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| So where do I begin?(if you don't like vulgarity, politics, or..well..ok if you're a pansy don't read it ok? and don't send me messages bitching about anything I say because I really don't care)
I had a lot of hope for this year, a lot of optimism, y'know? In January I was in lower-level management at a fast food job and it looked to everyone I knew that I was pretty much guaranteed the Ast. Manager position, and I thought to myself: "Y'know, I never planned to be here this long, but it would be awesome money, and just think, if I get in chummy with the owner I could use his money to springboard my career!", that was my initial master plan as the year started out anyway.
Inevitably I got sucked in a bit by WoW, and while I enjoyed my week away from Fairmont with the internship with Bob down in Charleston(presumably that was still the best week of the year for me, and for those who somehow don't know, well, read on), it was frustrating because I accomplished nothing while I was down there, I became more disillusioned with this state than I've ever been, as I concluded that somehow the people that are ideologically as conservative as me are stuck with the Democratic label, and somehow oddly enough are OPPOSED to their fellow Democrats who themselves are more liberal, but ALSO opposed to the Republicans(and don't get me started on them, most of the Republicans who can actually get elected in this state are a brand of evil to which I dare not speak).
So while it did give me a week to get away from things, I'm someone who really can't operate that way, and the week off essentially derailed all of my classwork, as I had been away for a week and thus stayed behind a week from there until the end. At least things were doing good with my dead-end job which I had(SOMEHOW) managed to turn into a job with potential, so then came March, and the turn over, and my being told that I needed to 'focus on schoolwork' and not be concerned with the store. A paradox essentially because I was working to PAY for school, and was told that school had to take precedence over my very method of paying for it.
So naturally the Ast. Manager failed, and I was still mr. go-to-guy, I wish I had hindsight but at the time I really wanted to help Lisa out, closing and opening and closing and opening like I did, I really wish I had known at the time what it would lead to. But I really cared about the job until when we got into April, and that stupid fucking junky came in.
Ha, that's a story to which I don't think got passed around very much outside my close family and those who worked there, I mark it as the 'day I stopped caring', specifically the day after it happened is that day, so it played out like this: I was closing with my buddy Doug(whom I hope for his sanity's sake has freed himself by now) and we had good ol' Amber pre-closing for us(I think???), but anyway, this bizarre character walks in with a hand concealed and approaches poor Amber, and naturally he's a junky so he makes absolutely no sense, and Amber being what we in upper circles call 'smart', said the words that every manager hates to hear in food service 'let me get the supervisor'.
I'm not a big guy by most reports, I've also been told that even if I had a gun I wouldn't be intimidating. I don't really care, I like to be quiet and I like to be passive, bite me. However, I am very VERY protective, and I'm also very suspicious, I had my eye on the guy as soon as he came in, Junky's may be common in Fairmont, but not in Subway. I treated him like any other person I would've encountered, was as nice as I could be, his problem was that he felt that a sub he had purchased at lunch was messed up, so he wanted a new one, he then gave me his Subway card because, somehow in his coked up brain, he thought that this card would prove that he had indeed had a sub. Naturally it doesn't, and I asked him if he had the receipt with him or the sub, and of course he didn't have any of those, he was a junky who wanted a free meal.
Now when it comes to giving people free things, I really don't care. It was a usual given that if you whined enough I would probably give in and say 'sure whatever I don't give a shit', but when you come in with the INTENTION of doing so, I get annoyed. So I told him simply 'Well sir, you don't have a receipt, and you don't have the sub with you so clearly you ate it or you threw it away so I have no way of knowing if you ever had a sub in the first place, so there's just nothing I can do for you, I'm sorry' Naturally this translated to something along the lines of 'I'm going to kill your babies' in 'Cocainese' because at that point he became very 'unpleasant', and hence my reference to being protective, because this guy had a concealed hand the entire time, and at that point I was pretty certain that he probably had a gun, or some other instrument to which I was probably going to meet an untimely end for, over a sub. I kept my cool and he threw a temper tantrum, never exposing his hand, threatened me, threatened Amber and Doug, and told me he'd be waiting for me when I got off work. It's not easy to keep your cool in those situations, but the only real thought process in my head was 'my friends', because they were just that, my friends.
