Jyvur Entropy's Blog, page 10

People who love Crazy

I’m not embarrassed (okay, maybe a little, but whatever); I love internet drama. I fucking love it. I watch all the tea channels. I always know who the villain of youtube is. I’m all over it. Give me the drama.

Also, before anybody pops up with the hot take “women love drama” I learned something during my period of idiocy where I was obsessed with all things manosphere/red pill/incel/ god-help-me-I’m-having-a-nervous-breakdown-so-I’ll-become-a-32-year-old-woman-who-watches-alpha-male-videos…anyway, those men do nothing but have drama with each other. So much fighting and backstabbing.

It’s not a woman thing or a man thing. It’s a human thing. Humans love drama. So shut up and don’t be a misogynist.

Anyhow, recently in internet drama, Gabbie Hanna is in trouble. Well, Gabbie Hanna is always in trouble. Gabbie Hanna is an asshole that I can’t help rooting for. I want her to stop being a dumbass so badly. Also I love her music.

‘This is gonna hurt. This is gonna hurt.’

In the endless back and forth between Gabbie Hanna and Jessi Smiles, Gabbie brought to light some old drama. Before we get into that, let me be clear, Gabbie Hanna is in the wrong in the Jessi Smiles situation. Jessi was raped and Gabbie is a selfish asshole who won’t stop making Jessi’s rape about herself. It’s weird. It’s gross. Gabbie Hanna was a rape apologist on twitter. She went and had a conversation with the man that she knew raped her friend. And years later, she will not stop talking about Jessi’s trauma.

Does Jessi antagonize that situation like Gabbie says? Does Jessi want to keep the back and forth with Gabbie going? In response to those claims by Gabbie, I’d have to say, it doesn’t matter. Jessi was raped and Gabbie DID defend and speak to her rapist. Consequences have actions. That might suck for Gabbie, but it’s the truth. It doesn’t matter if Jessi is or isn’t dragging it out. Gabbie’s behavior was egregious and she needs to deal with the fallout from it, however long that fallout may last (hint! Shutting up about it might help, lady).

So, now about I’m about to criticize Jessi for something completely separate.

Jessi is a rape victim.

That doesn’t mean Jessi is a perfect human.

This idea that in order to be a victim a person must be perfect is incredibly icky. A person does NOT have to be flawless in order to be a victim. And we shouldn’t want to live in a world where we demand perfection from victims.

All of that out of the way: I’m gonna fucking drag Jessi Smiles.

This situation happened quite a long time ago. But I think it’s important to talk about because of the audience response to it.

By Jessi’s own admission, all this woman Judy did was come over her house cry and be kind of weird.

She made numerous storytime videos about her, made memes out of her, and sent her massive audience to fuck with her and make fun of her.

But let’s back up…

Jen Dent

Jen Dent is a friend of Jessi’s and Jen is the one who befriended Judy.

Jen met Judy online. This is how they met: Judy was acting completely unhinged, leaving loads of rude comments all over Jen’s accounts and fighting her in DMs.

But why would they end up friends after that?

Easy, because some people love crazy.

Some people like to have emotionally unstable people around so they can treat them like a fucking haunted house. They can have that fun thrill of fear and surprise. They can revel in the chaos.

Oh, and one more thing:

They can pat themselves on the back for what a good person they are and how put together they are.

In all of her videos, Jen Dent says things like “I’m a nice person” and “I’m a genuine person” and “I tried to be her friend.”

The truth is Jen saw that Judy was emotionally unstable and she wanted that emotional instability so that she could laugh at it. And laugh at it she did.

This is the situation summarized:

After meeting Judy when Judy left a slew of angry unhinged comments all over her social media, Jen Dent befriended Judy and they started talking. One night Jen asked Jessi if Judy could come sleepover with them at Jessi’s house. Jessi said yes.

Judy came over, burst into tears a couple of times, got a little too high and puked, yelled strangely about how organized the closet was, elbowed a guy in a bar after he knocked into her while dancing, and pretended to be asleep at Ihop when she wasn’t.

Y’all…..I’ve done way weirder shit than that with people I’ve just met. That’s pretty innocuous behavior for someone who is clearly mentally ill.

But apparently her crying at inappropriate times and pretending to be asleep was absolutely terrifying. In her storytimes, Jessi carries on gleefully telling her audience “I thought she was gonna kill me! I thought she was gonna kill my dog!” The lady is practically salivating.

Some people love crazy. They love the excitement. They love the chaos. They love that feeling of power, that they can nudge someone just a little bit and an emotion bomb will go off.

Mentally ill people are not your fucking haunted house.

It amazes me that more people aren’t calling this awful behavior out. It’s not the fact that Jen and Jessi were really fucking shitty to someone 5 years ago (but continue to make videos about Judy up until two years ago….and Judy is the one behaving obsessively….uh-huhhh). The reason I feel this is worth talking about is the public response to it. How are the over a million people in Jessi and Jen’s combined audiences not seeing any issue with how they treated Judy?

This issue was recently brought up again by Gabbie Hanna. But because “Gabbie Bad/Jessi Victim” the NPCs of youtube can’t take a second to look at the situation with any nuance.

Everyone is so selectively rah rah mental health advocacy.

If you’re really pro-mental health awareness and destigmatize and all of that, then you should be outraged at how horrendously Jessi and Jen treated Judy.

Years after her storytimes about Judy, Jessi was still laughing about the situation on youtube. She got married and had children and never ever (as far as I can tell from how she acts in her videos) felt an ounce of guilt for what she did to Judy.

Because here is what happened to Judy.

Judy lost her fucking shit.

Judy never presented herself as anything other than emotionally unstable.

If you see an emotionally unstable person, pull them into your life just to gasp and ooh and ahh over her bizarre they are, and then make storytime videos making fun of them, send a wave of online hate to their page THEN YOU ARE NOT A “NICE PERSON” YOU ARE A PIECE OF ABSOLUTE SHIT. Emotionally unstable people don’t exist to entertain you.

Judy posted a fuckton of videos ranting about the situation. Judy wrote a book and put it up on Kindle. Judy sent a bunch of angry messages to Jen and Jessi.

They nudged at her, watched the emotion bomb go off, and then reveled in the chaos, all while having to take no accountability for their part. Because emotionally unstable people often act in ways that are so far afield of what is socially acceptable or reasonable. Posting hundreds of videos ranting about the way they treated her was so bizarre that everyone is ignoring one important factor: the way they treated her.

Having disregulated emotions doesn’t mean a person deserves to be treated like shit.

That doesn’t mean emotionally unstable people have to be pandered to or that they shouldn’t be called out when they behave inappropriately.

What would have actually been kind would have been for Jen Dent to completely ignore all of Judy’s messages and never befriend her.

You aren’t obligated to give time or attention to emotionally unstable people.

But when you go out of your way to make them your entertainment, you’re a nasty fucking person.

I have known a lot of people like that in my life.

Mostly when I was younger.

I was very easy to set off when I was in my teens and early twenties.

I was very easy to manipulate. I would get clingy with people very quickly. I would do almost anything to please people. I trusted people very easily. Be nice to me once, I’d follow you off a fucking cliff.

There weren’t many kind, decent people in my life back then. Because the kind thing to do when people are running around waving about their ticking emotion bombs is

The unkind thing to do is figure out what will make them BAM! and then step back like “Damn bitch, what’s your problem?”

The last time this happened to me was the very end of 2020. It had been so long since somebody had recognized that I was emotionally unstable (maybe not so much as I was in my early 20s, but my emotions still aren’t always regulated the best) and set me off on purpose just to step back and go “Damn bitch, what’s your problem?” Which actually…I’m an idiot, because that person had drama with a lot of other people and nobody who has drama with loads of other people isn’t doing something to fuck with them. And the people who constantly have drama with other people while never admitting any fault…they’re the worst. They’re always up to some real shady shit.

