Bleh. I'm not feeling too hot emotionally. I have one story due soon for spring kink and one that's, uh, overdue, but I simply can't work up the energy to write.

This week was the one year anniversary of my dad's death, so my sadness is rather understandable. I started crying at work the other day, but luckily no one noticed.

I've been feeling anxious about money lately. Not just my own spending money, but the family finances. I've had dental work lately and just had to refill my birth control and mood stabilizer prescriptions. God damn it, health care sucks so bad in this country. Why is everything so expensive?

Blah.

I'll be turning twenty on Tuesday. If it's all the same to everyone else, I'd rather not. I always hate getting older. It intensifies the feeling that I am a childish, immature waste of space. Twenty is a milestone too. I will no longer be able to use "teen angst" as an excuse for my wangst. What will I do!?

I'm missing my father a lot right now. I just want him to be with me. This will be my first birthday without him.

*sigh* There's nothing really wrong in my life right now. (Except the whole father being dead thing. That kind of sucks.) I'm just depressed.

I'm gonna go find some cat macros.

So, I didn't get the bookstore job. I didn't really expect to anyway. There were a dozen people more qualified than me, after all. But it was only after hearing how incredibly awesome working at Boulder Bookstore would be (30% discount! You get to borrow books!) that I realized how much my job sucks.

My job sucks.

Yesterday was a terrible day. No, terrible isn't the word. There is no word in my vocabulary to describe yesterday, and I have a fairly extensive vocabulary.

The first thing I had to do was discuss Stuff with my step-mom and relatives. There's going to be a public memorial for my dad. A very public memorial. They're planning on 500 people attending. My dad did not know 500 people!

Now, the people who know me will know that I have problems with social anxiety. It's also been getting steadily worse. I have difficulty eating in restaurants these days. Not only that, but I grieve very privately. Trying to grieve in front of five hundred people would send me into a serious anxiety attack. But they keep pushing me.

My mother, who is excellent at delivering reality checks as long as they don't involve her, pointed out what's probably going on. They're doing what they want, and they want me to want it too, so that they can feel good about themselves. They're doing something that they know I don't want, but they want me to agree so they don't have to feel guilty. My mother's advice: "Fuck 'em." I don't think I'll quite say that, but I like the spirit.

After I get back to my mom's, I discover that my mom's husband has turned my computer, WHILE I WAS DOWNLOADING SOMETHING. The computer was in use. He went into my room and messed with my stuff. My computer gets seriously confused when downloads are interrupted. My computer confuses easily, actually. I'm still trying to get the anime episode I was downloading to download now.

When I'm explaining my fury to my brother, he decides he has to get on his high horse, and tell me that he's sure that my mom's husband "thought he was doing the right thing." When I point out that it was actually "the fucking stupid thing," he gets huffy and tells me that he's just trying to give me "another point of view."

This would only be mildly irritating, except for the fact that my brother is always whining to me about how mean everyone is to him. "Mom is mad at me because I'm not doing my homework! She's so unreasonable!" Whenever he gets like this, I just nod my head and make vague noises of agreement, even though I usually think that he's being a moron.

A little after this, I went to work. Worst. Day. Of work. EVER. It was all right for most of the day, but when it came time for co-worker D to leave at 6:30, I realized that she hadn't finished her work, and that meant that I was going to have to do it. The floors are supposed to mopped and swept by six, and I hadn't even done that. But the real problem was that between 6:30 and 7:00 a scourge of customers came. I was busier in that half hour than I had been all day. I couldn't even wash dishes. So, I was rushing around, trying to get everything done. I was mopping...and the mop broke. I could have killed someone.

The very last straw came at the very end. I was covering the deli salads in the case with butcher paper, when I slipped in puddle of water and fell into the Ambrosia. It was at that point that I began to cry.

I'm afraid what my supervisors are going to say to me when I come into work tomorrow.

