Tag Archives: mike

Off My Mind: Christmas, Careful Economics, and Crashing Appointments

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I haven’t been able to do much writing lately, and I think it’s because my mind is clogged with so much other crap, I can’t get into writing mode. I’ve tried making a To Do list of all of the writing things, but that just bogs me down more. Clearly I need to get some things off my mind.

My day job is starting to get kind of intense. I worked five days in a row, and two of those days were like being in the Twilight Zone. My normally nice coworkers kept snapping at me and giving me snarky answers to questions. I think it’s the holidays — Black Friday is around the corner and we have no idea what the sales are or what the associate schedule is going to be — but still. I’m relieved that I have today and tomorrow off.

I still really like my job, though. I never thought I’d actually like working in retail, but I don’t mind working there at all.

I’m probably going to be working a second job during the Christmas season. I may or may not be completely out of my mind. Only time will tell. My old boss from my very first job asked me if I would come back during the holidays. I’m broke, so I’ll pretty much do anything — “anything” including working at the mall during December. I am fully prepared to be a babbling heap by the New Year.

Thinking about Christmas shopping kind of makes me want to throw up. I wrote a whole article about budgeting for the holidays — it’s coming, get ready! — and while I’m actively doing all of the steps I’ve outlined in said article, I’m still nervous. Clearly I am a trustworthy source.

In all seriousness, I’ve given myself a budget of $25 per person, and I hate it. I want to give everyone on my list the world, but I can’t even afford everyone on my list. It comes down to this: I have twelve people I’d like to shop for, but can only afford eight of them. How do you choose?!

I tried to get Mike to agree to not get each other gifts, but he said he’s getting me something anyway… which, in all honesty, just makes me feel like I have to get him something. I know he just means that he’s excited — he loves Christmas shopping — but he just doesn’t realize how stressed I am about the whole thing.

I know it shouldn’t matter, because either way, I’m going to spend the holidays with the people I love, and that’s very precious to me. I wish Christmas was more like Thanksgiving (which is next week, and my belly is very, very excited); there’s no pressure to get things for people. You just have to bring yourself (and some food). Eating is very zen like that.

Of course, thinking about Christmas shopping just reminds me that I’m very broke. How I can justify buying things for people when my car is currently unable to go on the highway is beyond me. I should be putting that money toward the car, and car insurance, and my student loan repayment. I wish I could figure out some other sort of gifts so that I could put the majority of the money I’m saving for Christmas toward the car instead. But thinking about that might just collapse my already fragile nerves.

I am, however, saving for a few things. My savings account is currently the home of Operation Apartment. I am saving at least $10 a week, which is nothing at the time, but it adds up. Or at least, it does as long as I don’t touch it.

I’m also saving for a new computer. Specifically, a Mac. More specifically, a 15-inch MacBook Pro. Of course, I so don’t have $1,799 (or $2,199). I’ve calculated that, if I save $30 a week and save all of my pennies (quite literally), I can afford one in about a year. I’ve been drooling over the idea of getting a Mac for quite some time. I’m admittedly kind of attached to the PC I have because I’m sentimentally weird like that, but it’s way out of date — I can’t even play The Sims 3 on it, and that’s a fucking crime — and acts like a geriatric brontosaurus. I refused to even start looking at computers until this one actually needed to be replaced, though; I’m just not the kind of girl that needs the latest and greatest. My basic needs in a computer are: internet, word processor, and Sims (and pretty much in that order). I’m not a tech junkie or WoW gamer (Sims are way cooler than WoW, anyway). Quite frankly, I’m sick of Microsoft and Windows. I want to get as far away from anything Microsoft as soon as I can. I have very limited experience with a Mac, but if getting away from Microsoft means shelling out about $2,000 and learning a whole new computer interface, then so be it. (Besides, it’s really not that different. I worked at a web design shop a few years ago that used nothing but Macs, so I spent my days bouncing back and forth between a PC and Mac. If I hadn’t started my day on a PC at Job 1, switched to a Mac at Job 2, then went back to a PC for Job 3, I would have gotten the hang of it much faster.)

