Service For Goodness Sake

Not that many people are, but I’m not a good person. I can go weeks without seeing any of my friends and be pretty content. I’m a poor weather friend so when someone is in need, I’m right there. A few weeks ago I saw Alli in the Valley. It was really random to run into each other half way across town. But as we caught up I could tell she was close to tears because of her recent break up. I promised I would take her out the dinner the following week. I told her joke to make her smile and I hugged her tightly before she left to let her know that she was special to me. And she is. But I can’t get myself to call her up casually to chat or join anyone at Café 50’s after FHE.

Velwyn has been living in Europe for the past few months. I still stalk her instagram and comment on her new business profile to give it a boost. But I didn’t feel comfortable when she was here to go out for tea alone just for kicks. I did offer to let her stay on my couch however for an interview she’s got next week. She’s the kind of wonderful girl who has friends everywhere but goes through life not thinking about it too much. I wish I was so brave.

But I’m not. I’ll do what service I can do but when it comes down to it- I can’t be myself. Except for Hawaii 2 years ago, I don’t think I’ve ever taken a vacation. Even during summer breaks any time there was anyone else in the room, there wasn’t a moment where I didn’t feel like I shouldn’t be doing something.

You know, when we were kids our mom came home once from shopping and started to yell at us because all the time she had been gone we didn’t think to do the dishes for her. From that point on, every time she left the house my brothers and I would clean it. I mean, clean it the best a 15, 11, and 9 year old knew how. The first time we tried to make it a surprise. The second time, we casually mentioned it to her. I remember thinking she looked a little uncomfortable with how dedicated we had become. The many times after that, we didn’t say anything at all and she didn’t either. We just did it. When she was in the house it was a little like the CEO had come for a visit and we always needed to look like we were busy. She got disappointed once when we went to the library and I picked “Murder, She Wrote” because it was too easy.

I don’t mean to tell that story to draw sympathy or excuse myself from being a self-serving person. Being afraid is really no excuse at all for selfishness- in fact it almost makes it worse. Then any kindness I do give can be interpreted as a desire to feel like I’m being a good person instead of really wanting to buoy the other person up (ironically, another characteristic of my mother). The fact that I am selfish in a different way than other people doesn’t change the fact at all.

Taking this too far, one could say that appearing happy too is then a façade instead of a harmless social obligation.

I might have taken a double dose of my medication today but I don’t remember. I feel my head warbling on my neck like all the fat from my body got stored in my skull and the top heavy crowding is keep blood from flowing to the cells that tell me I’m not a monster in a girl’s body.

Trash

You know what I am?
A weird girl.
too skinny
messy
unkempt
lazy
poor speller
failed entrepreneur
failed friend
failed financially
slow reader
with a job that works me too many hours
not in the position I want to be in
for very little money
on medication
too emotional even for an RP game
in love with a country I can't reach
on a losing political party
bad cook
weak dancer
poor dresser
afraid of people
incapable of getting into a healthy relationship
chatty introvert
dramatic
stupid
crazy.
I don't even like the Beatles.

So go ahead and get married. Have your career and your skills and great talents. Get paid ridiculous amounts of money for little to no work. Take trips and go on a cruise. Send me a hello from Oregon and Virginia and England and Hawaii and New York. Enjoy your craft. Go find better players that don't cry. I hope you're comfortable with someone else to take care of you and your needs and your home. Let your parents take care of your rent while you just go to school in fashion. Is Hawaii just TOO warm? Is your new ipad a little TOO easy to use? Just fire me or set me on fire I don't care. This life was an accident and it's just been thrashed so badly all I can see anymore is trash.

GIS v.s. Asia

*warning- this get's pretty long...*

I shouldn’t complain. But my job is frustrating me. Not that I blame any one particular person and maybe I’m just getting rubbed the wrong way by working for ‘the man’.

They’ve asked me to take on more responsibility for the digital side of the company which I would gladly do and I’ve been preparing to do, but I can’t with all these stupid assignments being thrown on top of the pile.

Yesterday, by noon my legs were killing me because I had to get up from my desk so many times to help people with their computer issues. I had to run to the back server room and crouch under desks and fiddling with boxes and wiring. I hate hardware.

You know, I don’t really feel like typing all this out even. This kind of problem is so much easier to express via voice. I feel like I have to outline all the problems in a list in order to justify my frustration and that would take so long. And I’m not really in the mood to come up with an elegant reader’s digest version. So I’m just going to pretend that everyone works with me already and knows what I’m talking about.

