As long as I'm tracking panic attacks, I might as well write down that I'm having a big freaking stomach ache/chest seizure every time I remind myself I'm about to quit a steady job with benefits and retirement for a job with 1/2 the pay and no benefits or retirement.

Thank god (and freaking Myles Brand, I suppose) that IU finally has domestic partner benefits, at least I won't have to give up my insurance, just pay a little more to add myself to Catherine's.

Finally this article showed up in The Daily's archives with a static link, so I can write it down. I thought it was well done for a college newspaper.

A Tale of Two Sides

Am I really such a petty person? Yeah, I guess so. I just get so tired of her asking me for things. If she was just going to stop by and chat every day, that would be one thing (well, I still wouldn't like it, I don't think), but she always *wants* something. Could I read this for her? Could I explain this to her? Do I have a jacket she could borrow? Do I have a blank video tape? Can she borrow my car? And I really do feel bad, I know I'm her only friend and I should really just BE NICE, but I'm starting to dread her visits. No, you can't borrow my car because: I've seen you drive, and I don't want to you put a dent in my car; you'll park illegally when you can't find a parking space, and I'll have to go through the hassle of paying the ticket/getting my car un-towed; I don't want to give you my keys because Catherine just replaced the keychain and if you drop it, it will shatter just like the old one and I don't want to give up my hockey keychain that Catherine gave me for just anyone...

I am a petty person. Either that, or she really is taking advantage of me all the time, and I'm justified in my annoyance. I'm just not sure which one is the right assessment of the situation.

My pledge to myself: go to New York on Wednesday, buy a few books, listen to a few good lectures, roll with whatever happens, and just relax for a few days. People can probably feel the tension radiating from me through the walls of my cubicle. I'm looking forward to going away for awhile and just doing something different. I probably owe a thousand apologies to my friends and co-workers for being a complete freak the past couple of weeks.

On the plus side of having nothing to do at work: Rough draft of the novel is done. Still 5000 words short, but the first draft is done, anyway. Now I can start working on my dad's book again.

Addendum:
I guess I am a total bitch, because I just got the following e-mail from Sunny:


Sister, thank you so much today.
I suddenly thought in the business law class that our team didn't discuss
about the video tape, and I didn't bring my car today. But I thought again
that you could help me to get it.
So, I ran into you.
However, I am thinking that you seemed busy that time. I'm so sorry about
that.
I just tried to borrow your car, so I don't want to bother you.
Now I'm thinking is that borrowing your car, even if you are my sister, is
also inappropriate, isn't it?
I prepared everything yesterday about the speech, but one thing I had to
prepare is a video tape.
I guess I'm getting old. :)
But thank you so much, sister.
Have a great day, even if it seemed it is hot weather.


I am such a jerk.

A quick addendum to my last post, Kirk just told me he definitely has four classes I can teach, so I am so quitting this job! Yay me!

Okay, obviously, last night's post was a sign to get the hell out of Dodge. I went home, talked to Catherine, and decided for certain and sure to quit my job. Kirk was really positive the last time I talked to him, thought I could teach at least a couple more classes out at Ivy Tech. I think if I can teach four classes fall semester, plus find a part time job, we'll be okay financially. Not great financially, not as well off as we are now, but okay. I guess that trip to Paris will have to wait, but I also guess I'm willing to sacrifice it to get out of this dead end job.

I've seen a couple of ads for part-time drafting work, so if I could get 10-20 hours a week doing that, and then teach a few classes, I could leave here. At any rate, I'm quitting. We decided last night that I should hold on until the end of summer semester, and quit before I start teaching at Ivy Tech the last week of August. I've got about a month's vacation pay coming to me, so that should get us through September, at any rate.

I feel tons better just knowing I don't have to rot here the rest of my life.

Catherine announced to me today that I would never have the legs of Cyd Charisse. Imagine my heartbreak.

