When You See Your Mother Scared For Her Life, It Changes You

So the weekend after Mother got her knee replaced, I was woken up by Father knocking on the door.  My sister, who was still home at the time, told him to wake me up.

When I got myself together and went to the dining room, I saw Mother sitting straight up but with her eyes closed.  My sister asked me to hold her because, according to my sis, she was feeling really dizzy, and she wasn't responding.  While my sister called the clinic at which she got her surgery, I started to hold her in case she fell over.  Mother continued to close her eyes, but all she could do was mumble.

Father thought she was just tired and needed to go back to sleep.  But after getting only the clinic's voicemail, my sister decided to call 911.  That's when, I think, Mother's mumbling started to get worrisome, like she was trying to tell us she was scared, but couldn't say the words.  Suffice it to say, I have never seen her like this before in my life.

The paramedics came.  They saw that her blood pressure was very low, caused by a combination of dehydration, constipation, and the pills she was taking.  But this wasn't a case where they give her some medicine and she'd be OK; they decided they had to take her to the ER.

Then, I saw something I'd really never seen before ... and something from Mother I had never seen before.  The paramedics needed her to get on this hammock they laid on the floor; from there, they would carry her into the ambulance parked outside.  We reminded them that she had just gotten her knee fixed; they knew, but this had to be done.

So, like ripping off a bandage, the only way to get her to lie on this hammock was to do it right in one straight shot, even though it would hurt like hell for Mother.  And it did.  Finally, Mother was able to speak, and loudly; in Chinese, she screamed, "Ow!  It hurts!"  (All this time she didn't speak English.  She must have been in some pain so deep that it made her revert to the long-term memory spots in her brain where she only knew Chinese.)  And she was really, really screaming, as if she was a little girl, howling for her suffering to stop.  I have known My Mother all her life as a domineering and even mean woman, oftentimes indifferent to other people's feelings.  But her she was, begging, even pleading for help, almost to the point of tears.  I've never seen her sound so ... well, helpless before.

---

We met Mother at the ER about an hour later.  Her eyes were open, she seemed awake and lucid, and she could even speak English again.  She was released several hours later with advice that she should drink water and electrolytes a lot more.

Mother hasn't been in that dire straits since, thank Buddha.  But the memories of that day are flooding back now that our family friend passed away unexpectedly.  While I was seeing her act like a little girl, I was thinking, "No, this can't be serious.  She can't be in real danger, can she?"  And while I don't know all the details about our family friend's death, I wonder if her relatives thought the same thing.  Maybe I haven't appreciated how close Mother was to the end.  But maybe her cries for help are something I have to heed if ... no, when the time really comes.  And that scares the hell out of me.  Because I am not ready for that, at all, and I don't think I ever will be.

We ate steak for dinner.  Every fucking time when My Fucking Father puts the steak on my plate, My Fucking Mother insists I should check to see if it's cooked well enough.  It is; Father likes it on the rarer side, but it's not as if the damn thing's alive.  But without fucking fail, when she checks her steak, My Fucking Mother always says it's undercooked and has My Fucking Father put it on the grill outside to cook it some more.

I hesitate to say that she also tells me that my steak is undercooked and he has to cook it some more.  At least I don't want to say that it's every time.  But it was this time.  Even though the steak was a medium, maybe medium-rare, My Fucking Mother just fucking told My Fucking Father to cook it again.

And this might be the tie-in as to how My Fucking Parents have ruined my life.  They step in and do things for me because they think it's best for me.  They did it when they just gave me a new fucking bed.  They did it when they told me I had to go to summer school.  And they did when I had to wait to eat my steak.  I am fucking powerless because of the decisions they make for me, and it pisses me off.

Goddamn, when are they going to leave??

Glad Last/Sunday Night Is Over

So after lunch and learning that I'm helping Father stick an EKG monitor on his bare chest, I hear Mother screaming at Father, over something.  I have never known what they've ever argued over, but I haven't heard Mother yell like that in a long, long time.

We eat a very early dinner (four hours after lunch, which is insane).  I was the one who attached this EKG on Father; Mother was in her office doing her own thing.  I go up to my bedroom and eventually take an early-evening nap before going out to exercise.  Mother bangs on my door to wake me up.  I'll expound on this hopefully in a different blog post, but never wake me up from sleep.  I hate that.

She gets me out to the dinner table.  She needs help booking their flight, although she actually said, "You promised to help me with my frequent flier miles," which is something I don't ever remember her saying.  It was obvious she was in the kind of mood she has often been in after yelling at Father -- wounded, feeling like a victim and lashing out because she felt entitled.  And this type of thing My Fucking Mother ropes me in to doing for her is the type of thing she usually ropes me in to do for her, which is something that has to do with not understanding English words and some elements of the task I believe she knows how to do, but doesn't want to do them because she wants to act helpless.  Besides all that, I feel like I've been dropped in unfamiliar territory, and so I'm figuring what the hell I need to do, but, and this is also typical of her, whenever I run into a roadblock or something I don't understand, she goes, "Well, what are we going to do?"  And I've gotten a little better at pointing to her, "Um, we are not doing anything.  You brought me into this because you don't want to do this.  I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do."  (She also has this tick where I say something to her and she goes, "I know."  She clearly isn't using that phrase when she's supposed to, but I still get triggered because I take her literally at her word, and I want to say to her, "No, you don't know!"  But that's another blog post.)

