"Dug In"

Let me tell you how I know I'm losing my fucking mind after about one month of the Safer At Home order here in Long Beach, CA. 

I did a bad thing. I didn't really *intend* to do a bad thing. The bad thing *kind of maybe* resulted in a good thing for someone. The bad thing started out as a kind gesture from someone else.

Yet, I definitely did a bad thing. 

Someone emailed me a gift card for a food delivery service, and our financial situation has been fucked for a couple of weeks, so I decided to use the gift card and order some delivery food on Friday evening.

My hubby had been feeling headache-y for a few days and was napping, so I asked for the food to come later in the evening, around 7:00. My instructions for the Delivery Specialist were basically what the CDC would recommend: Leave the food on the steps and nobody gets sick. Don't knock, don't call. Just leave it and walk away.

I placed the order around 5:45 and was expecting it to arrive around 7:00, not right away, but later, at the specific time that I selected from the drop down option menu that they offered me. Are you with me here?

After submitting the order, I got a text saying the restaurant received the order and it was going to be delivered around 7:00. I could see the order status flashing that it had been received by the restaurant and was going to be ready for delivery around 7:00. 

I went into the courtyard to do some needless pruning of leaves because what the fuck else is there to do when you have worked on a computer from home all week and live in a studio apartment with a giant human man and three animals - all four are living beings whom I love dearly, but also do very little these days except sleep and loudly demand to be fed, yet cooking wouldn't be required that evening, and all four were currently sleeping.

Suddenly, while pruning for no reason, and in the midst of listening to a VERY INTENSE podcast episode about the maniacally brutal, wholly pointless torture and murder of two young Tennesseans, my Bluetooth headphones started ringing. I jumped three feet in the air and answered the call. It was 6:09.

It was the driver calling to say my food had been delivered, and I was like, "You weren't supposed to deliver the food until 7:00 but okay, just leave it on the steps, thank you," and I hung up.

My order was fifty-one minutes early, my hands were covered in yard waste, my husband was napping, my face mask was indoors, the status bar on the delivery app still said the order wasn't even started at the restaurant level, the sudden ringing phone startled the hell out of me, and therefore...I was pissed. 

Angry enough that I spent the several minutes it took to prep for venturing into the Front of the Apartment to retrieve the food thinking of all of the Reasons Why I Should Be Pissed, thereby making myself even more pissed.

Why do people schedule delivery times? Generally for a motherfucking reason. I don't willy-nilly ask someone to bring me a bacon cheeseburger with fries two hours AFTER I'm dying to shove it in my mouth.

Why did they offer the option of choosing a delivery time if they were going to BLINDLY IGNORE THAT REQUEST?

They asked for delivery instructions, in which I told them not to call or knock! Maybe they knocked on the door and woke up my husband. I didn't know, I was in the courtyard, but it was possible, and I DID know they called me when I asked them not to!

My gift card wouldn't load properly onto the food delivery app earlier in the day! 

The list of grievances was long. 

Granted, everyone in the country who could afford to do so was probably also using the food delivery service that Friday night, so they absolutely must have been slammed, but that was NOT MY PROBLEM because my food was supposed to come around 7:00 delivered by a pandemic-level hero to my goddamn door step because I worked hard all week. Me. 

As someone who has worked in many many jobs which would be considered Customer Service, I understand. I Get It. I should not have been upset that they delivered my food 51 minutes early. But I was. 

I'm only vaguely clear on why I was upset, but I am completely clear that it had something to do with control. That also sounds strange to say, seeing as how I haven't been this regimented, productive, or - frankly - calm (out of necessity), in a very long time. I think it's that last bit about "out of necessity" that's flaring up control issues, probably not just for me.

Eventually, I ventured out front to collect the food. It was delivered in a brown paper bag with a white 8.5" x 11" paper receipt stapled to the front. It was piping hot. I can't smell anything, but I'm positive it must have been fragrant. I set the unopened bag on the counter (I was far too invested in my fury to eat at that moment, and everyone else was still sleeping), and returned to fuming about the situation.

Here is where I began to slide into doing the bad thing.

I decided to contact the food delivery service's online help team, which you can only do via the online chat, and once connected with a representative, I explained the situation, made it very clear that I was displeased, and informed her that they should figure out why their "vendors" agree to allow customers to schedule deliveries if they don't actually intend to do that. 

