Sunday, June 13, 2010

S'Marriage?

Someone who recently became a beneficial acquaintance is also a hardcore, FOX News-watching Republican. She stated that Sarah Palin and herself both do not believe in "marriage" for gays, but the legal equivalent of it. My friend said "Call it anything else. Wed. Garriage, S'marriage...."
I understand and respect that point of view because the Bible does say that God created marriage for the purpose of procreation. Okay. Then why don't people who protest gay marriage but feel that we deserve equal rights get out on the streets and fight with us? Hmm?

That's not what I really want to say right now. What I really want to say right now is that we sang the most lovely hymn in church today.

The Servant Song
Richard Gillard - copyright 1977, Scripture in Song/Maranatha! Music, administered by Music Services.

Will you let me be your servant, Let me be as Christ to you;
Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant, too.

We are pilgrims on a journey, We are trav'lers on the road;
We are here to help each other Walk the mile and bear the load.

I will hold the Christlight for you in the nighttime of your fear;
I will hold my hand out to you, Speak the peace you long to hear.

I will weep when you are weeping; When you laugh I'll laugh with you.
I will share your joy and sorrow 'Til we've seen this journey through.

When we sing to God in heaven We shall find such harmony,
Born of all we've known together Of Christ's love and agony.

The Servant Song concisely and eloquently explains how I feel about love.
Whether you believe in God or not, serving each other is what it's all about.

Sunday, June 06, 2010

It's been a while./unemployment

A lot has happened. I'm still unemployed, but I have been working steadfastly at trying to find a way or ways to support myself. I'm staying hopeful. Just last week I pulled into a place because I saw a "Now Hiring" sign. Even if I am not chosen, they were the nicest people and I was complimented by the hiring manager in regards to how much I care about other people. (I was chatting with the other people waiting to be interviewed. Some of them were sour-pusses but one particular gal and I just talked about everything.
Maybe that's because I know that we are all in this together. I've been to interviews that amounted to "cattle calls," pretty much. I'll be happy for whoever gets the job in thise circumstances. I just hope I get a turn soon.
My age is definitely a factor in why I haven't scored a new job yet.
I really don't care what I do. I'll be proud to be doing anything. There is honor in every legal and moral pursuit, even if it is shoveling up what horses leave behind. I'd be happy to do that but I haven't found anyone who needs that done yet.
I'm not complaining. That's just the way it is. I apply for everything I see that I believe myself capable of which would offer me enough pay to continue to support my creditors, landlord and veterinarian. I've had interviews but it always seems to be someone else who gets chosen.
I do wonder why. What am I lacking? Or: What are my references telling the caller?
I really just want to work. The process of looking for jobs and applying for them is a full-time job and a pretty exhausting one.
Because I am not employed, my family finds plenty of ways to keep me running like crazy when I am not job-hunting. I wash the parental dogs, help with homework, worked on my step-sister's wedding arrangements, shuttle the parental dogs to groomer and vet, help clean... it gives me some esteem back and usually comes with free dinner and sometimes a gasoline consideration.
I did get a position as census enumerator. It was very interesting to meet my neighbors. Unfortunately, I spent more time training than I did actually counting noses. At least it was something, and it was something I can add to my resume.
That's what I have been doing.
I did get to travel with my family to Louisiana for my step-sister's wedding. It was very nice. The people were very friendly and the state is a very nice place to visit. It's a lot like Florida, except there is even more water and bigger trees.
I experienced my first crawdad. Honestly, I wasn't that impressed... probably because I'm not that crazy about lobster unless it's Florida lobster prepared by my step-brother, who grills them to succulent perfection. Sorry, lobster liberation front. Sorry, Maine.
I have forgotten what else I left behind in this blog so I want to go back and look.
I don't want to start in the middle of a story that I haven't begun yet!
So, Hello. I'm back.
I just want to say I am not boycotting BP gas stations because really that onl;y hurts local business people. They might want to change their gas brand but they don't deserve to suffer because BP didn't emphasize safety before all else.
We're all in this together. We have to help each other out.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Goodbye, America.

I killed my Facebook account tonight.
I have really enjoyed almost everything about it, but I am so upset about the Supreme Court condoning corporations taking over the Government that I opened a page against corporate governance but I chose "non-profit" because it was the only choice I had for the kind of organization I was so I could start the page.
It was the wrong thing to do. It's just that I feel so powerless. I'm nobody, really. Who's going to listen to me?
The other thing is, I enjoy anonymity. I think I am justified in this feeling after seeing the results of my relationship someone who is very out-of-the-closet at the place she works. She works at a grocery store in a small, unincorporated town. I used to love going into that store. Half the shoppers knew me as the gal from the library and to the employeesI was a customer of the store.
Now, they all now I am the counterpart of the ornery receiver. They watch me. If I talk to someone, they talk about it.
I chatted in line with my friend, Lisa, whom I had run into there at the store and Lisa noticed that everyone was looking at us. I hugged her goodbye in the parking lot and Joey heard about it the next day. (I had told Joey about running into our friend and it being overly obvious that all eyes were on us as we chatted.)
I loved anonymity. I liked the friendliness of the store. Now I shop somewhere else every chance I get.
But my petty problems really mean nothing. They may just as well have sold the country to Satan himself.
I don't deny the whole "personhood" thing which states the companies have a right to an opinion. I do disagree with giving companies the right to own a politician and run the country. Hello?!
I'll sign anything but Free Speech is more endangered now than ever. And anyone who speaks out is a Jew to Hitler.
I really wouldn't be surprised if anyone who spoke against this turns of events suddenly disappeared like Jimmy Hoffa. The corporations really do have that much power.
True, the government was influenced by them before but now it's totally legal.
Thomas Jefferson remarked that companies seeking power were a threat to Democracy.
Too bad they don't make men like him anymore.

