Epiphany

This won’t be a long post, but I wanted to document the event somehow.   You see, a year ago I went to a wedding, and I wore a certain pair of pants.  These pants were cute and summery…and very rapidly didn’t fit me any longer.  Around January I tried to put them on and couldn’t get the zipper anywhere near zipped.

Now, two nights ago I tried again…and they fit!  As anyone who’s ever dieted knows, seeing the little numbers on the scale go down is all well and good, but fitting into clothes that were too small is awesome!  They were still a bit tight to wear around, since the sort of khaki material doesn’t look good snug, but if things keep going the way they currently are then I’ll be able to wear them again!

To put this in perspective, as far as I remember I’ve ever actually gotten too fat to fit into something and then later been able to wear it again.  Generally the weight o’ meter just goes up, either quickly or slowly, so to see it edging downward at about the same pace is, as they say in those credit card commercials, priceless.

…but something happened Friday that brought all that type of thing back to mind again.  It’s a short story but I wanted to write about it so I wouldn’t forget it.  Basically the house I now live in is in the same town as the house where I lived last year, just a few miles away.  Occasionally when I lived at the other house, when I would drive down a certain nearby road in a certain direction, I would have sort of an odd experience.  If you think about it, when you’re driving and you look in the rearview mirror it’s usually only for a moment before you turn your eyes back to the road.  Well on this particular street I would glance up in the rearview and think I saw a car behind me, but when I stopped at the stop sign and looked again, there was nothing.  This happened to me quite a few times, but never when I was actively thinking about it.  I could never think exactly what type of car it had been, although I always got the impression of a truck, but it happened often enough for me to look around and make sure there wasn’t a certain car parked at a bend in the road or some other simple explanation.

Now, I’d forgotten all about this since we moved, until friday when I was taking the back roads home from the store.  I was driving down that same road, my mind completely on something else…and it happened again.  The glimpse of something in my rearview but when I looked it was gone.  This time I got the distinct impression of a white truck, but there were no other cars on the road at all.  Very odd, and yet I never found it scary, just kind of neat and random.  Maybe it’s my brain, maybe it’s an optical illusion, maybe it’s a combination of factors…but it’s still pretty cool.

Well, I’m stealing another MeMe from Metalmom.  Then again, she sort of left the tag open so it’s not really stealing…

Anyway *ahem*.  Here’s de rules, in case anyone by chance actually reads this and wants to be tagged.  (The operative bit being if anyone is actually reading this.)

1.  The rules of the game get posted at the beginning of the post.

2.  Each player answers the questions about themselves in their post.

3.  At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

4.  Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

1. What were you doing ten years ago?  Wow, ten years ago I was…seventeen.  I was finishing up my junior year of high school and also my first year of community college, due to a neat program called Running Start that let me leave the hell that was my high school and paid for community college, which counted for both kinds of credit.  I did this full time, which basically meant that I went to school three hours a day instead of seven, and when I graduated a year later I also had an Associate’s degree and was able to enter 4-year college as a junior.  Neat stuff.
2. What are five things on your list to do today?  Goodness, I’m not usually that organized.  Um…I have a bunch of work stuff to get done, including getting a list of my new accounts and beginning the arduous and boring task of changing each and every one over to a new kind of application (in other words, re-entering every tiny bit of info, woo).  Second, I plan to stick to my diet and NOT go buy lunch somewhere but stay here and have boring oatmeal, woo.  Third, I plan to exercise when I get home.  Fourth, tonight I have to do laundry to make sure I have something to wear tomorrow.  Fifth is set my alarm half an hour early because tomorrow I have to get up early and go to the newest office for the agency we just bought so I can learn about the new accounts we got.
3. What snacks do you enjoy?  Jeeze, easier to say which snacks I don’t enjoy (see above re: diet).  I don’t like pretzels.  I do like…cookies, cheeze-it type crackers, chips, etc.
4. What would you do if you were a billionaire?  I would probably go broke giving people stuff.  I would give money to charity.  I would have a nice house with a pool and a stable and horses.  I would buy all my online peeps nice computers.  I would take the time to write a book, even if it sucked.  I would have a kickass car and I would drive it fast and get tickets because I could afford to pay them.  I would make sure all my family and friends were taken care of, and probably buy them all nice cars.  I would have an entire LIBRARY of books, and a hammock to sit in while I read them.
5. What are three of your bad habits?  I talk to much, and tend to interrupt and/or talk over people without realizing it.  I’m not good at eye contact thanks to being painfully shy and often give the wrong impression because of it.  Also, I procrastinate.
6. What are five places you’ve lived?  Wow um, I may have five total.  I haven’t moved a lot.  I lived in a small town in Washington until I was five, then another until I was eighteen.  After that I lived at college in Seattle, then another small town north of Seattle.  Then back south again in an apartment, then the town I live in now in another house, and finally where I’m at now.  That’s more than five…but oh well.
7. What are five jobs you’ve had?  I’ve been a receptionist/typist at a doctor’s office.  I’ve been the copy editor for a college yearbook.  I worked at a supermarket for just under a month.  I worked at a department store in high school and college.  I’ve been the assistant to a horse trainer.
8. How did you name your blog?  Well I’ve gone by Epiphany for a while, internet-wise, and sarcasm for me is a way of life, so there you go.

