I'll keep the exposition short so we can get right to the babbling.
Four years of Jim being largely unemployed or underemployed + kryssi being a public school teacher (meaning no raise, ever again as long as I live) = the Martin house is sagging.
Which is better than having lost it altogether. Let us keep perspective. We still have our house and our two cars.
The last four to five years have sucked for just about everyone.
The financial shitstorm also means no vacation. No money to try and keep the house up.
And No Will To Do Anything.
I pulled up just short of hanging out on my porch wearing a wife beater and nursing a can of Coors Light. Manic Depressives do not exactly excel under the above circumstances.
So this year Jim got a job. A real job, a place to go and be productive at a place he likes and they pay him, on time. Underpaid a bit but we are trying not to complain. And even though a real vacation is still not possible, we did at least get to schlep around Durango for a few days.
So I started purging the house. As a bit of a karma, feng shui geek, I am aware that all of the crap of the last four years is lurking in bedroom corners, stuck in 30 year old wallpaper and poised to strike when I open any closet.
I decided that enough was enough, and spent June winding down, doing a few things for school and kept to light cleaning, waiting for July so I could attack.
July hit and so did the purge. My bedroom has not been this clean since we moved in.
And while finances prevent anything huge from happening, I have managed to switch out curtain rods, put up new curtains, throw out a dresser, gut and reorganize a closet and scrape off the 150 year old wallpaper from the girls' bathroom and get a start on a new coat of paint.
This is not even a third of what needs to be done, but once I started Harper and Genoa had a babysitting job literally walk up to our front door and Genoa got a job at Kohl's.
These things are related. If you dig out the crap you can allow the good stuff to emerge.
I've known this for years, but I can be stubborn.
And all this cleaning has freed up my mind a bit. Which is a nice change, I've been pretty wound up and cranky. Serious mental constipation. I just kept pushing to the next thing, thinking "I just have to get through this" and then it was on to the next thing.
It had become increasingly difficult to pretend I was A) emotionally stable and B) not angry at the word. And as I was scraping the wallpaper today I realized that I am happier when I am emotionally unstable and angry. It is who I am. What was throwing me off and making me CRANKY was PRETENDING I am someone I am not because I was trying so hard to cover up what was going on. So I was pissed, but not for the right reasons!
What a glorious revelation!
I can now go back to actually being a cold hearted bitch instead of just saying it.
FREEDOM!
I had become this horrifying, passive aggressive, psuedo-accepting, nagging blob. So Gross. I was literally wandering around my classroom mumbling to myself by the end of the year about how much I hate these assholes.
And now I feel I can fly the 'hawk at full mast and do what it is I love to do, the way it needs to be done, full speed ahead, take no prisoners, too bad so sad.
So the next time some disrespectful student breaks my laptop, I won't just shrug and go cry in my office. I will scream at them, pack the broken laptop in their backpack and call home to explain to his parents that he will be bringing home a broken laptop and that I expect a new laptop to be returned to me.
I just had to sit down and share this. I am too old to try to be someone I'm not, what the hell? No more mumbling. If you are an asshole they I am going to openly call you an asshole.
Your self esteem is not my problem.
Anyone else hear the Dead Kennedys playing in the background?
YES. All right, I'm going back into the bathroom to finish the other half of the wallpaper. It is very hot in there with no airflow. Can you tell?
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