I can't book a flight online.  Mother asks me to call for her, fuckin' A.  The call wait time is 2 1/2 hours.  They invite me to text instead, so I tell My Mother I'm going to leave for the gym and just text the airline about this.  So as I'm putting on my shoes, my sister calls My Mother.  There is another matter my sister wants to talk to her about.  "Has Unforgivable Wetness talked to you about it yet?" my sis says.  "No," Mother replied, "He doesn't want to talk to me about it."  And I had to shout from the bottom, "That's not true!" and I went back up to the dining room to get my face on Mother's phone to tell my sister Mother's lying, and then to tell Mother that if she wants to talk about this other matter, she should talk to me, otherwise I'm assuming she's handling it herself.  Goddamn.  I've always thought I've gotten my self-pity from Father.  But I might be wrong.

Anyway, I got the gym but had to delay exercising because I was busy texting with the airline rep, or the bot, who knows?  There are no flights available.  So I come home, see Mother at the other side of the front door ... and she's all calm and stuff.  If she weren't calm, she wouldn't even look at me.  So maybe she's gotten over what she needed to get over.

At any rate, this was a Sunday that was a little too eventful.  Glad it's over.

Addendum To: I Played Myself

As paying ten more bucks than I needed to wasn't bad enough, I saw something at the X I didn't think I would see.  There was a merchandise stand there, selling several items related to the conference (the NCHC) and the event (the Frozen Faceoff), but not as many items as I would expect for an event of that size.  Two of the items, a shirt and a pint glass, commemorate the fact that this is the last time (or so they say) the conference will have its tournament in St. Paul (and for the first few year of the NCHC, it was at Target Center in Minneapolis)/neutral ice; starting next year and for the foreseeable future, the conference tournament will be played on campus sites.

The tag line for the event was "Last Call In St. Paul," and that slogan was on a shirt and a pint glass.  I saw the shirt (but not the pint glass) while I was walking the concourse inbetween the Semifinals on Friday and thought, "Hey, that's kind of cool."  And then I saw there were a few people at the stand, so I figured that I would continue to get my steps in, buy food (a pizza slice because it was the shortest line) and, once I got done with that, go back to the stand to purchase something.  Swear to God it was maybe 25 minutes at the most.  But once I went back to the merch table, the "Last Call In St. Paul" shirt was gone.  I never thought that, what, 5,000 people would buy enough shirts to sell out, but it sounds from the merch people that they didn't have much to sell.

What did catch my eye was a scarf.  It had the NCHC logo, the year of its birth ("Est. 2014"), and the 2025 Frozen Faceoff logo.  It makes no mention of the fact that this is the last neutral site Frozen Faceoff, but shit, this is as close to marking this "end of an era" as I'll get, especially if they don't make this scarf anymore, which, in hindsight, I doubt.  But I bought it, for $30.

I went back there last/Saturday night for the Frozen Faceoff Final.  (By the way, Western Michigan came back from a 3-0 Second Period deficit to win it in Double Overtime, 4-3.  Some kid from Prior Lake potted the Game-winner, his second of the night.  I didn't see it in person; I left early because I had to catch the last light rail, at a quarter after 11 [which got pushed back to 11:25 or so -- damn, Metro Transit has to be more accurate with that stuff], to get back to where I parked my car at Midway)  No new shirts or pint glasses.  But they still had scarves.  And now they were selling them for $25 apiece.  I looked at the sign with the price; someone printed out "25," cut it into a square, and taped it right in front of the "30."  I have no fucking clue why someone suddenly discounted the scarves by five bucks, but I feel cheated, and I feel so goddamn impotent because I want to complain to someone about it, but I don't want to come off as a whiner.  But why in the hell did they knock off five bucks on the scarf?!

So now, not only did I overpay for the ticket to that Game by $10-3, it looks as though I paid five bucks too much for that goddamn scarf.  So that's $15-8 I feel like I need to make up by not spending on something I would spend money on, like coffee and breakfast before work.  Man, that shit just pisses me off.

I Hate Everything Right Now

Really mad, can't lie, and I feel helpless to do anything about it.  Nothing that's affecting me personally -- at least not yet -- but cursed me for having empathy and giving a good goddamn about the concept of democracy.

He's really doing it.  He's ending every single department that would hold him and other ne'er-do-wells accountable.  He is firing everybody that has a government job, left and right.  He's going to install ass-kissers that'll do what he wants in service of his ultimate goal: To loot American taxpayers dry of their money.  And the fucking goddamn Republicans will let it happen because 1) he believes he is their god-king who 2) will help fulfill their fantasies of remaking this country with white males standing supreme overall.  And he's doing it, up through now and these motherfucking Friday night surprises.

