I. Am. Done.

Nothing I do seems to matter. I'm churning water in circles here. There's no point to this bullshit. Being an adjunct at my age is ridiculous. Insulting. No one gives a shit. I am given the worst schedules. I am given classes that I am not equipped to teach because you need to be a fucking counselor and psychotherapist before you need to be able to teach. I did not get two degrees so I could yell at a bunch of 18-year-olds who are still acting like it's 5th period in 8th grade and who refuse to learn the difference between an adverb and a preposition.

I am so done wasting my time with people who don't appreciate me, the work I do, or the work I HAVE to do. I am done with teaching. As long as I'm chained to this hole of a town I have to find something else to do. Question is what? THERE ARE NO FREAKING JOBS HERE.

I can't imagine what it is I'm supposed to do here. I am bored. I am pissed off. I am lonely. I don't have the few things that make me happy. I can't get a good job that will either a. pay me well and help me put something away for retirement or b. give me a rosy feeling that my work is meaningful and I am appreciated.

I am tired of hearing my fat-ass upstairs neighbors stomping on the ceiling that sounds like it's going to cave in at any moment. I'm sick of freezing cold air that hangs about in my apartment all winter. I am done with country music in the grocery store FOREVER. I am done with the elitist hippies who wear flax pants and snub you on the street. Tired of the HILLS that have EYES and make me feel like I'm living in some kind of horror movie about a cult that owns the entire town and because you live in the valley YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE. I'm done feeling trapped. I'm done with having $17 in the bank because some places apparently think it's fine not to pay their adjuncts until 3 weeks after the semester has started. I'm done getting shat upon for summer work. I'm done working at the Chorch out of desperation.

I am not happy. I am depressed. I am angry. I want to leave, but I don't know where to go or what to do.

I am also sitting here alone in my living room because everyone else apparently had a bad day too and can't possibly listen to what I have to say about how unhappy my life is right now.

I ate brownies for dinner because I can't even be bothered.

I just want to crawl in a hole and I am so afraid of winter because if I feel this shitty now I can't imagine what it's going to be like in 3 months when it's cold, grey, bleak and everything is covered in ice.

Really, what is the point?

So now I don't have a summer job because the course I was to teach has been canceled. I found this out after showing up for work this morning, teaching duds & makeup applied, syllabus in hand. The dean of instruction was mortified (it wasn't his fault, it was another program's policy that resulted in this debacle) and is at least offering me half pay of what I would have earned. This makes life a little easier but I still need a summer job and oh did I mention it's already June 15th?

I'm floored. I must have a curse or some kind of horrible karma from another lifetime or two. Why does this shit happen to me on such a regular basis? It seems I have to weather more shit storm damage than the average bear. One of these days I'm just going to say the hell with it and file for Section 8. Live off of disability the rest of my life.

Seriously. WHAT THE FUCKING HELL?

Will it ever end?

I have to pay over $700 to get my fucking car fixed. That's it. I have had it. If I get this full time job in the fall the first thing I'm doing is getting a newer used car. For all the money I've/we've put into this frakking thing, I could have been driving around a lovely 06 or 07 with a sunroof and a smoother ride. My next car will be a stick shift, as well. Oh I miss handling a stick shift. Do with that comment what you will.

I am also greatly annoyed that the chest cold has moved into my nose and now I am sneezing and wheezing. I am in no mood to deal with anyone's crap. I have writing to do that hasn't gotten done because of this fucking cold, as well as house work in preparation for people coming into town next week.

For Mom's final interment. And of course there's money to shell out for that. I just want the whole dreadful week to be over and to be sitting in my bro's backyard with a beer, listening to ELP and listening to him talk about how the Liberals have fucked up the country. Sometimes there's comfort in the familiar.

Today I learned what FML stands for: Fuck My Life.

Oh how appropriate... how perfectly apropos.

Although today didn't suck as hard as yesterday did. I think actually yesterday has been the worst day yet since Mom died, as far as how I was feeling and what I was thinking. Jeezus I hope there aren't any more of those days because I honestly don't think I can survive another one or two of those.

Some cheese with that whine?

Everything pretty well sucks right now. The CV I've been sending out to a bunch of places had a typo on page one that I just caught today. The Sox are losing miserably and now Josh Beckett is suspended (and rightly so). My apartment is still damp and cold. I am exhausted in every sense of the word. I just realized my "final exam" time for one of my teaching gigs conflicts with a class period at the other one, and now the dean's office is giving me grief. I don't even GIVE a final exam. It's freaking screenwriting!

And just now someone decided to save some electricity by turning out the hallway light at work. Great. I love walking to class in the dark.

Oh, and this just in: one of my employers FUCKED UP and I now owe the federal government substantial taxes for last year.

Fucking great. This is just what I needed to hear on a completely shit day with nothing but shit news.

Is there any point to all of this? Cause I'm really not seeing it at all.

