TMI

Sorry to go in such a diary direction with this blog lately, but it's nice to have a place to put my thoughts.

It's been an interesting journey, trying (and succeeding, so far) to drink less. A couple of things I've discovered, and am very grateful for:

1)I'm allowed to make mistakes, and there's no reason to go home and drink myself silly if I do make them. I can even do something nice for myself, like watch a movie, after making a mistake. I'm worthy of happiness.

2)People can like me without my happy-go-lucky, fake exterior, that I used to keep up with drinking. I'm not happy-go-lucky. I'm a little bit anal about some stuff. There, I said it. People will have to deal.

3)I get along with way less people when not drunk. People are really, really annoying sometimes. I appreciate them in small doses.

4)Alcoholism is a working-class disease for a reason. I'm feel lucky to have a steady job and paycheck, but it's ok for me to want more.

Weird shit I miss about drinking

1) Falling down. My apartment is suddenly very easy to navigate. It used to be more of a challenge. I sort of miss the challenge.

2) Also dropping stuff and other motor skill challenges. I just opened a bottle of seltzer water, and it didn't spill at ALL! I let air out of it several times to diffuse the bubbles. It's like being some kind of GENIUS. I miss concentrating hard about doing mundane things. Like whether or not I have to go to the bathroom. And then deciding I do, and getting there just in time! It's like a race against NATURE ITSELF!

3)Thinking I am completely awesome for a couple hours each night. "Damn, I can sing!" "Damn I have a nice ass!" are things I used to think on a regular basis. I never went as far as to think I could dance, though.

4)Living in the moment, instead of some distant future or foggy past.

Things I don't miss about drinking:

1) Drunk dialing people. I once drunk dialed my boyfriend a million times when he was trying to talk to his boss. And threatened to kill myself for effect. Yeah, I was that girl. I also drunk dialed my long-lost buds, and probably made no sense, but hey, I kept in touch. I also once drunk dialed my GRANDMA. Who saw through that shit but was too polite to say so. I wish somebody along the way hadn't been so polite, a little earlier.

2) Throwing up red wine. Nough said.

3)Having a maintenance guy come into my apartment, and say, "oh, wow, looks like you had a great party."

4)Drunk crying. It seriously sucks.

To be continued, I guess. I wonder what the fuck step this is?

Confessions of a disgruntled state worker

One of these days, I'm definitely gonna punch out my boss. My former boss is on the list, too. Also, the person who just honked their horn in my parking lot. It's 2 am, motherfucker! And the people who make my apartment cost $700 a month. So I have to have this fucking job.

Yeah, it might be time to move on. Freakin money. Whole reason I moved to Iowa.

uh oh.

So, I've been trying to figure out for months now if I'm an alcoholic. I've gone a couple days without a drink and today is the first day I've really wanted one. I just feel wound as tight as a spring, and wanting to let loose. I feel like if I really do let loose, people will laugh at me. After all, if you're drunk, you have an excuse. Plus it deadens your senses so that you can't feel or see people looking at you or rolling their eyes. My mind just races constantly, and I keep thinking, thinking thinking, and so much of it just isn't any good. When I'm drunk, I think animal videos on youtube are hilarious, and bad music is telling my life story. I'm calm, I'm in control. Or I'm not, and I don't care. Mostly I just don't want to go to work tomorrow, and beer makes me forget about tomorrow. I thought I had found a job I didn't mind, but maybe it's a job a drunk doesn't mind.

Right now, I'm listening to the blues, to calm me down. But I keep thinking - what if this song is sad, what if I feel sad, how will I kill that feeling? There are people right now crying all over the planet and how I am going to help them my god how am I going to heal them? Even if I'm happy there's someone somewhere who's not so what good is it?

God, that's a lot of weight to bear. It's a wonder I'm not on crack.

Fatness

A friend of mine told me that he finally won his battle with his weight when he embraced being fat. I've decided to do so as well - yay, I love being fat! I'm gonna buy a fucking mumu and a tiara and be the queen of fat!! I wanna go out in a bikini so people can gaze upon my round stomach! It's actually fascinating to me how I can gain weight all in one place. There are 3 inches difference between my hips and stomach - who can grow a stomach like nobody's business? I can! I'm sure anyone reading this would think that I am being sarcastic but I'm actually fascinated with my fat self, in sort of a disconnected way. I realize our society considers fat to be bad, lazy, even a little wrong. (don't get too skinny, though, that would make you even more wrong) But it doesn't really bother me all that much. To watch The Biggest Loser or somesuch, I'm fat because I hate myself, or my mother, or my situation in life. But that isn't it at all.