Well before that, it had been quite some time since I was in such a situation. Probably because I fucking shut the hell down and stopped allowing myself to connect with people. And hey, if you don’t connect with people then they can’t really nudge at you and get you to blow up.

Here is my advice to other people who aren’t emotionally stable:

You need to look out for the people who treat the mentally ill as a prop to make themselves feel better. They can feel put together while they’re watching you fall apart. It entertains them and feeds their ego.

And don’t forgive people.

That’s literally the point in my own character arc that helped me the most. Don’t ever forgive anybody who fucking crazy-makes you, who treats it like a joke or looks down on you for being upset.

Just because your emotions are not proportional doesn’t mean you don’t feel them.

In my early 20s, I constantly forgave people who treated me like a joke. Just say you’re sorry and I’ll come back to spin around like a top and entertain you some more.

I wrote a story on this blog a while back, a guy I dated who did nothing but nudge at me and then laugh at me when my head popped off. It was so frustrating trying to get him to treat me with some dignity, to treat me like a person.

I ended up threatening to slice my wrists open in the middle of Wal-Mart. I called him out for cheating on me and he said something like, “Are we even dating though?”

And I said, “What? What are you talking about? You call me your girlfriend! You asked me to stop talking to other guys!”

“Dating doesn’t mean I can’t sleep with other people. We have different definitions of dating.” He smirked when he said it.

There was more but it’s all too stupid to tell.

He wouldn’t admit what he was doing. He was fucking crazy-making me.

And then a big old emotion bomb went off.

So then it didn’t matter what he’d done. Because I was the crazy bitch who tried to cut her wrists open in the middle of Wal-Mart and then landed in the mental hospital.

Just because a bitch is crazy that doesn’t mean you’re not a shit fucking person if you find that funny. And it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to mistreat her.

If my reactions are always a little overblown, that doesn’t mean SOME level of upset wasn’t warranted.

What Jessi Smiles and Jen Dent did to poor Judy disgusts me.

Everyone is so fake mental health awareness.

Because the second a crazy person acts a little, well, crazy, somehow it becomes acceptable to treat them any kind of way in the world.

Sexually-Harassing Men At Work isn’t Quirky and Fun…

This was a very cute short read. I found the bond between Minnie and her mate so sweet and I’m so glad they were reunited in the end.

I liked the character Hughes a lot. He was very funny and brought a great sassy energy to the team.

Alas, I had to mark this book down a few stars. There is so much that I love about Zoe Chant books that it’s actually just disappointing that almost every book has some straight up problematic shit thrown in that doesn’t serve the plot; the only point, I think is to irritate the hell out of me.

We have to stop normalizing predatory behavior by women. And when women sexually harass men it shouldn’t be treated like a joke or something harmless or something the men should get a kick out of. These firefighters are freaking working and a crowd of women literally pulls out popcorn, makes a bunch of lewd jokes about their “equipment” and even wolf whistle at them.

The first interaction the main character has with a resident of the facility is a woman asking if he’s a real firefighter or a stripper.
That is all gross and despicable behavior. Not okay.
If a group of old men did that to working women we would be horrified.
We SHOULD be just as horrified when men are blatantly sexually harassed at their places of work.

All of the sexualizing of the men by community members when they were just trying to work is why this is a three star read for me.

Like damn, Zoe Chant team, can y’all just make me a beta reader so I can pull out like the 3 paragraphs of bullshit you put in every book just to make my head hurt?
Chant shifter romances are my favorite fluffy nonsense books and there’s always some sexist bullshit, whether misogynistic or misandrist, that just ruins the entire thing for me.

I’ll Take Care of You

I’ve written a lot about all the times people treated me badly. I want to tell a story about a time someone treated me really well.

It’s the man I’m married to now.

I have absolutely no idea why this man loves me so much. No clue.

We’ve had out problems and things haven’t always been perfect, but ever since I met him when I was 22 (it will be eleven years next month) he has always treated me like I’m the most amazing precious entertaining lovable person he’s ever met. I’m not any of those things. The man has been all goofy over from from the start. And he definitely knows I’m flawed. I mean, he’s always the one to sit me down and go “Look, what are you doing? Relax already. You’re being ridiculous and you’re gonna make a mess.” He’s fully aware he married a hot mess. Why he wanted to go and do that, I have no idea and sometimes I just feel really guilty that he loves me so much.

He has always been a way better partner to me than I am to him. Which I really want to change.

I wrote about my ex Dennis a few months back. Dennis and I had great sexual chemistry. Dennis was very sweet. But Dennis was not the sort of man you could rely on.

The man I married is the sort of man you can rely on. Which makes it even more egregious that I take him for granted sometimes.

It’s like literally my problems stem from the fact that I didn’t have a lot of love as a kid. And then I spent a bunch of years desperately throwing myself at men, hoping one of them would love me. Then the universe sent this sweet, sensitive, but still really fucking manly and reliable man my way, and my dumbass is like “Meh, still miserable.” It’s very stupid and at this point I think it’s time for me to just admit I’m the issue and for whatever weird reason, I want to have an issue.

Well, I guess I want to tell a story from about three years ago now. I think it was 2018.

So the backstory needed is that I have a lot of problems with my ears. I always have my whole life. I get a lot of ear infections and sometimes they’re so bad that my neck and face swell up and I get bouts of dizziness.

My ear had been clogged for about two weeks. Usually after a while, a clog eases up. Sometimes I’d get drops from the drug store or (I have no idea if this actually works but it seems to) blowdry my ear on the cold air setting. I’d already tried both and the clog just seemed to be getting worse. In the days leading up to this event, I had terrible tinnitus, including a shrill whistling sound that I swore was coming from outside. My husband had to tell me there was no whistling noise, it was in my ear.

I had no insurance at this time. I was freelancing and substitute teaching. The plan was for me to go through state portal for health insurance, but I’d just let it lapse because well…I have no excuse. I’m just messy and disorganized. But that was why I didn’t just go to the doctor. No insurance. Plus, my ears clogged all the time. This was a lot worse than usual, but my ear usually sorted itself out eventually. I was really hoping I’d avoid an infection.

One day before the event, I was substitute teaching in a kindergarten classroom. Something about swiveling my head here and there, doing the cat-herding that is kindergarten subbing, really amped up the slight dizziness I’d had for days before this. I stood up and my vision blurred. At one point I was walking across the classroom and the floor seemed to tilt. I stumbled and caught my balance. When I looked down, the floor was completely flat. This freaked me out. It had felt like the floor itself had lifted and tilted.

The next morning, even before I opened my eyes, I felt like something was very wrong. My head felt stranger than it ever had. There was a weird heavy pulsating feeling in my head. I opened my eyes and terror struck me.

My eyes weren’t working.

The room was spinning at such a high speed. It wasn’t even like the spins you get when you’re drunk. It was so much faster. The nausea I felt was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I blinked and blinked, trying to get my eyes to work. I couldn’t see anything. There was nothing but blurring.

Because this was a period of time when I was subbing a lot in elementary schools, I slept in later than Ernie. He was out of the house about thirty minutes before I got up. I didn’t know what time it was. My alarm was set to go off and eight and he left at seven-thirty.

I was so scared he wouldn’t be home. I couldn’t see anything. I was so dizzy that I didn’t know if I could get up.

I started yelling, just praying he was still home.

“Ernie! Ernie! Help! Help! Help!”

And he was still home. The bedroom door slammed open and he said, “Noodle? What’s wrong? What do you mean help?”

He was just about to leave he told me later. His hand on the front door. I don’t know what I would have done if he wasn’t there.

I started crying and I said, “Ernie, I can’t see anything. Everything is spinning.”

He was very confused at first. “What do you mean you can’t see anything?”

“It’s all moving. I’m so nauseas.”