So, more fallout from last week's appointment. I'm supposed to be tracking my anxiety attacks (I'm not sure "attacks" is the right word, they're more like "slight disruptions") on these little "worry forms." Like, there's check boxes for all the physical symptoms (pointless, I only ever have two: I break out in a sweat, and my heart starts pounding), and them I'm supposed to write down how long they last, and what triggered them. Also rather pointless, since it's always the same thing, talking to strangers. Not strangers at work, but people like sales clerks. I have finally decided to swear off shopping at Smith's Sport'n'Shoe forever--on Friday, three different clerks tried to talk to me, and I was like, "Look, I'm tired of tracking this panic attacks, already, would you people just *shut up*?"

I think tracking them might actually make them a little more intense, because now I'm kind of expecting/dreading them, when before, it was all quite unexpected, even though this has been happening since I was a kid.

More about the game last night--

I'm amazed Tamika Catchings hasn't done more damage to her body than just her ACL. I swear, that woman can *move*. There were a couple of times when she cut around the outside of a defender on the post (so, her feet were outside the key), and she still managed to lean in and do a finger roll. Where can I learn to do that? She is a scrapper, on the floor all the time. Coach Fortner did a nice thing and pulled her with just a minute or so to go in the game so we could give her a standing ovation. Awesome player, well worth the wait.

Olympia Scott-Richardson has the most regal hairstyle I have ever seen. She looks like an Olympia.

Guiltily pleased that I don't have to watch any Purdue players on our team this year. Not that I was hoping McCarty and Komara would get injured, but I am pleased Komara won't be playing for the Fever. I don't care if she gets picked up by another team, I don't wish her any particularly bad career, but I just don't want to watch her play for *my* team.

We saw Heather Cassady in the stands, she has an internship with the Fever this summer. We practically drooled, she was that ripped. I would kill to have those shoulders. If you compare her fitness level with that of Jill Chapman, who didn't get put out on waivers (probably because she's tall, so they're willing to work harder to bring her along), Jill looks like the Pillsbury doughboy. Heather has clearly been keeping up with her workouts, and I hope she gets to play some ball in Europe this fall (if she wants to). Catherine was going to tell Jodi we saw Heather and thought she looked good, I suggested she probably not tell Jodi we've both got a huge crush on her daughter!

Looking forward to the season, I did get so tired of losing last year.

Thank god the Fever finally had their home opener. I was seriously going through withdrawal. Watching sports on TV is nothing like watching it live, and watching men play basketball is nowhere near as good as watching women. Catherine had to admit that she was wrong about Tamika Catchings--she thought we wasted a draft pick on her last year when she was out with an ACL injury. This one game made up for that season on the injured reserve list, and Catherine has completely changed her mind.

I wish everyone could experience the Conseco Fieldhouse, it's a great place to see a game. I wish we had friends who liked sports, because sometimes it is just necessary to share the experience with someone to get the full effect.

We heard a Jimmy Eat World tour commercial on the radio on the way home, and instantly came home and bought tickets. So, we're seeing them on August 2. This "Hear You Me" song is incredibly sad.

I am about to fucking die of fucking boredom. I so need a new fucking job. I've got a major fucking headache and I don't have any fucking ibuprofen here at this stupid fucking office.

I am so sick of this job. Why in the hell is anybody paying me to sit at my desk and FUCKING SURF THE WEB FOR EIGHT HOURS ON A SUNDAY?????? Jesus.

I've updated my resume, wrote a new set of cover letters, and I'll send them all out again. No one is hiring in the architecture field right now. Even HTNB only has two openings in their Indianapolis office. I wish BRI would come up with that part-time work, and if they do, I wish it would turn out to be 1/2-time work. Then I could quit this lame ass job and get on with my life.

I never thought I'd be a whore, but that's what I am. I'm sitting here wasting my entire fucking life for a stupid paycheck.

