it's hard to believe everything that you hear

Should I apply to art school?

It's either that or get another job, and I'm pretty much never going to be as poor as I am this year again, so I'd get a hell of a lot of government aid. I still hate academia with a fiery blazing passion, but isn't the point of art school to be less dryly academic? There are still the pretentious fuckheads who look down their noses because they are There With A Noble Cause, but my mother will not shut up about my failure to acquire a degree.

And my ego is bruised.

I BOUGHT A COLORING BOOK. AND CRAYONS.

Oh yeah baby. I am coloring princesses and stuff and not working on my novel or my exchange piece AT ALL.

Frivoling SO HARD.

After four days of sleep deprivation, panic, anxiety attacks, a viral stomach bug (which incidentally is slowly felling everyone at my workplace) and one near miss with a migraine later, the apartment is going forward.

I met with my roomies this morning, and we discussed everyone's concerns and respective situations, got paperwork sorted and submitted, and once my Dad saw the place he agreed to cosign. My mother is beyond angry, as she has declared the location Unsuitable, but she will come around. Dad was the main obstacle, and he sees nothing wrong with the place. I could possibly start moving in as early as the 17th.

As for the room, it's not as bad as I thought it was. We measured the rooms, and my dark windowless hole is 11'x11'. I have acknowledged that I am spoiled and moved on. It's not like it's a closet, after all, and I can fit all my essentials in there. In exchange for my lack of window, I will be paying $150 a month to live there. With utilities split four ways, I'll be paying maybe $200 a month, $220 in winter, total, to live there.

It's worth it. Once I've slept, I may even be excited.

I have seen the apartment. I am not impressed.

I would be living in a room in the basement with no windows, that's about a third of the size of what I'm living in now, sharing a miniscule bathroom with someone I've never particularly liked. For at least a year. And I'll be ridiculously poor. As in, may occasionally have to make the choice between gas and food.

I won't be living with my sister.

But still. Is it perhaps a bad thing that to talk myself into it, I'm having to tell myself that it's only for a year? I love my friends dearly, but I don't want to live in a small dark box. 

There are uncrossable lines. There are lines that you do not cross. Ever.

Especially when you are with your mother when she learns her good friend's son, the boy whose graduation she attended last month, has been killed in an accident.

I knew she was a soulless monster, but I didn't know she was capable of being this awful. It is taking incredible restraint for me not to say "I told you so," or comment in any other way, because that would be insensitive to my mother. It is vastly difficult for me to be a good person right now.

No punishment they concoct will be enough, and I won't become involved. But now they know what she's like, and I cannot be pleased by my vindication.

I need to drop my word count I need to drop my word count I need to drop my word count.

WHAT IF I HAVE TO GIVE UP MY PIRATES???

(Should I?)

Soooooooo.

Citibank's hiring for glorified collections agents. Citibank pays rather a lot more than I make at Borders. But it's collections.

I could move out. And not have to worry about my finances. Is that worth hassling other people about theirs? I don't know. Advise. Please.

I think I might've been kicked out.

What do I do?

It's a miracle.

I wasn't actually expecting to get back in the groove of things this early. I honestly thought I'd still be fighting to get back into this book tomorrow night, but I'm in it and legitimately interested and it is all I can do not to dance around singing in between sentences.

The work is its own reward. Hot damn.

Among other things, my therapist thinks I might not be bipolar.

She did not elaborate.

EGO BOOST.

SO MUCH BALM TO EGO.

:) :) :) :) :) :)

Oh bugger, I am a hypocrite.


...have decided to repost things to FF. Probably in the next few days.

Once again, I am making this all inordinately difficult.

One would think that somewhere in the last ten years that I've been practicing this writing business, at some point I would have figured out what I'm doing. Not so. It never actually gets any easier. But. In times like this...

Occam's razor, how I love thee.

Estee.

Through no fault or action of my own, my coworkers (and now friends and family members) have renamed me Estee. It's not a name I would pick for myself, but it has stuck on something fierce, and doesn't seem to be going away. Don't get me wrong, it's preferable to the wretched one my parents gave me, but really?

It's not the name I've chosen for myself. That one, it seems, is not going to catch on like Estee has. They are both organic evolutions from part of my initials, so I could legitimately answer to either one without changing my actual name, but I had Plans, damnit. I don't know how to feel about this. It has a History, now, my new name. I've officially interacted with thousands of people with this name. When our regulars enter the store, they talk to Estee. It's young and hip and modern and classic at the same time, and I don't know about it.