Friday, October 09, 2009

Because there's time

I haven't spent time here in a long time. Even though I'm unemployed, I have been busy.
Each weekday and Saturday, my alarm goes off around 4: 10 a.m.
Because it's set to NPR instead of some hard rock station, it sometimes takes a few minutes to realize that the pretty music is not just there; it's there to tell me something.
I open my eyes and roll off the bed, cross the cat barricade and stagger to Joey's room to wake her up.
She has to be at work by 5 a.m.

Why do we have separate rooms? For many reasons. The primary one, I suppose, is that she sleeps in the shaps of a boomerang and butts me out of bed.

Other reasons include her snoring. (My snoring is irrelevant because Joey is legally deaf.) And there's three cats and a dog that share her bed. And she stills the covers and blames me for it.
So I bring my own blanket if I want to hang out in her room.

When I worked, she would call me at varying times to wake me up and sing to me, and to give me my orders for the day. She still calls and sings to me and gives me my orders, but she calls around 8 instead of 6:15.

Sometimes I cannot sleep so I turn on the computer and search the job listings. I average three applications a day.
On a really good day, I do six or seven. I think that I have just about applied for everything in a 60-mile radius that I am capable of doing. I have several pages of places I've applied to since September 15th. I have had three interviews.

Then my mother-in-law took me shopping for interview clothes. God bless her! Happy Birthday to me!

So today is the last day that I will go to my Dad's around noon to walk the dog and scoop the kitty litter for a small consideration. Their regular dog-walker will be back from vacation soon. I need to find another means of getting a weekly consideration. It helps. It's hard to find odd jobs these days. Everybody's gone legit, except for people who aren't.

The local drug dealer is a very nice looking young black man in an ostentatious bright green car on lifted wheels.
I finally saw his face from out behind his shaded car windows at the grocery store one evening.
It's tempting to do illegal things. But when I think of how drugs devastate families, like my own, I think again.

My own drug-addict stepbrother was finally kicked out of the house. It's very sad but he was impossible to take.
He did show up a few nights ago for food, but they made the mistake of letting him in the house. He stole. What did they expect? There are two tables outside the house where he could have sat. A bank envelope on the kitchen counter is something he feels entitled to.

Had they kept him outside, they could have hosed him off, too.

The person inside him is a very considerate person with an incredible aptitude for certain things. He is a fishing savant. Really. Unfortunately, there is not much market for that. And drugs have created a crusty exterior of lust for money to smoke off tinfoil up into his nose. That's how they take opiates.

I am the only person he has not stolen from, because I have nothing to steal.

Drug addicts are borne until the burden of them becomes to great. They either destroy their family totally, perhaps even kill their family, through murder or heartbreak, or they FINALLY get dumped.

The only good thing that a family can do is go to Al-Anon and talk it out. The only thing you can really do about other people's behavior is change your response to it.

I do love my drug addict step-brother, but I have treated him differently all along because I have known for years that there was no hope of changing anyone in my family. I talk to him, listen to his lies and act like they are the truth. Oh, drugs addicts become very artful liars. But I do not criticize or even bother to call him on his lies. I just know that unless I see it for myself, it's not true.

What's disgusting is that he has given up bathing. It doesn't matter anymore but it used to matter very much to him.
He loved to get cleaned up and put on nice clothes and cologne. He's handsome and he liked the attention he got.

I didn't know if I would come to the house and find my Dad and step-mother dead. I do know my step-brother's death is imminent, the way things are going. Any change that happens is completely up to him now. He's been sent to rehab three times. The last time he was saved from jail and sent out of state. In a year and a half he has spent more money and cost more money than I make in five years.

He is the living embodiment of what happens when you spare the rod and spoil the child. And he learned how to manipulate my step-mother from birth.

Parents these days indulge rather than discipline. We are raising future generations of assholes who will sit around watching footage of people getting hurt and laughing at it. These people will not consider the common good but only their own needs. Internal genocide is already approved by the Republican party and the right. Anyone who says that health care is a privilege for those who can afford it is espousing it. And they really don't care. Oh, they realize what they are saying and then they say that God wants them to be wealthy.

The deepest layer of Hell waits for these people.

So... I did not mean to detour into the heavy but I have had so much going on. Unfortunately, having a drug addict in the family makes life interesting. They say that you curse people by saying "May you have an interesting life."
It may be so.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Anniversary / Termination

I lost my job today. I left the office and found four places to fill out job applications.
It's also the "one-month anniversary" of our wedding.
Nice gift. Maybe I should have told my co-workers....

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Gay marriage, I'm getting married, merry-age

I'm marrying Joey.
It's not legal in Florida, but we're doing it, anyway.
When I was a child growing up in the Episcopal Church, I attended a confirmation class.
There was no proviso, no exclusion. The sacraments were for Christians. No limitations. Marriage is a sacrament. I am a Christian.
A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.
Who has the authorization to install grace?
I'm getting married.
It's not "legal" in this state, but that doesn't mean a thing.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

That's What She Said.

















My family questioned if I'm truly happy and if I'm sure about marrying Joey.
They can see that I'm not ecstatic.
Early on, my friends told me that she wasn't good enough for me.
















I know they love me and have my best interest at heart.
















To be truthful, being more of a caregiver than a lover wears on a person.
But none of those people read this blog...
















There's only one person besides me that knows I made my vow to Joey leaning over her grandmother's death bed.
















A sacred promise witnessed by the company of spirits, the transitioning soul of her grandmother and one other in the room.

A hard promise to keep, it turns out.

The Pineapple Paparazzi strikes again!