Path to Enlightened Insanity

So I have a space heater for my room because it gets really fucking cold in this house. Also I’ve got my vent blocked because there is dust in the system that drives my allergies haywire, so I’d rather not muck with that. Barron likes to keep the heat really low, and given the size of the house I can’t blame her.

But I leave the space heater on at 60 degrees all the time. (Its a ceramic heater so there is a very reduced danger of fire. I’m really comfortable that no part of the thing gets hot enough to set anything else on fire.)

So, I’ve been coming home and I’ve noted that its been off. I don’t remember turning it off but there is the slim, slim possibility that I’m turning it off while I’m sleeping. (I can forget things that I do in the groggy initial stages of waking up.)

But honestly I think Barron’s turning it off… Thats my guess, but I also don’t want to falsely accuse her given that our relationship is so poor. So I taped this note to the heater:

To whoever keeps turning this thing off:

1. You shouldn’t be in my room, I don’t go in yours, so I’d appreciate the same respect.
2. If you have a problem with it you should talk to me or leave me a note. You shouldn’t go behind my back.
3. Please don’t turn it off again. Talk to me first. Or if you want you could just pretend you didn’t see this note and leave it on this time and into the future.. Your choice.

So yeah, is a bit passive, but it has the intended effect. It can’t falsely accuse anyone, and it is communication.

Random email that I received via my email form:

At 6:45 PM -0500 1/30/07, Naomy Kemb wrote:

>Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by

>Naomy Kemb: kemb@won.net on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at 18:45:25

>—————————————————————————

>

>content: How can i become a saint?

>

>—————————————————————————

My Response:

Do good deeds every day.

Why do I have to be on this path, this adventure?

I almost, almost, so very close to actually, got back in the car and undid my July trip. I want to comfort my kindred spirit, in person.

But I can’t. I need to make this Seattle adventure work. I will make this work. Staying here is about self love, and it tears me up that I can’t be there for her, that I can’t share a cup of coffee and my ear and heart.

In response I did something that was something my dad would do. Its amazing how sometimes I see him in me.

I just found out that a close family member didn’t tell me something really big.

I love my family, we’re all amazingly different but we still pull together. I learned about this from mom, and she was surprised that I didn’t already know. She had just expected that I would’ve been the first one to be told. (yet another reason why I should call my mother more often.)

I just wrote more about this in my Personal eJournal, but unfortunately I took away her login name and password. But, I ended that entry by saying this:

Why can’t I fix the world’s problems, let alone the problems of those close to me? Why is the tendency for one to want to be omnipotent, but have no capacity to be all knowing and all powerful?

I know she’s embarrassed, but I don’t care, I love her no matter what. There really isn’t any question in that anymore.

Call me a bit insane, but I’ve already started on my income taxes. Not that I have all the forms I’ll need yet, but as they come in I’ve been entering information into TurboTax.

The Chiquita Employee Stock Purchase Plan was fun (29 separate tax lots that needed to be entered with four data points each, for a total of 116 data points. Add on top of that that some data points needed to be entered twice, so there were 174 actual entries to be made.)

Sadly enough I had to sell off my stock portfolio, so add in all that investment info, and I’ve probably already spent about four or five hours on my taxes, and I’m not even to the good stuff yet. (e.g. That which really fills in the picture) Its also worth noting that I had no long losses on long term sales; I did have losses and gains on short term sales.

But the real reason I decided to write this entry is that I just spent the time to type in all of the federal excise taxes from my telephone bills from the past three years. My basic “precalcuated” refund from these illegally collected taxes was $30. By pounding at the keyboard for about an hour I raised this to $66.

Score!

So, I’ve decided that my previous statement on Iraq, while morally is the correct thing to do, I do not believe the Bush Administration has the political skills to solve this situation.

Simply put the Bush Administration is strongest when they’re using the tool of fear. In fact, a nice subtitle for the Bush Administration would be “The Rein of Fear”. The administration’s positions this week, as detailed in The New York Times make clear that the only political tool the administration seems willing to use is fear. In the article the current administration simply said to the Iraqi government, get your shit together or we’ll be forced (by congress) to leave. This is akin to me walking into your house, setting it on fire, then handing you a fire hose without enough pressure and saying put the fire out or we’ll leave.

This is morally repugnant.

However even more morally repugnant is sending Young American men and women who have even less ability than the Iraqi people to politically correct the situation in Iraq.

Even further more morally repugnant is playing political games with our troops by sending more of them therefore attempting to end any debate on the future of Iraq by tying Congress’s hands.

1. I have to deal with “Barron’s” bullshit.
2. Financially, I’m more or less screwed.
3. Professionally I’ve gone from a challenging 39k a year job on a nice promotion track to being a shift supervisor at Starbucks. Which is fun, but just well isn’t the same.
4. Generally the future is in doubt, and unclear.

But the glass is half full.

