Not Thrilled in BookThree: Flight Log 2016

Precursor: For reasons that will be mentioned below, I arrived to work considerably later than usual. It was… actually good for me. Feeling a sense of urgency, even if fabricated, is good for my motivation. Of course, arriving to realize that (much like Philip J. Fry in The Why of Fry) ” It’s just that, the kind of importance I have … it doesn’t matter if I [quietly] don’t do it.” But I sat down, hit my work and sailed for a solid 90 minutes taking care of things. Before realizing that… hey… none of what I did actually has any impact on any person in any way. As an attorney… as a county attorney… that seems… wrong. ANYWAY… Story Time!

Yesterday was another nothing day as the weekends around here so often are… especially during the winter. People hibernate or temporarily relocate. Most of the work out here is crop based agricultural or a few scant manufacturing places… so the community simply steps everything way back during the winter. So… I shoveled a bit (severely hurting my back), I did three loads of laundry, I played video games, and I changed the sheets on the bed. A lackluster day to be sure. Until Wife came home from work. She was exuding anger and frustration. I asked her how work went and she said fine. Then stated how she was surprised to come home and see so little of the walks and drive shoveled. Well, yeah. It was sub-zero temperatures and I’m already experiencing enhanced pain due to the cold… the fact that my life has become so sedentary in this job isn’t helping either. So… my back kicked my ass in, as expressed previously, “mind altering pain.” But… anger fuels Wife. It acts as a distraction from hating her life and herself. So, she held onto that anger and walked into the kitchen. There were only two dishes out (as I had done the dishes, run the dishwasher, emptied the dishwasher, and did more dishes the day before). She looked over towards the microwave where there were only 4 pieces of bread left. “Really?!” She shouted. I gave her a puzzled look, not understanding her indignation. She held up the bread and raised her eyebrows in a manner that clearly stated “Explain this.” I cocked my head a bit, not entirely certain what the issue was and explained, “I had an egg sandwich today. And we both had a turkey sandwich last night during Doctor Who.” This seemed to be enough explanation for her as she returned the bread to its proper location. Whereupon I said, “Besides… I thought you said you were going to get bread today at work.” I should know better by now. If she was looking to stay angry, by speaking I gave her a target for that anger. She started shouting about how she doesn’t want to waste her lunch break every day buying things and how sometimes the grocery list is so long that if she were to buy it all on her lunch break she wouldn’t have time to eat and there’s no way in hell that she’ll do the shopping after work because by then she just wants to come home but she can’t even just come home because there is a 45-50 minute drive just to get back home! I let her burn her rage out through the shouting and when she was finished, I held my hands up defensively and said… “Wife, that was an awful lot of anger there. What set you off initially? What underlying thing needs dealt with?” So she calmed down a bit… before going off on me about how much shoveling was left to do and how she would have to do it now. I asked if she was so angry about that because she thought that I had done nothing all weekend and she would not respond. She continued to argue about the shoveling. So, I told her that (1) my back and legs were killing me all day from the small amount of -18 F shoveling I’d already done; (2) Our shovel doesn’t curve so I’d recommend investing in an actual snow shovel; (3) or if she was so upset that I didn’t do more outside, we could get a small snow blower as I had previously suggested. This… caused her to go on a tirade about the snow blower. How it is insane to suggest a snow blower because we don’t know how long we’ll be in this house, and we’re more than likely going to live in an apartment before the end of the year because we have to get out of Tiny Town and there’s nowhere to store a snowblower since we’ll be in an apartment in Des Moines. And the more she kept going on about that; the more sour my heart became. Because honestly… every time I’m looking for work (these last three years)… it is difficult for me. Rejection after rejection; no calls being returned; months where no opportunities even present themselves… it is difficult and emotionally taxing. Made worse so by our current predicament where we can’t even distract ourselves with a Beercade or Alamo for an evening. And, like a fool, I told my wife. I told her that when she discusses our future, which we don’t even know when we’ll be moving yet, the fact that she talks about me not working like it is a forgone conclusion hurts me. Then she went super-saiyan on the crazy. She raised her voice and pitch to the point where she was literally shrieking the following words: “It isn’t you that I don’t have faith in, it is the economy. The economy sucks so you can’t find work and that isn’t about you!!”

