If there is one thing about blogging I enjoy, it is having the ability to impart knowledge, expertise, and experiences to those who may wish to read about it.
It is especially satisfying when a person's writing is acknowledged as being pertinent, important, and is published.
So, imagine my surprise and joy when a submission of mine to Truthout.org was published.
Ive always known I would get this call... for years.
god god god fucking dammit.
my ex-husband ... crazy mutherfucker ... one of the dearest soul friends I could ever have. I rarely see him but he's always there, floating around in my conscious watery mind.
fuck
no info just yet... waiting for that. Sometime between last night and this morning. Word will come through the vine, when they know. Body at the ME's now.
It happened once, twice; I trust the third time could not charm me more. I have witnessed the power of a gesture, one made without words. I have seen the light that glows when people connect in quiet ways. Now experienced on more than one occasion, I have come to appreciate the peaceful power of consistent communication. I had not fully acknowledged what could be accomplished until I arrived on the scene, alone. Then I saw it. I felt it. I could hardly believe that a single steadfast individual, could convey a message without words, and still receive such a resounding response. Yet, while there, it occurred. I was struck by what had not been apparent for near a decade. The stance of a quiet soul, stated calmly, clearly, and with care, can move more persons than I ever imagined.
I attended a job fair last weekend, and I can scarcely recall a more depressing and desperate scene. It was extraordinary really, a thousand unemployed educators, young and old, queued up, sixty at a time, for a chance to speak with someone, a chance to place a piece of paper in someone's hand, and to look a prospective employer in the eye. The faces I saw looked desperate and more than a little scared.
I'm growing more tired and discouraged and depressed by the job hunt with each passing day. Each day that is exactly like the last: wake up, read the news, drink my coffee, scan the classifieds, go to the gym, eat a little something, stay up late watching Star Trek and the X-Files, go to bed and give my woman a kiss on the cheek. Rinse and repeat.
The sad thing (or, more properly, the tragi-comic thing) is, I'm unemployed by design. I left a pair of jobs that I had held for two years to move to Atlanta, to be close to my lover, my woman, who is an assistant professor at a local university. She's someone I've known for almost a decade, and we've seen each other off and on for much of that time, though we have rarely lived in the same city, or even the same part of the country. It was time for one of us to make a sacrifice, and I offerred myself up. I knew at the time that leaving two steady jobs during the worst job market since the 1940s was folly.
But the heart has its own reasons.
It is emasculating, however, to rely upon her income, I feel like so much less of a man, it's a withering, wilting little worm of a thought. So I stay at it, day after day, decrypting scams, feeling a lift when I apply for something that is appealing, and an absence when it doesn't pan out.
I hold the lazy in high personal regard. But I'm not like that myself, not really. The Protestant Ethic is in my marrow, despite my protestations. My parents were upper-middle class and educated, but every one of my ancestors prior to that worked with their hands, in the fields, behind the wheel of a truck, for generation upon generation, as far back as I can know. My Dad was born in a tar-paper shack, the son of a sharecropper. My mom rode a horse to the corner store. Her parents hunkered down every winter, when construction work dried up, with food carefully stowed away from the garden the previous summer.
And I'm not afraid of hard work. I've picked strawberries, and worked in a sawmill. I've installed cabinets and built a pole barn. I've tried (unsuccessfully) to raise chickens and break horses. My first real job was working a hydraulic press in a small factory, at 15. For the past couple of years, in addition to my teaching duties, I worked for an environmental company, and we did all sorts or very dirty and dangerous jobs.
Now I'm trying to get a job, though I remain wary of scams that seem all too common among the listings. Any company that would have you pay your own expenses, or provide your own capital equipment, likely isn't much of a company at all. I read a job listing yesterday that required the applicant to have a credit card with at least $1000 limit in order to cover travel expenses. You get to pay for the privilege of having a job. Imagine that.
So that's all I have to say, I don't really expect or want any sympathy, by reading this you've counseled me already. What I want is a job, something to do when I wake up in the morning. At this point, almost anything would do.
(2/10/2010, cross-posted at Daily Kos, first diary at Docudharma!)
