You Don't Have Nixon to Kick Around Anymore

I want to disappear, just to cease to have to exist in any functional way.  I'm angry about so many things I have absolutely no control over. 

I have $1600 in savings.  This is great.  Except that I'm counting down to a finite deadline.  I have to move between April 1st and May 4th.  Before that happens, I will have to pay my vehicle re-registration.  There is no way to get an estimate from the city, they refuse, but last year that was $583.  I had to pay another $500 in taxes. 

If all of that happens again, 1600 turns into $517. Will I save some more money between now and April 1st?  I have another 6 paychecks; if I can save $200 in every paycheck, that puts me back at $1600, and all of that will pretty much disappear the minute I move.  The taxes may not happen- I didn't move between states and I changed to the highest withholding, but, I have no way of knowing until I get my tax documents.  So I have to use last year's numbers until I know differently. 

Which brings me to the second problem.  My half of the rent is currently $640.  Clearly I'm currently able to save $400 a month.  640+400=1040.  That's what I can afford in rent.  Total.  After renters' insurance, utilities, deposit, fees, everything.  Now, if I get the .50 an hour raise I keep being vaguely hinted about, things get better.  If the second job I haven't actually started yet actually manages to pay me at least $150 a month, things get better.  That means the money from the raise and the second job becomes all my savings after circumstances change.  That would turn into roughly $200 a month after taxes.  Not great, but that's just under $2500 for the year.  It allows for a minor emergency and a cushion. 

Except, right now, I can't count on any of that.  Maybe by April, I can.  Still, $1040 is the magic number.  I am not going into debt because I got dumped.  No. 

Many places around here ask for flat utilities fees anywhere between $50 and $75 with tenants paying their own electric.  Some places ask for a $400-$600 deposit, others want a deposit equal to rent.  One of the larger companies asks (rent*2)+150+no included utilities.  When they don't really offer anything less than $840 a month, that's $1930 to move in.  Sure, it's only 940 a month after that, but if you break up the deposit by 12 (which is what you should do to actually figure out whether it's within budget or not), that's $1030, near the high end of my budget.  Those $840 a month apartments are pretty shit, too.  You're invariably in a basement studio, sometimes with a clearly a basement ceiling, with basement windows and the building's conduit running through your place. 

I'm indignant about this because, hey, somebody who says they want to be my friend and help me, they just can't be in a relationship with me, except that when I had an opportunity to move into a place in March for a flat $1040, no need to pay fees, or deposit because it's in the same building I'm in now, but you might have to pay the full rent for two months.  I mean, I think that counts as being my friend and helping me.  Especially considering that I *definitely* paid my half of the rent for May and June of 2018 and didn't move to Denver until the end of June 2018.  I'm not asking for anything I didn't already give.  But that's intolerable, because... I don't know, I barely see the guy, I have no idea what he's spending his money on, concerts, alcohol and going out with his friends, I guess.  I don't have expenses like that, so to be told, "I can't do that because I didn't budget for it!" And I definitely didn't need the lecture about how I need to compromise on some of my needs.  Well, my dude, I moved to Denver because of a desperate phone call I got on my lunch hour explaining that you couldn't possibly stay in New York, and you couldn't possibly move to Denver on your own but this apartment was perfect but you had to make a decision right now and please come with me. 

And I did.  That's on me.  Sure.  And this is why I'm never again getting involved with another human being.  Because I'm just a source of money for irresponsible people, and I'm too big a sap to say no, because I am willing to support people in all other ways, too, and the money's just an extension... except that I keep getting taken advantage of.  I would be, and this isn't a shred of an exaggeration, $22000 richer if I didn't keep being complacent about money.  And the irony here is that I work in the arts, so clearly money isn't actually that important to me, I'm just tired of giving and giving and giving until, "Hey, I'm gonna demonstrate exactly how much I don't like YOU, but please keep helping me financially."  I'm cool with a 300 sqft studio apartment from the 40s... as long as it has a real kitchen and is above ground.  Like, that and off-street parking are my three needs.  I don't want a hot plate and a mini fridge and I don't want to have to parallel park three blocks from my house.  That's it.  Everything else IS compromise, fucknut.  And I don't want to compromise on those three things because, HEY, I got handed this deal because you want to be out until all hours of the night drinking with your friends and I don't want to come. 

It's almost as though my mother isn't paying the mortgage on a house I bought with my ex-husband so that my brother can continue to live income free because that mortgage is less than the cost of rent in my hometown.  It's almost as though my mother was the single income for our family in spite of my father having the college degree.  It's like I *learned* this behaviour. 

