around and around we go

I've always known that my life was one big merry-go-round, situations just keep getting recycled. I've tried to be dynamic and make changes, but I just seem to end up in the same place again and again. I have a job, it is the same job with the same company that I had when I moved back to Seattle in 2005, except a different physical location. My boss is one of my former coworkers, and the big boss is my former supervisor. It is in the same building I worked in with the shit-ass company that let me go in December while I was struggling with my health, so I will likely run into people from the company at some point. Definitely in a two steps back part of the old adage.

today is a day

Here I am and I am here, having mostly recovered from an illness that has upended almost every aspect of my life. I am middle aged, unemployed, and generally feeling pretty down about life. I'm told this can be turned into a positive because I have the opportunity to start again, like rising from the ashes or something equally trite.

boo-hi

I never forgot about this thing. I guess it's my yearly pilgrimage to remind myself that I'm still here and as irrelevant as ever.

march of the middle aged

So here we are, more than half way through 2016 and most likely my life cycle. What have I done in the last two years since my last post. Nothing of substance. I am in a holding pattern of nothingness. I haven't done anything. I don't do anything. The few things I have tried have gone into the nothing abyss. If I weren't so dead inside, it would be depressing.

making lemonade out of lizlemons

I've been re-watching 30 Rock recently. Objectively speaking, I could be Liz Lemon. Except for the exercise and size 4 jeans. And the hilarity. I've been thinking that I should find a mentor, I need a Jack. I suppose there might already be a person or two who could fill that roll. I could take my neighbor lady's advice or perhaps start aping her behaviors. I half believe that she does what she does because it's fun and not to fill some empty chasm in her soul. I could take on a co-worker mentor. But then I think how drunk I have to get in order to be around the majority of them. Certainly it could not be a family member. Is there a mentor program out there for single & kinda lonely, teetering on the precipice of middle-aged women?

we aren’t the world

We Aren’t the World

shower power

At some point, the life I had lauded on this very blog lost its charm...probably about two years ago. I starting mentally calling bullshit on the community I had wrapped myself in like a warm and fuzzy sweater. Things just started feeling like this vaguely pretentious, privileged, almost entirely white, middle class, self-involved, passive-aggressive dystopia. And within that group, I had become this court jester; invited along to shuck and jive, be funny & crazy & outlandish & over the top enough that it probably made people feel better about their choices...that brilliant moment of "damn, at least I didn't take it that far." I really started to feel like the lone little boy who noticed the nakedness of the emperor, despite everybody else's conviction that he was in the finest garments EVER. So I bowed out. I think I did it as gracefully as I am personally capable of, most likely not... In the process I lost a few people who I didn't think I would lose. And that makes me sad. Friendships ended. Feelings hurt. Opportunities lost. Bridges burned, without even the memory of tossing the Molotov to have made it so. Probably the most deleterious side effect of all of this is that I also lost a great deal of my ability to relate to people. And to keep my mouth shut. Although, frankly, that one has always been a problem. I just spent a week doing a work thing, and by the end of it I didn't really like myself very much. I don't feel like a good person; I spend a fair amount of time in the douche-zone.