Just write about nothing at all

Is that we can’t benefit from it until it is too late.

Today, the day before Mother’s Day, my sweetie and I went to his mothers house to drop off flowers for her and his younger sister who also has a child. I don’t celebrate Mother’s Day with my own mother as: 1) she is out of the country and 2) she abondoned her children in a drugged out haze and was deported from this country.

The house was empty, but he got in anyway (in ways I don’t want to discuss) so we wouldn’t have to leave the flowers out front. We also took along some sodas because we know his family is having a hard time and are always out of such things.

Once inside we found the fridge open to the air, but no light on in it. The house was warm from no air conditioning, and there were oil lamps on the living room tables. The electricity was out. Not just out, but had been out for some time. Long enough for them to have gotten rid of all the perishiable food and to be using the fridge like a pantry.

We had never even gotten a call.

I know that we have our own money problems. There never seems to be enough of the stuff, but our money problems involve bills all being paid on time and not having enough money to go to the movies. This, this was something else. They should have at least called us.

We waited for a bit, then came home. An hour or so later the phone rings. My sweetie was hoping it was his mother so he could find out what the hell had been going on. It wasn’t.

It was my dad. Daddy was calling, in a rage, about my brother. The one I have disowned for the time being. Apparently my brother not only did not pay last months rent as he should have been, he snuck out of the house as soon as my father was not in the living room.

Mind you, on Tuesday, my brother is going to Orlando for training before shipping to Iraq. This may be the last time he sees my father for quite some time. And he sneaks out. Dad was livid, but not surprised. Not surprised at all. He says he expected it, really, but he had hoped it wouldn’t play out like this.

Two families, two twisted trees turning in the wind (alliteration!), and the bitter fruit they bear.

Sometimes I wonder, with such screwed up childhoods, how my sweetie and I ended up so…Normal.

You mention that I have turned my back on my family, yet the only occurrence you can come up with as a betrayal is my leaving Florida.

Moving away from home is not a betrayal of my family. I still love my family and support it in any way I am able. I admit that my leaving could have been done in a more mature fashion, but I was nineteen years old and ready to spread my own wings. I had found what I truly believed to be true love. To date my instincts have not disappointed me.

You speak of the sacrifices Sissy had made to help me over the years, and it is true. Because she loved me, she was willing to open her home to me, to help me through hard times.

You ignore that I never free loaded, I was always working and contributing to the household in whatever way I could. I was always giving back everything needed, and sometimes only wanted, because that was my family and their happiness was paramount.

You, the one she has had to kick out of her home on more than one occasion, are trying to speak down to me? The only time I ever chose to keep something for myself was in the name of love, love that you can’t understand.

Real love is selfless.

Real love will give anything, ANYTHING, to see the object of their affection happy. Not satisfied, not surviving, but happy.

You can’t know what it is to love someone more than yourself. You don’t know how your heart is torn to bloody shreds at the very thought that you might have inadvertently done something to upset them. You don’t know what it is to be loved back that way. Because you can’t love anything more than yourself. You aren’t willing to sweat, toil, and bleed for another person. You aren’t willing to give up every thing you know and love for the chance to spend just another day with someone else. You won’t suffer and be glad of it so that you can please someone else. You can’t love.

You think you love someone, I have seen you. You are willing to play at love and affection. Yet when push comes to shove, your girlfriends are always too much work, your wife was too much work, your family is too much work, keeping up the facade of love is just too much work for you.

Because you have never really loved another. You need that affection your girlfriends give you because you want love. You treat them badly just to see if they will love you anyway. One day you will come across someone who will spark true emotion in you and you will understand how silly your words today are.

Sacrificing everything for love is not a betrayal of your family, it is the creation of a new one.

The hurt feelings from my leaving four years ago have been gone for a long time. In the light of the obvious and blinding love Marshall and I have for one another no shadows of doubt can prevail. Not for anyone who had ever loved with everything they are.

A mother who loves her children as Sissy does can’t help but want that same love for the people she cares about becasue she knows what it is to suffer for love, because everyday she gives up somthing so that her kids can have instead and she is glad to be able to do so.

A father who gave everything for his kids like Dad did will always understand what has to be sacraficed in order for love to flourish because he fought for years for the right to do so.

A woman who left behind all thst she knew and loved as I did knows that love trancends something as paltry as miles because my love for my family stretches across states.

A shallow, self-centered boy such as yourself can’t understand something like this.

You have never felt it. You have never known in your heart that you would give everything, everything, to know that the person you love is well. Even if it means giving them up.

