Aren't we just the sweetest looking family...

Let me pick your brain for a minute

Big Brother is watching…

Case de Insurance has updated their internet whatever to not allow the viewing of blog pages, also meaning I can’t get on to post at work during those times when I just don’t feel like shuffling papers for a few minutes. Being the smart cookie that I am, though, I downloaded and installed the Blogger for Word feature before they banned the blogs, so I can still post – take that you Socialist bastards!

I have an ethical dilemma that I need your help with. I have a kind-of friend (and it really is someone I know and not me…) who is divorced and has a young daughter (11 years old). Said kind-of friend is somewhat mentally unstable, and rather fond of both recreational and prescription drugs, as well as Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Okay, maybe ‘somewhat mentally unstable’ is an understatement. She’s been suicidal several times since we’ve gotten to know each other the last few years. She keeps it together well enough to hold down a job here at the Casa de Insurance and pay her bills, but it’s a real struggle for her. The bottom line is that she needs serious help – she needs to check in someplace for a while and dry out, get all of the crap out of her system, then get some therapy to get all of the crap out of her head – but she refuses. Thinks therapy is a bunch of crap, and only goes to the psychiatrist for refills of her sleeping pills and Xanex. She regularly comes to work loaded up on God-knows what (surprising that her supervisor hasn’t done something about this, don’t you think?). She sometimes blacks out at home, and on at least one occasion her daughter could not get her to wake up, which scared her to death so she called her dad (the ex-husband) to come over. She convinced him that she had the flu and that she’d taken some Nyquil to get some sleep.

I’ve talked and talked and talked to her, and none of it does any good. I am concerned not only for her, but for her daughter as well. I feel like I should do something more, but am afraid the aftermath of anything more that I might do would completely devastate her and result in something very, very bad.

What do you think?

Clickity-clack

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Right-wing conservative girl in front of me BANGS on her keyboard all day long.  Email.  Instant message.  Back to email.  The sound of it will make you insane.

… iPod, take me away…

Last week was so peaceful – she was on vacation.  No constant key-tapping, no long, drawn-out stories about things that people really couldn’t care less about.  No listening to the irritating, childlike voice she uses when she talks on the phone.  I paid for it yesterday, though, with vacation story after vacation story, endless pictures that she’d taken with her camera-phone and her digital camera…  oh… my… God…

I’d like to know exactly when and how I built up so much bad karma.

And when did I get to be such a bitch?

I almost took her head off a few minutes ago.

She has two young sons ( 6 and 8 ) by TWO different fathers.  She’s been married and divorced THREE times, by the way, if I haven’t mentioned that before, but she’s VERY religious (while living with her current boyfriend, who does not attend church with her…).  The tax return of the father of the oldest boy was just deposited into her checking account, because he’s a little behind on his child support, and she’s giddy.  She won’t stop talking about it.  Oh the THINGS she’s going to buy with that extra $1900 she just got, none of which sound as if they have anything to do WITH HER SON.

But who am I to judge?


The psycho-analysis I’ve been doing on myself lately is staggering.  A therapist would make a fortune off me.  

I feel haunted by memories of my parents right now, so much so that I had to move the pictures of them out of our living room temporarily, because I was bursting into tears every time I looked at them.  It feels as if there’s unfinished business there, but I can’t figure out what it is.

Also, I am apparently very envious of my husband and the fact that he’s going back to school to start a new career.  This envy, of course, is being spurred on by the fact that I hate this new job I’ve taken.  It’s not that I don’t like the work, or that I can’t do the work.  The people, for the most part, are okay, but you run into idiots wherever you go.  There seems to be an unspoken expectation that you work more than 40 hours per week, without expecting to be paid overtime…  and this is NOT a salaried position, so isn’t that illegal?  I refuse to do it, period, and I think that’s not being looked upon too favorably…  but if I can get my assigned work done in 40 hours per week, why should I be here longer?  Yet there sits K at home, still not doing much in the way of housework, mind you, playing with the boy all day and enjoying him as he grows up.  And he’s not taking school nearly as seriously as I think he should.  It’s all just getting under my skin right now, and consequently our relationship is a little strained.  We’ve been through worse, though, so I’m sure we’ll get through this.