And you know what? I am the biggest fucking moron ever. I've been sitting here for hours trying to figure out why the hell this script won't run, and it's because I didn't copy it into the fucking website on my server. I swear to god, I'm getting stupider by the minute.

Yesterday was the 2 year mark of Jill Behrman's disappearance. The town has new yellow ribbons on it now. I only want two things these days: I want them to find the body and I want them to lie to us and tell us she didn't suffer before she died.

The FBI are so annoying--they are hoping the owner of a pickup truck "used for construction" will step forward and say who was driving it two years ago. I want to know, if they know so much about this truck, that is was used for construction, how come they don't know who owns it? And when are they going to tell us what they're looking for in Salt Creek? Clearly, they think something is there, it's the only spot they've come back to over and over. Are they looking for her body, her clothes, what? And did they suddenly focus on Salt Creek because Clause said something? Is he involved, or not?

This "hit and run" crap is starting to bug me, too. The theory that someone hit her and then panicked and got rid of the body doesn't make sense. For one thing, they told us the bike wasn't damaged. The bike was dumped in a manner consistent with panic, thrown in a corn field. But again, clearly, they didn't dump the body in a panic, or we would have found her by now. I really thought that when they cut down the corn fields after harvest, that would be it, we'd find out where she'd been, but that never happened. Then I thought, well, maybe the quarries, but surely they searched those first thing. So, now, please tell me what's supposed to be in Salt Creek?

I went running today for the first time since my ACL/hamstring tendon/collateral ligament injury. I only ran for 15 minutes, and at a very slow pace, but the knee held up pretty well. Every time I tried to stride out and speed up, the joint just shuddered, so I only tried twice. I think it will take some time to really run smoothly. Sunday I will do 24 minutes and see how that feels. I've got my knee packed in ice right now (you know your injury is for real when you really look forward to getting wrapped up in ice) and it feels okay. I think I might have been over-enthusiastic with the layups this afternoon and put too much stress on it, but it doesn't seem serious.

I should be balancing my checkbook, but I just don't feel like it. I think I spent too much time in the sun shooting hoops this afternoon. I ask you, what the hell is the point of having white people, anyway? It's not like we can make ourselves useful by going out in the sun and working, we (I) would scorch clean through in a matter of minutes. I mean, really, look at the Australians. What kind of loser people have to declare Slip, Slap, Slop the national motto (slip on a shirt, slap on a hat, slop on the sunscreen) in order to prevent themselves from going extinct from skin cancer?

Anyway. I've been laying here, packed in ice (re)reading Sarah Schulman's My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years. Mighty fucking depressing. Anyway, I was skimming through her commentary on her 1992 address "Why I'm Not a Revolutionary," and realized it's been ten years since Measure 9. (Schulman calls it Prop 9 throughout her essay, proving she knows nothing about the history of ballot measures and politics in Oregon, but I'll forgive her because her basic point was pretty good.) And I also realized I'm not tired anymore--politically, I mean.

Measure 9 took everything I had, so when Measure 13 came around two years later, I could barely bring myself to show up at the volunteer meetings. I just didn't care. The rhetoric surrounding Measure 9 was so cruel and hateful that I simply exhausted myself trying to keep myself mentally healthy. It just wore me out, all the "Save a child, kill a queer" bumper stickers, all of Lon Mabon's lies, all of hatred seeping into our lives uninvited. I'm not sure when I recovered, but definitely five years later, I was still, like, what-the-fuck-ever, I'm too tired to do volunteer work.

This also means it has been ten years since my parents had their meltdown over my coming out. I think I actually told them in September because I was too afraid to tell them during the summer. My brother was around, and I was afraid he would come across the coffee table at me and try to kill me for being queer, and I wasn't entirely sure my parents would stop him. That turned out to be a good call on my part, because although I think maybe they would have regretted letting him strangle me a few years later, at the time? I'm not so sure. They *completely* lost it. I knew it would be bad, but it surpassed even my worst imaginations. Maybe I should have told them years before I did, but in retrospect, the worrying about their reaction was actually less stressful than dealing with their reaction.

