glasspinata

The only downside to working weekend overnights is getting to fight the traffic home on Monday morning.

This weekend the coffee pot at work broke, which may or may not violate OSHA's standards for a safe workplace. The idea of facing 40 minutes to an hour in traffic sans caffeine nearly moved me to homicide, so I stopped at a gas station on the way home to buy coffee and cigarettes. My total bill was $7.77. The cashier commented that it was a very lucky number and that I must have a good day ahead of me.

The whole thing struck me as being a very... human interaction, a refreshing change from normal.

It should be noted, though, that aside from that one moment today was not all that noteworthy. I got a call from a hardware store in Iowa that seemed pretty confused that I lived in Texas. I think that if I hadn't been half-asleep when I answered the phone I could have made more sense of it, but that's neither here nor there.

If my coworkers don't STFU about me being "the next one to get pregnant" I'm going to fucking shank somebody.

And, yeah, "there's never a good time", but there sure as shit are better times than right goddamn now.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck. Yoooooooooou. It's none of your goddamn business and it's a sensitive fucking topic. Assholes.

This weekend at work was pretty full of stupid.

The best quote: "I think the movies that could actually happen are the scariest. Like the Exorcist."

..........orly.

Crisp fall mornings make me miss being a pedestrian. Walking through the cool morning air always felt so romantic; one of those simple pleasures that made it feel easy to be alive.

We're moving to Madison, WI next spring. I can't wait, I can't wait, I can't wait.

I recieved notification this weekend that I had a certified letter waiting for pickup. I took this to be an ominous sign; most likely someone had caught up with me and was trying to sue me for some minor offense, or I'd been picked for jury duty on a high-profile, drawn out, awful murder trial. I tried to convince myself that some distant, wealth relative had passed on and left me hundreds of thousands of dollars, but was largely unsuccessful.

After much fretting and paranoia, I went to the post office when it opened this morning. It turns out the women's clinic had decided it was neccessary to spend $4 on postage to tell me that I was late in scheduling a pap smear. O....k... Not exactly $300,000, but far better than a lawsuit.

For those not in the loop, I had my pap come back abnormal in March when I had my IUD removed. I'm pretty convinced my cervix was just hella pissed about the evil IUD from hell but it was disconcerting anyway. They said that they could perform some sort of test for $500, which I definitely did not have, so I resigned myself to waiting 6 months for a recheck. Well, 6 months has come and gone but now I have health insurance! Theoretically.

I called the clinic to setup an appointment. I misdialed the first time and the man who answered seemed as though it had happened before. How unfortunate to have essentially the same number as the abortion clinic. He must get a lot of interesting phone calls.

Rachel called today and woke me up. I can't really even summon the words to describe how nice it was to hear from someone.

I've been down lately. That whole "I sleep all the time and don't really feel emotions" kind of down. I guess the timing is ok. It's been all rainy and cool here for the past week or so. Which means that it's really comforting to go hide under a blanket and sleep away the grey afternoons. Depression and rainy days, while cliche, really do mesh quite nicely.

We had been going to get a dog. He was surrendered at the clinic after his owners couldn't afford his medical bills. I spent all sorts of time with him and finally last week took Jay in to meet him and arrange to take him home. We went out and bought dog things: a collar, leash, dishes, food, that sort of stuff.

I was planning to bring him home today, but the clinic owner told me at 8 am as I was getting ready to leave that they found a different family for him. They have kids and a yard and their other dog recently died. Evidently they've been coming in to the clinic for visits and really want to take him. Which, yay. That'll be great for the dog. But goddamn do I feel like a jackass for having gotten my hopes up.

I'd put the collar on him already. So I took that back, but I have absolutely no fucking clue what to do with it.

I am tired all the time these days. I just woke up from a 6 hour nap (if you can even still consider 6 hours a nap) and am still having difficulty with "awake". I need to stay up until 4 or 5 so I'll be able to sleep decently late tomorrow to be ready for the weekend of overnights that my work schedule requires.

Aside from that, though, today was a good day. I got paid so we went grocery shopping and ran some errands and hung out with some people. We went to Target and got Halloween-themed Kleenex and some cupcake wrappers with bats on them. We also found some spook-tastic skull throw pillows that we'll probably have to go back and get sometime because we're just that awesome.

I like Jay. I'm pretty glad I married him.

After 25 years of conditioning, my body has learned to anticipate the change of the seasons. The days here are getting shorter, yes, but it's not cooling off any. But out of habit I expect it to be autumn outside. I keep reaching for my sweaters, feeling like it should be time to wear them. But it's not. I find myself looking up knitting patterns for mittens and scarves that just won't need this year. I want to pull out the blankets and make up our bed to keep us cozy against the night's chill, but it isn't there.

It's still fucking hot.

Seeing pictures of snow is like a punch in the gut. I'm constantly caught off guard by how strong that reaction is. But I guess having lived my whole life in a place with seasons, it just feels like that's how things are supposed to be. It's like time just never passes here in Texas because it's always summer here. My brain knows that we've been here for over a year, but I just don't feel it.