So long story short, and it's too late, I did what any good white boy from Detroit does in a crisis situation, I called the cops on his ass. They later located him as a passenger in a drunk drivers car, a drunk driver who had been reported by the Wendy's down the street, and they were cornered by 4 cop cars in the Domino's drive way. What's the moral of this part of the story? Don't fuck with food service.
But on to the 'day I stopped caring', the following day I had a similar shift, big surprise I was closing, I came in a little early so I could talk to Lisa about the night before since I had called her to let her know what had happened, and she of course notified Willard(the owner), and ladies and gentlemen this is why I gave up on Subway: Willard was upset with me, nay, mad at me, for not alerting HIM first, not the police, and that HE should have been the one to alert the police, naturally in a crisis situation I do not think about what the fuck Willard wants, I focus on me and mine's safety first, fuck Willard. But anyway, the ruling on Willard's part was that 'from now on, if a customer comes in and claims to have been given a screwed up sub, give them a new one regardless of proof'
So, in other words. Go to the east side Subway and tell them you came in earlier and had a fucked up sub and you'd like a new one. If they don't do it, tell them you'll call the owner. If they don't do it then, ask for the owner's number and actually call him. Trust me, it will work, he's a pussy.
And on to May, when I quit WoW(the first time) and squeaked out passing grades despite being a week behind in all my classes.
As it became summer and my work schedule expanded, my frequency of closing-opening shifts expanded(due to lacking competent ast. managers STILL), and I had concluded that this summer at long last I would accomplish what I had thus far failed to accomplish, every year I set a new years resolution of a six pack, and every year I fail for one reason or another. I had resolved that this time, with a summer free of any real activity, I would accomplish it. I established a good diet high in the right types of food but still high in vitamins, and I had worked out an exercise routine which would finally get me where I wanted to be with my body.
June came and I started pushing myself farther than I'd ever pushed myself, I purchased a conditioning vest and I began jogging around the neighborhood. I was attempting to complete what at the time would've been one of the last Buddhist truths, Right Effort, essentially by taking the logic of 'Your body is a Temple' to a whole new level. It began quite well actually, I lost ten pounds, and then came my birthday, one which I had to go back to read the blog for to even remember, that's how bad it was. If you want a recap, go find the blog. Suffice to say it foreshadowed events in October.
July 1st. An irrelevant day, no more significant than any other. I woke up, did my usual extensive jogging routine, ate some pathetic resemblance of my former diet. You see at this point in the story I had run out of most of my dieting material and had been subsisting off of bread, turkey, and lettuce. Nothing else. My work schedule had relaxed as a result of a new ast. manager who seemed remotely competent, and so I had more time to focus on my exercise...
July 1st. I did the same routine I had been doing, I ran, I pushed myself, I came home. I shit blood.
July was an interesting month for another reason, but it's not worth dwelling on in this year's recap, it was a blip on the radar wherein I got really confused and attempted to make more out of something than what there was. But on reading the blogs I had wrote of that time period, I miss to some degree the eloquence I seemed to have possessed in the first half of this year. Before July 1st.
I told Becca and Shari first, Jess found out later and I don't think Lenny found out until around when I told my parents a month or two later. It's something which you really have to understand my psyche to appreciate, when I was a little kid I was sorrounded with stories about E Coli and the like, kids who shit blood and then died the next day or even that night. I was so petrified, so terrified that I didn't know what to do or who to talk to, I was convinced that I was to die, and I simply didn't want to trouble my loved ones with such a thought. Naturally you can understand my confusion on July 2nd when I woke up.
The summer went on from there uneventfully, I quit my diet completely, quit exercising completely as at the time I blamed them for the problem(naturally the diet was PARTIALLY to blame, but the exercise was not), and to my great horror it persisted for two weeks, every day more blood. Every day. For thirteen days.
