I’m sitting here wondering what the hell’s wrong with my blog. I’m tweaking the template on my big 20” iMac and I have my 15” laptop next to it so I can see how the layout looks on both screens. But the colors aren’t right. Not all of the colors on the big Mac are the same as on the laptop, WTF? I’m running XP on the Mac and Vista on the laptop, so maybe that’s got something to do with it. I suppose I should just use Blogger’s own template designs, but being creative and into these kinds of things I built my own template so I could design it myself. However, I’ve done enough designing, coding, configuring, formatting, editing and programming for the night, though I hardly do much of the things that require me to be good with numbers because I’m not.

Later…

Alison was kind enough to give me the ins and outs of Nebraska living. She told me what the different areas of the state were like. From the sound of it, the area she’s in isn’t as cheap as the town we lived in up in Oregon, but it’s certainly cheaper than Cali. We could survive quite well on a minimum wage job in a 2-bedroom apartment for $575, but we could also survive here on what we’re paying here. If we decide to live I’d rather live in this secluded trailer in the woods where it doesn’t get nearly as cold/snowy as opposed to an apartment where we’d be back to having to listen to everyone’s TVs, music, doors, footsteps and screaming kids in a horrible climate.

Besides, the biggest thing I’ve learned since living in California is that while things could get better and work out really well for us, they won’t. I’ve lived long enough to know this. Just because I could sit and write a long list stretching from here to an eternity of all the wonderful things that could happen to us to make our lives a whole lot better, even if it was nothing miraculous or grand, I know damn well that they won’t. And that’s the biggest reason I’ve been so damn down and despondent lately. When we’re young we tend to live in the moment, but when we get older we tend to live in both the present and the future, and when both seem so bleak it makes it harder to want to carry on. I have lost all hope and faith thanks to being both experienced and intuitive enough to know what’s in our cards and what’s not. And what’s not in our cards is for things to go our way. That just doesn’t happen to Tom and Jodi S. Never has, never will. Every single time we move our plans go to hell and we end up getting exactly what we didn’t move there for.

Not getting any pension money is no surprise at all to me as devastating as it still is. Well, they now claim he can have it at 66, but by then it’ll change to 77 and so on and so forth. Anyway, I told Tom years ago that I doubted we’d get anything. I saw it in my dreams and I felt it in my bones. It seems only my bad dreams and vibes are the ones coming true lately for Tom still has no job even though it’s almost mid-September and I haven’t won big at all despite the dreams I had. It’s nice to win size 5 panties that I somehow managed to squeeze my fat ass into and to be wedgie free just as Hanes promises, but I no longer win the hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars worth of cash and prizes I’m used to winning.

Right now all I want (or when he turns 55 next year) is a modest little house to rent in an adult community in Florida, but that is out of the question and totally not possible. Again, we could get there, but we couldn’t live/eat until we could get into a position to maybe achieve this. And what if we could? Notice there’s a serious price to pay with everything we do manage to achieve? One goal/dream achieved means a new problem(s) will arise. I traded in my smoking addiction for a weight problem. Then I lost weight and it was on to dental problems. And yes, I wanted to move to California and I wanted to be in a rural area and I got these things. But struggling in a dump and being forced to sit on our asses while other people’s dogs bark for hours at a time some days/nights, wasn’t part of the California dreamin’. As Alison said, you keep hoping things will get better and sometimes you think they will, but then they never do.

“Did you ever think of what it would do to me?” my sister asked in regard to my wanting to give up. Yes, I did. I know it would hurt my friends and family. But they would get over that hurt in time while we would never be able to get ahead in life and truly be happy. We’ve had our happy moments, don’t get me wrong, but the big picture can and will never change. Besides, sometimes we have to think of ourselves and put our own welfare ahead of others. So it’s not that I don’t realize my dying would hurt others. It’s just that 30 more years of poverty would hurt me a lot more than my dying could ever hurt my friends and family. It’s important that they try to remember that and that just because others may be in the same boat doesn’t mean I still don’t have the right to do what I feel is best for me personally. If one is suffering, does it really matter if just a few people or even the rest of the world is suffering right along with them?

Tammy also said she’s there if we need help. That’s awfully nice of her, but how could she help if she’s broke, too? And what could she do? Buy us a house? Rent one for us? Get Tom a job?

“Same old shit,” I had told my mom on the phone when we were talking about what was going on.

“Jodi, I know what it’s like to go through shit. Remember the shit I went through?” she asked me.

But I didn’t, assuming she was talking about financial shit, something I don’t think she’s ever had to deal with. Then I later realized she was referring to having to have a lung and a breast removed due to cancer. I don’t know what’s worse – being in financial ruin or being sick. I guess misery is misery and no matter what form that misery comes in – financial, emotional, physical – it all sucks either way.

In the end, I’m the one that’s going to decide whether or not to take my life. Whatever’s up there can decide most of what happens to me while I’m still alive, but not even it can decide whether or not I live or die. That one’s up to me and me only. I have not made an official decision yet and I won’t be doing so till closer to the end of the year for reasons I’m not going to get into just yet.

I sat down and I wrote a list of the things I’m good at (don’t ask for a list of things I’m not good at because that would take me forever to write, LOL) and those things are writing, languages, singing, dancing (that is – uhem – with or without my clothes on), acting and dieting/exercising. But in this day and age, none of it can help us really get ahead in any significant way so I may as well suck at these things, too. Even if I could keep a schedule like most people, these aren’t things one can just jump into no matter how good one may be at them. There are better writers, singers and dancers out there that can’t get anywhere with these things no matter how hard they try. I’m lucky to have gotten as far as I have with these things myself, even if it wasn’t very far.