When Life Gives You Shit...

...You can still make a profit selling to gardeners. 

This past week has been unbelievably crazy.  Everyone's got drama, everyone needs money, everyone is uptight blah blah blah wah wah wah. 

I've mentioned before somewhere that we have a houseguest in the form of my mom's best friend.  It's been over a year now that she's been staying with us, less a few months here and there when she was visiting her family or whatever.  A year to not get a job, not get her own place and basically not do anything of value besides cleaning up the apartment now and then, and sometimes cooking. 

I recently found out she has a long history of living off her friends to the point where they can't take it anymore and kick her out -- and then she acts like the injured party and badmouths the erstwhile friend. 

Also she apparently snores so stentoriously that my mom hasn't had a proper night's sleep for a year.  Even with earplugs.  Which contributes now to my mother's physical collapse from exhaustion.

Basically the woman is a parasite. A big, fat, covertly evil parasite.  Seriously. 

My stepdad has had enough of all of it.  His various interests will require he stay here for an extended period, so he's elected to move to a different, cheaper apartment.  Our current place is his apartment but my arrival left him sleeping on the floor in the living room when he visited.  No one liked it but he insisted on it so ... yeah.  But now that he's getting a new place, he wants one of the two bedrooms (my mother gets the other [they're not married anymore, just friends], which means I'd be the one sleeping in the living room. 

And if the Parasite stays with us for any length of time, she'll be in the living room too.  

Which is not acceptable to either of us.  And my stepdad knows it. 

So I need to get a new place.  In that I really kinda fucking hate OC (although to be fair, I've been a total social maladroit until recently), and I don't wanna move twice, this means that by sometime in May, I'll be living in Los Angeles County.  Don't know where yet, exactly, but it'll probably be in the Glendale/Burbank area, or possibly in a loft apartment downtown.  I'm hoping to score some roomies, actually. Much as I'd love to have my very own place, I'm really not in a financial position for that to be realistic at all. 

Which brings me to the next issue: Money and jobs. 

Money-wise, it seems like suddenly, just when I really need to be saving as much as possible, everyone suddenly wants my fucking paycheck. The bank docked me $70 for a bogus overdraft (which I need to deal with), the credit card company suddenly originates that I owe them $60 in addition to usual fees (which I will also deal with).  Oh, and all the bills I pay arrived in the mail yesterday.  

So here's me, two months from needing to get a new place (which = all kinds of costs) and a new job (which will need to pay at least half again as much as my current one).  It would be smart to save up, right? Except no one seems to want me to.  So for the next two months, I'm going to be even more hermitic than usual, saving every possible penny.  Last night was the last time I'll be going out for a while.  Well, maybe St. Patrick's Day. But only maybe.  

Meanwhile, work this past week was insanely busy, and the customers I had to deal with were total idiotic bitches.  Seriously.  I won't get into gory details but my senior turns around and yells at ME -- the dude who put in like 5 hours of unpaid overtime and skipped three lunches to get the job done, and that was on my own origination -- because the customer always has to be right. 

Those customers can suck it. 

So yeah, the contemplation of a new job is actually kind of a nice one. I mean, I do generally like working where I do, but it's definitely time to move on. 

All of this made for a crazy, stressful week, one where all my stable points, all the things I more or less took for granted, or as problems solved, are suddenly unstable, ungranted, unsolved.  

Hells yes I'm nervous -- my previous experiences on my own were significantly different from what this will be -- but I'm also muy excited.  

Because the waiting is over, you see.  I've spent the last three or four years basically waiting for certain conditions to be fulfilled so I could go out and live my life at last.  Well, those conditions have not been fulfilled (although they eventually will be), but the waiting is over.  It's carpe diem time, boys and girls.  

Carpe fucking diem.