Notes, Updates and Random Bitchings

Wow, my life is boring. But there's light at the end of this very long, very dark tunnel. I just haven't found it yet.

Picking up the pieces of what was left by Grampa: An email exchange between me and Uncle C. He told me that no one was listed in Grampa's will but the two sons, him and uncle K. They get everything.
In most ways, I'm not angry, I didn't expect that I would get much and I do know Grampa considered his sons "closer" relatives than his grandchildren. The words "blood is thicker than water" had come out of his mouth at one point many years ago. Uncle K has no children, so everything he gets is his and he'll be well-off for some time. Uncle C hasn't done too badly in his own life, so he's very well-set, and so is his wife, and their kids will be set when they're gone. But I was left nothing, and I've got no one. My parents are both dead, I have no husband, I'm the only one who is left to just flounder on my own. The rest of them will be just fine.
In a way it's no different than the rest of my life, what little financial support Grampa ever gave me was enough to help me get by and I am certainly grateful for it, but I really did think the circumstances of my life being so different and so much more difficult would have lent themselves to some consideration. Apparently not.
Uncle C says he is going to give me what Grampa had of my mother's possessions, but it will take a long time to clean out the house. He said he'd already found things like possessions of my mother's from when she was a child, her wedding dress, pictures of me and her, and that he is giving them to me because he feels I should have them. Well, that's big of you, considering what a hard time you gave me about the wedding pictures. But what am I supposed to do with it? The pictures obviously I'll want, but what about the things that were hers when she was a kid? I never knew about them, they were before i was around, and if they're kid things, I don't have any kids, what would I do with them? And her wedding dress? It won't fit me, it's nearly 40-years-old and probably yellowing by now, what do I do with that? He's gonna give me all of that shit just to get it out of what-is-now-his-house. He said he's let me know when they had everything packed up, so I'm just going to go over there, take what I want and leave the rest. He thinks being her brother trumps me as her daughter anyway, so fine, it's his and he can figure out what the fuck to do with it.

The head rushes and panic attacks have mostly subsided. I haven't had a panic attack in 11 days, my longest stretch. The head rushes are almost non-existent, and when they do happen they're very slight. Saw the doctor again, we're going to do our damnedest to control the anxiety without medication and I was given a list of things to do to bring about recovery. It will be another two months before we can determine if my thyroid meds are working, and I'm still not good enough to drive a car, but the progress is coming daily. I still have off days but they are less frequent and I'm learning how to accept them in the short-term.

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I am having the chicken vs. egg problem with my school. My financial aid applications have all been processed, but the school won't look at those records until I've been accepted into the Master's program. The problem is that it doesn't matter if I'm accepted, if the financial aid isn't there, I'm not going back to school, period. In order to get accepted, i have to turn in two letters of recommendation and pass the GRE exams, which costs $160 to take. I'm not going to shell out that much money to take this stupid test for nothing; I need to know first if I've been approved or not and no one seems to get that.

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Me and F have been friends since high school, but have gone our different paths since then, as most high school mates do. He grew up to be a Republican NASCAR-lover who "hates niggers" and for a while, "hated fags" too. The only thing he had in common left with me by our mid-twenties was that we'd both been "orphaned", both parents dead young. When I was younger and still recovering from those losses, it was important to have someone in my life who understood that, but as I got older the things about F I didn't like made him less tolerable. And then when he came out to me as a cross-dresser about ten years ago and was willing to accept homosexuality (he's hetero, but cross-dressing made him more tolerant), I thought maybe our relationship had taken a turn for the better.
But it's not enough, and as time went on, the other things that always bothered me about F continued to bother me and hanging on to the friendship just seemed pointless. Frankly, I don't find him interesting or fun or intelligent, and though it sounds harsh, I have no use for him in my life anymore, and I've felt that way for some time now. As one of my other friends said once "Just because he's a freak doesn't mean you have to like him."
Because there's no hard feelings, I had decided a few years back to gradually end the friendship with him and his wife, just slowly stop talking and hanging out with them until I just wasn't around anymore, but damn me if they didn't persist. F and his wife are also friends with several of my other high-school pals I still hang out with, so we still see each other on those occasions of mutual invite. And because I don't necessarily dislike them and they have been good to me over the years, I never felt it was right or fair to just tell them it's over, and I'm always nice to them when we're together. I just can't get rid of them, that's all. When F called and said they'd be at Grampa's funeral, I tried to tell them not to come, that I would be just fine, but of course they insisted.
So it gets posted on Facebook that I'm doing a Girls Night Out last night, and it happened to be with some of the girls that F also knows. Part of what turns me off about F is that he tries to invite himself to things like that and wants to go as his cross-dressing alter ego, "Ramona". There are gay bars and places in Cleveland where "alternative-lifestyles" are accepted; when Ramona first came to be, it was me who introduced her to those places. Now with time, she's developed her own fellow-cross-dressing friends and they go to those places to hang out. But Ramona insists on pushing herself into occasions where she wouldn't be considered appropriate, like a group dinner at Olive Garden or an upscale dance club downtown. When F is Ramona he looks like a man in drag, there is no mistaking that is a man in women's clothes, speaking in a man's voice, the whole nine. I have other friends who are totally trans-gendered who don't have that problem; you would never guess J was once a man. But a cross-dresser is not a transgendered person, they're literally men in women's clothing, and that is not considered acceptable.
Now I'm all about going against society's rules and that every type of person deserves acceptance, but a situation like that would make everyone uncomfortable. Ramona will get stared at, some stranger might even have the balls to say something to her. Ramona's answer is always to just "bring it on", but the rest of the people Ramona's there with, including me, are not looking to get in the middle of a morality war, we just want to have dinner. And trying to force yourself onto society is no way to gain acceptance and respect. Of course Ramona takes this personally and then starts whining about not getting invited and persist, persist, persist. I've been listening to F whine to me on phone and email for years now, I even get the whiny voice attached, "Well, if it was girls' night out, how come Ramona wasn't invited? One of you could have called me. You girls just don't love me anymore." F thinks he's being cute but he's really just being annoying and that shit is getting old, and I'm getting tired of the persistence and the explaining. D, one of mine and F's mutual high school buddies, has had this conversation with F more times than I have, and it just doesn't sink in. Society does have rules and you have to be careful with how you choose to bend and break them. Everyone, even the biggest rule-breakers, figure out what they have to do to be accepted and make those compromises within themselves. Ramona doesn't want to, she just wants to get on Facebook chat and grill me about why she wasn't invited to such-and-such event.
I agreed to go to F's surprise birthday party in a few weeks and from there restart the gradual drop-off of the friendship that had been working out so well before F insisted on coming to Grampa's funeral. Again, because I don't dislike them and there are no hard feelings, I'm not willing to just outright drop them and let things end badly. So here we go again.