Alright and now for the taggin’s.  There aren’t many blogs I read on a regular basis and one already did this so I’m going with four:

Finn

Shiny

Athena

Abs

Tadaaaaa!  Y’all are tagged, yo!

*blink*  I have no idea where that came from…

I haven’t done one in a while, but I decided to do one today.

I use this timer…because it’s purty.  I can’t find anyone else who’s done one today so no linkies there.  Here goes.

***BEGIN FREEWRITE***

So…I’m scared.  Well, I guess nervous is a more accurate term.  I’m at work, and thinking about work stuff basically.  The bottom line is that about eight months ago I was promoted to a job that requires much better organizational skills, and I’ve been having a hard time keeping up.  Now next week I’m shifting to a new set of accounts, which will come with its own complications…but it also means I’m going to be closely watched.  My last review wasn’t quite stellar, so I know I have to basically work my ass off to make sure I keep up with this new book of business.

I have to 100% stop being on the internet for not-job-related things AT ALL unless it’s at lunch (like now).  I’m basically an addict, and whereas people often use that as a cute term, with me it’s pretty true.  It got in the way of my last job, and I’m determined not to let that happen again.  I won’t let myself get behind because I was posting some message board or surfing blogs.

So I’m putting that resolution here, I guess, in hopes that I’ll stick to it.  I really don’t have a choice, at this point, unless I want to end up unemployed again.

Not an option.

That said…wish me luck.  I’m embarking on a whole new experience here, servicing accounts which are being brought into our agency through another agency we’re incorporating.  They’re all horse-related, yay, which is why I was the one they picked to put on it.  Otherwise it would never have happened, because I’m the newest customer service rep in the department.

A lot is riding on this, and I so desperately want my manager to think that the faith she’s placed in me is well-founded.  I really really like it here, and I want to do well, succeed…and basically excell at my job.  I want to make a place for myself, make myself indespensable.  I know I can do it, I just have to put in the work.

So…here goes.

***END FREEWRITE***

Perfect timing

This entry will be part book review and part anecdote.  I recently read a book by Athena called “Ghosts of Seattle.”  Unlike many ‘non fiction’ books of its kind, it wasn’t full of psychics wandering around in houses and getting vague feelings, sensationalist stories meant more to thrill than to educate, or any of the other things you find in most ghost-themed books.  It was more a collection of stories and anecdotes about Seattle, some of which had been passed down for several generations but none of which were the ‘campfire’ type that just try to get a scare out of the reader.

I really enjoyed the tone of the book, as well as the historical information that was interspersed with the ghost stories.  I’m somewhere in the middle myself when it comes to belief…I don’t like it when people insist that everything has a scientific explanation, but I also don’t like people who assume every speck of dust in a photograph is evidence of a spirit’s presence.  That said, I’d like to relate my own experience when it comes to ghosts, hauntings, and other unexplainable incidents.