I finally gave into my craving for ice cream and was going to give in and hop in the car and drive because I thought it was cold out. (I try to walk everywhere, and driving from my house to the grocery store without a needed off island stop is against my “rule”.) So I get outside and the weather is beautiful. Weather.com has it as a “feels like” 40 degrees. Covington, Kentucky right now has a “feels like” 26 degrees. Ahh.. I love Seattle weather! (Even if it gets crazy every so often and takes the power out.)

So, I generally try not to write negatively about other people, it generally ends badly. I learned this early on with the bitch fight Shawn and I had back in February 2003. (We’ve since made up and are reasonably active chatting partners.)

I’ve had a few other forays into the genre a biting open letter to Lambda Union which garnered me heaps of distain, and a open poetic rant which was flattering to its subject.

So, I’m going to engage in yet another foray into the genre although I doubt this jaunt will have an effect like the other two times.

I’ll call this person Barron, for it accurately represents her “management” style and it rhymes with her actual name.

She’s been my roommate for the past five and a half months. I think we got along for the first three weeks.

I was greeted with a tour of the place, and informed that my chore in the house would be cleaning the floors (not my favorite, but honestly not horrible.) She would be responsible for getting the dishes clean. I was simply to rinse them, leave the dishes/bowls in the sink, and leave the cups on the counter because she had problems with “breaking them”. Simple enough. Besides I’ve had some problems with the dishes in the past, so I figured it was good that someone else would have the responsibility for them. But more about that later.

Barron very nicely gave me a driving tour of Seattle, then promptly asked for gas money. I countered with a Chinese dinner.

Barron also goes shopping, buys shitty dollar store dish soap (waay more water in the stuff than the major brands in the mainstream stores, so there is less cleaning power) then bills me and the other roommate for the stuff, although neither of us do the same when we buy other household chemicals.

Barron and I share a refrigerator and freezer. Which shouldn’t be much of a problem. Every other time I’ve shared the fridge, everyone either gets a section of it, or we’re in a situation (e.g. a dorm room) where there isn’t really a problem with space. Call me strange, but I like to have a section of the fridge to myself so I know how much space I have to play with when I’m shopping for stuff. Barron wasn’t explicit about dividing the fridge so I cleaned a small section (less than half) out for my use. Unfortunately Barron didn’t get the concept (although I also didn’t explicitly tell her, I sort of figured she’d figure it out) and I’d come home and there’d be something of hers in my section. Why would this be? Because she’d simply see the nearest open spot and plop her stuff right there. So I took to making sure my space of the fridge always looked full (or at least had stuff right up front), and that solved that problem. The other fun thing about the fridge was she has some celery in there when I moved in in August. The same bunch of celery was still sitting there when I finally decided to throw it out in November. (It held up amazingly well given the circumstances, the middle section of it was a bit mushy, but overall it was still identifiable as celery.) At the same time in November I also took a peek at her carrots, which were happily growing roots! Given that they weren’t molding or food safety hazard I left them there, where they sit to this day, still uneaten.

This is a nice spot to segue into the general fact that she has issues disposing of items. (Note: In Seattle-speak “disposing of” includes trash, recycling and composting.) If I don’t put her mail in her mailbox, it’ll clutter the house for quite some time. She’s got a desk that’s got a good foot of stuff piled up on it. In the laundry room there is an empty club pack Tide bottle, which is only an issue because it got shoved right in front of my cleaning supplies. We’ll also have random items from food packaging that gets left on the counter now and then, and generally if someone makes a mess on the counter, it is a mess on the counter for someone else. The sponge isn’t a tool that seems to be used in the house.

Speaking of cleaning, I’ve been damaged for life by McDonald’s and I’m a firm believer in “Clean as you go”, or even better yet, don’t make a “fricking mess in the first place”. Translating this to a specific appliance, when you use a microwave the general concept is to cover things that will spatter so they don’t make a mess of the inside of the microwave. If by chance something does make a mess in the microwave it is best to clean it up immediately before it cakes on with the repeated exposure to microwaves. Yeah, tell Barron that. I’ve used a microwave for quite some time for myself, and I can keep it reasonably clean with spot cleanings and a good scrubbing every three or four months. I’ve had to start cleaning the thing monthly because well there is all sorts of foodcrap caked on the insides (I think is chicken soup by the smell of it, but I really don’t feel like tasting it after I’ve had to scrub it off with a sponge.) Yeah, so thats another thing that really annoys me.

Okay, two more then I’ll be done.

So, I mentioned the dishwasher earlier. Barron is supposed to do the dishes. However often things get to the point that we run out of utensils or cups, and there are dishes flowing out of the sink and taking up a good quarter of the counter space. I’ve actually had one of my metal coffee mugs that had a little liquid in it that sat long enough waiting to be put into the dishwasher that it managed a little bit of rust. Its honestly one of those things that really annoys me because I’ve offered to trade chores with her (I didn’t do the dishes to her “standards”) and if you attempt to help her she gets territorial about it. I’ll admit up front in our recent arguments I’ve been an unfair with my arguments, but that really doesn’t matter because usually they’re ended by her screaming ad nauseam.