Retreat Day 1

So far what I've done today on retreat:

- spent an hour with Sprint customer service and tech support because my phone's Roaming is not working if I place a call off the sprint network.
- emailing back and forth with the social worker at Mom's nursing home because I can't call anyone over there (Verizon) and I had a bunch of business to take care of for Mom.
- diddling with the settings on the thermostat because it was ballz cold in this room a little while ago.

I think I've gotten most of the immediate needs taken care of. Now it's 1:00 and I haven't written a thing and I need sustenance.

At least I had the presence of mind this morning to get a large hazelnut coffee to go before driving out here to the middle of nowhere.

I hope to gawd the rest of the week shapes up or this will be biggest waste of $25 ever.

Jane, get me off this crazy thing!

It does feel like I'm on a treadmill, or a super space-treadmill from the Jetson's.

I was feeling optimistic about Mom's situation after the care plan meeting, then before I knew it I was on the phone complaining to the Director of Nursing that Mom was refused her pain med (after our so-called discussion about getting her pain under control). And yesterday no one came to do massage for Mom, which is the one therapy that does seem to help with the pain (again, after the meeting in which we discussed the importance of pain management and using massage as a way to get there). Yesterday she was still in bed at 1:30 in the afternoon because she was in so much pain. She's also stoned from the vicadin (which is really 500 mgs of tylenol and a vicadin 5 mg punch) but it's not really kicking the pain. I demanded a palliative care consult at the meeting, and that doctor came in yesterday and really had nothing different to offer. Because Mom is a dialysis and Lupus patient, she can't get ibuprohpen, which is processed through the kidneys. So all they can do is throw viacadin at her. Meantime she's not walking, and the more she lays or sits around, the worse she'll be. This is a fucking nightmare.

I don't see how she can go back to assisted living in less than a week. I don't see how it will be possible if she's in so much UNMANAGED pain that she can't get out of bed. I am looking into what is supposed to be a better nursing home in town. I'm scared. I'm scared that if they can't/won't take her, there will no place for her to go. I have a couple resource people on my list to call today and see if there is something else that can be done.

I am trying my best to take care of myself and keep something of a center in the midst of what I call my walking nightmare. It's hard to maintain that when I talk to her on the phone every night and every night it's the same thing: she's crying, she's in pain, she's depressed and frustrated and angry that she's in this position. She needs psychological services too, for the depression, which of course the nursing home doesn't provide. I get in to see her every day but that's not enough to keep her spirits up and motivated.

I'm just appalled at the downward turn she's taken since entering the nursing home. I am outraged. But I feel powerless and I don't know what to do. I don't know if I'm just lashing out in anger because she's my Mom, or if I really need to raise a stink about her condition. I am so frustrated and angry, and hurt, and my heart aches for what she's going through.

And yet somehow I have to give a damn about the chorch job (I don't - I reduced my hours for these last 2 weeks to half days because I have too many phone calls and things to do to manage Mom's situation). Yesterday my students saw my dark side. Two of them started whining about the due date for their final portfolios - a due date that has been in place on the syllabus from the beginning of the semester - and I nearly took their heads off. I was so fucking pissed. I wanted to say to them, "When you're Mom is dying in a nursing home and you're the only one on duty to help her 24-7, then you can complain to me about how hard life is, you fucking little brat." Needless to say, I didn't. I did say that I didn't want to hear any whining about a deadline that's been in place from the beginning, and they have to deal with it because it's college life and as writers they need how to uphold deadlines. But I wasn't nice about it. They knew I was pissed.

I have a counseling appointment this morning, which I need to help hold my sanity together at this point. I'm on the edge all the time, and I feel like I am living in a separate reality than the rest of the world.

Well speaking of whining, I think I've done enough for now.

Just to clarify...

My life pretty much sucks right now.

Arthur C. Clark Dies

One of my favorite SF writers. A sad day.


Writer Arthur C. Clarke Dies at 90

By RAVI NESSMAN – 47 minutes ago

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90.

Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died at 1:30 a.m. after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.

Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey," Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer.

He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.

He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s.

Clarke's non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the greatest fulfillment.

"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said recently. "I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer."

From 1950, he began a prolific output of both fiction and non-fiction, sometimes publishing three books in a year. He published his best-selling "3001: The Final Odyssey" when he was 79.

Some of his best-known books are "Childhood's End," 1953; "The City and The Stars," 1956, "The Nine Billion Names of God," 1967; "Rendezvous with Rama," 1973; "Imperial Earth," 1975; and "The Songs of Distant Earth," 1986.

When Clarke and Kubrick got together to develop a movie about space, they used as basic ideas several of Clarke's shorter pieces, including "The Sentinel," written in 1948, and "Encounter in the Dawn." As work progressed on the screenplay, Clarke also wrote a novel of the story. He followed it up with "2010," "2061," and "3001: The Final Odyssey."

In 1989, two decades after the Apollo 11 moon landings, Clarke wrote: "2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined."

Clarke won the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979; the Hugo Award of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 and 1980, and in 1986 became Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was awarded the CBE in 1989.

