sorry, before you start reading, this is a long, emotional, rambling bit where I have been staying awake in emotional distress for so long I just...have to open a valve and let it out somewhere... so if you actually feel like reading it...i'm sorry...

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thats pretty much it... I've been in a shitty situation for about the last three and a half years... and its just...gradually gotten worse... but because it was with my own family i just kept telling myself it would get better... I even let go of several perfect chances to change it all (moving the hell away from here)... and yknow whats sad? Now i'm pretty much helpless... because of certain family issues my credit is screwed up... I owe the IRS money... and of course now my car is busted and I'm on foot (and have been for two months)... i'm stranded, stuck at home where I am lucky to have internet, but i dont have anything else... i'm lucky enough to have a few friends that pretty much moved in with me (but can barely provide for themselves...) and now i'm without reliable income unless my folks want me to work at their office...

and yknow whats sad...its ALL BECAUSE IM A BITCH >.> no, I dont mean bitch in the sense that i'm annoying and obnoxious and snotty... i mean because i'm a pushover... I was raised to always believe in my parents and trust them completely... sad thing is that its where many of my problems have come from... lets go down the list shall we? bear in mind since I was 15 I worked for them at the office, did their computer systems and kept up their records... for almost 10 solid years...

screwed up credit? well I lived in town in my own apartment for a while. but my mom begged me to move in with my grandmother after her house burned (to keep an eye on her), she offered to pay my living expenses there and to pay any fees to cancel my lease... after two years I ended up filing a contest against my lease at that apartment to get my credit fixed... while I lived with my grandma various things came up... I lived in a tiny two room domicile made into the garage... the wiring blew, frying my TV, half of my computers, my surround sound system, and some other shit i cannot recall...the water didn't work for two months... and after a year the water heater literally burst and flooded the back room, and ruined a lot of stuff that was in there too... my grandmother had me get a satellite system in my name, then the damn bill got neglected several times... and then we ended up clearing out and cancelling the contract which got me for even more money (by that time I was dirt poor and couldnt afford to pay that bill...)

to that end... when I had been doing decent I looked for my own house... turned out I wasn't doing decent enough and couldn't get a loan, so my mom buys a trailer house and puts it next door to her (a kind deed in and of itself, sure...but wait, she bombs) then tries to strongarm me into signing a "lease contract" agreeing to live there by myself for almost a 25% again what the house was worth, and to never have company late at night, and to only "come and go at reasonable hours"... and this contract said i could allow her to use space for storage, but if i didn't i'd have to pay 100 more a month... part of this conflict came because I had planned on two people living with me, one of which she assumed was my boyfriend (and she refuses to accept that I'm gay...) but after overcoming that hurdle I thought it was over... me and my 'boyfriend' try to cover food...electric...house...our cars... phone... we struggled, but things worked out decent... then came some restructuring at the office, the economy got poor, and suddenly it was "i dont have the money to pay you...can you wait?" completely trusting my family, I agreed... and well...lets just put it this way... i technically stopped working for them in october, but the last time i was paid was august (as in, almost three months) sure, she started paying for the car payment and not asking for rent... that was less than HALF of what I should have been paid in that time... the 'boyfriend' and the other guy at home paid for groceries, but now there wasn't money for the phone bill... (another debt for me, yay---) and when i demanded money to pay the phone bill, I was treated with contempt for asking for "money that isn't there"... I should have gotten a new job at that point, but I was a fool... I thought things would get better... I didn't go to work and finally started working on things, i ended up on unemployment for a few months, refusing to work where i was being treated like shit for what amounted to a gross amount BELOW minimum wage, i ended up with a weekend job at the local racetrack, but now unemployment was gone and the 'boyfriend' was moving away to be near his REAL boyfriend (love you hon, both of you)... so here I am now... folks asked me to come back and do shop labor for them, so now they are wanting me to get up at 6 in the morning, go to work until 5 (or whenever someone eventually decides to take me home) and i'm supposed to work for less than minimum wage... yeah, any work is good, especially if you'll get paid for it... well, i worked and started getting treated like complete shit (it takes a lot to make me pick up a two by four and use it as a baseball bat out of rage), not to mention if i get asked by them to do something like drive across town, or go do somethign else, they want me to clock out, or clock only a portion of that time... oh by the way, the shop is not climate controlled... so its a hundred degrees, high humidity, no relief, and i get griped at for "taking too many breaks" to wipe the sweat out of my eyes, or to stretch my back for less than one minute (heavy lifting, or prolonged moderate lifting, can cause me a lot of back pain, and i've told them repeatedly)...also note that the other employees dont get that kind of flak for going into the break room (which has A/C) and sitting there for about 5 minutes at a time, or longer... when I complain about being treated like shit and being yelled at, guess what happens... yeah, I get yelled at back because "you're gonna need money for your bills... and I'm not going to give it to you"... I could get more money, on time, without being treated like a worthless piece of SHIT, working at fucking WAL MART (being treated like a worthless peon is better than worthless shit, i've known about a dozen people to work at our wal mart) but whaddaya know, I fail the exam... i haven't gotten calls from McDondalds... and i've asked my folks to help me get into the local tyson plant (great uncle has pull there) but nadda...

