Suburb of Heaven

Haven't been talking about this with anyone but my sister (and the occasional venting to the husband), but we'll be back in DC really, really soon, because it seems that my mom's on-again, off-again romance with Dude I Have No Nickname For is permanently tripped to "on" and they plan to make the whole thing legal real soon now. In other words, I'm shopping for a Best Woman dress. And by "real soon now," I mean, "I'm buying plane tickets for a trip in about ten days."

My sister and I have probably done most of the :facepalm: that we have scheduled. From here on out, I think it's going to be a mix of Dignified Silence, Mordant Humor, and Stiff Upper Lips.

Frankly, my mom is nutty, and the guy isn't a horrible specimen of humanity but is kind of a pushy jerk, and comes complete with a family of more pushy jerks. And of course, mom refuses to do anything sensible like get her legal stuff in order before taking the plunge.

The plan is to snowbird, which is good, because apparently mom has just been diagnosed with a cold allergy (she gets hives if an air-conditioning vent is blowing on her, or if she touches or drinks anything too cold. It may be a sign of the family's tendency towards thyroid disease.) Winters in Florida are probably the better plan.

Anyway. The whole thing will likely affect my life very little, on the whole. But I wish she were marrying somebody we liked a little bit more.

I am tired of being the Calamity Jim and Calamity Jane Traveling Circus of Bad News, thanks. No, really. Even the small roadbumpy type stuff is really starting to wear.

I would really like to be able to change my LJ's playlist away from Woebegone: Greatest Hits of Woe and Tragedy and Yet More Woe, but damn. When I started to do our taxes on Saturday afternoon, I came across a W-2 from last year that I did not remember seeing. And I knew immediately that it meant trouble, I just didn't know how or when or in what form the trouble would come. Cue my opening our mailbox this morning to discover a perfectly polite notice from the IRS going, "You screwed up, you owe us money, have a nice day!" From Saturday to Monday - not a long time to have to wait for the shoe to drop.

If I hadn't had the warning on Saturday that something was in the wind, I would really been upset. Had kittens. Hit the ceiling. Had a cow, totally, dude. As it was, I saw the envelope, sighed heavily, and went to sit in the car to read it over and when I was done, I sighed again, put it in my purse, and drove back to work.

So tonight, I get to review our paperwork, and see if I did really botch things the way it looks like I did, and then figure out where we go from here. It's five hundred bucks. We didn't actually see a penny of our refund last year, since Bemo's student loans were still in default and they took it, but maybe we can work something out where if we're due a refund this year, they can take the money that way. Not sure. Am already tired just thinking about it.

Meanwhile, I feel like I have once again failed completely at this "adult" shit. And yet, I'm the one who continues to have to handle it. I'm feeling a bit resentful about that, and about the fact that if Bemo is too depressed/unmotivated/purely physically tired to go to the gym, I feel like I should stay home as well, since I'm already away a great deal what with working on the weekends. But it's gotten to the point where I need to either start insisting, or going without him, or something, because my activity at home when I'm not at the gym is cooking and baking, which is not the best thing to replace a trip to the gym with. In some ways, Bemo is doing better. But he's in a much deeper hole this time than I've ever experienced, so, you know, better is still pretty deep in that hole.

Anyway. The IRS and I continue to dance our dance of incompetence and finance. Feh to all of it.

