I Blame The Beard February 1, 2010

Well, folks, I ain’t gettin’ married anymore… and I don’t really care.

Sunday, January 10, 2010, we chose, but didn’t order, our invitations. Wednesday, January 13, 2010, he was moving out of my house. That is how out of nowhere the whole bust up came about. In hindsight, I think I can see the beginning of the end starting with the growth of his wretched fucking beard near the end of October. It started as a part of his Halloween costume and then just fucking stayed.

anyway.

His reasons are as follows:

1) “I don’t think I have what it takes to be a father.” Guy was a generally pissy dude. Monday, January 11, 2010, he was especially pissy. Early evening rolls around and he says to me, “Can we talk?”. That statement comes after a ridiculous amount of annoying brooding. By the time he asks if we can talk, I’m so pissed and annoyed with his pouting ass that I really don’t give a fuck what the fuck his problem is and I know I don’t want hear it, but I always agree to listen to him bitch talk about what whatever is bothering him.

“I don’t think I have what it takes to be a father.”

My response was some variation of “Um…” or “What?” or “Ok?”

“I’m just really starting to lose my patience with The Kid.”

“She’s two. I don’t really know what else to tell you other than that.”

Conversation progresses from there. Apparently, we differ on what we deem to be appropriate discipline. I would rather not spank all the time. He would. Spanking isn’t always effective. Time outs aren’t either. I think it depends on the situation. I’m not saying she should never be spanked. I bust her ass when the situation calls for it… Time out usually does the trick. I usually have to just threaten her with a time out and she does whatever I want her to do. I am afraid of my own temper. I know if I’m super pissed at her for something she’s done, I will put her in time out. I have spanked her while super pissed before and I scared myself… and cried like a baby. My mom beat the buhjesus out of me when I was a kid… for really dumb shit… and when she was pissed… sometimes not even at me. Anyway, my kid is usually really good. I don’t have to punish her too much. Sure, she steps out of line, but SHE’S TWO YEARS OLD! She doesn’t do everything I say like she used to because she’s figured out she has her own mind and can do what she wants… or she thinks so anyway.

guh.

anyway. he can’t handle the kid anymore. whatev. done.

2) “I don’t feel appreciated” I call bullshit. What the fuck does that mean anyway? I am I supposed to say “Thank you!” all day everyday? What the fuck ever. I think this is actually code for sex. In other words, he didn’t feel like he was getting laid enough. This is where the beard comes in… The sex hit a sharp decline with the appearance of the beard. I don’t like kissing scratchy face. I don’t like scratchy face touching me in general. I just don’t. Major turn off. I expressed this more than once… a day. Did he listen? Fuck no. That fucking beard stayed until New Year’s Eve. I begged him to shave that fucking thing off. I told him, “I harbor a lot of animosity towards your face. That is how much I hate your beard. Please, just shave it off.” I’m not even kidding. I actually said that. He wasn’t even attractive to me anymore. As soon as he shaved that wretched thing off… I was on him like white on rice…

anyway.

3) “I feel like I’m supporting you too much financially” Hi. You are living in the house I bought and paid for… in full… meaning we don’t have a house payment. Is it too much to ask that you pay some household expenses? Also, we agreed he was going to pay all of the bills instead of trying to reconcile between two accounts. I give him money for whatever bills and he pays them. He gives me money when I need it. Once he told me, “Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m the bank…” That may be because he was in charge of the money. good lord…

4) “I just don’t know where I see us in five years.” my response was literally, “no one knows what’s going to happen in five years.” seriously… what the fuck kind of shit is that?

He actually told me, “I don’t like the way things are going and I don’t really think it’s going to get any better.”

“Do you even want to work on it or do you just want to throw everything out and walk away?”

“no”

“No, what? You don’t want to work on it?”

“I don’t want to work on it.”

I think he meant to tell me he grew a vagina.

Spot Removal December 31, 2009

If you’re anything like me, after you saw Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind, you started to think of all of the exes you would love to have erased from your mind. POOF. Fucker never existed. Life different. There are a couple I can’t erase because they helped shape me into who I am now by the shitty shit they put me through. There is one though… that I think I can erase and my life wouldn’t be radically different. A few little things here and there would change, but nothing I wouldn’t have done on my own anyway.