“Let’s try and get you sitting up. Maybe you just slept weird or…I don’t know…But let me help you sit up.”

He started to help me to a seated position and my head lurched. I gagged and started dry-heaving.

He put me back down.

“I’m gonna throw up if I sit up. What do I do? What do I do?”

I was so panicked and he was so clam. He always gets calm when I get panicked.

“Please don’t go to work. Please please stay with me!”

He said, “Yeah, of course I’m calling out. I’ll call them in a minute. It’s okay. You’ll be fine. I’ll take care of you.”

And he did. What happened over the course of the next week amazed me. I literally couldn’t believe anybody loved me enough to do for the things that he did.

You won’t understand what I mean unless I give all the gory details.

I couldn’t lift my head without vomiting.

I vomited on myself numerous times and on the bed. And he cleaned me up and I kept crying “This is gross. I’m sorry. This is gross.” And he was never like “You’re right this is gross”….well, not with the vomit anyway. We’ll get to the grosser stuff. Instead he wiped me off and was very sweet and comforted me the whole time, saying stuff like, “It’s okay. I don’t mind” in this very calm, soothing voice that he always uses when I’m all worked up.

I couldn’t eat anything without throwing up. The spinning didn’t stop. It got worse.

Ernie put a bucket next to the bed and cleaned it out every single time I puked in it.

Getting to the bathroom was the worst. Ernie was very focused on keeping me hydrated, but the problem was I couldn’t even pick up my head without violently puking. Using the bathroom was incredibly difficult.

Ernie tried to carry me a few times. Being lifted up made me incredibly nauseous. I threw up on him.

What worked the best was crawling. I would literally crawl across the hall. Every time I did it, I would puke at least once. Literally every movement of my head made me nauseous beyond belief. Ernie would gently coax me to keep going, telling me I was almost there, putting the bucket in front of me and holding my hair when I puked.

The worst was when we finally got into the bathroom. After three days, I still couldn’t see anything. Ernie had put a headband around my eyes like a blindfold so that the awful spinning wouldn’t make my dizziness worse. When I’d finally crawled into the bathroom, Ernie had to push my pants down, put me on the toilet, hold me in place, and yeah, a couple of times when I was on the verge of hurling and trying not to, he helped me wipe. I remember crying and going, “No, that’s gross!” and he was just like, “Relax, it’s okay.”

By day four the nausea was so bad that crawling to the bathroom was no longer an option.

I laid on the bed sobbing and told Ernie, “Bring me the big bowl from the kitchen.”

That’s when he finally said, “No, Jen that IS gross. You can’t pee in a bowl.”

But I puked three times just trying to lift my head off the pillow.

“Okay..” he sighed. “I’m bringing the bowl.”

The man propped me up and held a bowl under me.

That afternoon, he brought me to an emergency clinic. Riding in the uber was horrible.

He half-carried me into the clinic. I held onto his shoulders and tried very hard not to puke.

I didn’t puke until I was in the office with the doctor.

She came in, took one look at me and said, “Not feeling well are we.”

I tried to answer and started retching. She put a bucket under me.

While I was throwing up for what felt like the hundredth time that week, Ernie explained everything to the doctor. He didn’t just tell about that week and how my symptoms had progressively worsened over the past few days. He basically gave her my entire medical history regarding my ears. I had told him all about the ear problems I had as a kid (because obviously, I never shut up, so the man has heard everything about my entire life). I didn’t think he’d been paying attention though. I just chatter at him constantly. He told her how I went to an ear specialist as a kid, how my ears still sometimes get clogged and bother me, but the infections were way worse back then. He told her how I used to get my ears cleaned out regularly and how my ears don’t drain right and I almost had the surgery to put tubes in.

So that was all good information for the doctor to hear. Because she knew exactly what to do once she heard that. She put this tool in my ear and suddenly there was a bunch of pressure. My ear hurt a LOT for a second and then there was a loud POP! and the doctor said, “Ah, there it is. Look at that sucker.” Ernie got a better look at it than me, but it was about the size of a large cricket. A giant wad of dark orange and black.

The doctor looked in my ear once that wad of hardened wax was out and she said there was a bad infection that was likely causing the spinning and vertigo.

She gave me a prescription for ear drops and an oral antibiotic.

The second that wad of wax that had been clogging everything up was out, I felt noticeably better. My head still hurt and I was still dizzy, but not nearly AS dizzy.

After that, I was another few days of recovering. Ernie was very focused on getting me to drink water, making me food like toast and bringing me crackers, lecturing me to eat and drink now that I could. He called out of work every single day.

We sat in bed and binged Black Mirror while I laid on Ernie’s chest, ate crackers, and he stopped every once in a while to go “Time for your ear drops.”

Look I have no clue why he thinks I’m worth all of that trouble.

He’s an incredibly sweet and kind person and if I’m going to write about all the times people were horrible, than I ought to write about that too.

I have no idea how I would have managed that without him.

Nobody was ever so kind and tender and concerned as Ernie was with me that week. And I really really can’t imagine why he thinks I was worth all the trouble.

Blog Stats of 2021

Quick question guys…

Why in the world are so many people paying attention to me? XD

Okay, Jyvur calm down, you get like an average of 15 people a day on your shitty wordpress blog.

You know what though. That’s like the exact level of attention I want.

Thanks, y’ll. but if any more people pay attenton to me, I’ll likely have a panic attack and delete everything.

RIP my youtube channel that made it to 48 subscribers. I had comments on every video. It had to be nuked. Had to do it.

WWW Weds: Zoe Chant binge-reading

A weekly meme hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words.

I’m having a better week than last week.I’m keeping busy working on my piece for a romance anthology I was invited to be part of (tentative publication winter 2021). I’m also thinking of going back to Instacart. Without getting into too too many details, when I was in the midst of struggling with weird ideas and fixation back in 2020 and I pulled myself out of it for a few months, working a lot of shifts at Instacart kept me really busy and I enjoyed doing it. I also made pretty good money. I don’t have to talk to people much when I do Instacart shifts.

That’s my tentative plan right now: go back to working Instacart shifts to keep busy while I try to break into adjunct teaching.

Anyway, I didn’t read as much this week, but I did finish a couple of books.

What Did I Recently Finish Reading?

I took a break from this series for a while. Not because the books aren’t great, but I just have a lot of book FOMO and jump around a lot.

This book has such an exciting climax. It’s like a typical Western showdown in the town square.

I loved that the female character is the hero. The male lead isn’t able to do much because he’s locked up in a jail cell. But there is still a happy ending, because the badass heroine saves the day (all while cursing up a storm and snapping at everybody-I absolutely love how much of a curmudgeon she is).

I also finished this collection of romance shorts. This is set in the Shifting Sands universe. Zoe Chant has this whole world of shifters, with all the stories overlapping and characters making cameos in other characters’ stories.

Some of the stories were better than others. My least favorite was the story with Scarlet. It wasn’t a romance and it made no sense. It was so short and had no damn plot.

Scarlet is playing with kittens. Then she finds out some gazelle shifter has ended up in a mental institution. Then she thinks about how she’s horny and lonely and then goes to sleep.

Just…what?

Of course, I saw Scarlet make appearances throughout all the other characters’ stories in this collection. I take it I’m supposed to be interested in her, because she’s the mysterious figure who runs the Shifting Sands resort? I could see that working, except the story was so short. The location never changes and basically nothing happens. It’s just one long scene of nothing.

And I have no idea who the gazelle character is.

Yes, Chant has all these books set in the same universe with tons of other Shifting Sands collections, but she also constantly bills her books as part of a series that can be read as standalones. So I read it as a standalone and was completely lost as to why I should care about this gazelle character. I wouldn’t have minded jumping in and figuring it out from context, except that the story didn’t go anywhere or have any resolution. There was what seemed like setup but then the story ended.

It was a frustrating and silly story that didn’t have any place in the collection.