Then I straight up I lied to her. I said the reason I asked for a 7:00 delivery time was because I wasn't home. I needed to know, is my food safe? Is it there sitting on my porch all by itself, or is it at the restaurant? After all, according to the app it hadn't even started being prepared, which makes sense because it was only 6:09 (That part was true.)

I literally let the customer service representative call the restaurant to ask them where my food was while she was chatting with me on the app, while I was looking at the bag of food I'd just placed on my kitchen counter. 

Then the restaurant lied to her and said my order wasn't ready, but would be on the way in another 35 to 40 minutes - did I still want the delivery, or did I want to cancel it? 

No joke, I got reverse-gas lit there. Which was actually fair, in hindsight.

Then the internet connection cut out and I lost my chat session with the customer service representative just as the restaurant called me directly. I would be lying if I didn't tell you I started to panic, but in for a penny...

...so I lied to them. Same lie, I wasn't even home yet. That's why I wanted the later delivery. In my hood? Who even knows if it'll still be on the steps when I get there? I mean, why the fuck do you think I ordered it with a two hour delay?

I had just doubled down on my bullshit - I absolutely was going to make a point, I just wasn't sure what point I was trying to make.

Now, the restaurant did NOT lie to me - they said sure, your food was delivered at 6:09, so I said I was going to ask the food delivery service for a refund because I wanted my delivery at 7:00 or after. 

You know, after I got "home."

That's when the restaurant person handed the phone to a different person who very clearly was the Restaurant Person In Charge, and that person informed me that they were happy to re-deliver my order around 7:00 but they absolutely would be retrieving my original delivery order and donating it to someone else. She didn't apologize for the error, but she strongly insinuated that I am an asshole.

"Of course!" I insisted to her, like I was some kind of philanthropic food delivery patron, and we hung up the phone. I re-donned my mask and returned the unopened bag of still hot food, careful to try and place it in exactly the same spot on my steps, receipt facing the same direction, so as to complete the ruse that I was not at home for any of the needless bullshit I'd created, and I went back to yard work and murder podcasts and waited for the replacement order.

I'm not sure where, or to whom, the food donation was made - but that response from the restaurant was the last thing I expected and probably the only way to make me feel a tiny bit less culpable for being an asshole. I literally called the restaurant back later and apologized, but either I spoke to someone who didn't know what happened, or they pretended like they didn't know what happened. I also gave a five star review online.

The fact remains that I've done a bad thing - my husband is currently furloughed from a different local restaurant, I literally know they cannot afford this type of nonsense, but I did it anyway (although I kind of thought the food delivery service would be the ones to take the hit, but I didn't even pay for the meal in the first place), and that's how I know I'm losing my fucking mind.

Muh Muh Muh Muh Muh Muh Muh My-Corona

This feels super awkward, but also super necessary, so here we are.

I MIGHT BE BACK.

After YEARS of silence from me, with almost no audience left (although blogs in general have lost most readers at this point), I'm hopping *right the fuck* back on the band wagon. 

I'm not even sure there is a wagon at this point (nor a band, if we're being honest), it's just that I've just heard several of my blog friends discuss whether or not they want to get back into the blogging game. 

You know, because of the world. wide. pandemic. and all.

I haven't logged into this account for a very long time, and now I see 91 draft posts. 

NINETY ONE POSTS I DID NOT DEEM WORTHY OF POSTING AT THE TIME I WROTE THEM.

That blows my mind, having spent the last five years fretting that I'd never have enough words to fill up even one single post. Also, at the time I wrote them, there was no world wide pandemic. Yet, write I did. 

So here's the thing - I've lost the flow, I've lost the dedication, I've lost the confidence. But I have NOT lost the ability to type. At least not yet, I haven't. 

And probably the most wonderful thing of all? Realizing the number of BLOG FRIENDS I'm still in touch with. It bonds some people together, and it lets me scream into the void without tons of void flowing back, it expands my dumb little world to corners of the world I'll likely never witness, and it makes a family of virtual strangers. 

I might be back. I'm pretty sure I'm back. 

Could be worse...could be a spider

I read somewhere that forcing yourself to smile can actually lift your mood, so I find myself smiling at random times – like right now sitting at my desk, for example, or when I’m sitting at a red light on Euclid Ave that has decided it won’t ever change to green – and the forced smile feels a lot like the one Sheldon Cooper wears when he’s been told it’s necessary for him to fulfill a social obligation that he completely disdains: false and creepy.