You can’t do that. And until you can, you will keep playing at love and wondering why no one who really knows the emotion takes you seriously.

Because real love hurts more than a frivolous tattoo and it is a pain you will gladly bear.

My family is supposed to be coming up to visit me this weekend. I was so excited by this. I was re-painting my apartment and in a cleaning frezy! This will be the first time any of them have come from Florida to South Carolina to see me. I wanted to make a good impression.

For the past few days there has been rumblings about problems with the trip. Of course, not living there, I have no idea what is going on.

It started that my father would be coming up along with my two brothers. Then it turns out my (older one) brother wants to bring his new girlfriend along for the ride. This didn’t bother my father right up until my brother made it clear that he actually wanted it to JUST be him and his new girlfriend.

Let me give you some back story to this. My brother is still married to a woman. They married last June and seperated a couple months ago. My brother had a girlfriend already lined up. So, ok, now he is seperated and in the process of a divorce, and he has a girlfriend. While I may not approve, it is obvious to his wife that they are not going to work out so it is almost not cheating. Not my place to judge though, as I am still “living in sin” with my own “common-law husband”.

Except he cheated on his girlfriend. With his wife.

On top of that, his new girlfriend has four children that he can’t stand. He only goes to spend time with her after they have been put to bed and he leaves when they “start annoying him”.

He doesn’t spend anytime with the woman as a family at all. Yet he brags to me that she is going to wait for him while he does his tour of duty overseas. So I ask him, “It must be serious if she is going to wait for you. Will you be marrying her?” His reply, “Oh, no. Naw, I don’t want to marry her. It’s not that serious.”

Not that serious? Then why should I want her included in my family gathering? Why would I want to meet her and get to know her if she is just another passing fling of his?

Even then, I didn’t mind it. My brother always has his girlfriends and I have learned to smile but not bother remembering their names. I am not being trite here, I am serious. By the time I learn his girlfriends names, he has usually replaced her with another. More than once I have embarssed myself by calling his current girlfriend by the last girls name. I gave up.

Hell, even his marriage didn’t last a year. He does not have the best of track records here. But I am getting off topic.

So he tells me that it will just be him and his girlfriend, and Dad talked him into bring our brother. I figure there has to be a reason for him suddenly excluding our father. Probably they are fighting (they always do at the worst possible times).

No, it turns out that my brother just can’t be bothered to wait a few hours while my father completes his dyalisis for the day. Except when I talk to Daddy, he tells me that he scheduled himself to do his treatment the day before so that they could leave on my brothers schedule rather than the original one agreed upon.

One might suspect my brother was just reaching for an excuse to exclude his family from this trip.

That is because he was.

Turns out he wasn’t really making this trip up here to see me for one last time before he goes overseas. Turns out he and his girlfriend just needed an excuse for a road trip. The real reason he didn’t want my father and other brother along is because Dad wants to get in the truck and drive straight to South Carolina. My brother and his girlfriend want to stop and sightsee and do all the ho-dinky roadside attractions that make any road trip worth it.

Except it isn’t supposed to be a road trip. It was supposed to be the first time I met my youngest brother and my goodbye to my enlisted one.

I had words with him. Some of which included me telling him that I didn’t want to meet his “fuck-buddy” I wanted to spend time with my family.

I reget that comment. Not because I didn’t mean, but because it was an insult to what might just be a perfectly wonderful woman. She obviously cares for my brother enough to wait for him so I am led to believe that, to her at least, it isn’t a relationship just about sex. It is more.

But to hear my brother speak of it, it is nothing at all. Just another one of his flings.

Still, I apologized. Oh, not to him even though he received it. I apologized for my insult to her. It was uncalled for. But I told my brother that he needs to grow up and get his priorities straight. He is eager to abandon the man who raised him, who took him back in after his failed marriage, and who puts up with all his crap. He is happy to use his older sister as an excuse to ditch his girlfriend’s kids for a weekend and meander about the country. He treats his younger brother as an after thought and a burden.

For years I have told myself that he acts this way because he is young. But he is only a year younger than me. There really isn’t an excuse for this kind of behavior.

Perhaps, if this was the first time he had done something truly outrageous and offensive to his family I could have blown it off. But this is a habit. This is tradition. Everyone knows that to help my brother in anyway is to set yourself up for disappointment, and that is sad.

So I have broken up with my brother. I have asked him not to contact me any longer. I have told him that I love him and that I will be praying for him during what is going to be a very hard time (all of his past misdeeds have begun to catch up to him and he had recently found himself in quite a bind of his own making). I also advised him to speak to our father regarding his troubles and for once, take the advice.