Born in Minehead, western England, on Dec. 16, 1917, the son of a farmer, Arthur Charles Clark became addicted to science-fiction after buying his first copies of the pulp magazine "Amazing Stories" at Woolworth's. He devoured English writers H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon and began writing for his school magazine in his teens.

Clarke went to work as a clerk in Her Majesty's Exchequer and Audit Department in London, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society and wrote his first short stories and scientific articles on space travel.

It was not until after the World War II that Clarke received a bachelor of science degree in physics and mathematics from King's College in London.

In the wartime Royal Air Force, he was put in charge of a new radar blind-landing system.

But it was an RAF memo he wrote in 1945 about the future of communications that led him to fame. It was about the possibility of using satellites to revolutionize communications — an idea whose time had decidedly not come.

Clarke later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost rejected it as too far-fetched.

Clarke married in 1953, and was divorced in 1964. He had no children.

Disabled by post-polio syndrome, the lingering effects of a disease that had paralyzed him for two months in 1959, Clarke rarely left his home in the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka.

He moved there in 1956, lured by his interest in marine diving which, he said, was as close as he could get to the weightless feeling of space.

"I'm perfectly operational underwater," he once said.

Clarke was linked by his computer with friends and fans around the world, spending each morning answering e-mails and browsing the Internet.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Clarke said he did not regret having never followed his novels into space, adding that he had arranged to have DNA from strands of his hair sent into orbit.

"One day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from the vanished species and I may exist in another time," he said. "Move over, Stephen King."

On the Net:

* The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation: http://www.clarkefoundation.org

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good: Two days of partly-sunny skies and near-60 degree temps are doing wonders for my mood.

The Bad: Still facing the funeral for my Uncle Bill this Saturday; and also found out I didn't make it into the semi-finalist round for one of the screenplay competitions I entered last fall.

The Ugly: My writing retreat is canceled because the people at the artists' colony didn't have their shit together and ungraciously bowed out when I called to confirm yesterday. Also, the director of the program at Out of Town University refused to write me a letter of recommendation because she supposedly didn't feel she knew me well enough after only one semester. Never mind that I drove and hour and a half through thick fog, pelting rain, and treacherous snow storm and was never late once for class or a student conference. Never mind that I drove my ass that hour and a half with 2nd degree burns on my face, in pain and exhausted. And the list goes on. I got this news only a few minutes before I found out about Uncle Bill, so last Thursday had to have been just about the suckiest day in awhile.

I know I'm supposed to be leaving the past behind and moving on, but these little tendrils of the total SUCK that was the last half 2007 are still reaching out to trip me up and drag me back into the muck. The Muck of Suck.

Yesterday I was pretty goddamned depressed after the artist colony debacle, but Salty Miss Jill came to my rescue and took me to lunch at our local Chinese/Vietnamese place.

I am working on making the best of the time I have left this break, and not losing any sleep over the assholes that continue to dominate the landscape. Assholes will always be there in some form or another, as will bad luck and tough breaks. Gotta shake their dust from my boots and keep a'goin'. But it ain't easy.

This weekend: down the shitter

Yesterday I had a severe case of ennui. I was unable to focus, concentrate, create, think or do anything. I just went to bed and figured things would get better today.

They didn't.

The hot bacon grease I was pouring into the can slipped out of my hand and splashed up onto my neck and face this morning, giving me first and second degree burns. Bizarro drove me to the ER, where I got perkisette and a painful shot of anti-inflammatory (in my bum, woudn't you know).

I'm doped up on vicadin now, and will be so for a few days to come. I have to get an appointment with the plastic surgeon "just in case" although the ER doc said it probably wouldn't scar because it's pretty superficial. I'm hoping. Hoping.

I can verify that hot bacon grease and human skin don't go well together. It's like introducing anti-matter into the matter universe. Not a good mix.

This was all on top of a very stressful week - waiting to hear whether Mom's doctors are diagnosing her with bone cancer.

This is a definite do-over weekend.

Tightening the Belt

I'm now in my second week of being unemployed, and the picture is not pretty. We are cutting all extraneous activities. Bizarro is stressed out, I'm stressed out, and I'm angry as fucking hell that we are in this position.

I am also really disappointed that the temp scene in this town is as shitty as it is. I've never had a problem getting a temp job in any other city I've ever lived in (Boston, Rochester, Elmira, Columbus).

Korea is looking more and more like a pie in the sky. I'm angry because my dream is being squashed by the realities of life that have been foisted upon me, despite all my hard work and apprent successes as a teacher.

Perhaps my lot in life is to be an admin until I can break in with screenwriting. Perhaps I have to say goodbye to being a filmmaker. At least I can write without disrupting my entire life, unlike making a film.

I'm working hard not to let my self esteem slide into the slimy depths of oblivion, but goddam it's hard. Meantime, I got word that yet another of my applications didn't make it to the interview round (the admin job at the international students office). Another one bites the dust.

If I don't get a temp job soon, we're F'd in the A.