateful that she thinks of me at all, but I really don’t need any more stuff. She says money is tight, but then shows me an entire rack of slightly hideous bargain basement yoga clothing she found somewhere for crazy cheap. I wish she would just .. you know, not buy stuff. Just because it’s on sale doesn’t mean it’s a killer deal; it usually means no one else would buy it and they were several days from just throwing it out anyway. I bet she’d find a lot more random money lying around if she didn’t buy so much random crap.

Of course, then she’d just buy more lottery tickets.

And YES, I’m aware of the irony of me being the person with the fiduciary sense in this relationship – but damnit, MY stuff is awesome (and certainly isn’t CHEAP). Shut up.

I’m an awful lot more like my mother than I’d ever dare admit, and that thought terrifies me. Who will buy my inappropriately fancy underwear when I’m old? That question keeps me awake at night.

Today was spent carting my mother around town, and it was trying. I had sort of hoped to get away for a few minutes on my own, but mom wanted to go all over the place .. so I drove, and listened to her talk about all the times she almost hit the big one in the past. Mom wanted to go see dad – she could bus up there, she said, but you never know. I asked what it was that I never knew, to which she trailed off and recited some more numbers like Rain Man. I should know better than to probe deeper when she says weird shit, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.

On the ride to my dad’s cubby hole, mom waxed some poetry about winning the lottery so she could buy a townhouse or condo because she hates her apartment. I let logic take over at this point, because I was beyond frustrated – I’ve been trying to get mom to move out of her stupid basement suite since day one, and she won’t listen to me. I poked holes in all her statements and told her I could help her move if she’d just LOOK for a new place; that she doesn’t belong in a basement suite (and shamelessly used the “dad wouldn’t want you in a gross basement suite either you know” card) and for what she’s paying monthly for this ridiculous hole she could have a lovely apartment with – wait for it – natural fucking light and no elephants living over her head. I’ve been offering to help her find a new place for years, and told her that now would be the perfect time because I have the time to basically manage everything for her – but when I’m working, I don’t. I picked apart her theory that owning a home would somehow solve all her problems, because everyone knows that once you buy a place that’s it you’ll never have to pay for anything ever again – and basically just lost it a little, because the whole situation is just so fucking ridiculous. My mother is SO STUBBORN. She’s as stubborn as ..

.. well, me.

Fuck.

We visited my dad’s cubbyhole, and mom got teary. She prayed to daddy for a while, then crossed herself in front of him – I don’t know what that’s about; we’re not Catholic and my dad is not the pope – then I had a little conversation with him. I don’t really like visiting my dad’s grave, because it’s all too fucking real there – and besides, I talk to my dad all the time. I don’t genuflect and pray at him like I’m apparently supposed to, but I definitely have little Wonder Years dialogues in his general direction on a regular basis – so I don’t see the need to visit the cemetery to do that, since dad’s memory is pretty portable. Still, mom wanted to go so we did – then to the mall for lottery tickets, Chinatown for BBQ duck, and Market Square for waffles. And a hat, and measuring spoons shaped like matryoshka dolls.

Okay, that last place might have been for me.

I’m going home tomorrow. Victoria is a lot more fun when Ed is around (and he keeps me from flying off the handle with my relentless logic), and I have Extreme Scooter Wanderlust – I’ll plan a visit back out in the spring, on Lola. Two wheels means no stuffed snowmen, and this can only be a good thing. I miss my cats and my bed and the internet – oh god, how I miss the internet – and I should really do something about finding myself a job.

One more night on the plywood. I can do this!

Maybe I’ll pray to daddy for some Tempur-Pedic memory foam.

ride the cyclo!

