July 29 - God, is it almost payday?

My life is so fucked up right now that I just don't care anymore. Sometimes that happens to me. I have a list of worries, and then it becomes a pile of worries, and then I just have to stop caring. I burn the pile and start over again.

I thought I had the issue of our new apartment all sewn up (note to new readers: I just got custody of my three kids and we need something slightly bigger than a one-bedroom apartment). I'm currently leasing on a month-to-month basis and my landlady just had a two-bedroom open up in another complex. I told her I wanted it. She said okay, it's almost ready for you to do a walk-through. I called her back and said that I didn't care about waiting for it to be ready for the walk-through. I wanted it no matter what it looked like. She said okay, but that I should really just drive by and check it out. She very kindly insisted. "Just drive by and check it out whenever you get a chance, and then call me and let me know if you still want it, and we'll start the paperwork," she said. I figured she was following some legal formality so I said okay.

Friday we drove by. My key unlocks the security gates of all the complexes owned by my landlady. The apartment was open because there was a woman cleaning it. "Hi. We came by to look at the apartment," I told the woman with the pink gloves and the can of Comet. She shook her head and mouthed "I don't speak English." "La Señora Conner dijo que podemos venir y ver el apartamento,"said I, mistress of lame bilinguality that I am. The lady politely nodded and went back to the task of cleaning the sadly yellowed shower. We meticulously wiped the rain off the bottoms of our shoes and tiptoed in. Everything was fabulous enough for me. So what if the low bedroom windows looked out onto a wooden fence lined with discarded potato-chip bags? So what if the kitchen was only big enough for my big ass and nothing else? It was fabulous, I decided. The big bedroom for the kids, the little bedroom for me, the multiple walk-in closets for all our crap, the linoleum-ed dining-room-nook floor for easier clean-up of spilled chocolate pudding fresh from the 4/99-cent containers that you don't have to refrigerate. "Here's our new apartment, peeps," I said to my kids.

We thanked our hostess and went back outside to press our faces against the high gate around the deep, dirty pool. I would just have to brush up on my swimming, I thought, so that I could more easily keep my two non-swimming sons from drowning. Or we could swim in the decorative fountain and plead ignorance or drunkenness. Or we could just... I don't know. Take more bubble baths.

Before we could turn away and hurry home to call my landlady, a stranger appeared. It was a woman about my heighth and about my width but with bulkier shoulders and longer, more tangled hair. She greeted us and the first thing I noticed about her face was the dent in her forehead right where I imagined her pituitary gland would be. It wasn't so much that as characteristics in her voice, facial expressions, and regard for inter-personal space that made me realize that this woman's faculties weren't at their full potential.

Of course she had to converse with me, because strange strangers always do, and she proceeded to immerse herself in my business. I admitted that I was planning to move my family into Number 11. The stranger told me that everyone in the complex was snooty and considered themselves too good to talk to anyone. The Chinese people, however, were okay. They talked. And so did the nice Mexican family in the front corner. The stranger pointed out the apartment where she lived with her grandmother, who was also not snooty but who was confined to her room at the moment for some health-related reason. She then changed the subject with a happy sigh. She was so happy that she would have children to talk to again. As she said this, she looked at my children, who were ambling all around the complex and near the parking lot despite the furtive looks and finger-snaps I kept directing at them. The stranger made the same stale joke about me giving birth to a sports team that I had already heard twice that week and then sighed again. "You know what I'd like to do with your children?" she asked.

I stiffened, not wanting to hear such a question, much less imagine its answer. Before I could indicate any aversion to the topic, however, the curiosity that I didn't feel was sated. "I would love to take your boys down to the First Baptist Church over here on Red Oak..."

Oh, no. No, no.

"What church do y'all go to?" she then thought to ask, perhaps considering the possibility that my previous plans might factor into her spontaneous ones. I told her that I didn't take my children to church, but that when they did go, it was to a Catholic one with their father. A slight glint appeared in her eye and she opened her mouth a little more than it had been opened before, but I firmly repeated that I did not go to church, making it clear that it was a permanent state for me.

After three thousand more seconds or so of this sort of conversation, I finally came up with a suitable excuse to end it. I barked the follow command at my children. After picking up several pieces of glass, fondling several foamy-mouthed stray dogs, accepting poisoned candy from several strangers, and wandering onto several train tracks, and running with scissors, they made their slow ways to my side and we got into my car and drove away.

No wonder my landlady insisted that I see the place first, I thought. I was sad that I would have to search for another place with, undoubtedly, a much higher rent and deposit.

Now, however, I'm thinking that I should just move into the apartment, anyway. I've been rehearsing a little speech in my mind. It goes something like this, "Hello, again. You know what? I'm trying to train my kids not to talk to strangers, so it would help me a lot if you wouldn't talk to us, because it's confusing them. I appreciate your understanding and your not talking to us ever again. Thanks."

***

Do y'all absolutely hate the new index page design? I hope not. I'm not in love with it myself -- it definitely needs fine-tuning -- but I probably won't get around to reworking it anytime soon. I already changed it several times in one day.

Since I put up all the new t-shirts and mugs for sale and then mentioned them on my site, a really nice person sent me plain money through Paypal, explaining that he didn't need any t-shirts or mugs but that he wanted to give something back in exchange for the years of enjoyment he'd gotten from my site. (I've been doing this site since 1997. Mind-boggling, isn't it?) I was flattered and pleased. Shortly after that, a friend suggested that I put a Paypal donation button on my site so that she and others could show their support during this slightly trying time in my life. (Like I said -- I just got custody of my kids, and I've also recently reentered the workforce after years of housewifery and college-drop-out-ittude.) And I thought, "Well... why the fuck not? I didn't do it back when all the other online journalers were doing it because I was too lazy and felt it wouldn't be modest... but, shit, I've been doing this site for years now, for FREE, and if there was ever a time to offer my readers the chance to show monetary appreciation, it's probably right freaking now."

