Change is Constant
I've not updated in so long it's a little daunting. This one might be novel length, folks. I'll add in some section headings.
Employment Status: Currently, I'm unemployed. The desk job didn't last very long; I allowed my social anxiety to get the better of me and ended up going back to my gas station job. I ended up working the overnight shift exclusively, and I began to really enjoy it. I planned to stay there as long as I could, but my assistant manager began to make my job extremely unpleasant to the point it just wasn't worth the stress. I'm bringing this up because she actually FINALLY GOT FIRED the other night and yes, I'm bitter enough to enjoy that. She was a terrible woman. I have no idea how she lasted as long as she did. She was never polite to customers, she picked one employee and made their work life miserable before they quit (It was the second assistant manager before me), she never wanted to actually work, called in constantly but got so angry when others did it, and she was extremely unprofessional. She'd been under investigation several times for cursing and yelling at employees in earshot of customers.
I did have a backup plan when I quit the gas station. I'd applied at a temp agency and they gave me an orientation for a factory job. However, they made it sound more semi-permanent than it was. Apparently "gauranteed for three months" means that they'll use me for three months and then suspend my availability. The only time I actually worked with them was for one week for said factory job. They offered me another three weeks work, and wanted me to interview for a car lot receptionist position, but then my grandmother fell and I was the only relative willing to take care of her.
On a side note: When the temp agency rep told me about the receptionist position, she said "I think you'd be a lot more suited for that than factory work." Despite her comment, I WAS actually going to interview for it. Her comment really offended me, even though I know she didn't mean it offensively. Who is she to say that I'm more suited to a customer relations position than factory work? I might be small and female, but that doesn't mean that customer service is the only thing I can do. I might come off as smiley and bubbly but that's actually NOT how I am. That's just my default attitude when going in for job interviews (which really helps me in the short run, but apparently really hurts me in the long run.) I HATE dealing with customers. I would MUCH rather do factory work. The one week I did it I actually liked it quite a bit. It was physically difficult to start out, but after the first day where I got the hang of it, it was actually fun. Time passed quickly, and the fact that it was more physically demanding than most of my jobs before it made me feel like I was actually accomplishing something. I don't mind tedious, repetitive tasks because they provide me with a comfort zone. I know what I'm doing and I do it well. I learn quickly and do what I'm told. My personality doesn't allow for me to goof off and get paid for it, so I actually work when I'm paid to, and I get nervous when someone else hinders my work. Dealing directly with customers is the bane of my work existence. The good ones are few and far between, and I just do not enjoy having to be fake and making small talk when I'm not feeling that way. I can work through a bad mood, but I find it difficult to pretend to be in a good mood just for a customer. So for her to say that I'm "more suited" to a customer relations position than to good, hard, physical work really annoys me. I even told them when applying with their agency that I really don't want a job in customer service.
Employent Status continued/Grandmother's Health Issues: Everything sort of fell through during the record-breaking snow fall. My grandmother had been having back pain to the point she went to the ER over it about a week before this instance. They couldn't figure out the cause, but found a stress fracture (and for some reason they didn't think that was the cause. :/ ). To help with the pain they gave her some pain medication. She reported that it wasn't working, so they gave her STRONGER pain medicine. The stronger pain medicine caused her to be unsteady on her feet, and she was disoriented. Dad asked me to stay around the house to make sure she didn't fall and instructed Gram to call me if she needed to go to the bathroom during the night. Of course, Gram being Gram, she didn't call me and she fell. When she fell, she cut herself. She's been on bloodthinners for years due to a heart valve replacement surgery several years ago. She wouldn't stop bleeding, and I had to call 911 to come get her. I could go on and on about the insanity that ensued over the next few days, but I won't. The result was that I began doing everything around the house, cooking, cleaning, and caring for her and the animals, while dad went to work. Now she's nearly 100% better, so I'm going to start looking for a job as soon as I can.
Dealing with Gram Now That She's Better: My grandmother and I have always had a love/hate relationship. One moment she loves me and the next moment she can't stand me. Where I try to help her, she thinks I'm trying to take over her life. She's always been very inconsistent in her attitude towards me. What's okay and appreciated one day is absolutely forbidden the next. She's 95 years old this year, and she's legally blind. She CAN see a little bit, but it's very, very poorly. She grew up during the great depression, and she knows the value of hard work. She's always done things on her own, and she refuses to admit that she can't.....BUT SHE CAN'T. Therefore my father and I get extremely frustrated with her.
