Corner of Bourbon & Division

 I've spent the last two days running in circles. I worked two night shifts, and I had agreed to spend some time with L. and J. on both days. Apart from my own crazy with my landlady, I found myself sucked into the nightmare crazy that L. and J. are experiencing too. Because they have to work everything around their harassing neighbours, even the simplest things end up being super complicated.

Monday was a bit of a clusterfuck. Originally I was supposed to go from about nine to noon, but they called and asked me if I could come later in the afternoon. Since I had a house viewing scheduled for 16:00 and then work at 17:30, I told them it wasn't really possible, but that I could stop by anytime up to 15:30. So they initially cancelled my whole visit, only to call back at noon to ask me to come by anyway. Monday was Family Day, which is a statutory holiday in Ontario, and so their neighbours were home and causing trouble.

I went over right away, and there ensued a logistical nightmare. Uh, I think I need to provide some context before this will make sense. The neighbours, among other things, harass them by parking their very large trucks in front of their house and sometimes in their actual driveway. Mostly they park in front of the house, and then they all hang out around their truck or stand right up on L. and J.'s property (the police won't lay charges because you can be up to 15 feet away from the public street on someone's property, make rude gestures, and even take pictures legally, apparently. I'm not well-enough versed in the law to know for sure myself, but the Ottawa Police made it clear to L. and J. that they weren't going to intervene in this kind of situation). So in order to discourage the harassers, L. and J. try to have cars parked in their driveway and directly in front of their house at all times.

Okay, explanation done. L. and J. don't own a car, but they've been renting vehicles. They also had a friend lend them a car over the weekend while she went on a ski trip, and that's where I came in. They wanted me to stay while J. drove the borrowed car back to its owner, and then got dropped back at home. I told them that was fine, as long as I could leave by 16:00 (my house viewing got cancelled, luckily), and also drove L. to Loblaws to do some grocery shopping, as they'd both been sick all weekend. While we were out at Loblaw's, J. called L. and revealed that she'd accidentally broken her glasses. So when we got back at 15:45 J. couldn't leave until L. had helped her Scotch tape her glasses together, and I ended up going with her because she can't see at all without her glasses, and they were worried the glasses might break again while she was driving. We left at 16:00, and when we got to our destination, the friend we were going to see wasn't there yet. So we waited some more, and ended up returning to L. and J.'s house at a quarter to five.

I ran home as fast as I could, tried to get ready for work, take care of the pets, and have dinner, and only succeeded at two out of the three. Oh, and the dog was sick while I was gone, so I had to clean that up too before work. It was, as I said, a total clusterfuck, and I ended up being late for work as a result.

Yesterday wasn't quite as bad in terms of logistics, but I ended up spending most of my day with them, from 09:30 to past 14:00, which means that I only got about four hours of sleep all day, total. I wasn't late for work, at least, but I was exhausted by the end of it all.

And today the landlady saga continues. The coop called me and said they left her messages which she hasn't returned yet, and when I spoke to them I hadn't heard from her directly in about three weeks (not since February 1st). I checked my cell phone when I hung up with the coop, and to my surprise found a text message from her, demanding to know if I'd be home tomorrow so a floor company could come in. I responded with my availability, and she hasn't gotten back to me. 

I'm a little concerned, because I spoke to my paralegal today, and she said she hasn't sent the letter yet that we agreed upon, and that means my landlady doesn't yet know that I've engaged legal representation. I don't know what that means for how tomorrow's as-yet hypothetical visit (with the floor company) will mean, and now I'm super stressed about it all again. I honestly thought that the letter would have been sent out either late last week or early this week. Two weeks seems like a really long time to send out what is essentially a one-page letter. I don't know, maybe legal stuff really does take that long, but this is sort of a time-sensitive issue. :(

Ugh. Anyway. Speaking of anxiety, it's time to go to therapy. I haven't been in over a month, due to scheduling and life issues. I had to cancel my last appointment due to my landlady being crazy, and then my therapist got sick, so it's been a while. I'm thinking of stopping, anyway. I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere or developing any true insights into my psyche that I didn't know before, and that means I'm wasting her time, and wasting my time and money.

