Crossroads or Crosshairs?

Most of you are aware that I am/have been working as a freelance writer for the past few months and while things having been going well, and I have made some contacts and gotten more exposure, the finances are not quiet balancing up yet.  Which I've tried not to worry about.  Till about 2 weeks ago.

My business partner whose entire mantra was "I hate working for the man, I'm gonna work for myself" called me soooooo excited and announced that she had gotten a full time job----working for someone else.  Ok????  How am I supposed to feel about this?  On one hand, "Yea for you!  Go chase that paycheck playing by someone's rules.  I hope you bring in the big bucks."  On the other hand, "Way to go, thanks for honoring the commitment we made to this business partnership!"


So after I freaked out and got depressed for several days, I rallied, came up with a new game plan, and pressed on.  One of the things I did was apply for a small business loan to have some working capital, but b/c my debt (a lot) to income (not enough) ratio is too high I got turned down.  Not much of a huge shock there.

But now I found out that benefits for Jeremiah just got cut by $350 to $16.  Go figure.  Nothing has changed, except the month.  (I hate being a govt sponge right now, but I'm doing all I can to remedy it.)  The woman on the phone who I spoke with/cried to said she didn't understand the rules, but that's the way it was. 

If things don't change by the end of August, I'll probably have to move, but I'm not sure where to go.  My parents don't have the room, so I'll probably have to pull Jeremiah from the private school a church member has offered to pay for and move down to Tampa with my grandmother. 

I'm really upset right now, and could use all the prayers that you can spare.  I am certain that my calling is to be a writer, but I'm really needing God and some serious money to come through for me.

This certainly makes interesting fodder for the rest of my life story.  Maybe I'll be the next JK Rowling minus the retarded wizardry.  Sorry JK, never could get into that shit.

But at least I have this to make me laugh!

Laissez les bullsh*t rouler or Why I Am Writing Porn for Spiders*

Inspiration strikes at random for me, so at 11 pm my ability to roll out bullshit finally kicked in.  Right now Amanda and I have landed a well paying gig writing SEO articles.  We are emailed a list of topics and the necessary word count and in return we get $4/500, which is considered really high by industry standard.  (Going rate is usually 1.50.  Yea, for liberal arts degrees.  We can bullshit with the best!)

I've been struggling for the past 5 days with believing in myself.  On some levels its understandable and I have given myself a little leeway, but enough is enough!  It's been over 8 years since I wrote something even remotely connected with learning and so I've been agonizing over every word and how my audience might perceive what I've written.  But here's the thing.  I'm not writing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract as a fan to the flames of the French Revolt.  I'm writing about spiders.

Yes spiders, which I've mentioned before I HATE!  The most challenging thing I've had to write about was a description of how the male Black Widow spider can only reproduce after he first spins a web of his semen, cover his spider parts with said stuff, and go off to bone the female Black Widow and untimely get eaten.  I laughed for so long and tried to come up with a delicate way of explain this natural, nature intending continuance of the life cycle, but somehow I felt like I was writing arachnid porn. 

So before you leave this site a little more knowledgeable about the Black Widow spider and feeling a bit dirty, go check out stereomood.com.  Its a free on-line musical playlist of songs you've never heard before which are sorted by types of moods you might be in.  So far I'm finding that I like the bohemian and the studying mood lists.  

*Aly, thanks for trying to teach me French.  I'll never understand how you can speak a language that sounds like a drunk gargling a handful of marbles, but it still provides me with an endless source of amusement. Bet you never thought I'd link you French lessons with spiders did you? 

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

One of the biggest challenges I face each day is overcoming the initial "oh-my-gosh-I-don't-know-why-I-write-because-I-suck" mind fuck.*  So yesterday I threw on my work clothes aka worn out yoga pants and a shirt that I had decorated for a day long pro-life side-walk campaign several months back.  Doing some deep yoga-type breathing I was a few paragraphs into an article due that afternoon when I Kiddo yelled from the kitchen that someone was knocking at the door.  Right now he thinks washing dishes is fun.  He doesn't get the dishes clean by any stretch of the imagination, but if that keeps him busy for 1 hour then I'm all for it.

Nearing the door, I fought my tendency to pull my 'Chuck Norris' knife off the wall and have it in my hand.  (I found it at my great-grandfather's house when he passed away last year and I didn't want it going to Salvation Army.  It's probably an old turkey carving knife, but it's got a 12 inch blade and a really kick-ass curve to it.  I pretend Chuck Norris would stab the bad guys with it).  Being a single woman/mother I am uneasy when someone comes to my door and I wasn't expecting anyone and I don't have a peep-hole or security chain.  But I cracked open the door to find myself staring at a cop easily over 6'5" weighing in the neighborhood of 275.

Officer D-bag snarls, "Do you own this place?"
"No, I rent this part."
"Step outside.  Now if you're honest, I probably won't arrest you."


Over the next hour he proceeds to accuse me of stealing cable from the Garden Club next door, that if I looked like a junkie when I opened the door he would have arrested me, why didn't I think to get a business card from the installer, the installer would lose his job, he would tell the phone company that he was arresting me and I could sue them (the phone company), and he would probably cut my cable.

