Especially ones involving my resources.
So yesterday, I ordered groceries. And, as usual, they fucked it up.
Not only did they give me the wrong god damned cookies again (I ordered sugar free, got sugary version instead), I didn’t get my usual 1 KG package of No Name™ Original Trail Mix nor did I get the big box of frozen chicken strips I ordered.
The chicken strips I can do without because I also got a box of Jamaican patties and those will serve as entrees for my suppers for now.
But the trail mix thing really pisses me off because that’s a cornerstone of my diet right there, sad as that may be. Luckily I also ordered a 600 gram bag of a different trail mix (the 1 kg No Name one never quite lasts a week) and that DID arrive, so I am not without my Fruvous kibble just yet.
But there is no way that 600 gram bag will last a whole week.
Now I am not blaming my DoorDash dude for things being out of stock at Real Canadian Superstore, although a paranoid little voice in my head makes me wonder if they REALLY looked or whether, in order to save time, they just skip some things.
Don’t look at me like that. They are paid per delivery. They have ever incentive to cut corners in order to do more deliveries per hour, and I just have to take their word that it was out of stock?
I truly can’t stop myself from thinking like that
But anyhow, paranoia aside, I don’t have my damned trail mix. And in the longer term, I am getting really tired of not getting what I god damned ordered.
It’s injurious to my ability to relax like I am supposed to. I loathe surprises in general and surprise food shortages are more or less guaranteed to really throw me off and I am beginning to seriously wonder if I need to go back to asking Julian to get my groceries for me because I know he will bring me what I asked for, even if he has to try a few different stores to find it.
I’m not gonna get that from DoorDash.
And speaking of unwelcome financial surprises, I just checked the balance remaining on my card and found out that DoorDash charged me the full $70 that the groceries I ordered would have costs if everything had shown up.
But everything did NOT show up. So the charge should have been a lot less.
Like, about $30 less.
God damn it, I don’t need this shit. Why must the universe fuck with me?
Then today, Julian was saying that I need to pay more than the $600 I have been paying in rent since forever to cover the household expenses.
But Joe and I have an agreement. I pay him $600 a month and that covers everything. Rent, food, cable, utilities, and so on.
if Julian wants to change that agreement, he needs to take it up with Joe. Joe is, effectively, my landlord.
And as far as I know, Joe’s paycheck is still being deposited in his bank account regularly, despite him being sick with cancer and hence not working, and I have a feeling he’s been spending remarkably little of it, poor guy, so that is where the money for groceries et al should be coming from.
It is, after all, Joe’s money, not Julian’s. If Joe wants to continue to charge me only $600 a month for everything, that’s his business.
Julian is only part of the process as an administrator. and as such, he is there to do what Joe wants him to do.
And he only wants to charge me $600 a month.
Sorry I had to bitch about this here, Julian, where you will undoubtedly read it, but our conversation this afternoon really upset me and I needed to vent.
Anyhow, here’s two minks in a sink.
More after the break.
The real me
That’s an incredibly difficult concept for me.
Because something in me refuses to say any of me is “fake” or “unreal”. It’s all me. I refuse to cut off parts of myself just to fit under a label.
Fuck that. Make the label bigger instead. Or just leave me the hell alone.
Besides, everything I do, I do as an expression of myself. Self-expression is my primary mode of existence, after all, and therefore everything I do falls under that banner.
Perhaps that is why I am so feisty about not being labeled or defined. Definitions, by their nature, defy individuality and reduce people to easily digestible categories.
Well fuck THAT. My brand of self-expression does not allow for the expression of anything other than my true authentic self. And that self does not bend, bow, or break for any god damned archetype.
I hate to break this to you, folks, but I’m real.
Hi. My name is Mike. Pleased to meet you.
This is all very Gen X of me, of course. As a generation, we sullen, withdrawn, insular, somewhat unpredictable, and we refuse to be defined.
As individuals, of course, we’re whatever.
But labels aside, like I was telling Doctor Costin last Therapy Thursday, I find it nearly impossible to conceive of a single identity for myself.
What conception of self could possibly encompass all my many modes, moods, and complexities? I can tell you about all my many different facets, some of which seem to contradict one another (I’m passionately empathic yet I am also coldly logical and calculation, for instance), and I can say with total assurance that I know that I am not any of my facets, I am the gem on which they live.
But I have no idea what kind of gem that is.
And lately, I have come to suspect that the “real me” lives inside that gem, and uses the facets as filters through which to glimpse reality while “I” stay safe and warm in my gemstone home locked away from the world.
And it could be that if I want to get well, I will have to leave that bedazzling bunker and some out into the world as my sad little self.
And that feels like it would kill me.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.