I’m not an incredibly social person to begin with. I have a few friends in Minnesota that I text every so often, hang out with even less frequently, and - when the situation is absolutely unavoidable – whom I call on the phone. Back home, I was used to talking to co-workers, living with Daylow, my animals and some tenants. Sometimes I’d chat with the neighbors, and by “sometimes,” I mean when I accidentally made eye contact on my way from the car to the back door. That was the extent of my wild social calendar.

So it’s amazing that out here in SoCal, living in a house with 5 other people, working with the same number of friendly co-workers, and seeing my MN friends with roughly the same frequency (which is and was almost never), I feel so much more alone. 

Down the road from my former office building in Minnesota, there was a small sheep farm. Every day during the spring and early summer, the lambs and sheep would rotate from one quadrant of the farm to another, presumably for grazing purposes, and they all looked just the same. Just a giant family of sheep, except there was this one llama amongst them. One lone, super tall llama, just grazing and looking around at the sheep thinking, “Where the hell am I?” 

Right now, I am that llama. 

And suddenly, I want to run back to that field in Minnesota and grab that llama by its giant neck and hug him and tell him that he’s a super tall sheep. Or maybe I’d tell him that his llama friends back home send their love, but really he should be happy here with the sheep because they get to graze in a very geometric pattern every day and isn’t that wonderful? I’ll tell him that there is a reason he’s there with the sheep, and eventually he’ll learn to love the sheep and he’ll feel like he belongs with them. 

But it might take a while and it won’t be easy. And I’ll tell him to smile even if it feels fake.

New strategies

So my new psychiatrist wears Crocs. Blue ones.

I'm pretty sure that's an important detail, but I have yet to decide what that means.

It seems that many of my past mental health professionals rocked questionable footwear. I wonder if that's something they learn in Crazy School. It might be a way to distract the patient from their $200 an hour rate.

He also stands the entire session. Right next to a giant, comfortable, reclining lounge chair in faux suede. At first, I felt like it was an interrogation method designed to keep me talking, but then I realized he's not a therapist so the questions were more medical than psychological, so then I was just confused all together.Why wouldn't he want to recline? I wanted to recline. The couch was ok, but it was covered by a blanket the same way I cover my dog-eaten couches with blankets when company comes over.

Somewhere between asking about my erratic behavior and my hospitalization, he blurted that he suffers from chronic back pain which is triggered by sitting for long periods of time, which explained the standing thing but did NOT explain why he wasted money on a perfectly comfortable recliner if he was just going to pace around the whole hour.

I've found that shrinks prefer when I avoid personal questions about their footwear and their personal choices, so I just nodded my approval of his vertical lifestyle.

He declared that I've been misdiagnosed for years. Apparently I don't suffer from depression, which kind of explains why my antidepressants don't really work very well.

Instead, he believes I'm bipolar, and have been misdiagnosed in the past because my manic phases are very short compared to textbook bipolar patients. The treatment for bipolar disorder (also called manic depression) is an entirely different class of drugs which are considered mood stabilizers, and which are supposed to level out both the lows and the highs, versus just fighting against the lows.

This sometimes manic diagnosis might explain why I decided to rip of the bathroom floor tile in 2011 and, by the next day, decided that floor rugs would be a perfect substitution for actual flooring. Laying in bed and ordering Chinese delivery for six months seemed like a much better use of my time and resources.

He also gave me something for anxiety, but that seems only to make me sleepy like an antihistamine, so I'm not sure if that particular option is going to work out. I've got a med check coming up in three weeks, so we'll have to discuss other options (XANAX) at that time.

Meanwhile, I'm getting closer to moving out of the weird All-Man household and into the new place. Just 12 days until I've got hardwood floors (which will make me feel more at home because my MN house is all hardwood floors), a big back yard with a garden (which will make me feel more at home because I have a big garden in MN), and cohabitors who WEAR SHIRTS (which is not true of my MN house, but it's different when the shirtless person also sleeps in your bed).

 So things are looking up at the moment. Hopefully this means I'll soon be blogging about Happy Things and Funny Things instead of just Crazy Things.

For example, I saw a chicken at a garage sale.

My anxiety is so bad, ya'll

I'm trying to keep busy. I really am.

I've noticed that the days when I have made plans to meet an actual human being are the days when I feel the most calm.

So Friday I met a co-worker for a cocktail while I waited for a girl date with a woman I met on Craigslist, who is also looking for friends in the area. It was a fun hang, and the bartenders were interesting. One of the servers is actually from Thief River Falls, MN which I've heard of, but am not sure why. Everyone was worried about me meeting a stranger from Craigslist and were pretty sure I was going to end up dead in a gutter or missing my kidneys, but I assured them I'd watched Craigslist Joe the night before, so I knew how to survive. And maybe even get a movie deal out of it.