Work got much worse, the man who I THOUGHT would make a good ast. manager turned out to be nothing more than a kiss-ass, inevitably him and I clashed frequently because he refused to listen to anything I told him or advised him, it got to the point that I was asking him things that I knew the answer to just for the perverse pleasure of being able to correct him in front of the rest of the crew(and honestly, I enjoyed it). But inevitably as August approached and my medical condition did not improve, I had to let my parents know, and I had to let Lisa know that something just wasn't right, she had depended on me for everything in that store since she took over(to the point that on some occasions she had called me at home because she didn't know how to do something), and now I would have to step down because I simply couldn't do it anymore. I of all people, someone who has built his entire persona around willpower and self-confidence, was weak.
The semester approached with something resembling optimism, my mom helped me into a new diet to try and alleviate the issues and it did..for a little while. I began hitting the gym with Bob, or at least we tried to anyway. My dad continued to insist that I stick my finger in my ass.(again, foreshadowing) And I saw a doctor.
I had hoped that this visit, this horrible visit, would solve everything. It solved nothing, no answers, only more questions. Thus I was scheduled for a colonoscopy, a fun procedure in which they shove a very long tube all the way up your large intestine(and yes kids, you can watch!!).
I became what I was when I first started at subway, the guy who closed on weekends. Which is something resembling a nice position when you think about it in food service, but I hated it, primarily because everyone still relied on me when I really wished they wouldn't. I had wanted to just be another random crew person again, but I wasn't allowed such a position so long as Bryan was ast.
So along came October, and the foreshadowing became unnecessary. My parents have never really 'gotten along', suffice to say me and Lenny probably couldn't count on BOTH our two hands the number of times dad had yelled at her in front of us. For me I really stopped caring about him when he first accused me of being gay(he has since done so at least two other times that I'm aware of), but that didn't mean I in any shape or form wanted my parents to divorce. I hate my father, let's not beat around the bush, he's annoying, he's weak, he's a bigot. He is in every facet and shape everything I am not, and yet he professes that He and I are one in the same. He will never appreciate that though he claims his mother ruined his life, he is a text book example of the parent who vows to 'be a better parent' than theirs, only to fail in the exact same way. My saving grace to which has spared me a similar fate as he is that I have ambition. I don't want to die alone, as he inevitably will.
But that in no way shape or form means I wanted them to divorce. I knew it was coming, and my mother doesn't realize that somewhere in me I hate her for doing it. Not so much that she did it, she needed to do it. It's when she did it that hurt me, she doesn't understand it and she never will, nor could I ever tell her because for fucks sake she's my mother. I'd probably crush what remains of her world if I told her she had hurt me in some way. But anyway to the point, the papers were served to my father on October 11th, in fact I posted a blog that day stated 'Huh, my dad's gone'. Why does it matter to me that she did this? Why? She could've waited. She told me in July that she had the papers, she could've waited. My procedure was the 23rd. Twelve days before I had to have what was to me the most serious medical crisis of my life, my mother filed for divorce.
The mind-numbing stress of all of this lead to the most unexpected of developments for me. I have always to some degree hated those who profess to be Christian. I was persecuted by them when I was a little kid, simply because I really just didn't know. It was on a lonely night I fled my house to try and calm my mind and make sense of all the madness that had happened to me over these few months. It didn't make sense. Nothing made sense. Why me? I had been as true to Buddhist teaching as I could be, how could one person have such horrible karma? Inevitably I asked myself one simple question: "What am I missing?", and as luck would have it, my eyes fell on the word Jesus.(but please for the love of, well, y'know..., don't misinterpet this, I am no different, I am still very tolerant of all things and very distrustful of those who put their faith on a stick so as to beat the nonbelievers, I am still me, I simply believe that there is a god now.)