Being that we are growing closer and closer to Valentine's Day, the supposedly most romantic (or depressing) of all holidays, I'd like to branch out a bit and take on a different topic than the norm today. NPR commentator Lori Gottlieb has just released a book entitled Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. In it, Gottlieb insists that a generation of contradictory messages and empowering commandments largely advanced by Feminism have prevented women from choosing a more-than-adequate husband when the opportunity presents itself. Instead, as Gottlieb suggests, such pronouncements have encouraged women to hold out for the perfect mate. Liesl Schillinger's review of the book in The Daily Beast summarizes and echoes my own response to a very incendiary text.
The way she sees it, as she explains in a chapter called, "How Feminism F****d Up My Love Life," a generation of women (or should I say 'girls'?) who ought to have been taught-like their great-grandmothers and like women in Taliban-era Afghanistan-to be demure in deportment and modest in aspiration, were tricked by the women's movement into "ego-tripping themselves out of romantic connection." That's right girls: If you're unwillingly unwed, blame it on mom and Title IX for duping you into educating, respecting and supporting yourselves. She intends this book, she writes, as a blood-chilling cautionary tale, "like those graphic anti-drunk driving public service announcements that show people crashing into poles and getting killed."
Even I, as a man, take issue with many of Gottlieb's conclusions and rather glib pronouncements because they seem to reflect personal experience more than abject truth. A variety of factors besides luck, personality, and presentation determine our success at the often-infuriating dating game. Gottlieb's analysis never takes into account rudimentary and simplistic variables that cast doubt as to the veracity of her entire work as a whole. Of all of the areas she neglects to take into account, that which comes to mind first is location.
In Washington, DC, my adopted home, one gratefully finds a vast amount of young adults like me in their twenties and thirties. A disproportionate share of them are female, which means that the competition for available men can be fairly fierce, if not deeply frustrating at times. A 2006 Washington Postarticle confirms this.
The U.S. government has confirmed what we single women in Washington have known for some time -- there are no single men in the District. Or, more precisely, not enough single men in the District.
According to the Census Bureau's recently released 2005 American Community Survey, the District has the lowest -- read, worst -- ratio of single men to single women in the nation. For every 100 single women in Washington, there are only 93.4 men. That's just over nine-tenths of a man for every woman. Now, if you've been single for as long as I have in this town, nine-tenths of a man is starting to sound pretty good.
Further compounding this struggle is that the stereotypical Washingtonian male is heavily Type A, married to his job, bereft of an actual personality outside of his occupation, and inclined to frequently take his work home with him, both literally and figuratively. Speaking purely from my own experiences, my girlfriend jokes that she had to import me from elsewhere, since many prior experiences finding a suitable relationship partner had been dismal. I wasn't aware of how common the problem was until, while at dinner one night, each of her female friends seated around the table mentioned they'd had the same exact problem. If we're to take Gottlieb at face value, then these women ought to put the blame at the feet of Feminism or at the dissolution of the traditional ways of courting.
According to a recent Pew Research study, the District of Columbia has the lowest marriage rate in the country. Only 23 percent of women and 28 percent of men and in D.C. are married, compared to 48 and 52 percent nationwide. The rates in D.C. are so low that they lie entirely off the Pew map's color key. The closest states to D.C.'s numbers are Rhode Island, where 43 percent of women are married, and Alaska, where 47 percent of men are married.
Why aren't D.C. residents getting hitched?
The Pew poll offers up one possibly related figure: residents of D.C. get married significantly later in life than do the residents of the 50 states. In D.C., the median age at first marriage is 30 for women and 32 for men. In contrast, the median age for a first marriage in the state of Idaho is 24 for women and 25 for men.
In the suburban, middle class, predominantly white city in Alabama where I grew up, most in my age range got married either in their early twenties or at least by their mid-twenties. When it came time for my tenth high school reunion this past August, I noticed by a quick survey of the Facebook page thoughtfully created for the event that roughly 60%-70% of my class had already gotten married. Of those, based on my own research, it appeared that 40% of my female classmates had given birth to at least one child. To say that I didn't quite fit in to the prevailing demographics would be putting it exceedingly lightly.