Then I met the woman - we'll call her Sunny - and we had another beer (well, she just had 1/2 a beer, but I'll forgive her because she was too beautiful to judge) and some gastropub food, and we talked about how we ended up in So Cal. She's from NYC and has been here two and a half years, but met her serious boyfriend early into that stint, and therefore has neglected her female social circle. I'm hoping we hang out again sometime. Preferably after I'm medicated again.

I wasn't ready to go home after she left, so the co-worker was kind enough to come back and we watched a bunch of drunk people bounce around on the dance floor. I also met a gaggle of gay men who were very very young, very very pretty, and very very drunk. One of them looked exactly like Neil Patrick Harris (minus 20 years). I got a couple of their numbers, but am quite sure that A) they don't remember me and B) they are too young to provide a satisfying hang should I even get the chance to try. The servers were all very glad to see that I'd survived my incredibly dangerous encounter with a mid-twenties IT professional. I just shrugged and flexed my biceps to show them how I'd managed it.

We walked to a couple more bars, but it was late enough that everyone was obnoxious instead of charming. I was interested to see a taco stand outside the back door of one bar - good idea for selling 2 a.m. tacos to people trying to sober up enough to drive. The co-worker bough some food, and while he was in line, I ended up talking to some other very young, stoned surfer types.

It's universally true that Californians believe their state is superior. Everyone insists I will never want to leave now that I'm here. Which is funny because there hasn't been a moment in the last month that I haven't wanted to run screaming back to Minnesota. The only things holding me back are the rent I've already paid for August and September, the psychic reading that told me I'd feel this way for the first two months, and the fact that I haven't eaten at In N Out yet.

Oh, and August in MN means that it's almost September, which may as well be December for all the summer that's left.

I was telling the stoned surfers that I've been attending some outings with groups I found on Meetup.com and one of them was all, "Dude, my mom totally loves that website. All her friends are from there." I think he meant to convey that Meetup.com is really awesome for some people, but what he actually conveyed was that I'm a hell of a lot older than him. I'm in the category of women he associates with his mother.

Yesterday I woke up with a hangover-style headache which was weird because I wasn't drunk at any point the night before, but I rolled with it and slept most of the day. Then I started another marathon of The United States of Tara on Netflix, a show about psychiatric disorders which helps me to feel a little less crazy. I also decided to treat myself to lunch and a movie, but none of the movies looked good, so I wasted several dollars in the book store instead. I looked for books about dealing with anxiety, but those invariably make me want to murder small children. I don't want to meditate when I'm focusing on keeping my stomach away from my tonsils.

Today I met an acquaintance for lunch and hated every second of it. I'm not sure if it's the guy I don't like, or the fact that my stomach has become permanently lodged in my throat and is a signal that I might freak the fuck out and enter Full Blown Panic mode at any moment. Outside the restaurant, a large group of flamboyantly dressed Latin folks congregated, and we eventually learned that it's some kind of holiday in Bolivia today. They were preparing to parade around the outdoor outlet mall. I've never seen so many long braids in one place, and I kind of wanted to cut one off and take it with me. I'm going to avoid introspection about that desire. I think that's for the best.

Finally I remembered that a friend recommended vitamin B6 for anxiety, so I ran to the world's most Hispanic-packed Wal-Mart and bought some. Hopefully it will tide me over until my psychiatrist appointment on Friday, because for a few minutes today, I found myself wondering if I was going to end up in the hospital again.

Then Scary ate one of the ear pieces on my ear buds and I spent ten minutes trying to fish the cheese grater looking piece out of her mouth.

So aside from the crippling anxiety, it was a pretty good weekend.

Home sweet nope

Because I didn't want to live with my dad and stepmother upon my arrival to California, I arranged my living situation while I was still in Minnesota. 

This means that I moved into a house in Orange County, sight unseen. A house, I later learned from almost everyone I've talked to, is in a Bad City. Dangerous City. City full of Asians, Hispanics, and doughnut shops. Those three things alone don't seem bad - Shakopee, MN is like the Little Mexico of the Midwest. But apparently the area is still up and coming, so it's shady to be walking around after dark. 

The stop sign in front of the place is tagged with graffiti, front and back.

But I've got pepper spray and a seriously dangerous tongue. So that doesn't bother me much. Really, the problem is that it's a house with four men.

Four. Men.

