Regina Noctis

There’s a little good and a lot of not so good around here lately.

The good is that a musical I’ve been wanting to see for years is finally coming to the area. I’m going with the psycho cousin’s ex-wife and their oldest child. My mom, who I’d most like to see it with, bought the tickets for us but won’t go to it herself. She’s too self-conscious about her appearance since a dental problem hit her hard. I’m sad she won’t go, because it’s something I know she’d love. I am excited to get to see it myself, though. And to discover that the same “Broadway in Bakersfield” thing will be bringing Cirque de Soleil to the area next year. I got spoiled by having clubs to dance at, theaters to see plays, musicals, and other stage performances at, and all the rest of it available in the Bay Area here on the left coast and NYC when I was living back east. Here in Hellano, there haven’t even been student plays at the high school to attend. I guess that the drama program which had just gotten restarted here when I was in high school has died in the 21 years since I graduated. So yeah, been starved of some form of culture, and finally get to feed that in October with Movin’ Out. The music of Billy Joel, the story of growing up in Long Island during the 60s and dealing with the Vietnam War, and the choreography of Twyla Tharp. I’m looking forward to this. And even though my mom won’t go, I’ll have Becky and Janette along. They’re two of my favorite people, so this should be fun. Yay!

In February, while I was in the Bay Area on a visit, raw sewage backed up into my garage bedroom and the little half-bath attached. That was a lovely homecoming. I had to move into my mother’s bedroom for a place to sleep and lived out of the suitcase I’d taken with me when I went to the Bay Area. A lot of work was done. The carpet was saved, but the padding under it had to be replaced. The drywall had sucked up a lot of ick and stench, so that had to be torn out and replaced. Since the bathroom was getting torn apart anyway, the lousy, constantly-leaking toilet was replaced, as was the rust-stained sink. The wood panelling in the bedroom around the flood of sewage was cleaned. Then all the debris and dust from construction had to be cleaned up. The guy who was doing all this would work for a while, and then disappear for days on end. By the time he was finished, the summer weather had arrived and it was too hot for me to be out there, so I stayed on in my mother’s bedroom. I’ve been here all summer. Now that it’s finally cooling off enough that I’d be able to move back out there soon, we had another flood of raw sewage, even worse than the last one. A massive amount of human feces are quite visible over the entire area of the flood. It happened on Tuesday afternoon while I was at school. When I got home and went out to my bedroom to view the damage, the stench knocked me back. Cleanup operations have begun, but if I know our handyman, I probably won’t be able to use my bedroom again until sometime in December or January.

The cause of the flood this time was another bad thing. The psychotic cousin is out of prison. We didn’t get a restraining order before he got out, so he was over here. He was paroled to his mother’s, but she wouldn’t let him in, so he came here and took a bath. None of us use the undersized tub, preferring the shower in the other bathroom. So the tub hadn’t been used in more than a year, and when he let the water out, it blew everything in the waste pipes into my bedroom. I’ll be going and picking up the restraining order paperwork on Friday, since today was spent dealing with my room and other stuff, and tomorrow is a school day. My original reason for not pushing for the restraining order earlier has been removed. My grandmother owns a broken-down old van that guzzles gas like you wouldn’t believe and has been most thoroughly trashed by my cousin. My mother planned to give it to the psycho, since it’s an expensive thing to keep around and in repair and the reasons it’s in such bad shape are all attributable to my psycho cousin anyway. Then we were going to get something smaller and more efficient, possibly a PT Cruiser since it has all the room we’d need for what hauling of things we sometimes have. I didn’t want to have the restraining order in place before this was done, because to voluntarily go and spend time in his presence to make sure the van was in his name would have violated the order and cancelled it. Violation of the last restraining order is the reason we don’t have one now after the last round of paperwork and court appearances. But now we aren’t going to give him the van. I could have gotten the damn restraining order in place a couple months ago, and now we have to deal with him until we can get through everything again. Dammit. At least he’s not living here. I suppose I should count my blessings on that score.