To return to Schillinger's analysis,
A woman doesn't always find it easy to persevere in a tepid affair once it's actual, not notional. And a man doesn't have to be handsome to bolt-or to take umbrage at the suspicion that he's being "settled" for. Perhaps in the future, in an over-perfected, suspense-less, Gattaca universe, men will come with LED displays on their foreheads that read: "I mean business" or "I'm deliberately wasting your time," or, "Actually, I'm gay," or "I'll marry you, but we'll loathe each other and I'll leave you for a 20-year old when you're 37." Until that day comes, one wonders how Gottlieb can be so emphatic in her pronouncements, so blistering in her blame of single women for being entitled and picky in their 20s, and "desperate but picky" thereafter.
I wouldn't at all encourage anyone, male or female, gay or straight (or somewhere in between), cisgender or transgender, to find much helpful or worthy of emulation in the traditional strategies regarding marriage and/or settling down that are prevalent in the region of my birth. Had I been born in the rural South rather than the city South, most people in my high school class would be married by now and many would probably have had at least one child well before the age of thirty. I've often been a proponent of waiting and using extreme caution before jumping into marriage or parenthood---both require a tremendous amount of patience, maturity, and energy. As such, I take tremendous offense to Gottlieb's bitter hypothesis, since I doubt she'd be any happier with three kids, a mortgage, and a lingering sense of doubt that she'd tossed aside the freedom of adulthood for the supposed contentment of marriage and motherhood. Between the fear of spinsterhood and the fear of being forced into a role of great responsibility at too early an age rests the reality. Life promises us nothing but the chance to roll the dice or play a hand at the table. Both sides of the coin, be it a lifetime of cats as companions or PTA meetings and dirty diapers are not necessarily the only two expected outcomes from which women can choose.
Schillinger concludes,
There's such a thing as luck, and there's such a thing as love. Sometimes the two forces combine, sometimes, they don't. If luck and love had combined for Gottlieb, today she might be a housewife in Teaneck with an SUV of her own, two kids and a mortgage, and she would not have had the need or the time to have built her fabulous career, or to have written this whining, corrosive, capricious book. Now there's a happy ending. But for anyone who dares order millions of people she doesn't know to sell out their dreams, regret their accomplishments, fear their futures and "Marry him," whoever he is, I have two words: You first.
Though I, as a man don't quite feel the same societal compulsion to marry, I will mention in all seriousness that I always craved the stability and the solid grounding of, if not marriage, certainly a long-term relationship. Though I am nearly thirty, I spent most of my twenties being ahead of the learning curve, and my expectations were always severely tempered by prior relationship partners who wanted only to have fun and to not entertain anything particularly serious. Now, finally, what I want and have wanted for a while is more in line with others my age, but in saying this, I would never make the assumption that every presumably heterosexual woman in her early thirties and beyond who isn't married is desperate to find a husband and start a family. This is certainly true with some, but not all. Not even close. Believing what Gottlieb has to say means that we must take her overblown postulates and acerbic suppositions at face value without expanding them beyond a very narrow sample of the population.
No successful movement is instantly realized upon enactment. Establishing greater equality for women at times looks a little raggedy and uneven because change doesn't happen overnight. Like Gottlieb, it is easy to confuse states of transition with proof of their ultimate dysfunction. It doesn't take a leap of faith to trust that gender equality is inevitable, but it does take an open mind and with it quite a bit of patience to recognize that no unfinished work in progress will find its way onto the walls of an art gallery as an unquestioned masterpiece. This same kind of buyer's remorse I see from time to time in books like Gottlieb's, each of which reflects the same basic frustration and fear that irrefutable results for generations worth of effort are never going to manifest themselves and that these sorts of struggles have created more problems than solutions. Again, I counter that true contentment lies within the self, not necessarily within the parameters of any movement. Each of us has more control over ourselves than over any progressive construct of seeking cultural evolution. Look within the movement as a whole if you want to know where to leave your mark, but look within yourself if you want to find a relationship partner. Never confuse the two.
This is an update since I promised to keep people informed.
So today for me started early - at 5:30 AM. I did laundry and a more or less normal routine to keep him from becoming suspicious. Keeping the cat carrier upended in the living room seemed to have had its intended surprise effect. I picked Twister up lovingly and he was licking my face when I dropped him unceremoniously into the carrier and closed the prison bars in less than a second. Bad, evil dad!