Um...where is this going...I think the absolute venom coming from my family combined with the horrific nature of the Measure 9 campaign really wore me out. My dad pretty much refused to talk to me for months--more than six, I think. Previous to this, the longest he'd gone without talking to me was two or three months, during the Gulf War. Whenever I called, he would just hand the phone to my mom and not say a word. Then my mom would scream at me for awhile ("No wonder you didn't have any friends in high school! Everyone hated you and now I know why!"), then start crying, then my dad would come back on the line and say, "Don't bother calling if you're just going to make your mother cry," and hang up on me. Repeat ad nauseum.

I just stop calling home, and eventually they noticed. My mom broke down first and called me, and it was really awkward, what was I supposed to say? Then she called again and actually said she loved me when she said goodby. I was totally floored because I had no idea where that came from, it's not like we ever say crap like that in my family. I think I said, "Uh....good." It took me three or four calls to say it back, I think.

Everything was still really strained for a couple years, and my dad was still barely talking to me. I went to visit them (without Catherine, how stupid was that?) near the end of my first year in the MA program in history because I was completely worn out. I had been sick and had been waiting to find out if I had cancer (which I did not!), and just wanted to go home, so I did. 24 hours into our visit, my dad was just picking at me, and I finally exploded and we got into this big fight, and my mom got into it with me, too, so I just walked out of the house. I drove the entire loop, up to Nighthawk, over to Oroville, down to Ellisforde, into Tonasket, and back out to Loomis, and was gone for hours. When I came back, my mom burst into tears and said she thought I had left forever and she was sorry and that she should have said she was sorry years ago because she was and she owed me an apology, and that was that, we've gotten along pretty well ever since.

My dad just walked out of the room.

Man, where *is* this going? I thought I was talking about Measure 9. Oh, okay, well, it was obviously a pivotal piece of political history in my personal life. It forced me to come out to my parents even though I was pretty sure it was going to suck, and it brought me closer to Catherine (our first date was canvassing neighborhoods with No-On-Nine literature, on Halloween, how very lesbian of us!). I had no idea I would go from the repressive community of University of Southern California to some queer-baiting, queer-hating state of Oregon. I think this may be the reason I never really bonded with Eugene or the University of Oregon. It was so much friendlier, safer, more real, more accessible than Los Angeles, but at the same time, we were surrounded by people who hated us, and weren't afraid to be rude about it.

So, it's funny that I feel more comfortable in Indiana of all places than in Eugene, Oregon. I have no illusions about the politics of this place, and even in Bloomington, diversity isn't exactly a thriving business. No way are they ever going to allow gay people to adopt or foster children here (especially in Martinsville! I know you're trying to clean up your image, Martinsville, but your elected officials are pigs, so there!), and a lot of people would just as soon see us rot in hell. But mostly, the conservatives here really do believe in the "you don't bug me, I don't bug you" theory of life. I know my coach has huge (religion-based) problems with gay people, but he would be the first person I would ask for help and he would be the first person to offer help in the event of a crisis. I am totally aware of all the problems in the midwest, I'm not white-washing them, but if I was given a choice of staying here or going back to Oregon, I'd stay here and be damned happy about it.

In unrelated news: the Jimmy Eat World "Bleed American" CD is surprisingly awesome. "A Praise Chorus" and "Hear You Me" are particularly nice.

Life has become one big adventure since Catherine discovered she can pants me whenever I wear my tan shorts.

Dear, divine self:

Congratulations on your new McDavid knee guard. You now have no reason to mope around the house as if there were no longer any reason to live. You may not be able to play hockey in it, but you can certainly run and skate in it. So, enjoy your new freedom of movement. Don't forget to take plenty of water with you as the humidity rises, and don't forget to wear sunblock. Be kind to yourself.