I am beyond angry.  And there is nothing I can do about it, even though I am pissed off right now.  And I know it's going to get worse, so even if I try to relax or take my mind off of this, I know that I'll have to hear some more bullshit coming from him, and probably something worse.

I fucking hate everything right now.

My Final Blog Post Of 2024 Is Another Reminder Of Why My Fucking Mother Has Ruined My Life

I was going to neatly tie up 2024 into a bow (well, as well as I can), but My Fucking Mother fucking had to send this shit off the rails with her goddamn anxieties again.

She bugs the fuck out of me while they're here, but it appears as though she bothers me even more when she's in Vegas.  I think that's due to expectations: Since they are so far away from me, I presume that we would talk less.  And I think we do; for example, even though I thought we would talk Christmas Day, we didn't, probably because we talked Christmas Eve.  And that's A-OK with me.

But when she texts me saying she needs help ... goddamn, the thing she needs help with is such a huge energy drain.  It literally takes hours to deal with her issue.  And it's an issue only she believes is an issue.  But I have to help her because that bitch acts so fucking helpless.

She texted me at work yesterday/Monday afternoon: "Need help!"  I get home and call her.  She tells me these real estate forms need to be filled out.  The government wants them, and she's scared as hell that, like, the FBI will arrest her if we don't do it before the end of the year ... even though the stuff she said told her that actually said she had a couple more weeks.  These forms are in English, of course, so she immediately ran to me, only to switch up her tone and just fuckin' saddle me with all this bullshit I need to deal with with an urgency only she has.  So fucking typical of her and her goddamn "issues."

These forms the government wants filled out I didn't even know existed until today.  And I had to waste two motherfucking hours with My Fucking Mother to do them online.  Worse than that, I screwed up one of the forms, and I'm not sure the website on which I did these forms took up the corrected information.  So I think I have to follow up today, some time after work, to see if some AI chatbot can let me know if the "government" has the correct information.  And who knows how long I'll have to fucking waste on that.  It's New Year's Eve, for fuck's sake.  I'm supposed to mark the death of the old year and say hello to the new one.  I don't want to spend it dealing with goddamn forms.

---

This year was bad because I lost my uncle.  I feel bad because I hadn't contacted him much before he died.  I think the last communication I had with him was wishing him a (Western) New Year via text.  He was gone within two months.  He didn't want anyone to talk to him in his decrepit state.  I don't care; I wanted to at least say goodbye to him and tell him I love him.  And I'll be honest (if I haven't stated this here in WAF already): I'm mad at him for not talking to me before he went.

Come to think of it, 2024 brought more signs my body is breaking down.  I saw someone for my knees after work yesterday/Monday.  She said it's probably arthritis, which everyone my age is going through.  Use exercises to get manage it.  I think I heard that before when my physical therapist told me to exercise my back.  I was given a referral for physical therapy for my knees, and there's a chance it's the same person who I met with five years ago.  I don't think the guy likes me, though, so I don't think I'll take up the referral.

Gaining weight, too.  I know I should eat better, but I'm still holding onto the delusion that I can eat what I want and not get too fat.  That's not happening, but I'm not changing my diet.  Oh, and I'm still dealing with trying to do my desk job with bifocals on.  Had a lot of trouble seeing with my eyeglasses in 2024.  My eyes got so strained looking at my computer screen that it began to hurt.  I even take them off and see my screen through blurry eyes.  It beats getting a headache.

Everything else, I guess, is the same, including dealing with My Fucking Mother.  Every fake emergency she makes me deal with reminds me that I got my anxious state of mind from her.  She has grafted every part of her insecurities onto me, and I cannot and will not forgive her for that.

Happy New Year!!!

I Have To Admit -- I'm Really Starting To Resent Them Coming Here

Yeah, it's the disruption, the (kind of) lack of privacy, and, once again, my sister's need to make things all about her.  She gets that way sometimes, but mostly on big occasions where she's the center of attention, and it pisses me off.

The last time she was here she wanted all the suitcases we have stowed in her bedroom out of her bedroom, and she wanted all her bedsheets washed.  Now, I think normal family members would of course do that for her, and wouldn't need prompting.  I am not normal.  I could sleep in dusty bedsheets for all I care.  I just need a clean damn bed.  But no, she wants what she and my brother-in-law are going to sleep in all clean and fresh-smelling, even if they're only going to be here a week and a half.

And I think I touched on this before, but this dinner in St. Paul on Sunday is really grinding my gears.  First of all, my sister wants to use my car, and I'm going to give it to her.  Also, it seems really damn inconvenient for one group of people who are staying in this house to go out to St. Paul and then have the people who live in the same house go out to St. Paul later that same day.  And then my folks told me on Saturday that the minivan, the vehicle I will purportedly be using whenever my sister and brother-in-law want to use my car, had its headlights short out.  I had to buy them on Amazon; they might get here before they get here, and they might not.  And on top of all that, I realized that the Wild are playing in St. Paul on Sunday, and around the same time as the early dinner.  I am not that familiar with St. Paul, and now I have to worry about getting stuck in hockey traffic, too??