Of course the moaning started immediately.
I got him to the vet on time and the doctor was very nice. Actually one of those rare types who seems more concerned about your animal than whatever distractions are going on or the size of your wallet.
Surgery of this nature, I was a bit surprised to learn, is an all day affair. I expected wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am when it comes to kitty surgery, but this was a bit different, and I was told I wouldn't be able to pick him up until after he had gone through recovery from general anesthesia.
Three weeks ago my own brother robbed me of every cent I had left and kicked me out into the street.
I just landed a job with an up and coming start up Progressive Political organization, but the job does not officially begin to pay until the end of February. I will be working on several of their projects as an opposition researcher, writer and reporter, among other things. This is the break that I have been waiting for. They have provided me with a laptop and cell phone, which is why I am able to write now. This helps a great deal, but it does not replace the money that my brother has stolen from me.
So I turn now to you, dearest friends, who are more family to me than my only flesh and blood, in the hopes that you can help me out until this job starts up for me, because my only brother just stole from me the last few dollars I had to my name.
If you are able to, please make a donation to the link below.
Paint splashes all across the board. Vibrant shades of red and yellow pour over the pure white walls, creating a massive whirlpool of color spilling all about the floor. To some this image is unsettling, the purity of the whitewashed sanctum ruined; but to others the room has become something much more than just four walls and a ceiling, for it has become a work of art.
I am an artist; the canvas upon which I paint, however, is not a solid. My whitewashed room; my masterpiece is inside. Constantly crafting, molding and creating, we are all artists of the mind. The clay we sculpt is the ideas of others, always being molded, recreated, and improved to fit ones personality. The paints we use are made up of life's experiences, its truths and untruths. The dark tones of betrayal, the bright pigments of joy all color the regions inside of us.
The artist's work is never done. Our portraits lack stasis and are ever changing. Through life, through death, through all, our work never remains stationary. Colors are added and mixed, the clay touched up in areas and completely rearranged in others, but the work is always our own. As life goes on, these works of art grow and develop into an individual, changed and rearranged by the world around them. I am an artist. We are all artists of the mind, constantly changing our masterpieces, constantly developing as individuals.
Goodnight, but not Goodbye
Gliding, almost flying, in circles around the frozen lake, my soul smiles. The calm, chilled air breezing across my skin erases all worry from my mind. On the ice there is no drama, no pain, no confusion; all the loud colors of life drain from vision, leaving only the purest, truest feeling of joy streaming from my eyes.
Glancing down I see my fallen friends, my worn warriors that have meant so much. Covered in blood stains and bruises, tears and tears, they are shadows of their former selves. While no longer the shiny and clean entities of the past, their magic and power still hold true. Each crack, each scar, tells a different tale. They speak of epic battles of wit and power, speed and of strength. Night after night they hide me from the weight of the world, transporting me to paradise.
But tonight, they sing their final ballad. Tonight, the beauteous steel, pumping in majestic harmony with my body, plays a magnificent song. Tonight the magic lives. Tomorrow, they shall hang their laces for good, and be replaced by the shiny, clean entities of the future. A new novel, ready to be written, the blank pages begging for words. The stories of old, however, will never be lost. Tonight, as they sing their final ballad, all is well. My soul will forever smile with enamored memories of fallen friends; the magic will never die.
Clouds and Concrete
The wind rushes through his hair. He closes his eyes and smiles. Suddenly the air pushes him off balance and he tips over, staring death in the face, only to be saved by another calm breeze blowing the opposite direction. As if watched by a guardian angel, he has managed to yet again escape his imminent defeat, for luck is always on his side. In his mind he is invincible and has no infirmities.
As I observe from below, he rides above on the clouds, sliding through life without a worry in the world. The fluffy white paradise upon which he floats glides off into the distance and the thunderstorm begins yet again pouring over my head. Memories flood into my mind as I pain for a life like his. My feet drag upon the concrete, leaving craters with every step, for I was once like him. Knocked off my holy chariot I have fallen to reality and become a pariah. I long for the simplicity of the carelessness my brother enjoys.