Hauntings

When I was five years old my family moved out of our single-wide trailer and into an old farm house, one with more room for our growing family (I was about to get a baby sister) and with a better school system.  It also had…well, ghosts.  The interesting thing is that during the time we lived in the house, almost thirteen years, we never really discussed the slightly odd goings on.  I suppose each one of us just thought it was our imagination, or maybe that if we talked about things they would get worse.

Now don’t get me wrong, I loved my house.  It was old but big, so that I never had to share a bedroom, and always had the opportunity to be alone if I wanted to.  The house had started out in the 1930’s as a one-story farmhouse with an attic and a cellar, a home built by a man who worked at a sawmill and used to bring home lumber from work to add on to his house.  However, the adding on didn’t stop there.  At some point the kitchen was built out to create a sort of L-shape, the cellar was dug out to create a basement/bottom floor (the downhill side had normal windows and the uphill side had none, side windows getting higher in the walls in the uphill rooms), and the attic was also changed so that there was an entire floor up there.  In fact, the upstairs was a fully functioning unit with its own kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms where my childhood best friend and his family lived.

Coincidentally, it was this family who was ‘blamed’ for my first…experience.  It’s a simple one, really, but it’s my earliest memory of something ‘odd’ in our house.  It was a weekend and I was sleeping late, probably six or seven years old.  I woke to a loud bang, loud enough that it woke me instantly, and startled me quite a bit.  I must have yelled because I remember my mother coming in to ask what was wrong.  When I told her, she suggested that maybe it was the upstairs neighbors who had made the noise, that they could have dropped something or even banged the lid of a toilet.  But even at that young age I somehow knew that wasn’t the answer.  I still don’t know what that noise might have been.  Maybe it was a car backfiring or something else with a simple explanation…but if that’s the case, why didn’t my mother hear the noise herself?

Also when I was young, like many kids I was afraid of the dark.  My room was in the bottom floor and the bathroom was upstairs, so in order to get to it I had to go into the rec room and up the stairs, leaving the dark room behind me.  One night my mother left the light in the rec room off and I stood in my room and screamed, terrified of going out into that room at night.  Also, when going up the stairs I would inevitably start out walking, then end up running as I reached the last few steps and finally spinning around when I reached the landing to look behind me, as if I was afraid someone was chasing me.

That feeling never went away.  Until the time I was eighteen and went off to college, I was rarely able to go up those stairs without breaking into a run.  I felt…chased.  It was as if someone or something was in the basement and didn’t want me to be there, something very angry and hostile.  Now, if it had only been me I might have written this off, but it wasn’t.  After we moved out of the house, the family went out to dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant and started talking about the house.  Oddly enough it was the first time our entire family had had such a discussion, though my mother and I had talked about some of our house’s oddities one night a few years earlier.  During this dinner my mother was telling us about some of her experiences, and my father said “All I ever got was like the heebie jeebies.  You know?”  I went still, trying not to let on that I knew exactly what he meant, and very carefully phrased my question.

“Where?  I mean…where in the house did you get that feeling?”

“Oh, on the lower staircase.”

Needless to say, I was stunned.  I’d never told either of my parents about that particular problem.  Ever.  I’d always just thought it was my imagination, a holdover from being a kid and being afraid of the dark room behind me and having the light on the stairs cast my shadow on the steps below.  Apparently I’d been wrong all this time.  My mother even talked about one day when they’d still been moving things from the trailer to the new house, and her parents had come by.  She’d been showing them the house and opened the door to the downstairs only to find that the stairs light was out.  It was past dusk and so it was dark downstairs, and my mother absolutely refused to go downstairs.  Now, my mother isn’t the type to be afraid of…well, anything, but she absolutely wouldn’t go down those stairs in the dark.

At this same family dinner, my mother relayed quite a few other interesting happenings.  I had known my mother was an insomniac, but what I hadn’t realized was that often at night she was woken by “anxious, worried voices” that seemed to fade as she woke.  She would then go around the house, checking to make sure everything was secure and that my sister and I were alright.  She also talked about something I remembered from my own perspective.