Once I realized the minivan had no night lights and I'd have to deal with Wild traffic on Sunday, I obsessed over it all day at work yesterday/Monday -- like, distractingly so.  I really do love my sister and brother-in-law, and I really want to spend some time with my niece, who is the reason my sis and bro-in-law are taking my car on Sunday.  But I hate, hate, hate these dinner plans the more I learned what I have to deal with.  I could feel my body well up with rage and anxiety and dread and helplessness because I feel forced to do something I really, really don't want to do.

And then it hit me: If I don't want to go, don't go.  At first that thought was insane.  I don't see my niece a whole lot as it is.  If I don't see her on this opportunity, I don't know when I'll see her again.  Also, has she noticed how seldomly I see her?  If I make the decision not to go, well, she has to know, and what will she think of me?  But as I kept thinking yesterday ... you know, my sister did raise the idea that I didn't have to go.  And I am such an incorrigible bastard that I might say, yeah, screw it, I'll see you guys some other time, tell my niece I say hi.  Frankly, I'm leaning that way right now.  It is selfish and self-centered of me, but once I started being more accepting of that decision, a weight was lifted off of me.  And I would do anything for peace of mind, even ditching family.

So I texted her my concerns.  I asked her if our parents wanted to go to dinner and she said yeah.  Guess I should have talked to them directly since, you know, I live with them.  Anyway, my thoughts are moot if they want to go; I can't not go if they're going.  Then again, their desire to go to dinner on Sunday may be moot if Amazon can't deliver these headlight bulbs in time.  (Yes, they can go to a store to get them, but Father did that on Saturday, and he's so goddamn cheap that when I told him we could get bulbs through Amazon for less than half the price he got them at Wal-Mart, he immediately went back and returned them.)  My sister couldn't foresee this shitshow, but in a shitshow like this, maybe this isn't a good idea, you know?  But these fucking plans are going through, and I have to be the dutiful brother/son and just fucking fall in line, no matter the stress and stupidity of the whole thing.

Yeah, I'm Addicted To Twitter

I hate that I get much of my news, and spend much of my time, doomscrolling on it.  It sucks so much out of me.  First of all, it sucks so much of my time.  Second of all, it is by far the application with the biggest drain of energy out of my phone.  That should be logical, but I swear that it is taking more than it did from my old iPhone, and it's taken more ever since Elon Musk bought it.

And speaking of Musk, I am seeing how Twitter/X has gone from a reputable social media site with standards to one that only pushes Republican shitposters and repeatedly and shamelessly upsells you on stuff I have no interest in buying at all.  The latter is annoying, but unfortunately, the former keeps me tuned in because my outrage keeps getting pushed with any tweet that I either like or hate.  I haven't bought anything from Musk, but I damn well know he is still making money off of me the way I am hooked on that site.

Like I did just now.  I just spent five minutes looking through Twitter/X.  There were some sports tweets, which I enjoy, but a lot of it was about politics, and if I liked that it was bashing Republicans, I like-like-liked it to my heart's content.  And I need to get on my roller, brush my teeth, and go to bed instead of doing that.  Like I said, I'm addicted.  I wonder if I could live without it.  And I wonder if I should.

Thirty-Four Years Ago Tonight, I Discovered I Had Hair Around My Dick

I have wanted to blog post about this for so long, but I only wanted to do so on the anniversary, and every time it rolled around, I forgot.  I forgot late last night when I spontaneously decided to blog post about how I'm years behind balancing my checkbook.  Well, it's time to talk about it now.

So yeah, January 10, 1990 ... I remember sitting on the toilet, either going #1 or #2, and scratching my groin.  Naturally I looked down ... and, by God, I saw hairs surrounding my dick.  I was only 13 at the time, and I remember being absolutely terrified at the changes to my body.  I think I was beginning to get obsessed with hairs underneath my arms.  I was really frightened by all the hairs that were starting to appear on my legs, and I spent many a time plucking them out.  My trichotillomania was a bid to stop my body from rebelling against me.  I had heard of this concept called "adolescence" as soon as I started 7th grade, but I didn't pay any attention to sex ed class at school, so I learned about what was about to happen to me through friends and classmates.  And it scared the shit out of me.  So I vainly hoped to remain looking like the same person I have gotten used to by plucking the fuck out of myself.

But the hair around my cock?  Don't know what I could do about that.  It's not as if I could pluck all those hairs down there; it'd hurt like hell.  I don't know if I saw any dick fur in any of the porn I saw up to that point, but I heard about pubes before I got them myself.  No, I was not happy, nor proud that I was "becoming a man."  It was the most glaring sign yet that my body was transforming, and in ways that metaphorically dropped me to my knees in fear and sadness and helplessness.  It was already a hopeless task to pluck all the hairs on my legs and in my pits.  I just knew, once I felt my hair down there, that it was game over for me.