Last night around 5:30 Bill called to ask me to re-run an MMA report for the DMA but include more Index numbers based on nursing homes and all the zips in each NTA. Not really a big deal. But in order to help him along, I also sent him a copy of the Zip Dwelling  Report which breaks down each NTA into zipcodes and tells you the total number and the % of the entire mailed area. You’d think that was going above and beyond. Apparently not.

Katherine asked me to submit a request to GIS to give them not only that information for 4 ADDITIONAL areas but also recreate LA because that Zip dwelling report was generated by a different research company and she wants all 5 areas to MATCH when we show it to the client. So now I’ve got to submit this ridiculously overblown request to GIS and here’s the rub- I don’t actually hear about this report after I submit the request. I’m just doing the stupid donkey-ass labor to get it in. Why am I doing this? This really shouldn’t be my job when THEY are the ones who want it and they have all the same abilities I do to complete it! It would take them less time and it’s their project! But they don’t want to do the leg work. It’s hard to ‘rise to [my] potential’ with stupid backhanded requests like this.

I have ONE assignment to do yesterday and all I could manage was bouncing up and down fixing this and that. Anthony was dumb enough, he *saw* me running around like a crazy person and decided that was the moment to throw on another complaint. His phone wasn’t ringing. This wasn’t a new problem, it had been happening since he got the phone, he just thought RIGHT NOW would be the perfect time to complain about it. So I GET UP from my desk AGAIN so I can’t finish this one little project I’ve had on my desk since that morning. Guess what? It took me 3 seconds to figure out the volume on his ringer was down. It’s not even a complicated process, there’s a freakn’ BUTTON of the FRONT of the phone where if you push it one way or another, the volume goes up and down. I told him I was going to strangle him with his own Ethernet cord.

This same dude in the same day also said his excel was acting up because when he closed the window, the box that asked him if he wanted to save didn’t pop up…. So he was losing all his work. Yes, you read that correctly, he didn’t know how to FILE > SAVE. All his life on every program he has been CLOSING the program and depending on the ‘do you want to save this’ option before closing. I wanted to kill him. I hate hardware problems and I’m a bad person because I don’t like stupid questions where if the questioner had put in the SMALLEST amount of effort, could have figured it out for themselves. I feel like a baby sitter and I’m not even babysitting kids I like. At the same time, when big huge hardware problems and I can’t solve them I feel helpless and lost and everyone needs me to know everything and fix it ALL RIGHT NOW.  It’s so much pressure for something I don’t even like doing. I really don’t think this was in my job description.

But what am I supposed to be doing with my life instead. That itch to go overseas is getting unbearable. All my friends seem to travel there and back with such ease it’s almost painful to watch. My penpal from China came to see me a few weeks ago and it was so nice. He brought me gifts and trinkets and told me all about transportation and the people. He said if I ever visited him he’d take great care of me and made sure I ate the best foods.

Dave’s (you remember, that lawyer I was bonkers about last summer who told me I wasn’t international enough to date him?) mother is visiting him here in the states. And Teida’s mother (Northern China) is coming next month and I want to meet her so badly just to see her and see what she brought with her culturally and physically. Eric Chen and his bride just got back from traveling Taiwan with the parent’s in law and took the most beautiful pictures. Even Hua was over there for a while. But I’ve been swimming in my Japanese lessons. In the car I listen to ‘drive time Japanese’ and I just learned to count to 100. I had a dream last night that someone told me how old they were and I translated it right away. When I get home I gobble the rosetta stone Japanese lessons.  Last night I spent 4 hours researching the course work and study abroad options for BYU MBA. I don’t really want an MBA… I mean, I do- and I’d love to take the classes and go back to a study schedule and steep myself back into the field I love so well, meet with like minds and work with bright youth and feel like I’m going somewhere again.

But I wonder if this craving will dissipate if I could just _go_. If I could just get over it and see it, get it out of my system and then I can settle down. Maybe my yellow fever would die down and I could find peace with myself that if I never worked in marketing again and I never had a set of beautiful dark-haired baby boys that I wouldn’t feel like I had failed. But I’m restless in this job. People say, “Just go!” but I can’t. It’s so expensive and I’d need some kind of guide or help or at least a translator to help me get around. I could go alone technically but it would be a lot more expensive and dangerous. And how will I ever save the money to do it anyway? I want at least ONE of these ventures I’m working on to come through and show success but all that seems far away.