When I come home, I'm told that I didn't get the bookstore job, then I discover that my computer won't turn on. I did figure out how to turn it on eventually. For some reason it won't turn on when it's on AC power, but if I unplug it, it will turn on. I can then plug it back in, and it will run on AC power. Go figure.

...In good news, I just got my amazon.com order! Sandman: Endless Nights, Sandman: King of Dreams, and Lucifer: Children and Monsters. Oh, Western comics, am I slowly being sucked into to you? (Surely not!)

First of all, I would like to thank everyone for all the love and support you've given me. I'm truly grateful.

Boulder Bookstore called me. I turned in a resume about month ago, and now I've scheduled an interview. This is awesome, fantastic news. I really want to work in a bookstore, and Boulder Bookstore would be the best of all. I really want to work in an independent place, as opposed to a chain, and Boulder Bookstore is a far shorter commute than The Tattered Cover in Denver.

Now, it's just an interview, and there's a good chance that I won't get hired, but the fact that they called me is awesome. The interview is scheduled for tomorrow. (I'm so glad I'm not working that day.)

My first impulse after getting the phone call was to call my mother, which I couldn't do because she's on a motorcycle ride. My second thought...was how much I'd like to share this with my dad. He would have been so happy for me.

God, I miss him.

My dad died a few hours ago.

Oh, daddy.

Sorry I haven't been posting, people. Stuff's been happening, and it hasn't been fun.

My dad's dying. It could be weeks or days. This depresses me, to say the least.

I'm working at Safeway as a deli clerk. I'm on my feet all day, I keep making mistakes, and I do nothing but deal with people.

Then I come home and get to listen to everyone whine at me about what I'm doing wrong. This is especially fun with my mother, who believes that if she makes a point once, there's no reason not to immediately make the same point again six or more times.

I still have to finish typing up my yuri challenge story, and I haven't even started my spring kink stuff.

Anyway, I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew that I'm still alive.

I hate everybody.

Molly Ivins just died.

Goddess. I didn't even know she was sick.

Yesterday I was thinking lovely thoughts about global warming, destruction of the environment, and other such cheerful thoughts. I decided that I wanted to go for a hike in the mountains. I tried to think about who I'd like to go with, and the first person to pop into my mind was my dad. Then I realized that I may never be able to do that with him. He's going onto some heavy duty chemo, and may not be able to do much. The chemo is supposed to shrink the tumor enough so that an operation is possible. If it doesn't...

I don't want my dad to die.

I hear a voice
"Your must learn to stand up for yourself
Cause I can't always be around"
He says
When you gonna make up your mind
When you gonna love you as much as I do
When you gonna make up your mind
Cause things are gonna change so fast
All the white horses are still in bed
I tell you that I'll always want you near
You say that things change my dear

So, I think most of the people reading this journal are aware that my dad has cancer. I think most people are also aware that he's Boulder County Commissioner. Two days he held a press conference making the news officially public. I read the news articles that were written about it, and it just sort of hit me all over again. I'm largely in denial about it; I don't want to think about my dad dying, but reading it in the news made it unavoidable.

Now for the amusing part. During the conference, my dad mentioned my brother and me. He said that he had two children, and mentioned our names. My name, in its shortened form, is androgynous. Apparently one reporter didn't bother to fact check, because he wrote that my father had two teenage boys. As most of you know (there's that phrase again), I'm transgendered, and while I identify as genderqueer (i.e. neither a man or a woman) I prefer male pronouns. (Actually, I prefer gender neutral pronouns, like ze and zir, but I take what I can get.) So it was bad journalism, yet oddly accurate.

Uh, that is all.

without fail. I put off writing the paper until the very last minute, and then I'm too tired to focus. I hate my life. I'm not going to get good grades. I'm praying for B's in social psych and English. My mom made it very clear that I was to get an A in psych, but screw that. I'm a worthless slacker. I'm so fed up with my English class I could scream.

If I don't get good grades, I might not be able to transfer to CU, which would mean another semester of Metro. At Metro, I can't work on the major I want.