With the spirit of being thrifty in mind (and because my time is worthless these days), I had decided to take the bus to Victoria. It would save some money and be an adventure, see, plus all environmentally friendly and girl power and make love not war ban the bomb. However, I changed my mind last night at the 11th hour (okay, it was more like the 7th) for several reasons:

• I don’t want to have to depend on my mother’s car to go anywhere because it is a horrible car full of shoes and discount paper towels
• I like to have an escape plan ready to flee the bucket a moment’s notice
• I’m a strong independent woman who works on no one’s schedule but mine
• .. taking the car means I can indulge in some of my very favourite secret pastimes: driving way too fast, turning the music up way too loud, and singing along at the top of my fucking lungs

I started out a little later than I had intended, but I’m safely ensconced on the ferry and .. well, really uncomfortable. I came upstairs to write but had to move because the woman working the cafe had a voice like a particularly inelegant fog horn, and my second temporary home has no table and a gaggle of hipsters eating cat food across from me. I may go outside, because what’s a ferry ride without freezing your ass off. It’s also kind of gorgeous outside, and I could use the fresh air.

.. okay, maybe when we’re a little further away from Delta. The smell of fertilizer is not conducive to Adventure, even if it’s more or less disguised as busy work under the banner of Good Daughter.

My mother canceled her post-Christmas trip to Vancouver, so I’m bringing Christmas to her. It’s just easier this way, and it’s a chance for me to get out of the house for reasons that do not involve going to the post office. I’m trying to convince myself it’ll be a quiet little vacation, but I know that I’ll be lucky to make it to Friday afternoon – Ed isn’t along to act as a buffer, so my historically short mom fuse is going to be even more explodey than usual. In the end, though, the therapy-inducing horrible lacy g-strings I had to buy my mother will be out of my house for good, and this way when she inevitably tries them on and models them in front of me, only one of us will suffer the untold horrors. I’m taking one for the team and sparing Ed this injustice (but not the mental images OR the horror-stricken text messages I’ll be sending him later), because I am a good wife. I hope he appreciates this. I deserve a pug.

Oh, I just thought of one other bonus to having the Mazdabator with me – we’re out of household paper products. I will help myself from mom’s ridiculous stockpile – if I steal enough paper towels, toilet paper and laundry soap, this trip will practically pay for itself. Yeah! I am fiscally responsible!

And slightly hoarse from singing on the trip to the ferry!

i want a home made out of colours

When the lyrics of Ke$ha’s Tik Tok hit uncomfortably close to home for you, it’s time to take a long hard look at your life and make some changes.

*groan*

I’m fairly certain I used being sick last week as an excuse to not do anything, and I’m worried that it’s going to be a trend. It’s hard to get moving on distasteful things when you’re depressed, and the thought of job hunting gives me mini panic attacks and belly rumblings. I know I haven’t really done much by way of seeking new employment, and I’m trying not to be discouraged that the jobs I DID apply for haven’t gotten so much as a peep in response .. for my own sake, I’m chalking that up to bureaucracy and not the fact that I am utterly without marketable skills and no one will ever hire me for anything let alone things I have fooled myself into thinking I’m good at and oh god I’m going to end up in a cardboard box in the alley.

See, this is why I don’t want to job hunt – every thought turns into an enormous harbinger of doom. Someone should just hire me so I can skip this part, and then everything will be just super (and I won’t have to rely on government cheese).

I need to start waking up a normal hour and forcing myself to be productive. I slept in today (being up until 3:30am doing crossword puzzles will do that to you – I’m an 80-year-old insomniac), but I did manage to haul my ass out of a bed full of cats and make two batches of muffins. Eventually I will shower, and then I will go back to the post office for the THIRD time to pick up this stupid package waiting for me. See, I’m productive! I’m busy! I’m not at all freaking the fuck out about my lack of income and the hilarious mockery of a Ke$ha song my life has turned into!

Damnit.

dear potential employers: this is not drugs; it's glitter.

Depression and allergies are waging an all-out war on me right now. I think my stomach flu is on the mend, which is good – but frankly, I’d rather be toilet bound than puffy-eyed and randomly, achingly sad. This sucks!

