Baby it's cold outside...

(This was written over the past weekend...)
Holy crap! It is freezing out there my friends. I hope you are all snuggled up and cozy wherever you may be reading this. It has been a rather lazy day. The only real chore today was when I had to take Meg to see the doctor earlier this morning. We thought she might have an ear infection, but it turns out she just has the same cold/flu junk everyone else has. So I paid $20 and waited nearly an hour plus to hear, “It has to run its course.” Oh well, at least we know for sure her ear is OK. They gave me a couple free samples to deal with her cold symptoms and told me to give her Advil for the aches.

Otherwise, I haven’t been very interested in my house chores today. Strangely enough, I just don’t find myself rushing to scrub the bathtub. Instead my mother came by and treated me and Meg to see ‘The Holiday,” which was showing at the dollar movie. All in all, I liked the film. I would have paid a matinee price for it even. Of course, my long time readers will remember my fondness for Kate Winslet and not be surprised by that last declaration. ;o) It was very much a chick flick and I felt badly for the younger men in the audience. Strangely enough, there were a bunch of old people there to see it too. Weird! At any rate, if you are PMSing or perhaps just got dumped then this is the movie for you. It drags a bit and you have to be able to buy Jack Black as a romantic lead actor, but it was an enjoyable couple of hours. Now I want to go see “Stranger than Fiction” before it leaves the dollar movie. Brian said he might actually go to that one with me.

While Meg and I went to the movie, Brian and Brandon went to visit Brian’s mom. While there, he finally brought home the small pile of Christmas gifts that were left there by his visiting brother from New York. We just don’t go over there much and Brian was dragging his feet to go pick up the packages. So today we celebrated a little bit of Christmas in February. We got a gift card to Uno’s Pizzeria & Grill, so guess where we had dinner? It was terrible. The food was nasty and it was freezing cold in the seat we were stuck in. Still…we were flat broke and without dinner, so beggars can’t be too choosy. I really must send out a thank you card to his brother this Monday…I can’t believe so much time has passed since they visited and when we finally got around to picking up the presents. I guess that tells you how sick I was of Christmas this year.

I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection these past few days. I am totally sick of being home. I can’t work on SpeakOUT stuff because I have no internet access (and can’t afford to pay for it at the moment) and I can’t go anywhere during the day and complete even the smallest of errands because I have no car. I’m sick of being a prisoner in my own home.

Last week I got up twice at 5:15AM to drive Brian to work just so I could have a car during the day. I hate doing that for several reasons…1) I either I have to drag the kids along with me or leave them here asleep and hope that the house doesn’t catch on fire while I’m gone 2) it costs us a lot in gas and racks up miles on the only car we have 3) I always end up exhausted – trying to do everything in a small amount of time 4) did I mention it is 5:15 in the freaking morning?! It is dark and cold for God’s sake! 5) I then have to drive in rush hour traffic, along the worst stretch of interstate in town, to pick him up at the end of a day where I probably spent most of it stuck in the car driving all over town. In short – it sucks in a major way!

Anyhow, I sucked it up and did it. I ran all over the place and accomplished a long list of errands, although I couldn’t find the time to squeeze in a hair cut for myself like I had hoped. I also spent a couple of hours on the computers at the library each day. There were 48 emails in one inbox alone! I spent the first day just catching up and the second working on my lengthy SpeakOUT list. I was finally able to send out our “weekly” update, after not doing so for 2 straight weeks. I may have to rename that thing! Doing all of this made me feel good, but at the same time I wondered why it had to be such a struggle to do something as mundane as going to the post office or picking up a birthday card. Brian works long hours and I feel guilty leaving him with the kids to do these things when he gets home. That leaves the weekends – but it gets really old running errands every weekend.

This past week I was watching Grey’s Anatomy and Meredith’s mother says to her, “I raised you be an exceptional person. What happened to you? You’re just ordinary.” Damn! What a bitch! Still, it got me thinking about my own life and how somewhere along the way I just allowed myself to become ordinary too. I certainly didn’t intend to be. I had bigger than life plans for myself. I worked really hard in school, yet that didn’t bring me the expected results which are promised to “good students”. I worked my ass off (for WAY longer than two years) just to get an associates degree in college – which isn’t at all what I had planned. Marriage number one was a disaster and now here I am in marriage number two with two kids living in the suburbs and I wonder what in the hell happened. I’m in my mid-thirties and I realize that I am no where near the person I though I’d be at this point in my life. In fact, I am slipping backward! I haven’t had a real paying job in two years. I have no 401K...no retirement plans at all. My mind is becoming mush from the endless cycle of washing dishes, folding laundry and prying the kids off one another. Everyday is like the last one. It is no wonder that I am still depressed. (Hey! I just counted up all my co-pays for my prescriptions in 2006…$600! I spent SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS on prescriptions last year. So why don’t I feel better??!!)

