I Know Places We Won’t Be Found

One day, you wake up to find that your relationship with someone has suddenly changed.

Technology is a funny thing. It can open doors to people and worlds you would have never found otherwise. It can let you reach out to others in ways you never thought possible. But there’s a darker side – and technology can reveal that, too.

There’s not much you can’t find out if you know where to look. For instance, there’s numerous apps and tools that allow you to see who is viewing your social media profiles and blogs. That’s, unfortunately, how I found out I was being stalked … by someone I know.

I won’t get into the whole story, but the long short of it is that I looked into who was viewing my social media pages and blog and found someone who was visiting my Twitter and WordPress an unhealthy and abnormal amount of times. I understand that this happens sometimes and that it’s possible to pick up someone who becomes wonderstruck by you. I expect that, eventually, I will pick up someone I don’t know and they will check my profiles swift and often, and then fall bored of me and scurry off. It has and will happen to all of us in this day and age. It doesn’t phase me.

This situation was much different. This was someone I knew, was friends with and trusted. This person had been religiously checking my Twitter and WordPress, but never said a word to me. I don’t use my real last name on Twitter or WordPress in order to maintain some sense of anonymity in case I do pick up that one wayward wonderstruck person, nor did I ever tell this person I had either of those social media sites simply because it never came up in conversation. Had they asked, I would have told them in a heartbeat. When we talked, we focused on the starlit world in front of us and the magic we had at our fingertips. In order to find me, this person had to be specifically looking for me and had to dig deep to find me under a fake last name, especially when there’s millions of girls (Or at least I hope they’re all girls.) named Amy in the world.

Through all of this, the person never once said a word to me. Nor did they try to follow me on Twitter or WordPress. Had they, I would have gladly welcomed them with open arms. I was never trying to hide from them, but their trying to hide their constant following of me is, well, creepy. I don’t mind that they look at my pages, but to do it consistently and not say anything? To not follow me? That makes me uncomfortable. They had me at their fingertips. Anything they wanted to know about me, they could have just asked and I would have told them. But instead they chose to check my social pages at least once a day and never say a word to me about it. And what’s worse is that they broke off our friendship for a short period of time, but continued to check my social media pages daily.

I feel betrayed. I feel hurt. I feel violated. I feel a little frightened. But mostly, I just feel confused.

I never went looking for their social media outlets, because I had no reason to. It never came up. It was never a conversation. And had I found out they had these outlets, I would have surely followed them, because that’s what friends do. I wouldn’t have checked their pages continuously and never said a word. It’s sneaky and it’s strange and it makes me feel like they don’t trust me or they were leery of me from the start. That’s a sad thing to feel in intimate situations.

It would be less violating if this were a stranger. But from someone I trust? The feeling in the pit of my stomach over this makes me sick sometimes.

Because of this, I’ve decided to move my blog somewhere I won’t be found by them. If you’re interested in following me, please comment on this post and I will make sure to privately get you the new blog information. But before I move from my little home on the internet, a decision that was difficult to make, I want to say this.

To the person who has been doing this – I am not mad. I am not angry in any way. But I am hurt. I cared about you and I still do. You meant something to me. I would have talked to you about anything, and I don’t understand why you felt the need to do this when you had access to me 24/7. One text and I would have answered you. I always did. I am an open door. You have the opportunity to talk to me about this and I will listen. But I can no longer allow you in my life like this, because even you have to know this isn’t right. Even you have to know how sneaky it is to be able to talk to me about personal pieces of you, but not tell me you saw my social media pages. If you want information from me, from now on in, you’re going to have to come to me, because I’m cutting off your lifeline. You don’t need it.

“And in the end, in Wonderland, we both went mad.”

Amy the Wombat

Alrighty, here we go. When we last left off, I had just adopted a new dog and met a cute waiter that was trying to work things out with his ex-girlfriend.

If you’ve been watching Jane the Virgin, you will totally get that I referenced the recap of the show in my opening monologue of this post. I am that much of a nerd. But seriously, can we talk about Jane the Virgin for a hot second? I thought the premise of this show looked improbable and mind numbingly dumb, so I waited until this month and became so curious that I couldn’t not watch it. Now I’m catching up on past episodes and I am in love. The humor of the show is right up my alley. If you haven’t seen it, allow me to give you a quick recap.

Jane is a virgin (obviously), who, during a routine gynecologist visit where she was to get a pap smear, ended up accidentally artificially inseminated by a doctor who was filling in for her own doctor and had never met her, hence the mix up. Oh, and the doctor had drinking problems, had been in legal trouble once before for malpractice issues, and found her girlfriend cheating on her the night before. Said doctor inseminated Jane with her brother’s sperm (The doctor’s brother, not Jane’s brother. Jane doesn’t have a brother.), which was supposed to go to her brother’s wife, and had she properly checked the charts before entering the room, she would have known her sister-in-law was waiting for her in the next room. Right after the artificial insemination comes to light, Jane’s boyfriend, who doesn’t know about the baby yet, proposes. After she tells him she’s pregos and he decides he doesn’t want to keep the baby, and she decides the biological father and his wife should have it, she accepts his proposal and decides to call the baby growing inside of her “The Milkshake” so she doesn’t get attached. This doesn’t last long. Her boyfriend is a cop who finds out that the sperm donor’s wife is cheating on him, and knowing that Jane wants the baby to go to a two parent home, withholds the info from her. She finds out and decides not to marry him, while the sperm donor decides to divorce his wife. Did I mention the sperm donor is her boss that she once kissed five years ago? And her dad is a a mega superstar on a Spanish soap opera? And she got a job student teaching at a catholic school where the nuns advertise she’s a pregnant virgin?

There is something so wrong with this show that it’s right. You have to watch it. It’s insanely ridiculous and ironically hilarious all at the same time. I’m in a serious non-romantic relationship with this show.

Speaking of relationships, I know some of you are dying to know what ultimately ended up happening with the Cute Waiter. In all my time of non blogging, I knew I was going to have to address this in the next blog, because my readers and friends always come to me curious when I don’t follow up with something I’ve previously blogged about. I’ve debated how to go about writing this post and what to say six ways to Sunday, and the truth is, I don’t have a good answer on how to address this. I always tell the whole story, written plainly for everyone to read, because I believe if you’re going to heart blog, you should do it with full disclosure. Someone out there will understand what you’re going through and connect with your post. I believe in connecting with people, and that’s why I blog and always has been why. This situation is a little different, and certainly something I haven’t dealt with before, so, for that reason, I’m going to keep the answer simple and discreet.

Cute Waiter and I met at a Starbucks on a Thursday night for our first face to face. We had been talking through text for a couple of weeks. When we met, the connection was immediate. We both agreed on this afterward – we had insane chemistry. And that caused issues. It caused us both to be a little weird with each other and a little crazy with the way we handled things. He walked away, apologized and came back. I let him. I saw him one night at his workplace after I had major surgery and was still on some painkillers. I don’t remember much of the night or what was said, but apparently I was an ass, and he walked again. Again, he came back. Again, I let him. In the meantime, during all of this, he and his girlfriend decided not to work things out. Two months after we first met, we finally, and I do mean FINALLY kissed. Things got muddled from there, and I’m sure there was a clear delineation of events that I will never quite understand that led to us not talking. Which was never my choice nor what I wanted. It is what it is.

Maybe that’s not the post you all were hoping for when you asked about what happened, but it’s all I can give. This is the first time I’ve felt the need to protect a situation and I have to go with my gut on this one. No one was the bad guy. I’m not mad and I don’t hate him or have any bad blood with him. I just keep telling myself that it is what it is.

My life has been busy and very happy and full. My little business is doing pretty well, but I make everything by hand and can’t keep up. It leaves little time to blog, but my heart is in my blogging and writing – something that I’m no longer willing to give up for this business. My goal in the coming year is to write and blog more – to take time for myself, doing what I love. What is your goal for the coming year? How was everyone’s Christmas?

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the name of this post comes from what someone once told me. I was explaining to that person that I wasn’t a typical girl, and that I should have been an awesome gay guy or black girl. In turn, they said, “You’re not a typical girl. I don’t know what you are. You’re a wombat.” Wombats are my people, apparently.