Having lived in a house with four adults for a couple of years, I figured it would be a cinch. But I forgot that either the man/woman ratio has been even, or there has been an abundance of vaginas in every case. 

Did ya'll know that men are weird?

There’s Mr. Hispanic, the retired guy. He’s going to school to get re-certified in automotive smog testing and state certification. That’s something new to me – Either Minnesota doesn’t give a fuck about having clean air, or California’s air is just *that* much worse. Or the broke government in CA just wants additional revenue from drivers getting smog certification testing. Mr. Hispanic walks around shirtless all day long, but is never without a blue tooth in his ear. He just took in two teacup chihuahuas, and he spends most of his time trying to get them to poop outside.

Then there’s the nameless black guy. I say that because no one in the house knows his name. Literally no one. I introduced myself once when we met in the hallway, and he turned around, went into his bedroom and shut the door. He has tall hair and makes frequent, righteously indignant phone calls while pacing the property.

There’s also John, the uber religious guy who works two jobs and goes to school and also, at some point, was an aspiring model. Or is one, I'm not sure. I just know I saw his head shots and he could totally be a model. Tall with eyelashes nearly as tall as he is. He’s the one who contacted me about the room being available. The landlady was going to try to find a disabled tenant, and John felt this would make the living situation awkward. Or something, I wasn't really listening after I saw his pictures.

The fourth guy was originally thin white kid (also didn't catch his name), but he moved out (and - we think - in with a maybe pregnant girlfriend), so then Mr. Hispanic's also-Hispanic brother moved in. The brother is very nice, but is painfully shy – the other day, I was walking into the garage and he was walking towards the bathroom. Startled to see me, he apologized (for existing?) and practically ran back the way he’d come. 

Then there’s Filipino the landlady. She lives in the home. Kind of. I’ve never met her. I guess she does in-home health care and is rarely at her own house, so Mr. Hispanic is kind of in charge in her absence. 

Actually, I guess The Rules are in charge. 

There are pieces of paper posted to the walls in nearly every room of the house. Coming from my house in Minnesota – that I own – this has been quite a shock to the system. Also made me wonder why I never thought to post house rules in my own home, seeing as I have two tenants at any given time. 

Then again - aside from last year's Zebra Cakes tenant, I’ve never run into problems.

But the landlady is very serious about her rules, some of which are such basic courtesy that it makes me scared to live here. My favorite is that you must spray air freshener after using the bathroom. She says there are 4 scents to choose from, but you'll notice that the note was dated May 2012, so now we're down to only 1. 

Actually, I bought one scent myself but it mysteriously disappeared around the time when think white kid moved out. I'm guessing he needed it to mask the smell of his pregnant girlfriend.

Between the penis and the rules, after owning my own place for so long, I'm really not feeling at home here, so after a little less than a month, I've decided I'm moving the fuck out.

I found another room nearby in a house with a young couple, their two daughters, and another female tenant. It feels more like home than this place, and it's a little cheaper. Scary hates it there because they have three other EXTREMELY hyper dogs, however Scary is old and does nothing but lay around in my bedroom. I'm sure I can run interference if necessary.

If not? 

Well, I can always move again.

It's been a few minutes and a few hundred miles

When last we spoke, I was pacing my living room in Shakopee, Minnesota, filled with righteous indignation and full blow panic over my doctor's refusal to refill a medication that was supposed to keep me calm.

Right now, I'm laying in a stranger's bed in my rented room in a primarily Asian neighborhood of Santa Ana, California, riding out the (hopefully) last few days of an ear infection, and the only medication I'm on is Amoxicillin.

It's been a weird month wherein I accepted a transfer to my employer's So Cal office, purposefully went off my medication, packed myself and Scary up and moved to California. My step-grandmother just died, Daylow is desperate for me to come back to Minnesota, and I've been sick for a week with no hearing in my left ear. 

I feel incredibly out of place here, but I'm sure that will pass given longer than a couple weeks. I'm hoping this move will kick the winter SAD right in the ass, but for the time being, I'm alone and lonely. I'm hoping the change of scenery will inspire me to be healthier and happier, but for now I'm just sick. I'm hoping I'll make new friends and meet new people, and that is starting to happen - and will likely continue - after I feel better and start going to meetup groups again. I'm hoping I'll start writing again, but at the moment this feels very forced and fake.

But you have to start somewhere, huh? Any where better to start than a zip code in Orange County.

Ironically, the cable here doesn't include Bravo, so I can't watch The Real Housewives of the OC.