Thirteen things that sucked this year:
13: I left my job at Spicy Horse. After six years paid plus a year before that volunteer, I closed that chapter. It was a fantastic job in many ways – I made tons of friends, developed some intense skills, etc – but it also sucked horribly. I have a whole big rant about that, but let me just say that it was a mixed bag leaving, but not having the steady pay was a problem. It led to…
12: I lost my house. By mid-August, it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to maintain rent and bills and groceries and all that other stuff, despite never quite technically being “without work”.
11: I had quite the string of bad dates, a couple of which actually ended in hurt feelings and chipped hearts. There was the movie guy (talk about getting your lines crossed), and the not-really-into-me guy, and then there were the reeeeeally bad connections, like the Dogmatic Atheist… and the Weasel even tried to email me this year. I did not respond.
10: I got really, really sick a couple of times. Yeah, I know that it’s my body/energy working things out, but seriously wondering if I should be begging for death just for a relief from the pain is pretty high up on the “suck” factor.
9: I had to write some people off. Sometimes, it just happens. We grow apart, or we find out that our commonalities are not enough to balance out our differences. For me, it was mostly about recognizing who was trying to lift me up and who was hanging around like dead weight – and who was trying to use me as an excuse to not get their own stuff taken care of. Definitely not.
8: Folks died. Some were closer than others, and even though I don’t get all weepy and weird about it, I pay attention. It hurts most when it’s an unnatural death, and there were a lot of those this year.
7: My Queen Anne’s Lace shawl that I made for myself with alpaca-silk yarn did not make it through the moves and is still awaiting frogging to try again. Maybe. If I have the heart for it.
6: People all around the world got really, really crazy, shooting up schools and movie theatres and each other. That really sucked. That’s kinda like in the “Folks died” category, but in this case, I’m more focused on the fact that people lost their marbles than on the loss of life. They’re two separate suckiosities to me.
5: My teens became… well… teens. The gulf that occurs between parents and teens at “that age” hit all at once and is exacerbated by circumstances (like the not living together thing).
4: Which leads us to, oh yeah, and my kids aren’t living with me right now. This is not altogether a bad thing – it’s important and healthy, I think – but it still sucks. Like the vacuum of space.
3: My tattoo apprenticeship is on hold until my teacher can get settled into a steady and clean workshop (which might not matter anyway because the commute is going to kill me on gas).
2: I haven’t made a single pro sale this year on stories submitted – counting equally that I haven’t submitted that many – and other book sales are less than stellar, which has everything to do with a lack of active marketing on my part. That’s a whole story in and of itself.
1: I came face-to-face with the reality of the consequences of my inner idealism, mainly in that part that trusts people to a fault. More than half of the broken heart I’ve sported in the past has been for me taking people at their word, and now I have to go through the trouble of that whole name-change thing again. There’d better be lots and lots of bacon and cookies in it for me if I have to do this again.
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