changes

There are a few, so I'm feeling listy.

1. Pslightly Psycho Kevin is moving out in May, to be replaced by the Absent Landlord and his family, inclusive of a wife, one small (and adorable) toddler, and one or two foster kids. This should be interesting. Good, I think, because things like broken basement doors and wonky electrical wiring will be fixed more quickly. Bad, potentially, because the living room is located directly beneath my bedroom, and I can imagine evenings complete with loud TVs and screaming children. Also I have to come up with a new acronym; AL won't fit anymore. I'm considering the Live-In Landlord (Yikes!), or LILY for short.

2. I've finally gotten mad enough at my insurance company to call and bawl them out tomorrow. I sat down with a pen and piece of scrap paper today and calculated that my medical bills from last December, which, thanks to my own suffocating poverty (until now) and the overwhelming nonsympathy of multiple hospital billing departments, have been threatening my credit (but not actually damaging it -- I do work for a lawyer), have skyrocketed about four hundred dollars beyond my deductible. Unforfuckinggiveable. I looked over my various hospital/doctor's bills and found very little insurance coverage on most of them. This could lead to a tirade about the state of American health plans, but won't; I'm just going to call a few places tomorrow to straighten out some payment plans and then give the insurance company a stern talking-to. (These are things I have been dealing with all year, which have definitely contributed to poor sleep, tight muscles, depression, and headache. But I haven't talked about them until a light at the end of the tunnel appeared. What was the point?)

3. Consternation and much mental wrestling with thoughts of the future have still produced nothing definitive. I have a few embryonic ideas, which are far better than the nothing I'd come up with so far (I've spent the last three years in a limbo of What-the-Bleep-Do-I-Do-Now?, working six different jobs and sorting through my changing passions and constant gifts), but again, no "go here, do this"; just a "wait here, do this," so I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, with a twist: buckle my bootie down and start taking my writing seriously. I did pretty well for awhile during Lent with the getting up at five a.m. thing, but that really petered out, and it's time to get back on the horse. There are a lot of things to write about -- some fiction, the church, Christianity, the Bible, etc. -- a lot of things I love, and a lot of raw blog material waiting to be harvested and threshed. Now I need to set down some concrete goals, but I've been sitting on this talent for way too long, and it's collecting no interest.

4. I have a new goal of regular church attendance. Nothing beyond that for the time being; I just want to go every Sunday on a regular basis through the end of the summer, before I look at ways to get more involved. Church is one of my bigger problems. I'm afraid of it, even when I enjoy it and want to go. I'm always sure that at some point it's going to turn out to be terrible, that the people will ostracize me, that I won't fit in, that it will be high school all over again, but in a worse way, because these are supposed to be my spiritual family. When it comes to other Christians, I've tended to feel like the little latchkey kid looking in the candy shop window at everybody else eating jelly beans and having fun. Maybe I'll meet another urchin like me, another Charlie Bucket or Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn or Little Arliss or Caddie Woodlawn or whatever, and we'll watch for awhile and rub our grubby noses against the glass and stick our tongues out and laugh about it and then go running off looking for frogs in the creek, but my "place" has always been on the margins. Sure, wah, get over it; so I've been trying to attend, and wanting to get into the swing, but I'm still afraid it's going to collapse on me and I'll be worse off, more hurt and more disillusioned than I was before. So I'm taking it slow. Baby steps. Regular attendance first. Not counting on finding friends. Then praying a lot and at the end of the summer seeing if maybe there's something more there I could be doing, and particularly some small group or Bible study I could join.

5. Grrr, taxes. (And where did I put the W-2? Where? I remember when it was handed to me. Now where did I put it? And why do I do this? Why?) But yay, later filing date. (Procrastination, hm, that's not a change at all. BUT, I'm doing my taxes all on my own this year, with no help, so that's a change.)

6. More hot baths. Fewer sore muscles. Candles. Book. Mm.

7. Spring.