She wants to wash the dishes on her own, but she can't tell when they're clean, so we often find old food on the dishes. She fixes her own medication but she drops pills and therefore doesn't end up taking them which is EXTREMELY BAD because she takes medication that is absolutely VITAL to her continued existence. (I.E. Blood pressure, blood thinners, etc.) But she completely REFUSES to let us help her. She "cleans." I think that's self-explanatory. She gets extremely offended when my dad gets tired of the house being dirty because of her "cleaning" and he asks me to do it....so she just does it...again. >.> I love and admire her very much, and I realize that it must be scary getting to the point that she's at with her health, but she's making things harder on herself and frustrating for everyone else.
She's insanely hypocritical. I've lived there on and off since I was fourteen years old. I have a bed on the closed-in porch and two dressers. She hates the fact that I have material objects. "You mean she has CLOTHES? She has TOILETRIES?! Are you KIDDING ME?!" <----Basically her reaction to everything I own. There is ONE clothes closet in the house. It's an old house. The closet is in my Dad's room. My dad and my grandmother are alike in that they wear like two sets of clothes, and that's it. Therefore, there are a lot of clothes in my dad's closet that he doesn't wear, AND a lot of empty space. He told me that I could use his closet for some of my clothes.
I have two dressers close to my bed, but due to the fact that she doesn't want ANYTHING I OWN to be in any other part of her house than in my corner, or visible to guests, a lot of my dresser drawers are used to store toiletries and various other things like makeup, bills, bank statements, shoes (because my shoes absolutely canNOT be on the floor and visible), extra blankets, etc. (There was a long period of several years that she insisted I use ONE set of sheets, the sheets that SHE provided for my bed, and the bedspread that SHE gave me, because they were "brand new." "Brand new" to her means she's had them for several years and just never used them, or it means that they've only been in use for one or two years.) So I only, in reality, had about three or four drawers for my clothes. She does not appreciate the fact that my clothes are encroaching upon other parts of her house. She complains to my dad constantly that they're in his closet. This furstrates my Dad because he DOESN'T CARE. He even OFFERED to let me use it, and she's constantly commenting on it.
She's always talking about how things were when she was a child, those typical "I walked 15 miles to school in the SNOW!" stories. She apparently only had two sets of clothes and things I should, too. EXCEPT that it's a LIE. She has THREE DRESSERS AND A WARDROBE full of clothes. Granted, she doesn't wear them, but it's completely hypocritical of her to comment on how many clothes I have and where they're stored when she has so many more clothes than I have! She has so much stuff that she never uses that she won't get rid of. Granted, I've never said anything about it because it's her house and therefore her perogative, but she drives me crazy with that shit.
At one point close to my 21st birthday, I had made use of an empty bathroom cabinet and put my shampoo and soap in it. She waited until I went out on a date, put my toiletries in a basket, and set them in the middle of my floor so I'd be sure to see them. She said to me the next day that I "could use the basket to take your things to and from the bathroom." I was furious, and so was my father, because it was EMPTY SPACE, and my things were area appropriate, and put up nicely, not messily. So Gram got my uncle to take her out to buy towels to put in the cabinet so the space was no longer available. To this day she hasn't used the towels.
Anything she finds of mine around the house somehow makes its way back to my corner. I absolutely canNOT have anything of mine in any area of her house other than my designated area.
Cooking and Living with Gram: After she fell, I took over the cooking and the tea making. Since, she's taken over tea making again, but I still cook. She's constantly trying to worm her way back into that, but she can't see to do it, so she overcooks and burns the food. Due to this, my father put his foot down and I'm still cooking. I find it both frustrating and amusing that she finds something wrong with everything I cook, but she never openly insults me. She'll make a comment about the potatoes being too "mushy" or the meat being too "thick." She blames it on the food itself, and not me. "These potatoes never used to be this mushy. Don't get them from that store again." Neither my father nor I find anything wrong with the food. Besides, SHE is the one that taught me how to cook. When she complains about the meat being "tough," it isn't. She's just not strong enough to cut the meat on her own and won't let us do it. so she spends half her meal sawing away at her meat.
She's constantly coming in the kitchen while I cook and asking if she can help with anything. If I don't have meat thawed out because Dad and I planned to get food from out that day, she takes it upon herself to thaw meat out and not tell me until it's thawed, so I'm forced to cook it....but of COURSE she offers to cook it for me. She makes comments like "I think she's getting tired of cooking." when she thinks I'm out of earshot, to my father. This isn't true in the least.