Even if I were to start a master’s program, it wouldn’t be until Fall 2014. 2 years away until I gave away another 2 years of my life. I wouldn’t get to see that beautiful place until Jan 2015. By then, I hope my Japanese is shabby enough to use it but feel completely embarrassed about it.

It’s so far away from submitting this request to GIS.

The Downside to Logic is you Lose.

I've figured out why women are so unreasonable when they fight. Because if they use their brains like I do and wait for an argument that I'm actually right about to fight, I always lose. Not because I'm wrong. But because the other person is never wrong. Tim for example is never wrong. Hua is never wrong. I'd lick the floor of a New York public restroom before I ever expected any concede from either of those two. Better to be a stupid hormonal girl and just pick random fights that have no reasoning or thought to them at all. That way I'll actually win once in a while.

"You hit me and it hurt!"
"Then you should learn to duck better!"

...Wth.


Dear boys,

I hate you right now. Stay away from me or I'll treat you like a pez dispenser.

Casey.

The Way You Make Me Feel

So yes, I went on another date tonight. Someone I met very briefly at AX this summer who got my facebook address. We've never corresponded since but randomly this week he asked if I was free for dinner. So I said Yes. It's not that hard to get dates when you actually say yes. What most girls complain about isn't not getting asked out, it's not getting asked out by guys they LIKE. Which is dumb if you think about it. You want to be single and date a lot of guys you like but not establish any relationship with them? Wouldn't that just say bad things about you?

Anyway, not the point. What I think I learned tonight may seem obvious to others but it just occurred to me. This guy is CLEARLY not the one for me. He's a current goth club hopper, former cross dresser, with long tattoos and most of his facebook photos are of him with heavy white makeup screaming into a microphone. I'm not saying any of that is bad at all but why the heck would he get all flustered and twitter-pated about ME for goodness sake? Mormon white straight-laced girl with a style that came right out of the 1930s and 40s. I'm not wild or brave or anything like that. I don't or clubbing or get wicked drunk or curse. I don't even like the taste of fish. So why does he imagine this would work?

I don't have the details of the theory down but I think people don't fall in love with all the check lists of what would make a good relationship. Instead, guys like girls who are encouraging and sweet: Someone you feel comfortable with who brings out the best in him.

I'll never be a surfer girl or a raver or a super sports fan. In the end, some of those lifestyle choices make a difference in a successful long term relationship. But when people decide to put their heart into someone, it's much much much less based upon what you think you look like or what you do as it is the way you treat people. The way you make people feel.

Same old thing/Headrest

All day I spent wishing to go home. Now that everyone is gone I don't want to go anymore.
Today feels just like yesterday and the weekend means nothing to me.

I'm supposed to speak in church on Sunday but I feel really not worthy to do it. Prepare a talk... I haven't done that in so long. I ate an apple today but skipped my meds but still I feel the same as yesterday. Maybe a little less patient.

So someone asked to take me out tomorrow as a new year’s resolution to go on more dates. I feel like it's a waste of my time but if I don't have any plans on Saturdays I end up staying in bed until 3pm. So it's a good motivator. I should go to the hospital and get the labs taken like my doctor told me to but I can't figure out where to go so I'm too scared to try by myself. Who knows what I'll do with the free time this weekend. I already finished the DFs for next week. Probably nothing.

Just blah. I know a social life will come back to me soon and I'll probably perk up just fine. I know I'll probably be just fine. I'm smart enough to know that whatever feelings you have won't last forever. But can I say one thing I would love? I don't want to drive home by myself again tonight. It's such a long and boring drive. The same music on the FM, the same complaints about the fiscal cliff on the AM. Nothing changes.

It's my fantasy that I'll be here at work and someone offers to come pick me up. I'll wait all night for that just so I don't have to drive home without any prospect of something new. Anything new. Where is my adventure?

Like I said, a social life will come to me soon. So I really shouldn't go the path of reaching out to those friends of mine who are solo relations. By that I mean people I know who don't know any of my OTHER friends. It's just the two of us existing in our own world with our own rules. Not in all, but in most cases those are the ones that get me into the most trouble. Because then when we're together it's like the rules of the world don't apply.

