We’ve been in California for exactly 3 years today. Financially we’ve gotten absolutely nowhere. Personally, intellectually and material-wise we’ve come a long way.

Jesse goes out on Friday and Saturday nights, so the dogs are going crazy. It’s times like this I don’t feel the least bit guilty about being late with the rent. We specifically told Maryann up front we wanted a quiet place.

I have been depressed, frustrated, stressed and pissed, but mostly pissed. My job as an artificial intelligence worker prohibits me from discussing much in the way of details, but I will say that one of the requestors had a huge glitch in their system last night and I ended up working all night for free when I could’ve been working on my story and studying languages. They obviously got a lot of complaints and people stopped doing their jobs once they realized that they too, were automatically getting rejected, because they still have a million HITs listed, and these usually go fast. I thought it was weird at first since I’ve worked for these people before and have always had all my work approved and paid.

All workers have an approval rate, depending on how well they do. My approval rate had been 99.4%, but the fuckers threw me down to 98.7% after their fucked up system rejected 196 HITs, as they call the jobs. They’re aware of the problem now and have approved a dollar’s worth of the $9 I’m owed. We’re pretty sure they’ll compensate people somehow with a bonus of some kind, but as MT themselves said, they can’t un-reject rejected HITs, so I’m stuck with a lower approval rate, even though anything over 95% is outstanding. I cashed out immediately because until I realized it was a glitch in the system, I was afraid I’d get kicked off and basically fired. I couldn’t just open a new account in a different name/email if I did because my SS# is still the same either way. I’m tempted to take Tom’s advice and just do educational surveys, translation and transcription jobs, and leave it at that. We’re still going to be poor anyway so what the hell.

Yeah, speaking of that, God’s blessed us so much that He’s seen to it that we won’t be eating much this week. Isn’t He wonderful, folks? Well, that’s ok. I hate Him as much as He hates my husband and I. See, we were supposed to get our money last week. But now the new earliest/latest scenario is on for between next Monday and Wednesday. Tom, who keeps up to date at their site as to what they’re doing and when they’re doing it, says there’s no way the money won’t get to us next week, everything’s fine, etc., but I’m so sick of being teased and beaten over the head with money that if I could reach up, yank God down out of the sky long enough to shove a dollar bill in his mouth and make him choke on it, I probably would! And I don’t care who I piss off by saying so! We all have our own ways of venting and this is mine. I’m just so fucking fed up! It’s a never-ending cycle of bullshit that just won’t quit no matter what we do! Every day I’m thinking of suicide. Every day now. If you knew someone or something put a curse on you for reasons you’ll probably never know, that could never be undone, and if you knew you were destined to be dirt poor and have all your dreams in life denied to you, wouldn’t you think about it? The older I get, the more I realize things will never ever change. If I were still in my 20s, even my 30s, I would probably have some hope that we could turn things around. But not at 44 and 53. As I told Tom, who’s been begging me to “hang on,” I can only live for him so much. Sometimes a person’s gotta do what they gotta do and live for themselves. And I just don’t know that I could go on like this another 30 or 40 years if we survive this recession. He insisted he not only doesn’t want to lose me, but that he would be blamed for my suicide and doesn’t want to go to prison. Of course I had to laugh at that one. If God protects those who have really actually wronged me for real, why would He see that Tom got punished for something he didn’t do and that I did to myself all by myself? Anyway, I’m not saying I’m going to kill myself. I’m just saying that I’m getting awfully sick of life and am losing my will to go on. Nothing excites me anymore and I just feel like I have nothing to live for at times.

I try to just take solace in and be grateful for the fact that Tom and I are healthy, though I still have scattered chest pains, palpations and feelings of being smothered. Not tight-chested like I’d get down in Arizona, but I sometimes feel like I can’t take in a full breath of air, and yawning doesn’t always help either. These are all said to be classic heart failure symptoms, but the longer I have this, the more obvious it is that my heart is ok because I would probably be dead by now if it was my heart, or the symptoms would have worsened by now. My next guess is nerves, but I’ve been under a lot more stress than this before but didn’t have these symptoms. IDK, maybe it’s my body’s new way of reacting to stress. sighs A part of me wishes I did have something deadly. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about being poor or killing myself, would I?

I’ve also got hobbies I enjoy, though I can’t do some of them, like studying languages, when it’s noisy.

What the hell? My keyboard stopped working and I got so pissed that I punched the shit out of it and now it’s working again! Jesus, it never ends! Leaky pipes, computer problems, money problems… it never fucking ends! What’s next, God? Huh? What’s next? Aaaarrrggghhh!!!!!!!

Before my foul mood gets any more fucked up or my keyboard quits for good no matter how viciously I beat the snot out of it, we have baby birds nesting just outside the kitchen door in the corner of the porch. Their little chirps are cute to hear, and we hate to have to scare Mama Bird when we go in and out. She’s getting used to us, though.

I think my fucking hand is broken – aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!!!!!!

Almost forgot - I remember 4 dreams I had last night, for those of you who don’t find that sort of thing boring.

In one dream I was going through my MIL’s dresser, though I don’t know how or why I would be at her place of all places. I was rummaging through the top drawer. There was an Italian coin that said “Italia” on it, but instead of swiping that I swiped a couple of bucks of American change, feeling no guilt at all, and bought myself some junk food with it from a vending machine.

Then we were stuck in a tooth house again, as I call houses that are just a few feet apart, that was tiny and laid out like the Oregon house. I didn’t know it, but we were stuck living next to the crazy black bitch all over again that we lived with in Phoenix. We both stepped out of our houses at the same time. She spotted me and began screaming, “She’s going to kill me! She’s going to kill me!”

I immediately ran back inside and hid as she and someone else kicked at the door, knowing that once the cops got there, she would be the one to automatically be believed because I’m white, and even though there’s no one left alive who had a hand in slavery, we whites of today are the ones paying for it.

Next I was visiting some woman in a very big and old house. The living room was huge and nearly empty. Then I realized the woman was crazy when she kept insisting I was her dead daughter come back to life. I went to leave, but the door was locked.

The last dream wasn’t too bad, though. I actually liked it and was kind of sorry to wake up from it because Tom and I both seemed so excited. We seemed to have all the freedom and money in the world to be able to do what we were going to do. We were driving through the woods, though the woods looked more Oregonish than down here. “I’m sick of this climate,” I said, and Tom said, “Me too.” I was surprised cuz I thought he liked it. Then I said, “Now’s the time. Now’s the time before you turn 55 to check out Florida where most dogs are household pets in the east. You said it yourself - we don’t want to settle in a place and then have to move a few years later. If we don’t like it we can always head back out west.”

Tom agreed and the dream ended with me saying we’d get as close to my folks as we could. How wonderful it would be to be able to shop around for our forever home like that! But I wouldn’t have the guts to move long-distance after what happened the last time, and we definitely wouldn’t have the money. I still don’t think there’s even going to be a temporary home in our cards. Oh, I don’t want to think about it. I’ll only start crying!

Oh, God, why oh why won’t you be a little bit nicer to us????? If I could suddenly know for sure that I was wrong, man, what a blubbering fool I’d be! I’d totally go ballistic with joy!

Someone in Concord, NH searched for “Valleyhead Lenox, school and girls” and hit my blog. I wonder if it was Tammie?

Still nothing from the sick bitch, not surprisingly. I won’t let her ignore me, though. I can’t make her read my messages, but I’ll be sure to remind her of my existence every so often. I think she is reading them, though, cuz just like Maliheh, she’s hoping I’ll say the wrong thing.