While my laptop is pretty outdated, though, I don’t really need a new one… yet. (But not being able to play TS3 or The Sims Medieval is kind of making me want to cry.) I do, however, need a new phone. My BlackBerry, bless its little chip, is pretty wonky, and even more outdated than my laptop at this point, even though the laptop is physically older. How’s that for the technology we have these days?! I abhor the BlackBerry’s track ball. My biggest gripe about this phone from day one is the track ball constantly getting stuck, or the screen moving up instead of down even though I am scrolling down, dammit. A little less than a year ago, I updated my BB’s OS so that I could have the new Twitter app at the time, but now the damn thing’s OS is out of date again. It’s a pain in the ass to do, though, and I’d rather not tempt fate (I was a little nervous about accidentally destroying my phone the first time around). Contrary to popular belief, I am not an IT. (Web designer =/= IT. I cannot stress this to my family enough. Sigh.)

Even worse, though, the thing keeps freezing all the time. I’m waiting for the day it just stops working completely. Realistically, it still makes phone calls, so it’s still serving its purpose — like I said, I’m more practical than techie, even though I really like shiny things — but I’d really like to come a little bit out of the dark ages and get a touch screen. My grandmother — Noni — has a touch screen, and I don’t. (She rocks at it, too.) The question is, though, which one? My mom told me she’d get me a new phone for Christmas. When my sister and dad got the HTC Evo several months ago, I started drooling over it. I figured I’d just get that. But now Sprint has the iPhone, and the iPhone 4 — not 4S, mind you; I don’t need my phone talking to me, thank you very much — is actually the same price as the Evo. How do you choose?!

I have a friend who has had and loved both, and even she doesn’t always give me the same answer. The iPhone’s battery lasts longer, she says, but the HTC survives more drops (unless you get the expensive plexiglass hard case for the iPhone). She also told me the HTC’s apps are cheaper (as in, usually free), but after some research I discovered the iPhone can be synced to your Mac, so all pictures you take or changes to documents you make on your iPhone instantly go to your Mac via iCloud. Since I know I’m getting a Mac at some point, this is a huge thing; I could put Pages (word processor) on my iPhone and Mac, and write away from my computer if I need to… and it would be on my computer instantly. Right now, if I’m away from my computer and get an idea for a story or book I’m writing, I pull out my BlackBerry, open up WordPress, and start writing. Then I send it as a draft and it goes to my WP site, and then I log in to my website, open up the draft, and copy and paste it into a Word document. If I take a picture on my BB, I have to connect it to my PC via USB, upload the photos to my computer, and then upload them to my website or whatever. iCloud cuts out those middle steps, and like I said, it’s a huge deal to me.

So I guess I’m leaning toward an iPhone. My mom told me to let her know whenever I decide. Hahaha, I guess there is a techie in me.

I should be coming into some extra money soon, so fortunately we may be getting our apartment and I may be getting my Mac even sooner. I don’t know if I wrote about my 401(k) woes here — and if I did, I can’t find the post — but I finally got it all straightened out. To make a long story short, the third party company that managed the retirement plans at the newspaper I worked at a couple of years ago took it upon themselves to move my 401(k) into one of their IRA accounts, instead of into an IRA account at my bank like I requested. I still don’t know entirely how it happened, but when they moved it into their IRA, they never sent me any access information, so I got locked out of it somehow. I couldn’t contact them, either, for similar reasons — you have to have a PIN to even get through their 800 number to talk to someone — so I ended up going through my bank yet again, the retirement plan company sent me some paperwork in the mail and I filled it out and faxed it, and I should be getting a check from them soon. That check is going toward the Operation Apartment fund.

Come January, I should be coming into more money, because I put a lot of extra money into taxes withheld while I worked at my full-time job as a Tee Shirt Terrorist. At the time, I made enough money to do so without even missing it, and figured it would be like a savings account I’d get to use on whatever I wanted down the road. Well, “down the road” is here, and I’m putting that money toward my Mac.