Sorry, been AFK for a few days. Since Sunday, at the very least. It's been a bit of a busy week, what with Easter and Bean having the Gastro That Would Not Go Away, though pdaughter is the one who ended up dealing with the latter for the better part of the week, as I had to head back to Ottawa for work on Tuesday afternoon. I suppose that, aside from that, it hasn't been much busier than usual, though it felt that way.

( Cut for complaining )

( Food! And also nutrition! And general health stuff! )

Today was one of those days when I didn't even get a chance to sit still for two minutes except at lunch time. It was a day of more messages than usual and constant interruptions and problems that took forever to solve. I am very glad to be home this evening, let me tell you. My landlord does not appear to be home, though his car is here. I'm guessing he might be on a work trip, or else he and his wife carpooled back to their primary residence in Bainsville. Either way, it's nice to have the house to myself.

I was toying with the idea earlier—inspired by someone else's blog post—to write a bit about what mental illness is like from the inside as well as the outside, but I'm not sure it's a good idea anymore. It will make for an incredibly depressing LJ entry, and my posts are already pretty awful as it is. Mental illness is a messy affair, and my own history with it is also messy (though I was lucky compared to most people), so... yeah, I'm not sure.

The plan for tonight, once I get my act together, is to scrounge up some dinner, maybe watch Grimm if it's on early enough, and maybe, maybe try to get a few words down on paper. That still hasn't happened, mostly because I'm not a night owl and tend to get my writing done in the morning when I can. On work days that's not possible, since I have to be at work at 05:30. Alas. Stupid work, getting in the way of my hobbies. :P

I haven't been as productive in general as I'd like lately, due to the fact that I'm just getting more and more tired as time goes by. It just feels more difficult to do even basic maintenance stuff, like laundry and dishes and wiping kitchen counters and cleaning up when the coffee pot leaks. Some of the time I'll catch myself just staring blankly into space instead of doing what I'd planned to do. Or else I forget my plans entirely, and only remember that I was going to do X when it's 20:00 and far too late to do anything of the sort. I think I need to start setting alarms for myself so that I'll remember to do things.

:::ETA:::

Whoops. I forgot to hit "post" on this, and now it's nearly two hours later. My bad. Short attention spans r us, these days. Easily distracted by other things, too.

I promise not all my entries will be about procrastination and the iProcrastinate podcast. However, today is not the day I won't be talking about that. Double negatives for the win!

I've been thinking about time, and procrastination, and what I'm doing with my life. Time is the one resource all humans have that is truly finite. It was Bob Dylan who sang that "he not busy being born is busy dying," and that rings very true. It's why laziness and sloth seem to be universally considered a grave sin—it's the waste of our most precious commodity.

So the question I've been asking myself is what I want to do with the time I have. I never seem to have enough, and yet I procrastinate on a lot of things, most of them work-related, but some of them life things that I need to deal with (usually government stuff, or things like organising my paperwork—always tasks that I usually find aversive).

The guilt we feel when we procrastinate, according to Pychyl, stems from the fact that we are not being authentic to ourselves. We know we ought to be doing whatever it is we planned, but instead we're doing something else to avoid the task we currently find aversive. In order to mitigate the dissonance we're experiencing, we lie to ourselves about why we're procrastinating.

In my case, 90% of my procrastination stems from anxiety, usually because I'm convinced I won't do it properly. This ranges from my translation work all the way to filling out official forms. Yes, I know it's not rational. With forms I'm always convinced that after I send them in I'll end up with irritated government officials landing (metaphorically) on my doorstep to tell me I've done it all wrong and now they're going to take away all my things as punishment. I'll lose the house, or the car, or my job, or whatever. IDK, I did say it wasn't rational, right?

It's what my father always called la pensée magique. If I don't do it at all, then I can't do it wrong. What could possibly go wrong with that plan? ;)

So the order of the day is to make use of all the time I have. This is not a prescriptive thing, per se. There will be no melodramatic declarations of never spending time in front of the TV again when I could be outside climbing mountains or white water rafting, or whatever. I just want to make sure that I spend my time doing the stuff I actually planned to be doing. If I'm watching television, I want it to be because I want to watch television at that moment, and not because I'm putting off filing my taxes or avoiding my writing because it's stressful. If I'm surfing the internet, it's because that's what I want and planned to do, and not because I don't want to be shovelling the balcony.

In short, I want to try to use the few hours I have to myself every month to do things that I find useful and/or fulfilling. I don't want to be one of those people who finishes life with a boatload of regrets concerning things I never got around to doing.