The Crazy Baby Dog Lady

I am a horrible blog owner. My blog feels lonely and neglected. I think it has even tried to find a new owner behind my back. I can’t be sure, but I saw some scandalous signs around the internet that seems to point to my blog whoring itself out just to get attention. So much has happened in the last nearly two months. I will give you a quick rundown of the holy terror that life has rained down on me, before regaling you with a funny and odd story that only my life could produce.

Since my last post, all Hell has broken loose. It’s like Supernatural up in here, and I find myself without a Sam or a Dean. The day after my last post the contractors started on our house. Walls came out, all of our ceilings came out, things we didn’t think would get broken did, and it was general chaos. We have a very small house and pets, so we were living in a construction zone and it wasn’t fairing well. Add in my chronic bronchitis with insulation and dust flying everywhere and you have the perfect crap storm. The contractors just recently left, so I’m thankful for that. We basically have an entirely new house that has no mold and I’m able to breathe much better. I’m looking on the bright side for this one.

The same day our construction workers started, our dog Leo suddenly fell very ill. He’s the dog I’ve talked about in previous posts that had to have surgery to remove cancer in his shoulder last July. The day he fell ill, he just sat down, started to swell up, and couldn’t stand back up. It all happened so fast, and our contractors, who are wonderful guys and we actually miss talking to, carried him to the car for us. We lost him that day. He had rapidly began internally bleeding out of nowhere that morning, and though I noticed it immediately and had the training as a vet tech to know something was wrong and get him to the vet right away, there was nothing that could be done. We miss him terribly.

During all of this, I ended up getting violently ill again and having to pull out of a prior commitment, and then a few afterwards. I couldn’t leave the house and had no peace, because the contractors were here. After an absurd amount of trips to the hospital, urgent care and doctors offices, we found I had a bad case of H Pylori and my stomach wall was twisted. I had to get a shot in my stomach and go on over 3000 milligrams of antibiotics a day, along with other medication. That high amount of antibiotics crashed my autoimmune system after ten days and sent me into seizures. Did I mention I blacked out and fell during all of this and had to rotate between wearing a rocker boot and air cast while trying to manuever the construction? My ankle is healed, and I’m feeling better now. I’m just tired because my autoimmune system is still trying to recover.

As if it couldn’t get any more hectic, our one dog Helena began to fall into a deep depression and even become mean. She wasn’t herself since Leo died. Greta, who is a loner in the dog world and a mommy’s girl in the human world, couldn’t care less either way, but she also wouldn’t play with Helena. Greta’s idea of playing is passing Helena in the back yard to come inside and get a treat. Helena’s depression got so bad that we thought we were going to lose her. We came to the conclusion that we had to get her a new friend that would play with her. I found a friend online that I was in love with and wanted Helena and Greta to meet. Our dream dog turned into a nightmare due to an issue with the shelter’s outside source that checks vet references. The source kept insisting that our vet had told her we hadn’t been there since 2012 and our dogs had all these diseases, despite us having basically moved right in during the last year with Leo and his cancer. When I called the vet’s office, who were aware this woman would be calling, they told us she had never called. Long story short, the entire thing turned into a debacle, and by the time it finally got straightened out (7 hours later.) we were so uncomfortable adopting from them that we decided to look elsewhere. To this day the third party will not admit she did not actually call our vet, because when she actually did, we got, in her words, a “glowing recommendation.”

Helena picked a new friend at a shelter down the road from us and we couldn’t be more in love with him. His name is Monkey – a name he’s had his whole life and I’m delighted with. He is six years old and was surrendered by his owner. He loves long hugs and being a really good boy. He moved right in without nary andaccident or any arguments from any of our pets. He was comfortable his first day here and it’s as if he’s always lived here. We couldn’t be happier with our new best friend and feel like he was meant for us. As for Helena, she’s pulled out of her depression and is back to her old self, so we couldn’t be more thrilled. I will be doing a blog about his cute little face hopefully soon, though my schedule is crazy busy.

All of that is why I haven’t had a chance to blog, and isn’t even half the story, but it does bring me to tonight’s story. For those of you who have been reading this blog for awhile, nothing about this odd story will shock you. You know my life thinks it’s hysterical.

Last week my friend was in from out of town. Every time we go out, we have ourselves some adventures. Not one adventure. Not two. Some adventures – plural and more than two. I guess I wasn’t fully prepared for the adventure I was about to have, because I’m still not sure if I would have swiftly aborted said adventure had I known about it prior, or if I like how it turned out.

If you know anything about me, you know about my misadventures with the Mars born kind. Everyone thinks I’m way younger than I am, which always ends with me getting hit on by guys under 20. They’re always adorable in that ‘I want to take you to the zoo and feed you a lollipop’ kind of way. I’m twenty-eight, so they’re also only cute in that ‘feels like jailbait’ kind of way. I can’t go there. I was not surprised when my friend and I encountered a perfectly nice fellow at The Dollar Store, who was fun and datable but probably under twenty. This is par for the course for me. Nothing to see here, folks. That wasn’t the problem with this adventure.

The problem was that I made an offhand comment about how cute I thought a waiter was in the restaurant where we were eating. He wasn’t even our waiter. I had simply noticed him cruising on by and thought he looked pretty okey dokey. What happened after that still confuses me, because it happened so quickly and I don’t have all the details on how this transpired during the parts I was absent for.

The next time our waitress passed our table, my friend began asking her about the waiter. Despite my protests, the waitress insisted I was awesome, the waiter was awesome, and we should totally date, so she scurried off and got the dirt on him. You guys, our waitress took my friend’s questioning and made the decision she was setting us up somehow. Only, I didn’t exactly catch on, because I thought she was just being polite. What was she supposed to do? Not be polite? Not go ask about him? Some people are jerks and would have not left her a tip because she simply said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t get involved in his personal life.” Not us. We would have tipped her anyway.

She came back, physically sat down at the table with us, and gave us all the info. I couldn’t have been more shades of red if I were a tomato covered in red paint. Then she left and I thought that was the end of it, because really, what else could she do? Not two minutes later, she came back with a piece of paper, handed it to me and says, “He apologizes for his handwriting. He said it’s not a reflection on his maturity.” I tried to ask her how she got his number, but stumbled over my words in all the confusion. She seemed to understand and told me she pointed me out to him and he voluntarily forked it over. Because nothing says awkward like pointing to someone and thinking, “I might want that one! Maybe. If they don’t smell.” Before I could process this, another waitress came out and told me I had to text him. I had to. Because he was awesome and I was awesome and aww. I still have no idea what clear delineation of events occurred between me mentioning he was cute, to me ending up with his number. I was involved in none of this. He was involved in more of it than I was and I’m sure this was less comfortable for him than it was for me. All I said was, “Please don’t. I just said he was cute.” The rest just happened without me.

We never spoke, me and this guy. Never said a word. He would look over and smile at me. I would turn more shades of red than were possible for a human, but completely so for a chameleon. My friends talked me into texting him, because I don’t date or get out much and I’m really a lot of fun, I just tend to have said fun by myself, but I have a lot of it. In other words, I didn’t see the problem. I decided to adopt my friend Sarah’s outlook on life. He was cute, so I texted. I didn’t hear back. Somehow this didn’t surprise me, because I have the kind of life where someone would voluntarily give me their number and then not text me back. This is just another Wednesday of Weird Shit for me. I didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed, because though cute, I didn’t know this guy from Adam and it took all the guts I had in me to send that text. Then my friends all unanimously convinced me to try him again, because technology can sometimes be jerk. Turns out, the second time was the charm because, yes, technology – it’s a jerk.

To make a situation even more amusingly awkward, he seems like a super nice and mature guy……who, over the weekend, decided to see if he could work things out with his ex-girlfriend. This goes right along with things my life does to me, so I was completely unaffected by this. To be honest, I was kind of relieved, because we don’t know each other at all. It’s easy to see someone across a room and think they’re cute. That doesn’t mean they’re someone you’d want to date. He was completely up front with me abut the situation, as well as apologetic when he had no reason to be. We’re going to hang out as friends, which is kind of cool. How many times can you not even talk to someone and still get their number, and then try to become friends? Also, maybe he can explain to me what the heck went on that I missed, because there’s way more to this story than I was told, and I’m sure he’s still confused, too. He also assures me that the waitresses involved actually want to friend me in real life, so that’s awkward. Cool, but awkward. It’s just another weird situation for the books. As if my life.

