I thought this weekend would do a bit to raise my lowly of late spirits. It did while I was with my family, but coming back to my apartment and finding a note saying my June rent was ‘overdue’ was enough to drive me back into apathy and bitterness. Apparently it doesn’t take much. Apparently there is always stupid crap to deal with and apparently I need to learn to deal with the fact that there is stupid crap to deal.
The weathermen care about their jobs just about as much as I care about my life. Nothing really has a value to it at the moment. I guess I am looking for value then. Currently my life seems filled with me explaining to people why I don’t owe them money. Since April I’ve been calling Verizon Wireless every two weeks because I’ve been getting a bill every two weeks because the stupid saleswoman didn’t do her job correctly and started a new account without canceling my old one. Actually, she did everything wrong, I was supposed to get a 17% discount on my plan but my bill ended up being more than twice as much as before. I estimate that I called Verizon Wireless 6 to 10 times before I managed to get out of the $275 bill/early cancellation morass.
Then discovering that my apartment lost my rent check from a month ago but thinks I didn’t pay and now wants an extra fifty bucks from me and didn’t bother asking about it until I paid my July rent despite the fact that my check was with the note about my leaking bathtub and they came in and fixed my bathtub so what, you ask, happened to the rent check and I say yes, that is a good question and one I am not going to pay an extra fifty bucks to find the answer for. This is partially my fault as I have been mentioning that the apartment had not cashed my check and that I wasn’t going to ask about it until they came to me.
It has been suggested to me that I can get out of this funk by getting involved in some type of service. It bears looking in to. I signed up to work one weekend a month for Habitat a while ago, but they never called back. I should call and volunteer. And/or I should find the nearest Knights of Columbus and become involved in whatever service stuff they’ve got going on. The less internalized I am at this point the better.
I wrote someone an email yesterday that said the hopeful man in me might seem feeble but has a loud heart. I hope he can have more than just a loud heart one of these days.
I was reading the paper yesterday and I saw a very strange add that I thought I’d share:
“Marmoset problems? Traps for cheap guarunteed to finish the bastards. Nontoxic trap- marmoset is good eatin’! End the nuisance of marmoset damage today- (440) 234‑5555”
Isn’t that weird? I didn’t even know you could say “bastard” in the newspaper.
I like the idea that you pay your apartment for staying in it. I’ve never heard it phrased that way. Like the apartment is a person, or a dog that needs to be fed, or something. Anyway, about the phone bills and everything else: I sympathize… it can really suck to deal with these kinds of companies. My own home phone hasn’t been working for months. I can schedule a repair, but they’ll only come “between 7am and 7pm” which means I’d have to take off an entire day from work. I did this once before, and the repair took 3 hours or something. The line then worked for about a month, then stopped again. I think my phone line stops working every time someone else in my building gets a new phone line or gets any kind of work done by the phone company…
No matter where you go, you’re still there. I know you are always seeking out new ways to grow and to improve upon yourself (in hopes to remove much of your self-maligned attributes), but even as you do grow you’re building upon a base that you yourself have found unstable. So, from time to time, you’re going to look around and only see an unhappy reminder of the past–whether in your emotions, apartment, phone, or relationships–and wonder why all the work you’ve done hasn’t rid you of your old pains. The truth: you will never rid yourself of the past, and until your dying day it will attempt to reintegrate itself into your consciousness. Just realize that although you cannot escape the past, you can keep it from dictating your present and future.
Well spoken NeaL.
“The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels.” — Khan