A
girl needs a gun these days on account of all the rattlesnakes.
--Lloyd
Cole
Verizon is supposed to come and fix the phone line tomorrow.
They will be here between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. and I can't decide if a
thirteen-hour window is funny or not. We need to clean up as much as possible
between now and then. I hate having people in the trailer. I'm always so afraid
they will, idk, call some sort of authority, charge me with something, get the
place condemned, try to take the kids. Something; I don't know.
I know this is unlikely. At eighteen, Sierra is officially
an adult. Trinity at seventeen is an adult in Texas. I'm just always afraid;
after CPS accused me of witchcraft and removed the kids in 2002, I'm always
afraid.
I'm working very hard at not thinking about the court thing.
Sometimes blocks of minutes will pass and I'll realize that I haven't thought
about it in that time.
The good thing about losing child support is that we'll
qualify for food stamps. Every cloud/silver lining, right? The bad thing is
that House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan is proposing a budget that would
cut food stamp funding by 17 percent. If it passes, I'll explain to the kids
that they simply need to cut down their daily food intake by 17 percent. No
problem, right?
It's way, way, way past time to get out of here. Out of
Texas, out of the entire nation. Did you know that a whole bunch of
universities in Finland are looking for professors in my field? They're even
okay with courses being taught in English. In four, five years I'll have my
PhD. I'll have experience, stellar refs, a CV plush with published work; I can
pack up the dogs and head out to Finland. When I still had Internet, I checked
into Finland's bringing-pets-into-the country laws and apparently it's
super-simple. No quarantine. No hassle. My nonhuman animal companions just need
proof of their recent shots and they just get off the airplane as instant
nonhuman animal citizens of Finland. (It'll probably be harder for me,
actually, to achieve permanent citizenship.)
But I'll probably never get out of here. I'll die here,
still living in this trailer.
I wish I were twenty years younger. What I need is an extra
twenty years. I'm feeling my age. I feel slow, I feel tired all the time. I
feel constantly not-quite-well, always a little bit sick. Oh well. Oh well,
right? What am I going to do about it? Nothing. This's another one of those
things: Nothing to do/it doesn't matter.
So. Work-work-work on paper today. Drive somewhere where I
can get Internet. Check stuff. Try to pick up a sub job tomorrow. Call tomorrow
and try to find out why Medicaid hasn't yet approved Sierra's PT. Try to figure
out how to correctly put the belt I bought last year upon the mower (I can't go
another summer not-mowing). Pick up a new 12-gauge, shells. Fence in garden
area. Pick up bare necessities at Wal-Mart. Figure out my class schedule for
Fall 2012. Keep shoving it down.