I ATE A LOT OF GODDAMN FROSTIES. FROSTIES TASTE GOOD.

That's it, my friend. My stomach is proud evidence that I enjoy the good things in life (i.e. frosties). Now, I may lose a lil weight, but this time, it won't be for anybody else - it will be that I love this cute, fat little chick and would like her to live a little longer. And for now, I'm gonna shake my little round ass to this song on the radio. Oh, did I happen to do that in your direction, haters? Oopsie.

Hola, Blogosphere.

So, it's been a while since I've written on this thing. A lot has happened, really. I moved to North Carolina. I quit working for the store, a job I loved, because my boss was a jerk. Now I have a job I sort of like, making enough money to get by, but feel nervous often, because though I have lots of work friends, I feel like I don't really fit in with the culture there. On my first day there, a long-time employee told me that a lot of people had recently been fired for what seemed like no reason. Tonight I met the guy no one thought should have been fired.
I'm aware that a big hospital can be heartless - and that employees can be disposable, but I really didn't feel like being reminded of it right before I'm about to resign a lease at my first decent apartment in years. After a succession of bad career decisions, I've spent the last few years clawing and scraping my way into the working class. I can support myself and my ugly student loans, and I take a lot of pride in that. But I've learned the hard way (Jeff's death, etc.), that it can all be whisked away in a second. Freedom really is nothing left to lose - now I've got a basket full of things I want to keep that I guard like a hen (holy mixed metaphors!). And a cute boyfriend who goes into a deep well of self-loathing when I reject him, that doesn't help either. Am I waiting for the other shoe to drop because I'm doing the wrong things? Have I built my security on the wrong things, like a house built on sand? I probably need to trust God to provide again. But we had a few disagreements, so I started relying on me - and let's face it, I'm a little flaky too.

An Easter story

As a Christian, one of the hardest stories for me to swalllow has always been Jesus rising from the dead. I mean, preacher goes around talking about toppling the status quo, helps people out, gets crowds of said people to follow him around, and then gets executed - this sort of thing happens all the time, it's the price a lot of our great leaders have paid for changing the world. You'll think I'm odd, but one of the things I've always liked about Christianity is its focus on sacrifice - the idea that you have to give things up in order to get things, that you have to put yourself on the line if you want to change things. For me the resurrection thing has always sort of muddied things - guess what, he came back to life! It's all good now! The fact that his message lives on and has inspired folks like MLK, Gandhi, etc., has always seemed like more than enough.

In the midst of contemplating these things, I heard the news report about the ship's captain that offered himself up as a hostage on Friday. Since I had the "holy week" story on my mind, it seemed really sadly appropriate that he made the sacrifice on that day. On Saturday night, while I was drinking red wine and comparing sob stories with a friend on the phone, another friend beeped in to say tell me "They lost that ship's captain. I just heard the news that he died." I gasped. I was sitting there whining on the phone while people were out there giving it all for what they care about. It was sobering (well, as sobering as it could get, with the wine and all.) but it was good to know that people like that are still out there. But it was also very sad, and unfortunately, very familiar.

Yesterday, I was going to be lazy and take a long bath, when I suddenly remembered that I hadn't talked to my mom yet on the holiday. I dialed her up, and she gave me the rundown of my family's Easter adventures - big choirs singing both services at church, long-winded sermons with special holiday gimmicks (Mom's pastor started an impromptu dance with the little girl who lights the candles, mine threw fake rocks around - really, he did) and meals with family friends. And then she said - "Did you hear? They rescued that ship's captain who was being held hostage." "WHAT?" I asked. "Oh, maybe you haven't been following it. The Navy Seals went in by parachute." "But Chris said he was dead!! He's alive?!" I sounded pretty surprised, considering I had sung songs about a resurrection that morning.

Now, whether or not it's a good idea to use special ops to rescue hostages is up for debate, surely. And I'm sure the mothers and friends of the Somalis who passed aren't celebrating too much today. But hearing about this one "resurrection" gave me a lot of hope. And that might be the point, after all.

You may not think I'm brave...

But you try giving up the perfect-on-paper relationship, to find one that feels perfect. Which may not even exsist.

So far: breakup: 1 Kim: 1

In other words, I'm still kicking. More than Mich State can say, ya bracket busters.