So I posted about not having any money. Just sold my 3rd generation iPod touch 64gb for $35, so now as long as I use dollar menus or the dollar store to stash food, I’m gonna make it until I can reset my credit card!
Monthly Archives: February 2014
I’m officially an adult.
I now know what it’s like to know that you don’t have any money until like six weeks from now. My bills will be paid, but food…. that’s gonna be hard to come by. I’m going to be scrounging in the fridge for something my mom made so I don’t have to use my credit card to buy food at lunch and then for the gas it would take to drive to wherever.
and yes, I know I’m a female and I could ask my guy friends to take care of me and help me out with a meal. Especially the ones who have crushes on me. But you know what, I’m not gonna do that. I don’t think I should play the “damsel in distress” card. Because I’m better than that. I got myself into this mess and even if it means starving for a little bit, I’m going to get myself out of it. I can ask one of those friends to repay a $10 debt that he owes me and make those ten dollars last a week and a half if I get ramen noodles from the dollar store ($1 for a three pack!).
But, that makes it really hard to save money. But I’ve worked that into my budget. So if I keep going to the dollar store for food from here on out and keep myself from unnecessary spending, I can save more than I have been or put more money into paying off my loans faster.
I’m actually considering getting a second job. The job I have right now is 8-5, a little over minimum wage, about 42 hours per week. But if I was making more money, I could put even more money into savings and into my bills and be even better off, right? There’s a job I’m considering that would be about 4-9am, which would have me getting up at 2:30am or so and working until 5pm like normal…. I’m not sure I could do that; I like my sleep. But, the AM job would be $12 per hour, at least 20 hours per week. That would almost double my income. Almost. It would be a stretch and a sacrifice to work 13 hours per day, depending on my days off with the AM job. But I like sleep… and I have an application in with a career job that I may or may not make it into.
So many things to think about and things to make sure and double sure I take care of. I believe that qualifies me as an adult, don’t you?
“Tormented”
I am tormented by the last words I said to her. All she wanted was to love me, and to be loved by me. And I couldn’t give her that because I was too selfish. Or stupid. Most likely both, with a side of ignorance.
She loved me. If I had asked her to pick me up when I was out of my mind drunk at three o’clock in the morning, she would have. But I knew better than to ask her. She was too good for that, and I didn’t care about the money it took to get a cab or ask a friend to be a designated driver.
When I told her that I was engaged, she didn’t say anything. It seemed like she couldn’t say anything, like her brain shut down or her throat tightened up, keeping words from coming out. Every muscle in her body tensed, her shoulders stiffening, and the thing I noticed the most was that her eyes filled to the brim with tears. Those blue eyes looked even more blue when the whites of her eyes became marbled with red, and the sunlight reflected off those unshed tears.
I respected her in that moment, because she didn’t let me see those tears fall. I knew she was in pain, but honestly I didn’t know how to fix it or what to say to make the news easier for her. Had I missed all the signs that she had fallen in love with me long ago?
……
Evidently I had, because in that moment, I heard a voice tell me that I was engaged to the wrong girl. The girl right in front of me, with those baby blue eyes and that shy smile and all that beautiful auburn hair, was the one I should be engaged to. She loved me with every bit of her soul, and I was too stupid to see that. Those tears told me that. But what was I supposed to do, just drop my fiancé and ask Laura to marry me, right then and there? Tell her to wait for me while I broke off my engagement and that I would come back for her?
I had sincerely fallen in love with my fiancé, and she wasn’t comfortable with Laura always being around but I had never understood why. Laura was my best friend, she had always been there and was always trying to take care of me, kind of like my sister. But when I told her about my engagement, I realized that it wasn’t like a sister. She was taking care of me like a girlfriend or wife should take care of her man. When I was sick, she would come to my house after work to bring me whatever cold remedy she believed in at the time, along with some hot tea even though she knew I hated it, and whatever action movie was out that she thought I would like. She would invite herself into my apartment, put the DVD in while the water was heating on the stove and tell me to sit on the couch and cuddle up under a blanket. I hated the blanket part. But she made me cuddle under a blanket with her when she brought me the tea and most of the time, she was spot on when she picked a movie.
But that’s all beside the point. When I told her about my engagement, she looked nothing less than broken. Not just heartbroken, either; it was like her whole being had just been shattered. She didn’t say a word to me, just turned around and walked away. I caught up with her, offering her a ride home since her car was in the shop. But she wanted no part of it. She had wanted to walk.
She lived down a long country road, and there were a lot of people that liked to use the road that led to her house as a drag strip. Two idiots were racing trucks and one of them had rammed the other one. The driver lost control and slammed into the fence post that Laura was walking beside. She was pinned between the grill of the truck and the fence.
