Aug 18, 2010 02:04
I guess I’ll just die this way. Some mad ball of frustration. I feel the intensity of the tightening tension gripping firmly on my neck and the back of my head. Truthfully, maybe I’m just complaining for no reason. I’m irritated at the uncertainty of my living conditions. I’m irritated with the drum and droll of my job. I’m irritated that my television was confiscated last night and for two weekends in a row now I haven’t had that Sunday-evening-wind-down time that I so look forward to. I’m tired of wiping asses and noses of 50 people at work only to do the same at home to someone who shows little appreciation. Someone who some days I question whether or not he’d even notice if I was gone save for the indention on the bed I leave. Some days I feel I should pack the car with the Mac and my precious kitty and wave goodbye to everything. I’m not good enough- then take the house and the china and the responsibilities and all of the pretty little secular tchotchkes and line them up in a pattern that works better for you. But then maybe that’s jumping the gun; it could simply be that I’m overly sensitive to someone whose brain obviously doesn’t operate in the same zone as my own. And to whose fault would that lie? Inside I want to scream out all of the things that are bottled below but they remain trapped because I can never reach high enough for the words.
There’s a position opening in Payroll at Saia. On my left shoulder sits a voice that says “Take it, silly. You need a change. Life is going no where fast and this bike is riding downhill on two flat tires.” On my right shoulder sits a voice that says: “A new job? At your age. You can barely string together a sentence, boy. You’d better head for a new career in a new town but not a moment before you get your head a bit smarter with schooling & them books.” And my heart is telling me: you got him into this and then you’ll leave him for another position?
Unfortunately, practicality rarely wins out for me. I generally let my head deal the cards but it’s always my heart that ultimately draws from the deck.
And really the solution is so simple. To Stay: If things were better at home, I wouldn’t think twice about staying for him in billing. I don’t need to be catered to. I just need to feel appreciated and a little tender loving from time to time. To Leave: Get my resume together and apply. An interview would ensue and if it was meant to be, it would be.
Nothing ever happens in this mind; it’s all wind and knowing.
* * *
Matt & Cindy came over to round us out of bed on Saturday. Our stomachs were crying. We followed them to an crazy-busy Chipotle for burrito bowls to stuff our insides. “Where to next?” Someone asked. “We’ll let Matthew decide,” Danny piped in. “Because we’ll never go anywhere if we leave the decision to Charly.” This is true, but I do tire of it getting thrown back at me. I tire of trying to defend my personality and not fitting into the mold that would be out of my character to pursue. Why? Frankly, unless I have a place on my mind, then I could care less where we go to next. It could be on the living room couch or back to bed for all I care.
“Let’s go look at the pet adoptions,” Matt said nonchalantly not a moment after. Now, this is a man of action & the idea was agreed across the table.
Bad idea. So we ended up at Pet Smart and Petco. Which one was first, I couldn’t remember. The first stop had cuter dogs. I wondered if the sad, puppy eyes were an act for the potential adopters who grazed past the metal cages or a genuine reflection of how forlorn some of these animals felt. And I instantly wished that I owned a farm so they all could live happily under my care.
The second shelter really had me going. The cats were adorable. There was this beautiful fluffy orange cat that Danny remarked looked like something from a Fancy Feast commercial that had quite a story behind him as told to me by the elderly caretaker who was tending to the animal cages. “His owner died. Well, rather his owner committed suicide and he lived on a farm with tons of other animals, goats, cats, chickens, cows. They had to put all of the other cats they found on the property down because they were feral but this guy was fine. Nothing wrong with him at all.” He was beautiful. It took everything in me not to sign papers right then and there.
Then there was a tuxedo kitty in the back cages. “I don’t know why no one will adopt him. He’s the sweetest cat we have here. Loves to be petted had never shown a slightest sign of aggression. He’s been here four months which is an awfully long time.” Danny warmed to the grey one next to him that enjoyed being brushed.
So what will it be, fella? I felt like the contestant in a game show. Will he choose…… A. The beautiful soft-coated orange cat with the suicidal owner and the mysterious past. B. The lovable tuxedo that just wants a home yet no one will adopt. C. the Grey cat with the playful disposition who loves being held and groomed. Or D. All three of them!