When we moved in, as I said before, I was quite young and my bedroom was in the bottom floor of the house.  Often I would be playing in my room and hear my mother calling me.  I would run upstairs and into the kitchen (a large room, big enough to hold a full-sized dining table as well as other furniture, that was at the center of the house) and ask her what she wanted…at which point she would say she hadn’t called me.  When I thought about it, I could never actually remember hearing her voice call my name.  I couldn’t recall the tone or the pitch or where the voice had sounded like it was coming from, either in the kitchen or someplace else upstairs.  I was too young to realize how much this must have bothered my mother at the time, and as I got older it just stopped happening.

The other incidents in the house centered around a downstairs bedroom and a bedroom on the middle floor.  The downstairs bedroom was my parents’ when we first moved in, before the family on the top floor moved out and we shifted our bedrooms up there, renting out the downstairs for a time before gradually taking over the entire house.  This downstairs room was…well, creepy.  My high school best friend didn’t like it at all, and my mother never slept well when that was the bedroom.  She said she’d be woken up, startled awake but unable to find a reason for it.  She often felt as if someone or something was angry with her, or confused and just lashing out at anyone nearby.

Unfortunately, I got the chance to experience this feeling myself one night during a time when my bedroom was located on the middle floor.  The room had been a playroom, had housed my aunt and uncle for a time, had been an office, and had even been a storage room for all our horse show supplies.  For a time when I was around fifteen to sixteen, it was my bedroom.  One night I woke up terrified…I literally sat up in bed feeling as if someone was about to get me, expecting to see someone in my room…but no one was there.  Now, to be fair I should note that I often suffer from “night terrors”, which don’t always involve fear but often mean that I’ll wake up confused or disoriented for a while.  However, when I brought the above incident up to my mother she told me that when she’d used that room as a bedroom after she’d had my sister by cesarean and wasn’t able to climb stairs, she’d often woken to bright flashes of light.  Also, I suffered from severe insomnia during the entire time I slept in that room.  Whether it was just hormones, my body adjusting from being a child to being an adult, oor something else, I’ll never know.

So that’s my experience growing up in a haunted house.  Some of it is backed up by the other members of my family, all except my sister who never had any problems and in fact loved the house so much she still misses it ten years later.  It doesn’t change the fact that I loved the house, and I loved growing up there…what it does mean is that my last experience in the house was more eerie than heartwarming. 

We’d come back to get the pool table in the basement, the last item to be moved out because it too three full-grown men to do so, and I wanted to take the opportunity to sort of ’say goodbye’ to my house. I’d been away at college for most of the moving process so I hadn’t been back since things were truly empty.  I walked up to the middle floor, peeked up the stairs to the top floor then walked around to the sitting room at the front of the house.  It was empty, a wide expanse of bare linoleum giving way to old hard wood floors where the dining room met the living room, the only decoration a vacuum sitting in the middle.

And then it happened.  I suddenly got those ‘heebie jeebies’ my dad had been talking about, a feeling of just plain unwelcome that hit me so hard I abruptly turned on my heel, an eighteen year old girl (technically a woman, though looking back I’m not sure I would count myself as such just yet) and ran for the stairs to rejoin the rest of the group.  I never got to say goodbye, never walked through the house taking one last look at rooms I’d spent most of my life in.  Instead, I got the message loud and clear…we don’t want you here.  And so I went, and although I’ve often driven up that dead-end street to look at the house I grew up in, I haven’t been inside since that night.

I often wonder if the people who now live in that house ever have any odd experiences, if they hear someone call their name and go find them only to be told that they weren’t called after all, if they wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of worried, anxious voices…or if they ever get that chill up the back of their neck when they’re walking up the stairs.

Alright, so this post is going to need a bit of a preface.  The thing is, I spend a lot of time online.  Most of this time is spent in online roleplaying.  No, I don’t mean WoW or any of those games, I mean sites where you create a character and post sections of a story from that character’s point of view.  It’s basically it’s own subculture, with all sorts of people being involved, and most times it’s great fun.