I’m writing a graphic novel with Mike, Robbie, and Sean. This isn’t actually stressful, but it is on my mind (I’m super excited about it). A couple weeks ago, Mike and I were sitting around the house talking about how talented of artists Robbie and Sean are, and I said, “You’re getting really good, too, though.” He kind of just shrugged that off, and somehow the conversation led to me announcing that the four of us should make a graphic novel and get it published. “I mean, the three of you all draw, and I write, and it just seems like a crime to not take advantage of that and at least try to get something out there.” The original idea was for me to write, Mike to do the cover, and Robbie and Sean to do the inside art, but since then, Mike has been talking about cowriting it. I came up with some characters and then the story today, and am writing a short story that Mike and I will convert into a script later.

I need to set up some appointments with a few doctors. I missed my Mirena followup again when the power was out; the office didn’t have power on the date of the appointment, and it never got rescheduled. I also never followed up with my PA-C after seeing my rheumatologist a few months ago. (Oops.) I guess I’m just sick of the whole doctor thing. I have an appointment with my rheumatologist next week, I think, but I’m not sure if it’ll work out because the schedule for next week at work isn’t up yet for some reason, and they’ve also put up a notice saying that no one can request any time off until after the holidays. (This is normal, though, from what I remember from my previous retail days.) I may have to reschedule it for January or later; I kind of want to schedule an appointment at Yale first. I also need to see a different gastroenterologist. My GI issues are not improving, and I don’t feel that my current gastroenterologist is attentive enough.

I’m really sick of playing the doctor game. I don’t want to go all the way to New Haven every time I need to see a rheumatologist, but Yale is world renowned for its medical practitioners. They have an entire rheumatology building there. If they can’t figure out what’s wrong with me, I don’t know who can.

We are moving our things out of storage during the last weekend of this month. Our dressers are definitely coming up here, and most of the stuff is going into the cellar so that we can go through it little by little. I have to move the dining room around so that I can fit the dressers in here, but I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to do it. The roof/ceiling hasn’t leaked since that rain storm before Irene, but I don’t want to put anything important under that general area because it would kind of be like asking for the roof to collapse. Still, the only way I can think of to make that room work involves putting my bed right under where the leak is. I really want to move that room around, though, because Noni said I can use her desk that’s in there as a work station. I am seriously sick of working from the couch, even though it’s kind of comfy.

Still, I’m really excited about getting my dresser back.

I did something I thought I could never do this past Saturday. I really want to write about it, but it’s hard. I tried writing a poem about it, but so far all I have is a bunch of fragments that could be a poem. Still, I’m really proud of myself. I feel a lot better, and I’m not regretting my decision… which was one of my fears.

I need to create a writing schedule, but the thought of doing it kind of overwhelms me. I’ve even created half-assed schedules, and those overwhelmed me enough. It boils down to being afraid of actually doing it — “it” meaning making a living off of writing — or failing; whether I become successful or fail, I’ll still no longer have the goal of becoming a professional writer. It’s been my goal for so long that I am not sure how to be apart from it now that I’m actively pursuing it.

♦

I really do feel a lot better now that this is all off my mind. I even have a mini To Do list now:

  • write short story for graphic novel (goal: 5,000 words)
  • create article schedule
  • submit “Outlaw Love Story”

What do you wish you could get off your mind?

New York Comic Con 2011

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On October 15th, I went to New York Comic Con for the second time. (Last year was our first NYCC.) This time, our friends Sean and Gabi came with us.

Robbie brought portfolios again this year in the hopes of landing a drawing gig. He busted his ass throughout the last year putting together a new portfolio and improving his technique as an artist.

I found out the night before that James O’Barr would be there. I looked for him first.

Me and James O'Barr

Everything I read online said he rarely does signings and public appearances, and that he’s nice in person but sort of curt and withdrawn. He was a sweetheart. He told Mike to take care of me, signed my copy of The Crow, and also signed and gave me a reprint. Mike embarrassed the hell out of me by telling James that he and The Crow are how I got into comics, and saying, “You’re her love.”

It was amazing.