So I feel like shit right now.  Because I'm on my own.  Every time you come home at 1am or don't come home, and I know you have to be up at 5:30, I don't sleep.  So I'm not sleeping.  I'm told I have no reason to worry or ask questions like, "When are you coming home?"  Just because I'd like to not worry about you.  But I also can't LEAVE here.  So I wind up walking around Denver in the middle of the fucking night because I don't even want to be in an empty apartment almost entirely full of your stuff.  I don't want to be lectured to about how I need to compromise, and I need to get a different job, and I need to demand a raise, and all this bullshit that I can't do.  I have a limited ability to put up with the job that I currently HAVE, and it's NICE.  That's on me, sure, but I am tired of everyone else getting exactly what they want and I have to compromise. 

Take my rent money for an apartment I didn't even SEE before agreeing to move; tell me I'm being unreasonable every time I raise questions about whether drinking as often as you do is healthy; get angry about the way I eat, even though we aren't eating together anymore; leave your dishes in the sink and be angry that I didn't fill the dishwasher; leave your crap all over the floor and refuse to clean it up but be mad when I don't clean the bathroom; ex-boyfriend (you have never cleaned the bathroom in this apartment ONCE, not even when it's been your puke). Break my car having sex with hookers in it; don't give me any access to the joint bank account for fear I'll find out what you're spending the money on, ex-husband.  Both of you, feel free to cheat on me.  I'll trust you.  Because what am I worth?  I can't get a job that pays me a living wage.  I can't get a job with benefits.  I'm actively a terrible person for the ways I eat, dress, socialise or don't. 

I exist solely to be useful to other people until they don't need me, and I'm barely even useful to me. 

I just want to disappear. 

A Decade in Review

People are doing decade reviews on Facebook.  I would like to.  I would like to say, "A decade ago, I knew my husband of less than a year was hooking up with men on Craigslist, and I chose to believe when he lied and said he wasn't.  In 2012, I put together all of the pieces and discovered he was hooking up with men on Craigslist, hiring hookers and continued to lie about it, even after he was caught.  I decided to stay with him.  I waited two years more, during which time nothing changed.  I separated from him, he got fired, turned suicidal, got committed and moved back in with his parents where he's been basically ever since.  We got divorced in 2016 and I picked up five jobs, eventually moving to New York City in 2017 because I couldn't stand to live in Des Moines with its tiny, in-bred, petty little theatre community anymore.  In New York, I worked another five jobs and met the second relationship I've ever had.  We moved to Denver, where the relationship promptly fizzled out because I am so inherently unlikable that I can't actually be tolerated for more than a year unless you've got no other friends because I am such a fucking doormat.  Although, he actually cheated on me after two months, so I really should have just left him then.  And now I'm living in Denver starting a second job.  I bought an amazing vibrator and I never, ever, ever need to have sex with a human ever again." 

That's what I would like to say, to see the reactions of the people who think they know me except that they would not be able to handle any of this.  Because I am either so incredibly pure and sheltered that nothing could possibly happen to me, or because I'm such a bitch that they would be glad to hear it.  I don't have friends.  I know people who find me useful.  And the friends I do have, I'll probably never see any of them ever again. 

I wonder how long you can last with minimal human interaction?  Probably a long and horrifying time if you work in customer service.  I am tired of customer service.  I am tired of giving myself to humans who don't deserve me.  People I'm smarter than.  Better than.  I am tired of solving everyone else's problems.  I clearly can't solve my own.  Well, fuck it, I don't want to.  I'm very comfortable being an arrogant pain-in-the-ass with no friends. 

Things Which Are Bullshit

Today, our custodian tells me that the cult who typically meets on Thursday nights is meeting on the 2nd. This in spite of the fact that I have been asking our production manager to confirm their meeting time literally since November and was told, "Oh no, they're not meeting." The custodian tells me that the information HE was given was, "Oh, yeah, they emailed me two weeks ago, I said it was fine." So, now I'm working a 13 hour day on Thursday because fuck me; no other staff is available.

Today, our resident community theatre says, "Oh, by the way, can you kick some season ticket holders out of their seats for this one performance in two weeks? We need the seats so we can film." It's not like their performance calendar hasn't been set in stone since BEFORE the season tickets got renewed, or anything.

Today, we noticed that a staff member at our satellite location (who aren't supervised by us in spite of doing almost the exact same damn job, due to a weird separation of powers that we inherited) sold a ticket a couple weeks ago to someone. They failed to capture any contact information and also failed to give them the ticket. I have no idea what's going to happen when this nameless patron shows up to whatever show they think they have a ticket to, but I've been trying to communicate that to as many people as possible.

Tonight, I'm at home, pajamas on, in bed. "What are you doing tonight?" "...I'm doing it." "No! Go do something!" "What?" "I'll give you money." "I don't want money, you tell me what the hell I'd 'go and do.'" Because I don't want to be anywhere with alcohol or other people, and those are your fucking options on New Year's Fucking Eve. Just let me be.

People fucking suck.

