Diary of the Aruetiise

There are so many options in life. I’ve learned, though, that as I get older I have fewer and fewer of them. It’s like… when you’re 18, fresh outta high school, you could do anything you wanted. Go to college… go to work… enlist… live at home and stay unemployed… etc. More and more, though, it’s like once you graduate there this HUGE pressure which states that if you don’t immediately go to college and get a degree, you fucking suck. That’s kinda the boat I’m in, and it kinda sucks. Nobody wants to hire me because I’m lacking in college education. I do get tuition reimbursement from my current job, but there’s two immense problems here:

-The very concept of reimbursement is flawed: I’ve got to have the money before I can spend it for them to pay me back.
-Working a full-time job, I can only take one or two classes per semester. A BS will take me probably 12 years to accomplish. Fucking sweet.

So, I’m in this job with nowhere else to go. I’m begging them to get me some certifications, which should help my situation. At this point, all I can think to do is keep collecting certifications from this job until someone else will hire me.

There is, of course, another alternative…

… I could always enlist. If I were to do it, I’d join the Navy. I took a practice ASVAB yesterday…  that’s a basic entrance/aptitude test you’ve got to take before enlisting in any branch of the military… and I scored amazingly well on it. My mechanical skills and higher mathematics could use some work, but aside from that I did very well. There are a lot of perks and benefits to joining, which I’m not going to delve into here for fear of sounding like a recruiter, and they’re numerous enough for it to be truly tempting. Probably the biggest benefit is that it’ll get me outta here, and into something new. I think I’m a creature of change, I need new and different shit to keep me entertained/challenged. The downside, of course, is that it’s going to take me away from her.

I realize it’s not healthy to peg so much on one person’s existence, and that’s not only what this is. Part of it is that I am really starting to feel things coming together. I’m getting my financial shit handled, I’m not broke anymore, ever. As a happy result, I can afford to live somewhere other than my friend/co-worker’s spare bedroom. My beloved will be moving up here with me in a few months, into a house we hope to rent. I can finally look just a few months down the road, and feel truly happy about what I see. And I think if I enlisted now, it’d throw all of that into disarray. We’d figure something else out, sure. Assuming she’d stay with me, she’d (hopefully) move to wherever I get stationed, we’d have a place to live, money for food, blah blah blah… everything we need. Aside from the climate change, things would mostly stay the same save for one huge difference: I’d be gone. A lot. I don’t know that I could do that to her, to us. Once again, it’s got me feeling stuck.

Part of me thinks I should just forget about it. I mean, Navy careers can really work for some people. I see my brother, sisters, their spouses having had great careers in and as a result of the Navy… but, they’ve all been there for years. There’s a lot of bullshit between basic and where they are now. I think if I was single, had no friends, had no job, I might just do it. Thankfully, none of these things are factors. And that’s not me saying the the military is a last resort, meant only for losers. Not by a long-shot. I’m saying that I have someone who I really, truly care about here that I really don’t want to put through the lifestyle of being a military girlfriend/spouse/wife/whatever… it’s not fair. If she had known, going into this, that the Navy was something I wanted and still chose to get involved with me it might make a little more sense, but as that’s not the case, no dice.

Blah… too many thoughts at once.

In a few months, I’m gonna be in a house with someone I love very much. It’s gonna be tits, and I am choosing to just shut the hell up and be happy about it.

I’m back from Hawaii. It was probably the most amazing week of my whole life. That sounds pretty dramatic, I know, but it’s absolutely true. I got to know my sister and brother more than I have yet, and I feel like I’m closer to my girlfriend than I’ve ever been… this showed us that we could be together for long, extended periods of time and not only not kill each other, but grow that much more attached. Saying good-bye this morning when I dropped her off at the train station was terrible… we both cried, and it sucked. I’m not much of a crier, either.

At any rate, I’m stupidly tired and my internal clock is still completely fucked. With that, I’m off to bed.

The girlfriend and I are about to get on an airplane and head to Hawaii for a week. Yesterday was a miscommunication on both parts, and we’re over it.

Time for awesomeness

… had I actually said them:

“I’m not depressed.

I’m pissed off and hurt. There’s a difference.

When I talked to you earlier, all I wanted to do was reassure you. I was trying to tell you that no matter how much worrying you do, it wasn’t gonna take the classes or their responsibilities away. That there was nothing to worry about, because I have faith in you that you’ll pull through on what you need to. I was trying, in what apparently is a wholly unacceptable way, to support you.

Instead of talking any of that out, or listening to one word I had to say, you threw it all back at me and told me to all but fuck off. Not cool. If you think what I have to say is so unimportant, and so flawed, as to not even warrant a whole conversation then I don’t know what you expect from me. When you’re stressing as hardcore as you are, I’m not gonna sit mute and watch it happen. That’s not what I do, because I love you and I care about you.

The way you snapped at me and threw all that back at me really hurt, and really insulted me, and I feel like a complete piece of shit for it. That’s something I never would think of doing to you, and never expected from you. I understand that it was probably (hopefully) stress talking, but I think it’s only fair and honest to tell you how your words hit me.

I love you, and I want you to feel less stressed, and I would do anything to help you. If what I need to do is shut the fuck up, then tell me so. I’ll do it. I’ll leave you alone, if you want me to… but please, don’t yell at me like that. Don’t treat me that way. I’m not just some asshole, I’m someone who loves you, and someone who wants the best for you.

I love you… and I hope you don’t hate me.

