I’ve spent the last few months (years?) trying to figure out what I want to do for a living…I’ve decided my own company would be the best route considering the fact I’d love to see my hard work and effort go towards my own baby and not someone else’s. I know it’s pointless to attempt to make ends meet with traditional graphic design, I don’t have the heart to open my own subsidy publishing company considering it’s ripping people off…if your book isn’t being picked up by publishers you need to either polish your angle or your writing. Painting, sewing, other crafts take too much time…not worth the ROI. I need something I can market from home instead of networking considering I can’t get out to meetings because of our family’s schedule, can’t open the artisan retreat b/c the overhead is too high, can’t sit around b/c of bills and retirement funds and college savings and health care and… arg!!!!

So what’s there to do? Get creative.

Why do businesses offer FREE consultations in order to find out anything about them? They waste their money on pages full of fluffy…these are the organizations I belong to, this is stuff I do, here is a picture of me smiling-aren’t I pretty and pretending to look friendly, this is how I fit in with everybody else…but in order to find out the meat of what makes or breaks a business-specifically price, businesses get skeevish. Why? I have no idea. When a company doesn’t want to share their rates with me I am left to question what they are hiding. Are you ashamed of your rates? Do you have something so important to convey to me that it is impossible to do it through words and pictures on the net or in your materials? Let’s get to the bottom line, if you aren’t secure enough in your prices that you can’t openly distribute them to your clientele, maybe your pricing isn’t up to par.

Here’s the raw deal… if I have to go through an exchange of a dozen emails before I can even get to a notion of a price with you and you still refuse to tell me what it’s going to cost without meeting in person we have a situation. You are putting a strain on our relationship as client and business and wasting my time. If I have to call you are wasting my minutes and if I have to get in the car, take out a loan to pay for gas ($12 roundtrip) to get across town to your “free” consultation, lose three hours of valuable work time I could be making money ($150), we’re no longer looking at a free consultation. I don’t give a fuck about your personality, if I don’t like you after the first appointment I won’t be back, I don’t need an introductory consultation…what do you have to consult me on…how you are different from other dentists? Can’t be that different. How to sit in the chair and say ahh? Been there, done that. Give me your price, give me your benefits, I’ll figure out the ROI between you and your competitors and make my decision from there. Chances are if you are dealing with something as vital as my smile or the life of my unborn child I’m not going to just choose you b/c you are the cheapest. If I won’t even take the lowest bid on a printer for my business cards why would I do it on dentists and midwives? This is the age of technology, lay it out on the line or atleast give me a range. When have prices become trade secrets, what are you protecting? This kind of queer sinister behavior doesn’t make sense, if you can’t trust me to know what you charge for an appointment/hour/whatever, why would I trust you with your head between my legs poking around at my baby-to-be? We know what’s going to happen at a dental cleaning, spit, say ah, x-rays, you’re done, just give me a price. It’s like companies who put “negotiable” for their salary but list in detail responsibilites, education and experience requirements. If you know what you want and how much you want to pay…list it. Why would I trust you with my livelyhood and my family’s financial well being (not to mention my sanity) if you can’t be honest up-front, even a range is good… minimum experienc/requirements: $25,000, maximum experience/requirements: $45,000. How much more honest would the business be if we stopped being shady.

What the hell am I doing here still? I should have left ages ago. Its cold, silent wind blows through the trees and lands in my head with a loud thud. This is expectation. I expected myself to change the world, have the perfect family life, be strong enough to take it all on and whined up on top. So here I am at the bottom, I left a good paying job, a fabulous house and the sun for this shit. And for what? So he could pursue his sailing dreams…go after the ideal job then FUCK IT ALL UP and get fired for talking on the phone to his fucking pothead friends while he should have been working. I’m trying to think of where else I haven’t looked for change yet. I’m still a few dollars short and the baby needs milk. She’s freaking out at me, cabin fevered by this small apartment we moved into. She wants outside but there’s no place to play. I have clients calling me about photographs they want me to fix a certain way but don’t want to pay me for the work, I have others who want me to save their business but don’t want to change their current ways…and to do it for cheap. I spent a quarter tank of gas to dropping off a cd since my internet is fucked up. I’ve been screamed at all day by the baby and while I’m here eating leftovers a few days too old to be eating, he’s having blackend catfish and dirty rice at a four star. He, who won’t official marry me and shoved cake in another girls face at our psuedo-wedding. I don’t know if change is even worth it anymore…should I pack up and move back north? Go somewhere noone knows me and disappear? The baby dumped orange kool-aid on the carpet, the top of the highchair and all over herself. I could clean it up but it won’t matter. She’s like her father, everything else will become a mess so why bother anymore.

So here we are in Houston, and I hate it. We got rid of our beautiful house for some 800 sq. ft. apartment POS where the neighbors are perpetually doing construction upstairs. I can’t find a day care center under $200 a week and Solaris has decided to be pure fucking evil. David’s always at work and when he is home he is watching TV or leaving garbage everywhere. AND I am perpetually pissed off b/c apparently the new baby is just like me and two me’s equals perpetual anger. Oh yes, plus I have to take devil child on an airplane on Wednesday. This ought to be fun. I wouldn’t mind it so much and would actually be excited to go to this stupid thing if a.) i fit into my damn dress and b.) it wasn’t the SAME fucking dress as I had as my wedding dress, just in blue. It’s quite rude and I am sure if I picked the same wedding dress as the bride for my wedding she’d be ALOT less civil than I am. FUCK WEDDINGS. FUCK kids.

