The Last Sunset in August, no filter. Beautiful, isn't it? August may have been an atrocious month, but there were some shining points like this moment. I remember that day simply being a particularly uneventful and boring day, then I stepped out of the store to this. I even do a year in review with photo collages of anything great that happened in that particular month. I ended with five noteworthy photos for the month, and that was stretching it, but I digress. The food experiment isn't going very well and we've extended it, probably indefinitely. It's like World War II up in here, only no great USO jook joint jitterbug dancing or soldiers looking good in uniform (ya know the perks). We're rationing everything from coffee and sugar to butter and flour; even petrol is being rationed, and there's no way to cheat the system when your dad, who holds the cheque book, is like the wartime government. *sigh* I get that money is tight, but the person enforcing all the rules is really why money is tight to begin with. We do not need twenty packages of hot dog weenies, I don't care that they were on sale, or for him to buy himself some fancy hair cutting comb. Or if we could just run the air conditioning like normal people our electric bill wouldn't be so high, but he's absolutely convinced that running the fan constantly doesn't use electricity and circulates the cool air (that we don't have, by the way, if we're not running the air). I love my dad, but he's absolutely infuriating a lot of the time. We need laundry detergent, but he bought bags of potatoes instead. Yeah, that's good and all, except that we're not going to eat all the potatoes before they rot and we'll just stink. Woohoo! I get that it's his money, but he greatly mismanages it. One could say, "Well, you go get a job." Easier said than done. I seem to be about as qualified for work as I am for health insurance; which means I'm not qualified. I don't get call backs for interviews and if I do, I don't get the job. Believe me, anything that comes along that doesn't demand a full college education or multiple languages or specialized things like specific driving licenses or specialized skills (book keeping, the medical profession, a mechanic), I jump at it. It's neither here nor there if people believe me, as I'm used to that. I can see where it's hard to believe if you're someone who can get a job easily, to not believe the person who can't. But my brother was also an excellent employee, but would get fired from jobs for no real reason (ya know real reasons as in stealing or clocking our early or taking longer than normal breaks or being rude to customers) and had an exceedingly difficult time gaining new employment. My brother understood as he knew exactly what it was like to walk in the same shoes I'm walking in now. Things aren't really all that bad though. I mean we really are being forced to ration things (as if we weren't on the skimpy side of things before), but it's just I feel like we can't get a break, and when we do it's like false hope. It's a few days of a break and then The Universe smashes something back down on us. The espresso maker (that mom and dad got on super sale fourteen years ago) died. Which is how I made coffee. My French press, the glass carafe busted back in December. So now I'm just dying for a decent, strong cup of coffee. There is something wrong with every car we own and everyone except The Sister has something medically speaking that needs seeing too, only there's no money for that sort of thing. That's not really correct. There is money for it, because my parents find a way to pay for all of their gazillion prescriptions and medical appointments... but there's never any money for me to see a doctor or the dentist. There's money for The Sister, she just never really needs it. But at least The Sister doesn't need medical attention and mom and dad have all of their meds and are tended to. Though my eye prescription is now out of date and I can't get more contacts, my vision is still OK, so my glasses are still fine. I do have coffee and a coffee maker and while it's not perfect coffee, I've had worse, so at least I can have coffee. The cats are all well and have their food and cat litter. I have electricity, or else I wouldn't be sitting here typing this listening to my music. But it's just a frustrating time right now. Lack of funds, lack of food, lack of petrol and working cars, especially that last one since The Sister is still house sitting and also has a job to get to and it's slightly stressful to work all of that out. There's also the matter of Mika, The Sisters' aged, large-breed dog. She's dying. It's stressful, because we all love her and don't want her to die (she's family!), but it is clearly her time, so we have to deal with letting her go (not that there's anything a vet could do for her, because there isn't). She needs a lot of extra care and it's like caring for an aged parent, if that parent can't walk, feed, bathe, or preform general maintenance cleaning for themselves, etc. She's big and it's a lot of work and a lot to deal