Apparently the driver got out unscathed and went to see what he hit. Laura was still alive, and would be for several minutes. The driver asked if he could do anything, and the driver of the other truck returned and called 911 to the scene. They stayed with her even after the emergency vehicles arrived and talked to her. She knew she couldn’t survive that. Her ribs were broken and blood was seeping into her lungs. She had to spit out blood several times and once she involuntarily coughed and spattered one of the drivers with her blood.
He tried telling her not to talk, but she had wanted him to give me a message. She handed him her phone and asked him to call me and tell me what happened. She also wanted him to tell me that she had truly always loved me and that she hoped I was happy with my fiancé, especially since my fiancé now had no threats that would steal my heart. But she had never had my heart, and she told him a bit about what happened.
She thought I never loved her. She knew I loved her for who she was, but she thought I had never wanted her to be mine. To some degree, she hated me when I gave her the news about my engagement. She asked the driver to tell me she was sorry for hating me and that she truly loved me and always would. She said she would be watching over me if she went to Heaven and rooting for me to make it into Heaven if she didn’t after all.
The driver relayed her story to me using her phone right after they laid her on the street to try to save her, but were forced to pronounce her dead. I thanked him for his courtesy and asked him to allow the police to take her phone and purse to give to her family. He graciously obliged and that was the end of the conversation.
Laura’s words haunted me for months, and I couldn’t even think about making wedding plans. My fiancé was a little angry, but did her best to be understanding. Eventually, I couldn’t take the stress and broke off the engagement and left her. I couldn’t live with myself if I had gone through with what had caused Laura to die that night. Maybe she would have wanted me to be happy with my now-ex-fiancé, but I couldn’t deal with it, and my ex-fiancé was pressuring me and being angry with me while I mourned, just because of who I was mourning.
May Laura rest in peace, and may her soul be in Heaven looking down on me with love and not resentment.
A Rant about having kids,
So, I’m totally anti-having-kids. I don’t want any part of it. It actually kind of upsets me when my potential boyfriend tells me he wants kids, because that means that if we got serious, I would have to fight with him about it.
So, I’m very vocal about my not wanting kids. Everyone I know knows that I don’t want kids. But it’s really strange– about half of them have taken it upon themselves to convince me to have kids later in life. Not now, of course, because I’m only 22, but sometime down the road.
And you know what? It just really pisses me off. What makes you think you can make decisions for me in my life? I have reasons why I don’t ever want children. Just because you had kids and you thought all those experiences were sprinkled with unicorn sprinkles that made them all amazing and made your life worth living or whatever shit you’re trying to tell me DOES NOT mean that I want to try those experiences.
I’m not feminine enough to want children, and especially not to carry a child. Most women go all googly-eyed when they see a baby and they want to hold it or kiss it or what have you. But with me, I think of all the squirming and the messiness and the spitting up all over your new shirt or the pooping in its diaper and spreading it everywhere and the crying and screaming and all that crap. And kids just don’t make sense to me.
The average human does not have a complete brain until about 20 years old. Parts of the brain haven’t developed until then. And yes, I know that I’m not that much older than that. But still. That means that I would have to teach someone every-fucking-thing or else they’re gonna get it from their ratty little friends at school and that’s even worse.
So, let’s just make all our lives easier and just let me be me and not want kids, k? I’m gonna run my life the way I wanna run it and there’s nothing you can do about it. In fact, if you try, I won’t really be all that upset to leave you out of my life altogether so I can be happy thinking about all the money I won’t have to spend.
🙂 rant over.
Day 29 of the CreativeWritingChallenge #1
Day 29: Story about space.
She didn’t know where she had gone wrong in her life that made her so melancholy. True, there were a few choices she had made in the past that she knew she probably shouldn’t have made, but that alone shouldn’t have put her in this low state. There used to be many instances that made her smile, and she consciously tried to find new things to smile about, such as the smell of a breeze after the rain or how sweetly a butterfly floats on the air as it goes from flower to flower.
Work was finally over and she went home to an empty house. Well, home, actually. It really was her home, and it had been since she had been adopted at fifteen. Still, she wished she could get away.
She parked her car in its space in the garage, next to her mother’s car that was much more worthy of a garage space. The driveway was cool beneath her butt, and the wall of the house was rough on her back. There was a slight breeze, but this time it didn’t smell of coming rain, nor did it smell of just-passed rain. It just smelled like home.
The sun would set in about twenty minutes, and she wanted to see it fall below those oh-so-familiar mountains and watch the stars slowly appear, as if they had been in hiding from the star that so outshined them.
Would she see a falling star tonight? Would the clouds pass in wispy strands over the moon, creating a dreamscape? Would the sky be utterly black, as if she were no longer at home but falling through a bottomless pit that reflected the space in her soul that needed to be filled?
Her mind wandered as the sun fell, jumping from work to people she loved to things she wanted in her life. And then something above her caught her eye.
The moon seemed to dance in its place in the sky, shimmering and turning and twisting itself. It was bright enough to throw shadows, and the shadows danced around the things that surrounded her, seeming to let her know that the moon’s dancing was, in fact, real.