The dark hair upon my head is pressed down by the rains of life, while his blonde mane shimmers in the sunlight of blissful unawareness. I watch and wish for a life like his, but I also worry, for I know how it shall end. Like me, the day will come when he shall meet his finish. An obstacle that need be overcome will look in his eyes and laugh, as he simply waits for it to move from his path. He shall fall from his holy chariot down to the earth, and like me, journey on the concrete, having finally realized he is not invincible. I watch, wait, and worry, for the day he will fall.
A Grown Man
Cold and covered in blood, an infant opens his eyes for the very first time; the constant darkness he has always known has been replaced with a bright and complex new reality. From the very moment this newborn takes his first breath his incipient body begins to grow. Destination unknown, he begins to transform, slowly, into a man. Through the years he shall learn to become a man; he shall grow up.
The process of growing up is a complicated mess of emotions and experiences, each changing the man that is to walk out into the world upon his eighteenth birthday. He learns to feel; finding and discovering love, only to have it torn away, thus teaching him heartache. He watches those around him, seeing their plunders and successes, comparing their lives with his, predicting for some their futures, and in others seeing his own. He listens to those wiser than he. He crafts his opinions. He crafts his morals. He crafts his character.
With his arsenal of knowledge, he is ready. Throughout time he has learned many lessons, some painless, others pain-full. He is a result of the world around him, those who taught him, those who tested him. He has grown into a man.
Hello All,
So I got my Vignettes back today and wasn't exactly satisfied with my grade. I recieved a 72%. I just thought I'd post them up here (new page up top) and get some feedback from some other readers. Thank you.
So, just to let you know how we're all doing -- Took Twister to the vet today. The news isn't all that good. The vet took blood and it appears he may have a sarcoma or carcinoma because the cells looked abnormal.
The next step is to get the lump surgically excised and looked at by a pathologist. This is going to cost a lot of money, naturally, but we're looking into options and I may get some help.
He was a big baby about the cat carrier but was too terrified by the vet to give them much trouble and was a very good boy on getting home (only 15 minutes of pouting under the bed) and has now been rewarded with his catnip treat.
I am keeping my job, for now. The somewhat stressful irony is I have to complete certain work within a month and the recommendation is for Twister to have his lump removed within the month so it doesn't become in the words of the vet "too difficult to manage". This is encouraging in a sense .. we don't know how invasive the tumor is but in getting it removed the hope is "not too much".
And apparently my dad is cranky but feeling better and is getting out of the hospital tomorrow.
All this of course sucks but I am so grateful and aware that it's not anything like "Haiti class sucking". I just wish I could help but it appears that all my energies for the next month or so are going to be about self and cat rescue.
Thanks to everyone for their kind words and support - and, I will be all right. I broke down and cried to my brother a bit over the potential loss of my long time companion and friend, like the wussy I am, but he's a happy kitty and wants to live. He's not in any pain unless his foolish master, like the oaf he is, pushes too hard on the lump, which he will not do again, on pain of being bitten.
I rarely write about sports because to me they are a fun distraction from more pressing matters, one ultimately of far less importance to the grand scheme of things. To be sure, I've always been aware of the base inequalities lurking underneath the surface, whether it be the pro players who make obscene amounts of money to play a game or the college kids who are treated as prized endowment cash cows for their individual universities, colleges, or conferences. Though I watch the games, once they have drawn to a conclusion, I turn off my television or internet feed and go on about the rest of my life. What has always troubled me the most is the extent to which some will pursue the minutia and exacting analysis of fandom, which if applied with even half the effort and half the obsession to a cause that would make strides to say, educate the illiterate or aim to reform a societal malady of choice, would produce impressive results.
Another year has come and gone. Everywhere she goes she hears people speak of New Years resolutions. They all say this time will be different. I will decide to do as I had not done previously or at least had not done well. Countless commit to a life of calorie counting. Others merely muse that they will exercise more. Drugs, drinking, there are also discussions of these concerns. People are confident. This year I will deliver myself from what I think evil. A few philosophize as to their personal career path. Change is the objective. A greater goal is thought to be golden. As Author Mary Anne Radmacher reflected and now millions whisper as their mantra, "Live with intention . . . Choose with no regret. . . . Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is." Therein lies the problem.