In other news, I will probably be sixty years old with ninety-three baby dolls and four dogs, which would kind of make me the Crazy Baby Dog Lady, right?

Madder Than Two Rhinos Forced to Watch Barney On Repeat

I have never been so angry in my life. If you take all of the times I’ve ever been angry and put the together, they don’t even come close to how angry I am right now.

Let me back up and catch you all up on what’s gone on since my inaugural vlog, before I even get into the total b.s. that is today. First, I am back  home. I was back home the same night I was in the hotel for two reasons. One, the hotel was full of construction workers who, though they had designated parking spaces by their own building, chose to park right outside my room, a room that was in a totally different building than theirs. They were loud and disruptive and constantly in and out of their cars. Greta was upset and couldn’t settle because of it, so all that was happening was that I was getting aggravated by the situation and knew neither of us would sleep, so I came home. I can’t be alone because of my passing out and seizure like spells and must have Greta with me if there is no human to stay with me, so staying alone with no crying dog was not an option. Not to mention that the construction guys were a tad creepy and I was the only one in the particular building I was staying in. No big deal. We’ll find another hotel in the morning.

The next day we got a check in the mail from our insurance that was supposed to be for the hotel room, like the insurance agent promised. We come to find out that by, “The insurance will pay for your hotel room,” and I do quote that, he actually meant they would send up an advance on the money to repair the house, and we would still owe the difference the hotel room cost us in the end. We don’t have money for a hotel room, and the fact that our house isn’t done yet is entirely the insurance agent’s fault. He’s awful. He has no idea what he’s doing or talking about. He told us we couldn’t have mold from water leakage and water and dampness didn’t cause mold. Luckily our contractor knew better. He also had surgery and was off for awhile, but never passed on our case for someone else to look at and just let it sit. We still do not have our check for the repair work that needs done after two and a half months, going on three, to have the work done. Luckily, we called and explained the entire situation to the construction crew coming out, and the guy who owns the company, having worked with this particular agent numerous times, agreed to come out and start the work even though we don’t have the check. He is personally willing to fight with the agent himself for the check. God bless him.

This brings us to another debacle. Though we are thankful he is coming out, he promised us a few days notice. I’m obviously still sick and unable to clear everything out of my room and closet very quickly. I’ve been trying to rest and get better and was awaiting his call. Once he called, I would have a few days to pack my stuff at my own pace. He calls around noon today and says he’ll be out at 7:30 tomorrow morning. We’re so glad he’s coming out, but that meant that I had to get everything moved out of my room and packed, closet included, when I can’t walk around without my oxygen dropping, in less than twenty four hours. Add that to the fact that I had an appointment today and was going to be gone several hours. My room is partially finished and everything is, by some miracle, out of my closet. My chest hurts. I can’t breathe. I’m going to have to get up super early tomorrow and finish this, because I physically can’t tonight.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned many more things about my care at the hospital that have ticked me off. I finally got to pour over my discharge papers with a fine tooth comb. Not much is right on them, including that they tried to give me medications that I specifically told them I was allergic to, and all which I refused. Only they made it sound as if I were being difficult and didn’t want to take them. They shouldn’t have even been giving them to me in the first place. Nothing in my medical history was right, which ticks me off, because all of my medical conditions are already in their system, so I have no idea where they’re getting their information. They really did try to give me medications that had nothing to do with why I was there, like two different stool softeners for a breathing problem. They tried to give me a medication that I had tried before and there are extensive notes in the computer system about why I can’t take it. The list goes on.

The most important screw up was that they told me it was necessary to see a pulmonary doctor within seven days to get my test results, because they chose to release me without telling me what was going on, which should have never happened. I called my own pulmonary doctor and explained the situation. My doctor didn’t have anything until July, so central scheduling transferred the call to the office itself so that I could talk to the person in charge of scheduling and let them know that this was an emergency and I had been in the hospital and needed an appointment. The deficient girl who ran the office flat out refused to give me an appointment with my own pulmonary doctor until July. Clearly she is unsure how to do her job and what an emergency is. Being in the hospital = not a good enough excuse to need to see my own doctor. She kept insisting I was a new patient. Really, you guys, I don’t know where their computer systems are failing them. I know there is another girl with the same name and birth date as me in their system, however, I also give them my social security number, address, phone number and email address to avoid this issue. Apparently that doesn’t help.

On a good note, another nurse took over at my autoimmune doctor’s office and she actually calls me back, unlike this other girl who doesn’t even tell the doctor that I called, when the doctor is the one who told me to call. My autoimmune doctor, who can used the system, got in and saw the debacle I was facing and was kind enough to call in my prescription that the doctor in the ER prescribed, but never called in or gave me the script for. She also told me to see my pulmonary doctor. I explained the situation with my pulmonary doctor to her nurse, and both the nurse and my autoimmune doctor tried to get me in with my regular pulmonary doctor, but the girl still wouldn’t budge. We are all collectively befuddled by this. It was one thing to turn me down, but to turn down another doctor in the same building who is friends with my pulmonary doctor and telling them it is crucial I get an appointment is a whole other ballgame.

With no other choice, I called the pulmonary doctor whose number was on my screwed up discharge papers from the hospital. I made an appointment for Monday. Sunday night I was doing something fully unrelated and come to find out that the doctor they put on my paperwork as a pulmonary doctor was actually a general physician. I have one. I don’t need theirs. Not only that, but I didn’t care for the guy at all. He’s the one who kept trying to give me medications I couldn’t take, as well as medications for issues I wasn’t even having. He also tried to take me off an antibiotic I was on for a sinus infection without ever asking me what I was on it for. I had zero interest in seeing him. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I looked up reviews online on him thinking that maybe, since he had seen me in the hospital, that he could shed some light on what was going on. All the reviews on him were terrible. There wasn’t one good one, so I felt I was justified in not wanting to see him and canceled the appointment.

It took me some run around to find out who the pulmonary doctor I saw in the ER was. Once I found him, I called and explained to the super nice gentleman on the phone what had happened. He fit me in for a 4:45 appointment today, which I was thrilled and thankful about. Too bad that gentleman didn’t work at the office where my appointment was.

Let me start by saying that I wasn’t having a terrific day to begin with, but even if I was, what had happened at this office would have pushed me over the edge, considering I’ve gone a week without knowing what was going on with me and playing ring around the doctor with their offices due to incorrect information on my discharge papers. I went to get my migraine medication out to get it refilled on my way to the doctor. I had just taken it last night and had one left. I got to it today and there were none in there and it wasn’t in the same place I had put it last night. I didn’t take the last one. My mom is the only other person I live with. I was already ticked, and then I get into town to fill the medication and the bridge is closed with no warning, so I had to go way out and around. Now I’m concerned I’m going to be late, and I have to wait for the medication, because this specific pharmacy is family owned and closes before I would be home from my appointment and I need the medication.

I get my medication and haul ass to my appointment. I’m concerned I’m going to be really late. I’m trying to get there as quickly as I can. The building isn’t exactly where they say it is, but I find it and I get there with fifteen minutes to spare, at 4:30, by some grace of God. I go in, prepared to fill out new patient papers since I had never seen this doctor outside of the ER and thankful that I’m early enough to do it without holding anyone up. I get into the office, walk up to the front desk, smile and say this exactly. “I am here for my 4:45 with Dr. Lanz.” The woman looks at me and very coldly says, “You mean your 4:15 appointment. You’re late.” I keep trying to smile and say, “No, I am here for a 4:45 appointment. I double checked with the person who made the appointment yesterday and my appointment is definitely at 4:45.” She again reiterates that I’m late and then gets up and walks out of the room.

I’m already suspicious that something is up. I double checked my appointment time, wrote it in two places, and it’s also listed as 4:45 in their own computer system that patients have access to their records through – a system automatically generated by them when an appointment is made so that this doesn’t happen. She never bothered to ask me my name or anything about me, and I was a new patient there, so she had no way of knowing who I was, yet she was insistent that I was late. Not only that, but I’m only fifteen minutes late, by her account, even though I know my time is correct and I am fifteen minutes early. Doctors always, always run over, so fifteen minutes is hardly anything to get concerned about and I probably wouldn’t have even been in the with the doctor even if I had gotten there at 4:15. I know something is up, and then she comes back and proves it.