What Am I Currently Reading?

I have a real problem…Zoe Chant is like my favorite thing right now. There’s something wrong with me.

Well, the Shifting Sands collection I had to buy. I saw it in the bookspry newsletter for 0.99. 99 cents for all these books! WHAT?! There are 3 full novels here, all set in the Shifting Sands universe.

Yes, I bought it and yes I will making a deep dive video on Zoe Chant books for my youtube channel. This is how I choose to spend my time.

After reading the graphic novel adaptation of ‘Heart of Darkness’ I was in a mood to explore some of Conrad’s other works. This is a collection of his most famous stories. These are adventure stories of sailing on tumultous seas and exploring islands and jungles. The settings range from Thailand to Africa to everywhere in between. What makes the stories all the more interesting is that Conrad was a sailor and (as men like him were called back in his day) a “gentleman adventurer.” He has been to all of the places described in his stories.

What Will I Read Next?

I am behind on so many arcs (months behind in some cases. Ah!). If i’m taking forever to read your arc, please know it’s probably not your book. It’s me and my mood reading and short attention span.

I’m not even gonna try to list out all the arcs I need to get into.

I’ve started accepting arcs by saying “I’d love to, but it might take me a VERY long time to get to it. Because I suck.”

Anyway that’s it for me!

What are you reading this week?

So Angry at You

It’s weird; being alive is weird.

People end up as the antagonists in your story and without even meaning to you end up the antagonist in other peoples’ stories.

The way that I tried to make one last attempt to fix thing with Carly, my mom made one last attempt to fix things with me.

Beofe that, there was the fall out with Mary.

I couldn’t believe that everything went wrong with Mary.

Mary was my baby. Because Mom and Jose always left in the closet and didn’t feed or change her, so I did it. When there were no baby wipes, I used paper towels or toilet paper. This was when I was seven and had no idea how babies worked, except that I knew she couldn’t sit in a filthy diaper and I knew she had to eat.

There was one somewhat notable event that I’m not going to talk about in detail. I’ll mention it, because it seems like I should. There was an incident with boiling the nipples of the baby bottles. They have to be boiled to clean them. There was a fire. The house didn’t burn down, but all of the pets died and that’s all I really want to say about that.

There was a big black burn mark on the ceiling above the stove for years after. Until Mom decided to renovate the kitchen when I was 15. Every once in a while, I looked up at that big black circle on the white ceiling and I remembered that all of the animals had died of smoke inhalation.

Anyway, Mary doesn’t remember that. Carly barely does.

When Mary was a baby and a toddler, she came to me for everything.

“Jen, can I have cheerios?”

“Jen, can we play outside?”

“Jen, I peed my pants.”

Toilet training was a nightmare with Mary. Not that I have anything to compare it to, because I only ever toilet trained one kid and I did it when I was nine…ten…eleven years old. Fuck, that kid did not want to use the toilet.

It stressed me out so much, because if she peed herself while we were out doing something, Mom would lose her shit. Mom also wouldn’t buy anymore pull-ups.

How does a fourth-grader toilet train her younger sister? With bribes.

But they didn’t really work. I didn’t have a lot to bribe her with.

I lavished praise on her whenever she did use the toilet.

Let me get right to the crux of it, I loved Mary but I also resented the fuck out of her. She needed so much all the time and she was so exhausting and always doing things to set Mom off and it was my job to keep her safe from that, but she was so incredibly bad at just keeping her head down, doing what she should, and staying out of trouble.

Mary was very quiet and for the first few months she talked all she did was repeat things. She would repeat whole phrases from television shows, badly butchered of course.Eventually she started actually communicating.

Mary was always very sensitive. More sensitive than me. Can you believe that? What a feat. Give the woman a prize.

Mary loved organizing things. If I sat her down in front of the VHS cabinet and helped her make piles, she could stay happy for hours. Her system always made some degree of sense. Which was amazing, because she did this when she was like 2.

When she got older, Mary never believed me that she was smart, that she must be very smart because she did such weird stuff like that. Mary is dyslexic and went undiagnosed for many years. She struggled to learn to read and was always below grade level. She was very nearly placed into a special ed program. Mom used to always snap “I think Mary is special. She has some kind of learning disability.”

There is nothing wrong with having a learning disability or being special needs. But the way our mom used to say it with such disgust and derision. It’s no wonder Mary always said things like “I’m not good at school. I’m not smart that way.”

In elementary school, Mary didn’t make friends. She didn’t have her first friend until middle school. All through elementary school, she was terrified to open her mouth in school. She would hide in the bathroom at recess. She was called names constantly.

This is all an important part of why I am the villain in Mary’s story.

If we compare Mary’s early childhood to mine, hers is objectively worse.

As a baby and toddler, my grandmother took care of me. She spoiled me with lots of toys and dresses and sent me to a fancy preschool. She held me and sang to me every night.

Mary sat in a closet all day until I came home from school. I don’t think Jose looked in on her once. I don’t think this because she broke her diaper open once and it was smeared all over the crib and walls and all over her. It seemed like she’d been sitting that way for a long time.

Mary was burned very badly when she was two years old.

Mary was picked up and hurled into a wall so hard the wall broke, again when she was only two.

The first time Mary tried to run away she was four and she was alone. A neighbor found her toddling down the road in her underwear.

I was at school.

I had no idea where she was going, because when I asked she just shrugged.

Mary’s earliest years were lonely, sad, violent, filthy.

But she had me.

She explained it to me, one of the very last times we were together. Because she didn’t up and drop me like Carly did. She did a slow fade. Her fade was completed years ago and everything has been hard enough for Mary. I won’t stress her out more by demanding attention from her. She’s been through so much more than I have and if she ever wants to talk to me again, I know she knows where to find me. Maybe she never will reach out to me again and I have to be okay with that.

So here is how she explained it to me, why she’s so angry and resentful towards me.

I’m not going to be able to remember it word for word. But I will retell it as best I can.

“You took care of me, Jen. Everyone was mean except for you. I loved spending time with you. I remember you read me all of those stories and you let me sleep in your bed whenever I wanted. And you protected me. You always knew what to do. I think I thought you were a grown-up. I dunno. I just knew you were the person to go to if I needed something.

Then suddenly, you weren’t.

You started spending all that time in your room, playing No doubt really loud and reading books and taping all those weird pictures up all over your walls.

I missed you and was really sad that you didn’t like me anymore. If I tried to come talk to you, you yelled and slammed the door in my face. You yelled a few times before that. I know you hit me a few times when I was little. But you were always really sorry after and it always seemed like you were sad you did it. Then you were completely different and it wasn’t like you were just annoyed for a second. It was like you really hated me and wanted me to go away forever.

I stopped trying to come to your room. even though I was really upset. And you never went back to normal. you never did.

You started going crazy and fighting mom all the time.

I was afraid of you.

Mom was always like that and you never were. But then you were just like her.

There was one day you really lost it and I’ve never seen anyone lose it like that. You were on the ground screaming, with your face all red. Carly pulled me into the bedroom and Carly was never nice to me back then, but it was like she was trying to be you, since you weren’t you anymore.

And I feel like you haven’t been you since.

So many bad things happened. You kept going to the hospital. You forgot all about me and I was almost glad you forgot me, because you were so scary.

It’s hard not to be angry at you, because I loved you a lot and I thought you loved me. And nothing ever hurt so much as when you forgot all about me and went crazy like that.

I try to forgive you. I try to hang out with you.

I don’t like being around you.

You’re my sister, but I don’t know how to deal with you.

Thanks for taking care of me when I was really little. I have a lot of nice memories with you. Like when we’d sit behind the shed and you’d sing “You are My Sunshine.” That’s still my favorite song, Jen.

I love you, okay?

I’m so angry at you though.