Sincerely,

JR

have a major headache. I'm going to go home early and feel sorry for myself the rest of the afternoon. Then I'm going to get up and go lug a bunch of junk out to the curb because tomorrow is Big Garbage Day here in Bloomington. Will the excitement ever end.

Wow. That was harder than I thought it would be. I fidgeted the entire time. I could see my foot bouncing, and tried to stop it, no luck. I think the "are you ever anxious" question was pretty much superfluous.

Afterward, I really just wanted to go home and cry, but...I went to McDonald's instead.

The Federation met tonight, I am so tired. I think the meeting went smoothly, we're going to extend invitations to Beth, Jane, Coach York, and the CPA to join the board of directors. Coach York will preside. Next meeting in two weeks, to discuss bylaws and sponsorships. A ton of things on my to-do list now. I can't forget to get some of this junk done tomorrow.

register our web domain
open webhosting account, ask for reimbursement?
find bylaw/articles of incorporation manual at Business/SPEA library
e-mail Amy about new website, updating old site
mail significant bylaws to Shelly
next meeting June 12

www.pahockey.com/bylaws.html
Carmel stick-n-puck 12:45-2:15 Saturday (before Fever game?)
Fishers open skate 11:00-1:00 Friday
password on Ronda's bylaws

I'm not sure which is worst, thinking that my teammates didn't notice how angry (frustrated, humiliated, isolated) I was last January, or finding out they did notice but didn't bother to talk to me about it.

For Liza:

Underneath my breastbone is a shallow, tender hollow, and it is here where I store all my insecurities, fears and pains. As time passes, my collection of hidden objects grows piece by piece. Suddenly I discover the space isn't large enough. It's full, there's no more room. Thankfully, nothing spills over. Nothing falls exposed to the sidewalk in front of my feet. Instead, the hollow expands, pressing deep into my spine, against my lungs and my heart and my stomach. I can no longer breathe. My spine is severed by the weight, leaving me numb and empty. When this happens, I am forced to make room before the black blood of depression overwhelms me.

I take each item out for individual consideration, examining every picayune until I know which I must keep and which I can let go. "You, HumilationOfTenthGrade," I may say, "you can go free. I am so over you, I have no use for you anymore." Or "You, LackOfProtectionFromMyBrother, since you have slimmed down over the years, since you no longer take up so much space, maybe I can keep you for awhile longer. Just for awhile, because eventually I will be done with you, and you also will be free." Or "You, DisappointingFriendship, I know I should let you go, but I will not. Instead, I will bury you at the bottom of my collection. I will place you exactly where you can do the most damage; I will encourage you to fester and rot. You will never be free."

Finally, everything is neat and organized, shielded by the flat of my breastbone. Everything is safe from harm, because it is harder than you could imagine to penetrate a protective cage made of ribs, even with the sharpest arrow. So, I can rest and relax, and tuck every painful bit into its proper place until the tender hollow threatens to overflow once again.

Okay, these "who are you" quizzes have taken over blogs everywhere, and they're getting kind of annoying, but ohmigod, this one really describes me--I wasn't even trying to stack the answers and get the personality I wanted. I am soooooo old school--I loved my Commodore64! My first program was written on an Apple IIc but am always quick to point out, "but I'd run other people's programs years before that!" I used to constantly bitch about all these new people throwing up web pages liked they'd earned the privilege (I've gotten over that one, having discovered that even if everyone out there is too damn lazy to code their html by hand, they can still have interesting things to say). I've totally given up on Usenet, because when I go there, I just start lamenting the loss of quality postings that I associate with, oh...1991 or so. My first e-mail program (conveniently called "mail") was command-line driven, none of this polished GUI crap for me. I learned UNIX by accident, just by hanging out in IRC in the old days before this stupid mIRC program let everyone and his/her dog onto IRC. Damn, I missed the old days.