Jump start

I don't believe in signs. I believe I have control over my life.

But they're there. They're small, but they're there, damn it.

Recent developments have made my days quieter and me more prone to introspection. Not a good thing. I've been feeling anxious and down for a while now, and to combat that, I've tried mixing up my routine to do things that might relax me and get my mind on better thoughts.

So I've been watching a lot of documentaries. They take me back to my childhood when the only movies my parents could afford to rent from the video store were the free educational films. My sister and I ate those up, and I'm happy to find that my appetite for them was suppressed but never eliminated. Huzzah!

One night I was watching a movie about a climber who got separated from his climbing partner in a storm, broke his leg and still managed to climb, crawl and hobble his way off the mountain and get back to his base camp. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but he said something in the interview that resonated with me later. He said that while he was stuck in this ice crevasse with a broken leg and no way, it seemed at the time, to get out, he remembered something he was told or had read or had heard before: The only way to survive is to keep making decisions.

Once you stop making decisions, even small ones, you're fucked.

Later it hit me. That's what I've been doing. I've been sitting and waiting for something to happen, for a perfect job to open up or for something crazy to happen to jar me from my complacency. I guess I'm surviving (I'm typing this afterall), but that's all I've been doing. I wake up. I make the decision to get ready for work. I make the decision to eat (sometimes). I make the decision to go to my shitty job. I make the decision to leave, go home and waste time before bed.

It's surviving but it's hardly living. I've stopped making the vital decisions, the dreaded "big" decisions, the ones that might change my life and make me happier.

I woke up one morning and put on my bikini. I was going to work in the yard. The weeds were choking out the lilies I planted last year and overtaking the paving stones on my tiny patio — more green was visible than stone. About 20 minutes into the task, after my usual early-morning worried thoughts subsided, I began to focus on the task at hand. I thought about what I was actually doing. I was killing plants, plants that have been decided through generations of gardeners to be undesirable. I was ripping the undesirables, the ones keeping the sun and water and nutrients from the desired plants, out of the ground by the roots and tossing them aside. Not only was I tossing them aside, I was gathering them together and dumping their limp bodies in the hot gravel next to my house.

I was clearing out the unwanted so the wanted, the intended could take root, gain strength and bloom.

Then there was the dream in which I was pregnant OH BOY. I have many dreams in which my sister is pregnant (something she never likes to hear, can't imagine why), but I've seldom had dreams in which I was the chosen vessel. A few days after the dream, while on the pot, I looked up its possible meaning in a dream journal I own. (I'm not a nut. I once wanted to be a psychologist. My best friend knew this so she got me several books on dreams, the journal and "Man and His Symbols" by Carl G. Jung and that's the reason for the journal so back the fuck off.) The book's limited, abbreviated glossary of dream symbols had three words to say about pregnancy: a new beginning.

So there. My signs: make decisions, clear out the bad and look for a new beginning.

I applied for a new job this week in a city far from this one. Fingers crossed.

Nest egg

This is what my dad left me on the kitchen counter one morning. A $20 bill for groceries I couldn't drag myself out of the house to purchase, and the remaining hard boiled egg I had made the day before. It made me want to cry. I remember that much.

Health insurance is totally in right now

This is an apology to everyone I served pizza to last week with a terrible cold. I wasn’t fooling anyone. I could see the cringe in my tables’ eyes when I croaked out the lunch specials. But irony of ironies: My restaurant requires a doctor’s note if you are out sick from work. And they don’t provide health insurance.

One severe cold and a sprained ankle later and I’m questioning my mortality.

In a nutshell, I am currently functioning with the idea that somehow death is a better option than financial ruin. My health takes a backseat when I begin to tabulate the cost of check-ups, the appointments, the tests, my god, the medication. One blown knee, one failed kidney, a removed tonsil or two and I become one of masses who mill the flea markets for gently worn muumuus.

My imagination shows me run down by speeding car and dusting it off with a cool, “$350 PLUS mileage for an ambulance ride?! No thank you sir, I’ll take my compound fracture home. I own an ace bandage.”

So now I find myself stepping carefully into the bathtub, shying away from the use of knives and saying things like, “ooh, careful” when I may be barreling a little too quickly down the stairs. I no longer hit the Ski and frosted animal crackers quite as hard either.

At least the knowledge that I’m uninsured quells my newfound proletariat temper. Every time I’m tempted to ram my car into someone’s Porsche I simply remember that my recovery would be almost as expensive as her new tires. Knowledge is power but this knowledge is depressing (but only the kind that doesn’t require Zoloft).

"your sister's not working, ask her to do it"

Before I begin this particular rant, I just want everyone to know, I love my family and DO NOT actually mind being my little sister's taxi. That is, until she gets her license.

However, this has become a serious problem. Thanks to unemployment, I actually have so little to do during the day that picking my 15-year-old sister up in the middle of the day so she does not have to ride with other high schoolers is an option. A.REAL.OPTION.
(She plays volleyball and they get out early on days they have out-of-town games so they can go to a local restaurant and eat as a team.)

What has my life become? The lack of response my job search has given me gets more and more depressing every day.