We have a winner!
We left them all there; it’s just too big of a commitment at this time for me even though I’m sure Kitty Ruxbin would love having a playmate. He’s awfully lonely while we’re at work and since Kathleen moved out he doesn’t have anyone home to play with from 4:30pm to after 2am. Danny doesn’t like him to sleep in his bedroom so most of the time I spend with him is in the afternoon when I wake up before work and when we come home at night and watch TV.
I won’t feel so bad once Nilsa, Kyle and Foofy move in because at least he won’t be alone and I’m sure Kyle at least will give him attention.
Heartbroken after the adoption agency, we decided to carry our short attention spans to Mozart bakery for sweets. I picked up a loaf of yogurt bread and Danny got a strawberry cheesecake. That place is so yummy. The last time I had been there was about 3 years ago when Amy Moua and Tony Young had stopped in after they took me to eat fried chicken feet and fish gut soup at what appeared to be an illegal Chinese market in Mechanicsville.
Later that night Cindy and Matt had come over with Johnny and we stood around the kitchen and drank. I remembered the weekend before when Terry had come over and missed that type of interaction terribly. My jive is sitting around the kitchen table with drinks and a board game listening to chill music. But every weekend it’s the same ordeal: someone plugs in their iPod to the speakers and blasts party music ala Jamie Foxx or fill-in-the-blank mindless club beats. And we stand. We’ll funnel beer or make cocktails. But there’s no stimulation. I loved having Terry here. At least I was able to do something -I- enjoyed. I just think I’m getting tired of conforming. Tired of playing host to an air filled of empty-handed guests. I like my friends. I enjoy having Cindy and Matt come over. But I grow weary of the same drill. Danny, who has been a remarkably good drunk lately, showed his devilish side when he snapped at me for telling him not to shove the new camera in my face. All of his nasty derivatives didn’t look so nice in front of Cindy and Steven. Oh yeah, so Steven had come over as well - icing on the cake.
I just don’t know. Maybe I was just being a Debbie downer for no reason.
So Cindy, Matt and Johnny took off sometime in the early morning hours. Johnny moped most of the night due to Lyndsey’s rejection from the weekend before. These fucking guys are so girl crazy for chicas they’ve met for only two and a half seconds. Of course, Steven spent the night. Because one can never just come for a visit. One must come for a visit and then politely spend the entire weekend assuring they’ve overextended the welcome. While Danny was in the bathroom Steven corned me. “So Charly, um. I…kinda have something to tell you.” Fuck me. Why? But I listened as he reacted as though he was a twelve year old boy in a confession booth shuffling his feet and stumbling over his words. “So okay, about last weekend. I’m never like that. I wanted to apologize. Despite the way I feel about you, I didn’t want to make you feel uncomfortable. I was so embarrassed the next day. I acted completely inappropriately” “Well steven, undoubtedly I’d agree you were a bit much.” “It was the reason I hesitated coming over today.” “And look at that, you’re here aren’t you?” “I didn’t know if you would have ever wanted to see me again.” “Well Danny wouldn’t invite anyone without clearing it with me first,” I lied since Danny had announced his arrival only twenty minutes before he rang the doorbell much to my dismay. “So obviously, I’m over it.”
Hugs.
“What kind of hugs do you give?” Excuse me? “Are you a swayer? A swear? I asked him three times before I understood phonetically what he was trying to say. This apparently was in reference to the act of embracing someone while rocking from side to side.
I could do without hugging at all is what I really wanted to tell him.
He slept upstairs while Danny and I locked the downstairs bedroom behind us- the usual ritual when he’s over. I was still irritated with him for his gratuitous outburst earlier but I didn’t feed into his hateful act as to avoid a worse situation and now he acted as though he was completely oblivious to what he had done; being drunk can be such a crutch. He tried to play while I tried not to smile. He passed out like a brick after tinkering on the Mac for a while beside me.