I thought “ok, this is great, it was rough at first but everything will work out in the end.” David had an interview for a realy (really, really) great job that he probably would have been a shoe-in for. We sent out his resume, he got a response back with in a day and we were on our way to TX. Things changed. My suburban dream where lifestyles were affordable, kids played in fenced backyards and we had benefits, montessori and dance classes went down the drain thanks to god knows what. After we all caught the flu last week our trip to TX had to be postponed, and when the man didn’t call D back about rescheduling I got confused. So here I am, 1 a.m. trying to type in the dark, I wonder if he’s heard anything back from the HYC also and check his mail. I find an email he sent to the original job…a tragic, chances ending email asking all the major No’s you ask before an offer…money, benefits, etc. All in beautiful grammatical inaccuracey.

I don’t even know what to do now, I can’t be mad at him b/c he didn’t know. But then again he didn’t try to learn. Instead my heart is breaking because I can’t afford to…anything here. I was counting on this, on him to make this. Instead of sitting down and learning how to go about interviews and job hunts he’s too busy reading and planning upcoming rum races at some roach YC up the river. I think its finally starting to dawn on me, I’ve had faith this whole time, a level of “he’s young” to fall back on but now I can’t do it anymore. His mother referred to herself as “mommy” to my daughter today. I need to get the fuck out of here.

I’m just so fucking tired of this though, I’m just exhausted. I am almost writing things like “I need to take a proactive approach to my family” but then stop short when I ask myself what the fuck I’ve been doing for the last few years. I love him, I do when I think of how great he is with the baby and with me, he’s the perfect family man. Then I think of his deadbeat fucking friends, his loser parents that do absolutely fucking nothing…they do everything but all towards the goal of fucking nothing, whine complain manipulate and finally act human as a strategic manuever when in desperation. His racing is accomplishing nothing, he’s completely oblivious to the potential networking opps and it seems like his only in to the whole world is too interested in herself to help him up.

Now what? What are my options? Where do I go from here? I actually thought about abortion tonight for a brief second, how the hell am I going to do this on my own? I would never though, the thought dissolved as soon as it started and I realized the bitty life was still that and murder was not an option. So I am looking at places in Pittsburgh, looking at jobs, looking at studios where the baby and I can squeeze in for a bit until something better comes. I can get a one bedroom there for about $500 and I don’t have to tell my mother I live there. I can afford it, I’ll probably get something with benefits and I know there are good montessoris there. The only problem is it is cold, but on the brighter side the babies will have fun playing in the snow and they’ll grow up around a bohemian underground which will do more for them than this elitist me culture. There will be art and tea and conversations (maybe) or atleast a good book. I’m just so fucking tired. I always dreamed of one day growing up and meeting a guy who took care of me…fuck the corbins and jays and all the other losers I’ve busted my ass for. David takes care of us, or at least tries to in his own way. But I am still so fucking tired.

Here I am stuck in this dirty little town with trees falling away, towed under with ignorance and greed. They treat the people the way they treat the trees and all the children here are mad and lost, running around in philosophical crisis trying to find a self amongst the lost. They cannot be held, cannot be tied down even with friendship, The few who break free become outcasts even to their parents, who turn on them like mother rabbits to devour their young–wretched awash in the scent of human. Two years I’ve spent bouncing amongst the dead, deciphering the hieroglyphics of youth smeared vermillion crusting at the edges of their perception. Beyond that, a denial which will not focus in our peripheral. I’ve sat for two years and, unable to find analysis beyond the self and creativity beyond elitism, began to watch the way the two bounced off each other and swirled in hypocrisy, casting rays of sunlight and madness into thick glares across my vision. Two years and “enough”…she screams it into the open chasm and silence falls like a stage curtain. Eyes closed and smeared with great sweeping blind spots that take the form of Christ. The lose of sight has become a miracle, an act of martyrdom. You are not a martyr, you laugh to yourself. Two years and back to the beginning with you? Hardly, you know this already… You are not a martyr. But the words are not meant for you. You cannot save them but you can escape. “You are not a martyr.” And the words came echoing back…”enough”.

Oh the “-ish”, for old times sake. Looking back through the pages and pages of previous blogging between this one and the 2003 one, I’m amused. I begin to see glimmers of things that I supposably lost over the ages: strength, heart, confusion, innocence (he he he…truthfully though, the ability to let myself be hurt) and I wonder if they all cannot be found within me still. I don’t see myself in the same light as the girl I read about. There is a level of chaos that was there that’s been replace by responsibility. Have I choosen to hide myself behind my family? Is there a way to break back out of this?