My mother will throw a fit, I'll feel like shit, she'll go one about how worthless I am.

My father... well, if you're looking for ways to up your self-esteem, disappointing a loving, supportive father who also happens to be a cancer patient is not the way to do it.

I hate myself. I hate school. I don't know what I'm going to do.

Ever since my dad wound up in the hospital, people have been asking what's wrong with him. I kept feeling stupid and ignorant when this question was asked, because I didn't really know. All I could say was that something was wrong with his stomach and that he'd had his appendix and part of his colon removed. Well, today I figured out why I didn't know anything. It was because no one was telling me anything.

My father has cancer.

They say his chances are good. He's relatively young and healthy. His type of cancer can't be cured, but it can go into remission.

Oh god. My father has cancer and it can't be cured. Oh god.

Everyone else has known since Wednesday, but no one wanted to tell me. They wanted me to go to the conference without worrying about it. I called Kara on Friday and asked how he was. She told me that he was more lucid than he had been when I saw him last, and that he was walking around a bit. That was all she told me.

So, I got home (to my dad's) tonight and found a message to call my mother. I did so, and she told me we were going to visit my dad. I was feeling really tired, and I had homework that was due at 9:00 PM, but she was insistent.

Our conversation in the car was as follows:

Mom: So, what did Kara tell you?

Me: Just that he was feeling more lucid and was walking around a bit.

Mom: So, you know he has cancer--

Me: WHAT!?

I'm not sure how she thought I could possibly know. We actually started cracking up about it later. About how lucidity is the first sign of cancer, and "walking around" is the latest code word. She admitted that it was a major non sequitur.

My mother's bedside manner leaves something to be desired.

I did not end up doing my homework.

My father's in the hospital. There's something wrong with his stomach, though I'm not entirely clear on what. He had his appendix removed and part of his colon. He was rather amusing when I visited though. All that morphine.


( But here's something that cheers me up )

Today I had therapy. I worked some stuff out and was feeling pretty good. Like maybe I wasn't completely worthless as a human being. I also had some more confidence about the job situation. When I got home, I decide to fill out some online applications. It was then I discovered that I could find my social security card. I had a melt down. I had thought for a moment that I might not be completely worthless, but here was something to immediately prove me wrong. If that wasn't a sign of complete, utter, and in all other ways total incompetence, then what was? I tried to put it out of my mind by reading manga and surfing the internet, but I kept get anxiety attacks that made it nearly impossible to breath and horrible pains all over my body from the stress. I thought about telling my mom, because she often manages to fix things, but I couldn't handle someone else telling how stupid and irresponsible I was. I was having enough problems with just myself. I finally broke down and told me dad. Well, actually, he asked. I guess he noticed that I was hyperventilating and sobbing in the hallway.

Him: What's wrong

Me: I'm a completely worthless person, and I thought might not be, butI'mstupidandworthlesandIlostmysocialsecuritycard.

Him: Well we can get a new one. Do you need it right now?

Me: I'm trying to apply for jobs

Him: Do you just need the number then? Because I have that.

Me:...You do?

Him: Sure, let's go get it.

So crisis was averted. Though I would screw up again a few hours later by possible breaking one of Kara's antique toys. It was an accident!

You know, I would like to go just one day without screwing up. I feel like a walking disaster.

One possibly positive thing that came out of tonight is my resolution to stop being so self-destructive. I'm not just talking about self-harm (which I bravely resisted, thank you very much). I'm talking about about drinking caffienated soda late at night when I know I have problems with insomnia (I did that tonight), or purposefully not taking my medication (which I haven't done recently, but have done in the past). Punishing myself is not helping anything. I repeat, punishing myself is not helping anything. I need to remember that.

With that in mind, I'm going email someone I've been attracted to for a long time, and invite him over for dinner. Not as a date, but just as a nice gesture. I've wanted to call him for ages, but haven't because I was punishing myself for not having a job. Sheesh.

I've just made a mix CD that's meant to represent me. I present to you the song list:

( Song list and explanations )