He replied with scathing remarks, but I expected that. I wasn’t exactly peaches and cream in my own goodbye.

But I hurt. No matter what, I love the boy and I hate what is going to happen to him if he doesn’t straighten up real quick. And I fear, no I know, in my heart that he won’t.

And I hate myself a little for praying that the bad things he is going to be forced to endure will teach him something.

Thanks for listening.

Which is to say, I am no longer sleeping on an air mattress. And it only took me two years. Gads I am such a procrastinator, really!

It is a lovely queen sized monstrosity which completly dominates the room. I don’t have a headboard yet, or even sheets that fit properly, but I have what I need!

Since I moved all of our (being me and my near-husband) computers into the main bedroom when we got a room-mate for a time and gave the smaller bedroom (which was our office at the time) over to him. I decided to leave them in the master bedroom when he moved back out, rather than drag two extremely heavy desks back into the office.

So my office is now my tiny bedroom, which works for us as we both spend more time in the office-which-used-to-be-the-bedroom anyway. You think you are confused? I am too.

I think I will make the big room the rec-room and eventually move all my book shelves out of the living room and into here along with a really comfortable chair or a loveseat.

First, however, I have to buy a couch for the living room. We are still stitting on collapsible camp chairs. Our priorities were a little more electronic when we first moved into our apartment. That worked two years ago, but I would like to have my family over, and I don’t think offering them “the good camp chair” is going to go over very well.

So, still on the list:
Couch
Loveseat
Comfortable Chairs for rec-room
Two More Bookcases (I am overflowing my current ones)

Then there is HIS list:
Bigger TV
A 2nd surround sound system
PS3

Not gonna happen, but I let him dream. I am not buying anymore electronics until I have some actual furniture!

II feel very strongly about voting. I feel that anyone who does not take the ten minutes to cast their vote no longer has the right to whine about their nation’s state of affairs. I almost did not go myself. My sweetie has the car and the polls were a whole five blocks away!

But I was strong. I tugged on my sneakers, grabbed my bag, and hiked the distance to the library. The polls were empty but for the volunteers, all of them elderly and all of them quite surprised to see me.

I felt a brilliant shard of pride when the woman asked me if I would like to review the amendments up for vote today and I was able to tell her I had already read about them. I got another look of surprise and my heart ached. Being well read about the local politics should not earn me such looks.

I stepped into the booth and began to expertly work the electronic voting system. I am 23, I work for a tech support company, I can handle a touch screen like a pro. While I was ensconced in my not-quite-private booth a few other contentious Americans appeared. All of them were silver haired. It shamed me and made me proud at the same time.

No matter how willing others my age are to give away their rights, I am here, I know the worth of my ten minutes. I care what happens and am willing to take the tiniest smidgen of time to say so.

As I left one of the women helping with the polls pasted a small white sticker onto my shoulder. “I Voted” It proclaimed. I swelled with pride and wore it all the way home. As I strolled through my apartment complex, my head held high, some kids stopped and asked me about my sticker. I happily waxed poetic about voting and what a privilege it is, how it makes a difference. The kids looked bored and somewhat amused, but maybe they will remember, and maybe the next generation will care more than mine appears too.

I hope so. Voting is such a bitter-sweet action for me. My heart still aches at my country’s apathy. The sticker in pasted to the front of my computer, neatly covering the Dell brand. I am still proud.

You have got to be kidding me? Though, I have to admit, he did just have surgery on his colon and can now only eat soft foods. Also, he can only eat about 1/4 a cup of food before he is full. So I suppose he has a bit of “help” with his diet. But geez.

I outweigh my DAD by 16 lbs! My dad is huge! Not overly fat, just a very large man. What does that make me? A very large, fat, woman? Gah!

Though I have to admit, this is a good thing for him. He was only having the surgery because being overweight has wrecked havoc with his body over the years. So bad kidneys, liver, heart and now colon… He HAS to lose weight, it is literally killing him. Daddy is a living, breathing warning for where I am heading if I do not change my ways. I know this because he told me so, when he refused to let me donate a kidney. How crappy is that to be told, “No girl, you are gonna need yours when you get to be where I am. Don’t you think it is time to start losing weight.”

Though, I have to admit, it feels really good to have him proud of me again. I get up an hour earlier each morning to work out before heading to work. That makes me getting up at 5:30 am! Which is, I am certain, a crime against humanity. The world suffers for my health. Ok, ok, maybe not. Whatever. The point is, he is proud of me. We were keeping up with each other with weight loss, but now he is challenging me to meet his weight and beat it. And he is cheating! Is it fair to hold sugery weight loss against me?