I’ve got one site that I run, and on that site I have two people who don’t get along with each other.  They just don’t, which is fine because they try not to let it get in the way of the writing.  One I’ve known for a while, maybe three years (we’ll just use the initial U), and one for more like a year (T).

Now, about a month ago, maybe less, there was a disagreement between them about the interpretation of a certain post.  They disagreed on how something would work, kind of a ‘my character could beat up your character’ type argument.  By the time I got on the computer that night, U had taken down his post entirely.  I was disappointed about this because I was interested in playing against the character he’d made.  He’s a good writer, and i like writing with him.  But he’d taken it down and so I thought that meant he didn’t want to deal with the problem and had chosen to drop it.

Since then he’s made a habit of making snotty remarks in conversations (usually where all of us are present, including T).  Now I’m a peacemaker by nature, so I tend to gloss over that kind of thing before it turns into a fight.

Apparently I was wrong.

See, what I was supposed to do was hunt U down and ask “Gee, why are you being a dick?  What’s the matter?  Why did you take your post down.  How did that make you feel?”  At least according to the huge, rambling email I got last night from U.  It was ranting and attacking and I got very upset over it.

When I talked to him, he basically said “Well I’m sorry you got your feelings hurt but it had to be said.”  Which to me…not an apology.  I told him that the way he phrased the email made sure that my emotional reaction would overshadow the actual message, and he basically said ‘no that’s not true’, and said that if that was the case it was my fault for getting over-emotional.

So I guess what this whole long post is trying to ask is, was it wrong for me to expect him to be an adult and bring his problem to me if he had one?  Am I a bad friend for getting annoyed when he made snide comments instead of asking him what was wrong?  I feel totally blindsided by the anger in the email he sent me, and the way he’s basically told me that I’m not a good friend for having ‘missed the signals’ or whatever.

I’m not the most well-versed in relationships, friendships, etc…but any advice or comments would be welcome because I’m totally out at sea here.

So as I may have previously stated, I currently live with my fiance and his dad.  The reasons for this are many, chief among them being that the fiance’s dad can’t really live on his own.  He doesn’t require care, exactly, but there are some things he can’t do for himself, and he has enough health issues that his living alone just isn’t going to happen.

So this week, FD is in California visiting my fiance’s older sister and all her family.  He figures he might not be healthy enough to make the trip much longer so he went now, plus it helps that she bought him a ticket.  Anyway this basically means that for two weeks it’s just me and the fiance in the house.

Whee!

Anyway he just left Sunday so really it’s been a day or so of empty houseness, and Monday he had friends over and I wasn’t feeling well, what with the coughing. 

I got home yesterday, however, and…he was cooking dinner.  Yummy dinner.  And the table was set (we hardly ever eat at the table, we’re heathens).  And a lot of cleaning had been done that I haven’t gotten done thanks to being sick.  And there was candlelight.  And music.

It was just totally, beyond sweet.  We had a nice dinner together and watched a movie, just basically snuggled and spent some time together.  It was very nice.  I’m thinking we need to start doing something like that once a week or so, even if we have to go out somewhere to do it, because we need more time just to us. 

Today, in spite of being awake late because of coughing, I actually feel pretty recharged.  Whee

Alright so this Friday Freewrite is going to be something of a rant.  Bear with me.

***Freewrite on***

So, when I come to work in the morning, once I get off the freeway I take a somewhat indirect route thanks to yicky city traffic.  Well, not big city…but anyway.

Basically it’s Right from the off ramp, Left at the second light, Right at the next light, through the light after that, turn Left…through the two stop signs and I’m home free.

This morning I took this same route, and as often happens there was the same car in front of me the entire way.  We got a little jammed up on the on ramp with a bunch of other cars but I thought nothing of it.  Anyway we get to the second stop sign, where you have to wait for cross traffic…and she stops.

And doesn’t move.

For like…nearly a minute.  So I’m looking around, I see no traffic…I am puzzled.  Do I honk my horn or wave?  No, not quite yet.