oh, to explain the IRS thing... we all had a friend of ours do our taxes for years... then my aunt and her boyfriend get licensed to do them...they offer, and like a fool i agreed when mom and dad said "let her do them...she said she wont charge as much" well, i never was tax-savvy (another foolish thing on my part) and so I didn't notice anything wrong when they were filed...but apparently an auditer did... and we tried to contest it, but after being treated like shit by the IRS for almost a year, they concluded that I owed them about five grand... and because i hadn't paid it in the previous year I owed them more (they say you can contest it, but guess what, they're gonna charge you to do it, go figure) i've not exactly had enough to pay it off since then, so i haven't gotten a return in the last few years... i think its almost paid off, but you'd be surprised how much interest those fuckers tack on each year >.< but i can't afford to pay it, all i do is let them keep (let them keep...hah...thats a joke) my return each year... about 1500 down, but interest is like half that... Well, it wasn't my fault, my tax filer screwed up right? five thouusand dollars and a little "comfort care" later, she's dead >.< a very shitty thing too, I mean, I really was tore up over it, but still, her gone, nobody to take the blame...shoulda filed something anyway, but i didn't have the heart and being the bitch i am, I listened when mom said "you should just give up and let them take your money, you can't win"

and my car? well, about six months ago the suspension was starting to get wonkey... we took it in and the shop suggested about 900 bucks worth of work (they said one set of parts were bad, mos of it was labor)... I didn't have that, and the car wasn't going to fall apart going down the highway...so i just drove it as was...tried to cut back on my travel, which was fine. Well, in the time i've had my car, my folks have borrowed it a fair share because its got gas mileage and plenty of room, so when they go on trips they borrow it, in fact my dad helped me choose the mazda5 because of that reason and it would be "good for the family to have access to something like that" (dont get me wrong, i love my car... but for the same cost i could have gotten a miata or something a little sportier or even something with BETTER mileage, like a focus). it had gotten pretty bad and my dad said he wanted to borrow it to go see grandpa, so he said "its gonna be a few weeks, so lets go ahead and get the parts to fix it now... we'll pay for the parts, after all we've used it so much (my dad is good, sometimes, he actually liked my 'boyfriend' because he could see how happy i was around him, and he understands the frustration i go through constantly...though there was the time he tried to get me to get a immigrant wife because he thought having somewhat of a concubine would 'straighten me out'...i'm serious, he actually was to the point where he could just say the word and she'd be on my doorstep within a week >.< anyway, the car!) so, he helped me tear the frontend apart the week before Anthrocon (i'd planned on going in the car, fixed or not) we bought new parts, and the damn things took a whole week to get in. I picked them up, and when we went to put it all back together we figured out that there was a lot more wrong now (so far its almost five hundred dollars worth of parts, at my cousin's employee cost at the Ford place), so i ended up taking a bus to AC and because of more of my family's inadvertant meddling, I didn't really have the money to take care of some obligations at the convention, let alone the bus ticket home... I stayed with my 'boyfriend' at his place and tried to think about how i was gonna get home (we'd thought about him buying me a ticket, but he had some medical bills that came due)...well, some things came up back home and mom insisted i come back immediately, so she agreed to pay for my ticket home... then threatened to kick me out when I got back... >.< i punched a wall and to be honest at a month later my hand is still fucked up I can't clench certain things and certain movements still hurt... then she convinced my older brother that the only reason I ran off was because I knew someone would bail me out (nevermind that 'bailing me out' was already planned by my companion, and that at that exact point in time, I honestly didn't care if i made it 'home' because I was happy where I was...sorry, i'm on another segway) anywho... so dad asked mom for the money to fix the car so he could use it... and she refused... and since my car couldn't be reassembled at this point (trust me, dad and I tried for 6 hours... those broken parts just dont go back together once they are taken out...being on the car was the only thing holding them) I couldn't drive it... and because of a lack of income worth a damn, I haven't been able to afford new parts...i dont have transportation to get to another job if I manage to get one (let alone to go file applications at further away places)...heck I have to ask my friend, that doesn't even live out here, to take me to town on occasion...

so my situation right now... I make less in a month than your average SSI/disability/unemployment drawing american... my credit is atrocious... I'm paying for a car I can't even drive...i am consuming on a daily basis, one to two meals a day, consisting of water or on occasion cheap juice, and whatever is the cheapest thing to eat for two people, usually a totinos pizza (1.25 at wal mart, paid for with whatever change we can pull from the couch cushions) or a package of ramen... only reason we have internet is because of a local provider that has it cheap, and one of my friend's mom pays for it, for his sake...

and this is just a portion of the shit my family has put me through... nevermind the kind of shit i had to go through since I realized I was gay... yknow, I begged my mom to send me to a counselor when i was younger...about 16-18 i can't remember exactly...I begged her, and she told me I just needed to ask God for help...so I did (and yknow it did help...friends helped too)... well, when she figured out I was gay she wanted to send me to a shrink... >.< after I come to terms with some of my problems she decides that sense of peace is the problem... one day i should just ask her to imagine how it felt to think my little brother died because I'm gay...

and its all my own fucking fault because I couldn't do what I knew would make me happy cuz I felt like i'd be abandoning my family... and THAT IS WHY I'M A PATHETIC, MISERABLE FOOL... that, friends...is why if you've talked to me in the last little while, i've seemed a mite estranged or despondant...sometimes i'm good at covering it up, sometimes not, and sometimes I just find some solace in your company...