with. It's also very sad. It's sad to see anyone you love slipping away, knowing that what you're breaking your back for is only to ensure their comfort at the end and will not help them to live. Knowing that you can't save them and the inevitable is coming. I've had to deal with some pretty gross things. I've also cried for her on more than one occasion. If you're a 'putting down your animals' type of person, that is not an option for us. If it's normal things, we treat them like a human. If you wouldn't kill your grandma because she broke her hip, we're not going to kill our animal for the same reason basically. We've luckily not had any pets who were dying to also be in excrutiating pain or who were suffering. Sadly some of our cats have met very tragic ends, but the car that hit them or the animal that attacked them left no room for "this can be fixed", because it couldn't. But, I would consider it if one of our pets was like my my maternal grandmother or that stray cat The Sister found once. The stray cat was infested with maggots and dying a horrible death. Dad helped The Sister put her down because she was too far gone for help, but was in agony. My grandmother was riddled with cancer, had just had all of her intestines taken out, had waste bags that needed changing every ten minutes and was in a lot a lot of pain. Hospice gave her morphine until it killed her. My mom's pissed about that, even though she didn't like her mother. When mom told me that's how she went out, I said, "Thank god! Because she just kept holding on and it was terrible." I'm not angry that Hospice did that for her. It was the humane thing to do because it was over for her, nothing more could be done and she was in such terrible and agonizing pain. The point is, Mika is not in pain and agony. So, she's going to be treated with kindness like one would a human, because none of have the heart to just kill her or have her killed professionally (ya know, by a vet) because she's still responsive and happy to see us, it would just be cruel to kill her. So, it's also stressful to think, 'What if we come to that place in the road? What if Mika is in so much pain that the humane thing to do is to end her suffering? Can we do it? Oh, I don't want to think about it!' So, there's that. There's also the little matter of my impending birthday, which is in ten days. I've never really been a fan of my birthdays and it has nothing to do with aging. I'm the weird girl who since she can remember would state, "I'm the grandma!" and wishing I had beautiful grey hair, for what felt like again not merely the first time. I'm ecstatic every time I find more grey hair, or the first year I had wrinkles that stayed. If I looked like a Shar-pei, considering I'm not yet forty, that might be bad. But I don't look decades older than I am, so I'm aging well, and I won't mind looking like an old tree when I'm in my seventies or eighties. No, it's that birthdays were always sour for me because of outside forces, mainly my mom. She did great things birthday wise. She never forgot ones birthday and it was considered a big deal, so we always had a party. If it was a year that she got me an ice cream cake from Baskin & Robbins, then she was spot on with the cake/ice cream combo as to being to my taste. If it was a year that I wanted my party at the roller rink, she was on board with that. However, she was a Birthday Nazi (including on her own birthdays!) and everything must adhere to a strict schedule. Though this was stressful, considering that everyone received the same treatment from mom, it was normal. Otherwise though, I wasn't really treated like everyone else in my family. She showed effort, care, and thought when choosing their gifts, but with me she didn't allow me to be me. Well, she didn't allow that for any aspect of my life, forcing onto me what she felt I should like, instead of what I actually liked, but didn't do this with my siblings or my dad. She always asked for a birthday list of gifts we'd want. She'd follow the list for the others, but for me she basically threw it out. I mean it'd be great to get gifts you actually like and want, but really it was the fact that she didn't care to actually learn what I liked and felt I couldn't be trusted to know my own mind. It was hurtful. That or not giving any thought to the gifts because she just needed to find whatever that didn't cost very much to give to me. That was hurtful too. However, hurful isn't the only emotion that's mingled up in my birthday. There's also shame, ridicule, and trepidation. I stated she was the Birthday Nazi, and everyone had to deal with it, but I seemed to end up with the brunt of the horror. The Sister could choose her party theme and mom would do it. I could choose, because mom would ask, but I never got a theme that I wanted, so it was always what mom wanted. Mom seemed to celebrate herself the most on my birthdays, and if I didn't follow the unknown protocols I was shamed and ridiculed at my own parties. Just one example is the Dress Up Tea Party she decided on for my 7th birthday. It was a year that