Bah, what's the point, right?

So, I've spent my day procrastinating on just about everything. Having a head cold tends to put me into moods like that. I've played with the boy and tried to mentally function, leaving a small mountain of laundry, a slightly smaller mountain of dishes, and a sizable pile of papers to be dealt with. I know that I really shouldn't be too aggravated with myself, but I can't exactly help it.

I've sat here screwing around on the computer when I could have been taking care of these things. I took a nap this morning when I could have resolved the vast majority of the dishes or the filing with out worrying about the boy needing me. And now, as he's finally fallen asleep for his second nap of the day, I just don't have the ... energy to slog thru a sink full of dishes, filing a months worth of correspondance, or folding ... alot of laundry.

Does this make me far too lazy? Or am I just feeling sick and need to give myself a break? I honestly am not entirely sure. I know that last night, as I attempted to meditate, I fell asleep and then slept just about all night on the couch. I hate getting sick, it just sucks the life right out of me. I was barely able to keep up with the boy today.

Ugh!

I hate dealing with paperwork!

So, my dear husband and I have started on the road to financial freedom!

And it's left me feeling like I'm going to die a death of a thousand paper cuts! I recognize that having hard copy of everything is going to make it easier to keep track of what is going on. We can actually prove that bills are paid and such. I know that it's easier for me to keep the numbers straight if I have them on paper in front of me when I balance the checkbook. All of these things make sense and are very practical things to keep in mind.

At the same time, I really do feel like I should just go running off into the dark screaming and gibbering like a madwoman in the face of the small mountain of papers that need to be organized, filed, and dealt with. It is intimidating but yet I know it needs done and I can't let it scare me any longer. It's not like my husband and I will only drag ourselves down if we make financial mistakes here. We now have a little boy to keep in mind.

Sure, it may sound cheezy, but we really are doing this more for the boy then ourselves at the moment. It's a miserable and frustrating thing to get all of our finances in order. It's also rather... painful to realize that you just don't have the money to go out to dinner as often as you like or to do some of those fun things you'd really love to do. We can't exactly say that our fun is more important then making sure that our son has food to eat, clothes to wear, and a safe home to live in. So, we tighten the belt and set our noses to the grindstone.

Fortunately, however, we're not required to enjoy this process. That, I think, probably would make a crazy woman out of me. Right now, however, I am actually looking forward to that sink full of baby bottles and dirty dishes. It gives me a legitimate excuse to avoid more paper cuts as I file away the papers from last month's bills.

repost from elsewhere

It seems that when I find that I am beginning to make progress and get all my ducks in a row, something just comes along to throw me off. I'm sure that y'all have days (weeks, months, years???) like this. I've had a short string of 'em and I'm just going to take a moment to vent a little bit. Please, forgive me and the fact that this isn't exactly cheerful at the moment. I'm having a little difficulty with some of this and I'm still not entirely sure how to approach it all. Who knows, maybe some one has some advice that can help me puzzle it out!

First off, the holiday season went fairly well for my family and I. It is a thing that I am most thankful for. If it hadn't, I think the last few weeks would have been impossibly hard to bear. My youngest brother is in the Army Reserves and he just shipped out for Afghanistan last week. My whole family is in a tizzy over this, especially with him talking about re-enlisting into the Marine Corps. His wife is not exactly happy but there's been some problems within their marriage, and she's hoping that this tour will scare him into acting more responsibly.

I've been having a real tough time coping with the emotional fall out of all this. I can at least say with some degree of quiet pride that I didn't get into an argument with my brother the last time I saw him, even though his egoism and casually vulgar attitudes really made me angry. Hard on the heels of this, I realized that my problem with depression has come back full force. It is rather embaressing for me to have to take antidepressants. I feel that I should be able to cope with this problem with out these things.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. So, last night, we filled the perscription on the way home and my husband reassured me that this is a legitimate medical problem. He said that if people approached postpartum depression and depression in general as a "real" medical problem, then there wouldn't be people murdering their small children because they were convinced that the babies were doomed for hell by accident of their birth. It's rather chilling to realize that I had internalized that attitude and the rather disgusting version that I had grown up with: psychological problems = attention seeking behavior.

It is my hope that I'll do a better job handling these things, but I can't help feeling like the wind's gone out of my sails. I really wish that it were possible for me to get out into a garden and put this anxious energy to work doing something, like hoeing potatoes or something. Scrubbing out the bathroom can only be done for so long before the fumes from the cleaners make me start wheezing, sadly. That said, thanks for listening to my bit of a rant/whining about life at the moment.

I'm sorry if I happened to bring anyone down also as they read this.

Yeah, it's been a few days...

I'm not going to say how long it has been since I've written in my off-line journal. That'd be a bit longer, and it's all I'm going to admit to. At some point in time, I should probably copy what I've typed up on here into there, so that I've got a 'hard copy' record of it as well. I'm pretty sure that project will be at about the same point as the one I started to make a digital copy of my journals.

Alot has happened over the last several weeks. My darling Stargazer has lost several people in her family over a short span of time. You know that you are in the hearts and thoughts of everyone here in this house. Please, call me if there is anything we can do to be of help to you, love. If anything, I've got plenty of stupid human tricks I can compare notes with you on. I swear some of the people in this town just don't think at all!