You know, my body is changing in ways I don't understand now, too, just in a different way.  Well, I understand why it's changing now -- I'm getting older and I'm not totally watching my diet.  That's why my belly has been getting bigger and bigger over the course of the past two decades, and why pants that used to fit me just fine I am now straining to suck my gut in to, then fearing that the button will pop out and fly across the room.  (That's happened once or twice to me already.)  But I am not confused about what is happening to me now like I was then.  Just resigned.

---

By the way, I am absolutely certain that in prime time that night, I was watching an episode of Quantum Leap (The Original Series staring Scott Bakula, not the revival that's on right now of which I have seen  only a minute) that mirrored my "discovery" later that night.  Bakula leaped into the body of a mother whose son is running away because he didn't know what his body was doing -- maybe.  In one scene, Bakula was captured by a group of random men, and one of them tore open the front of "his" dress.  I'm sure Bakula got out of it without getting assaulted.  Anyway, the theme of changing and sexualizing bodies became apt for me that evening when I relieved myself in the bathroom.  And it hit me like a ton of bricks, and I have never, ever been the same ever, ever again.

I Don't Want Any Help!!!

Work yesterday/Tuesday was going along smoothly until, well, what I was afraid could happen did happen.  The new work was substantially light.  However, since Monday was an avalanche, I spent the first half of work yesterday/Tuesday finishing up the work I sent out the day before.

Nevertheless, I was able to finally get my head above water and tackle the new work that came in.  That's what I had been forced to do when I started off in The Fourth Department feeling totally lost and helpless.  I learned to fend for myself, and now I feel like I am in control of whatever comes my way.  That takes time ... overtime, and thus money.  But I feel like if I were left on my own to figure this out, don't take that independence away from me.  The time to step in was when I felt like I needed help.

And still my boss didn't like it.  You see, even though what came in yesterday/Tuesday was a mere trickle, he had my supervisor do some of it.  And she did it while I was at lunch.  Mind you, I would feel undermined even if I were sitting at my desk and she came up and told me to give her what I planned to work on.  I really think it was a matter of timing; my boss e-mailed my supervisor telling her to do the work, and she went to my desk and just grabbed the forms, and I just so happened not to be there.

Still, that stings.  I wouldn't have felt good about it, but if she did this on Monday (and she can't because she doesn't work Mondays), I would understand because there was a lot of work.  But by making this decision, I take it as my boss not leaving me alone.  And once again, overtime is the issue.  He also e-mailed me (while I was at my late lunch), um, "encouraging" me to leave before my eight hours are up if I can.  He must be getting his chops busted by his higher-ups, but that doesn't mean he has to take responsibilities off of my plate in order to shove me out the door.

My boss might not be happy, but with end-of-day duties and e-mails and one big phone call that came in, I lingered at work longer than I initially thought I would.  Still, based on how urgently I felt he wanted me to leave, I left 35-40 minutes short of a regular work day.  I would have stayed more than eight hours if I was the only one to do the work that came in, but it wouldn't have been like the two extra hours like it was on Monday, so what's the big damn deal?

I don't want any help!  I want to do it by myself!  And I have worked too damn much for too damn long to have OT taken away from me, goddammit!

Worst Day At Work. Ever.

I should have known that last week, where I worked in The Fourth Department and somehow left after eight hours all four workdays (Monday was Labor Day), was too good to be true.  I was hoping beyond hope that I had turned a corner when it came to work.  Sure, my boss was pissing me off about overtime, but he seems to have backed off.  And frankly, it has been a relief to come home "when I'm supposed to."

That was all blown to shit yesterday/Monday.  I really don't know what happened since the number of forms, while extremely high, was not an amount I hadn't seen before.  But it was a combination of going through all of those plus answering phones plus dealing with other weird shit plus another batch of stuff that came through in the afternoon (something, I realized, that didn't happen in any of the four days I worked last week -- a big reason, I also realized, why I left work on time last week) that I could not finish all the forms that came in before my self-imposed deadline of two extra hours of overtime only.  This is the first time that has happened to me since the early days of working in The Fourth Department.  Then, I was about to throw the monitors against the wall because I was so goddamned overwhelmed with figuring out just what the hell I was supposed to do to get all the information I need to get.  Yesterday I knew how get all the information; I was just ... overwhelmed.

I'm kind of embarrassed that I didn't finish all the stuff that fell into my lap.  I now pride myself for being able to at least touch every form that came in that day at least once, even if I have to work late.  But ... shit, man, there was just a lot.  Thing is, the morning couldn't have started off better.  Maybe there was one answer that came in over the weekend I dealt with top of the morning, and there were very few forms I needed to work on again.  I got into the new work 90 minutes into my day.  I thought I would be able to get through whatever came at me because I was starting the new stuff so early.  But I took a huge gulp at the pile of crap that waited for me from the weekend, and the other shit just kind of fucked me over through the rest of the day.  At lunch I called Father and told him I would be home at 7, the latest I would be home if I were going straight from work to home.  That was around 2:30.  I usually don't know how my afternoon is going to work out at that time; for all I know, things could settle down and I could leave earlier than I feared.  But I knew, based on the mountain of work I still had to tackle after lunch because of everything else I needed to deal with first, that that wasn't going to fucking happen.  And goddammit, I was right.