I thought, 'OK, I can dig it. That doesn't sound too bad.' However, I ended up choosing a dress that she had issues with or wasn't on her mental list of appropriate dresses (I say she could have issues, because our dress up clothes were all clothes that mom or her sister had worn in their childhood and teen years). So because I didn't play by the rules that were only in mom's head she poked fun at me in front of my friends and I was the only one to not receive a best dressed award. That was not the only time that type of thing would happen, but also only at my parties. The trepidation was that my birthday was treated like some weird bargaining chip in some sick power game. I wasn't a bad kid, but sometimes I did get in trouble, but never anything major. Any other time of year if I was a little slow coming into the room when I was called it wasn't a big deal. If I didn't pick up my toys right away I was reprimanded, but still it wasn't a big deal. The month leading up to my birthday, every year, though, my mom would say, "That's it. That's one less gift you'll be getting this year. It's your own fault for ruining your birthday." Had I back-talked her? No. Had I failed a test? No. Had I stolen a car? Stolen something from her? Broken something on purpose? No, no, and no. I'd been the same girl I always was, but was now being punished like I'd robbed a bank and killed some people and the punishment was to slowly strip my birthday away from me, little by little, and blame it on me. It would start off small with one present here or there, until the lot of them were gone and then "Well, now there's no party, I hope you're happy with yourself!" I don't know which is worse. The fact that she even did all of this crazy fear mongering power trip thing, or that all of it was a lie because I did get a party and presents on my birthday. I'm not sure. It's bad enough to threaten your kid and hang things over their head like that, especially for indiscretions that at any other time weren't punishable at all; or doing all that and then it was all some lie, but having scared me that I thought my presents would explode or the cake might poison me or that my mom would beat me if I opened my gifts wrong. None of which happened, though it wasn't unknown for mom to beat me for something stupid that didn't warrant a beating. I'd even try to be better or more like she wanted me to be, but she did the same thing every single year. For the entire month leading up to my birthday. I think she finally stopped with I was seventeen or eighteen. But by that time I was completely gun shy about my birthdays and never looked forward to them. We no longer get parties (but only because we don't have friends really, as we did have parties up until our late twenties) and I still get treated as less than and my parents still don't really know or accept who I am, but that's not as bad as it was when I was growing up. Hell, even mom is way less of a Birthday Nazi than she used to be (though that old bat shows up from time to time) and thankfully there's no slow belittling of "There's that gone, good job for ruining your birthday!". However, it's a hard thing to let go of. I try to be excited about my birthday or even neutral, but the old feelings and taunts always seem to creep in and I become completely depressed about the entire affair, feeling slightly nauseas on some days even. It's a poisoning I just can't seem to shake. I'm not sure if I'm just not working on the problem properly, if it's not time to face it just yet, if it's still because I'm in my childhood home with my parents, or if too much damage is done and I can never hope to be happy about my birthdays when they're looming closer? So that's the past month in a round-about way. But I have some happy, pretty pictures, so let's close with that. Septembers Beauty in Blight This right here was a good day. I found mushrooms twice! The first are my favourite as they were so tiny. I put my finger in the second photo for scale. The next ones, found at a completely different location, reminded me of Brain Coral. I don't know what either of the fungi's are, as in names, but it was still a good day. I'm sort of a mycology nerd, if you couldn't tell. I always enjoy Aromatherapy Classes, and there was one last night! That's me making an oil blend of Chamomile and Ylang-Ylang. (Obviously I didn't take the photo with my teeth or my third arm, The Sister took this photo of me). Our crazy nutter, Yata, who'd been trying to sleep all squished up underneath the drain rack. So things are crazy and not terribly fantastic, but there's always something good and happy, I feel, if we just notice it. I seem like Haley Mills in Pollyanna all "Let's play the glad game!" and "Let's look for the good in everything!" but it keeps me sane and makes life enjoyable, even when it's threatening to capsize me into the tumultuous and churning waters.
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AuthorA girl from South Mississippi who finds herself in exploration. Archives
November 2019
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