Alright, so now I am just waiting for it to cool down a bit so I can trot out an hour long walk. Fie. 16 lbs. I am going to have to work my bum off. Literally!

Some words to the wise:

Don’t start the call yelling. No matter what has been going on, or for how long it has been going on, the person on the other end of the phone did not cause it. They are there to help you. Starting off with snide comments or yelling at that person only makes them want to get you off the phone as fast as possible, and not always in the most helpful manner.

Don’t tell them everything you have done already. Unless you are asked. They do this for a living, they do this everyday, all day. Everything you have done did not work, so really doesn’t matter. They will ask you questions, answer those questions as concisely as you are able, without stories of what you did before hand, afterwards, or how frustrated you are.

Don’t use foul language. There is no need for that and it will not make you feel better. It will just get you hung up on. Please remember, these people can see your account. These people leave notes in your account about how each call goes. These people are just people and can be as spiteful and angry as you are. These people have their cable, internet, phone service, electricity, ect. You don’t.

Do not always ask to speak to a manager. The manager can also see how the call went, sometimes the manager was standing over the person on the phone the whole time, or was listening to the call for quality, if you constantly ask to speak to a manager when you call for help, they are going to stop taking you seriously. One day you are going to have a REAL problem that needs a manager and no one is going to really listen.

Listen. Listen. Listen. You have already done everything you could, or you would not have been calling. Don’t go running off trying to fix things until the person on the phone has told you, very clearly, exactly what must be done. Better to ask an extra question than yank cords that do not need to be yanked and have to be walked through putting everything back the way it was. You may be ruining your whole system, and you were just in an outage that will fix itself.

Ask questions, and listen to the answers. Of course you have questions, why wouldn’t you? Your service is not working and you pay good money for it. When will it be back up? What is the problem? Is there anything I can do to fix it from here? Then listen.

Do not have children call in for you. I do not care how smart they are, or how good at whatever it is that is broken they are, they are not authorized to make any changes to your account. If you cannot do it yourself, have an adult friend do so. If you put your 12 year old on the phone, they are just going to want to speak to an adult. Even if you think you are not smart enough to handle it, the person on the other end of the phone can help you. You just have to stay calm and listen.

Ask for credit. Whenever you lose service, you lose some money. They do not stop billing you just because it stops working. However, do not become upset if you do not get it right away. Credit will sometimes require calling back when it is working again. This way you can recieve credit for the whole time you are without, rather than only that small portion. Keep in mind, most companies will only credit you from the first time you call to report a problem AND GET ASSISTANCE. The problem actually has to be resolved, or an attempt to resolve it has to happen. Do not expect credit for less than 12 hours. If you call, and they fix the problem on the phone, you will not get credit for that. If you call, and it is an outage, expect the person on the phone to be willing to tell you how to go about getting credit for that time.

Speak clearly. Don’t mumble into your cell phone. They cannot help you if they cannot hear you. If the person on the phone asks you to speak up, do so. Minimize background noise. Kids have the tv blaring? Go to another room. Do not put the phone to a piece of equipment making a strange noise unless the person on the phone asks you to. Half of the time they cannot hear it, the other half it does not help.

If it smokes, burns, or is extremely hot, unplug it. Then call to let them know something is overheating. Do not wait on hold for half and hour, THEN get told by the person on the phone to unplug it. It could have started a fire by then.

Be in the same room as the problem. Calling from the road because your internet is not working leaves them no way to help you. You have to actually be able to see the equipment. Calling from a payphone because your phone is not working is acceptable, but calling from work because your tv is not won’t do at all. The same goes for calling from a phone that you cannot move around with. If you have to unplug things to get them working again, but you are downstairs, you risk taking to long and the person on the phone will end the call while you are gone. Please keep in mind, they are only allowed to stay on hold for you for so long.

Call back. If you do not think the person on the phone was very helpful, try again. Do not take it out on the next person however, that only promises that they will not be very helpful either. But don’t hesistate to call back and see if the next person says the same thing, of if you have more questions. Most places have 24 hour support lines and the middle of the night has less hold time. However, if three people in a row tell you that you are in an outage, I think you can take their word for it.

Be honest. Lying about what the problem is won’t save you any time or aggrevation. It will only increase it, as the person on the phone will try to fix the problem you state, not the problem that is.