All the while the officer is walking around my yard on hold with the phone company and walking in and out of my (very messy) bed room where I have the connection.  Finally, he gets off the phone and said he spoke with Supervisor T at the phone company and that 'my story checks out.'

"My job here is done.  You need to call the repair line and tell them to bury the cable."  Then he was gone.

I was so spooked that my concentration was lost and I was exhausted.  I didn't have time to write because I had to meet up with my mother and run errands.  When I call the phone company later in the afternoon to confirm that the line issue would be straightened out, the woman on the other line, along with her supervisor told me that I was not stealing cable.

The thin orange cable is a legal, temporary wire; that the hub the wire is connected to at the Garden Club is considered 'eminent domain' for the phone company; that the installer wouldn't be losing his job; that any police should know that the thin orange wire can't be purchased at any store and is standard operating procedure that when a service is installed it takes about 2 weeks to get the real cable run and buried in the ground.

ALL OF THIS I TRIED EXPLAINING TO THE COP.

And did he listen or believe me?  Hell no!  I felt so violated after hearing this from the phone company operator.  This cop had been on the force for over 4 years and told me 'he sees this stuff all the time' so he obviously isn't new to this.  He treated me like I was a piece of maggot ridden shit.  I suppose I could excuse his gruff, brusque manner if he were a hardened beat cop from the mean streets of Chicago or Miami, but come on!  I think the biggest crimes in this town is domestic abuse and cow tipping.  I live next to a fancy shamncy Garden Club and almost adjacent to the Women's Club.  This is by far the scary hood.

I got so upset.  I was mad at myself for being so naive to allow myself to be bullied.  I was mad that I allowed a stranger into my house.  What if he had been a bad person with evil intentions?  I've read extensively on methods and minds of serial killers, yet I did something that would have made me and my son a perfect victim.  I know well enough that if I am pulled over for driving in the evening I can refuse to get out of my car until backup arrives. 

I cried to my friend K last night.  Today my sister insisted that I make a complaint to the supervisor of the cop.  So tomorrow after the Kiddo goes to grandma's for the weekend, IT IS ON!

Gonna get my attitude on, put on my heels (cuz I always feel powerful in heeled shoes), and make myself heard.  That was such severe bullshit and I didn't deserve to go through that.

*(Editorial note: I attempted to curb my swearing in most of earlier writings, well except for the post regarding fucking Terry Jones, but I realize that sometimes I censure myself far too much and then I hate myself for not being 'the real me.'  And yes, I know daily 'struggles  with because-I-suck-thoughts' are what has kept me seeing a good therapist for the past two years.  Believe me, if you'd have seen me last year, I would be apologizing for breathing too loudly.  So now, thanks to a post by Aunt Becky, I realize that if someone is offended by my writings, they can just not follow me.  It's not like they can fire me, like the last boss I had did.  That's why I'm working for myself Bitch!).

Skechers Shape-ups for Girls, Now In Bruised Ego Blue!

Maybe I'm a little behind on product commercials.  Being without network or cable TV for over a year, there are things that have been out on the market for months that I am just finding out about.  Never realized there was a Popsicle maker that didn't utilize the freezer compartment and a sluggish one hour wait, but the Zoku Quick Pop Maker exists for the ADD driven adolescent who won't be made to wait.

Maybe you've already seen this product out there, maybe your darling prepubescent daughter, niece, babysitter, or your best-friends-10yr old-step-sister-from-Daddy's-mid-life-crisis is caterwauling about how the lonely and miserable their existence is because they don't yet own Shape-Ups XF High Kix by Skechers.  If you've missed the commercial here it is off of Youtube.

My favorite part?  I'm not sure if it's the depiction of boys struggling after the girls like they are a pack of beaten dogs or if it's the line "looking good and having fun."  I love, love, love the dual dejecting message that the commercial sends out.  First, boys are out of shape idiots, dressed up as junk food.  Obviously, the aren't cool nor smart enough to be fit.  Secondly, the girls wear these shoes because "they're everything a girls wants!"

Not to mention that a pair of these shoes cost 50 bucks and in this shitty economy $50 won't get you a full tank of gas.  Are you as a parent willing going to shell out for shoes that the kid will outgrow by the time they sneeze? 

What really get's me pissed off the most, and I've written about it in a prior post, is the there seems to be a subtle message aimed at girls that even at an age where they should be running around a playground during recess time, they need to be concerned about their looks. 

Just look at the adjectives used as write up for these style shoes: FIRMING, TONING, LIFTING. Okay, if you are 20-30-40 something and insecure about your ass looking too droopy, go ahead a shell out the money for these shoes.  But to we really need to be putting the idea into our girls heads that they need to be concerned about the state of their ass and thighs at the tender age of 8?

And Laughter Filled the Quiet Room

Says the (loud) Kiddo as the yoga instructor tells us to breathe in deeply and exhale loudly, "I win!  I was the loudest blower!"