I submit it to You, the attendant community who have interacted with the odd being occasionally known as Heist. Does it fit? Does it work? Can you reconcile the name to the manic wramblings of a part-time revisionist bookseller? It seems frivolous to fret so much about a name, but I overthink a lot, and I know all too well how much an identity can be wrapped up in the preconceived impressions of a name.

Heist = Estee? Maybe?

Updates on the housing situation: I will not, decidedly not, be purchasing the house.

There are a number of structural issues which need significant repairs, and there are other things which honestly can't be fixed. You can see daylight between the house and the foundation. All but two windows need to be replaced, and I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect that there are some points where the house has settled unevenly and someone just threw some drywall over the cracks. The stairs leading to the upstairs are steep, narrow and uneven, and the rooms are tiny. Tiny tiny. And lacking closets, electrical outlets and lighting.

No amount of love and time and effort are going to make this particular house a good investment. It has a large kitchen, I grant it, but the cabinets need work, and all the ceilings hover uncomfortably low.

It's not going to happen. I'll keep looking around, but I'm starting to figure out that I'm not going to able to afford the kind of place that I want. Even a fixer-upper that could become the kind of place that I want is well outside my price range. It seems I will have to investigate apartments after all. Damn.


And as a side note, I am giving Aetna's vision plan a big fat finger at the moment. I'm paying $120 a year when I can't get an eye exam, and I get maybe 10% off contact lenses. Screw this bullshit, I'm going to Walmart.

Oh sweet jesus on a pogo stick, I'm having a creative breakthrough. This chapter edit's gone from wretched to sexy. So so sexy.

It looks like I'm keeping maybe twenty percent of the chapter as it was, exact wording and all. Half of it, I'm moving around and rearranging, so that I keep the content in spirit, if not in exact execution and configuration. The last third, I don't know where this is coming from, but this.... Oh this works. This, at the very least, I will be able to keep, and it is bittersweetly romantic to the extreme.

At times, I hate this writing thing. Right now, I love it unequivocally.

Holy crap, I really need to get on this weight loss bandwagon again.

I can sell my reproductive potential at 5K a pop, as long as I'm healthy, and damnit but the women in my family are a fertile bunch.

That's right. I'm going to sell some babycells. It's not like I'm going to use them, and frankly I am fascinated by the idea of little Heistlings running around, and I don't have to have any responsibility or contact with them or host the little parasites for ten months. It's the perfect arrangement.

I could pay off my student loans in three years. Maybe two. And improve the gene pool. How cool is that?

An update on the potential house:

I have seen the outside of it, and I am not particularly impressed. This is not to say the house doesn't have good bones, it's just that the exterior needs some love. A whole lotta love. I'm talking paint and shutters (how does it not have shutters already?) and porch railings and landscaping and a safe pathway to the door and possibly to have a hole knocked into the back of it for another door and a deck. And that godawful chainlink fence needs to come down. Oh yeah, and a garage would be nice too.

A giant perk: the lot that neglected little house is sitting on is huge. There is room for a garage, and for better fencing and a hell of a lot of landscaping. And for whatever reason, it seems to have about a block of side-street that belongs exclusively to the house. It ends at a treeline, but it looks like they had made plans for another several blocks of houses before they realized that they'd run out of developable land. Another perk: vast swathes of exclusive parking.

I'm scheduling an appointment for Thursday afternoon to actually visit the interior of the house to get an idea of what's to happen with it. Wood floors aren't worth a damn if the foundation's crumbling and moldy and the plumbing leaks. I'll be taking potential roomies with me, and we shall investigate. I'm still interested for the moment, but I recognize that only so much can be done for a place before it's wiser not to get involved. So I suppose we shall see.

I'm going to go scope out a house. As in, a house I could potentially buy and move into.

The price is right, the location looks good, and at first glance it looks to be in decent shape. It's probably too good to be true, but all the same it just might turn out to be more than adequate. The recession has made the area a veritable buyer's market, so I'm taking one of my potential roomies along for the ride.

I've got my fingers crossed. If there's nothing wrong with it... I could have my own place by the end of the summer.