When Sojourner Truth's Speech Was First Published, It Did Not Contain the Phrase, "Ain't I a Woman?"

There's a thread going around Twitter at the moment about a woman insisting that she was a tomboy, and she grew up just fine to be a feminine woman and today she'd be labelled as trans and that's wrong and leave kids alone. 

And a lot of people are saying, "Yes, just leave kids alone to be whatever physical expressions they want.  Maybe some will be trans, some won't, that's all OK."  Which, yes. 

I can't remember how old my mother tells me I was, but it was under a year for sure.  She'd bought some dress she absolutely loved for me, and every time it was brought out of the closet, I would scream.  Not even had it tried on me yet, screaming.  Wearing it involved screaming, and I probably wore it about twice because that's as much as she could put up with, and about six years later sent it to her sister for my cousin, mentioning that she never thought she'd be fighting with her child about clothes before I was in my teens. 

I continued to be stubborn about clothes. My Kindergarten teacher requested that I not be sent to school in dresses because I refused to sit on the floor or move or do anything for fear of getting dirty or someone seeing my underwear.  I remember clothes shopping in first grade, standing in the dressing room at Richmond Gordmans insisting that I wanted to wear PLAIN clothes.  (This is still a thing- girls clothes with ruffles, lace and sequined decoration still make me uncomfortable.)  My dad brought back some things from the boy's section, which I was immediately OK with and my mother was horrified. 

I always had long hair, but so did my dad, the only adult I knew with long hair, so I often wonder if I don't actually think of that as a feminine trait in spite of the fact that every time I get my hair cut short, I get mistaken for a dude.  I don't mind.  I didn't play sports, I played with dolls because I needed actors. 

By the time I was 10, I was convinced I would rather be a boy.  This conviction stuck around in various forms, until the present day, honestly.  I'm taking continuous birth control so I don't get periods or cramps, but I still have awful emotional PMS, and if I could stop that with anything short of surgery, I would.  I hate to buy bras.  I still don't wear make-up.  I have no interest in a lot of traditionally feminine activities.  I know a lot of guys who are much more feminine than I will ever be. 

At the same time, I was a Girl Scout.  And I enjoyed it.  I remember this coming up in my need to reconcile being a girl- I was a Girl Scout, and I liked that, therefore, I must actually BE a girl.  I eventually decided that I was me, and that was clearly fine, and I got to define what that meant.  To this day I don't really know what I do that's all that feminine- most of my least female friends eventually picked up feminine habits like fancy underwear or being mothers or wearing make-up or jewellry, and I never did. 

A gender fluid friend once posited on Facebook whether we would change gender for $10,000, and I was like, "Absolutely."  Not only would I get $10,000, I'd start to be paid more, I'd be ignored when I went to the grocery store, and I suspect I'd be taken more seriously than currently.  A lot of other women added that they would have the added bonus of not being harassed by men in public.  My ex has been harassed by men in public more than I ever have.  Which is another way I know I'm not a woman anybody pays any attention to.  The only time I ever attract unwanted attention is when I wear a specific red coat I own, then I notice that I get stopped by people asking for money a lot more than when I don't wear the coat.  I'm not sure if it's because it's bright red or it's suddenly obvious I'm a girl when I wear it. 

So, really, while I'd probably happily change gender, I also don't really think I'm trans.  I think I'm me, and while there are a few biological processes that I'd happily magic away, I don't think that's the same thing.  But when I see all these women saying, "I was a tomboy and I turned into a perfectly normal woman!" I pretty much have to admit that I... did not.  I'm not entirely sure if that's a problem or not.  I'm me, I guess, whatever that means. 

And while all of this is happening, Betelgeuse is dimming, meaning that over 600 years ago, the star was doing its red supergiant thing, and we're only just finding out about it now.  In another hundred thousand years, it might go supernova.  None of us will be here to see it.  Our records of this moment might not even survive (this one certainly won't).  There might not be anybody on this planet to witness Betelgeuse going supernova.  So, that's perspective for you. 

Now What I'm Gonna Say May Sound Indelicate

A friend on Facebook asked, generally, what the word pith or pithy meant to us.  It means the core, or essence, and the word's also used to describe the central fiber in some plants- orange pith is the white stuff that goes down the center of the orange and around the segments under the peel.  Pith helmets, the khaki vented hats on European jungle explorers and British people in India, were made from the pith of... I can't remember which plant, but, that's where they get their name.  To be pithy means to be able to describe the essence of something. 

The rest of the replies were that the word is a synonym for witty or dry humour- which is because of Oscar Wilde, I think.  He's a wit, but he's also pithy.  Stuff like, "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." It's a succinct description of life as well as an exact description of a Greek reversal, which is the crux of tragedy: discovering you do not want the thing you wanted.  It's not particularly funny and it's not witty, unlike Wilde's alleged last words, "This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death.  One or the other of us has to go." Implies the wallpaper is hideous, implies Wilde is gonna die real soon, and the wallpaper is so hideous it might actually be the thing that kills him, trivialising the meningitis. That's witty.  But, sure, whatever people, keep liking all the wrong answers. 