She proceeds to tell me that I will have to reschedule and that the doctor doesn’t have 4:45 appointments and already left to go to UPMC East, the hospital I had previously seen him at. I tell her that I have just driven forty five minutes for an appointment that I double checked on yesterday and was told was at 4:45. I was not rescheduling, I know she had just been in the back talking to the doctor, because I heard them, and I need to be seen. I say this all very nicely, but firmly. She proceeds to cop and attitude with me and tell me that this is my fault and that I should have known the appointment was at 4:15 and not 4:45. She never once apologized or took responsibility for our own office’s error. Clearly I am supposed to be that kind of psychic. I had enough of her attitude, enough of the situation, enough of today and did something I never do – I lost on it a customer service agent. I am fully against doing this, since I’ve been in that position. I would not have done this had she not chosen to lie to me and cop and attitude with me. I know she went in the back to talk to the doctor. I could hear them. Not only that, but something was still up. Had he had other patients ahead of me, I really wouldn’t have been all that late considering all doctors run late. It also was not my fault that I was given the incorrect time on two separate occasions by their own office. I really felt like he just didn’t care to see patients that day. They were essentially making a big stink over fifteen minutes, since I had gotten there at 4:30. It just simply didn’t make sense, and there was not a soul in the office.

Then, the woman tried to rebook me for the next day. I told her straight out that I do have a life and contractors coming to the house the next day and can’t just pick up and leave because they screwed up and won’t admit it. They clearly can’t keep anything straight, considering their the ones who put 4:45 in their own system, as proven by the system I have access to which shows my appointment was put in by them as being at 4:45, and she still hadn’t asked me my name to confirm the appointment, so she had no way of knowing if I was actually late or not since she didn’t know who I was. I would never, ever be back to their offices. I was not going to risk driving another forty five minutes to be turned away again because of their own screw up.

I have never in my life been that angry with a situation, and had the woman not copped an attitude with me, this could have all been avoided. Since I was only a few miles from UPMC East, I decided to hop in my car, go up there, and talk to someone. I was completely done with this situation and not knowing what was going on with my own health and getting nothing but a run around. I decided to talk to a hospital administrator to let them know everything I’ve been through since their hospital discharged me without any diagnoses and then royally screwed up all of my paperwork. I had been waiting a week for a diagnoses because of them, when I should have never been let go without being told what was going on. I was kind and polite, but let her know that I was very angry and was not leaving the hospital until a doctor told me my results, since this was their fault. I had no reason to yell at her, because she had nothing to do with the issues I was having, nor was she anything but very kind to me. I asked specifically to talk to the doctor of whom I had an appointment with that day and explained what had happened and that his receptionist told me he was here. I left out the part where I had actually heard his receptionist talking to him and just decided to see what the administrator had to say about him being in the hospital that day. I wanted to have solid proof of her lie.

Long story short, I found out two things. One, the woman at the first doctors office was a liar. The doctor was not scheduled to be at UPMC East that night, nor did they know why I was told that, so the receptionist telling me he had left to go there was completely false, further proving this office, and more specifically the woman who copped an attitude with me has not a clue what is going on at her own office. I was flat out lied to, and I still don’t know the reason why she would tell me he was gone and at that hospital when I even heard her talking to him, but now I had proof she was a full fledged fruit loop and the hospital also now knew it.

Two, I learned that the administrator was very helpful and apologetic, and it really wasn’t that hard to get my results. She made a few phone calls and had a doctor come talk to me. She made it so easy when everyone else was giving me such a difficult time over something so simple. I didn’t care who read the results, but since they were pulmonary results I needed a pulmonologist to do it. Luckily, hospitals are full of those. If you get the right person, they’ll even let you talk with one without admitting you into the hospital or ER.

Turns out, I have chronic bronchitis, which can be very dangerous and would have been very important for me to know before I even left that hospital a week ago. It was also equally important for them to call in the medication for me or give me a script for it, which they had failed to do. Chronic bronchitis can either be caused by smoking, which I don’t do, or airborne allergens such as mold. Ding, ding ding, guess which one I have! That’s right, mold. So basically living in this mold for all this time caused me to have chronic bronchitis, a condition that will never go away and will flair up on and off for the rest of my life. This brings us back to the fact that had our insurance agent done his job and turned our case over to someone else when he was gone, this would have been fixed months ago and this never would have happened. I wouldn’t have lived in the mold long enough for this to form.

Madder than a hornet, y’all. I might even be madder than a rhino. It’s warranted.

The Inaugural Vlog

I spent three weeks trying to blog, so instead I decided to Vlog. If I’m really boring, I apologize. If I’m really weird, I don’t.

We Fly at Midnight, Little Mockingbirds

Ahh, spring is in the air and… Okay, that’s a lie. I live in Pennsylvania and Mother Nature has completely gone off her meds again. Yesterday, it snowed. Today, it was sixty degrees. Tomorrow, it’s supposed to be seventy. We have no idea what’s going on and are easily having four seasons in one day. So when I got an email about Nanowrimo Summer Camp starting in April this year, I was eager to join and also afraid that instead of ending up with bug bites in my cabin, I’d end up with frostbite. Good thing it’s a virtual camp of which I can participate in from the comfort of my own bedroom. I never was any good at camping anyway. Even when I was a Girl Scout, my friend’s mom ran the camp, so our troop never had to stay in any of the cabins. We slept inside of the mess hall, with heat and indoor bathrooms with plumbing, and a fireplace. The whole shebang.

For those of you who don’t know what Nanowrimo is, it’s this wonderful month where authors get together online and write, write, write. It literally stands for National Writing Month. The goal is 50,000 words in a month. Summer camp is a little different. It happens in April and July (Or maybe June. Don’t quote me on this.) and you set your own word count. It’s just a way to encourage yourself to write. I’ve been wanting nothing more than to get back into working on my novel for several months, but was caught up with other things. I got all of the overly time consuming things out of the way so that I can focus on my novel this month. I’m going to have a very busy month and already have a ton of things on my schedule, but I’m attempting to dedicate myself to writing 50,000 words this month. For those of you joining in on Nanowrimo Summer Camp, you can find my profile here, under Cassadee Willows.

For those of you not participating with good reason, such as you’re not a writer or you just plain don’t want to, I’m going to share a bit about my novel, which I’ve premised and began. Please forgive the sucky synopsis, as I’m so focused on the novel that I half assed it for the synopsis. See: Nothing seemed to describe it in a way that made my invisible ducks sing me the song of their people. Nothing I’ve started before midnight tonight counts toward Nanowrimo Summer Camp. We fly at midnight, little mockingbird.

The title has yet to be fleshed out. Right now it’s tentatively called State of Treacherous. I threw it at the wall, but it didn’t stick, so likely that will be changing. Other ideas for a title are Red Grace and, well, that about sums up where I’ve gotten with that. The novel is a paranormal suspense thriller. If you can say that three times fast, you are my hero. Just imagine me reading this to you in a creepy, female Hannibal Lecter kind of voice. “Hello, Clarice.”

Synopsis:

Juliette White has a treacherous past, but doesn’t everyone? It’s what made her connect with Taylor Ford just four short years ago, after moving hundreds of miles to escape what haunted her the most. Taylor knew a thing or two about running, right up until the night she found herself locked in an eight by eight underground cell, surrounded by other women just like her.

When Taylor fails to make contact with her brother Mason, or show up to meet him and Juliette, the pair make their way from Austin to Memphis to try and track her down. The police see Taylor’s past as proof that she is nothing but a strung out runaway, and after digging deeper into Juliette’s they become convinced both girls are unstable and throw the case to the wayside.

Knowing she’s Taylor’s only hope, Juliette finds herself staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, forced to pit herself against a gift that she voweled to keep hidden years ago. Mason finds himself faced with the truth that the girl he’s become so close to isn’t who he thought she was. With no other choice but to trust her, the two set out to find Taylor, come Hell or high water. What they soon uncover is far worse than anyone could have imagined in their wildest nightmares.

Excerpt:

The ground I lay on was stone cold, no warmth or familiarity of home to be found. I hadn’t dared to opened my eyes yet, but I knew the moment I did I would immediately come to regret it like I had each day before this. I knew I had to, but the harder I tried, the more my breathing became labored. It was fear itself that held me back, a nasty old foe I thought I had come face to face with and ultimately conquered more than a year ago, along with my darkest demons. Now I was paralyzed by it.