After going full on.... wake the neighbors.... with her pitch and volume.... we just kind of let the house be quiet for about an hour. Because that was scary and unnecessary. After about an hour, I heard her rinsing some items and told her that most of the recycling had already been rinsed. She snapped back that she knows the cheese bags of hers hadn’t been rinsed because she just put them on the counter. Okay. So another hour goes by. She is placing stuff on the bed and I need to be to work early the next day, so I shut off everything I was doing… making sure not to leave any mess behind me… and head to bed. Even that elicited a comment from Wife: “So, I’ve been tidying up for thirty minutes and you’re in bed first.” Just breath. Just breath through it. Try to dig at the real issue… which is likely… (only a guess) Wife is starting to resent me because the last few years, she has hated her life and blames it on the location and as I am responsible for the location it manifests thusly. So I decided to ask an iffy question. Remembering how Wife had been most insistent on getting us back to Iowa… I asked if she hated things more in Omaha or in Tiny Town. She stated emphatically that she was far more upset with Tiny Town than she had ever been in Omaha. This exchange (and likely the proximity of the New Year) reminded me of Day 1 Month 1 Year 2016 and the five dragons I wanted to slay in 2016. I’m thinking about the things I want to accomplish in 2017 and… they all look so very similar. (1) Job? Well, I did get us back into Iowa. But in 2017, I need to keep looking for work and hope for another job because we’ve realized that a small community is NO place for us. (2) Health/Wellness? Whether discussing mental or physical health, this place is a wasteland for both of them. Admittedly, there is considerably more Wife and I could be doing to better improve our health… but I see it entirely as something that (from rational analysis) neither of us are emotionally ready for. We’re just… we feel so stuck, so isolated, so down… that more intentional choices and more active lifestyles are difficult for us to even comprehend. (3) YAY! One that actually happened! I have no more debt and by the end of the year, our account will be over 100k! Of course, Wife is still convinced that we are on the verge of bankruptcy… because she views everything from the lens of “Husband Not Working.” (4) Community Engagement. This one is totally on me. Because I don’t want to engage with this community. Whenever I leave my door already I run into people who I’ve punished or people I’ve let down. In a town of 1500 people; an average caseload of 80 cases a month.... I’m always The Lawyer. Worse still… I’m the Big City Lawyer, kid coming from Des Moines and Omaha. Even worse… the community is notorious for being anti-outsider as it is. So, yeah. I decided not to complete this one here. (5) Wife. What all of that was getting to was this. Our marriage was… not great… while in Omaha. Marked with excessive celibacy and lack of intimacy; frequent neglect from my wife… so I figured getting her back to Iowa as she so desperately requested would help me figure out if the marriage was worth fighting for. But… as she said… she was happier in Omaha than this place… so in a sense… I honestly really have been married to a different woman than I dated. Because our entire married life has been either in Omaha or Tiny Town. Two places that Wife genuinely deeply despises. So I guess this goes back on the list. (1) Moving to Des Moines; (2) Desperately, hopelessly, gravely looking for work; (3) Trying to discover if our marriage has any shot, any shot at all, of being a functional one.

I drifted in and out of sleep on that notion. But as I fell asleep, I felt colder and colder. Until Wife woke me up to tell me that the Thermostat said our house temperature was 50 F. It was set at 68. Confused, we checked things. We found a way to “fix” the heater so that it would kick on, we’d go back to bed, and as soon as we were back in bed… it cut out again. SO I loaded us down with blankets and we decided to call the Landlord in the morning. But that cold and my body? I didn’t exactly sleep great. So, I called into work to tell them I’d be late since I needed to get my furnace fixed. Stayed in bed until 9 when the furnace people came. Apparently, the furnace filter hadn’t been changed since before reconstruction began… 3 years ago. GREAT job landlording… douche. A house with no Air Conditioning in the summer and you didn’t change the furnace filter at any point… and we still don’t have a key to our back door or the security code for our garage. Reminding me that… yup. Since we first moved to this place… it has treated us poorly. Landlord issues; house issues; job issues; community issues. This place… fucking… sucks. I pray that Ran will be able to train me a bit; be understanding that we have to leave here; and help me get work down in Des Moines. Because seriously… this shit is crazy.