Next we searched for Ben Templesmith. Mike worked on a drawing of Wormwood poisoning a baby squid while its mother looked on in angry for months and brought it framed for Ben as a gift. (Normally, poisoning baby anythings is evil, but trust me, it’s good to poison baby squid in the Wormwood universe.)

We took a picture with Ben, who wanted all of us to flip off the camera.

Mike and I with Ben Templesmith

Ben, as you can clearly see, tricked us, the scoundrel! I love his sense of humor; he’s just as great in person as he is in his writing.

(Ben Templesmith, by the way, was shocked that James O’Barr talked to us, further cementing just how lucky I was.)

We met Greg Capullo again, and one of the first things he said to Mike was, “I know you. Did we meet before?” We told him we met him last year, and he said, “Your beard is longer!”

Mike and Greg Capullo

I was really looking forward to meeting Brandon Seifert, the writer of Witch Doctor (whom I interviewed not too long ago). He’s super down to Earth. And he had cool syringe pens.

Mike and I with Brandon Seifert

At some point, we went outside with Robbie and had a cigarette, then found some hot dogs for lunch, and had another cigarette. I snapped some pictures of us, since we totally forgot to actually take pictures of ourselves last year.

Mike and me

Mike and Rob

I also met Robert Kirkman and had him sign my issue of The Walking Dead with a certain two-page spread of a certain character getting shot in the face, because that particular spread had me starting at it for several minutes in shock when I first read it, and ignited a huge amount of controversy. Sadly, I didn’t get a picture with him, mostly because the fans behind me were rabid after waiting in line for two or so hours and I didn’t want them to shoot my face off.

We all had a great time. I don’t regret anything, even though I didn’t get to meet Eliza Dushku. (She wanted $40 for an autograph and wasn’t doing photos with fans other than the professional ones at an earlier shoot, and I just didn’t have the money.) We passed out Robbie’s portfolio. Mike met the artist from Crossed. Sean and Gabi survived their first NYCC. Junior got a lot of Legos.

Not a week later, Robbie got an email from one of the small press publishers he talked to. He’s drawing pages for a comic as you read this.

I Don’t Want Babies (Right Now)

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She calls for my attention with one short, simple sound. It’s one of my favorite sounds that she makes, a musical “look at me.” I scoop her into my arms, hold her close to my chest, breathe in her scent, then let her go when she starts to squirm. She walks away, for the moment satisfied with my love. It could be hours or days before she asks for me to hold her again. With cats, you never know.

She fills my heart with pure joy. She is the only baby I need right now. As long as she has food in her purple dish, water in her big white bowl, and the occasional snuggle, she leaves me to my own devices. When I’m sad or sick, she sprints to me and watches me with her big, green eyes before curling up close to me, as if pressing happiness and wellness into my brain and body. She is pure magic.

While I love my friends’ human children, I can’t imagine having any of my own right now, or in the near future. Most of the people my age that I know have at least one kid. I watch them love their children unconditionally, but I also watch them give up or postpone dreams. As selfish as this may sound, right now I want to publish a novel more than I want a baby. Sometimes, I feel like a stranger among my child-rearing friends. I’m not in the mom club. I can’t relate to their problems. Sometimes I desperately wish I had more childless friends. The few that I have, I cling to with tenacity; they are busy chasing their dreams, too.

Mike wants a baby within the next three years, before he turns thirty. Sometimes, the four years between us feel like more like ten. I’m not ready to even think about babies. I do want two or three, someday, but not now. Not yet. There are so many other things I want first.

I want to publish a novel. I want to get out of these everything-keeps-going-wrong twenties. I want a diagnosis. I want a steady income. I want to buy a house. If all else fails, I want that steady income and house. I honestly don’t know how anyone in their twenties — especially someone in their early twenties like me — could afford one child, never mind two or three. I can barely afford simple necessities like vitamins for myself. I can’t imagine having to buy diapers and formula every week, and entire miniature wardrobes at least twice a year. I also refuse to raise any child of mine in an apartment. I grew up with my grandparents’ house as a solid fixture in my life. If anything went wrong, Noni’s and Popi’s house was my safe place. I want my children to have their own safe, permanent house, where they will never have to learn what an eviction is or deal with not being able to go outside because the landlord couldn’t be bothered to finish filling the giant hole he left in the yard after removing a bush.