I do the best I can with it all…”

It was something like that. I’m paraphrasing. This happened in my apartment in New Hampshire, when I’d been living with Ernie for about a year. We sat on the floor of my living room and I told her how I wished we were closer, how I wish she didn’t ignore my texts half the time.

And over the course of maybe an hour, she explained that to me. With tearful interjections from me, of course.

That’s it then.

My relationships with both of my sisters are destroyed for all of time because of me. Mostly because of how shitty and emotional I was as a teenager. But that’s not all of it.

My mom fed this. I know she did. She talked so much shit about me to both my sisters. She was in both their ears talking about how emotional and dramatic I am.

I am emotional and dramatic.

Yes.

I enter a guilty plea.

It’s not that my mom was wrong to say “Jen is so crazy and emotional and dramatic.” It’s just that it stings a little more because of it. She’s done a lot of awful stuff to all of us. Did she have to also facilitate the estrangement we now all have with each other?

You know back when I still talked to my mom, she talked shit about both of them to me too. I ignored it. Because she would literally talk shit about Mary having an eating disorder and talk about how stressful the whole situation was FOR HER. She would vent like Mary had struggled with anorexia just to get attention, just to mess up HER life. I ignored it all.

I don’t know why my sisters couldn’t have done the same for me.

Then again, I mean, both of them have enough good reasons not to want to be around me even without that.

I suck. I did shitty things. I won’t even tell you half the shitty things. I already said I’m an unreliable narrator.

I’m bitter and sad and mad and wish I could fix it. But I know I can’t and I know that sometimes actions have consequences. I’m dealing with the consequences of my own actions. So it hurts. Consequences do sometimes. I have to figure out a way to be okay with this.

Every time I’m upset about anything, I end up crying about the fact that my sisters won’t talk to me. Or crying about all the shitty stuff my mom did.

So people keep telling me “Shut up about all the nonsense you carry on about. All of THAT is the real issue.”

Cool. Well. I have no idea how to resolve that.

Because there will be no happy ending.

And to pivot, another conversation was had three years after that conversation.

I am the antagonist in Mary’s story. I was the steady loving not-always perfect-but-mostly-there-for-her older sister and then suddenly, I wasn’t that anymore. I was the screaming, hysterical, physically fighting our mom and destroying the house scary older sister. I took away her only source of love, comfort, and stability.

And by the time she was twelve, she had a serious eating disorder.

She painted constantly. She drew and put the drawings up all over her walls. She would go out by herself and walk to yard sales and thrift stores. She started collecting porcelain dolls. She had hundreds the last time I saw her. She became very interested in Victorian post-moderm photography. As a teenager, she would take the money she earned from her part-time job and order post-moderm photographs off the internet. That worried me a little. The dead bodies she had on the walls by her bed. But then I spent years obsessed with Columbine. I understand why it’s nice to just think about death sometimes. Even if you’ll never have the nerve to do a An Hero. It’s nice to think that one day you won’t be thinking and living and feeling and no matter what happens, all of it will end at some point. Or maybe the post-moderm photographs weren’t really about that. When I asked Mary about them she would say, “I like how they look. Creepy, but also beautiful. It’s art.”

So fine, maybe it was just art.

Well…let’s keep going.

The conversation that was had three years after Mary told me all of that happened in a different apartment in a different state.

This was when my mom made her last ditch effort to fix things with me.

She didn’t come herself. She sent her wife.

I mean, yes, she did try to reach out to me many times. Like Carly ignored me, I ignored Mom.

Then her wife texted me. I’d only met her wife a couple of times. They’d been married for maybe…3 years? something like that…when this woman reached out to me. I thought she was okay. Kind of funny and very easy-going.

Mom’s very obvious ploy worked. Even with me knowing this was tactical and Mom had sent Chelsea to talk to me, even knowing that I told Chelsea I’d love to see her.

She drove hours to come to my house.

She was very chatty and talked to me for hours at my dining room table.

Chelsea is a very butch lesbian. Very masc. She works a very traditionally-masculine job. She talked to me about her work and what it was like being the only woman at her workplace. We had fun talking.

Then she broached the subject that I knew she would.

“She’s your mom. You only have one.”

I resented that statement, but I still tried to explain my side of it.

“I don’t trust her not to hurt me. She always talks about me behind my back. She goes around saying I’m crazy.”

What Chelsea said next made me so livid that I kicked the woman out of my house. She stood outside, called my mom and cried right there on the sidewalk.

Oh well…who cares what she said?

Who cares about any of it?

Me obviously.

An absolute nuisance

I worked at Home Depot for almost three years when Natasha started. She started as a cashier. Then she went to the service desk.

Natasha was mean as hell, but so was I by that point.

I don’t know why I liked her so much. I did though. I wanted to be best best friends with her so much.

She was assigned to work the phones one day a week and the call center position was in the same office as me and the other COS (Customer Order Specialist). I used to go out of my mind with nerves every day I knew she was scheduled. She would be nice to me some of the time, but then snap at me or roll her eyes at me other times.

I just lived for those moments when she would laugh at something I said or tell me my outfit was cute.

At the time, I considered myself incredibly left-leaning. It was only because Ernie (the guy I’m now married to-he was my boyfriend at the time) was incredibly left-leaning. I hadn’t known anything about politics when I met him, but I knew that I was feminist and pro-life.

Ernie was so much smarter than me, but he took everything I said seriously. Even when I was being ridiculous. He always had the nicest way of explaining to me that I was being ridiculous without making me feel bad. He still does, actually. He’s incredibly patient and kind to everyone. But especially to me.

Maybe it was because he took me so seriously that I decided I believed in Marxism and social safety nets and Bernie Sanders. He taught me a lot of things and was incredibly knowledgeable.

So by the time I met Natasha, I very much identified as left-leaning, and Natasha was conservative. Well, New Hampshire is a very conservative state. People used to actually stop me to scold me for the Obama bumper stickers all over my car. Natasha would watch Fox News. Which now, years later, I like Fox News. For the most part. I do think they ought to rebrand as political commentary other than “news” but really that could be said of all news channels at this point. Well, Natasha being conservative was one of the only things I didn’t like about her.

She loved country music. She loved shopping. She did dance when she was a kid, just like me, only her focus was ballet and lyrical, while mine was jazz and Irish Step. But like me, she did a little of everything. When you grow up a dance kid, it sort of works out that way. A little tap here, a little acro there.

I guess I liked how comfortable she always seemed in her own skin. She always said exactly what she wanted and never seemed to give a fuck what anyone thought. I care what people think, okay? I wish I didn’t, but I do. I cared what she thought. She was so confident and so funny and so interesting. She was also so pretty. Like so pretty I really think she could have been a model. Now, Natasha was on the heavier side. I wouldn’t have called her fat. I guess some rude people might call her that. She was probably about twice my weight, but it was all distributed really gorgeously. She had this beautiful hourglass shape. Big round ass and tits that were just the right shape, and yes she had a belly and her legs were a little thick, but she really did pull all the weight off in the most beautiful way. And here’s the part where I have to clarify: I did not have a crush on her. Whenever I get clingy and weird at another woman, I know it sounds like I’m crushing. All I can say is that I didn’t want to fuck her. Everything else though, YES. I wanted to do all of the things with her. Watch movies with her, have phone calls with her, cuddle with her, brush her hair, hear her talk, listen to her sing, all of it.

So….yeah, well obviously she was hella creeped out by it.

I bought clothes like hers. I copied a lot of things she did.

And I think all my recounting all of these times I lost my mind over a person I barely knew begs the question: Jen, you see the problem, what do you keep doing it for?

The thing is, there’s like regular brain and then there’s crazy brain. When I’m having a moment and going off the deep end, I usually don’t realize I’m doing it. Sometimes in little flashes here and there, I realize it and try to reel it all in. Mostly though, crazy brain is a whole other feeling. It feels like my regular head just pops all the way off my body and then I’m in crazy brain mode. Whatever, or whoever, I’m going crazy over is all I’m thinking about. It all feels so fast and panicked and my thoughts are like brr-brr-brrrrr! One thought-two thought-over-here-over-there! Hophophophop POW!