As I myself struggle with a chronic disease of the brain best known as mental illness, I am constantly aware of discriminatory practices towards those who suffer with the same disability as I do. To make a long story short, some years back I befriended a woman who attended the same support group as I did. She and I have maintained close contact ever since then and I frequently serve as a sympathetic ear when she needs someone to talk to about how her illness complicates her daily life and complicates her understandable desire to be the best mother that she can to her kids. At times she is deeply reluctant to share with me the issues most pressing and more distressing, but today she opened up and talked at length about a matter that had been troubling her for quite some time.
My friend deals with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and depression, two conditions I struggle with myself. For many reasons, money being one of them, she's been off her meds for the past several months and is unwilling to seek further treatment. Since she has recently separated from her soon-to-be ex-husband, she is reluctant to go to a psychiatrist and be prescribed new meds because she fears losing custody of her three children. I believed her worry to be justified, but it wasn't until I did some research to bolster my argument that I realized just how commonplace a problem this is. The below passage spells out the matter in detail.
Some state laws cite mental illness as a condition that can lead to loss of custody or parental rights. Thus, parents with mental illness often avoid seeking mental health services for fear of losing custody of their children. Custody loss rates for parents with mental illness range as high as 70-80 percent, and a higher proportion of parents with serious mental illnesses lose custody of their children than parents without mental illness. Studies that have investigated this issue report that:
*
Only one-third of children with a parent who has a serious mental illness are being raised by that parent.
*
In New York, 16 percent of the families involved in the foster care system and 21 percent of those receiving family preservation services include a parent with a mental illness.
*
Grandparents and other relatives are the most frequent caretakers if a parent is psychiatrically hospitalized, however other possible placements include voluntary or involuntary placement in foster care.[1]
The major reason states take away custody from parents with mental illness is the severity of the illness, and the absence of other competent adults in the home.[2] Although mental disability alone is insufficient to establish parental unfitness, some symptoms of mental illness, such as disorientation and adverse side effects from psychiatric medications, may demonstrate parental unfitness. A research study found that nearly 25 percent of caseworkers had filed reports of suspected child abuse or neglect concerning their clients.[3]
The loss of custody can be traumatic for a parent and can exacerbate their illness, making it more difficult for them to regain custody. If mental illness prevents a parent from protecting their child from harmful situations, the likelihood of losing custody is drastically increased.
Having mental illness is bad enough, but for women with mental illness, the repercussions are far more severe. A lethal combination of sexism and Paternalism is to blame. Recent history records the most extreme cases, instances which were blown out of proportion and sensationalized to such a degree that they tainted our understanding of brain disorders, particularly regarding women with children. The image in most peoples' minds likely flashes back to the negative publicity surrounding the Andrea Yates case, in which a mother suffering from post-partum depression and psychosis drowned her children. A second example is Dena Schlosser, who, suffering from postpartum psychosis, killed her eleven-month-old daughter believing she was sacrificing her to God. A less well known example is that of Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes' second wife, a depressive, who killed herself and her four-year-old daughter in a murder/suicide. Extreme cases like these have led many to believe that children must be uprooted and taken away from mothers who suffer from any degree of mental illness, no matter how minor. If only it were that simple. Yet again, women are deemed not responsible enough to handle their personal lives, the state (and we, by proxy), jump the gun and assume that keeping children safe is more important than understanding the crucial nuances of the situation.
I severely dislike the term "mental illness" because the phrasing makes it seem as though all brain disorders are similar. Mental illness is an umbrella term, but it is not a precise diagnosis. Brain disorders vary in severity and in their physical manifestation. Many assume that mentally ill means psychotic or schizophrenic, when those are merely the most severe forms of a vast spectrum of related, but not identical disorders. I cannot emphasize enough that many people who are treated properly with medications lead otherwise normal lives with the need for a few modest changes in lifestyle here and then as the case may be. This goes for mothers in the same way as for fathers. In being so draconian about custody rights, government overreaches, assuming a child must be protected from a parent who is likely to abuse her child.