I know I've been a little mom-heavy here in the ol' journal recently, but seriously, she is driving me and my sister up a collective tree. Last night I had a conversation with her that was less fraught than most (that is, she wasn't yelling incoherently) but in the same conversation she asserted that:

- She has no money and therefore no estate, and therefore no need to see an estate lawyer of financial planner before she marries
- She has plenty of money and therefore can spend gobs of it on a wedding if she wants to
- Spending money on a bus to ferry relatives from Virginia to Pennsylvania so they can come to the ceremony doesn't count as spending a lot of money, because it's a good idea!
- Her husband-to-be's plan of limiting the budget for the wedding to $3,000 is an excellent one.
- She doesn't intend to stick to that budget because it's far too small.
- She doesn't want to sell her house and move to Pennsylvania because it's colder there, and anyway she loves her house.
- Her husband-to-be wants to sell the house so they can live in the Pennsylvania countryside. How they will reconcile these two opposing desires, we have no idea. Cage match?
- My sister and I are "money-faced." (Apparently it sounds better in Tagalog.)
- Husband-to-be's family are mostly composed of immoral money-grubbers, but they won't be able to touch her money even if they get married. This despite having no actual idea what happens once they are married and he becomes...her heir? Closest next-of-kin? Automatically entitled to half the house and so could pass it on to his kids if mom dies first and then they force us to sell it so they can get their half? Which would go against mom's desire that we keep the house? We don't know. She doesn't know either, and doesn't want to ask.
- There is no difference between a wedding in Pennsylvania and a wedding in Virginia, because that's just silly.
- Getting married is about love, not money, therefore seeing an estate planner or financial adviser is a waste of money. (This from the woman who matter-of-factly calls herself a high-maintenance woman with ABSOLUTELY NO IRONY.)
- All of this makes her tired. Why do we want to make her tired?

My sister and I have no real expectation of an inheritance from mom. Our assumption all this time has been that the house would finance her retirement once she was older, and anything we inherited would be stuff like pieces of furniture and the Le Creuset pots we intend to fight over. We're not exactly money-grubbers, either of us. However, the last thing either of us want is some sort of protracted legal brangle where suddenly Husband-to-Be's six kids sue us over some part of mom's estate and end up forcing us to do things we don't want to do. And frankly, the only reason we have a bit of a dubious view of this guy's kids is because HE HAS TOLD US THEY ARE HORRIBLE PEOPLE. Seriously. He's the one telling us they're leeches, while at the same time feeding his martyr complex by bankrupting himself to give them money (apparently he put 26K on his credit cards to put an son-in-law through rehab, and then the guy went to jail as soon as he got out for doing...something, and now he's out of jail and babysitting the kids and OH MY GOD DO WE WANT TO BE INVOLVED IN THIS FAMILY'S DRAMA? DO WE?)

So. These are a few of the things my sister and I have been dealing with.

I haven't mentioned it, because it hasn't been as interesting a story as when she was dating the Wee Irish Man, but mom has been dating a new guy for about 8-9 months now. My sister and I don't like him as much, although he's not a horrible person or anything - his personality is just a little bit off-putting. However, between the two of us, we see only bad things to come in their relationship, both from his side and hers. Firstly, they don't seem to be communicating very well. Secondly, he's stubborn and pushy. Thirdly, they both want different things out of life. He's a "life is an adventure and we don't know what will come next and whee!" type, and my mom is a bit of a hypochondriac(ok, she's really and truly one) and likes her quiet routine and sometimes wants to just stay in bed all day and thinks adventure is a dirty word. Also mom loves considering herself a frail flower - she is the oldest 61-year-old in the world - and hates bustling while this guy is very much a bustle-around type. And also also, he seems to think he's St. Francis incarnate, and is full of good works and simple living, which is laudable but not when you're trying to impose that lifestyle on a woman who doesn't want it, at all.

Mostly, we wish my mom would just put the brakes on things. Instead, they're talking marriage, despite the huge red flags already mentioned. Sadly, she is apparently now on the path to marrying the guy (despite calling it quits on the relationship about five times now) and seems to be waiting for some external force - God, the Church, her kids - to be the ones to prevent her from going down this path if it's not the right choice. I phoned her up just now, and talked about it with her in a way that didn't make her defensive, and hopefully we'll be able to slow down the matrimony train.