I got so stressed and anxious and upset as 6:30 crept closer that I developed a new knot, one up against the left side of my neck, that was getting really distracting.  I was scared that I wouldn't be able to clock out at 6:30 because I was balancing getting as much of the work as I could done and making sure I not only did all my end-of-day stuff but also cleaned out the Internet browsers and tidied up the workspace by 6:30.  I had to cut it off with several forms left over.  I needed to cut it a tad shorter than I would have because I needed to clean up because I am not working today/Tuesday.  Turns out, I now realize, I don't think I did a great job of cleaning up the workspace.  I did remember to apologize to my supervisor for leaving her all this work, however.

Hope she's not mad.  Hope my boss isn't mad, either.  I really hope he doesn't fuckin' ask me why I stayed ten hours and still couldn't get all my shit done.  If he accuses me of just sloughing off ... man, I don't know what I'll do.  I was working my ass off, man, really.  What really pisses me off was the helplessness I felt yesterday afternoon.  I thought I had overcome all my feelings of abandonment and confusion once I started "getting" The Fourth Department.  But by sheer tonnage, I was back to feeling besieged.  I hope I don't get that goddamn feeling again when I go back to work tomorrow/Wednesday, and I hope I don't get any blowback for the decisions I made in doing the best I could yesterday/Monday.

T-Minus Two Days

Yeah, I just hit a fucking wall last/Wednesday night after work.  Lot of stuff I need to do about my stuff, particularly in my bedroom, but I'm too damn tired and indifferent to do them.  Hell, I'm doing enough as it is, moving stuff around and into the stay-dirty rooms so that my stripper girlfriend can (cross your fingers she shows up) come in and tidy up the place.  I might take tomorrow/Friday and Saturday to make final decisions on what to keep here and what to move into storage, but right now, I'm drunk as fuck (I once thought I had the ability to drink all the remaining alcohol I have; instead, I'm going to see if it keeps after a month in a non-controlled environment), worried about waking up extra early tomorrow/Friday for my screening, and hoping she comes when she's supposed to so that I won't have to take up more than a little of my lunch "hour" to drive back here and pop open the door so she can start working because she's a bit, shall we say, unreliable when it comes to coming on time.

Man, I feel more unprepared for my parents coming home than at any previous time.  I don't know why, but I just do.  It's a helpless feeling.

Goddammit, The Minivan Almost Overheated

Just wanted to put my parents' car through its paces over the winter, so after work I wanted to take it to Chick-Fil-A.  And then I looked at the thermostat and saw it slowly, slowly going up.  That is a hopeless feeling, especially when I remember seeing the thermostat on my Lexus go up and not knowing what the hell to do.  Worse than that, I was stuck in the busy drive-thru and there was no way out.  I had to beg a guy to wait while I drove the minivan up and down the curb so I could get it to a parking spot and to finally turn off the engine.  My God, I was so close to losing the minivan.

Thank God that Cub Foods had antifreeze, because Walgreens and Big Lots didn't have it.  Sure enough, there was no coolant in the tank.  I put it in, and the thermostat stayed where it was ... until about halfway through my drive home, when I slowed down and the thermostat went up.  Just a tad, but above level, and I freaked out again, but then I started accelerating, and it went back down.  And then it started going up, steadily, as I approached home.  But I made it home, thank Buddha.  The thermostat still was going up, though, and so maybe this piece of shit needs more than antifreeze.

I can't trust this car now.  And that sucks, because I think everybody should be able to have two cars in case one needs service.  I remember when my main car had that smart key indicator light on, and so I used the minivan for a week -- confidently.  And now that motherfucking thing is breaking down on me.  What would I do if the minivan had this problem when my main car had its problem?  I would be absolutely lost and helpless.

And now I'm worried I destroyed the minivan's shocks and struts and axels because I drove it up and down that curb.  Ah, who fucking cares about that -- I need to worry about the radiator or something.  Whatever, I won't be driving that car for the rest of the season.  Don't care about it anymore.  Can't care about it anymore.  And now I have to hope to Buddha my main car won't go to shit on me.

False Alarm?

God, I have so many things I could talk about now.  But I'll address the one thing that's giving me the most anxiety right now, and that's my goddamn car.

So after I panicked like shit over the smart key indicator light last night, I made an appointment online with the dealership to bring it in Wednesday.  However ... I was going to try and use the other key fob when I drove my car this morning.  There was nothing to indicate that this indicator light is dependent on the fob; if anything, the start engine button, and the entire contraption behind it, appears to be the problem.  I just tried it anyway because I couldn't think of anything else to do in order to diagnose the problem.  I immediately default to feeling helpless when it comes to cars breaking down.

Well, wouldn't you know it?  I use the other fob, I push the button, and there was no light.  It didn't come on when I drove home from work, either.  Does this mean this is a fluke?