I have flashes here and there like “Jen, you’re going nuts again. Stop. You’re being wild and making a fool of yourself, so stop.”

But then I get pulled right back in and that little flash of lucid is just gone.

So like…do other people around me try to tell me my head has popped off?

Well…crazy brain Jen is a jerk.

After my last episode, a friend said to me “I kind of wanted to say something to you, but I didn’t think it would help.”

And I told her, “It’s good you didn’t say anything. I would have been mean to you. I wouldn’t have listened to you. You would have had to deal with a whole lot of rudeness for no reason.”

Because that’s the truth. A couple of people were brutally honest with me. I yelled at them and shut my ears.

Crazy brain Jen doesn’t listen to fucking anybody.

I guess what makes me most upset about my last episode is that I pulled myself out of crazy brain. I did it before anybody had realized there was a problem. I knew what I was doing that was fueling crazy brain and I stopped.

But you know, all it took was one piece of evidence that the person I was losing it over knew who I was and BAM I was off and going again.

Before that I was back in normal brain mode for almost three months.

That whole situation was incredibly painful and I don’t know how to get over it. I’m not going to rehash any details. I think I’m finally sick of doing that. But yeah, it was incredibly painful.

Although, to be honest, I deserved it.

That’s the truth.

I go through life making an absolute nuisance of myself and only thinking about my feelings.

I’m still thinking about my feelings.

I’m not only thinking about my feelings, but literally I’m ranting to myself in my little corner of the internet where like maybe 5 people pay attention to me, so there’s no reason to speculate on anyone else’s feelings.

Yeah, I’m a nuisance.

And I run around acting weird and erratic and demanding attention and then get all shook up when things go awry.

Okay, let me maybe talk a little about what everything was like before my last episode.

That part seems a little important.

Or maybe it’s not. I don’t know.

I probably take myself a little too seriously and treat this life that is actually one long string of idiotic events I do to myself with far more gravitas than it deserves.

But before the whole crazy brain situation of 2019/2020, I was a teacher.

I liked my job, but I felt very out of place. All of the other teachers seemed like they belonged and I felt like a fraud.

I liked working with kids for the most part. I liked finding fun and entertaining ways to teach them about books and writing. I worked in Special Education. It was an autism program. I often covered in gen ed classrooms though. I absolutely sucked with gen ed kids. I couldn’t ever keep control of the classroom. And my goodness did these teenagers do some ridiculous things. Just stupid shit that I had no idea how to handle. I wish I was making this up, but one kid took his pants off in class. I still don’t know why he did it. Probably to shock me and it worked. I think I yelled something like “Oh! No! Hey!” and he smirked and said, “Miss, I need to change.” I gaped at him while the class lost its collective shit and I screamed “Office! Out!”

It was easier working with the special ed kids. It came easily to me. I mean, it was a very specialized program. All of the kids had autism.

I’m married to an autistic guy. I don’t have autism (numerous people have tried to tell me I have autism, but I’m not gonna latch onto a label like that when I don’t think it fits me-we can just call me a weird mix of extroversion and anxiety that probably seems a lot like autism but isn’t). Anyway, I vibe with autistic people. Autistic adults and also, as I learned right away in this K12 job, autistic kids.

I’m not gonna say I was the best and I’m not gonna say I never screwed up. Kids say weird things. Autistic kids say even weirder things. There were times when I didn’t know how to respond and said the wrong thing.

Generally though, I did pretty well. I could joke around with the kids and have fun. In the gen ed classrooms, my jokes didn’t really land. They did pretty good in the special ed rooms though. I think it was just my vibe; my “I love being here with you guys!” vibe. in other words…I doubt I’m even funny to autistic kids, but I think they were polite enough to pretend I was.

I had fun in my job.

What stressed me out about it was feeling like I shouldn’t be there.

I had applied on a whim. I started by substitute teaching. I applied because people who know me in real life…people who know about all my mental health issues…kept telling me I should. I just didn’t think I’d get the job. I thought I’d apply for the substitute teaching job and all my mental hospital stays would show up on the background check.

I guess it didn’t though.

I did substitute teaching for a while, decided I liked working with teenagers, and decided I liked special education best, even though eventually I would have to go back and get another Master’s Degree. I studied and took tests. Every state has different tests for teachers. I know how to study so I passed them all on my first try.

I got a full-time job working in an autism program.

I really loved working with those kids. It made me…not happy..but the closest to happy that I’ve ever been.

There was still something really really wrong though. I don’t know what. Every time I try to figure out what exactly was (is?) wrong, I think I get further away from figuring it out.

It’s probably nothing too deep. Probably just that I want to be miserable.

Except…that was the only time in my life I really didn’t want to be miserable, and I promise, I really was the closest to happy that I’ve ever been.

Except that despite all of that…something was wrong. I don’t know what. I’d explain better if I could.

But this is how it went.

First, I became obsessed with Columbine. I would come home from school, turn the lights off and make a nest in the bed, or sit inside of the closet and listen to the Columbine 911 calls or watch the news footage from that day.

The obsession became all-consuming. I thought about Columbine constantly.

I had people worried.

I stopped doing that for a bit. I wrote a 600 page novel in 3 months.

Then I wrote a 400 page novel in 3 months.

Then I started posting on incel forums.

And then comes the part where I really went crazy, but it’s all too stupid and I don’t feel like rehashing that part anymore.

Right before that part, was the whole long boring, empty, sad slog. All the days of feeling like I was nothing and I was pretending and what was I pretending FOR anyway? What was I waiting to happen? When was “better” coming?

I went to yoga with other teachers and talked about recipes and skincare and everything boring and flat, and I felt more like I’m not a real person than I ever had in my life. I felt fake. Like I shouldn’t be there. I felt like eventually they would all notice I shouldn’t be there. Like my camouflage would stop working.

On the weekends, I went out for drinks and out to hipster breweries with this group of 30ish professionals. I didn’t feel connected to them at all and I wanted to be connected to someone so much.

There’s other stuff too. But of course, I can’t talk about everything, because my life involves other people and other people don’t always like to be written about.

Maybe I had no right to be, but I was lonely.

I’m less lonely now, but I’m not going to pretend it’s all patched up and perfect. I still feel alone sometimes. Even though I understand a lot of it is in my imagination; it’s still how I feel.

I can’t tell if this was a big part of it or not. And I’m the adult, so I’m just a dumbass if it was a big part of it, but here it is: Teenagers are not kind to substitute teachers. Even after I got my full-time position, I would cover in gen-ed rooms regularly. Every insecurity I had those kids got to.

Pimple lip. Wash your face. You have a mustache. What’s wrong with your skin?

I know. They’re kids. And I wasn’t a nice kid myself. I never insulted a teacher’s appearance, but I was shitty in my own ways.

I was about to turn 30. then I was 30. Then 31. I was insecure about getting older, feeling ugly. And the next generation was telling me every day that I should be insecure.

Isn’t that pathetic? I cared what a bunch of kids said about me.

I really tried not to let it bother me. I tried to stay cool and calm and professional. Only twice did I have to turn and look at the whiteboard and blink and tell myself “If you cry, it’s all over. They will not feel bad for you. They will make fun of you worse. They will go wild and laugh at you if you cry.”

And I never did burst into tears in front of the kids. I never did that.

The kids I always liked talking to the best were the foster kids. I feel like that must be so awful to bounce from one home to another. You get attached to people and then they leave you forever. I couldn’t imagine that.