So that brings us to the end of the medical issue. I have, or hopefully HAD as I hope it's gone...a fissure. A tear in the lining of my intestine. Look it up on WebMD like I did, and you will see the bitter sweet statement 'occurs most often in young adults who are otherwise healthy'. It's caused by stress and a bad diet, specifically(according to my doctors), back-to-back close/open shifts, where it was quite normal for me to be up for 40 hours straight.
And so with that insight from my doctors, I put in my two weeks notice at Subway, and was gone by mid-november, and had moved out of my house and in with Joby, her fiance, and Becca by the end of the month.
So to summarize this year:
It couldn't end soon enough.
Thank you for reading, Merry Christmas, God Bless, Happy Chanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, And happy new year.
And if I missed anything. Fuck off.
Now hopefully when I wrap up 2008, I'll be talking about how happy I am and how I'm not single anymore. But for those who care, in 2008, I WILL follow through on my New Years resolution.
Consider this to be my second wind, I'm back bitches.
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| In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.
In the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost.
First I have to come clean for Lenny's sake.
And
lenny, I'm sorry you have to hear this in a blog, but understand mom
forbid me to mention this to you because she didn't want it to stress
you like it was me or her.
I don't know when this will all go
down, but at least since July mom has had divorce papers in her locker
at work, she told me recently that she expects she'll probably be
divorced by Halloween.
Ok, now that Lenny(and everyone) is up to speed, here's the course of events of this past weekend.
Saturday
while I was out avoiding my house with Shari, my aunt and uncle came
over. For those who don't know, my uncle owns our house. Apparently the
jist of his visit was to tell my mom and dad that if they don't start
renting to own and start soon, they're going to have to leave. I agree
with this because as of now we have nothing in writing, if something
happens to my uncle the house will go to the authorities, and we have
no documented claim to it. We would be kicked out on our behinds with
nothing to show for our time in West Virginia.
My dad, however,
fails to grasp this concept, and to a degree so too does my mom. So
from what I understand it basically turned into an argument between my
dad and my uncle wherein my uncle apparently said 'Go ahead Steve, have
another heart attack.' Why this was said I don't know, but it was said.
So
I come home and find my dad upset and concluding that we have to pack
up and leave, ignoring the thought of 'gee what do we do with our
college student son who lives with us?'. Insert first thought of
abandonment here.
So...fast forward to today, my dad
emphasizes to me that I really should help my mom with a project
involving our sink, which involves us sawing wood, so I decide to help
her out. In the process of helping her I conclude that our saws are
crap and we need new ones, she complains to me that while she agrees,
she has no money to buy new saws, so I told her I'd float the bill(my
friends wonder why I insist on paying for everything? it's because I'm
used to it).
So she went upstairs to let my dad know that we
were going to head to Big Lots to get a new saw, neglecting the part
about me paying, and he completely exploded. Somehow this project that
he emphasized to me the importance of helping with, because another one
of my uncle's 'Jobs' that he should be doing as our 'landlord', and he
basically snapped, and his tantrum ended with 'LEAVE IT ALONE'. Then he
huffed and puffed his way into their bedroom, got a suitcase and packed
some clothes, at which point I went in to talk to him, to simply point
out the fallacy in telling me to help her with a project that he told
her not to do, at which point he broke down and cried, then asked me to
get him some garbage bags, which he put the rest of his clothes into.
For
the most part it's been quiet since then, we finished the project
without new saws, his suitcase is still packed, but I think he's
concluded he won't go just yet.
Here's where things in my head started working though, and here's where I get to the point.
While
working on the project AFTER the argument, my mom told me that he's
been 'doing this for ten years', reminding me that he's slept on the
couch for about ten years now. I told her simply 'well, me and Lee
aren't as oblivious as you guys like to think we are, we notice stuff',
but what confused me the most was that HE has been trying to leave HER
for ten years. It dawned on me how this could be, because my mother was
raised in a devotedly Catholic family. Her faith, what little of it was
left, instilled in her that she could not simply walk out on her
marriage, knowing full well that if she did he would be worse off,
ignoring the obvious that she would be better off without him. When I
pointed this out to here about twenty minutes ago, before writing this,
she was startled but had to agree with me. She hadn't thought about it
that way, but conceded it was true. This is the bright side to being
over-analytical, you pick up on the small details pretty well.