I’m supposed to go out tonight, but all I want to do is hide under the covers until .. I feel better, I guess. I should probably be forced outside with a crowbar and threats of Kraft Dinner – I haven’t been outside since Tuesday, and I could probably use some fresh air.

Perhaps I will wear my white petticoat.

I’ve been sick for the last 48 hours with a nasty stomach flu, and it seems to be getting WORSE and not better. I feel fine except for my inability to keep food down, and it’s starting to stress me out – I want to go outside and do things, not sit around the house bored out of my mind because I’m afraid to leave sight of a bathroom. I have a package waiting for me at the post office, several errands to run, and groceries from Tuesday still sitting in the car (all dry goods + Diet Coke .. I think). I also need to, you know, start looking for work. I gave in to the holiday spirit and fully threw myself into the worry-free lifestyle of a wealthy dowager (which was wrong for a surprising number of reasons), but now it’s officially the New Year and I need to find a New Job. This annoying (and gross) little tummy bug is putting a pretty big damper on my plans to do anything at all and I DO NOT APPROVE.

That’s really all I have to say today. I still want to talk about the amazing food at the NYE party, but perhaps when the thought of food doesn’t make me weep. I have a couple posts brewing in the back of my head, but they’re not fully percolated yet. I want to do some baking what with all this free time I have, but I don’t think cooking food for others while ill is such a good idea. What’s left? I could play video games, I suppose. If I have to. Perhaps I’ll go speak to the gentleman who took an arrow to the knee.

In the meantime, I would truly like this stomach flu to go away so I can get on with my January.

this is where i would like to be

I vaguely remember this, but apparently right before the world ended on New Year’s Eve I pulled out my laptop and started to write an update. I managed a full paragraph and a whole page of bullet points, which I will now attempt to flesh out into an actual recap of what happened that evening. Ironically, I had entitled the update as “not that high”, with a subtitle of “How I started 2012 being date raped by a 4-year-old” – as it turns out, only one of those was true.

—

It was quarter to 2am after the New Year officially began, and the small child should have been in bed. It was a special occasion, though, so everyone ignored the loud and aggressive child – because it was New Year’s Day, or because everyone felt sorry for the kid who had spent the last 75 minutes wailing for his mother who couldn’t be retrieved because she was busy having bathroom sex. Whatever the reason, the small child was left to his own devices in a room full of drunken adults at the end of a long evening. No one watched him, and more importantly, no one watched the table full of delicious and highly potent chocolate truffles.

After the small child ate his fill of 2am chocolate, he descended upon the remaining horns on the ground, leftover from our rowdy countdown into the new year. Blowing the horns as loud as possible became a hilarious new game, one that was not appreciated by all due to the babies who had FINALLY gone to sleep. Ali confiscated the horns, but they were everywhere – so she handed them to me so I could basically lay on them and keep them out of reach of the small child. I was on my stomach with my spinning head in my arms, so I gathered all the noisemakers unto my bountiful bosom and resumed my pre-bedtime dozing.

Small child was having none of this, though.

He wanted those horns, and he wanted them now. He forced his way between my arms, blindly grasping and scratching to find the horns hidden under my boobs. I tried to tell him NO, but he was way too hyper to listen – over and over again he shoved his small sticky hands with sharp evil baby nails right into my cleavage and groped around for treasure. On one hand, I was aware that my breasts were receiving more action from a neglected 4-year-old than they’d seen at all in the last quarter of 2011 – but on the other hand, this was painful and highly inappropriate in ways I was not comfortable with. When I firmly clamped my arms down in an attempt to keep him out of my tits, he began tugging on my head with a finger in my eye socket and yanking on my clothes. I’d raise my head to get his fingers out of my eye, and he’d dive right back into my boobs to dig around some more.

