Tagged: worry

Are You Worrying About Life?

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Well, stop it.

The truth is, there’s probably nothing you can do about your worries right now. Unless there is, in which case you are in a glorious amount of luck. If you have the power to enact change in the otherwise helpless, chaotic flume ride that is the human life-span, you can’t sit around shitting in the bed and wondering why it stinks. You have an obligation to take the moments you can by their hairy, chaffing balls.

Think of some principals (make sure they come from inside you and not a hypocritical institution like the church or the government), then live by them. They don’t have to be fancy. Mine are: be honest with yourself, respect your own boundaries and the boundaries of others, try to be kind, and operate on the theory that hard work is it’s own reward. I don’t always live by them (which is completely obvious to anybody reading this blog), but they’re a nice indicator of how far away I am from my moorings at any given point.

The temptation to worry about one’s life is pretty great. After all, while you’re worrying about something you can avoid doing about it. You’re like a rat on a wheel, feeling the accomplishment of movement without the results. Worrying when you know the solution, but fear the result helps you to avoid the consequences of your actions for just a little bit longer while rest of the waking world rushes forward without you. Worrying when you know nothing can be done gives you the illusion of control at the cost of your mental stability (and if you’re me, your stomach lining).

Rather than worry about something that has to be done, plan about it instead. That way, you’re moving towards your goal responsibly and without the stress of having to take major action all at once. Break your task into the tiniest pieces possible, put them on a checklist and look at it from time to time. Do as much or as little of the list items that you are comfortable with, it’s not a race. What matters is not how fast you move towards your goals, but that you’re moving at all.

If you find yourself worrying about something you can’t change, I recommend focusing on the things you can. I usually pick between cleaning, exercise and loafing. Loafing, done well, can be a really healing experience, especially when one is the type of person who craves action and finds it hard to sit still. Reading non-fiction books, taking a bath, or playing video games are all excellent loafing activities.

If you don’t know what to do, then do some research and let the problem ferment for a couple of hours or days. It’s very rare that something is a true emergency. In situations of real emergency it’s planning, not worrying, that will save your ass.


Look at the pretty beach. Don’t you feel better?

Grandma’s Surgery and My Writer’s Block

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So today (Wednesday) is the day my grandmother has her hip replacement surgery. Which means that I’ll have gotten up at 4:30 a.m. in order to meet her at the hospital in Pasadena at 5:30, where we will wait until 7 for her to go into surgery. After that I’ll drive back to L.A. and work a full day, and then I’ll come home to Hawthorne and completely collapse.

I’m writing this from Monday, where I’m already tired from worry and it’s getting in the way of my ability to write other things. Tomorrow, I usually go to my meeting after work, but there’s a massive chance that I’ll skip it in order to get more precious sleep. However, I’m already thinking that I should probably go to the meeting so my head’s on straight the next morning, when I’ll be exhausted and hanging out in a hospital with my grandma, her boyfriend, and possibly (but probably not) my mother, who I haven’t seen since May 19, 2007.

I already skipped my meeting on Sunday night because I wanted to stay on the couch and watch Warehouse 13 with Ben. Look, I know I’m a shinning example of the 12 step community, but they were bringing Agent Jinx back from the dead, and I couldn’t leave it like that, I just couldn’t! He’s fine by the way. My own fate is far less certain.

Probably the most fun thing about going to the hospital with my grandma is that we’ll be pretending that her boyfriend is her son so that he can be let into the pre-surgery room (whatever that’s called) and so that he can make medical decisions since he’s the only one of us that can be there all day with her. Us being me, him, grandma’s best friend, and my mother, who says she might not be able to come since she’s really sick from Chemo. Which is a totally valid reason not to go anywhere. It also makes me feel better since I’m not pushing my mom out by being there since she’s too sick to show up anyway. And it’s not like we really have to super-pretend that he’s her son. I don’t have to call him Uncle Grandma’s Boyfriend or anything, we just say it once and then everybody knows he’s her ‘son.’ Her extremely loving and devoted son (ick.) Whatever gets him in the hospital, I guess.

Anyway, I’m extremely worried about the surgery. I know that hip replacement is a relatively simple procedure, and that old people get it all the time, and it vastly improves their quality of life, that less than 1% of people die from the procedure, etcetera and so on. But I also know that grandma’s primary care doctor told her that she shouldn’t get the surgery until she put on weight, and that instead of gaining weight, she’s actually been loosing it since the doctor said that, and she’s going ahead with the surgery anyway. I also also know that the last time she had a major surgery, she had a stroke that left her legally blind and only functionally literate.

So, I’m worried, but this is a woman that had a procedure done on her leg a couple of years ago, and didn’t tell a soul, except the boyfriend who drove her to the hospital and then picked her back up again. It was relatively minor, but she was still in a cast and a wheelchair for 8 weeks. If it was up to her, we’d just kick her out in the hospital driveway without even stopping the car. Maybe we’d toss her walker out after her, and maybe we wouldn’t. Because that’s the kind of family she wishes we were: inconsiderate, uncaring bastards who would coldly leave their matriarch to die of hip replacement all alone in one of the best hospitals in the world. There, I said it.