Living with Gram, Period: The fact that she refuses to take responsibility for any mistakes she makes frustrates me to no end. If she can't open a jar, it's not because she's older and weaker, it's the jar's fault. It's not her, it's the vaccuum's fault that she can't push it. I must have set it to a setting the last time I used it that makes it harder to push. That's another thing, she blames anything that goes wrong on me if she can. When she still had her own vaccuum, I hadn't touched it in months, and she'd used it several times since I had, and she still blamed it on me, to my father, yet again while she thought I wasn't in earshot. "She must have done something to it." and he said, God bless him, "Mama, she hasn't even touched it in months." Eventually my dad got so annoyed with the vaccuum issues that he bought me my own personal vaccuum, and ironically, hers broke not long after and she's having to use mine....so it's still my fault everytime something is wrong with it, and she also makes comments like "My old one wasn't like this."
She finds something wrong with EVERYTHING, and isn't quiet about it. On top of that, she insists that she isn't hard to please. This is most prominent with food. Unless she makes it herself, there's something about it. Dad and I eat the same thing she does, and once a week, so does a cousin of mine, and she is the ONLY ONE that isn't satisfied. If there IS something wrong with it when she makes it herself, it's the food's fault, not hers. The food isn't "fresh" or the meat is too tough because of where it came from. I don't know, she has a wide variety of complaints. If I go grocery shopping, I have to get the exact brand and size of something that she wants or she blames it on that. Also on the subject of grocery shopping, she stocks up to a ridiculous degree. At one point, she had ten boxes of tea, three boxes of her cereal, and this wouldn't be annoying if it didn't go bad before she uses it up. It's her money, so it shouldn't get to me, but it does.
So. I'm continuing to deal with that while looking for a factory job.
Significant Other Status: We're still together. It bothers him very much that we're not living together anymore, but honestly, it doesn't bother me at all. I like hanging out with my dad more than hanging out with B. He doesn't ever do anything. When I'm there, he plays WoW or watches sports and we don't actually do anything together. I just feel like there's not point in us being together. He disagrees. I don't care that we don't go out, but I want something. Conversation or watching a movie together or SOMETHING.
He is actually getting his finances together, so I'm a little proud of that. He pays his rent on time, since he moved apartments, and he's paying his child support. Everything else, such as food, he still hasn't figured out, but I have a small amount of hope that he'll figure it out eventually.
End: I suppose that's all I have right now.
Employment Status: Currently, I'm unemployed. The desk job didn't last very long; I allowed my social anxiety to get the better of me and ended up going back to my gas station job. I ended up working the overnight shift exclusively, and I began to really enjoy it. I planned to stay there as long as I could, but my assistant manager began to make my job extremely unpleasant to the point it just wasn't worth the stress. I'm bringing this up because she actually FINALLY GOT FIRED the other night and yes, I'm bitter enough to enjoy that. She was a terrible woman. I have no idea how she lasted as long as she did. She was never polite to customers, she picked one employee and made their work life miserable before they quit (It was the second assistant manager before me), she never wanted to actually work, called in constantly but got so angry when others did it, and she was extremely unprofessional. She'd been under investigation several times for cursing and yelling at employees in earshot of customers.
I did have a backup plan when I quit the gas station. I'd applied at a temp agency and they gave me an orientation for a factory job. However, they made it sound more semi-permanent than it was. Apparently "gauranteed for three months" means that they'll use me for three months and then suspend my availability. The only time I actually worked with them was for one week for said factory job. They offered me another three weeks work, and wanted me to interview for a car lot receptionist position, but then my grandmother fell and I was the only relative willing to take care of her.
On a side note: When the temp agency rep told me about the receptionist position, she said "I think you'd be a lot more suited for that than factory work." Despite her comment, I WAS actually going to interview for it. Her comment really offended me, even though I know she didn't mean it offensively. Who is she to say that I'm more suited to a customer relations position than factory work? I might be small and female, but that doesn't mean that customer service is the only thing I can do. I might come off as smiley and bubbly but that's actually NOT how I am. That's just my default attitude when going in for job interviews (which really helps me in the short run, but apparently really hurts me in the long run.) I HATE dealing with customers. I would MUCH rather do factory work. The one week I did it I actually liked it quite a bit. It was physically difficult to start out, but after the first day where I got the hang of it, it was actually fun. Time passed quickly, and the fact that it was more physically demanding than most of my jobs before it made me feel like I was actually accomplishing something. I don't mind tedious, repetitive tasks because they provide me with a comfort zone. I know what I'm doing and I do it well. I learn quickly and do what I'm told. My personality doesn't allow for me to goof off and get paid for it, so I actually work when I'm paid to, and I get nervous when someone else hinders my work. Dealing directly with customers is the bane of my work existence. The good ones are few and far between, and I just do not enjoy having to be fake and making small talk when I'm not feeling that way. I can work through a bad mood, but I find it difficult to pretend to be in a good mood just for a customer. So for her to say that I'm "more suited" to a customer relations position than to good, hard, physical work really annoys me. I even told them when applying with their agency that I really don't want a job in customer service.