Love, Always & Forever,
((Tavv ‘Aruetiise’ Bralor))”

I am so beyond well-aware of how juvenile some of that sounds. It’s not as if I actually SAID those things to her, it’s just sentiments really… things that I would say if I had no filter. Thankfully, I’m not an idiot. Not a complete one, anyway. I understand that my way of “supporting” her must suck, and that there must be some reason she reacted the way she did… but, this is the kind of treatment I received from my ex. I could never be supportive enough, I could never say the right thing, I could never… do anything right. My interaction with my girlfriend today stirred up those kinds of feelings, and I don’t like it. Those feelings are why I left, and I’ll be damned if I put up with them for another six years. I gotta nip this in the bud, but I need to do it in a way that is kind and caring… I don’t want to drive this one away.

Sometimes, I don’t know why the fuck I bother trying to help other people out with how they feel. My girlfriend and I are about to take a trip to motherfuckin’ Hawaii, and all she can think about is the stress of her classes. I understand that they are stressful, but I also understand that worrying does nothing. Not a Goddamned thing. It doesn’t get the work done, it doesn’t make the classes or their stress disappear, it just makes that stress worse. So when I try to explain this, and try to be supportive, it just gets thrown back at me. Suddenly, it’s “who cares about the trip, I’m gonna worry if I want to, and you better just deal with it”.

I stopped the conversation there because I was floored. All I was trying to do was reassure her, and not let arbitrary worries ruin what should be an awesome trip. Instead, she got pissed at me and threw it all back at me.

Couples fight, I get that… This isn’t one of those “Oh my God, we’re done for” kinda things, it just sucks is all. It has me wondering if I should ever attempt to help her when she’s like this, or just leave her the fuck alone. That’s not my style, but I don’t like having good effort thrown back at me this way. It’s bullshit. I have never done, and would never do, this to her. So, I’m left with a big ol’ WTF on my plate. Fuckin’ sweet.

I have to go to my old house today after work so I can pick some of my belongings up before going to Hawaii. I hate going there. It just reminds me of the time I spent there, with her. For the most part, the times were not good… especially towards the end. One of my dogs is still there, and I miss the little guy. That’s never fun, seeing him. Maybe I’ll get lucky. Maybe he will have forgotten me, and I won’t have to hear those soul-crushing rooooo’s this time around. That place is like the cave on Dagobah for me. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about it, but there’s a certain… malevolence that I can just feel when I walk in. It always weighs so heavily on me, and causes me to want to just get the hell out of there! It’s why I always forget shit when I go there… I always feel rushed to leave. But, I suppose it’s all in my head…

LUKE: “What’s in there?”
YODA: “Only what you take with you.”
<<LUKE MAKES READY TO ENTER THE CAVE WITH HIS LIGHTSABER AND BLASTER>>
YODA: “Your weapons… you will not need them.”
<<LUKE ENTERS THE CAVE WITH THIS WEAPONS REGARDLESS OF YODA’S ADVICE>>

Maybe I should stop being a Skywalker-like pussy, and just do the damned thing. Enter with a clear head, and do what I need to do. I guess we’ll see tonight, won’t we?

It’s a long fucking drive from Chicago to Lansing… made that much harder by the fact that not only am I driving back to a place I don’t want to be, but I’m also driving away from where I want to be, and who I want to be with. Oh, also, it’s a 3-hour-plus drive. So, it’s pretty much chock-full of insult and injury. This time, by the by, I got pulled over on the way back for speeding. I didn’t get a ticket, but it was just one more thing to bother me with, y’know? Now, it’s late and I should be sleeping… but, I’m not. I miss her, and it hurts, and it’s keeping me awake. I have a giant bed, and I’m the only one in it. It seems wrong, and uncomfortable.

No me gusta.

Sometimes, there are moments in life that remind you that no matter how bad you think you have it… You’re wrong, and should probably quit your bitching before something bad actually happens.

For me, these moments always come when I get a letter… Well, not a letter… More of a Facebook message… From my girlfriend. She unintentionally reminds me of how lucky I am to have her. That every morning I wake, I’ve got a beautiful, loving woman who cares that I’m doing so. That all the money and material bullshit in the world can’t make me feel like she can. It’s kinda beautiful in itself, if you think about it. Which I do, less frequently than I should.

So, I head to bed with this in mind.

Nighters.

Do you ever have moments or people in your life, where it seems like the whole purpose of their existence, their speciality if you will, is to make things worse for other people?

I have a supervisor like that. He doesn’t actually supervise… he delegated most of that role to me over the course of the last three years… but it’s as if he’ll get bored and decide to come back into my shop and poke and prod at me until I get pissed enough to engage him in something close enough to conversation for him to leave me alone, feeling satisfied and smug. He doesn’t actively contribute anything to my work. He’s supposed to evaluate me from year to year, he doesn’t. He’s supposed to get me trained, he doesn’t. He’s supposed to give me SOME kind of direction day-to-day, he doesn’t. He’s supposed to supervise my co-workers, he doesn’t. I’m sensing a pattern here. The worst part is probably that he’ll never be fired, despite the fact that he’s not effective at the job he’s getting paid for in the least. Upper management will continue to say, “We’re gonna stick with him, and you’re gonna have to be patient”. My patience only lasts until the man drives me to put a spike through my own skull.

True, anyone can bitch about having a shitty job, but that’s part of the problem: I don’t have a shitty job. I have a shitty supervisor, who makes my work environment suck by sapping and destroying any semblance of morale there could have been in this shop. A change-fearing control-freak, a supervisor does not make. Ever. What it does create, and has created, is the will of their employees to look elsewhere.