There were thoughts forming in my head that felt like lines from a drama only penned to frighten the masses. In the state I was in, I almost had to pinch myself as a reminder that this wasn’t a movie and I wasn’t dreaming. I was never one to find glory in being a drama queen. That’s how I knew that the place full of vacancy where my battered body dwelled was pure, unadulterated hell, a place formed on fear for the sake of it. Opening my eyes would only make it real and surround me with the images that, until now, had only been conjured by the sounds that swallowed the silence.

Slowly, my eyes fluttered open. I focused on aiming them straight ahead, to not look around more than I had to so that fear didn’t lurk into the deepest places where my skeletons hid amongst the cobwebs, unapologetically leaving me in a defenseless place. All I had to keep me company now was my own mind, the singular thing I was relying on to keep me strong. If I got out of my head even for a brief second and lost the memories of what kept me together, I’d have nothing to live for. I’d have no hope.

One of the first things that hit me when I tried to move was the intense pain in the left side of my abdomen. It was sharp, and though not unexpected still hit me like a ton of bricks. For the past three days that I had been here, it had kept me from getting from the ground to my feet. Today I decided I was having that no more. I had inspected the wound in a former bout of consciousness and rendered it ultimately superficial. Although the wound was deep where the knife had sliced into my skin, it had still only maimed the skin. Everything else remained untouched by evil.

Even still, I had spent these days on the concrete bleeding. At first I gushed, holding my side and applying pressure to make it stop. The pressure was enough to rapidly slow the blood flow to a pace no quicker than a trickle, leaving only a stain on my now filthy clothes. Bandages had been thrown at me to cover the wound, something I was forced to do myself. This was the first time I had looked at the bandage and saw no blood seeping through. Although extremely weak from losing blood, it had not been a fatal amount and I knew all too well that it wouldn’t be what killed me.

The Day That Two Absentminded People Equaled One Half of a Normal Person – In Public

I’ve learned several life lessons from Aunt Bev. None greater than “If someone is weird at twenty, they are three times weirder at sixty. Think about that when you date someone.” There was no way I wasn’t passing that one along.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention, let me share the ways my life currently thinks it is hilarious. People on Craigslist who email me to ask me if I still have an item, but never email me back once I tell them I do? Check. A car insurance agent that gave me incorrect information about my car insurance payment and has me scrambling to come up with more money than I was told I would have to? Check. Paranormal problems that are causing a connection to someone that is making me super sick? Check. Finding myself eyeballs deep in dog cookies? Check. A ceiling that is caving in and walls full of mold that are causing us to have to have our whole house literally ripped apart and put back together? Check. Having awkward conversations with people in your life because you say inappropriate things to each other? Check. Getting myself into a big mess? Check. Having an awesome dog named Greta Hayley laying beside me to cuddle with? Check.

Truth be told, even with all of those things going on, I’ve sat down to write a post several times, but was unsure of how to follow up the last post. A situation worthy of the last post fell into my lap. It was a learning situation for the ages, and one that told me I had found my own ground. It needed written about and shared, and we all know that I have a no holds barred attitude about that sort of thing. The fact that I decided against writing about it is a testament to the relationship I have with the other person involved. Writing about it would mean betraying someone and their trust, so ultimately I decided against it for the sake of their relationship and ours.

Basically, now I’ve got no good material. All I’ve got are emails from Aunt Bev and stories of the day we spent together. Hold onto your hats, we’re going for a ride.

Last week, we shared an email conversation concerning what day we were going to get together. Ultimately, Aunt Bev decided Thursday would be better than Wednesday, because there was a windstorm coming in Wednesday and she was concerned we would be blown away and end up in Afghanistan. Naturally, I told her that may not be such a bad thing because there could be some cute soldiers in Afghanistan that could protect us and we could fall madly in love with them. She decided we should get blown away to an island instead. We still went out on Thursday.

Today, she emailed me about Shaun White. Apparently I’ve accidentally convinced my 66 year old Aunt Bev to be ShaunWhiteSexual. She literally emailed me about his hair, you guys. I just like his personality. This is getting very awkward.

We spent our Thursday together last week, as a previously mentioned. I forgot five things on my way to her house, only four of which I remember that I forgot. She wasn’t faring much better, yet we still decided to go into public together. This was clearly a wonderful idea for anyone who needed a laugh.

We went to Giant Eagle to fill ink cartridges. It was the guy who works in the photo and ink department’s day off. Neither of us called to check.

We went to Target. I did okay, but Aunt Bev had a thousand and seven coupons to go with her one that let her get $10 off if she spent $40 on cat food and litter. Coupons were thrown all over the place, totals were added wrong, a poor kid stocking shelves was pulled into the situation and it was pretty much a half an hour of utter catastrophe. But she saved $28. That’s all that counts, right?

We went to PetSmart. We stared at the area where cat wormer was. We didn’t see cat wormer. We involved an employee. It was exactly in the area we had spent five minutes staring into the abyss of and missed it. Then we debated cat wormer for another ten minutes, even though they only had two kinds. Aunt Bev couldn’t find her PetSmart card. We got out of there without injuring anything but our own common sense.

We went to TGIFridays. The menus were different, the waiter was confusing, we had no coupons, I drank too much soda, and we had conversations about Bible studies, doctor’s offices, inappropriate relationships, exes and Shaun White’s hair. All of those things go together, right?

We went back to Giant Eagle because it occurred to us that we needed cake. We went through every single one of the cakes once to find the one with the latest expiration date, and then again to find the one with the most icing. We then weighed the pros and cons of both and ended up with a cake with the most icing. Aunt Bev is diabetic.

We went to Walgreen’s. There were almost no mishaps. Then we went to the checkout. The well built, fabulously lovely gay man opened the register across from us, calling us over since we were next in line. In an immediate rush to want to friend him, I started walking toward him. Aunt Bev, not paying attention, started walking forward. We smacked into each other, I turned her around, and the poor man had to keep from laughing at us out of professional politeness and whatnot. She had also couldn’t find her Walgreen’s card, but when it was all said and done, she had a coupon that made her item free.

After that we went home. We know better than to test fate. It’s amazing that there’s not some kind of law about us going out in public together. Between the two of us, we couldn’t even make a half of a person that day. Sheesh.

Come Hell, Come High Water, You Push On Me I’m Gonna Push Back Harder

I had a super snappy post lined up. Controversial, but snappy. I had planned to roll it out last night, but then ended up inexplicably tired and unable to do much in the way of making sentences that were properly punctuated and fun to read. In other words, I was halfway between Sucksville and Snoresville and not living on a prayer of staying awake. I didn’t want to impose that on you.

Today, a few things happened that made me change my mind about that post. It made me decide to not go ahead with it, but instead use what I was going to post as a jumping off point to mesh what I learned today into an inspirational, honest, bleeding heart look at heartbreak, humor, and life lessons. I never started this blog just to document my own days. That’s what journals are for. I was inspired to start this blog by Keltie Knight, then Keltie Colleen, who wrote a blog called High Kicks and High Hopes. Her entire blog was dedicated to her honestly spilling her heart out and sometimes saying unfavorable things about people everyone knew and loved (Hint: Her ex boyfriend Ryan Ross, formerly of Panic at the Disco.) because she knew it could help others who were going through the same thing. She took a lot of flak for it, too. Since she was quasi-famous, I decided that I wanted to do the very real, very modest girl version of her blog, because I was so inspired by her. I wanted to prove to myself that I was brave enough to bare my heart and regular girl problems to anyone who wanted to listen. I’m also happy to report that I recently had a lovely little conversation with her on Twitter, and she’s as amazing as you would think. You can also see her on The Insider on E! Just saying.

Because of the honesty of this post, it’s going to get murky at first. I’m going to say some bad things about myself and admit to bad habits of my own. I’m going to lay things on the line and state my feelings toward someone else, and that may make people who know him mad, because I typically don’t talk about this situation in detail, so a lot of people really have no idea what happened from my point of view. They’ve only heard his, and they may be shocked at some of the things I say. If you are going to start reading this post, I ask that you read it the whole way through, because the way it starts out is not how it ends. It’s all rainbows and butterflies and forgiveness and gratefulness for all its worth. That is what this post is really about, but without the rawness of the situation being laid out first, none of those things mean anything. None of them let my readers identify with me and know that someone else understands them. None of that helps them heal through my experiences. I’m putting myself on the line in a way I never have before, because I want to share with every girl who has ever had a broken heart the things I’ve learned from it and those that I wish I knew back then. Had I known them, the myriad of emotions I felt would have made sense. I’m not Taylor Swift. I don’t have a multimillion dollar record deal to reach out to everyone and let them know that I get it, that I’m just like them. This is all I have, and I’m exactly like you.

