Suburb of Heaven

Happy about the day off tomorrow, but I'm not actually happy. Actually, at the moment I'm suffused with an unfocused rage. It would be self-destructive if, well, I were a self-destructive type, but all that's happening right now is a lot of surly staring at things. I want to be somewhere else, doing something else, alone. I want to be out from inside my own skin.

If only I could do something useful with all this energy, even if it's negative.

Driving back from the gym, I needed to get into the right lane to make a turn. Usually a few cars peel off into the Target parking lot, but none did and I figured I wouldn't be able to make the turn. But I was able to speed up and pull into a gap left by a battered pickup truck which had fallen back, and did it without anybody having to slam on brakes. I'd say it was a typical aggressive east-coast driver move, except I don't think it would rate on that scale because I wasn't legitimately cutting anybody off. There was a big gap, I could take it, so I took it. While we're sitting to make the right turn, behind a car that's ahead of me, I hear a commotion...male voices yelling behind me. I'm confused - is this directed at me? Somebody in an adjacent car?

We make the turn, the pickup is behind us and pulls out and around to pass us. And then, again from behind us, comes a white sedan and a young feral manchild is leaning out of the window, calling me a bitch, screaming incoherently, pulling up past me to pull level with the pickup but still making sure that he's facing me to call me things.

I ended up pulling out onto a side street so we wouldn't be caught next to them at the next stoplight. And I am still completely baffled by the whole thing. Am I a bitch because I dared to pass the dude in the pickup truck, causing his buddies in the white car to defend his honor? Is it a Nebraska thing to be outraged at my little display of ever-so-mild assertive driving? Was he just drunk and looking for a target?

I hate ugliness and feeling threatened like that. I also hate that I don't even understand why it happened.

The support group was ok, although there were only three other people in attendance, plus the person leading the group. I got to talk a little bit and cry a little bit more than that, and will probably show up next week, although I don't know that it all was helpful, exactly. What it was, I'm not certain.

There was an elderly couple dealing with their daughter, who has something along the schizophrenic line, where she believes that she is the only well one in a world of sick, abusive people who infect her carpets with gas that leaks out if she turns the heat on, so she is sitting in an apartment with no heat in this frigid weather. Also, she refuses to take any medication because she is not sick. Her mom and dad are concerned that as belligerent as she is, she will never be allowed to stay in a group home (she's been evicted from several), but she obviously has trouble living alone in her own apartment (...she's been evicted from several), so what will she do once they're dead? Heartbreaking.

The other guy was, I dunno. Honestly, the things he described that he's witnessing in his wife sound much more to me like early-stage Alzheimer's than the dissociative identity disorder that he firmly believes she has - I hope they have a good doctor who screens for that. I suggested it and the therapist leading the group agreed that it was a definite possibility, so I wasn't completely off-base with my suspicion. And god knows which diagnosis would be worse.

The therapist herself was youngish, and helpful enough, although occasionally muddled in her explanations. She mentioned that the uni I work for has a big-deal specialist in anxiety disorders, so it might be worth it taking Bemo there specifically for anxiety stuff while working on his depression there at the crisis care center. She also expressed some deep suspicion about the utility of Xanax, which I'm interested in since I think my mother's side of the family must be keeping them in business. In her mind, therapy and therapy alone is the most successful solution to anxiety disorders, and she says she suffered from panic issues until recently, and has successfully overcome them this way.

I was also sad to learn (although not surprised - I had an inkling) that the governor of Nebraska has done a lot of slash and burning to the mental health services budget. Apparently people who need long-term care are really going to be underserved, and a lot of useful programs will be getting cut. It's easy to cut back on mental health programs until somebody shoots up a school, and then people want to know why the person wasn't diagnosed and helped and given therapy and medicine and carefully shepherded by psychiatrists until they were better, and it's usually because there's no infrastructure to get it done...not enough money, not enough trained people, not enough interest. The short-term hospitalization that Bemo is using right now seems to be quite good; I'm grieved that people who need even more intense long-term care will have a hard time getting it because of the cuts.

You know, over the past many years, I've lived in a lot of apartments. I've finally come to the conclusion that it's really damn difficult to predict whether or not your experience with a rental agency or apartment complex will be a positive one, a neutral one, or a wildly negative one. Our apartment complex in Alexandria was, for us, great. A friend of mine moved in two floors above us and had a less-than-stellar experience. On the advice of a co-worker, we moved into the Chantilly apartment - same complex she lived in at the time. She had no problems with them - we had a carnival of bad experiences and still refer to the place as Amityville. We had, more or less, a good relationship with our current leasing company here in Lincoln (rec'd to us by a person who had also had a good experience with them) - to the point that, when we were booted out of our first place, we sought out another building managed by them. But I've just recently been told a couple of horror stories by people who had profoundly negative experiences with the same company.

This musing brought to you by the fact that we just had our walk-through for our old apartment, and we could tell already that the guy was going to be a genuine, class-A dick about some things that truly were there when we moved in. The ledge of the window is very worn and gouged in long parallel rows along the grain, and he clearly intimated that our cats were somehow responsible. Perhaps if we were keeping a lynx, or several small cougars, that might happen. We're crossing our fingers that we wrote down the wear on our initial walk-through form, but we might have made a $300 mistake by not noting it down, since we might have mentally written it off as wear and tear on an apartment that's forty or fifty years old that we didn't need to specifically write down, just like we didn't write down that the cabinets were kinda janky - usable, but janky.

We have to find our copy of the walk-through form from when we moved in, It's around somewhere, I just have to unearth it. But we can just tell this guy is going to do his best to not have to return our deposit, and I don't know if I have the wherewithal right now to take him to small claims court, or whatever would have to happen.

I hate this sort of petty bullshit. I know homeownership brings its own unique sets of problems and issues, but right now, I'd trade.