The psycho had called a week ago Tuesday to tell us he’d be out on Saturday and would be here by Monday. I’d missed my morning class because of a night of stress and a crying, projectile-vomiting cat. The call from John came as I was preparing to head for my night class. After the call, a roaring argument broke out with my irrational grandmother. It went on for an hour, which meant it ended just about half an hour before I would have to hit the road for class. We all three stormed off to different rooms to cool off. By then, I was so stressed and so enraged that I was beyond shaking. I couldn’t control it and looked like I had Parkinson’s. My whole body was swaying and jerking with Parkinson’s-like tremors. The idea of going to class made me start crying on top of all the shaking. I thought I should skip class, and that made me cry more. I could not stop any of it. I tried calling my best friend, because he has always been good at helping me to calm down. He didn’t answer, so I tried other things to calm down and stop the crying and shaking. I was finally starting to get it under control when he got my message and called me back. This time he was too angry at the situation to help me achieve a calmer or more rational point of view. I know, and knew then, that he was not angry at me. He was angry at the situation and pretty much everyone else involved with it, but not me. But I was still raw from the hour-long fight with my grandmother, highly emotional and not able to be very rational about my reactions. In spite of my knowledge that he wasn’t actually yelling at me but more like to me, on an emotional level it felt like his anger was directed at me. So I got angry, hurt, crying, and shaking all over again. I finally wound up not going to class, and was upset about that for the rest of the night.

Going to that class would have been a little difficult, but doable, without the sudden amping of my stress levels through the other events of the day. It was a painting class, another of those things I’m taking to rebuild lost skills after 20 years of not doing artwork, or only working on computer graphics. The instructor was new, hired just five days before the start of the semester. And I was having some pretty serious personality conflicts with her. I could swing from “I kinda like her, I think this is going to be good” to seeing red, metaphorical fangs coming out, and a desire to smack her repeatedly across the face – and back – in under five minutes. It went on like that all three hours of class every time since the start of the semester. I made sure she didn’t see those reactions, since that would not have helped anything. I guess I concealed it very well. I decided finally that I would be dropping the class because I didn’t need this stress on top of everything else. When I said I’d be dropping, she was very disappointed, showed me that I’d gotten solid A’s on every project, and told me she hoped I’d be able to take the class again with her another semester. At the end of the talk about the conflict I felt (which I explained as gently as I could) and a fair amount of ego-stroking from her about my obvious talent at painting, we shook hands and parted on much better terms than I’d have thought.

I was very conflicted about dropping the class. The first time I went to college, I’d take lots of classes and then drop all but one (or maybe all of them) by the end of the first month. This time, I’ve gone perhaps too far the other direction. Dropping a class for any reason got equated since that time with being an absolute loser. It rather took me by surprise that I’d be that upset at dropping the class. I guess all those years working jobs with crap bosses who’d treat their employees poorly gave me that. I am accustomed to hanging grimly on and giving my best work, no matter how unhappy I might be, because the end result is something I want. After those jobs, to give in on a course at a junior college felt wrong, a failure. It fell below a standard I didn’t really realize I was holding myself to until this came up. But I knew that dropping the class was still necessary for my mental health. I got to experience a high-stress breakdown last year from taking too many intensive courses while having nonstop stress and insanity at home, and it’s not an experience I intend to repeat. If the psycho cousin were still in prison so I wouldn’t have the almost constant preparedness for fight-or-flight both my mother and I live with when he’s out, plus the roaring fights with my grandmother about her treatment of us and her wish for John to live her no matter what he does to us, plus the sick cat problems, plus the floods of raw sewage into my bedroom, and on and on… well, I’d stick it out in this class. But it was pretty clear from the way things went last week that the personality conflict was just that one little extra helping of stress that could put me back in the same mental state as last year.

At least I know that the psycho will eventually get jailed again. He might even manage to commit his third felony before too long. We just need one more strike and then he’ll be gone for a good long time. Hell, I was halfway tempted to leave a checkbook sitting out where it could tempt him into repeating his check forgery, just so it’d happen sooner. The problem is that there’s a minimum amount he’d have to steal for it to move out of the possibility of pleading down to a misdemeanor, and I just don’t have that kind of money.

Maybe, since he’s living at his mother’s for now, he’ll be dumb enough to take her car without asking. That was his first felony conviction, grand theft auto, and proof that his mother has no problem with turning him in. I can hope, anwyway.