Admittedly, not all my 'solo' relationships are that way. John for example, although I rarely see our mutal relations, when I'm with him I don't get into trouble. He always takes care of me. I don't really know why. But he's kind and always let's me rest my head on his shoulder when I'm tired or worried or stressed. Most of the time that's all I need. Someone to support my head.

I just don't have a headrest tonight.

Under happy

i am really so tired. Not sleepy, just under happy. Or something. Because I'm not in a mode where thoughts come with fluidity, I hope you'll forgive the stagnant sentences I don't have the energy to string into cohesive story.
I can't get the motivation to clean again. My Dad said I should keep my journal because I'm going to forget. He's right. I don't even remember most of what happened to me in college- and tjat was only 5 years ago.

I spent too much at christmas. Literally. I'm a tad over drawn. Which is the worst feeling in the world. The truth is, it was three things, I jumped the gun on having my car paid off (January is the last one) and I replaced the money I'll be saving on financing a new computer because my old one was on it's last legs. Second, I spent WAY too much of christmas gifts. That's not normal for me but this year I desperately wanted to give everyone a good gift. And I felt better about my finances than I have in so so so many years. Well I blew that. But lastly, when I checked my account last I didn't realize my roommate hadn't deposited my rent/utilities check until the 24th... so that sucks. Financial difficultly always takes the wind out of my lungs. It's embarrassing and disheartening and brings me back feelings I had as a child when I said I didn't want any kids at all. I can't even believe I'm writing this in a public place. I'm going to regret it I know.

Christmas this year was... tough. For everyone. The main things that made it so were unavoidable really. My parents have sold the house and for inspections they've had to keep it clean. That means none of the major decorations or traditional movies are games were taken out. My mommy was depressed about that. My little sister had surgery on a tongue defect she had since birth which has caused her to have a slight lisp all her life. The numbness of her mouth and the stitches made her tired and more than a little somber too. My younger brother didn't make it home at all. My sister in law is such a poor hostess that any traditional christmas we might have had at her home was a "material gathering opportunity". It rained and rained everyday I was there and I started my lovely time of the month. And then I had to fly home in the middle of christmas day. Which broke my heart. I had a very awkward dinner with the Bishop and his family and then went to see Le Miserable in theaters which was very good on a standard scale but really only a 7/10 to me. But I decided to keep my mouth shut about my feelings that way.

I came home and I still don't want to unpack. My parents have been asking me to get off their family phone plan for a number of years now and so I have, but it caused a lot more problems than I hoped. I got an iphone because over thanksgiving I left my ipod touch on the plane and I deeply wanted to have that familiarity back. But with the transfer to my new phone, only half of my contacts followed and none of my pictures or video or any of the precious texts I've been saving. It doesn't sync with my car's speakers so I no longer have handsfree. It took me half a day to locate and reestablish my appleID so I could piece back together some of the smidgens of things I had on my ipod. But most of it I'm going to have to start over.

It was the first christmas that it hit me and I became physically afraid of not being able to provide my parents with a grandchild by christmas 2014. My older brother has somewhat screwed the pooch as far as that opportunity goes. My parents are working so hard to provide the perfect Grandparent home... and what is a holiday if you don't have children to share it with? My two youngest cousins (daughters of my divorced Aunt Dawn) are going to be living with them in Utah but they'll quickly be too old for these kind of celebrations.

Just before I came to LA one of the members of my Mommy's family did something so heinous to be sentenced to prison for some many many years. This caused a huge rift and upheaval of everyone's lives and bitter and angry fights split the whole huge family. Where we once used to gather for every holiday with all the step-cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and babies... is left a void. Every holiday season especially it pains my poor mother and I can see it in her eyes. I want to be able to provide that big family for her again. Give someone to sew for again. To build that large lovely family she longs for again. So I started to fear that the task falling to me, I will not be able to do. I'll fail.

And here I am at home. Feeling misunderstood and lost. Luckily, I went shopping for food before I found about about my account but the stab at my stomach that remembering that brings doesn't make me hungry.

Something else my Dad said to me while I was at home, the more I want something, the more I consider it impossible. He's right. But then, it was never likely I'd get to see Japan anyway no matter how I felt about it. No matter how badly I WANT it, there is not fairy godmother. ANd I'll always be stuck with me. My friend Bernard is going to travel soon. To Spain then Russia and Tokyo. But I'll be here in L.A.  I'm happy for him but I guess I'm just different. I'm just not made for that.