GrumblePeg in BookThree: Flight Log 2016

Bah.
Last night, I couldn’t sleep. Not sure if it was body pain, or hunger, or general discomfort or what. But I didn’t actually nod off until after 4 am. Wife woke up at 5 am because of a MASSIVE storm outside. When I left the house to go to work… yeah, that was a pretty massive storm. Most of the street was littered with large tree branches that had been ripped off of the surrounding trees. You add that storm, the expectation of continued high winds and thunderstorms on top of temperatures expected to hit 105 via heat index… it already seems like a day where I should have simply stayed in bed.

Add that to it being a Thursday… a day that, lately, is truly a nothing day in most respects around here? Bah. Times like this I wish I could just call and say “Working from home today, call me if you need me.” But… since everyone else in this office is hourly… there is a “building wide” expectation. LoL… I say building wide like that means a lot of people here. It is the only “Office Complex” in the city but… it is 5 people, and that includes me!

And… my feelings about this place not withstanding… Wife is also already to the point of “OMG, this place suUucks. There’s nothing to do, no opportunities to grow in education. When can we leave?” I try to say, “I’m trying to get us back home but you’re always more than welcome to try, too.” Her response, which around here is valid, is that since she doesn’t even know what she wants to do, it doesn’t make sense for her stuff to take us out of here. My counter? “Lady, this job I’m doing is basically like solo practice as it is. Granted, I wouldn’t want to but if you decide what you want to do and we need to move so you can go back to school… I can always hang my own shingle.” But… of course… yeah. She still chimes in with the fact that she’s terrified. And reasonably, I know that as long as she is unwilling… there really isn’t anything I can do other than be supportive. As I have been. But… yeah. Shades of Omaha all over again. She doesn’t like where she’s wound up, so it is up to me to fix the situation because I’m the reason we’re here.

Of course, that marital frustration is compounded lately by some other notable factors. You see, I don’t exactly have friends in this town. Or family. Or anyone that I can talk to. Neither does Wife. So, it would be nice if we could talk to each other. But Wife is back in her weird “hyper focusing” mode where she “pays attention to anything besides me because I’m understanding and patient.” Last night is an excellent example, but it has been happening more and more the past several days.
We haven’t talked since Tuesday night and she comes home around 8-ish. I greet her and give her time to decompress after work (hoping that the 40 minute drive home from her store also helps with that). I ask her how her day went, knowing that she doesn’t answer that question. She ignores it completely to eat some cheese sticks. She sits down on the couch and I try telling her about my day. She ignores it completely to play a game on her cellphone. I try to talk to her about an interesting Geo-Political Article I read about the current state of Venezuela. She ignores it completely trying to find what Olympic coverage she wants to watch. I try to talk to her about the swimming as she was remarking on flip turns… an area I have some experience with going from a non-competitive swimmer to leading the JV team with a 1:09 100 Fly. Still… ignores me completely.
Here’s the issue: (1) Obviously, I don’t like being ignored… nobody does; (2) When Wife talks, it is usually in large monologue-style blocks of info dump, way too much info dump… last time we visited my parents Wife talked for a solid 2 hours to my mom; (3) in a town where neither of us have friends, it would make sense for one (or both) of us to want to connect… to want to gain a bit more “social interaction” via our marriage. And that last one is where I try to flip it… would I be this… unhappy about Wife’s behavior if I was in a town where I had more social interaction than just Wife? Am I genuinely upset as a husband who feels his wife deprioritizes him; or am I upset as a person who needs social interaction and is being starved for it?

......

In a completely different vein.... there was a Web Comic I read a few weeks… months?… back that I thought was amazing. It was about a girl, who wanted revenge on the people that killed her father, and she wore a magical amulet that spawned a man who protected her. It was Cowboy Era with magical elements and possibly some steam punk. And try as I might? I can’t remember the NAME of the Web Series and every permutation of word combinations I try to put into Google won’t bring up the comic. A young woman waits for her father’s return from archaeological adventures. She, and her magical protector, go out to avenge him. I really wanted to keep reading it BUT I CAN’T FIND IT AND IT IS MAKING ME A LITTLE CRAZY, lol. Especially because… Google Searches are not only not helping; but the more times I try to find it… the more times I get things that would… significantly upset my government bosses.