She looked directly at the moon, and when her gaze met it, it was perfectly still like it always should be. Her gaze fell to the driveway as her eyes narrowed, her brain going through all the reasons why the moon should dance while in her peripheral vision, but be stationary in her direct sight. The moon danced again, perhaps mocking her confusion. She looked at it again and it stood still once more.
Suddenly, the stars came out from hiding and became ever brighter and bigger, surrounding the moon just as ants swarm a fallen breadcrumb. She felt as if she was getting sunburned, but by those stars that continually grew in her sight. She looked at them and finally saw the moon dancing as the stars surrounded it closer and closer.
Checking her Facebook account to see if any of her friends were seeing this phenomenon and seeing nothing, she decided that perhaps she was going crazy and needed to go to bed. Bed and lots of sleep might help reset her brain. Maybe someone slipped something into her drink at lunch and she was just now feeling the drug’s effect. Maybe her brain had eaten itself in its effort to make the days go by faster. She got up from her seat on the driveway, shaking her head to try to clear it and studiously fixed her eyes on the driveway in front of her and then at the cars so she wouldn’t see the celestial freak-out any longer.
When she turned the doorknob to open the garage door and enter the house, the first step she took was suddenly the first foot out of the door of her car in the garage. She checked the time on her phone, exactly the time it had been when she had first arrived home from work. The date was the same. She rushed outside to look at the sky. The sun was once more just beginning its descent from the sky.
She really needed to get away from here. Her melancholy mood must be rewiring neurons in her brain.
Day 30 of the CreativeWritingChallenge #1
I feel like doing this one backwards. So here is Day 30.
Day 30: Story or poem about ice.
So, It was a really stupid thing to do. I was a junior in high school and we were all trying to come up with ways to inflict small amounts of pain on each other to see who was the best when it came to pain tolerance and kill a few hours on a Friday evening. One guy would burn a candle and put his hand into the little pool of wax when there was enough. Another guy would hold his finger over a lighter for a second or maybe two. I was the idiot who got dry ice and held it in his hand for 30 seconds. His dominant hand, that he needed to play football and to run his fingers through his girlfriend’s hair and all that.
Thirty whole seconds of dry ice on bare skin isn’t the greatest thing ever. In fact, it’s really frickin’ dumb. Ice burns are just as bad as, if not worse than, fire burns. You know why? Because the ice, especially dry ice, will basically char your skin and leave it like a scab. For a few seconds, you feel cold and that’s painful as it is. But after that, your skin registers the sensation as burning. When you ignore the burning because you’re trying to show off to your friends, the skin starts to burn.
I dropped the dry ice after those thirty seconds and my skin didn’t’ look all that bad. It was really red, but that was about it. Needless to say, I won the contest that day because the other guys couldn’t make it past ten seconds. I was really proud of myself. But in the next couple of days, I really saw how bad dry ice burns can be.
I noticed it the next morning; my skin was a little rough but I went about my day thinking nothing of it except when it would sting a little when i washed my hands after the bathroom or little things like that. When I woke up the next morning, there was a scab around the whole area and just breathing on it hurt. Seriously, breathing on it hurt. My girlfriend’s hair was always so silky and soft, and I couldn’t even touch it because just a few strands of her hair brushing across that scab hurt like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I mean, I had my left hand to pick up where I couldn’t use my right hand, and luckily enough I could write with my left hand so I didn’t fall behind in school. But my right hand was screwed up for at least a week.
And that’s why that area of my palm is just a slightly different color than the rest of my skin. Because of a dumb decision in high school.
But I still won the pain tolerance contest. So it was worth it.
😉
Day 16 of the Somethings Challenge: A book
Day 16: A book you’ve read that changed your views on something.
So once, a friend gave me
Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul, revised and expanded
I was at a low point in my life, although it was very immature of me. I believe I was 17, yearning and longing for a boyfriend like my friends had. I was the only single one. So I read the book and it made me go all girly when I read that the God of the universe gives me love notes every day (in the Bible, sending signs that He’s there, etc). I got really religious for awhile, and I vowed that I would start reading those love notes more often. That has faded, but I still try to make a conscious effort to think about Him and see the signs He gives me every day.
Like, the other day, I was driving to church and I made it from the traffic light two blocks from my house all the way to my church (which is basically down the one street, but several miles) and I caught all the green lights. That street is littered with traffic lights that one might have to stop at for those several miles, ruining my 30.3mpg record on my car. But that day, I made all the green lights. Maybe it was just my timing, but I decided to take it as a “Here you go, daughter, enjoy a simple pleasure.”
I’m getting to one of those low points in my life again, and now that I’m writing this post, I think I need to read that book again and start reading the love notes more often again. I need that hole in my heart filled again. Because I sure have been in a low spot lately.
GT 40 Razor's Edge 