( Unrelated planning stuff under the cut )

Stay tuned for more posts later. I want to do one on weight and body image and health and What It All Means to me. Right now, though, I have writing to do. I have a little under an hour and a half before it's nap time.

I just got a call from a woman who has been trapped in her car on the highway for 20 minutes because there is a spider in the car with her. She's so afraid of spiders that she is convinced she'll have an accident if she tries to drive with the spider in there with her.

I realise that phobias are not funny, that they are in fact very serious and potentially crippling psychiatric conditions, and that this woman probably legitimately can't do anything remotely sane like squish the spider or shoo it out of her car.

That being said, I am a bad person and I am going to hell, because damn it was funny anyway.

I had to transfer her to the SQ, who have jurisdiction over the highways, and I am quite sure that they were not nearly as sympathetic to her plight, unfortunately for her.

So I'm at the gym today for a session with my trainer, when a guy in a fluorescent yellow t-shirt goes by as I'm working on my bench press. I've seen this guy once before, shared the bench with him so we could both get our training in. I don't think we exchanged more than three words.

Today, the guy is obviously spitting mad. G, my trainer, sees that he's in a bad mood, and asks what's up. YellowShirt!Guy is banging the free weights about, looks up, glares and says something to the effect that someone at the front of the gym was rude to him and told him to "shut up." He added that he wasn't accustomed to being talked to that way in a gym.

I was surprised, because the staff at the gym are usually super nice and super polite. I couldn't imagine anyone telling this guy to shut up. When G asked him who it was, he continued banging his weights about and said angrily: "I'm not telling you." He repeated this even when G took him aside to try to calm him down.

Nothing to do except shrug and move on. So we did, except that the guy was taking up a lot of space with his anger management problem. Eventually G asked him again who it was who'd been rude to him as he was walking by, and he turned, pointed right at me, and said: "It's HER!"

O_O

My jaw dropped. You could seriously have knocked me over with a feather, and the same went for G. I have NO idea where this guy got that idea. I hadn't seen him at all that day, let alone spoken to him (in fact, I don't think I ever spoke to him directly), but here he was convinced that I had been inexcusably rude to him.

So G left me to do some pull-ups and took the guy aside again to set him straight (since G knew perfectly well where I'd been the entire time), which resulted in YellowShirt!Guy storming off and leaving the gym after kicking up another fuss at the front desk.

No fewer than four people, three of them staff members (and one the gym manager) came to see what the hell was up after that, and they were all equally as perplexed. I'm pretty well-known at the gym now, and since I'm always friendly and unfailingly polite, they all came to the conclusion that the guy was obviously mistaken and might well be either crazy or high on some sort of substance. YellowShirt!Guy is known for doing really intensive weight training, and a lot of the trainers think he might be taking something (I'm guessing steroids) that make him act really crazy.

Nonetheless, I was unsettled. If G hadn't intervened, it seemed a lot of them were concerned the guy was actually going to go off on me and commit some sort of random act of violence.

Ah, off-hours at the RCMP. This was quite possibly the most surreal conversation I've had since speaking with the Queen of the Universe.

Me: "GRC-RCMP Montréal bonjour, good afternoon!"

Male Caller: "Yeah, are you guys going to come help me with my problem, or what?"

Me: "What seems to be the trouble, sir?"

MC: "I keep calling, but no one's coming to arrest these guys?"

Me: "Okay, why don't you tell me what's going on? What's the nature of your complaint?"

MC: "My landlords are growing pot in the other apartments."

Me: "I see. For that you'll have to contact your local police. I can provide you with the number and connect you, if you want."

MC: "No, they don't want to help, they're all in on it together. It's the Russian mob!"

Me: "The Russian mob."

MC: "Yeah. They're forcing the other tenants to move out, but we're not going to be intimidated!"

Me: "I see. If someone is threatening you, that's also the jurisdiction of the local police. I can connect us to them now, and we'll speak to them together."

MC: "They're not threatening us. They're using voodoo to hurt us!"

Me: o_O "Voodoo?"

MC: "Yeah! They're sending electric shocks up through the floors using voodoo!"

Me: ...

MC: "The elderly lady down the hall says she can feel them too. We thought she was nuts but it turns out she's not."