The next day everyone had come over - the plan was to have lunch and go thrift store shopping for 80s outfits for our party next weekend. It ended up just a lunch ordeal. We had dinner at the Grand Buffet, some “international” buffet right up Breckinridge Blvd. The place smelled like butt and the food was hardly anything to brag about. It was the first time I’d been to an actual Chinese buffet since I had come to Georgia. I’ll never forget how good they are back at home which is strange considering how small the Asian population is there compared to here. The Korean population, especially is quite significant in Duluth.
Back at home it was an afternoon filled with hard-core gaming. Adam had come over and brought Left for Dead for the Xbox. I escaped to my bedroom trying to nurture a tension/heat headache and not wanting to sit on the floor considering that the guys (Danny, Steven, Matt & Adam) had confiscated the sofa. Cindy seemed bored but sat on the sidelines and watched them play.
Before long Nilsa and Kyle had arrived for a visit to scope out their bedrooms. Her attitude about taking residence “I’m not trying to cramp anybody’s style here” alleviated Danny’s apprehension about her moving in.
Personally, the financial aspect of her move in is enough to have me looking at the positive side of her occupation. Her plan is to have all of her things moved in by next Saturday. She’s taking Q’s nursery and Kyle will settle into Kathleen’s old bedroom with the cute windows. The upstairs now-abandoned “game room” I’ve offered to her as storage. Her kitchen table will replace mine and we’ll move the small glass table to the foyer. We’ll put her living room set next to ours around the downstairs television. For better or worse, it’ll happen - the plans are in motion; Danny issued her the spare key and she slipped it on her key ring.
It would have been nice to have the last Sunday Danny and I may ever have alone in this house to ourselves. Unfortunately, Adam had better plans. Steven darted out sometime before 9 or 10 and would have stayed longer if we had HBO; he wanted to be home in time to get True Blood. I had enough of him and I don’t know what it is about our friends but once they come over, they never leave. At least Cindy and Matt were gone just at dusk; they don’t really stick around so late on Sunday nights because they both work in the morning.
Adam stayed forever. He and Danny spent practically the entire night playing Left for Dead. It seemed like an interesting enough game but I had things to do and I really wanted to wind down before work the next day. While they played I was able to:
1. Shop for groceries at Kroger particularly greens for the week’s salads.
2. Wash several batches of clothes including the sheets that Steven slept on the previous night (Call me crazy but I have an issue with people sleeping in the bed I rest my body. Not everyone, mind you. Not Danny of course, or Kendra and her group, or my mother. Or my close friends. However, if you don’t clip your toenails, you automatically have germs in my book. And Steven has nails that stick out just above the toe itself, enough for me to categorize it as gross. Plus, he always seems kind of dirty.)
3. Grill chicken for my salads and burgers for the week outside on
the charcoal grill.
4. Fold and put away the mountain of clothes I had washed.
And
5. Catch up on Facebook with some email responses that I had been meaning to for weeks now (with the exception of Laurie Golding who probably thinks that I’ve completely forgotten about her by now.)
I stopped to watch them play for a while. The zombie carnage and gun play was deafening. Danny kept finding me during Adam’s pee breaks: “You wanna play? It’s really fun. I feel bad that you’re just watching us.” At one point he corned me in the laundry room while I flitted about taking clothes out of the dryer to ask: “Are you mad?” Not really, why? “Because you look mad. Are you sure you don’t want to play?” I just shook my head. It wasn’t like I was angry and he was being very considerate I just get weird when I don’t have down time and I feel like having someone over the entire weekend was too much. Sometimes I’m okay with it. Maybe it’s because I feel some kind of weird deadline while the clocks tick waiting for his mother to move in? Maybe I wonder if he’ll be different around her?
Maybe I was irritated because I love playing games with Danny yet he could spend an entire afternoon with Adam having a blast but gaming with me alone would seem to be a giant bore to him.
Adam stayed forever. He also decided he wanted to watch a movie; so he put it in. We bought the Princess & the Frog a while ago when it first came to DVD. I’d been wanting to see it. Danny thinks movie watching is always a last resort unless of course someone else makes that decision, someone other than me. So Adam decided to watch a movie. Sure. Fine. Whatever. I put my computer on his seat while he was in the bathroom then put away my clothes. When I got back the computer was moved, he was back in his position and Danny took the orange futon. I wanted to pick him up and manually switch him out with Danny.