Shan tried valiantly to help me, but she had no authority over the small child and he knew it. He ignored her completely, along with my pleas then demands that he stop right now. I did manage to tweet for help, which almost cost me an eye and didn’t actually help at all – the small child was pointy, hyper, out of control, and hurting me quite a lot. I finally gave up and threw all the horns out from under my chest in an attempt to get him to leave me alone, but it was too late – the game had gone from “get the horns” to “beat up this person”, and it was ALL BAD.

To make matters worse, the small child’s mother was ten feet away while all this was going on. She was in no shape to deal with her son, though – she was rocking her youngest back and forth; looking wistfully off into the distance and oblivious to the chaos happening around her. I later learned that she wasn’t just rocking but attempting to feed the baby, which made me Clue into Lactation and the horrible realization of what just happened – but I’ll let you figure that out for yourself; the dawning horror is not something I want to deprive you of.

I witnessed a really interesting dynamic that evening; one I had to sloppily write down in my phone so I could remember to puzzle over it later. While the woman mentioned above was off having (much needed, from what I heard) bathroom sex, two of her friends were extremely busy distracting her two children and (unsuccessfully) trying to keep them from freaking the fuck out over their missing mother. I heard the terrified wails of the children and watched the frantic back and forth “maybe she’s downstairs! let’s go check” action, and thought some deep track suit thoughts to myself about friendship. I had written down:

I want to be happy to distract your kids so you can get laid in the bathroom at a house party, not angry because you’re being selfish – work on that.

I was questioning my own ability to be a friend, and wondering if I was a terrible friend because my first instinct is to not be happy you’re having sex and to do whatever I can to help, but to be annoyed because your kids are FREAKING OUT and I have to deal with it. I wondered if this was a motherhood thing, and had to do with precious minutes of “you” time to blow off steam/some guy you met that night – if I was a mother, would I “get” that this was really, really needed and therefore be happy to run interference? Is it my selfish hipster lifestyle that keeps me from understanding the layer beneath “lol, bathroom porking” and displaying the compassion required? I didn’t get it then with cookies, and I don’t get it now without. I did run the scenario by others, all of whom immediately agreed with my own raised eyebrow and disdain at the situation – but they’re all childless as well, both by choice and because the babies aren’t here yet.

There are a whole lot of other factors that I don’t know, of course, but it’s still an interesting thing to think about. I don’t necessarily think I am a bad friend, but maybe there could be room for a little more compassion from my camp instead of scorn and ire.

Also, even if there is a 30-year age difference, NO MEANS NO. Date rape by small child left me with scratches all over my chest and renewed my fear in every small person who wasn’t made by Doug and Ali.

NO MEANS NO

This isn’t official until I go over every single iTunes receipt by hand and calculate it all, but according to SpentOnApps, my grand total for 2011 is $571.66. This is a significant (but unofficial) improvement over 2010, which clocked in at a startling $836.77, but I feel I can do better. I don’t have an iPad any more, which will help .. but I’ve been buying a few apps for my various Macs (most notably the $30 upgrade to Lion for my desktop), which will add up quickly. When my headache goes away, I’ll go over the receipts individually and see if the app is close – last year it wasn’t – and then I will average out my monthly spending. Spending some quality time wrist-deep in spreadsheets is pretty much exactly what the doctor ordered – after my NYE, I’m not allowed to have any more fun for a least two weeks.

My week suddenly opened up, though – my mother isn’t coming to visit for our post-Christmas extravaganza because I am fat. I admit that I zoned out partially through her phone call because she was going over her scratch ticket winnings in excruciating detail, but I’m fairly certain that was her reasoning for cancelling her trip. She also called me “sweetheart” a lot, which was weird. Maybe I should have paid attention. At any rate, I may go over to the island next week to visit HER, mostly because I want her Christmas gift out of my house – I wrapped up all her lacy g-strings in a box and hid them, but I still know they’re here. It’s likely why I can’t sleep at night.

accurate graffiti in the REI parking lot