And in other news, my father has just announced, in an aside in an email to my sister, that he's moving to Korea for good. This Wednesday. My brain is trying to make me feel that now is the time for regret - that I should have been more aggressive about trying to reconcile with him while he was in the US. But I'm not feeling that way. I'm feeling something, and I will poke at that feeling more later, but I think it's mostly just a vague regret that it's all turned out this way, and not guilt that I didn't fix it somehow. Which I suppose is improvement, because I will assume guilt for a wide range of things at the drop of a hat, most days.

So, uh...there's that, that's been happening. I will look at it this way - it's all fodder for the novel, right?

Not the whole bike, just the back wheel. $65-85 to replace. All because I was careless and didn't secure the back wheel like I do with the front wheel. Nobody to blame but myself - and the MOTHERFUCKERS WHO STOLE MY WHEEL.

My poor bike looked like a wounded gazelle this morning, lying limply against the porch, the chain dangling in the dirt.

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.

In the clutches of the insomnia fairy, sitting here at two in the morning tired but somehow unwilling to just go to bed. Packing has resulted in me trawling through my stash of keepsakes and mementos, which have been winnowed down every time we move but still take up a substantial space. The old class essays, which I cringe to read - apparently the idea of a spell-check and a final sweep to edit my work was foreign to me, even if I got a good grade. Oh, for an editor with a strong whip-hand to wrench my rambling prose into shape! My multiple journals, my scribblings, some full of pain, some full of happiness, so many of them incredibly gauche and trying so hard, I can hardly stand rereading them but I can't throw them away. Old photos, things cut out of magazines, a tidal wave of nostalgia in bits of paper. No wonder I collect old magazines. A note from a professor on my neatly typed travel journal from the second Italy trip, saying that my world-weariness at such a young age made him sad. Was I world-weary? I thought I was just being honest.

I'm living in a sea of boxes. Being sick meant that I spent too much time sitting on the sofa with my little netbook, and my right wrist is now aching because of it and I've dug up my old wrist brace. I spent too much money on more medications today. The new owner of the building has leaped into building improvements, so the parking lot was dug up and new concrete laid, and the upstairs apartment is being torn apart and redone so all we hear are drills and hammering most of the day.

I'm not happy, really, but I'm not unhappy. I'm just overloaded and out of balance. And going to go to bed, because that's probably what I need the most.

Left-side walking pneumonia. Sixty bucks for a week of some hot-shot antibiotic and an inhaler that is already making me trembly and spazzy (as expected, albuterol does this to me whenever I have to use it). A week of no gym. Another week of no aikido. Recheck on Thursday.

I am so incredibly pissed off right now.

Bemo is doing better. He has technically quit the job, but was told by the hiring and training people that "he was valuable enough to hire, he is valuable enough to keep on, even if they may need to put him in a different department." We will explore what that means when I get home.

The dude who works at the rental management company when we first got the apartment is being very helpful, assembling our papers for us so we have proof of our valid lease and valid pets. The one hesitation was that our newest cat hasn't been licensed by the county, so I am tending to that asap so that they can't point a finger at that. (That was mostly laziness on my part - they usually send you the forms after the first time your cat has been seen by a vet and Ratchet hasn't had to go yet. He's up to date on his rabies shots, and all.)

They have been sitting on our rent checks - last month's and this month's. I have the carbons to prove they were written. A friend suggested that they were holding them and then going to deposit them all at once, hoping they'll bounce and we can be cited for defaulting on the rent. If that is their plan, it will fail - the money is there in the account.

We are actively looking for a new place. I don't want to hang out and be passive-aggressived by a landlord even if we are in the right. What I hope to do is use the fact that we are in the right to make him give us another month, at least, to complete the move. I don't know about the back rent and the deposit - I am assuming they will try to weasel us out of the deposit.

My mom has said she'll help us with a deposit on a new place. I am very grateful for that. I'm very grateful for all of you internet friends, too, because the support has been very helpful.

Gods above and below, this is enough to make a saint smack his mother in the mouth.