Employent Status continued/Grandmother's Health Issues: Everything sort of fell through during the record-breaking snow fall. My grandmother had been having back pain to the point she went to the ER over it about a week before this instance. They couldn't figure out the cause, but found a stress fracture (and for some reason they didn't think that was the cause. :/ ). To help with the pain they gave her some pain medication. She reported that it wasn't working, so they gave her STRONGER pain medicine. The stronger pain medicine caused her to be unsteady on her feet, and she was disoriented. Dad asked me to stay around the house to make sure she didn't fall and instructed Gram to call me if she needed to go to the bathroom during the night. Of course, Gram being Gram, she didn't call me and she fell. When she fell, she cut herself. She's been on bloodthinners for years due to a heart valve replacement surgery several years ago. She wouldn't stop bleeding, and I had to call 911 to come get her. I could go on and on about the insanity that ensued over the next few days, but I won't. The result was that I began doing everything around the house, cooking, cleaning, and caring for her and the animals, while dad went to work. Now she's nearly 100% better, so I'm going to start looking for a job as soon as I can.
Dealing with Gram Now That She's Better: My grandmother and I have always had a love/hate relationship. One moment she loves me and the next moment she can't stand me. Where I try to help her, she thinks I'm trying to take over her life. She's always been very inconsistent in her attitude towards me. What's okay and appreciated one day is absolutely forbidden the next. She's 95 years old this year, and she's legally blind. She CAN see a little bit, but it's very, very poorly. She grew up during the great depression, and she knows the value of hard work. She's always done things on her own, and she refuses to admit that she can't.....BUT SHE CAN'T. Therefore my father and I get extremely frustrated with her.
She wants to wash the dishes on her own, but she can't tell when they're clean, so we often find old food on the dishes. She fixes her own medication but she drops pills and therefore doesn't end up taking them which is EXTREMELY BAD because she takes medication that is absolutely VITAL to her continued existence. (I.E. Blood pressure, blood thinners, etc.) But she completely REFUSES to let us help her. She "cleans." I think that's self-explanatory. She gets extremely offended when my dad gets tired of the house being dirty because of her "cleaning" and he asks me to do it....so she just does it...again. >.> I love and admire her very much, and I realize that it must be scary getting to the point that she's at with her health, but she's making things harder on herself and frustrating for everyone else.
She's insanely hypocritical. I've lived there on and off since I was fourteen years old. I have a bed on the closed-in porch and two dressers. She hates the fact that I have material objects. "You mean she has CLOTHES? She has TOILETRIES?! Are you KIDDING ME?!" <----Basically her reaction to everything I own. There is ONE clothes closet in the house. It's an old house. The closet is in my Dad's room. My dad and my grandmother are alike in that they wear like two sets of clothes, and that's it. Therefore, there are a lot of clothes in my dad's closet that he doesn't wear, AND a lot of empty space. He told me that I could use his closet for some of my clothes.
I have two dressers close to my bed, but due to the fact that she doesn't want ANYTHING I OWN to be in any other part of her house than in my corner, or visible to guests, a lot of my dresser drawers are used to store toiletries and various other things like makeup, bills, bank statements, shoes (because my shoes absolutely canNOT be on the floor and visible), extra blankets, etc. (There was a long period of several years that she insisted I use ONE set of sheets, the sheets that SHE provided for my bed, and the bedspread that SHE gave me, because they were "brand new." "Brand new" to her means she's had them for several years and just never used them, or it means that they've only been in use for one or two years.) So I only, in reality, had about three or four drawers for my clothes. She does not appreciate the fact that my clothes are encroaching upon other parts of her house. She complains to my dad constantly that they're in his closet. This furstrates my Dad because he DOESN'T CARE. He even OFFERED to let me use it, and she's constantly commenting on it.