This is a good “reflection and share” moment, though. Yes, it is driving me absolutely mad because it was a good project that I wanted to keep up with. But there is another reason that the whole thing is driving me crazy. When I was growing up, I would have memories or I would see things on the television. I would ask my parents about them, and they would tell me “that didn’t happen” or that I didn’t really see what I thought I did. So I would either think I was crazy or creative. Then years later, I would rediscover whatever it was! So… I’m constantly trying to discern if my memories are memories or creative projects. Which goes farther, because if it is just a “creative project” than I could certainly write it down and express that creativity. But if it was a MEMORY than I’m simply plagiarizing.

CASE IN POINT: I distinctly remember watching a cartoon show when I was a kid. Probably preschool/kindergarten age. It took place both in Australia and a magical alien realm. The main character was a young human (can’t remember if it was a girl or boy) and the majority of the characters were Koalas. The Koalas may or may not have been stuffed animals in the real world; but their world was foreign, different, and strange. They had birthing centers where the young were looked after… so they didn’t really understand the concept of parents. This is all I remember from the series but I remember it so vividly and so exactly that I’m just certain it happened. My mom is fairly positive it didn’t happen. She has no memory of me watching a show like that or ever seeing a cartoon like that on our television.

Therefore, do I write a story using concepts from that “memory” safe in the assurance that it isn’t a memory of a TV show but something I may have imagined and committed to memory? Or, as I believe, would that simply be plagiarism because the property already exists in a copyrighted form?

BTW, fairly convinced this is the Koala Cartoon I was talking about!
Now if only I could find the webcomic!

A long political discussion with Cecilia happened… likely because we’re BOTH worried about the future of the world and because this job drives us crazy… and then I came back to Google. Sat down. Typed “Webcomic Cowboy Revenge” and instantly the first thing that popped up? Plume. Which, yes, WAS the webcomic I was looking for! lol. Life. Eh?

Then the afternoon comes in with that great one-two punch of “You’re incompetent”, “Why is no one helping you?”
(1) ANOTHER order that I wrote my first week here… so, one I most definitely asked my boss to look over… was wrong. ANOTHER ONE. So I had to file a “yeah, I fucked up” order… now waiting to see if the judge accepts it or not.
(2) One of our Revolving Door Frequent Flier criminals has been in jail since he was arrested. I filed a Probation revocation. Now, the probation office is asking why I ignored their request for an arrest warrant. Well… honestly, I thought since he was already arrested, we wouldn’t need to do it again… instead we could serve him the papers required while he was in jail. Genuinely asking: Did I miss something because I wouldn’t know if I did.
(3) Same case, revolving door frequent flier criminal… since he re-offended after only 5 days free… the Probation Office requested he not get a bond. It’s right there on their order. It is something I certainly would have said if I was able to be present at the bond hearing. But… as all bond hearings in this county occur without a Defense Attorney or a Prosecutor… the magistrate simply assigned a bond based on what she wanted to do. So, I’m like.... yeah, this system doesn’t make any sense to me… doing bonds without attorney input seems fucking crazy… but what am I to do?

So while I’m dealing with that… Boss calls to ask us questions about Collections. Seriously, this woman doesn’t know what the fuck is going on in a department that she is supposed to be the head of. She’s asking questions Cecilia and I have dealt with, moved on, and forgotten about… because they are months old. She’s asking us to explain decisions we’ve made that are obvious to people who do this job… which is clearly why Boss doesn’t understand anything ABOUT those decisions. And thus, as bad as the isolation is, we experience the obvious pain of this job… a boss unwilling to teach, apparently unable to teach, who still prefers to think she can “effectively manage” things from her private office in a different city. Head:Desk. If this were a situation where she was ABLE to help, I’d do whatever possible… I really would. But everything I wrote in the beginning of my career; everything I asked her to look over… has now come back with errors. She is incompetent and infuriating. And it just puts me into SUCH a bad place because… for example this probation thing… I have no one else to go to in regards to asking for help! So I have to drive out to her, ask her to take me through this thing (desperately hoping she even CAN) and hope that whatever she says isn’t so blatantly wrong as to fuck everything up. Her shittiness makes me look incompetent… which I am… but I need to be getting better. Not discovering months after the fact that things I thought I did right are still completely wrong.

So… that is what this town is, apparently.
Isolation: Depression
Emptiness: Boredom
Work BS: Rage

Still just… so mad. Boss bothers us about something she knows nothing about because she’s actively made the decision to remove herself. But when I genuinely try to get her help… or when she asks me to do something that I’m telling her I’ve never done before… she shows either no interest in helping me do it right; or actively gives me the wrong advise forcing me to do it over again later. I.... I may be worked up over this for a while.