Then she gets out of her car.  I’m thinking, well maybe she’s got a malfunction and needs help or something with her giant, brand new, shiny black SUV that she was barely able to climb down out of.

Nope.

I missed the first bit because she wasn’t very loud and my radio was on.  I did, however, turn it down in time to hear “you’ve been like, almost hitting me since the freeway, but they have your license plate number now so you’d better stop it.”

W…TF?

I look at her, and her cell phone, and just…am kind of puzzled as she climbs back into her car and drives away.  I replay the drive in my head.  I wasn’t anxious, not late for work, not angry, she wasn’t driving too slow, and I’m fairly certain I wasn’t tailgating her.  I try not to do that, having been rear-ended in the past.

I honestly have no idea what bug crawled up her butt, but wow.  If she’d seen half the idiotic drivers I’ve had behind and in front of me on that road, she’d have probably had a coronary right there and fallen right out of her gigantically oversized, ostentatious car.

I wonder what kind o…

***Freewrite off***

Well :P  I may have to figure out what kind of car it was just to illustrate my point.  *heads for google*

Eh, no idea.  It had funny bulbous tail lights that were weird, I remember noticing.

Aaaanyway, rant over for now.  Whee.

Everyone has their own little pet peeves, that one thing that just drives you over the edge, that always manages to get to you no matter how you try to keep your cool.  For me, one of these is the phrase ‘you people’.  Having worked for both a doctor’s office and insurance agencies, I’ve been called this twice that I can remember.

I just wrote out the boring specifics but then deleted them when I realized that they don’t matter.  What matters is that the term ‘you people’ is such a dismissive thing, and defensive as well.  It demonstrates an ‘us versus them’ mentality, and alienates whoever you’re talking to. 

I am not a ‘you people’, I’m a me, an I…whether or not I’m part of the group you’re upset with, I’m an individual and I deserve to be treated like one.  Lumping people together is how bigotry starts, and I suppose at the root of it that’s why this particular phrase aggravates me so much.

*ahem* Rant over…for now.

So I missed last week, but here I am again with the best of intentions.  I’m too lazy to put a whole list up of everyone now involved, but I know of at least two people who’ve actually read mine so I’ll link to the one who’s done his already.

 Shiny’s Takeout

Always entertaining and educational, even on Friday

***BEGIN FREEWRITE***

Whoo boy, so this week has been kind of cruddy.  Most of the cruddiness is work-related, to do with massive system failures and people getting fired.  Well, one people anyway.

Other than that things aren’t too bad.  I’m still working on the whole weight-loss thing, jump-started by the fact that when I was sick for a week I lost like three pounds.  Not my preferred method of weight loss but I’ll take what I can get.  I’ve decided to do the Slim-Fast thing again, which has worked for me before in the deep, dark past. 

I started exercising again, because thankfully I’ve recovered from the flu bug thing that I had enough to actually have the energy for it again.  I’ve gone backwards a bit, not surprisingly, but thankfully going through my usual half hour workout wasn’t as difficult as I was afraid it might be.  It only takes about two weeks for muscles to begin to atrophy, after all.

My goal at this point is to go to my next doctor’s appointment in a couple of months and be able to see some actual results.  I do have a scale at home, but using it is a matter of doing some interesting math.  Like…I’m pretty sure it’s about five pounds off, but then sometimes it zeroes out above or below zero (meaning hte little indicator swings below or above the zero by a pound or so) and then I try to add that in there too.

According to my own scale, since the first time I weighed myself on it I’ve lost at least three pounds, maybe more.  I’m eager to go to the doctor’s office where the scale is more accurate and see what I really weigh now.  For the first time in a long while, I’m actually managing to stick with the diet and exercise, and not lose my motivation.  Having it be a health issue is entirely different, and I’m looking at the fact that I’ll be able to buy smaller clothes as just a bonus.

***FREEWRITE OFF***

So that was fun.  Five minutes went by quickly that time.  I’m off lunch now so it’s back to work.  I’m not usually a TGIF type person but seriously, yay for Friday.