If anything could sum up what this post encompasses, it’s lyrics from a song called “When the Right One Comes Along.” They say, “Every single broken heart will lead you to the truth, you think you know what you’re looking for, until what you’re looking for finds you.”This post has also been edited forty billion times over four hours to get it just right, because I want everyone to understand where I’m coming from and to know that there’s no hard feelings here. There’s no hatred. There’s no pain now. I have always been open-hearted and honest with y’all on this blog. If I feel like I can’t be that way, I don’t blog, which is why the blog sat lonely for so long over the past year. I never want to be anything but authentic, and whether you love me or hate me is your prerogative and none of my business. I love and appreciate every single one of you that reads this.

Because there is no way for this post to make the kind of impact that it should without telling you a little about what I was initially going to post and how it led me to this moment of truth, I will share a bit about the lost post. I knew what I was going to post was going to tick a handful of people that I knew off, but I also knew that the people who had been by my side through the situation and those who heard both sides of the story and not just one would get the post and find it hilarious. I was willing to take the risk of having a few people angry at me, because I felt like the point of the post was actually very funny in a satirical sort of way, which is really my niche. I knew the possibility of the post getting taken the wrong way was high, but also that I didn’t want to feel like I had to hide my feelings about how I had been treated because someone may not understand them.

Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in friends who don’t know my side of the situations per my lack of talking about it, but if I were to write the post I wanted to write, would suddenly see me as the bad guy anyway. In saying nothing at all about the situation, this meant that I had also never said anything bad about the person the post referenced, but I still felt that because the person the post referenced had been so willing to talk about what happened between us and I wasn’t, that the odds were already against me. I also decided if bad things came out of a comical post because of that, then it was meant to be, because the amount of people who understood why it was funny far outweighed those few who didn’t have all the details. Even now I am taking a risk in posting this, but still feel it’s worth it. Now I am not comprising a controversial post for laughs. I’m doing it because I hope to help and inspire someone else. The chips will fall where they may.

The original post had to do with my recent posts about Craigslist. I was bored the other night and started reading my old posts tagged Oh, Craigslist. That’s when I noticed something utterly ridiculous, funny and epic in timing. On May 7, 2012, I wrote this post entitled Stupidlist. At the end of it I made a joke stating, “Who is Craig and where can I find him to slap him?” I found myself in a ball in a fit of laughter for about five minutes over this. Exactly five days after this post I met my ex. His name is Craig. How is that for timing? It’s like the universe was just shoving someone at me to slap and saying, “Here he is!” Up until then, I had never met anyone named Craig before.

More times than not over the last year and a half I have very much wanted to slap him, but not for anything that had to do with the breakup. I wanted to slap him for listening to other people that I hadn’t talked to in months, and then coming at me or my friends in an accusatory fashion well after the breakup when none of it was true. When I tried to tell him what I had actually said, which was vastly dissimilar to what he been told, he wouldn’t listen to me. Breakups don’t constitute me wanting to slap anyone, but stuff like that definitely does, because there’s nothing I hate more than putting my heart and one hundred percent of my trust into someone who I was completely honest with and told personal things I had never told anyone else just to have that happened. More than anything, I was hurt, because I thought I meant more to him than the words of other people. I thought he had gotten to know me better than to believe the really bizarre and downright insane things that were said about me. Even now I don’t know if I was hurt because I was mad, or if I was just mad as hell for the sake of it.

One night last August I was so damn mad that I put on my clothes, coat and shoes at 11:30 at night and was on my way out the door to drive to his house and literally slap him over a text he sent me when someone stopped me. My rationale is that he was too timid to call the cops on me if I smacked him upside the head Agent Gibbs style. That wasn’t my best moment, and neither is the next thing I’m going to say. I never said anything bad about him for over a year, until he did something that hurt a three year old girl because he and I just frankly couldn’t communicate in a way that didn’t piss each other off. It became about us, not the little girl, and things went down. All bets were off at that point. Say what you want about me, upset me all you want, and hurt me until the cows come home, but when a three year old girl cries over you, Momma just don’t play that game. I have a gun for a mouth in these situations, and though I didn’t run around bad mouthing him, if someone would bring him up or ask me what I thought of him, I stopped giving politically correct answers and spoke my mind.

Maybe all of the memories this one little lost post brought up are what made me change my mind about posting it. I had pushed so many things into the cobwebs of my mind when I moved on over a year ago, and maybe I never really dealt with them  or attempted to form an opinion on him or how I felt about everything that happened after the dust had settled. I just bid it adieu. I have a bad habit of kicking things under the rug like that. Those things form dusty bunnies, and they attack every so once in awhile if you don’t clean them up.

That one little funny post made me look back on things. It opened a door. After everything I went through with him, I find it hard to remember anything good about him or us. But ultimately I loved him for a reason. I was enchanted by us. I don’t think about him or us anymore. I haven’t in a long time. I don’t talk to him. I haven’t done either of these things in a long time, and I very much like it that way. What I don’t like is feeling like he’s an awful person. His actions put me on that path of emotions, but it doesn’t mean I like it. It forces me to only remember the bad, when there were more redeeming qualities about him that made me feel something after being closed off emotionally for so long. But the bad, it was a demon for him, and he fed it and let it feed itself, too.

I’ll probably end up crucified for saying this by someone, but anyone who knows Craig knows this is true. He has issues with alcohol, and no amount of feelings I had for him were going to change that. I couldn’t change that. I felt like I failed because he just wanted to drink so much all the time, and I knew he was worth so much more than that. I felt like a horrible girlfriend because I didn’t understand why he wanted to drink so much, but no one drinks as much as he did because they are happy. I clearly couldn’t make him happy. People drink like that to forget and to numb themselves. This was a situation that I had been through years ago with a good friend of mine and was able to instantly recognize. With Craig, much like my friend, he didn’t think his drinking was a problem. He could drink a pitcher of beer and not be drunk at all. There was no change in his personality. That is the problem. When we were together, I even bought into the logic that he was fine for that reason; he acted fine no matter how much he drank. The truth is, no one comes upon that level of alcohol tolerance unless they have a reason to consistently drink that much. No matter how things ended or how he made me feel, I don’t ever want it to be that way or see anything happen to him.

I have not always been the best person I could be in this situation. I’ve often times wondered if things that got said and were done post the breakup made him drink more, and I never wanted to be the reason he drank. I react to the way you treat me by giving you back the same, which isn’t always the most proactive way to handle a situation. Because he had accused me of lying about things when I had never once lied to him, I made the decision to use that to my advantage when we would periodically and tensely talk many months after we were apart. There was a time I had to text him about something, because when my friend tried, he wouldn’t answer her. He answered me immediately, but I wanted to make sure he knew I was only texting him for my friend. To avoid a bunch of crap, I told him I was in a serious relationship with someone so that there was no confusion and he didn’t think what was going on with my friend was a front for me trying to wedge my way back into my life. Was it optimal? No. Did it work? Like a charm. Lying is still not in any of my best moments, because I’m not that kind of girl.

These go-by-the-gut reactions don’t always culminate into my best decisions. I have issues smiling in someone’s face when they are not being straightforward with me, which is why I give them back what they gave me. It’s something I’ll never do; smile in your face and stab you in the back. If I feel like I want to stab you in the back, I’ll just tell you where to shove it to your face and cut out all the drama. I also have issues dealing with drama, so if a lie avoids it and simply fills in the gaps where the truth still may not, sometimes I will do it as long as it’s not a lie that matters or hurts anyone. Saying I was in a relationship, though wrong, didn’t matter or change anything between us. It just stopped the drama. Regardless, none of these are good things.

What also isn’t good is something that is a little funny, totally Mean Girls, and that I’m only sharing because the reference I’m going to make is actually the turning point of the situation. I’ll admit that my friends and I have nicknamed him Norman, as in Norman Bates, for the emotional fuckery he put me through. He single-handedly killed the old me. But that death was the best thing that ever happened to me. If anyone else felt like that, Psycho wouldn’t have been re-imagined into the television show Bates Motel.