Mike.

Yeah. I’m giving an actual name here. It’s a common enough name and I don’t feel like trying to come up with some sort of nickname for him. He doesn’t deserve anymore of my mental energy…

I met Mike early 2003. My boyfriend and I had just broken up and he decided to move out and back to his mother’s house. I needed a new roommate. Like any other time when I need something, I turned to the Internet. Mike was probably the billionth person to contact me and the only one who had gainful employment. I thought the arrangement would work because 1) I get along with dudes better than I do chicks 2) I didn’t find him attractive. He was really nice, super funny, very smart and didn’t seem like rapist material… so I invited him to live with me.

It was super cool… He was like my long lost best friend. I kept finding myself more and more attracted to him by sheer mental stimulation. He isn’t an ugly guy by any means… just doesn’t fit the usual profile of what I’m physically attracted to… I like short guys (for whatever reason) and he was about 6′2″. I also like them fairly thin and he was around 200 lbs. I guess I like a guy I can throw around… and he definitely wasn’t it.

Four months go by and we wind up sleeping together… I was drunk. He was drunk. We’d been flirty with each other the whole night. The usual girl fucks guy story… However, we were roommates… and that complicated the story a little. Do we do it again? Do I sleep in his room or does he sleep in mine? Do we act like nothing happened? Well, we did do it again and I started sleeping in his room, but we hadn’t exactly established what the hell was going on… Suffice to say, we figured out we liked each other and commenced with a full blown relationship. We wound up moving from our Webster Groves apartment to one in Maryland Heights and then bought a house together close to Pattonville High School.

Our relationship was what dreams are made of. We were like two best buddies who constantly messed with each other. Two kids just playing all the time. It was super fun. He let me do whatever I wanted. I let him do whatever he wanted. We weren’t that couple constantly stuck up each others asses. We never fought. It was fucking bliss, I tell ya.

Bliss… until 11/12/2004 when my dad was killed in an accident and I lost my head. Until Mike thought it was a brilliant idea to buy a house we couldn’t afford. Until I got the great idea to get my realtor’s license and quit my job because I was doing fairly well selling houses.

I didn’t think my dad’s death affected me as much as it did until a few years later. (I have a whole post devoted to this I hope to finish today or tomorrow… so more on that later.) I was drinking more and caring less. A few months later, when our lease was up, Mike thought we should buy a house. It was his thing… I let him do everything and I was along for the ride. He found the realtor (who was an idiot), decided what we could “afford” (no idea how he thought we could afford a $154,000 house with no down payment), and the mortgage broker (another idiot). I just had to agree on a house. Mike somehow thought that our payment was going to be less than our rent, $800 a month. Um… no. It was $1200 a month. We thought we were having a hard enough time with $800… we really weren’t. In hindsight, we were living high on the hog. That $1200 a month was killing us.

I had a stable job working in accounting at the time. I was making $12 an hour and there was no room for advancement. The whole house buying process inspired me to make a career change to work as a realtor. I figured if our idiot agent could do it… so could I… and better because I’m awesome. This was also around the same time as the housing boom. There was money to made and I was going to make it. I got my license and got to work makin’ the money part time. I was doing well enough at it that I decided to quit my job and work real estate full time… and then the housing bubble burst. I still tried though… I worked at Best Buy part time… a temp job here and there… started working at Lowe’s in the spring… worked at Riverport (oh, I’m sorry. UMB Bank Pavilion. No, Verizon Wireless Amphitheater.) that summer… I had 3 jobs (4 if you count the real estate) at one point. I finally gave it up July 2006.

To make matters worse, Mike kept borrowing money against his truck to dig us out every other month. This title loan came about because I needed a car when we lived in Webster Groves… I bought a $1000 ‘88 Honda Accord. This title loan had proliferated to around $10,000 by the time I had moved out. Remember this. This is very important to the story.

Things came to a head February 2006. A month shy of being in the house for a whole year. Mike unceremoniously broke up with me. I think I knew it was coming… but I didn’t want to believe it… He told me he wanted to end things the year before, but he thought buying a house would fix things. I told him that’s like your marriage isn’t working so you should have kid. He also told me he wasn’t sure he had ever loved me. My heart was completely broken.