This is me in a nutshell, basically.  All I'm good for is correctly providing answers and explanations to things people don't actually want to know because most people prefer confirmation bias. I'm a living, "well, actually."  I don't necessarily *need* to be right, it bugs me more that other people are OK with being wrong. It's not like I go out of my way to learn a bunch of bullshit- I'm interested in things and I remember them. 

We got new keys at work, and they're stiff in the locks to the point they don't go in or turn easily. 
"Should we put WD-40 in the locks?" 
"No!  The lock isn't the problem, the key is.  Put graphite on the key." 
"Where do we get graphite?" 
"A pencil?"
"That's brilliant!"

It's not brilliant. It's a simple combination of knowing that WD-40 is an oil lubricant, which will stay in the lock, and graphite is a solid lubricant which will stay on the key.  Since the keys don't turn in the locks, the key needs the lubricant not the lock, so graphite is the better choice, and graphite is easily available in pencil form.  Also it's what you put on the wheels of Cub Scout Pinewood Derby cars to make them turn better on the axels, to add the Slumdog Millionaire element. 

This is why I get mad when that video of Justin Trudeau knowing the basic idea behind quantum computing gets trotted out to make him look like a genius. He either got briefed and he remembered what he was told, or he knew exactly two things: most computers operate on a binary system of being on or off, quantum computers operate on a system where the binary system can be simultaneously on and off, like Schrodinger's cat who is both alive and dead in the box.  That's it.  That's all you have to know and he simplified the quantum part by defining it as able to carry more information, which makes it technically wrong. No, it's still just on or off, there's no more information there, it's just that the computer is also working out the probability of whether it might be on or off rather than simply being on or off.  Meaning that the computer, while deciding between an alive cat or a dead cat, is considering what it knows about cats and poison gasses and the amount of time that has passed to determine the odds that the cat is actually alive, and then it opens the box and the answer is whatever it decided.  ...This is why quantum computers are still really not great at simple math. And I think neural nets are built around a similar idea- take what you can find from this background information and see what you get. 

He knew two things, he just said them in a way that sounded like he knew more, and he got one of them basically wrong. 

I don't think the problem is necessarily that other people are suddenly more stupid, or happier being ignorant. Shakespeare's audience has language exploding around them and he's repeating himself five times to get the point across.  It's pretty clearly always been like this.  I'm not sure what's different about me that I notice.  Or care. 

This way lies imposter syndrome.  I think.  The alternative is that I'm just that self-absorbed and believe I'm the smartest person in the room... except that if knowing things and being able to articulate them and extrapolate and speculate on the things we don't know is how we're defining smartest person in the room, I *am.*  Me and Alexander Hamilton, I guess.  So why should it be getting me down? 

Because it's all I'm good for and it's singularly useless most of the time.  It doesn't get me a better job, it doesn't make me particularly well-liked, but this is what I've got.  And I don't particularly WANT to be well-liked, it's just standing out in the gulf between me and humanity going, "This, weirdo, is the problem." 

A Failed Experiment

In May, 2016 I thought I'd find out what I was capable of.  I moved to New York City just over a year later.  I worked for a well-known theatre company in a terrible, unpaid capacity, took five part time jobs and decided to move to Denver after a year, when I was basically out of money but thought I'd found someone who liked me.

I was wrong about that.  In May 2020 I'll be single and living on my own again, with no savings.  I feel like I'm basically starting over again and I don't want to make the same mistakes again.  Ever.

No more people.  Most people are not worth the investment.

I'm getting a second job which will, hopefully, keep me busy enough that I don't notice I won't have a life.  Current financial projections suggest I'll be just far enough ahead to allow for one minor emergency a year but not enough to leave the state.

I subtracted the 6 vacation days and 5 sick days I took this past year from my pay and discovered I was exactly 8 unpaid days short of [my hourly wage]*[my weekly hour cap]*52 weeks in the year.  Those are the holidays, the days we're closed that I can't make up even if I want to because it's not like I can just put an extra 9 hours on the previous or next week, due to the hour cap.  Hence the second job.

So what am I capable of?  Screwing up my own life, all on my own, apparently.

A List of Stupid Things I've Googled Recently

"How to be less introverted."

"How do you make yourself interested in things you hate?"

"What is wrong with me?"  

"How to behave like a human being."  

"Improve self esteem"

"What to do when you're not interested in anything."  

What are you supposed to do when you need to fix yourself, because you clearly can't stand the person you are, but also don't want to do any of that work because you aren't interested in being anybody else?