Barron is the one who pays the rent and the utilities (except the DSL, which I pay) We all have to give her a check/cash and she writes one check for everything. This shouldn’t be a big issue. But on Tuesday she left a note that she needed the rent check a bit earlier than usual by Thursday evening. Now I was off on Thursday, and I figured since evening generally starts at 5 PM for most people I’d be fine writing the check sometime around 1 or 2 PM. So that Thursday I woke up, and started my day off by watching some television on DVD in bed. Basically a lazy morning. Barron knocks on my door and lets me know that she needs the rent check by 11 because she is leaving for the weekend. Now 11 AM isn’t evening in my book, but this wasn’t anything to make a huge fuss over. So I tell her I’ll get it for her. Now mind you I slept in my underwear only and I simply woke up and didn’t even get out of bed to start watching the DVD. Given that I didn’t plan on getting out of my room for a while I didn’t want to get dressed yet. So I wrote the check, and laid it on the floor in front of my room, and attempted to get her attention, but she was busy. So I figured she’d ask/go looking for it, and she’d find it. So 11 rolls around and she gets in a tizzy about the check. I tell her its on the floor in front of my room. Okay so maybe that wasn’t the most completely polite thing to do, but given that I was flexible in the first place about writing the check then and there instead of at the previous time I figure it wasn’t a big deal. Wrong. Barron launches into a tirade about how rude and inconsiderate I am, I attempt to refocus the issue by telling her she’s making a mountain out of a molehill, and she continues on. I realize this is one of those arguments that really isn’t worth the oxygen and nitrogen it travels through, and be
sides its interrupting me from my Star Trek. So I loudly close my door.. Yes. So that huge paragraph is because Barron can’t communicate clearly and accurately (e.g. the time she wants the check) and really sweats the small inconsequential stuff.

Oh, one more thing. By her college training she’s a stage manager. Stage managers are supposed to be organized, neat, good communicators, patient, and polite. Being a former stage management major, and having spent enough time around the theater I’m left with the question “How the fuck she made it through her freshman year, let alone graduate?”

One of these problems would be forgivable, but the whole package is more or less unbearable. So now you know why I’m looking for somewhere to move.

Fuck.

I really really want to be back in the first week and a half or so of January 2003.

Shawn and I had just started dating, things were looking up at Lambda Union and life had a nice neat plan that seemed to work and make sense.

It would be nice if I just had groundhog week, and I could replay that week over and over again. In so many ways I identify that short period as being some sort of ideal. I had a cute, intelligent boyfriend who knew how to cuddle. Politically things looked like I was in line to become the President of Lambda Union, a powerful BLGT organization at Wright State.

By the end of the month I had attempted suicide. Yeah, so if that wasn’t an Oedipean month I don’t know what is.

I can’t see things through the end of February. I’ve been on a grand adventure, and well, I’m not sure what the next chapter of this story is.

Ultimately I’ll be fine. But just as I was starting working for Starbucks one of my coworkers had to pack up and leave because he had run out of money. It seems his grand quest to Seattle had been cut short. So now you know what is in the back of my head.

I’m being cuddled up to by one of the most consistent, persistent, and expert cuddlers I’ve ever known: Shaun, my lovable mexican sewer rat. (e.g. One of the two Felis silvestris catus that walked into my internal combustion engine powered hunks of metal almost four years ago.)

A friend mentioned to my on my world-wind trip back through southwest ohio that she didn’t realize how lonely I was. She was wrong and right.

On the same trip my sister, the deftly skilled interviewer, asked me “Do you miss Dayton?” and I, being the deftly skilled politician, answered, “I miss you all.” (This of course was followed by a pointed observation that I didn’t answer the question.)

Also on the same trip I re-experienced the joy of being tailgate, mind you not just any tailgating, this is the good ol’ lets drive 10 feet behind you at 60 miles an hour tailgating. (This is about 0.10 seconds between cars.)

I’ve found a new method of cardiovascular exercise, it simply involves commenting to my roommate on how she doesn’t actually do her chores at the house, which results in her using the world’s worst conflict resolution skills® (essentially high pitched screaming that comes out of blue), which raises my heart rate.. If this were actually helpful exercise I’d have lost ten pounds by now.

The Seattle adventure® is hitting an interesting point right now.

• The aforementioned roommate has prompted me to quietly begin looking for places to move to.
• I’m lonely in a way I wasn’t lonely in Cincinnati.. In Cincinnati, I was missing a very specific type of companionship that the friend above didn’t have the ability to provide, specifically romantic companionship. I’ve not found that yet, but I’m enjoying the search, and I’ve probably gone on more dates in the past six weeks than I did in my last six months in Cincinnati.

  I’m a bit lonely here in Seattle because I’m still needing to expand my circle of friends, which I’ll do, but right now it’ll just take more time. I’ve never been one to quickly make lots of friends, but those I do make I tend to keep.

I miss my friends back in the midwest. (hey y’all! Move out here, we’ll all rent a house together!)

But, I don’t miss the midwest, especially not those damn tailgaters.