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The vitiligo is getting worse on my face, I now have what looks like a dark brown ring around my lips where the pigment has faded all around my mouth and then darkened at the nerve endings. I wear make up to cover it, but any time I have to wipe my face (after eating or drinking, the make up comes off and the brown ring is very visible, especially in bright light. All these years I've done a great job of hiding the vitiligo with long sleeves, pantyhose, fake suntan lotion, but it's virtually impossible to hide now that it's on my face and right square on my lips. It almost looks like I don;t clean my face. Now is the time to start talking to the doctors about depigmentation. Creams are available that will remove the remaining pigment from my skin; I'll essentially be an albino. Since I'm already very fair-skinned, it won't make too much of a difference, and the vitiligo already covers over half my body so I'm not losing much. But I'll be all one colour, and the days of having to hide myself will be over. Typical depigmenting takes 1-4 years, since I don't have much to lose, if I start now, by the time I'm done with school, I'll be almost, or maybe even completely white. Moving to a place with little sun means I won't look out of place among all the other very-white people. My next appointment with the doctor about my thyroid is in the beginning of June; I'll be asking for the referral to a dermatologist then.

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I'm still no good at reading for pleasure, blasphemy for an English major. When I first got sick, I went to the library and took out Toni Morrison books because she's one of the only authors I can be convinced to read, and because it helped eat up time being out of work unable to get stoned and focus my mind away from panicking. I got through three of the books, but I took them back before I managed to open the fourth. I tried, but I just don't take interest in reading books, and it's a something of myself I'm just going to have to accept.

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"I'm just not a caring person. I'm not the type who can spend my life taking care of people, I guess I'm just selfish in that way".
"I know, me too. Maybe it's from being an only child, but I don't have it either. People have been telling me I should go into health care because it's a field that's in demand, but I'm just not interested in taking care of people. I'm willing to help and I could do it in a short-term way, but no, not a care-giver. I get it."
"I gave T the option of backing out of this marriage when my back was all screwed up. I knew there was a possibility i could end up in a wheelchair the rest of my life and I know that's not what he signed up for. So I told him, 'If you want to call this relationship off, I totally understand. I wouldn't want you stuck taking care of me for the rest of my life and I wouldn't blame you at all if you wanted to back out. I know it's a lot to take on and it wouldn't be fair to you.'"
"What did he say?"
"He said 'of course, not', that he would take care of me if something bad happened, he wasn't backing out of the relationship."
"Well that's good to know."
"But I had be honest with him, so I told him that if roles were reversed that I probably would have backed out. That I couldn't just spend the rest of my life caring for him. He has to know that I'm just not good like that, so I was up front about it. I told him I just couldn't do it."
"Well, you know, because of your age difference, that the odds are a bit higher that some day you would end up having to take care of him. What did he say?"
"He said 'Well, I guess I hope I never need you to take care of me, then.'"

I don't feel sorry for him if something does happen to him health-wise and she leaves him for it, she told him up front and apparently he's so desperate to be loved by someone he's willing to accept that risk. I understand where she's coming from, our friendship has worked out so well because we're both uncaring and selfish.
But if I'm in love with someone, truly in love, I would be wiling to try 110% to do everything I could to take care of him and if it just wasn't enough and I had to go, then I would go. But the point is I would give it my all first, and I would try with every ounce of willpower I have to stick with the relationship and take care of him the best I could before I succumb to the selfishness. That's when I knew for sure that she doesn't love him. This truly is a marriage of convenience. He's desperate for someone to love and she needs someone who will give her money and a free pass into the UK. Have fun, kids!!