I don’t look down on people who have kids; mostly, I marvel at how they pull it off. And I get that some people feel they can balance their dreams with their babies. My brother-in-law does it, somehow, but it’s times like tonight when his daughter threw mini tantrums as he tried to draw pages for a comic book that I realize raising children and achieving your goals is not like frosting a cake and talking on the phone at the same time the way that movies, MTV, or some bloggers would have you believe. I get that it’s worth it to some people because at the end of the day, they have this beautiful, cuddly little human who throws their arms around their necks and whispers, “I love you, Mommy.” But I know myself. To do anything, I have to be 100% ready to do it, have to have completely made up my mind about it without a shadow of a doubt, or else I will struggle through it all the way to failure. Struggling to success is one thing, but I can’t do it if I’m not sure that I’m doing the right thing.

Right now, babies are not the right thing for me.

But my furry baby is more than enough.

Appendectomy, Mass Power Outage, and NaNoWriMo!

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What a week.

Mike had an appendectomy last Wednesday night, after I took him to the ER because I thought he had some kind of food poisoning or stomach bug. I so didn’t expect him to need surgery. I got like eight hours of sleep in three days because I worried so much and just couldn’t settle my nerves. Thankfully, he was only in the hospital one night and is recovering well. Just as I started to soothe my system into some semblance of normal, a Nor’easter hit us while I was at work Saturday afternoon.

For those of you lucky enough to not encounter one, a Nor’easter is a typical crazy New England snowstorm. We get tons of snow dumped on us, high winds, and very low temperatures. We’re pretty used to them… except we rarely get them this early. The snow was that wet, slushy, slippery kind, too, so I wasn’t looking forward to driving home in it with my currently crippled car. A coworker asked me to bring her home since her ride “couldn’t even get out of his driveway,” she said. I hated to say no, but I also really didn’t want to drive in it at all, never mind put someone else’s life in my hands in those conditions.

The store lost power twice in twenty minutes, so we ended up leaving like fifteen minutes early. The roads were a mess. She lives on a hill, of course, but had me drop her off at the bottom because she didn’t want me to risk getting stuck. I was already soaked from getting carts at work, so by the time I got home, all I wanted to do was cocoon myself in some sweats and blankets and sit by the radiator. Unfortunately, a few hours after I got home, we lost power.

We were out of power for four days (we lost it Saturday night and just got it back a few hours ago). Luckily, we have a gas stove on the third floor, so we were able to cook on it and boil water for different things. We also took advantage of the warm outside temperatures and opened up the blinds so that, during the day, we used the sunlight to warm up the house. Dad found a kerosene heater in the cellar and managed to find some kerosene in Thomaston (a town next to us), so he put that on the first floor so Noni and Biz Noni could stay warm. At night, I made myself into a human burrito in bed, and during the day we all bundled up. I can honestly say the only downside to this whole thing was not being able to take a shower, and not having a lot of laptop juice to write.

Mike’s mom got power earlier today, so he and I headed over this afternoon to take hot showers and charge some stuff. Naturally, a little while after we left, my mom texted me to tell me our power was back. As fortunate as we were throughout the last four days, I am definitely not complaining. There are still a lot of people out of power, though.

Between yesterday and today, I started working on my novel Secondhand Mom again. I decided a couple of weeks ago not to do the traditional NaNoWriMo this year, and decided instead to finish something I’d started during a previous NaNoWriMo. Secondhand Mom is actually almost done; yesterday, I went through the six or so documents I’d written different scenes in and moved them into the correct order in the master document the entire novel is in, and today I started writing another section of the novel. I had quite a mess on my hands yesterday, and since my laptop battery only last two to three hours, by the time I finished all of that, I only had forty minutes to actually write today. (I did a little writing yesterday, but mostly just a couple of “connecting” sections as I moved sections into the master document.) Altogether, I had 66,810 words before yesterday, and now have 65,414. It might seem like I made no progress, but believe me, I did; I actually had written the same scene twice — in two completely different ways — over a period of one year, and needed to scrap another section entirely because in the year or so since I wrote it, I completely changed my mind about how that character was going to come back. After today, I have only two documents I’m working on for this novel: the master one, and the section I’m writing now.

