The George W Bush Sewage Plant

I like the idea of naming a sewage plant for George Bush. Think how essential a sewage plant is to society. The people who work work there are unsung heroes who are responsible for protecting the rest of society from unsanitary conditions. Just like George Bush, an unsung hero, who has spent most of his presidency trying to rid the world of human sewage - the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, the brutal killers of Al Quaeda and the brutal theocratic tyrants, the Taliban. So, although the leftwingers who proposed this ballot initiative must think it's quite funny, I think it's an appropriate honor.

Leap Years

I went for a walk at lunchtime with Leonid, a former colleague of mine, today. While we were walking, he asked if a lot people I knew had recently died. He mentioned a number of his friends and relatives who passed away in the past few months and also referred to the recent deaths of Tony Snow and Tim Russert. He then made the peculiar observation that during leap years there seem to be more deaths than in other years. I had never heard of this. He even said that he had been taught this in school and that there was more sun activity during leap years. I was taken aback by this theory which seemed to me to be pure superstition. He grew up in the Ukraine. I wonder if this is a common belief there. According to some, the sun has been eerily calm recently.

My Disorders

Reading through descriptions of various personality disorders, the one that fits me best is avoidant personality disorder. Throughout my life I have had difficulty forming relationships with other people. I often worry about rejection and ridicule by other people. My occupation of computer analyst fits my personality because most of my time is spent on the computer, writing programs and working with databases. I wonder if it will ever be possible to move to a higher position of responsibility. Could I ever be successful in situations involving other people? In most social situations I say very little. At times I feel paralyzed and unable to say anything. This is particularly true in intimate situations. In college, I was unable to have a romantic relationship. The only time I came close to one was with Tammy. For an entire semester we hung out together but I was unable to really ask her out or initiate anything despite the numerous times she indicated her interest. Even though she would show a lot of interest and sometimes kiss me, I still didn't feel confident to ask her to date me. When she finally asked me whether I wanted her to be my girlfriend or just my friend, I did answer I wanted her to be my girlfriend. However, it only lasted about a week. After an awkward date in which we saw a concert by a major band, I said something wrong and she got upset. The next time I saw her, she wouldn't talk to me. I felt completely rejected. I believed I had been exposed as a loser and she wouldn't want anything to do with me. I knew I should call her but was so upset I kept calling the wrong number for a week. After a few days, she stopped being so upset and smiled at me when she saw me. When I finally called her I said I was sorry but didn't really know what else do say. I talked to her a number of times after that but never could bring myself to try to get back together or ask her out again.

I have a lot in common with those who are love shy although most men diagnosed with this have never gone on a date or had sex or been married. Still I share the same feelings and fears as the love shy. It's almost a miracle that I have ever had sex or gotten married. To this day I really can't initiate sexual contact with my wife. We go through long periods of inactivity.

Marriage is driving me crazy.