So, before I used my parents' minivan to drive to the gym, I took the old fob (the one with which I got the scary indicator light from last night) and started the car with it on the driveway.  It started, and the smart key indicator light went out along with all the other dashboard lights immediately after I turned the engine on.

Great.  The only explanation I can come up with this is that I was driving my car everywhere Sunday night.  I took it to the airport, drove back, stopped off at Target, came home, went to my storage unit, went back home, and I turned on my car to go to work to get a couple hours of overtime in precisely when Mother called and said their flight was postponed till the morning.  That is when that indicator light came on, so maybe it's a signal that things got so hot in there that the connections behind the on/off button started to wear or fritz ... or something?

At this point I kind of want the light to go on and stay on, because then I can go to the dealership and point to that light and say, "See?  Fix this!"  But in the morning I am going to take my old fob and use it to at least start the car.  If the light goes on, well, I am taking tomorrow off work and getting to the bottom of this.  But if it doesn't, and if my car runs just fine, at the very least that means that the button has cooled off to the point where the light won't come on.  I would then have to cancel the appointment for tomorrow because I cannot reproduce the problem and I therefore would be telling them to look for something they can't see.  Like I said, I kind of wish that the light just shows up again as proof that there's something wrong with it.

And mark my words, as soon as I cancel with the dealership (and tell my boss that it turns out I don't have to take tomorrow off after all), that fuckin' smart key indicator light will go on and stay on.  Such is my shitty life.

Visited Grandmother's best friend this afternoon.  Try to do it once a month.

I'll be frank; since she is now in that stage where she's completely forgotten the English she learned and is now just speaking in her native Vietnamese (at least I hope it is), I do my best to cope for the hour I give myself being in her presence.  It's football season, though, and so my plan was to change her TV to a football Game and just sneak a peek once in a while as she speaks to me in Vietnamese as though I understand her.  (I have an app, Papago, to try and translate what she says, but it's gibberish, indicating either the app doesn't work or she is gone to the point where she is speaking gibberish.)

This time around I was transfixed with the end of Illinois' nonuple-overtime upset at Penn St., and so I was openly ignoring her for minutes at a time, honestly.  But during her Vietnamese ramblings, I noticed that her eyes started to redden and swell.  Is she ... about to ... cry?

When she started sniffling, I had to stop watching the Game and I held her.  And she started to weep some more.  I never saw any tears, however, and after a few minutes she seemed OK again, just talking about stuff and even laughing once or twice.  She then started to get sad again, but she pulled herself back from the brink.

See, this is where not being able to understand her becomes a big problem.  I want to console her, but I don't know what to say.  I think I left her (after about 75 minutes) in a good place; she wasn't about to cry or anything.  Well, at least I don't think.  I hope she's OK, but like I said, I don't know how to help her if she isn't.

Tempting The COVID Bear

OK, I don't think what I did yesterday was heeding risk of contracting the coronavirus.

I had the day off yesterday because of Chinese New Year.  Oh: It appears as though I will be filling in on Sundays for the time being, so I usually will have Friday afternoons off.  Beyond that, because of the pandemic, I am rolling over a bunch of paid time off, and even though I don't want to use them all now, I figure I should treat myself with a whole Friday off once a month.  It just so happens that I used yesterday because it was Chinese/Lunar New Year.

What I wanted to do was go to Eat Street to get tested.  But I couldn't.  That clinic recently revamped their hours; they will not test in the afternoon.  According to its website, the clinic will end testing at 11.  OK, so I went there before 11, but the guy said they ended testing at 10.  Sure they did.  Did the guy expect me to accept him just tossing out a time to get me to leave?  Well, I did leave, because it's not as if I can barge in and demand a test.  But I don't appreciate the sudden change in hours -- as uncomfortable a swab up the nostril is, it's more accurate than the spit test -- and I think the guy was lying to me.  And this clinic is sending me e-mails asking me for money?  Fuck you guys.

I bought Jimmy John's -- chicken, because of the New Year -- and ate it at the parking lot of Glam Doll before getting out and ordering donuts and hot chocolate from Glam Doll.  I had thought about exercising at the cemetery, but just that walk froze my feet.  And I didn't really have anything to do the rest of the afternoon, so I went to the Mall Of America -- primarily to walk, even though I ate the donuts at the MOA parking lot and brought the hot chocolate into the mall with me.

I wouldn't call it busy.  But I wouldn't call it not busy there.  And I was surprised that I saw more kids there.  Isn't it a school afternoon?  Then again, with the pandemic, maybe they wouldn't be holding classes in person, and if they're not, can parents just decide to take their kids to the mall one afternoon?  Most of the people were wearing masks, but many of them were wearing them incorrectly -- under the nose like men pulling their genitals above and past the top of their underwear, and chin diapers.  And since I was there to walk, I spent 75 minutes doing laps there.  Didn't stop besides taking off my mask to sip my hot cocoa; didn't want to catch corona.