So I thought that, and I put a Paypal button on my site. And I felt a little silly doing it, so I thought I would try to make it tongue-in-cheek yet chutzpah-ful and self-deprecating with a little irreverence to taste. So, first of all, I wrote a header that said "Tip Jar" and said something cutesy about me sitting on the street corner with a hard drive in my lap and a styrofoam cup full of pennies at my side. I indicated that I was going to type my stuff whether people threw pennies in the cup or not, but if they wanted to throw the pennies, I wasn't going to spit on them and chase them away.

Then, I started to install the PAYPAL DONATION button. But it was kind of funky-looking, so I made my own button instead. I looked through my image files and found an old cartoon of myself with a tear in my eye that I had made as a joke for a friend. "That would be kind of funny," I thought as I pasted that in. I typed something about the face being not-at-all-solicitous, and then I said, "Oh, what the hell?" and typed "CAN YOU HELP?" right under the face.

Finally, when I got to the part of the Paypal form where it asks you the name of your charity, I figured I had to put SOMEthing, so I typed in the silly thing I'd typed before regarding the t-shirts I had for sale -- that the proceeds were benefitting "the newly created Gwen and Her Kids and Their Single-Parent Household Fund."

Overkill? Maybe.

In poor taste? Probably.

Not at all a good idea? I guess maybe it wasn't.

I put all the new stuff on my site late Friday night, but I didn't send out a site-update notification letter. I wasn't entirely happy with the page. I figured I'd rework it in the morning -- that no one would be looking at my site that late during the precious weekend hours.

The next day, I received the following email:

I've been reading your website on a regular basis for over a year now. In all honesty, you're actually the one who inspired me to start a webjournal of my own. You're a good writer, and you can be very funny. The Walmart thing used to crack me up. But I just read your latest journal entry the other day, and just now saw your new index page design. Being a single mother myself, I really wanted to say something the other day, but decided against it. But now that I've seen the PayPal Single Parent Household Fund thing, I've gotta say something. Dude! Do you really want your entire readership (and potential readership) to see this stuff? From reading your past entries, I realize I may get a profanity-filled angry response to this, but you're making yourself look completely incapable and especially pathetic. Even if it is supposed to be a joke. Is it supposed to be a joke? Man, I hope so. It doesn't look that way. My son's dad abandoned us, and I'm living with my parents because I'm so broke, and I can't even work because of a disability. But I'm not on my website, telling people how I need perfect strangers to send me money to help raise my kids and how I think the guy at the restaurant paid for our meal because he felt sorry for me. Seriously, I know in real life you may have a grip on things, but from what I've gathered over the past year, you have a pretty extensive readership. Soliciting money from them for this reason is definitely not cool. But, of course, this is all just my opinion. If you feel you gotta skewer me with insults after reading this, well, do what you gotta do. But I've really liked your work, and I definitely feel for your situation, and I really felt like I wanted to say something.

And maybe it was just the fact that I was tired and disappointed from the events of the day before, or maybe it was the fact that the writer insisted that I'd want to use profanity against her, but the first thing I thought was, "Fuck you."

And I sent this woman's email to a friend, and he said pointed out that, by putting the Paypal button on my site, I'd "rung the dinner bell" for people like this woman to email me their negative judgments. And while I knew what my friend said was true (shit -- I had already been considering calling the whole thing off before I got the rude email,) I still felt, suddenly, like saying, "Fuck everybody. Who the fuck is this stranger to tell me what to do?"

But in the end, I took down the button. I figure I didn't want to feel obligated to strangers, anyway, and especially not if their generosity is accompanied by the rude comments of others. Maybe I'm just weak, but I feel like I get enough rude comments as it is in real life. Whenever I want someone's unsolicited, negative opinion about me and the way I'm handling my life, all I have to do is step outside (or un-password-protect my forum.) Sometimes it's just a matter of getting offline long enough for the phone to ring. There are plenty of people who are only too happy to let me know that I'm fucking up. I'm lazy, I'm not living up to my potential, I'm not a good mother, I should have tried harder to make my marriage work, I don't appreciate what people do for me, I think I'm better than everybody else, I curse too much, I'm fat, I don't deserve what I have, I'm just a fucking jerk. And the people who are good enough to inform me of these things always have it harder than I do. They have more hardships than I do. If anyone has the right to complain, it's them, but they don't complain. Oh, no. Instead, they walk around giving assholes like me the benefit of their good advice.

I guess I should be grateful. Thanks, y'all, for taking the time to help me. Thanks, lady, for saving my website from showing everyone how incapable and pathetic I am.

So... yeah.

The funny part of the whole thing -- the thing that made me decide to burn my pile of worries and just move on -- was that after all that (and after I wrote her with admirabe curse-word restraint,) she wrote me again and sent me the link to her own web journal.

I went and read it. It was brilliant. I'm redesigning my link page, and her URL is going right on the top.

Just kidding. Or am I? If she had the nerve to insult me and THEN send me her URL, you gotta figure her site must be pretty goddamned good, right?

Haw, haw. So, anyway... I'm just gonna stick to selling things. That way there's no shame, no ethical dilemma, and no hate mail. Unless, of course, the crack I sell isn't of the very best quality. In that case, I'd expect that people might complain.

Just kidding again. Ha, ha, ha, I'm so freaking funny! Damn, I amuse myself when I'm down. I bring myself right back up again, you see.

"I'm training my kids not to talk to strangers... Yes, I know my kids aren't standing here. But it helps for you not to talk to me, anyway. You understand, don't you? Shh... shh... of course you do. Goodbye."

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