The movie was fantastic; it unsoured my mood a tad. I don’t know if it was because of the New Orleans setting, or the voodoo or the fact that they nailed the culture and Cajun dialect but I thought it was one of the best Disney movie’s I’ve seen yet. (The songs, though boisterous are still lacking though. No Little Mermaid catchy singalongs here but Disney has lost that edge years ago.)
After the movie, I took upstairs to bed. Danny followed asking me if I was really okay about Nilsa moving in. Urging me to tell him if I ever felt uncomfortable - that it was imperative I inform him immediately because if I wasn’t okay with her being here then he would force her out.
It’s just weird because I’ve never had a problem with her. Sure she’s loud and bold and brash and normally I find that an unfortunate characteristic but I do love his mother. She’s clean, so I won’t be the only person handling the mop or dishes. AND she doesn’t tolerate things not getting done. By the end of the month she will already have commissioned a Mexican to: replace the broken bedroom door, patch the hole in the wall, and fix the garbage disposal sink all for a very low price. That’s not even mentioning lawn care.
If she’s promising not to be in the way of our normal life routine then I see no problem with her. It makes me think of two things: 1. Danny really doesn’t want her here and is trying to convince me to disprove or 2. She turns into a fucking four-headed Hydra when the sun goes down.
I told him I didn’t foresee a problem.
I thought back to something Maria said ages ago about the two of us rooming together. Something to the effect of ‘seeing if it would even work out.” I always thought that an odd statement but maybe there’s truth in her words. Maybe no matter how much you really enjoy someone’s company -it, for reasons out of anyone’s control, may not always work out. For the record, I don’t think Maria and I would ever have that problem.
Danny said he would read a passage in his text book for school then come to bed. He was acting as though he was trying to apologize for doing something wrong as though my moods controlled the tides. And really I wasn’t angry with him. I was more frustrated with everything in life; and he is the only thing that could alleviate that frustration yet he complicates it by aggravating it to an excruciating degree thru multiple offenses. Simply put, it’s something he would not understand so it doesn’t even pay to bring it up to him.
It was 4 in the morning; I didn’t feel the bed move beside me until well after I had fallen asleep. Adam had kept him up watching Hercules as though that was more important than getting rest before school. I didn’t care; I’m not his mother. As long as I didn’t have to hear how awfully tired he was all thru the night at work considering that he had class in the morning.
Adam took him to work. He asked to use the shower then proceeded to take a 45 minute shower putting me fifteen minutes late for work. Aye-yi.
Monday night, in order to ease any tensions he felt I may have been exuding, Danny came over to my desk to bullshit and pass the time as though billing had down time or something. He wanted to ask if I’d read a passage in his text book so that he could discuss it with someone and also to request my help for studying on his next exam which happens to be on Wednesday. It was an odd conversation and I wondered why it would seem that I must act like a pouty bitch in order to garner even the slightest positive reaction but when I’m in my slave rags I get treated like I’m invisible.
* * *
On a seemingly less self-centred note, I woke up Monday morning, August 16th, and noticed a response to one of the missives I had sent the night before on Facebook. It wasn’t a typical message; it was the kind of heartbreaking message that reverberated in my head the rest of the evening. I’d been in contact with Aunt Mary now for the past 10 years or so. I used to write her letters and send them in the mail before resorting to Facebook about a year or so ago.
She moved away from home in the 1980s due to some big family controversy where she got in trouble with the law and stole money from a family friend; she was seeing some loser guy who she ended up running off with. But my father wasn’t involved in the situation and was the only sibling who kept in contact with her. Aunt Charlotte held a huge grudge because it was her friend, Buddy Warren whom Aunt Mary had borrowed money from which she never paid back. Buddy Warren -an immensely obese man, was in love with Mary which veritably complicated matters; he died some years back.
She came for a visit only once in 1992 and stayed with Mamaw and Aunt Sherry. I had no idea that Daddy tried to convince her to stay at this time nor that my grandmother had issued such a hateful response to her plea to move back home. I had no idea that Nan Mert (I think she is my grandmother’s sister) had gone to visit her and tried to convince her to move back home. I knew that she was close to my maternal Grandmother (they were neighbours for years and she’d go to her for advice when things got rough at home); if only the whole world could be.