I never consciously had favorites when I was a teacher. I wouldn’t even, not even in my head, admit I had a favorite. But look, I’m never going to be a teacher again, so here it is. My favorite kid was a 14-year-old who had been in foster care for years. She was inappropriately clingy and affectionate some days. She was so desperate for someone to love her. Other days, she would snap and yell and be difficult. The other kids weren’t always nice to her. Even in a special education program, I think they could sense the desperation on her. She stole things. She was rude. She was a pain in the ass.

I wished wished wished so hard that I was in a place to take her. We didn’t have as much money back then. We lived in a shitty apartment downtown. We were barely getting by. Even with both of us working professional jobs, I live in a high cost of living city.

I cried more than once that this desperate little thing lived in a group home run by staff. That she had so much sweetness if she could just get out of her own way. And if people could just be a little patient with her.

Towards the tail end of my time in K12, she started talking about boys. Then she started throwing herself at them. She passed a note to a gen ed boy once. He came and gave the note to me. He looked uncomfortable. “I don’t want her to give me notes like this,” he said.

I said, “You understand that she needs a little kindness, right? It would be really kind if you didn’t make fun of her for this. If you didn’t tell your friends, because if you do, they’ll make fun of her. I’ll tell her not to give you notes again, but it would be very kind of you not to set her up to get laughed at.”

Kids think teachers don’t know what goes on between them. Well, a lot of it, we probably don’t. But we definitely hear and see more than they think we do.

He did tell his friends. Girls did make fun of her.

It made me incredibly sad.

Couldn’t they see she was looking for some love? Why should they laugh at her for that? When they had homes with parents and siblings who loved them. This girl saw her mom sporadically, every few months. Half the time, the woman didn’t bother to show up for the scheduled visits.

One of the male teachers in the program said once, “She’s going to end up in a not good situation one day. I think we all know that.”

He was a good guy. She had nobody to give her birthday gifts, so he bought her a nail kit for her birthday. He asked the other teachers what he should buy her. We told him a DIY nail kit, and then to go along with that, another female teacher and myself took her out to get a manicure. Got special permission from the principal and everything.

I would have fostered/adopted her if I could have. But we were barely getting by back then. We didn’t have the money or the space.

I don’t know where any of this is going.

But that’s about as well as I can summarize what I was doing and what I was thinking, before my last episode.

I was thinking, I’m lonely

I was thinking, I’m not connected to anyone

I was thinking I’m a fraud

And I don’t belong here

And I’m ugly

And I’m getting old and I already looked so gross, and now I’m old on top of that.

And I wish I wish I wish that I could save her. That I could give her the love she never got. Which probably is incredibly inappropriate for a teacher to think.

But well, I’m not teaching anymore.

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.

Here I am. I’m alive. I must be.

Home Depot: Part 2

I’d always had a bit of an aggressive streak. Pretty much always. I could pretend that’s a symptom of all the trauma from my childhood, but I know it’s not. Nothing really terrible happened until I was 5, a few months before I moved in with my mom and her boyfriend, and I had an aggressive streak before that too. In preschool I would get in trouble for bossing other kids around and yelling at them when they wouldn’t listen to me. So there’s nature and nurture and being a tad aggressive is a nature thing with me.

But I guess to give you the full picture of the sort of aggressive I am, it’s like this. When I was maybe four, I got into this argument with another little girl because she wanted to wear my Barbie smock for art time. We argued back and forth and for some reason, the teacher gave the smock to her. It was my smock, so I don’t know why she did that. Well I tried to ignore the injustice of it all, until I was so livid I just couldn’t. I walked over, knocked the paint out of her hands and tried to physically remove the smock from her. I told her she was too fat to be pretty, so she didn’t need a pretty smock. She cried really hard and then I felt bad. I wasn’t allowed to do art the next day, so I asked the teacher if the other girl could wear my smock, since I was in time-out anyway.

So am I nice or mean? I’m both. I’m still pretty much exactly like I was back then. If you’re not listening to me or doing what I want, I’m likely to be very mean and aggressive, but for some reason, I’m always shocked when I’m able to hurt people’s feelings, and then I try to make it better however I can.

Should I have learned something in the past twenty-something years? Well, probably. I guess I’m a bit of a static character.

I don’t think I was ever quite AS aggressive until I worked at Home Depot.

Because I was aggressive to everyone. I was aggressive to the sorts of humans I was always a little gentler with. Look if you throw a bunch of aggression at a timid little shy person, well then you’re just a jerk. Then you’re just a bully. And even back in middle and high school when I was literally a bully, I couldn’t be mean to the girls who looked terrified that I was talking to them. I bullied the girls who could sort of hold their own against me. There was one mousy little thing in 10th grade. After my boyfriend and I broke up, he asked her out and I think she was afraid I’d try to come fuck her up or something. She quite obviously mustered up all her little courage to come find me at my locker and tell me she was dating him now. I hadn’t expected that, because she was so different than me, and I snapped on her. I yelled at her to get away from me and a few other choice words. And even then, I felt bad. I was heartbroken and I felt bad. She couldn’t match my energy. She was afraid of me, and maybe I like to fight, but I don’t like people to be afraid of me. It’s like…that expression, pick on people your own size. You know? Where’s the fun in fighting with people who are just gonna curl up in a ball and shake until you go away?

Well, at Home Depot, I became a workplace bully and everyone was fair game. Even the women who looked terrified I was talking to them. Even the men who looked terrified I was talking to them. And if I was a little gentler with shy meek women, I was always even more so with shy meek men. Except at Home Depot.

It started with this women whose job I wanted. Her name was Anna and she had an office in the back of the store. She worked regular hours, monday-friday. What a sweet fucking schedule. And everyone had so much respect for her.

“She’s a bitch, but she gets stuff done.”

“Anna will be really rude to you, but if you pretend you don’t notice, she can always fix any situation with an installer or customer.”

The store manager loved her. Everyone went to her with everything. She was the problem-solver of the store. She knew all the tricks. If I called her for anything, she would cut me off, snap at me, talk to me like I was an idiot.

She did it to everyone.

And everyone had so much respect for her.

I wanted that respect. I wanted it so much.

I tried to be as much like Anna as I could.

I was mean. I talked down to people. I snapped at people. Rolled my eyes.

A new girl started at the service desk. A mousy little thing. The sort of person I would have been a little more gentle with in the past. I snapped at her, demanded to know why she was calling me, instead of trying to solve the problem herself. I located the PO within seconds. A customer very sarcastically said, “Thank you. Finally. Was it that hard?” I let him talk shit about this girl right in front of me. I felt bad, but that doesn’t matter, because i kept on being mean.

Within two years, I had Anna’s job. I got an office in the back of the store. I got regular hours Monday-Friday.

I was “unapproachable” “bitchy”.

Mean. I was mean.

That girl I was so mean to at the service desk quit a week later.

I think of that ASM who was so rude to me and how when he died I thought “He’s just an asshole who died.”

It would make sense if other people thought the same about me, if I died out of nowhere like he did. “Jen was just an asshole who died.”

And it also makes me think what was it that made him so mean? Was he trying to get something? Did he think he had to? Or was he like me, just always a little bit mean, turning the mean-ness up as high as it went so that you could get a little more money and a better schedule.

Well, I dunno.

It was nice to have weekends off. It was nice to have a desk and business cards. It was nice to feel like I did something.

It was nice to not be on the receiving end of that mean-ness. I know that’s very cliche. It is true though. If you’re not mean, other people are mean to you.

But also, that’s a shitty excuse, because like I said, I was always sort of like this.

Home Depot: Part 1

I’d say an important moment in my character arc was Home Depot.

I started working at Home Depot as a cashier. There were very clear goals to meet. Get credit cards. Get Extended Protection Plans. Open every item and look inside of it. Ring everything up separately.

I got credit cards. I got extended protection plans. I got high scores on the VOC (the customer survey at the bottom of the receipt).

I liked being a cashier because I got to talk to people all day and whenever I started to feel like I was really bad at my job, there were my VOC scores.