Marriage is driving me crazy. How does anyone survive it? Here is a list of all the times my wife drove me to almost have a complete nervous breakdown. First she insisted on getting married immediately. It was on a Friday and she wanted to go to the courthouse on Monday. We left our jobs during our lunchbreaks. I was in a state of panic but she refused to reconsider. Then in late January she insisted on a huge wedding reception on Valentine’s day that cost about $10,0000. The stress of organizing and paying for this wedding in a few weeks almost gave me a heart attack. Shortly thereafter she bought two dogs. I of course had to walk them everyday and clean up their dog shit. These dogs did not get along and when I walked them they constantly pulled me in opposite directions. Taking care of them was a nightmare. Thank God, my wife agreed to give them away before our son was born.
Then she decided to buy a new, more expensive house and rent our townhouse even though we didn’t have any money for a downpayment and really were having trouble financially in our current house. She agreed to rent our townhouse while I was in class. Then she got into a dispute with the builder of our new house and cancelled the contract. So we had tenants preparing to move into our townhouse and we had no new house to move into. We scrambled to find another house which we did but the move itself was horrible. There was a gap of a several days in which we had to stay in a hotel. We put all of our stuff in five different storage units. While we were preparing to move, she bought a lot more crap at yard sales making the move even more difficult.
After living there for three years she then insisted on buying an even bigger and more expensive house. She agreed to buy the new house without consulting me at all. She dragged me to the sales office and nagged me into signing the contract. I didn’t think we would qualify but these days mortgage companies approve anyone so the house got built, and we ended up buying it. Realizing we absolutely could not afford it, we put it on the market immediately after buying it. My wife became panicked and so depressed that she could hardly leave the house. She wanted to back out of the contract and lose the $100,000 down payment. I at least wanted to try to get some of it back. It took six months to sell the property for the same price we bought it. With the closing costs, the mortgage payments, and the upkeep of the house, we lost a fortune.
While we were trying to sell it, her mother kept pressuring me to move into the new house and sell our existing one. I knew we absolutely could not afford the new one and the equity on the existing one was almost used up so the proceeds from the sale would not make that big of a difference. The stress was so great that I ended up spending several days in a mental hospital. When we finally sold it, I felt relief but my wife cried at the settlement.
Even after that disaster, she keep trying to buy things we couldn’t afford. The following year she insisted on her mother buying a house at a development for retired people. She wrote a check from our joint account for $5,000 as the earnest deposit. There was no way her mother could afford the payments on the house and we certainly did not have $5,000 in our account. The check bounced but she keep writing new ones. She ended up bouncing two or three checks. We’re lucky that her mother was not sued by the real estate company.
Then in the space of a month, she bought two cars. Here we were trying to recover from a financial catastrophe and she buys two cars with combined payments of over $900 a month. Already we were going into deeper debt every month and she adds this burden. At the time she did not even have a job. How she qualified for those car loans, I will never know.
During most of our marriage she did not work. She insisted on finishing her college degrees. After about five years she qualified for an associates degree at our community college. For several classes she insisted I write the papers which I did. Then she transferred to George Mason University. She should have finished in two years but it has dragged for four years and she is still not finished. She insists I write her papers even though it’s a Spanish literature class and I don’t know even Spanish to write college papers. She says to write them in English and she’ll translate them. Here we are going deeper into debt, headed for bankruptcy and foreclosure and she wants me to concentrate on her classes. She finally got a job as a secretary at the church but continually threatens to quit so she can concentrate on her stupid degree. What her degree in Spanish is going to do for her I don’t know. I really doubt she will ever become a teacher as she once planned. Trying to read sixteenth century Spanish literature and writing a paper on it while worrying about the huge debts that are piling up is driving me crazy.

Story of a barista as a middle aged man

For the past two years, I worked part-time as a weekend barista at a Starbucks at Harris Teeter. I worked there for extra money while my wife was a full-time student with no income. I averaged about $500 a month. Eventually I decided it wasn't worth it because it tired me out and made working overtime at my full-time job more difficult. Considering that my full-time hourly rate was around five times greater than what I was making at Starbucks, I decided that it was probably costing me money to work there. Hopefully the experience of working in a retail environment gave me some valuable experience. Certain things about the job really bother me. I really did not like having a manager draw up a schedule of my hours. Sometimes I opened, sometime I closed sometimes I was mid-shift. I'm using to have set business hours and deciding for myself if I needed to come to work early or late. I also wasn't thrilled about having manager nag me if I didn't look busy enough. Constantly wiping the counter got boring pretty quickly. Also for some reason I was always given the longest shifts on the weekends, usually 8 or 9 hours while others often worked 4 or 5 hour shifts. However, I did enjoy getting to know a lot of the regular customers and learning about Starbucks was kind of interesting at first. However, I don't think I'm going to get a job like that again anytime soon. I didn't have the life changing experience that some have had. I belong in an office, in front of a computer, not in a grocery store.

The weekend

I woke up this morning with a headache and couldn't get out of bed until 6:30 am. As a result I spent two hours in traffic trying to get to work. I need to leave the house by 5:30 in order to get there in an hour or less. The weekend was very stressful because I was at home with my wife and mother-in-law so every five minutes they were nagging me about something. I quit my weekend job a couple of weeks ago. It was exhausting working for 8 or 9 hours a day during the weekend after working and commuting during the week but the stress of being at home is pretty bad too.

Desperate Times

Now, the biggest struggle is staying afloat. The gigantic mountain of debt keeps getting bigger. If I could just stop going further into debt. My wife hasn't worked regularly for the past six years. She is trying to finish her college degree. A bachelor's degree can't possibly be worth the heartache and financial ruin our family is experiencing. She is without pity. She will do anything to ruin my finances. It isn't enough not to work and to acquire all these tuition bills. In the past few years, she has bought three cars and tried to buy three or four houses. All without having any job or income. She starting a low paid receptionist job this Monday. I doubt she'll use any of her income to help pay our bills. She usually gives all of her money to her mother who's just as bad as her. I didn't know marriage was going to mean this kind of financial meltdown as well as having to live with both my wife and mother-in-law. The only thing that keeps me going is my son who I have to try to save from these crazy women.