I'm so close to getting my little basement space livable. I've sent out a few job applications and I have a few more and then some places to which I'm simply sending my resume. I should have a job soon. I have an appt. at the community college in Portsmouth, NH to talk to a counselor to help me figure out what I need to do to get my A.S. in science, which should only take a year. Then I can be a medical assistant or a vet tech so I can get paid a decent wage while I finish my B.A.
I just want to save enough money to buy my own car and get my own apartment and get away from my crazy mother. She's just so miserable it makes me feel physically sick to be around her. I do love her, somehow, some way, I do. I just don't know how to take her, what to say to her, how to tune out the whining, the depression, the misery. She's never happy. I don't think I've seen her actually happy since I was a very young child. And even then who knows if it was genuine or just the poorly remembered fantasy of a child?
Anyway, I'm going to stick it out. For once, I left so many times when I was young, and then haven't been back for over ten years. So I don't care how miserable she tries to make me, I'm not leaving until I have the things I need to make it on my own without having to ask for anyone's help. I'm not going to have to rely on anyone else.

Wow, how sad is it that while putting stuff away from boxes which have been long packed I came across an old journal in which the first entry was almost identical to what I have written above. I have made no strides in the past eight years. I am still stuck, unable to take care of myself, jobless and under-educated. Oh my, how sad am I? The one difference is that I'm no longer hung up on some loser asshole with no care for anyone in the world but himself. That has to be something, right?

(Ah, what was that? A blood-curling scream from above? My mother, the only one it could be. She's alone, making dinner for I don't know who since she just saw my brother eat twenty minutes ago, but she'll still be angry when he doesn't eat anything, and I am certainly not eating anywhere near her. I'll eat what she makes cuz she'll cause a scene if I don't but I'm not sitting there so she can scowl at me and make rude comments the whole time I'm eating. There's nothing like trying to enjoy a meal in front of someone who insinuates how fat you are all the time. Anyway, only she could find a reason to scream that loud while alone in a room. I'm not even buying into it and running up there - and that is partially why she hates me. Because I don't buy into her insane dramatics.)

Even if I don't stay here very long, it feels good to take my books out and set them up on shelves. It feels like soon I will have my own retreat, my own safe, happy place away from all their shit. And they wonder why I don't want to live in a tiny room upstairs with the rest of them. I'd rather sleep on a mattress on the floor in the basement. Oh yeah, my crazy junkie brother decided he wanted the bed I was sleeping on because it was "his". And my mother told me I had to give it to him right away. That's why we're fighting today. I dared to be so bold as to suggest he needed to wait until I got my futon out of storage since I just offered to make a point to get it the other day if he needed the bed and my mother told me he said "No, It doesn't even fit in his room at his new place". So I told Mikey not to worry about getting it until he got back from his trip next week. Then on Sunday morning he decided he needed me to get it right then. I said he could continue to sleep on his futon, which he's been doing so I could have someplace decent to sleep too. No, no go. So I'm on the floor. But get this, after I put my breakfast on a back burner to sit while I dismantled the bed and put it out the top of the bulkhead door for him, he left it there! In the rain! All afternoon and night. Then my mother told my sister I left it in the rain. I handed it right to her out the bulkhead, so how did I leave it there. Does anyone think it was my responsibility to move it for him. He was supposed to be taking it right to his new place. I really can't stand my family.
Please God, let someone hire me so I can spend much of my time at work. Even work would seem like a retreat right now.
Oh, did I also mention I went upstairs to pee the other night at about two a.m. and my mom was sitting there with some random guy out on the porch. I thought she had gone out w/her friend Cynthia. Not to mention she's had this long term boyfriend, Larry who's been calling and calling and whose Volvo she drives. But she's ignoring Larry because she thinks he answered her in an insensitive tone the other day and doesn't care enough about her problems. But then the guy was still there sleeping right next to her the next morning. I think that's really vulgar behavior for a sixty year old woman. At least fuck some stranger in your own room so your kids don't have to see your two hung-over, half naked bodies draped over the furniture first thing in the morning. In fact, I think that's really irresponsible behavior for anyone of any age. That's how you get raped and murdered. I wouldn't have heard if he decided to kill her. Thank God I lock myself in the basement from the inside every night. With my mother bringing strange men into the house. Maybe it helps that my younger brother, Sam, not the junkie, just crazy, threatens every man my mother brings home with his butterfly knife. I'm not kidding, he walks around the house just flipping the f'n thing around and around. I hate it. I can't go anywhere without hearing that clink of metal on metal and not think of him flipping those damn knives.

I love it when the threat of oncoming rain at dusk makes the air itself take on color. Sometimes green, blue, purple. It's sad and beautiful.