It all adds up to my just not knowing what to do with myself. I'm so used to the seasons dictating my activities. There are certain things that you just do in spring, summer, fall, winter. I find myself still wanting to do them, but hitting a wall when I realize that they're just not practical.

---

Other than that, things are going well here. Married life is... nice. It's not at all different from pre-married life, and yet it somehow is? I don't know. It's comfortable, is all. I like it. It's nice to be able to say that Jay is my husband and to have that describe our relationship, whereas saying he was my boyfriend just never felt like enough. It didn't ever really convey how integrated he is into my everyday life. He's been my family for quite some time, it's just more widely recognizable now.

I've been working a lot. I'm getting a lot more comfortable with my job and learning how to do other basic skills around the clinic. I learned how to dis/connect IV lines, which makes me feel like a competent person. I'm looking forward to getting my first real paycheck, and my first substantial paycheck in almost a year. I've already earmarked most of it to go off to different things, but it's nice to know that I'll actually be able to pay off some of the debts I've incurred by being a chronically un(der)employed asshole for the past 9 months.

We're having an interesting time transitioning to my working overnights. My sleep schedule has pretty well switched over. I wake up between 4-7 pm and go to sleep between 8-10 am. I'm sleeping a lot less than usual, which is actually kind of nice. When I spend most of my hours during the daytime I tend to sleep 10-12 hours/night, whereas now I'm sleeping 6-8 and waking up refreshed and ready to go. The only awkwardness is that my most productive hours fall when Jay is trying to sleep, so I need to limit myself to fairly quiet activities (ie, no vacuuming or doing dishes). Which is pretty ok by me. :) The most challenging aspect is finding the time to hang out with Jay, but he's starting to stay up a little later, which helps.

So, the wedding is over and we're back in Texas and I'm throwing myself into plotting a dramatic escape. Well, not so dramatic. But we talked and agreed that our lives needed to be developing some solid sense of direction by 30, and that we needed to be relatively stable by 35. Because neither of us wants to wake up at 40 and realize that we've worked for 20 years and earned absolutely nothing for it.

I'm unsure if this seems overwrought, but in my head it makes sense. By the time our lease runs out here I'll be 26. It looks like most direct-entry midwifery programs take approximately 3 years. Assuming it takes a year to settle in to a new place and work up the funds to go back to school, I'll be 30 by the time I graduate. Which seems to put me right on the edge of being regularly employed in a job that I'm passionate about by 35.

I have absolutely no interest in staying in Texas. The climate has been novel, but is not at all something I care to continue to subject myself to. So, the options I'm looking at now are Portland: Oregon or Maine.

It figures that I would want to relocate to the two farthest possible points in the contiguous United States. Sometimes I want to punch me in the face.

Jay is interested in Oregon. He got fired from his fancypants contemporary Mexican restaurant while we were in Iowa because the chef is a fickle douchenozzle, so he's not feeling all that attached to Austin any more either. We'd talked some about Chicago, but there's not really anything more for me there than there is here career-wise.

I suppose I should detail what we need from a place to live, too.

Jay needs a thriving culinary community. That's the only real criteria he's given me. I know he'd like a bigger city, as that's the environment he grew up in and is the most comfortable with.

I, however, am fucking picky by comparison. I need a bike-friendly area, which in my mind predicates a reasonably flat city with relatively few awful hills because I am lazy and don't want to work that hard for the gratification of biking, though I am willing to compromise on this if it is not blisteringly hot in addition to being hilly. I need a relatively temperate climate with a good growing season and the ability to plant a food garden. I need a community of adults with better things to do than binge drink. A thriving craft culture would be nice. One of the things about Austin that I haven't taken advantage of as much as I should is the sheer number of knitting groups in the city. An abundance of feminists and veg*ns would also be nice.

So, yeah. I guess that's about what's on my plate at the moment. Speaking of plates, I need to go to the grocery store. Woo!

I got married! It still doesn't feel any different from before, but it's kind of novel to be able to call Jay "husband" now.

We did almost everything ourselves, which was very gratifying. Most of the planning was really relaxed, so it wasn't too stressful up until the week leading into the wedding when everything had to get put into place. But it came together really well, and we had a bunch more people than expected show up. About 100 RSVP'd, and the working estimate is that 150 ended up coming. Which is a bunch.

But as far as we can tell, everyone got fed and everyone had a pretty ok time. I really couldn't have asked for a better day.

Everything feels so much more bearable when I'm surrounded by soft green grass and the smell of rural Iowa. It's safer here. It's so much easier to be happy.

However, having lived in Austin for a year now I can see just exactly how small my hometown is. In Iowa 35,000 people is a lot. But we have a lot more in common with the towns of 1,000 than the cities of 1,000,000. Not that it's a bad thing. It just kind of is.

I had a busy day today tying up loose ends before we leave for Iowa. I procured an oil change, new contact lenses, and picked up some new plugs that I'd ordered ages ago and forgotten about.

Now we're cooking dinner with Jay's friend who has agreed to do Murderface duty while we're gone. It's nice to have someone else here, it breaks up the monotony.