So it’s been a hell of a week. My family and extended family are all okay, and even though Mike is still sore and now has a sinus infection on top of everything, he’s okay, too. That’s all that matters to me.

How has your week been? How did you fare during the Snowpocalypse and the power outage? Are you doing NaNoWriMo? What’s your word count? (I guess mine would technically be 886, hahaha.)

Hesitation

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I printed a copy of the readmission form for my community college, dug out my old student ID number, clicked open my pen… and hesitated. Is this really what I want to do? Why is it that I can’t make a commitment lately, even when it’s only for now and not forever? I guess it’s the fear that I’ll spend time and money getting a degree to learn a new skill, only to find I don’t like it when all is said and done.

The reality of the situation is, you don’t know you’ll like or dislike anything until you try it. I didn’t know I’d like the job I’m working now. I just knew I needed a job and that retail would work best for me since I didn’t want to be a web designer anymore and wanted to go back to school. I went into it hoping that I wouldn’t hate it, but I had no idea what it would be like until I actually started working. So far, I like it. I’ve been there for over a month now.

In the same sense, I won’t know that I like ECE until I start taking classes. I might not even know until I’ve done some student teaching. Hell, it might take actually working in the field for a while before I know for sure. I just know that I like children in the 0-4 age group. They’re fun, and happy, and are little sponges that soak up everything you teach them. Their little faces light up when they finally recognize colors, or when they learn how to use the Play-Doh tool properly. They’re tough, hardwired for survival* and learning, and are open to the new, which in turn makes them great teachers to us. They know how to laugh and dance and play without worrying that someone is watching or judging them. They’re proud of each and every accomplishment, no matter how small.

These tiny humans are amazing.

And I guess, when it comes down to it, if I weren’t a little nervous or scared, it would mean that it doesn’t matter to me. It does. It matters so much. Going back to school feels like a second chance to me, a fresh start. When I graduated high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I just knew I had a job waiting if I got a degree in web design, so I did. I don’t want a job to be my sole reason for education this time around. Obviously, one of my reasons for going back to school is employment (because that’s pretty much the sole reason anyone goes to college), but I also can’t stop thinking about teaching. I can’t stop thinking about how much fun it would be to spend my days with children aged from a few months to a few years.

It won’t be easy. I know that. I have to take at least eighteen courses, so fifty-four credits. It will take me about two years to finish the degree. The program director told me that most preschool programs will hire you as a teacher’s aid as long as you’ve already taken some courses and are working on your degree, so I can probably get a part-time job as an aid after one semester and continue working at the store part-time. It’s not going to be easy. I think that scares me a little, too. I’m kind of just scared of life lately, I’ve noticed.

But, it will also be fun. It’ll be a new experience. It’ll be a new career that will enable me to have my own health insurance** and add Mike on, when we do get married, because his job only offers full-time employees health insurance and they refuse to make him full-time. It’ll be a new career that will enable me to work with an age group I love.

I’m nervous. And a little scared. That’s why I’m hesitating, but I won’t know until I try it.

*Yes, that’s a Grey’s quote. Kind of. I can’t find the actual quote, but I know Arizona told Alex that she was in Pediatrics because children are hardwired for survival. Please correct me if I’m wrong or comment with the full quote if you know it. It’s driving me crazy that I can’t find it, and Google is — gasp — no help.

**I can stay on my mom’s health insurance plan until I’m twenty-five, so I have another two years before I have to worry about it, but in all reality, two years isn’t a long time and I want to have my own plan before then so that I’m not taken by surprise. The store I work at now has health insurance, but I don’t make enough to be able to comfortably afford it.