She's always talking about how things were when she was a child, those typical "I walked 15 miles to school in the SNOW!" stories. She apparently only had two sets of clothes and things I should, too. EXCEPT that it's a LIE. She has THREE DRESSERS AND A WARDROBE full of clothes. Granted, she doesn't wear them, but it's completely hypocritical of her to comment on how many clothes I have and where they're stored when she has so many more clothes than I have! She has so much stuff that she never uses that she won't get rid of. Granted, I've never said anything about it because it's her house and therefore her perogative, but she drives me crazy with that shit.
At one point close to my 21st birthday, I had made use of an empty bathroom cabinet and put my shampoo and soap in it. She waited until I went out on a date, put my toiletries in a basket, and set them in the middle of my floor so I'd be sure to see them. She said to me the next day that I "could use the basket to take your things to and from the bathroom." I was furious, and so was my father, because it was EMPTY SPACE, and my things were area appropriate, and put up nicely, not messily. So Gram got my uncle to take her out to buy towels to put in the cabinet so the space was no longer available. To this day she hasn't used the towels.
Anything she finds of mine around the house somehow makes its way back to my corner. I absolutely canNOT have anything of mine in any area of her house other than my designated area.
Cooking and Living with Gram: After she fell, I took over the cooking and the tea making. Since, she's taken over tea making again, but I still cook. She's constantly trying to worm her way back into that, but she can't see to do it, so she overcooks and burns the food. Due to this, my father put his foot down and I'm still cooking. I find it both frustrating and amusing that she finds something wrong with everything I cook, but she never openly insults me. She'll make a comment about the potatoes being too "mushy" or the meat being too "thick." She blames it on the food itself, and not me. "These potatoes never used to be this mushy. Don't get them from that store again." Neither my father nor I find anything wrong with the food. Besides, SHE is the one that taught me how to cook. When she complains about the meat being "tough," it isn't. She's just not strong enough to cut the meat on her own and won't let us do it. so she spends half her meal sawing away at her meat.
She's constantly coming in the kitchen while I cook and asking if she can help with anything. If I don't have meat thawed out because Dad and I planned to get food from out that day, she takes it upon herself to thaw meat out and not tell me until it's thawed, so I'm forced to cook it....but of COURSE she offers to cook it for me. She makes comments like "I think she's getting tired of cooking." when she thinks I'm out of earshot, to my father. This isn't true in the least.
Living with Gram, Period: The fact that she refuses to take responsibility for any mistakes she makes frustrates me to no end. If she can't open a jar, it's not because she's older and weaker, it's the jar's fault. It's not her, it's the vaccuum's fault that she can't push it. I must have set it to a setting the last time I used it that makes it harder to push. That's another thing, she blames anything that goes wrong on me if she can. When she still had her own vaccuum, I hadn't touched it in months, and she'd used it several times since I had, and she still blamed it on me, to my father, yet again while she thought I wasn't in earshot. "She must have done something to it." and he said, God bless him, "Mama, she hasn't even touched it in months." Eventually my dad got so annoyed with the vaccuum issues that he bought me my own personal vaccuum, and ironically, hers broke not long after and she's having to use mine....so it's still my fault everytime something is wrong with it, and she also makes comments like "My old one wasn't like this."
She finds something wrong with EVERYTHING, and isn't quiet about it. On top of that, she insists that she isn't hard to please. This is most prominent with food. Unless she makes it herself, there's something about it. Dad and I eat the same thing she does, and once a week, so does a cousin of mine, and she is the ONLY ONE that isn't satisfied. If there IS something wrong with it when she makes it herself, it's the food's fault, not hers. The food isn't "fresh" or the meat is too tough because of where it came from. I don't know, she has a wide variety of complaints. If I go grocery shopping, I have to get the exact brand and size of something that she wants or she blames it on that. Also on the subject of grocery shopping, she stocks up to a ridiculous degree. At one point, she had ten boxes of tea, three boxes of her cereal, and this wouldn't be annoying if it didn't go bad before she uses it up. It's her money, so it shouldn't get to me, but it does.
So. I'm continuing to deal with that while looking for a factory job.
Significant Other Status: We're still together. It bothers him very much that we're not living together anymore, but honestly, it doesn't bother me at all. I like hanging out with my dad more than hanging out with B. He doesn't ever do anything. When I'm there, he plays WoW or watches sports and we don't actually do anything together. I just feel like there's not point in us being together. He disagrees. I don't care that we don't go out, but I want something. Conversation or watching a movie together or SOMETHING.
He is actually getting his finances together, so I'm a little proud of that. He pays his rent on time, since he moved apartments, and he's paying his child support. Everything else, such as food, he still hasn't figured out, but I have a small amount of hope that he'll figure it out eventually.
End: I suppose that's all I have right now.