hippybngstockng | 2003 can eat my shorts...

I’ve been reading a lot of people’s posts about their year in review.

I feel the sadness and grief of people who’ve lost ones they love.
I feel the loss and frustration of car accidents and other forms of destruction and other deep financial trauma.
I feel the burden and uncertainty of illness.
I feel the emptiness at the end of relationships, and the exhilaration at the beginning of new ones.
I feel the excitement and anticipation of childbirth and watching children grow.
I feel the creative release of new works being revealed.
I feel truly happy for people who have good things happen to them.

I read all this and I feel like I can’t talk about my year because it means I have to talk about 2002, and about 2001. My grandma always told me if you can’t say something nice you shouldn’t say anything at all…

Many people talk about how horrible Mr. W. Bush was and is, and what September 11th did to the country.

I am one of those people that all that stuff happened to. I lost no one personally on 9/11 but it set in motion a chain of events that changed every aspect of our lives. It’s taken until now, nearly almost 2004 to fix it, so it makes me feel like anything I say isn’t nice.

Months before 9/11, I watched my poor husband as he exited his company for the last time carrying a pitiful box of his measly possessions for the second time in so many months.

I watched him get up every day with the baby and I and spend his entire day looking for work, anywhere, any work.

I watched the morning the planes crashed into the buildings I had gone to visit religiously every year as a child, always pressing my head against the glass, peering down on the people the size of ants weaving around below. I thought of my grandfather who helped build the Empire State building, and what he would have felt. He would have been speechless.

I waited patiently and tried not to lose faith for months.

As we didn’t have the money to buy gifts, I used wrapping paper and ribbon I had lying around and I wrapped our groceries as Christmas presents so our tree wouldn’t seem so bare. This is how I began 2002.

We put our house on the market after that and faced the reality that we had little more choice as our unemployment was due to end soon. I waited for miracles, and when none came I watched all of my belongings get crammed into a 10X15 storage unit that cost little more than $125 per month and I put my family in a moving van.

In hindsight at this point I almost wished we had gone full blown statistic and gone for government assisted housing, but since I believe that if you can avoid using the system for support that you should, we moved in with my mother instead.

I’m not going to go into what a bad decision that was because it’s horrendously complex and boring for anyone who doesn’t know my mother or I personally. Rehashes are for pussies.

Suffice it to say it gave me a lot of time to think about choices. I can’t make a single choice anymore without thinking and fearing what it will do to me later on. What shirt I buy today could make a lot of difference in whether I can afford to buy milk later on. I’ve sort of given up feeling like it’s within my power at all to control both the choices and the outcome anymore. This is the point where so many people say they see god and find Christ and whatnot, and those people would continue to not be me…

After a while it seemed like we would be there with my mom forever. There was little hope of any change, especially not in Ohio. A lot of TV shows covered the phenomenon of our generation returning to live with relatives during times of financial stress and made it look like and almost sentimental and romantic solution. Those reporters have never met my mom. I love my mom, but she has this nature that could bring Kathy Lee Gifford down.

I used to make the jokes about living in the car, but they weren’t really jokes. I know how close we came to being some of those people. I felt ungrateful in my misery. I felt unworthy of the fortune bestowed upon me. I was lucky that it was my choice to be inside and warm and well fed and bathed. I had a television to watch, I had whatever I wanted except happiness, but I had so much more than so many people in my same situation, happiness shouldn’t have meant so much to me. Wanting to be happy felt greedy. But I discovered that happiness in some form is really hard to live without. This was the way I began 2003

If things hadn’t ended soon there would have been some changes either way, and I am sure they would have proven ugly and very sad.

But even as things are now they are still ugly and sad. We have debt that our original plans would have (and should have) paid off 2 years ago, plus more, with interest. We have a car in need of more work than its actual value that if we sold we would have to pay a duty also likely equal to the actual ticket value of the car. And it’s the only car we have and we need it. I am sure our credit rating would make even the kindliest banker cringe.

And I only have one person to thank for all this chaos and nonsense, and we all know his name and I will not mention that shrub-man again. When I think about him I think ugly thoughts that would likely have me unable to cross the border without a complete cavity search for a long long time…

But it’s only because I am a statistic.

