Tom listed the flooring yesterday. He wanted to do it the day before, but there were a couple of ads for more flooring for cheaper, and he didn’t want to be asking for more and selling less right along with them. I hope the ads were taken down yesterday because the items sold and not for any other reason. Better yet, I hope ours sells and not for pennies! I’m sick of people trying to get a deal from us. Giving someone a deal is one thing, but seeing them trying to gain at our expense or expecting us to give to them for nothing is another. It sickens me just how many greedy people there are out there who can only think of themselves. I sometimes feel like we were put here to make or save other people money while we spend most of the time struggling.

While they may want to get whatever they can get from us, people are otherwise quite generous when it comes to languages. I’m amazed at the offers I’ve gotten for help with my Italian and Portuguese. I’m more of a self-taught kind of person, but occasionally I have a question I wouldn’t mind asking someone who should know better than me.

Later…

I just got a sorry reminder of why I rarely read the news. Yeah, learning that this country just gave $200m in aid to Pakistan, a bunch of low-life terrorists who treat women like animals, while my husband and I continue to sit here broke, jobless and uninsured, doesn’t sit well with me. Almost every adult in the US could’ve been given one of those millions.

And then the tall tales of slavery keep coming into play too, and I have to wonder what the past has to do with the here and now and why people still fall for those stories. They wanted to come over here from Africa and work. But just cuz they decided they didn’t like working and therefore cried slavery since they couldn’t get back home so easily, doesn’t mean slavery really ever existed. I think that if any of it really did happen, it’s been greatly exaggerated over the years. That’s just blacks for you, in my opinion. When they didn’t want to work, they cried slavery. Today, when they can’t get their way, they cry racism. And I once tried so hard to give these people a chance, telling myself that there’s good and bad in every kind. Ah, but when 9 out of 10 of you are bad news as opposed to 7 out of 10, it’s kind of hard to keep an open mind, you know? But when has anyone gay ever done anything directly to you or to someone you’re close to that’s really bad? I’m sure even you agree that you don’t see them “gang-banging” or being notorious for crime and welfare.

And why aren’t people protesting at the government’s office against them giving our money away by the millions? It’s one thing to give a little bit of aid to those caught up in natural disasters, but Pakistanis? These people don’t want to help themselves any more than most Mexicans do!

Tom’s going to call a dental college on Monday that sees people based on a sliding scale fee, but I’m sure they won’t be able to help me. I still say that the only one who can help me is me and that it’ll be up to me to pull my own teeth. If our lovely God wanted me to have any help, then He wouldn’t have seen to it that I’ve been uninsured for 5 years and counting. Nor would He have us be this broke this late in life if it weren’t meant to be this way indefinitely.

I simply see absolutely no change in sight for a long, long time and that’s a hard pill to swallow. Knowing we’re more than likely going to spend the rest of our lives living like bums and having to do without some of the things we need is a really tough burden to carry around on one’s shoulders. It really has a way of taking the fun out of life. I just don’t look forward to getting out of bed each day like I used to. The future simply no longer holds the hope and the promise that it once at least seemed to hold. Instead, there’s nothing but the same old guaranteed pain and poverty each day. So I live in a bottle of Aleve, knowing that money will be a never-ending problem for us till the day we die in SOMEONE ELSE’S trashy trailer, and not our own home.

Tom read an interesting article that suggests one reason I’m good with languages is that I was exposed to Hebrew and Yiddish when I was between 6-18 months old when the brain learns to identify sounds. There’s no L sound in Japanese, and when they did a study amongst Japanese babies, the ones who were exposed to the L sound had an easier time learning English than those who weren’t. They would make sounds like loo-loo, la-la and stuff like that.

We moved in right next to my grandparents right before I was born, and they spoke some Hebrew, so this theory makes sense. I would have been more exposed to it than my older siblings. Nana and Pa would have been in and out more often with us living right next door, and it wasn’t uncommon for them – especially Nana – to mutter something or another in Hebrew or Yiddish.

I also have a song in Japanese that I always thought was so pretty. I can sing along with it even though I don’t know what the words mean. Tom, on the other hand, can’t make sense of the words he hears in order to follow along himself. So I’m hearing what a lot of folks can’t, and that’s also part of what makes me good with singing and instruments, even if I rarely sing anymore and never play instruments anymore either.

No calls so far for the flooring. Gee, what a surprise. Like maybe God’s put a money curse on us, huh? It’s frustrating wanting to let Him have it for allowing us to continue to go through this shit and for not answering my prayers for help, but knowing I can’t tear into Him or else He’ll punish us like He always would when I’d give him a piece of my mind. Blowing off steam at Him isn’t worth putting our lives on the line.

Anyway, Tom believes they can help me with my teeth, but because it’s not infected or any type of life-and-death crisis, I won’t be their top priority. Yeah, that’s part of the problem in this world. Nothing seems to happen until it does become a crisis, but no one wants to get to the point that they’re in a crisis either. It seems like a no-win situation all around.