I didn’t move out right away because my brother and friend of his had just moved in. I also didn’t have any money to get my own place yet… hell, I wasn’t even helping with the mortgage payment because I was so broke. Mike moved to the basement. I got to keep the bedroom. I stayed until September… when my mom said the most horrific thing any mother (especially mine) could ever say to their child, “You can move back in with me if you want.”

So I did. That’s how I got back to my home town. I was in true dire straits. Lost my father, my boyfriend, my “friends” (that story will come another time), my house, and now my independence. I was 25 and living with my mother in the town I swore I would never live in again. Needless to say… I started drinking more. I was up to 6 days a week… sometimes 7. Got knocked up in December… had a baby the following September… Received a settlement from a lawsuit stemming from my dad’s accident… Moved out of Mom’s… Rented an apartment for a few months… bought a house…

Somewhere in the middle there after I moved out of our house, Mike and I became friends again. Just friends and it was good. I still harbored some feelings for him… but nothing I really acted on… I may have said something once when I was drunk, but that was it. My feelings were completely dead by the time I met Guy… so have no fear for him. Anyway… After I bought the house, I told Mike I would help him out with the title loan (did you remember like I told you to?) and lend him the money to get out from under it so he could get himself a new vehicle because his truck was getting ready to die. Yes, my feelings did play a role in this idiotic move. Even if I didn’t still have feelings for him, I probably would have still lent him the money. I am generous to a fault. It’s a weakness, I know. Anyway, I told him he didn’t have to start paying me back for a whole year and even then he didn’t have to pay all of it back as I owed him money for the Honda and several months of 1/2 of the mortgage payment. We agreed on $6000.

This is where things start going down hill… I found out from him that he didn’t use the money to pay off the loan. He socked it away for emergencies. Ok. Wasn’t my intention when I lent him the money, but whatever. At some point, he did get it paid off… Went and traded the truck for a certified preowned BMfuckingW 300 series. Used his year end bonus for additional down payment. This REALLY irritated me. Yet, I said nothing. I said a year. I was going to wait.

Time came for him to start paying me back early 2009… We agreed on $150 a month until he got his year end bonus at which time he would pay me off. It took him a few months to actually start paying me back because “something” always came up. Even when he did start paying me back, I had to ask him when he was going to send me something. Every month. I had to put my foot down in November and I asked him to see about getting a loan to just pay me off. He said he had already tried to do that and was denied. I believed him because I knew his credit was shot because of the house. (even though he somehow got a loan for a BMfuckingW) He said he would send me something when he could… I got a check in the mail for $150 when he actually needed to send me $375 to get caught up.

In the middle of this, Mike started dating someone. Which was cool. I was totally happy for him. Really. Mike doesn’t really date too much… he… can’t really… um… find anyone to like him. He’s a goof in the true sense of the word. You have to have a special sense of humor to understand him and his humor… I guess it is best characterized as fucked up sarcasm. He’s really fucked up… and really sarcastic. He has probably only dated 2 or 3 girls since he broke up with me in early 2006. Anyway, him and this girl really hit it off… and he asked her to marry him… after dating for probably six months or less. Gave her a fat ass ring. Pretty sure the fucker could BLIND someone. I found out via Facebook. Saw pictures on their wedding website he posted a link to on Facebook. They’re getting married in July.

This pisses me off for two reasons. 1) He still owes me $5000. I saw on his Facebook most of his year end bonus is going towards paying off the ring and the wedding. “Paying off the ring” means he bought the ring on credit. This ring had to have been at the VERY LEAST $5000, probably more like $8000. Hmm. Couldn’t get a loan for $5000, but could get a fat ass engagement ring on credit. Also… I thought I was supposed to paid back with this year end bonus? Fucker. 2) He wasted 2 1/2 – 3 years of my life. I waited and waited for him to ask me to marry him. He dates this girl for maybe six months and proposed. Yeah, I’m a little bitter. I’m pissed spent 3 years of my life completely snowed. That’s 3 years I can’t get back. I’ve aired this frustration with Guy and he understands… I’m actually more pissed about the $5000.

THAT is why I would pull an Eternal Sunshine on Mike. I’m doing my best to delete him from my life. I deleted him from Facebook last night, the phone today, and I’m planning to block him on my email.