Tomorrow is reserved for cleaning and making sure I've tracked down and packed everything we'll need. Then on Saturday we're driving out at 3pm.

Monday we need to get our marriage license and reserve kegs. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are going to be a flurry of acquiring stuff and general panic. Friday is bachelor/ette parties, Saturday is the rehearsal dinner. Then SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY. Oh man.

I was going to write a long, meandering entry about the significance of writing long, meandering entries in a 140 character world, but then I remembered that I worked 12 hours today and have to be back to work in 9 more. I am tired and so is my brain.

I now work in a 24-hour emergency vet clinic. It's interesting, and not in a sarcastic way.

It's August now. Jay and I get married in 2 weeks.

My life is on auto pilot. I'm pretty ok with that, because I'm fairly certain it's not going to crash and explode into a fiery shower of doom anymore.

But nothing's ever 100%, right?

I want a house. Preferably a little house. With just enough yard for a real garden so that I can dig in the dirt again and so Murderface can hunt for bugs.

I want a porch. And I want seasons so that I can sit on my porch with a beverage of choice and enjoy the changes in temperature and scenery.

I want a kitchen with a working oven and a window so I can bake things while I look out into the sunlight and the changing leaves and the snow and the budding flowers.

I want friends that can come over for dinner, or just to sit around. Friends that I can go places with, or not. Friends who are tangible, and not just a distant memory.

I want a garage for bikes, and I want to be able to ride my bike everywhere I could conceivably need to be. I want to be able to leave my car parked for weeks at a time.

I want to go back to school to get a degree that's actually useful. I want to have a job that I love and that I can depend on.

It's ironic to realize that I left behind the things that I most want when I decided to come here. It's ironic that now I'm dying to get back to the place I was dying to leave. Some day I hope I can reach a point where I'm happy with what I have, and really know what I need.

I'm not sure what I was looking for when I left Iowa City. I guess I felt like I needed to move on to bigger things with my life. I think I was probably wrong. I miss my small, warm, comfortable, fulfilling existence. I was happier then.

Not to say that things were perfect. But I think maybe I was mistaking occasional dissatisfaction for always inadequate. It's hard to tell for sure. I'm pretty impulsive, so it's difficult to know what's going to be "enough" from one moment to the next.

I'm pretty sure, though, having had this experience will make it a lot easier to tell exactly what is livable and what isn't. It's amazing the good a little perspective can do.

I just wish there was a way to make Jay really understand.

We are about to run out of coffee.

It's weird, the things that I find the most upsetting about a given situation. Like, yeah, no money. That sucks. But I threw a crying, throwing-whatever-was-closest fit the other night because we didn't have any peppermint tea and my stomach was upset.

Blah.

Just in case you were still on the edge of your seat over my eyelid drama, you should know that the twitching finally subsided around Fridayish. And I didn't even have to murder anyone. Hooray!

I'm feeling... better. I don't know if "better" is really the right word, since nothing has changed. I guess I'm more at peace with what my life is right now. I'm working on getting the apartment to be clean, as opposed to just kind of letting it exist in a state of controlled chaos. I scrubbed the dirt off of the windowsills today. And I've mostly tamed Jay's epic laundry drifts.

( Cut for pictures! )

Everyone I've talked to about my eye twitch has told me that it's either lack of sleep or stress related. Since I have nothing to do but sleep most days, I'm going to blame it on stress. Except that having a twitchy eyelid is making me more stressed out.

I'm going to be pretty sad if it's twitchy eyelid that finally pushes me over the edge to being full-blown homicidal. I always hoped it'd be something cooler than that.

C'est la vie.

Today is the day when we have to resign our lease. I have been dreading it for a long time. Jay keeps asking me how long I want to resign for. HOW ABOUT NOT AT ALL. But I told him it was his call, since he was the one who wanted to stay. So he's opting for an entire year. I'm gonna see if I can argue him down to 9 months so that we can move out before it gets blisteringly hot, since I'm pretty sure that 3 isn't going to fly.

Ugh.

Still no callback from the midwife.

I have had a spasm in my left eyelid since Friday.

I am probably going to off myself if it doesn't stop soon.

Just a heads up.

This picture makes me smile:

Today has been a waste of time.

A local midwife wants to give me a job (YAY!) but is too busy to find time in her schedule to talk to me about it (BOO). I spent a large portion of today sitting next to the phone waiting for it to ring. It didn't.

Except for when Jay called to tell me that he wasn't coming home after work at 3:30 to hang out with me and go get his suit fitted, and that he was going out with his coworkers instead. It rang again at 9 to tell me that he was on his way home. When he arrived home he spent 20 minutes drunkenly ranting at me about how we need to be ready for the apocalypse, nuclear holocaust style. Then he passed out on the couch.

I desperately, desperately, desperately wish I had someone to call and hang out with. Because I don't want my only human contact today to be be someone raving about canning and its relation to emergency preparedness. My psyche cannot handle that.

I'm going to go buy a bottle of wine and maybe go swimming. See if that makes things any better.