It’s strange, the only thing I really remember about Aunt Mary is that visit in the summer 1992. I have no recollection from my childhood. Yet I feel very close to her. I feel as though she would have been the Aunt that I could have pulled up a chair in her kitchen and bitched and griped about all of the other family members who were annoying me at any given time.
Aunt Charlotte would be another person I feel I could go to but always held back but she’s a little harsh. She’s a bit liberal and different from the family. But she’s a hard one and just like Daddy and their mother before them, was hell to grow up under. She did send me the sweetest birthday card this year though saying that she missed me and called me in 2008 on my birthday to wish me a happy one. I feel she’s one of the only ones on my Father’s side of the family who really likes me.
Aunt Violet was the one that I got along with the most. She and Aunt Charlotte worked the Rainbow Fantasy, a shoppe they opened that sold hamburgers/sandwiches ice cream & snow balls in the early 1990s. It was my first job. I loved working with Aunt Violet but on the days Aunt Charlotte and I worked it was all business, pins and needles. It was like a storm cloud had swooped over and enshrouded your freedom.
These days Aunt Violet and I aren’t so close. I think Uncle Jimmy prefers the girls and she’s readily influenced by her husband and attentive to his brazen opinions.
It’s strange how things happen.
But unfortunately, I don’t think my Father’s family will ever mend their estranged woes.
I’m just glad Aunt Mary feels she can confide in me and it angers me that she has been ostracized unwillingly for all of these years. If only I could figure out a method to mend the broken fences.
Her message was as such:
Hi Sweetie-
It is so good to hear from you, I haven’t talked to sherry in over a year I know. It just gets on my nerves too bad; I never believe what she tells me anyway.
I saw on facebook where Mrs Raffray had been n the hospital. Kim let me know how she was doing, your right she is such a lovely person and always was. I can’t tell you how much I love her. It will probably hurt worst losing her than my own Mom.
And I saw on facebook where Jenny had a boy, I also send Shana a friend request but she didn’t respond I really didn’t think she would, Charlotte hates the ground I walk on so I’m sure Shana and Ivy have nothing to say to me. And that’s a shame because he is my godson and was close to me.
I didn’t realize that Charlie was hard on you growing up. Why? You surely never gave them any problems and your grades were great, But don’t be to hard on him remember he was raised by my mother and there was no mercy in her eyes. It’s funny how different her and Daddy was. She was hard on us we never did anything good enough in her eyes and she didn’t mind beating the hell out of you once a day either.
Matt and I looked thru some letters she sent me over the years, I really didn’t want him to see them after all she is his grandmother. But he was helping me move the furniture around in my bedroom and I forgot that they were in a box under the bed. So now he never says anything about going to see her anymore. He did want to meet her even though she would not know him. The summer that I came home I talked to Mom about moving back, the day I left your Dad didn’t want me and the kids to go. He said we could stay with ya’ll but I knew he had enough on his plate and there really wasn’t room. So I talked to Mom and I got a letter from her shortly after that telling me how selfish I was and that me and my kids couldn’t stay with her and Sherry and that I had been gone too long and wasn’t welcome.
Nan Mert and Uncle Doc came to see me twice and wanted me to move in with them but I just felt that it would get the family up in arms - when Charlotte found out there would have been hell to pay. Nan Mert said she could handle Charlotte but I never wanted to put anyone thru that.
You know what’s amazing is that no one knew any of this but you. I love you baby always have and always will
Aunt Mary
Thanks for being there for me.
If only life weren’t so fucking complicated.
My iPhone 4 came in today. After over 6 years of perfect service with Verizon, I’m giving it up to spotty AT&T service due to a pretty phone. Now before I even give out my new number I’m going to pay to have it changed; it would be horrible to memorize.
And maybe I’ll crawl out of this funk or slide deeper down the hole. Certainly couldn’t land any easier without an instruction booklet.
Cause when I’m sad... I slide.