When it’s all said and done, I’m grateful the old me is gone. I like the new me a lot better because, as it turns out, the new me is really just the girl I was when I was seventeen, before I had something happen that changed the way I felt about the world and made me unhappy, and before I got sick. These things festered for years and just got worse and worse. I was deep in a depression that I hid well and had been for many years. I was at my breaking point when I met Craig. He made me happy, and he was the only thing other than my Greta Hayley dog. That should sound sad, but my dog is awesome, so don’t hate.

And then he was gone, I was unhappy, and things got worse after the breakup than they were during it. Everything I was afraid of was thrust upon me, and that just mixed in with the depression I had already felt and it had me lying on the cold hard ground. (This is a tragic love story. I have to quote Taylor Swift. It’s the law.)

Having had a chance to be that happy, even temporarily, had magnified my depression by a thousand and ended up creating this little monster called PTSD. Every situation I had been through was no longer something I could deal with and was just depressed about. It was a panic attack and the inability to breathe. I blamed him for this, but honestly, it wasn’t his fault. He could have handled things with me better, told me flat out he didn’t want to talk to me anymore, and not just walked away like my dad did when I was thirteen. That was the one thing I asked him not to do, and that was the trigger point for the PTSD. I had a hard time letting go of that for awhile, but I learned to.

He’s just a person; a human being and I think a very confused one at the time when things happened. I don’t know if he knew what he wanted or why we had gotten so close so fast, because I didn’t have the answers to that either. I didn’t know if I wanted to get serious with him, I just knew that, for some reason, I loved this person I barely knew. I can’t speak for him and the way he feels now, because I don’t know who he is now. At the same time, I’m also not going to make excuses because, as it turns out, I couldn’t be more grateful for him and the clusterfuck of a situation we found ourselves in. I have never been happier or more secure in who I am. I’ve never been able to be the person who was able to say, “There is no one I can’t say ‘screw you’ to” and mean it. I would let people run me over, but pretend like I never let that happen. I’d make excuses for the person and make the situation seem like it was my fault rather than admit I couldn’t stand up for myself. Now I can say “screw you” to anyone who deserves it and walk away. I don’t take peoples’ crap. I speak my mind. I’m not shy and mousy and allowing people to consistently run me over anymore.

I always felt that I was the most me that I could possibly be. I didn’t know until six months ago that who I was inside and who I was verbally and emotionally with everyone else wasn’t the same thing. I’ve hid a lot of things about myself, even from him. I had always been that awkward, gawky girl who couldn’t get noticed by guys. When I got out of my teens, suddenly I had guys hitting on me and telling me how pretty I was at best, and trying to get me into bed more times than not. I didn’t know how to handle that, because in my mind I was a wicked amount of fun, but still gawky and awkward. Because of this, I felt like I had to impress boys, so I stuffed all the not so socially acceptable things in my back pocket and decided to pretend I was a normal twenty something when I have a very old soul and am far from it. I was emulating characters from television shows that were popular because I wasn’t confident enough to tell someone that if they didn’t like me, I didn’t need them in my life. I wanted to be liked and needed. I still mother people because of it.

The list of things I hid isn’t enormous, but crucial. I have a somewhat southern accent. I have no idea why, either, because I’m from Pennsylvania. Over the years I’ve conditioned it out of my voice with tactics I’ve learned from vocal coaches when I took singing lessons. It’s not cool to talk southern here in PA. I listened to super cool music on the radio and talked normal and tried to act like I was in with the cool kids and blend in. I acted as if I was always the pretty girl that got attention and that it came naturally to me, when really I’m the ugly duckling turned the nerd next door. I edited myself instead of saying what was on my mind, because I tend to say some weird things and wanted to say cool things instead. I am not very ladylike. I’m kind of like a guy. I think my body got confused and gave me boobs when it shouldn’t have, but I try to act ladylike. I acted like I needed to go to clubs and party to have fun, and worse, that I liked doing these things. I bought some clothes that were more sexy, showed my lovely ladies, and tried to make myself look like girls do in magazines. I’ve always felt like I had to have a boyfriend, so I would date just to do it, even when I was unhappy with someone. Craig was the first time I hadn’t done that.

Y’all, that is not me. I like my strange little southern accent that I still sometimes, by habit, edit out. I like my country music with heavy guitars and a little kick ass, take no names attitude that you don’t get with pop music, and I am really, really good at singing it. I like dressing conservatively a la the impeccable Taylor Swift and forever southern Lemon Breeland. It’s so me. I like not being cool and hanging out at home and writing and crafting and baking while sober. I like being surprised by what comes out of my mouth too. I like that I can throw down with the guys, and that I’m not necessarily romantic or mushy and think a lot of women overreact to things their boyfriends do. I like not being the girl that cares if she gets married or talks about next month, far more forever. I’ve got more balls than most guys I know, and that scares a lot of guys away, but I really don’t care. I love being single, because I think I’m tons of fun and I like hanging out with me and dancing around the house because there’s no one there to see me. I’ve been told many times that I’m too independent for most guys, because I don’t need a man’s help and I have my own life. So be it. I don’t want someone that can’t handle me. I know why I’m single, but I’m having too much fun to change those quirks.

I pushed all of those things away because I’m a twenty something that should be hip, but I’m just not and I all kinds of love it. The one person who has known me since I was twenty and knows the real me and knows I am all of these things is also happier to see me being myself again, and he doesn’t like me any less for my lady balls. He does like me less, however, when I retract them. He would attest to this in a court of law, in front of his girlfriend.

I’ve taken control of my life because of one person, who, for a very, very long time I thought was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I had wished I had never met him. I hated everything about how things went down and kept thinking about how I wasn’t going to go to the party where I met him, but changed my mind at the last minute. I blamed myself for all of this because of that. I kept telling myself that I shouldn’t have gone. If I hadn’t, none of this would have happened.

Now I know that I was supposed to be there that night. I was supposed to meet him. Things were supposed to turn out this way. I don’t know how much belief I had in the saying that things always turn out the way they’re supposed to and for the best. When you’re so depressed you can’t deal with regular everyday things and you end up having to go to a psychologist because you end up with PTSD over a situation, it really doesn’t seem like the best thing and you want to go out and kick every single person who has ever uttered that phrase in the balls or va-jay-jay.

But it’s true. Sometimes the worst people to ever happen to you are the best, and it doesn’t mean that person is the worst person ever. It just means the situation you were in sucked a little more than it should have. Had we stayed together, I wouldn’t have started my business to earn a little extra money to help me save up and pay for important things like car insurance. Had we never gotten together, I doubt I would have started the business at all, because I just couldn’t motivate myself to function like a normal human being. I was so depressed from being sick for so long, and I knew I needed to talk to someone. The PTSD caused by the end of our relationship forced me into doing that just so I could stop having these horrible panic attacks. Therapy was the best thing for me because it taught me how to deal with everything I’ve been through emotionally, and all the medical things, such as my stroke at 22. I do want to experience life now, and I do enjoy baking dog treats and selling them here and there. I would have never gone to talk to someone if it wasn’t for what he I went through with him. I wouldn’t have found true happiness.

Not writing my initial post last night was kismet. I had to go through today to learn that everything I thought I knew about what had happened between us was wrong. Maybe I figured it out more than a year after I gave up the ghost of thinking about him anymore or missing him or wanting him back and getting over him. Oh well. It took a year. At least I figured it out. This is the first time I’ve thought about him in so long, but I’ve made the conscious decision to not hate him, because it is just that; a decision. I made the decision to respect that he is going through some stuff that I don’t know about, nor do I want to, nor is it any of my business. I do not regret the way things turned out or the decisions I made in the way I dealt with him. The only thing that matters to me is what I think of me, not what he thinks of me. That is simply none of my business. Sometimes the last time you think of someone has to be the best time you think of them, because you look back and know you learned something. You decide against ambivalence and instead have sympathy that they are going through things too, and hope that they have betterment in their life as well, even though you have a separate one from them.