I keep telling myself that it’s okay now, and it is, we will be okay now. But it’s only going to be okay because I’ve changed. I have changed from living in the moment to living for tomorrow and for myself and my own. If I don’t live for tomorrow then there won’t be stuff there for the next time some ass hole comes along and screws with me because it’s in his financial best interest to do so. I am vicious in this respect and I take no prisoners. I will not haggle and I will not take your shit unless you show me some identification…

It’s hard to look back now, now that I am safely out of all that, safely supporting my amply employed husband. It’s hard to rebuild my life, barely being able to remember what it was all like. I can’t remember being a home maker in this way, and I can’t find my damn frying pans. I feel weak. I feel compromised.

I feel like the fear of it happening again is standing between me and feeling settled in. There’s very little reason it would happen again with proper precautions and basic reparations of various things. But when you’ve been made into a statistic once so easily before it’s not hard to envisage all kinds of terror being brought upon your house. All choices seem suspect, nothing seems worth settling into since there’s little chance of any permanence in today’s society. There just isn’t and no one can tell me there is. You can have the best job in the world and still wake up tomorrow out on your sorry ass.

And I have 2002 and 2003 to thank for that feeling. There are a billion tiny lessons that link all together in a terribly complex ways to make me feel like it was terribly educational but it can all still go suck my ass. I would have rather read those lessons in a magazine like the other 60% than had it so prettily delivered to me in a big stinky pile of shit. In the long run I know it shouldn’t mean so much to me because through it all I got to keep my health and my family including my pets, and I didn’t lose anything more than a building, a moldy damp dark building in the middle of nowhere that no one would ever visit despite the fact that we had a hot tub. It shouldn’t mean anything to me but I’m sorry, it does.

If this was one of those “no one to blame but ourselves” things it would be different I imagine, but for once I can look around and point at at least four people in the world who had a hand in effectively trying to ruin and therefore end our lives. All but one of them doesn’t even know us personally. And if I live a hundred years I’ll never be able to do anything about them, or say anything to them about what they did to me, and how I feel about it.

And for me that sucks. When someone hurts me I need to be able to look them in the eye and say, “Bite my hairy ass.” But in this case if I do that I’d likely go to jail. If I speak up about what I believe was done to me, I’m not a good American. And I also don’t have the time or the energy to waste on them anymore, they are no longer part of taking care of me, and what’s mine. Either way I get forced to take their provided solution no matter how equally hard I find that to swallow. No one outside of this continent had any hand in what happened to me, that’s for sure. My problem started right in the bloody secure homeland. I don’t see how anything we are doing now is supposed to help me, or anyone else who was hurt by 9/11 in any way.

But I have to move on. I need to go forward without looking back. But I can’t take a single step without thinking about it. I will never feel secure in any homeland anymore it seems, not until we have some protections in place. I never wanted to be this brutally ruled by the forces of capitalist society, but having children and needing to feed them will do that to you. I simply need to rebuild, and I should do it without bitterness but that’s very hard to do.

My feeling is that if 2004 tries to pull any of the same crap that 2002 and 2003 had to dish out that I will kick its sorry ass. And then right after that I would likely crawl in a hole and die because I am getting too old to keep starting over again and again. I know I am due for a good year, and I am willing to believe I will get one because I have a hard time seeing how things could get too much worse, or shall I say I don’t even want to try to imagine it because it’s too painful to think of the things that could be worse than anything we’ve already been through.

I still have some love left for the world, but it’s like it’s kept safely away in a little sack somewhere. I will pull it out and give you some, but these days you have to really deserve it. Sometimes it feels like it’s the only thing I really have left, and I am having a really hard time making any new….

I had very few joys in 2003, certainly none I can thank 2003 for itself. I was thankful for the continued patience and support and love of my wonderful husband, and I was thankful for the health and growth and general existence of my beautiful son. I was in my heart grateful to my mother for keeping us alive. I was happy one of my cats finally got her life long wish to be the only cat in a household. I am grateful to my husband for getting a job here and getting us the hell out of “there” being both the economic and societal nightmare that is the US and my mom’s house. And I am grateful for time not heaving to a stop and letting us end this bloody mad cow of a year.

All hail the linear quality of time.

I truly believe now that despite how I might feel about it, I can survive just about anything. I described it to someone as feeling like “standing on the front porch of hell and turning back without opening the door.” That’s the closest I can come to describing it. I don’t feel like I chose to turn back, I just wasn’t forced in the door this time around. Almost passively I was lead away back to a lighter place. I don’t want to go back there again, but if I do, I’ll know to bring my mace.