I've been forced to admit that my youngest brother is an unrepentant asshole of the first order. His wife is on the verge of divorcing him because of his failure to stand up and act like a man. You know, uphold his end of the bargain to be a husband and a father to their three little girls. And all of this is even as he's shipped out to Afghanistan for the next year. I believe the most excruciating part of all this is the fact that I am torn between feeling like it'd be a good thing if this misogynistic bastard that shares the same genetic background that I do get's whacked in combat and feeling like my goofy little brother that helped me blow up model rockets to tick of Dad is going to die, and being terrified of that.

To say that I feel like I'm in a moral quandry is an understatement it so say one that is beyond my own masterful ability to commit such outrageous understatements. I love my family deeply. They are my own flesh and blood, and one of the few things that I feel you need to be able to count on in life. After all, if you don't have your kin behind you, you're going to be losing a lot of history and alot of support. At the same time, I find myself feeling that the ties of kinship pale in comparison to the abomination that my brother has become over the years. I don't even recognize this man.

I could add more but I don't believe I will.

I'll focus on happier things in another post. I need a little break before I get angry or upset.

Oh, dear, what do I do now?

I'm a fool. I thought that I could just strong arm my way thru something. I thought that if I did things the hard way, it would prove to make things work easier in several other areas. As usual, my stubborn streak hasn't proven enough. Now I'm not sure how to make this right, how to fix this problem.

I don't even know how I should discuss it, because I know it's going to be a huge source of frustration.

Stargazer, I love you.

Before anybody thinks something foolish, there's alot of past history here that I'm not going to bring up for the rest of the internet to know. Somethings just stay between the people who know the facts, and there will be things I mention that are going to fall in to that category.

First off, Stargazer, I love you so much that it hurts. I'm still furious with myself over how I broke your heart years ago and how close I came to losing one of the most important people in my life. I feel terribly embaressed by how much of a coward I am when it comes to telling you how important you are to me. Not a day goes by that I don't think of you and not a day goes by that I don't miss you. He knows that and he feels badly for me. I think that he thinks I'm too hard on myself. I know that you'd say the same thing, and maybe you're both right.

I'm sorry but I really can't forgive myself for how stupid I was then. I got scared I didn't say anything, I didn't even realize when I was starting to dissociate. Looking back on it now, I realize that was what happened that night. It was the same thing that happened when he and I started trying to be intimate after I left that bastard who hurt me. The only difference was I wasn't having those screaming panic attacks where I started hitting myself. I've got to admit, I thank all the Gods for that small mercy. I don't know if I could have handled that. I tried for years to forget that I started to shut down when I felt your hands on my skin, but it haunts me.

Sometimes, I have nightmares of it. Where I can't feel anything and I desparately want to, because it felt so cold inside me and so... dark. There are times where, in my dreams, we're together. You hold me as I cry about my fustrations with the boy, with my husband, with my life in general. In my dreams, you help me to forgive myself, as you always have and you continue to be the calm, radiant presence at my side that you were in that moment. It scared me then and it scares me a little now that you love me.

It scares me even more that one day, you could slip out of my life forever and I'd have never done this. I'd have never told you how I feel about you, even today, and all that I'd have left was bittersweet memories.

I do love you, darling. I love you so very, very much. I'm sorry that I hurt you and if there was some way that I could take all of that back, the distance that came from my idiot pride and my foolish fears to the badly phrased bullshit things I said, I would. I never wanted to hurt you and I still hate myself to this very day for it. I do think I failed you. I tried to love you as you deserved to be loved but I couldn't do it right. Maybe I was too broken at that time, maybe I was just too scared to believe in myself. I don't know.

But I can't find the words to say how much I love you, Stargazer. I'm sorry that I've been so far away. Please forgive me for it, love. I was afraid that I'd hurt you again by being stupid.

Bah, who needs sleep, right?

Or at least, that's how my darling son feels at this moment. He's throwing one monster of a temper tantrum at the moment because it's still nap time. I feel relieved that he's feeling well enough to be showing that he does have a temper like I do, but I'm mildly irritated that he has decided that he really isn't tired (never mind his yawning and rubbing of the eyes).

Ah.. wait! He did finally fall asleep.

It seems to be how nap time has gone since he caught his cold. Here's hoping that now that he's getting over it, my boy will not be so cranky when it's time to sleep. I can't be entirely sure, though, as he has started teething. We'll see how this unfolds, I suppose.

Happy New Year!

Or what ever. :P

I'm feeling a bit apathetic. I think all of that effort making thing for people burned me out some. I'm a little bit ticked off with the post office.

They keep losing my mail. It's be one thing if it got lost because it was stuck to another piece of mail. But, that's not the case, as I learned recently from one of the folks who work there. Apparently, one of the staff there refuses to wear his glasses. He feels it makes him look old.

It also makes him send my mail off to the other side of town. My name is not Vanessa. My husband's name is not Vanessa. And our son isn't named that either. We have a post office box! And one last thing, just because this woman's last name as two 'L's in it, like ours does, it does not mean that we're interchangeable.

As a result of the vanity of one (if not more) of the postal service employees here in town, we're late on paying the bills on a semi-regular basis. If I'm lucky, letters sent to me will actually reach me. I'm still wondering if a package that was sent up shortly after the boy was born didn't reach me because it went over to this woman's house.

Honestly, people, would you please read the address on the packages and letters!

Sorry, I'm a little bit ... aggravated. I spent all day on the phone making sure we had car insurance and that we didn't have a laundry list of problems because this happened again. Once in a while, I can understand, even accept. Every few months, like clockwork, is just insane.