Me: *deadpan* "Well, voodoo certainly doesn't come under the RCMP's jurisdiction. For your other two problems, though, like I said, it'll be your local police."

MC: "They won't help us. We've made dozens of complaints but they say they don't have a record of any of them."

Me: "In that case, I suggest asking for your file number when you make your next complaint."

MC: "No! I want the RCMP to tell them to do their jobs!"

Me: "I'm afraid that's not within our purview. You can, however, go along official channels and make a complaint that they are not following the code of ethics, and that you would like Internal Affairs to investigate. I can provide you with that number as well."

MC: "No, they're all in it together. Why aren't you helping me?"

Me: "I am attempting to help you, sir, by giving you the available options."

MC: "If you won't help me, we're just going to go up there, break down their door, and take care of them ourselves!"

Me: "Sir, I remind you that you're on a recorded line. Uttering threats against your neighbour is a criminal offense, and this could be used as evidence should you choose to follow through on that threat."

MC: "You people are useless! I pay your goddamned salary and I still have to take matters into my own hands. You're telling me I have no choice!"

Me: "Sir, I have given you two perfectly viable options. If you choose neither of those, I can't help you further. But you do have a choice."

MC: "No I don't!" *swears colourfully at me and hangs up*


So, yeah. That was my weekend. Pot-growing, Russian mobster voodoo practitioners of DOOM.

Okay, the title is a lie, but it's been a while since I updated with anything other than whining about the fact that my head hurt. So!

Life has been proceeding apace. While it seems it's a hard winter for everyone (media sources say 70% less sun than the national average this year! GAH!), the St. John's Wort is helping me get up and get out the door every day, and that's a Very Good Thing™.

The rest of my life is being taken up by work and going to the gym, occasionally seeing people (veeeery occasionally, alas), and generally keeping out of trouble.

Supernatural started up again on Thursday with a new episode, and there was much squeeing and bouncing until about the halfway mark of the episode, when it kind of turned a little "meh." Still, it was a pretty decent episode, just not earth-shattering and annoyingly didn't resolve anything at all (I was sort of hoping for progress on a meta level. Oh well. Maybe next time.)

Basically, I've come to the conclusion that I need to just roll with the whole low-energy thing this winter. If that's how it is, that's how it is. I am going to stop feeling as though I'm letting down the universe just because I'm not a whirlwind of sociability. Seriously, Phnee, the universe will survive just fine without you there to prop it up. :P

So I'm doing the bare minimum to keep functioning and keep myself in a good headspace. I get plenty of sleep, see friends when I can (all alone time and no friends makes Phnee go crazy!), and go to the gym. The gym is a two-fold blessing: 1) regular exercise helps keep me on an even keel, and 2) I am doing SUPER well. I can totally bench press 100lbs now, and I am SO PROUD!

The cats have been like VELCRO lately. I've had a bit of extra time off from work (long story, don't ask, and I'm totally paying for it in February), and when I'm home they glom onto me like alien face huggers. Especially Pan-Pan, who has been doing his level best to actually graft himself to my person. It's been a painful if very loving experience.

Yeah, that's about it. I've been reading e.e. cummings and fanfic, and am contemplating picking up the latest Harry Dresden novel sooner rather than later. It ought to be in paperback by now, if memory serves. Part of me is considering picking up a big juicy classic in February, too, if only for a change of pace away from genre fiction.

So, how's everyone been?

So November is continuing right on until Christmas this year, it seems. I want to complain to management, except I keep getting put on hold with horrific Christmas music on loop.

[Poll #1500394]

I just recognized a pattern of behaviour. Why I didn't notice before is beyond me.

See, I always knew November kind of sucked for me. What I *didn't* see until today is that every November I go into survival hyperdrive, withdraw from humanity, and find something to obsess over. Every year it's something different. 2006 was the zombie novel, 2007 was the new job at the RCMP, and last year I read something like forty-three books (yes, I went back and checked) and spent all my free time (which wasn't much) with BorderCrossing. This year it appears to be watching Supernatural and reading fanfic. Yes, fanfic.

There's been a new thing every year. I was wondering why I wasn't "feeling" the same thing as in 2006 when I was writing about zombie, why this novel isn't coming together in my head, and now I understand why: the obsession is different this year.

It's too bad, but at least I get what's going on now.