In the immortal words of Jay-Z… VAM-MOOSE, SON OF A BITCH!

Write. Check. December 30, 2009

I’m a to-do list maker. I’m a very specific to-do list maker. I don’t leave too much out. If I need to do it that day, it goes on the list. For example, I need to take a shower. Not only is “shower” on the list, but so is “get dressed”. Lists are always written in order in which things are to be done. I started this several years ago when I first started working in accounting. I rarely stick to the list. I start out good and usually get sidetracked. Hello, ADD. How are you?

Lately, my list has included “Write”. As you may notice… I haven’t gotten to it as I promised when I got out of school for this semester. It isn’t because I get sidetracked… it’s because by the time I get to “write”, I’m worn out. Nap time doesn’t come easy to the child for what ever reason. After I lay her down, I keep having to go in her room… “Lay down. No talking.” “Do I need to take the bunny?” “LAY DOWN!” All I can think the whole time is, fortheloveofgodjustgotosleepalreadygoddamnitjesuschristfuck. When she’s finally asleep… I want to sleep… or get drunk. Neither of which I do.

Today, I write. I’m trying to ignore her to write… wish me luck.

HEY-O! December 16, 2009

This stupid semester is finally over… I promise to write more this month as I haven’t much else to do with myself. I have a few things rolling around up here in me head that may or may not be interesting to anyone or no one. Preview of some of what is to come:

- a reflection on 11/12/04 and my life since (day my dad died. i actually started working on this post last month… haven’t had time to finish.)

- my theory on why Americans are such fat fucks (the beginnings of my life’s work)

- People Eating Tasty Animals (why we should eat meat and hunt animals.)

- Science is cool! (rediscovering my love for science.)

- Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind (my wish to erase 3 years of my life and why)

I’m sure many more subjects will pop up in addition to these… I’ll work on a new post everyday during Kid’s nap time. Two hours should be enough time to spit something worth reading out here for the masses or lack thereof to read.

Surrounded By Idiots November 20, 2009

My biology class is ridiculously easy. Granted, I’m studying to be a high school biology teacher, but come the fuck on… it’s Biology 101. It’s high school biology. Most of the kids in my class probably took this class in high school within the last 2-3 years. Really.

Yet… More than half of these kids can’t score higher than a 60% on our exams. Did I mention the last 3 out of 5 exams have been open book/notes? That’s only because our instructor felt sorry for most of the class. Before our exams were open book/notes, there were only 4 people or so who scored higher than a 60%. I cannot understand why no one scores better. The exams are not hard. If you pay attention during lecture and read the book, you really shouldn’t score lower than an 80%. Seriously. All of the answers are there… it’s just a matter of recalling the information. Just like any other class.

I told everyone in the class my secret to success on the exams… Besides the fact that I’m a fucking genius, I use the textbook website to take practice exams. I use the book to find the answers if I need to… that’s it. The practice exams written by the textbook authors is 100 times harder than the test we’re given in class… plus, he takes questions from these practice exams and reworks them. I made a point to tell everyone this… and that I’m a biology major. I also offered to study with anyone if they wanted. No one has taken me up on my offer.

There was one girl who actually waited outside of the classroom for me before class one day. She asked me if the book practice tests were still helping me. I told her they were and she said she had tried them, but they didn’t seem to be helping. She feels like she does super on the tests when she’s done, but she isn’t getting as good of a grade as she thought she would have. I told her I’m also just naturally good with biology and I remember most of the stuff from high school even though it’s been 10 years since I’ve had a biology course. She told me she’s usually pretty good at biology too, but she just isn’t getting this for some reason. I’ve neglected to mention this girl looked like she just rolled out of bed, smoked a joint and threw on a hat… at 1:00 in the afternoon. BTW, she’s a biology major as well… maybe she should start getting up a little earlier, quit smokin’ doobers and get serious. I don’t know… it may help.

Anyway, in addition to the exams becoming open book/notes… they’ve gotten shorter and WAY easier. Stupid easy. The only way these exams could get easier is if he made the last page an answer key.

I guess I should get used to this… Seems to be the life of a teacher. Students constantly not living up to expectations or their potential. oh well… hopefully, I’ll be totally fucking awesome and all of my kids will get it.