Don’t feel stupid. Remember, the last person they spoke to, the one who spent the whole call yelling but didn’t get their problem solved, was far far stupider than you can ever be. Don’t be that person. As long as you are polite, listen, and do what the person on the phone says needs to be done, you are good to go.

Treat people how you want to be treated. Need I really say more? Take a moment, before you call, to calm down and remember that the person you speak to is there to help you. They are not your verbal punching bag. Do not say things to them that you would be offended having said to you. It offendeds them.

Do not give out your WHOLE social security number. No company should require that over the phone. Most will only need the last four digits to verify that you are you, and not some crazy neighbor who has been digging through your trash. Not comfortable having that information out there? Create a pin number for your account, or a password. However, if you forget it, you will have to go into an office with id to get it changed. Do not yell at the person on the phone because the numbers on the account are not the ones you remember, they can’t change them for you and legally, they cannot access your account. Be grateful for that. That protects YOU.

If someone must come to your house to fix the problem do not leave them unsupervised. Do not leave children to deal with them. These are strangers, no matter what company they work for. I have heard of unsightly holes being drilled in hard wood floors, or a tech cutting through drywall overtop electronic equipment and the dust ruining it all. Worse, I have heard of the person knocking on the door not being a tech at all, but a serial rapist. The woman only got away because her very large son happened to be visiting and in the backyard at the time. If you live alone, or they look shady in any way, ask to see their badge. Every company provides badges for anyone they expect to be coming into your house. Every vehicle a home technican uses should be clearly labled with the name of the company. More often than not, if you have made an appointment, they will call you in advance to let you know they are coming. Be careful!

I bet none of you expected to hear about THIS in July! However, I feel that the middle of the years is the perfect time to look back at the begining of the year and reaffirm or readjust my priorities.

This year, so far, I have accomplished two out of six of my resolutions. I have gotten a tune up for my car, horray! I have also gone to visit my family in Florida, double horray!

I am actively working on losing 40 pounds by the years ends. So what if I yo-yoed and am once again back at 37 pounds to go. I am still actively working on it, and that is what matters.

I am working at saving $1,500 dollars. I can have this done by years end with careful planning and steadfastness. I may have to spend some of my saved money on a new bed, but that will be worth it. If I come close, it counts as done. Included in that goal is to get two months ahead on bills. I count that towards saving money since if anything should happen I will at least not have to worry about my power going off.

I will be getting my drivers license, at the ripe age of 23, with either this paycheck or my next one. I am seriously in no hurry, and I have cold feet.

Getting married may be the one I don’t make. Wanting a perfect wedding, and actually planning a perfect wedding just don’t seem to align in my head. I know exactly what I want, but I get lost trying to find it, so I give up. Having let it sit for so long, now I find I will not being able to afford by the date I want to get married on. No worries, my man isn’t going anywhere, and is in no hurry either. My family, on the other hand, won’t stop asking me when. Nags, the lot of them.

Five out of six isn’t bad for something nearly everyone forgets after the hangover goes away! So I have reaffirmed and readjusted. Now, to just keeping working on my goals.

It started with a video, on Yahoo.com, about how Hollywood stars have to worry about their body image. It shows clips of all these movie stars, all of them women, all of them talking about the pressure to stay incredibly thin. How they have to be 5 pounds less that what is healthy just to look good on camera. These same women are now fending off accusations of anorexia. We want them skinny, but then we want to blast them for getting that way.

The next article started playing, and it started with Jack Black, and talked about how Hollywood is falling in love with “flabby men”. The “average man” is in. Two out of three women interviewed said that was disgusting, but that didn’t stop the article or the interview strangely enough. It continued, still instsiting that women want fatter men because it “makes them feel more secure, women don’t want a man who is more fit than she is”

Are you kidding me? You have got to be kidding me. But there they are. I do not know if I should be disgusted or insulted. I will settle for writing about it instead. Hollywood is stupid.

Was not my birthday, but my sweety gave my my present anyway. See, I want a dog. I love animals, and love dogs most of all. The problem is, we live in an apartment. Not only is the pet fee fairly large, but there is no real yard for a dog to run in, and a dog could never be off the leash outside. We could do it anyway, but I would rather wait until we have a house.

Well, for my birthday, he got me a dog. Actually, he got me a lot of dogs. He got me Nintendogs. And the DS to play it on. So me and my dogs can go everywhere together, no worries about yards, or leashes, or digging up my carpet! My dog can already sit, shake, lay down, and has won second place in an agility competition, and that was only our first day together! I have to say, as birthday presents go, this was perfect. He says he has been plotting it for ages. I am such a lucky duck.