Some customers couldn’t be pleased no matter what and I always found this upsetting. Some would come in ready for a fight.

A lot of days I worked the returns desk. I liked working returns because the ASMs told me I was good at it.

There was only one ASM who didn’t stop to tell me what a good job I was doing.

I’ll tell you about that ASM.

See I’d been working at Home Depot for two weeks and I was already covering the returns desk. In between customers, I would keep the desk clean. I’d bring carts of stuff back to the RTV area. I’d bring trash back. So I was doing that and this ASM stopped me. He stopped me by raising his voice at me, yelling, “Hey! Stop right there!”

And so I stopped and glaring at me, he said, “Do you know what FIRST stands for?”

I was able to name all the letters in the acronym except for R. I forgot that R stood for Respect, but give me a break, I’d worked there for two weeks.

He snapped the word “respect” at me and then said, “Do you know that you’re supposed to greet every customer?”

I said, “Oh…even when I’m just bringing RTVs back? I thought they’d need me to get back up to the desk as soon as possible.”

At this point in time, I was so confused about when I was and wasn’t supposed to stop and greet customers. At first I’d thought I was literally supposed to greet every single customer, but a few days earlier, I’d been walking back up to the front end from my lunch break. I greeted a customer in electrical (which was the department you had to walk through to get to the timeclock). They needed help with something, so I spent the next 5 minutes tracking down an electrical associate to help them. When I got to the front end 5 minutes late, the head cashier was frantic. She’d already paged me 5x and without letting me explain, she launched into a lecture about how I only had a 30 minute lunch. There was another cashier standing there smirking at me the whole time. The most explanation I could get out was “Listen, I clocked back in right at 10:42-” and she cut me off to say, “Look at what time it is. Just clock back in on time tomorrow.”

So then this assistant store manager was angrily demanding to know why I was going back and forth not greeting every customer. After that altercation with the head cashier, I’d decided what I was supposed to do was greet customers while I was at my register, saying hi to them as they passed and I was waiting for my next person to check out.

I tried to clarify this with the ASM. I was nervous, because he looked so mad and he was yelling at me and I’d thought I was doing everything the way I was supposed to be doing it. But I pushed through my nerves and said, “I thought I was only supposed to do that up at the register. Am I supposed to greet customers when I’m walking from one place to another too?”

And he snapped, “Obviously. I don’t want to see you ignoring customers again.”

Then he walked away.

Another time a customer came in without a receipt and I had to give him a store credit. Without a receipt, the only money customers get back is the lowest sales price within the last 90 days and without the sales tax (this was NH, so usually there was no sales tax, but every once in awhile we’d get a customer from a Massachusetts store who made a fuss about it). The customer wanted to know why he wasn’t getting back what he paid and I explained to him how returns worked without a receipt.

Fifteen minutes or so later, the customer came back over and he had that same ASM with him. The ASM thrust the item into my hand and snapped “How much is this?”

I scanned it and told him the price.

He practically threw the receipt at me and demanded, “Then why did you only give him [x-amount] back?”

I started to explain how store credits work, but he interrupted me, sounding even more annoyed and told me to give him the man the right amount of money back.

I tried maybe two more times to explain and he kept interrupting me.

I sort of froze at that point. I just stopped and stared at the computer screen. I could feel that I was going to cry out of frustration and embarrassment.

Maybe the ASM could tell that too, because he said, “No, go ahead. What were you gonna say?” And he still sounded plenty annoyed, but he did actually let me finish talking that time.

I said, “This is how store credits work. Without a receipt, the register will only give him back the lowest sales price. It doesn’t matter what the price is now.”

He snapped, “Well, I’m telling you to give the man back what it costs now.”

I handed the receipt over to him and said quietly, still trying not to cry, “I don’t know how to do that. Will you show me?”

“Get out of the way. I’ll do it.”

But of course, he couldn’t do it. The register doesn’t work that way, or at least it didn’t back then, back in 2011.

He brought the customer over to the service desk DH and she told him the same thing that I did.

He never apologized to me for throwing me under the bus in front of the customer like that, for yelling at me, while all the customers waiting at the desk stared at me, and then they all assumed I didn’t know what I was doing and every single one of them was impatient and snapped at me when it was their turn to be helped. He never said he was sorry.

Two years later, after that man had transferred to another store, and I’d never had any interactions with him other than those two interactions, I’d been promoted to COS and I had a little office in the back of the store that I shared with two other people. I came into work one morning and my two coworkers were talking about this ASM.

“Jen, do you remember Tim? He used to be an ASM here.”

“Oh yeah, bald guy right?”

“That’s him.”

“What an asshole. I hope I never see that guy again.”

There was an awkward pause. Both my coworkers looked at each other.

“What?”

“He…died.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

I sat down and went to work.

I know how that conversation made me look. How I was supposed to backtrack, pretend I hadn’t meant it, pretend the man had actually been a saint. But I didn’t.

Everyone else sainted him postmortem. I didn’t want to pretend he was anything other than an asshole who died.

Shifter Beach Resort Christmas Romance

This collection was okay. Some of the stories are better than others.

The weird story with the kittens is my least favorite. Now, I’ll fully admit I’m not super familiar with the Shifting Sands universe, but Chant bills all her books as books that can be read as standalones, so I didn’t think I had to be. From the perspective of someone who has never read a Shifting Sands book before, that story was: Lady gets kittens, is planning a wedding, finds out her friend with a whole backstory I know nothing about has been locked up in a mental institution (I’ve had about a dozen in-patient stays myself-so the flippant way this was treated struck a nerve with me) and right after she thinks about this, thinks about how horny she is, plays with kittens, end of story: no resolution on the mental hospital thing….erm, wut? Wtf was the point of that story?

Wasn’t a huge fan of the hockey player story either, only because that brother sister energy was SERIOUSLY weird. I got very icky vibes from the protective older brother spiel…while they vacationed together…yech. And I’m never a fan of the whole weird dynamic where a male family member must be won over before the woman can be wooed. It’s misogynistic and gross. Why was that lady such a lame pushover? Her brother tells her to get away from the guy and she runs away pissing herself like a shaking little dog. It really made me dislike her what a damn wimp she was. However, I did like the hero of the story. Lars was so damn cute. The female lead (forgot her name) thinking he was dumb because English wasn’t his first language was xenophobic as hell and had me irritated on his behalf. He was way too cute and sweet for her.

I did like the story of Magnolia and Chef. Way too sweet I really liked reading a romance about an established couple. And the conflict of the story had nothing to do with the relationship, but with Chef finding a sense of purpose again. A really healthy message here about love/romance are great, but everyone needs more in life. People need their own interests and sense of purpose outside of the relationship. I really liked the resolution. Chef really found his dream job and they ended up finally settling down in a paradise location. Loved it

I also liked the story of Caroline and Liam. I’ll admit, I didn’t think I was gonna like this one. but that’s only because Caroline being asexual too was a real third-act twist. Liam is all worried that Caroline won’t want him because he’s asexual. We, the readers, don’t even get a hint that Caroline is also asexual. As someone who has been in a sexless relationship before, I didn’t like the idea of an asexual person ending up with a non-asexual person. If people want to do that irl, okay cool. For wish fulfillment romance, as someone who spent years feeling really ugly and unwanted and feeling that pain of being with someone and wanting to have sex with him and he didn’t want me in that same way: yeah, I don’t need my cheesy shifter romance to go stirring all those feelings up. So with the book hinting that this would be a mismatched ace/non-ace relationship, I was not feeling it.
But then Caroline reveals that she is also asexual and the story ended up being pretty cute. They both got exactly what they needed from each other. There was lots of tenderness and cuddling and no pressure on either of them to have sex. It was really beautiful and sweet.

As far as Zoe Chant books, this was middle of the road for me. It wasn’t bad and it wasn’t great. It was okay. I liked it well enough.

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