Sometimes
the smallest detail can create the biggest change, reference to a
snowball effect or the concept of a 'butterfly effect'. The smallest
most minute detail can create a change so drastic that it is usually
unforeseen and not protected against.
Fast forward, a
few hours, I decided finally to go to subway to get some food. I had
texted my three best friends earlier in the day about my dad, before
going to Subway only one of them had texted me back. By the time I had
left Subway, I spoke with all three of them, one of which I
accidentally angered, the other of which didn't mention it at all. I am
not trying to make any of you three mad, and don't count this as me
blaming you for anything, I only bring this up so as to...set the
scene, so to speak. I have always been one to have abandonment issues,
I am a clingy person and when I feel very down, I cling desperately to
my friends to hold me up. Tonight I felt as though I had no one to
cling to, that I was alone.
I was walking home, shuffling my
feet down Morgantown avenue, trying to think of a place to go, anywhere
but home. I thought back to Colby and how I always figured when I was
in high school that if this ever happened, if ever my house was no
longer a happy place that I could just run to Colby's where I would be
welcomed with open arms. And I sank deeper, it hurts when you realize
you've neglected your friends. But I know why her and I don't talk that
much anymore, but I don't think she really knows why. Only three people
know why.
I digress, insert second thought of abandonment here.
So
as I'm shuffling down Morgantown Avenue in a complete blur, lost in my
thoughts and trying to figure out what to do, I began to question
myself. My faith has buckled, wavered, and cracked over the past few
months. From toilet bowls of blood to tumors to divorcing parents to
financial uncertainty, I had to ask myself a simple question.
Where have I gone wrong?
I
asked myself this repeatidly as I walked, and as I passed Att's, I
asked myself, 'what am I missing?', and as I asked myself this, my eyes
locked onto a specific word in the marquis at the Baptist temple.
What am I missing?
Jesus. | | |
| so...I committed myself to Samadhi.
But perhaps this commitment was more my own selfish desire for things which maybe I was simply never meant to have?
My
diet, my work-out regime, were so cripplingly brutal that I think that
I may have actually caused damage to my own body. I lost 10lbs, and now
I need to see a doctor as soon as I have the money to do so.
I won't say why, just that I really really need to.
I
focused too hard on calories and limiting my intake, and because of my
own lack of transportation, I ended up living off of a very limited
amount of food.
So, I'm thinking no diet at all. Eat what I want, and stick to just working out.
But
I won't do anything at all until these symptoms clear themselves up. If
they persist...then I've got a real problem on my hands.
When
I weighed in at 175 at my cardiologists, three years ago, my doctor
told me I was at the ideal weight, in their eyes. That I had no need to
lose anymore weight. I continued and dropped down to my own low of 157.
I've since packed on some muscle, and don't really look much different
then when I was 157, but now weigh 165(after going back up to 175 after
my trip to Charleston).
The point to my thought patterns, my
religious belief, is all focused around NOT suffering, and everytime I
screw up or make a mistake I am only reminded further of the teachings.
I focused myself too much, and have ALWAYS focused myself too
much on things that don't matter. Who gives a shit if I DO have a 6
pack? I look fine, in fact I look good. If you disagree, find a picture
of me when I was fourteen.
I just need to stop trying so much, and relax.
Seriously. | | |
| I stopped playing WoW. I had contemplated that it might interfere with my efforts to achieve that which I have yet to achieve, and as a result, it has lost its appeal to me. In other words, I exist again, mentally at least. On a physical note...or rather on the note of Samadhi.
They say your body is your temple, and being a buddhist living in West Virginia, I suppose I adhere to that greater than most, being that I have no physical temple.
So to put it lightly, I have demolished the temple, and efforts are now underway to reconstruct it.
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