Thursday, April 30, 2009

I probably shouldn't be writing this...

But I am feeling heartbroken. Every time I play with kids or hear about someone having a baby or being pregnant, I am filled with the heartfelt desire to join the ranks of motherhood. And even though I'm TTC right now, there is an emotional toll on my body and spirit as I have negative pregnancy test after negative pregnancy test. I worry I won't ever be able to experience being pregnant. Even if that is the case, I WILL be a mother. No matter how long or what it takes, I know I will have an addition (or more) to my family. Still, it is hard. Almost every day, I feel left out. I am praying for strength and guidance.

And my heart breaks when I hear stories or witness a child being mistreated. Yesterday, what I witnessed in line for 31 cent ice cream at Baskin Robbins wasn't criminal but still heart-wrenching. Children are precious! For those of you who are fortunate enough to be parents, cherish your children!

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Gots to get paid!

I just filed for unemployment. I feel all dirty now.

I don't know why... I guess I just feel like it means I've failed at life or something. I'm still looking for a job. I'm still applying for jobs. But I haven't heard anything back about any of them. So I keep looking, and at the same time, I try not to worry.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

My life is fairly boring

I just realized I haven't written for a week. I just don't have much of anything interesting to write about.

I have applied for several different jobs. No responses whatsoever. The only people who have contacted me about jobs are those offering sales/commission jobs. No thank you!

But I keep looking and waiting. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying spending time with friends and Joe and watching TV and reading. I am keeping busy, more or less.

And I am getting random occasional surges of motivation to lose weight, eat healthy, or do some intense cleaning. When I feel that way, I run with it. Friday, I walked about 7.5 miles. Yesterday, Joe and I did a lot of yard work together. And I also shredded several years worth of pay stubs and other mail that Joe had accumulated. I found some interesting pieces of mail, including a trust check for over $300 from 2003. It, like much of his mail, had never been opened. I also found the graduation announcement for my masters program unopened.

I knew he was a bit of a pack rat when I married him, but I didn't know the full extent of it. Tsk, tsk.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Joe got arrested!!!

Luckily, Joe is making enough money that we aren't freaking out too much with me having lost my job. After all, this whole year, I haven't worked a whole lot anyway. But we're still able to pay the bills. Things are just tighter than usual. However, last night we were able to go out to dinner. And it was for a good cause.

When Joe got home from his army training, we headed to Red Robin to eat. There were several police cars outside, one with flashing lights. As we walked toward the restaurant, we were greeted by a police officer who handed us an envelope we could use to make a donation to Special Olympics. The cops also had a booth set up outside the restaurant where they were selling shirts and other various items to raise money for the Special Olympics.

Right after getting inside, Joe was greeted by one of his friends who happens to be a police officer for the city. They served in Iraq together, and Joe has seen his friend around town several times while his friend was on duty. In fact, a while back, Joe even did a ride-along with his friend, which fell on quite the adventurous shift.

When Joe ran into his friend, his friend and a couple other officers were escorting out two smiling kids by handcuff, announcing they had captured the bad guys. Joe's friend said hello and said, "Oh, we're coming for this one later!"

So as we sat down to eat, another couple at a table near us was cuffed and paraded around the restaurant and out to the cop car. Then Joe was picked up for "impersonating a security guard." His picture was taken by the car with his friend (I'd post it but it was not high quality film used and the picture didn't turn out very well). Then he was released and came back to the table to eat.

It was quite an interesting date, and we were happy to spend a little money for such a good cause.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Casper, the extra-friendly ghost!

I just wrote and then deleted two blog entries on two different subjects instead of posting them. Why? Because they were terribly boring Debra-did-this, Debra-did-that. So you don't have to wonder why you wasted your time reading as much of the blog as you did before deleting it, I started over. You're welcome.

Instead, I decided to present the Ghost Sex Story (which I alluded to in a previous post). But a little background first.

I used to work at a cubicle next to someone from a small town in New Mexico. His mother still lived in that small town, and for kicks, she would send him links to their newspaper's online crime blotter. Sometimes reading those stories was downright funny and entertaining. I felt bad that some of the things going on were things the police actually had to deal with as part of their job duties.

And now where I live, I feel like I must live in a place that has some small-town feel. I get a paper delivered to our house 2 times a week. Reading the police crime blotter can be quite entertaining. Joe and I (or at least our house) were referred to in the paper twice, once in the crime blotter and once as a separate article (both dealing with theft/attempted theft).

But as I perused the paper at the end of the year, an article caught my eye. It was about the top stories of Federal Way in 2008. And one of the section headings caught my eye. So here it is, unedited, from the Federal Way Mirror, without further ado:

Ghost Sex (April 19)
The following is a sample from the Federal Way police public information log:
At 4:02 p.m. April 10, two women went into the Federal Way police station claiming that over the past two years, a paranormal person has been placing sensors on their bodies and visiting them in their house at 28600 block of 25th Place South.
They said that the ghost has been having sexual intercourse with them. One woman said that these incidents started in Kent and continued when she moved here. The other woman said that this just started now.

Reading stories like that make me miss my job working with adults with serious mental illnesses. I heard some great stories then, but usually there wasn't a second person to give merit to the tale.

I wonder if the ghost prefers a certain sexual position. I wonder if the ghost engages in foreplay. I wonder if the ghost makes any faces or noises. And I wonder if the ghost does house calls.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Taco, burrito, what's coming out of that speedo?