Of course, I realize that her seeming apathy about the whole thing, and her annoyance that I would even show up for this is all a smoke screen, because this is exactly what I would do if something serious were happening to me. I mean, this surgery is all I’ve been able to think about for the last week, and instead of writing about it, I’ve written about nothing, and bushes. Because if we had a family crest it would be someone with a sword in their chest looking inconvenienced at having to croak on such short notice. Ignore it, pretend to be exasperated, but for God’s sake, never let the bastards see you squirm.

Neighborhood Drama Turns Into Navel Gazing Freak Out

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ben's car with side view mirror torn off
This morning when Ben went to get into his car to go to work, he found it missing a side view mirror. It was torn off the sidewalk side, so the culprit is definitely a person and not a bad driver. This is the second time someone has broken off his side view mirror. The only thing we can think of is that the kids in the neighborhood have some sort of crew, initiation to which is procured in trade for a side view mirror from the shittiest car on the block.

I get really mad when bad things happen to my boyfriend, and I feel totally powerless over whichever punks have targeted his poor, run down little car two times in a row. He works really hard, he drives a shitty car because he doesn’t make enough money to buy a new one and somebody decides that it’s okay to take pieces of his car just because they can. It costs a lot of money to replace a side view mirror, even a plain old plastic mirror you have to adjust with your hand like the one he has.

I don’t know why, but my immediate reaction to something like that is to wish I had committed more vandalism in my youth. That’s completely, one hundred percent the wrong answer, but that’s the first thing I think. I have an overinflated sense of fairness, especially when it comes to me and mine. I want to balance the scales on a universal level, but I cant.

There are days when I love my neighborhood, and then there are days like today. When I finally trudged home from work myself there was a random stranger, (I know a good number of the neighbors) standing in our courtyard yelling about this “bitch” who “had touched my stuff,” and how he felt that “she had no right” to touch it. The yelling only lasted for 5 minutes at the very most, but that’s kind of a scary experience. One second you’re saving the citizens of Skyrim from various nefarious foes, the next there’s a grown ass man in a hoodie yelling incomprehensible gibberish in the courtyard and looking fucking scary.

Days like this I just want to know what. the. fuck. I’m going to be 30 in three short years, and when I envision my childhood self, with all her dreams and plans looking at my life, all I can think of her saying is “Jesus, you live in a shithole.” And it’s true. There are roaches, the shower leaks, the sink was literally painted white before we moved in and now there’s always flakes of latex paint in my sponge after I do the dishes. The sidewalks are all cracked, the “front yard” is filled with dog poop that no one picks up and we randomly have electrical outages that affect the half the apartment for weeks at a time.

Is this normal? I don’t think this is normal.

To be fair, I’m just upset about Ben’s car, and annoyed at myself because I’m trying to figure out my plan for the next few years, and I’m worried about the future and money and status. Despite my tirade about the roaches and the electricity and the paint in the sink, this is the perfect place for us right now. We work so many hours that it’s almost ludicrous to have the amount of space we occupy anyway, why pay more for something in a nicer neighborhood that will just sit empty for longer because we’ll have to work even more in order to afford it? But I feel like I’m spinning my wheels. Ben and I work until we drop, and what does it get us? Really, the answer to this is: it gets us a lot. We have more fun at our jobs than anybody else I know, even though the amount of care we put into them can sometimes make them extremely frustrating as well as fun. We also have a fairly large apartment considering what we pay and how close we are to the beach. We’re paying off our student loans, living comfortably and creating long term savings.

When I look back at this time last year, and the year before, all the way back to when I was 18 living in a garage, working two menial jobs and going to high school in the hopes of getting a scholarship to college, I remember how amazing it is for me to even live indoors right now.

My computer finally died after nearly 5 years of dedicated service and I was able to pay cash for another machine without any worry at all. There was a time in my life when $1.53 meant the difference between being able to afford a grilled cheese sandwich at In and Out and not eating lunch at all. If 18 year old me got to follow 27 year old me around for a day, she would probably be appalled at how lazy I’ve gotten. I don’t do nearly the hours, or the strenuous labor that I did in school, and yet I feel constantly tired. 18 year old me could live for a year on what I currently make in a month, and yet I wonder if I have enough.

There’s something I’m missing, and I don’t know what it is. Currently my job is in a place where I don’t know if it’ll be here in three months time. It’s stressing me out and making me insecure about my abilities as a worker. I’m trying to save all the money I can before the (in my mind) inevitable lay off, but I can’t help but wonder at times like these, what’s the purpose of all this work? Is there a better way? I personally think that I’m the type of person who will work myself silly no matter the context, I’ll find a way to throw myself in. And the rewards I get from working hard are so much more than monetary. Just like when I was 18, trying to navigate college scholarships and financial aid packages and dorms and books all by myself I want to know “what is all this work for? Will it actually help me, or is it futile?” What I learned from that, and what I lean on now is that hard work is never wasted. Even if you don’t get what you want, or what you think you need, hard work is a perpetual motion machine.

There have been times when it seemed desperate, where if I had just gotten a glimpse of my life today I would have felt relieved. These are the times I have to think about now when I’m frustrated like I was then, wanting to know if it all works out. Based on experience, it does.

Manhattan Beach at Sunrise
I live 15 minutes away from this. How amazing is that?