In a rare show of intelligence, the Casa de Insurance has given us both Monday and Tuesday off next week, to celebrate the birth of our great nation.  We are taking advantage of this 4-day weekend and going to KY, to visit my dear friend Mou and his lovely wife.  On the way to their place, we’re stopping outside Louisville to visit my brother and his family, see their new home, etc.  We’re spending Saturday night with them.  Can I just say…  I’m actually nervous about this.  Why?  I’ll be honest – my sister-in-law.  We have so much in common (at least I thought we did – favorite authors, hobbies, etc), that you’d think we’d be great friends.  Somewhere along the line, though, she seems to have taken a dislike to me, and I’ve never figured out why.  We’ll see how it goes…

Thanks for listening…

I am physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. I hate it when i feel like this....

A new era has begun...

With moving departments, the woman that sits in the cubicle behind me has been replaced by the right-wing conservative girl that sits in front of me. We started within just a few months of each other, so I’ve known and worked closely with her the whole time I’ve worked here at the Casa de Insurance. She is aggressive and thinks everyone is out to get her. She wants to move up in the company and she’s determined that no one will get in her way, which has gotten her into trouble more than once (For example, last year, telling our then-supervisor, in front of quite a few co-workers, that he wasn’t qualified to be a supervisor. She never apologized to him, and was then stunned when he trashed her in her performance review at the end of the year. Hmmmm….). She is nice enough, most of the time, but annoying.

So if feeling good about this is wrong, then I don’t want to be right. We were on a conference call together yesterday that included big-wigs from the corporate office, regarding a project that we’re both working on. The topic of the call got a little off-track at one point. Thinking she had her phone on mute, she let out a heavy sigh and said to me “Why are we wasting time talking about this?!?! I mean really!! This is why we never get anything done!!!”

All conversation on the call stopped for a few seconds, then the project manager spoke up, asking who it was that had just made those comments. Dead silence. Thankfully, my mute button works because I was laughing so hard that tears were streaming down my face. She never did fess up to the project manager that it was her, and probably won’t. I can’t wait to see what the fall-out from this might be, because our project manager is not one to let something like this go.

To those of you that were sad to hear of me moving away from the woman that sits in the cubicle behind me, cheer up. This is not the last you will hear of the right-wing, conservative girl, I promise you!

Can I just say...

I loathe these times when life gets in the way of what you'd rather be doing. Times like these make me very salty and hard to deal with.

I'm not quite sure right now if my marriage will survive K going to school for the next 2 years. We've got one quarter under our belts now, and OH MY GOD what a struggle THAT was! SEVEN more quarters of this???????? The th0ught makes me shudder.

I need to accept the fact that my house will never be clutter-free again, because by the time W.T. is grown and gone, I'll be too tired to re-organize. Toys are, of course, strewn hither and yon, and it makes... me... crazy. Sometimes you just have to let things go, though.

I've switched doctors, going back to the doctor I was seeing before W.T. was born, who (or whom? I never get it right...) I stopped seeing because, even with an appointment, you had to wait (no joke) upwards of 2 hours to get in to see her. My blood sugar, though, is just not coming around to where it should be, and 2 years of this is enough. For the last year, he's thrown a new prescription at me at each appointment. For the diabetes ALONE I take 3 pills and inject 2 medicines daily (one of them twice a day, which means three injections daily... don't look at my stomach, I look like a junkie). I DON'T LIKE THAT. At my last appointment, I tried again to voice my concerns. He started throwing out things like liquid-protein diets, some new weight-loss drug approved by the FDA that will be out in the fall, and 'exploring all of the non-surgical options to get this weight off'. That was the last straw for me. The weight will come off once the blood sugar is under control. It happened before, and I know it will happen again. The key right now is finding the magic formula to get the blood sugar under control. Eating right and exercising arent' the problem. The 'new' doctor switched out one med for another and took more blood. I'm supposed to get the results from her in about a week. I already feel better - perhaps this new drug was the missing key to all this. And there must be something to it, because others have noticed and commented that I seem perkier and more upbeat. We'll see.