So now I don’t even know what to do. Hopefully writing this will give me some sort of insight. I just called David to see if he had my ATM card (which is not suppose to be) because I found a twenty dollar charge on my account from today. Since I was working from home and hadn’t left, something was up. I called. He was upset. “I just got pulled over…ran a stop sign…yada, yada, yada.” ANOTHER $150. I just got done reconsidering kicking him out from the last stint he pulled…lossing $140 at the fucking black jack table in three hours and lying about hitting my account for the cash. And the one before that… laying in bed curled up with a friend with his hand on her ass. And before that…$2,000 in credit card debt in two weeks. And before that…more money shit. And before that…more girl shit. And before that…dropping out of classes. And from when it started last summer when he all but dissappeared the week or two he went to the Koch cup, rarely called, talked non-stop about some chick when he did and finally came home and announced that he would be joining the Coast Guard (just like the some chick was in). Fuck him, fuck his some chicks and fuck his funding. His is out screwing around while I bust my ass working and can’t even pay my student loans.

He looks at me “we’re moving up north, i need away from them.” Thinking about the life I had, and how to blend two babies and a boy into the mix does not look promising. We’re heading up in May for K and S’s wedding, so we’ll see how the baby lugging, Starbucks with boy singular, T riding with the family goes. Will I be able to fit back into the rythym of things? The idea of intellectual conversation not rotating around the self sounds promising, of going out to dinner with friends, galleries and shows and art, oh my. But will there be a problem between guy friends and boy singular? Will it cause tension? What jobs? What houses? Boy singular won’t survive there, I know this. We won’t be heading back to Pittsburgh, but maybe I can find the things I love of the old city and mix it with the things he loves from here.

A train runs silently through the woods, great desperate swirls of frustration leading to one tragically dramatic thought after another. I thought I would vent here, but I now that I’ve started I seemed to have lost the motivation. Maybe I will just track a laundry list of random players of pathes splintering off into wonderland. Where to start…

Prelude: Pygmy Land

Grey carpet smeared with food, disinfectant smell. Cold, early mornings without reason…grey with frost on the windows, waiting patiently for 15% and the dawning hour. Blood bubbling onto white pants from a botched blood test. CBT, grahm crackers, butter, rasins, milk, water, Sheryl Crow, Jewel, tiny kitchen, assertiveness training, pitt stadium imploding, tela ropa,

Standing backwards on scales in open back hospital gowns, Marya. Knives, tylenol PM, Dixie Chicks, Green bedrooms, brad, another kid I talked to twice on the phone…found my number in a yearbook. Did he kill someone? Cathedral of Learning, Oakland, spring, spiraling, bouncing, silver sculpture on the side of the building, dogwood blooming in front, kids pushing past.

Elevator down, pink index card in fist, opens into grey hallway surrounded by glass blocks, fake lighting some twenty feet below ground level, over to another elevator, up, through tunnels, through hallways, stairways and doors. Cafeteria, mad anxiety. Three ice cream bars…why not? How else to 900 calories? Fuck your cupcakes, fuck your roast beasties, fuck your milk and your butter, drinking your oil from tomatoe and cucumber concoctions, missing coffee, ditrex, herbal supplements and EKG, body…stops, speeds, falls, colapses, black, vomit, moving dinner down the drain. Fuck, hats, fuck showers, fuck your rules, no razors and hairy legs, fuck your world. I want mine back. I want her back. Fuck

Outpatient, almost cured, almost in society. Girl crys her way out of a ticket, fat girl…does she belong here? McDonald house with blonde girl…what was her name. Brunette girl…only there a few days. Skinny girl (in ED, its bad) with the tube and the parents and the phone call I couldn’t tell them they strapped her to a bed…who didn’t tell them? Wasn’t my fucking job I run sobbing down the hallway and dive into bed. Passing out on sofa after bad meds, EKG. Scale, food, school cubicals with names painted in finger goo and sparkels. Big orange building. Tiny girl with curls, so thin she couldn’t walk. Thiry years with her, my one roommate. Old women with her off to geriatrics. 8 year old, girl coming down from cigarettes, my Robin.

Act 1: New Brighton

Bone Thugs and Harmony: recently heard a new song by them, brought me back to a time when life was a bit less. Beth, and Bryan and Corbin, Jamie, Beth 2, Vogan and Josh and Blazers, McDonlads and parking lots in beat up buicks shivering and passing fake bowls to celebrate the 4:20 hour, two away from day break.

Fighting and drinking and childish games, childish loves, childish kisses. Jessica and sitting on the lake with the fire going with two boys who disappeared into the night. A cut off picture of another unidentifiable. Dry erase walls.

Bus rides to Nationals with Justin rolling off the seat and onto the floor, rotten apples in Olgebay dressingrooms. Flashing cars at the end of stephanie’s driveway.

Jack and Matt and getting kicked in the chin, Football with the guys, Zephyr, the coxes and peanut…peanut butter and jelly. Emily and Liza and eating the Murphies. Boxer. Tree swing from a frizbee, tree house in a pine. Club house out of bricks. Buses and hills and rollerblade accidents, baseball with jacks dad. The girls up the road gemma and amy? jaime. Dennis and the sying cat. the sled riding hill. Snow days.

Act 2: Clear Brook

Act 3: Juniata

Act 4: Pittsburgh

Act 5: Vero