I’ve been thinking a bunch about my role in the GLBT community as well. Every other month or so it seems I have a crisis of faith and I want to quit running SpeakOUT. I think I finally realized that it isn’t the group that brings me down; it is my disappointment in the failure to meet my own personal goals. I am not going to be modest here – I am a kick ass advocate. I run the hell out of my group and I am damned good at what I do. Yet, I am still the ‘good little volunteer’. Every time an opportunity comes up for me to be employed (re: PAID) as an advocate, my name gets passed over. I just found out recently that yet another paid position at Equality Ohio came up and it was filled without them even contacting me. It’s like getting kicked in the guts. Why am I not tops on their lists? Even Stonewall just hired two people without even blinking my way. I know I would be a great employee. I have real passion for this part of my life, but the continuous snubs are slowly kicking the spirit out of me.

It doesn’t help that a lot of people I know are getting these new really great jobs. Much of these opportunities were born from being at the right place at the right time – they volunteered and then were hired to work for candidates running for election. Now those candidates are in office and they have offered my friends/colleagues these awesome jobs. I don’t begrudge them – they deserve this. I am just jealous and feeling left behind. I can’t even imagine a starting point but I know I want to change things in my own life. I want to go out there and work again. I want to be productive in ways that don’t involve laundry and mopping. I somehow have to find the financial means to do this. I cannot stand living the way that we do anymore! For example:

Here it is Saturday evening and we have $4 in our checking account until this coming Thursday, which is Brian’s payday. But I wrote a check for $20 this morning to get Meg’s ear looked at. So that means I have to take the last $50 we have in our savings and put $20 of it in the checking account so it doesn’t bounce. That leaves us roughly $30 to live on for the next 5 days. Did I forget to mention that we have no food? Or that the car is running on vapors? Did I mention I wrote our rent check out yesterday and asked my landlady to wait until the ninth to cash it – but she may choose to ignore that request all together! Or that I still need to pay the car payment ($160). Rent + car payment on payday = no money left for the two weeks following Thursday. Don’t even ask me how I’ll manage to pay the pesky $134 gas bill on the 12th before they turn it off. Oh and lets not even think about groceries and gas…and yet another Valentine’s Day that will not be celebrated for the lack of money.

Do I know stress??!! Yea, we are in a long-term commitment with one another.

This is my life. The real one…and people were probably wondering why I needed an escape. These are the circumstances I live with each and every day that I get up. It hangs over us like this big, dark, ominous cloud. It never gets better. We pay bills just to avoid terminations and then never have enough left over to pay down the debts. Brian works 10 hours a day from 6AM (or earlier) until 4:30PM (or later) each day…but it isn’t enough. When I finally do get a job, we will make too much money to get subsidized lunch prices. Instead of .80 cents a day for my kid’s school lunches it will be $4 a day. I will also have to worry about money for gas, insurance for a second car and lunches. I’ll have to worry about day care and who will watch them if one gets sick or there is no school. It is the ultimate catch-22.

I know there are people with much worst lives than mine. I know this. I also know I am one missed paycheck or major emergency away from being just like them. It scares me! I hate wallowing in my own self-pity, but sometimes it just gets too much to handle. Brian walks through much of our lives in this zombie-like state. He goes to work, he comes home exhausted…repeat. I’m the one who has to worry and figure out someway to survive until the next day. That is all I can do – make it through one day/one 24-hour period at a time. If I sat here and thought about time in big chunks, I’d probably just curl up in the fetal position and go into a panic induced coma.

So…I need to find a way out of this downward spiral. I need to stop this terrible state of existence. I don’t know where or how or when…but I am praying to be struck with inspiration very soon before all the “exceptional” dies out in me.

Sorry to vent - but thank you for reading this to the end!