If I could tell him anything, I’d hope he’d know that I hold nothing against him, I don’t hate him, I forgave him long ago and moved on. I don’t blame him. I would thank him for doing what he did, and ask him not to do it to anyone else, because he won’t be happy that way, and he should be happy. He deserves to be. I don’t think he ever saw the good in himself or what I saw, but I hope one day he does, because I thought he was pretty amazing just the way he was. I wouldn’t flip out at him if he tried to talk to me, and I don’t know how well it would go over either. As long as he finds happiness as I have, everything else that happened between us is just stuff from the past. No hard feelings.

There’s songs that resonate with the bad; with the things you went through with someone that made you feel empty and open.

There’s songs that help you find peace; with the things that you can’t control and know it’s not worth trying. But that was a hard lesson to learn.

There’s songs for when you realize you can make it through everything. This is exactly where I am now. This song defines me in every single way. Watch out, world. It’s gonna take more than that to put me under.

The Return of Crazy Bed Lady

Y’all, remember the crazy Craigslist lady who wanted my bed? She was the one that I told you all about in this post? She did the unexpected and, instead of telling me she couldn’t get the bed if I didn’t meet her with it, therefore ending the conversation, she decided to do something much ruder. She told me she was going to see if the furniture fit in her van and get back to me, and even though I asked her if she obtained the amount of money I was asking for the bed and reiterated that I would not take what she was offering, she never answered me. I knew something was up. That was three weeks ago. I heard not a peep from her and felt all the relief that Shaun White felt when the Olympics were over, he went home, and people stopped giving him constant shit.

Then she emailed me again tonight.

Cue the horror movie music now.

She asked me if I still had the bed. I told her I did. I about face palmed a million face palms, because I knew she was going somewhere out of this world stupid with this. After all, wasn’t she supposed to be getting back to me about it fitting in her van? I gave her the benefit of the doubt, thinking maybe things happen and she was really busy these past three weeks and hadn’t had a chance to take measurements until now. I told her I did still have the bed. I knew I shouldn’t have. I totally knew better, you guys, because I could feel it in my butt, which is bigger than my gut and more accurate, that this was going south of the Equator in four seconds flat.

As expected, she emailed me back, but again asked me if I would take way less than what I was asking for the bed. We had been over this. I was done going over this with her. I had told her point blank I would not take that for the bed before, end of discussion. At least it would have been for normal, sane and polite people. We’ve established this woman possesses none of these qualities, so she chose to play the “I don’t remember talking to you before,” card. This was more entertaining than two snails racing each other after accidentally falling into a puddle of Jagermeister, because she had emailed me by replying to a previous email I had sent her.

At this point I was over the entire situation. I had played nice with her through a dozen emails, the run around, and a whole lot of dumb, but as I had always known but hadn’t had proof of until just this second, she knew exactly what she was doing. I politely told her that she had replied to a previous email and knew we had talked, and she also knew that I had clearly told her I would not take the price she was offering for the bed. I was in no hurry to get rid of the bed and would prefer to give it plenty of time to sell in clear weather, when the roads aren’t constantly being shut down because of the snow, at the fair price I was asking. Apparently I’m an awful person for nicely setting her straight after politely tolerating all her bullshit.

Naturally, the way she chose to handle this was by telling me it was my loss for not taking her much lower offer and that I didn’t have to be rude to her about it. Forget that she had been rude to me this entire time by giving me the run around when she had just made it clear to me that she had no intentions of buying the bed unless she could get it for a price that I already told her she could not buy it for. She even went as far as to tell me she was going to borrow money from someone to get the bed. So yes, you guys, I’m totally the rude one here, I admit it.

I figured since she decided I was rude anyway, I was going to actually be rude and tell her off, because one woman can only take so much of someone’s crap, and my limit was met after a month and a dozen or so emails that ended in her telling me off because I wouldn’t let her rip me off. I tactfully used the “iron fisted velvet glove” approach at telling her off, a tactic that has been patented throughout the generations by every good southern woman on God’s green earth. I told her it was not my loss that I refused to be ripped off by her, when she clearly could not afford what I was selling. I explained that I didn’t appreciate her giving me the run around when I had so clearly told her in the second email, a full month back, that I would not take the price she was offering me. I did not appreciate that she continued emailing and giving me the go round round as if she were actually going to purchase the bed at the asking price, with no intentions of buying the bed for any price but the one I told her I would not take. I pointed out how she had given me the run around by asking me if I would meet her with the bed, and also saying she didn’t know if she could fit the bed in her van, after both the measurements and the terms of the sale were stated in the ad, so neither should have been an issue. I ended in telling her that I didn’t appreciate her waiting three weeks to email me again, after leading me to believe she was going to get back to me about if the bed fit in her vehicle or not, only to have her start trying to get the bed for the price I told her I would not take all over again. I was looking for serious buyers only. To be nice, I even thanked her for wasting my time.

Then I turned her into Craigslist for spam and harassment, because Momma don’t play that game. This was directly after I blocked her email. I’ve tried to explain this repeatedly to an ex who wouldn’t step the back off and has deservingly earned himself the nickname Norman Bates. I’ve said it once, a thousand times, and I’ll say it again.

I’m a little like Taylor Swift in the way that I always get the last word.

Valentine’s Day Memes For the Anti-Valentine’s Day Girls

Full disclosure: I hate Valentine’s Day. I’ve never had a Valentine to call my own, but even if I did, I’m still pretty sure I’d hate it with a Grumpy Cat-like passion. The second my man tried to take me somewhere fancy or get mushy with me, it would be over. Not Valentine’s Day itself, but the whole relationship. I don’t do mushy. I’m not that kind of girl. I don’t like being dotted over or have someone drop a lot of money on me. All I want is someone I can trust and count on. Everything else is just material.

Because I got out today, I am in a particularly non-snarky mood for this holiday. Then again, the township kind of got their own eff you and trying to keep people blew up in their face when temperatures soared to a balmy forty some degrees and all the snow melted. Everyone left their houses anyway, and the township was forced to lift the Declaration of Disaster Emergency. So, like I said yesterday, their so called emergency was a bunch of bologna, no offense to bologna. It was a little zoo-ish out there, but I like when the weather sticks it to the man, so I went out anyway and supported it.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, and my first Valentine’s post in the ten or so years that I’ve been blogging, I’ve decided to go an unusual route. Since I have nothing to gush about, I’m just going to post a bunch of adorable memes that represent different sides of the holiday so you can squee over them, because meme squeeing is the only kind of cute squeeing I want to do on Valentine’s Day.

The most natural valentines to start with are those done up by my girl, Grumpy Cat. There are many more of these online, but these are the ones that I would actually send to people, and I’m sure they would send them back with a nasty letter. Nonetheless, I would send them. My favorites are the two stating “I think you’re…” because it totally goes with my Team Even My Compliments Are Kind of Accidentally Mean that I started in yesterday’s post by, of course, total accident.

It’s totally bizarre when you grow up and realize that every single human sees this holiday differently and loves different things. Take, for instance, Jennifer Lawrence. She don’t need no man.

And even if she did, let’s just be totally honest about the sanction of love.

And when you can’t get a date, just remember the below things, because they’re so true. And someone somewhere is really missing out and doesn’t even know it yet.

And if that person does finally figure it out and they screw up, well, there’s always this option for making things right. Especially if you go in and yell nine on an alphabetical scale.

With those nine on a alphabetical scale flowers should come this, because girls love punny things earmarked with cute animals of any kind.

But remember, if you love something and it doesn’t love you back and leaves, it’s okay to feel like this squirrel.

But after the initial devastation wears off and you decide you’re never dating again, please, oh please, do NOT take it out on your cat.

And do not date guys who are kind of okay but also a little weird, because they could actually be related to this cat, and no one would want that.

After you do date that guy in your period of bad judgment, you can come home to the one thing that always understands you, no matter how bad things get. The one thing that will not judge you.

Because even if you think your cat gets you, he or she doesn’t. That’s why they don’t meow back, leaving you feeling even more rejected and alone.

When your cat doesn’t get you, it’s important to remember that your dog is feeling the same rejection as you are feeling from your cat.

At the end of the day, you can all come together knowing that, when relationships don’t work, the bed cradles you but never listens to your feelings, and the cat doesn’t meow back, the dog always has your back. As long as you have a dog, you have a Valentine of your very own.

This is mine.

Even if she did have a brief affair with Stitch the cat.

And Mr. Giraffe the stuffed animal.

And even if she is a little weird.

I have no regrets. Best Valentine ever!