But ... I later went to Wal-Mart because I want to see if I could buy a cable that will allow me to charge my laptop from my battery.  (I went to Wal-Mart because my supervisors got me a $10 gift card for the store.)  And I went up to the cable aisle, and I tried reading all the labels of the cables, and I still was not sure what to get.  So I stood there, opened up the Internet, and tried looking up information as to which specific cable I should get.  And it dawned one me that I had spent, oh, half an hour at that aisle ... in a somewhat-crowded store ... not moving and staying about in one place.  And then I left, because I don't think the cable I needed was there.

Goddamn, I contracted the virus today.  Whether it was at MOA or at Wal-Mart, I got it.

---

I was woken up this morning by Father.  He asked for my help in scheduling a vaccine for him.  He called me out of my bedroom again about an hour later because he found another place in the area where he could sign up for a shot.  I was visibly annoyed at him -- for waking me up, for coaxing me out of my cozy and warm bedroom, for doing something that I was hoping he and Mother could do themselves, for being helpless.

But I understand that this is all coming from an anxiety, and from Father feeling he is entitled to get a shot now.  He's right; he is entitled.  Plus, I want him to get a vaccination.  And so that makes me feel even more guilty that I engaged in risky behavior yesterday just because it was too cold to walk outside and because I want to buy a cable for my laptop.  I really, really hope they don't get COVID-19 just as they're able to schedule an appointment for a shot.

---

And on top of all that, I feel a mass in my chest.  I hope I'm being a hypochondriac, but shit, man, maybe I did get the virus yesterday.  Goddammit. ...

Another Goddamn Flat Tire ...

... and it's the tire I replaced the first tire with.

Coming home from work.  Getting onto the highway where I heard, "BAM!!!" and the car lurched to the side.  I knew a tire had to have blown, and sure enough, the driver's-side front -- the one I had to replace exactly a month ago -- had a hole on the side.  A fucking blowout.

They'll say underinflation was the problem.  I checked the pressure on it a week ago, and I was going to again today.  Good thing I went on the Internet because seeing someone else go through something like this, I remembered that tire has a warranty on it.  I don't know if the car shop is going to fight me on this.  And I don't even know how to invoke the warranty.  But I have a phone number for the warranty place, and I have to try getting a new tire for free, or at least cheap.

One problem in all of this.  If the replacement tire got blown out, and for the same reason (a side blowout) as my original tire, could it be the rim?  I noticed that the rim right where the blowout is is all scratchy.  I didn't think that was an issue, but if a similar situation happened with two tires, maybe the goddamn thing is bent or something.  Shit, that hit on the train track could have made a fucking number on my rim.

See, the problem is that all day, I've been dreading meeting up with That Cunt starting on Tuesday, and I was hoping that talking with my boss about it would assuage my fears.  But that hasn't happened since I have been trying to meet with him since Tuesday and have been stymied, and so dread has been all I've been feeling for a week.  Sure, maybe what he would have told me would have not helped me at all.  But being stuck in limbo hasn't been good, either.

Maybe I'm just mad that I'm back to full-time.

It's Going To Get Us All

We're all going to die.

I'm not trying to be funny.  I ... we don't have anything to stop it.  And we can wash our hands all we want, and we can distance socially as much as we want.  But once it's in our bodies, it's going to fuck us up really good.  One-in-five of us will have to go the ER, and at some point, if we need a ventilator -- and it sounds like there's no chance all of us who needs a ventilator will get a ventilator -- it's a 50/50 shot we'll survive.

Three things have convinced me to be more pessimistic.  One is a series of tweets by some guy I don't know saying that he took all the right precautions except for having a beer with a friend at a bar for one hour ... and he was knocked on his ass (albeit at home) for a week.  He's just like me: He was vigilant, but just slipped once, and he got caught by this #TrumpVirus.

The second thing is a sad milestone: Minnesota announced its first death from COVID-19.  He was in his eighties, but he caught it from someone else.  I have people in my life that are that old.

The third thing comes from an article tweeted to me.  It's a first-person account of a frontline health worker in Louisiana who was horrified at how some young-ish COVID-19 patients are dying on his watch.  I didn't click on the link.  The description of the fluids coming out of some fortysomething's lungs convinced me I would go crazy if I read it.

It's over.  For me, for my family, for all of us.  We could be hermetically sealed in our homes, but if and when it gets us, it's got us.  We have no defense against this.  My God, there's nothing we can do. ...

Oh, And Now A Plant Is Dying

I just noticed this last night.  My Father has a small plant that has peculiar "leaves" coming out of it.  It was in full bloom when my parents left, and I watered it and it seemed fine.  But what I noticed last night was a bunch of shriveled stems.

I actually downloaded an app to identify the plant.  (It doesn't come free; I have to cancel it by next Saturday or else I'll have to pay.)  I think it's a Dunce's Cap.  This app diagnoses problems, and when I took photos of this sickly plant, the app gave me three diagnoses.  The first two: Underwatering and overwatering.  Well, thanks for narrowing it down!

Plants die whenever I have to take care of it.  I don't know what to do.  I water them, every day, according to My Father's instructions.  And like every year, still at least one of the plants dies.  And unless I have the will to find a solution, or a miracle happens, this one will, too.

I ... I don't know.