I am a picky eater. I used to be a lot pickier. I didn't like mushrooms or strawberries because of their texture. I like both quite a bit now (because of their taste). I threw up once at an amusement park after my parents forced me to eat a lunchmeat sandwich that had mustard on the bread (at least I warned them that I would puke if they made me eat it).

My pickiness often didn't jive with my mother's cooking and my father's strictness. I remember being stuck at the dinner table one time when I was quite young, sitting with gristle in my mouth because chewing it wasn't doing the job, and I wasn't allowed to get down until it was gone. Someone asked me what I was doing, and I told them I was waiting for it to dissolve.

Other times, it wasn't that I couldn't chew or stomach what I was being forced to eat, but it was about the quantity. My eyes were often bigger than my stomach. I would come home from school to soggy cereal my mother had so kindly saved for me to finish because I couldn't in the morning.

Oh, we had tricks to get away from being stuck at the table. There was the food-in-the-napkin trick, which we sometimes could get away with but didn't count on. Or we would save some of our milk and spit our broccoli into the milk, hoping it wouldn't be noticed. I was apparently the most creative in my family. I hid my food in different locations. A portion of a hamburger was found behind our organ. I think I pulled that one off more than once, though. Food was flushed down toilets (yes, the I-have-to-go-to-the-bathroom excuse worked for me). And one time, I guess I was worried about the food clogging the toilet, so I smashed the remnants of my taco underneath the bathroom rug.

I was a little hellion at times. I think when I have kids, I'll just let them lave their food behind. And maybe if we have lots of leftovers, I can make some interesting shakes or soup or even pea pancakes like I once had to eat for breakfast. That's more fun than trying to win at hide-and-seek with food.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Free at last, free at last...

I got fired yesterday. It's not like I didn't see it coming. But I just couldn't bring myself to go back to work. The thought of potentially having to clench my butt cheeks closed and hold that pose until finishing a conversation, just to high-tail it to the bathroom for a drive-by spraying held little appeal to me when I woke up yesterday. So call me crazy, but I called in sick.

So around 2 pm, my supervisor called me and announced that so-and-so from HR was on the line with him. That's when any doubt I might've had about the nature of the call was gone. He said that because I didn't return to work yesterday per our previously agreed upon terms (ha! but more on that later), they were going to have to let me go. It was a very short call.

And I felt relieved. I'll explain that more in a little bit, but first some background.

I've been sick with digestive problems (after having 2 colds in a row) for weeks. They're slowly improving. Very slowly. I started taking acidophilus capsules and I think they might be helping, but I don't know if it's that or just my body fighting whatever ails it. I've been in contact with my supervisor to let him know what's wrong. I didn't feel bad about missing work when he reassured me that there are some things that you just can't work while suffering from in my job title. I mean, my job was to speak to person after person after person on the phone, 30 minutes give or take at a time, for 8 hours. Maybe I'd get little breaks in between, but with the new cigarette tax laws going into effect April 1st, the company has been busier than ever.

I haven't been vomiting for a while, and the nausea I had seems to have gone away as well. No, I'm not pregnant. I just went to the doctor's office yesterday for a final test while I had insurance to pay for it, and they confirmed that. Anyway, I received a call on Tuesday from my supervisor. He said I had two options: resign or come back on April 2nd. Well, neither of those options really sat well with me. I told him I spent every day hoping I would get through the day well enough to return to work the following day, but I wasn't lucky enough to feel secure that I could get through the work day without incident. I told him I wanted to return the next day (April 1st) but didn't know if I would be able to. Well, the call ended up with him saying he'd see me on the 2nd, and me wondering if he would.

Obviously, he didn't.

But yesterday, as I was perusing through my Facebook profile, I realized just how many times I'd been sick in the past several months. I realized how stressed I had really become because of my job. And I realized just how much I'd hated it. It hadn't been happening since January, like I'd previously thought. I had been having issues way before then.

It's not like the job is especially difficult. However, you do have to find out what it is that a supervisor wants you to say and do in each call, which can often be quite subjective, even though they say it's not. And then you have to form your calls around what you think someone wants you to say as the call continues versus what you really want to say or think might really help someone quit smoking. For me, being a trained therapist who knows there are many more counseling techniques than just motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, to say I could only draw from these kinds of things was frustrating to say the least.

I was out of my element in that job. I was overqualified. I was unmotivated and unchallenged (honestly), which created a lot of frustration. I found myself time and time again suffering from deja vu. And I often had to stop myself and think: 'Did I already go over this with this person, or was that the last person I was talking to?' That's how repetitive my day was.

So I'm glad to be gone. I went into my home office and pulled out all things associated with my job. I put several inches worth of paper into our recycling bin yesterday, and I shredded several more pieces of paper with personal information on it from the job. I haven't thrown away everything just yet, either. For the time being, I kept my medical insurance information and HR information. I'm not sure why, but I think I might look over it, and maybe I'll know why I saved it or I can get rid of it then.

The funny thing about all this is how free and calm and unstressed I felt after getting fired yesterday. My mind cleared up and I knew what to do next, things I hadn't thought about before. I went to my doctor's office to order refills on my prescriptions while I still had insurance. I cancelled the phone line I'd had to dedicate to work. I sent out some emails and made some calls. And today, I feel great. No upset stomach. No acid reflux. No stomach cramps. No diarrhea. I am free.