I wish we would learn that policies implemented out of a fear of bad publicity and a resulting media firestorm have many times created major problems often more severe than the ones they've sought to address. To be fair, while specific legislation has been passed to address this matter, laws are only as effective as those who follow them and those who enforce them properly. The letter of the law does not address the stigma which exists in the minds of those who do not understand the peculiarities and particulars of a still very misunderstood and still taboo subject. To best address this travesty of justice, it will take more exposure and more visibility to bring an end to this.
Wow, what a sendoff for Tennent! He saved the universe from The Master, and also booted the Time Lords from existence, since they would have done anything to continue to exist. This new series, like the new Star Trek, is a reboot.
I prefer the original timelines, but I also understand that to keep viewers, the story much change to be current. But it does not mean that the original timeline has to chance. Please keep with me to agree that I, Translator, should be the next Doctor in the series.
Just when things are looking about as down for me as they can get, I find the bottom dropping out again. I am currently registered with Cuyahoga Community College for the spring semester, reliant on what financial aid I can get to pay for classes and transportation, as well as food when money allows. I can't get a job. Often,I must raid the student food bank just to have enough to eat for the week.
This past semester I learned that my financial aid would be cut off because I had reached the maximum number of course credit hours (93), and would have to file an appeal for further financial assistance. I did that, got the paperwork months ago, got it filled out, but was told repeatedly by the financial aid office to wait until December, when grades were due to be posted. So I handed the paperwork in on December 8th, when I was told to, and was informed that it would be two weeks for the process to be completed.
I found out yesterday that the process may take another two weeks or more, partly because of the holidays and partly because FAFSA has decided to take its sweet time. I have until January 6th to make payment arrangements with the campus business office so I can remain registered for courses. If I am not approved, or if I haven't made payment arrangements by the 6th, I will be dropped from my courses and will receive no money from FAFSA. Payment arrangements must be made with a deposit up front.
This isn't simply a matter of wanting to remain in school to finish up the required courses to earn my degree. It's quite literally a matter of survival. Because I can't get a job (no one will hire me), financial aid is all I have to live on. Without it, I have no money for food, no money to pay for my telephone and Internet connection - I need at least a phone line for prospective employers to get a hold of me, no money for transportation, to say nothing of money for classes and textbooks. Everything depends on the dubious mercy of FAFSA getting around to reviewing my appeal some time after the first of the year.
So I am typing this entry now, at a public library terminal, reduced to begging you for money, food, and any job postings on Cleveland, Ohio's west side. Bear in mind that the only transportation I now have is my own two feet after the 31st of this month, so it has to be within a reasonable walking distance from where I live.
I am willing to provide my full name and mailing address for those of you able to donate money, food, or both. PayPal locked me out, and I have no other online means of accepting donations. You can reach me by e-mail here: boycott_o_reilly@yahoo.com
I'm in a pretty dire situation, so anyone able to help out please do so. I'm not too proud to beg, not after more than two straight years of unemployment and existing each and every day under the threat of homelessness and starvation.
Luck: Couple of months ago, my husband's stepmother's niece, 18 years old, wants heated windshield wipers. Can't find them online, files a patent and now Walmart wants the rights. True story. (seriously)
Why I am the Mom of the Year: If your five year old finds your vibrator and thinks it's a light saber, running around the house swinging it with both hands zroom-zroom, you might want to downsize or at least choose a different color. (no comment)
Best Drinks Ever: Eiswein and Chocolate milk made with dark cocoa.
I am a veteran, a mama of three and soon starting my junior year pursuing a degree in Microbiology, then on to PA school (please science gods). I am a eco-socialist libertarian progressive atheist who also happens to have a single economic thought progressives hate so you will have to be in the dark about because unlike vibrator stories, its personal. Proud Moment: I met Howard Dean in Iowa the week he made both the Newsweek and Time covers. I would have a picture if not for some asshole who bumped my husband as he took the picture. Because we were with Sen. Johnson people, we were able to hang around in the background with Dean and his people after the event. Pelosi's daughter was filming. I hope I am not on film. I haven't watched her documentary for just that reason. Stupid, I know.
Reform Immigration -
March on Washington
