----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- sorry doesn't feed the bulldog Day before yesterday my husband broke his glass container of shaving powder. I was in my studio when it happened, and my cat was sitting behind my computer on my desk, like she likes to do in the mornings when I'm working. It was one of those perfectly painful sounds. Shattering glass. It should have been recorded, it should be on a Halloween sounds LP. My cat immediately got tense, and after the few seconds of terror left I called out to see if he was OK. There is a glass shelf in there, above the toilet, and I am always worried it's going to break. But it wasn't the shelf, it was the little jar. It fell mostly into the bathtub, and he said he cleaned it up, but I know what that means. He does everything half way anymore. I swept the floor and there were shards all over the place. There were shards in the rug and in the folds of my hanging towel and on the ledge of the bathtub. I washed all the linen that was in there and there were shards all over the bottom of the hamper that I had to clean out and after the wash was done there were still some shards in the machine that I had to pick out. I thought I did an OK job cleaning up, but last night right before I went to bed I stepped on an almost invisible sliver of glass. I think it was in the ridge where the hardwood in the hallway meets the shitty tile in the bathroom, in the little crevice there. It hurt like a MF and at first I wasn't sure I was going to be able to pull it out. We have some awesome tweezers for getting out slivers and splinters...they are really old, they were here at the house when we moved in, but I have used them so much since we got here. I have been injured so much with all the work I've done. It seems for the first few months we were here, if I didn't have a gaping wound on my foot or my hand I had to pull out slivers of metal and wood and plant materials and even glass. I have had a rule for a long time. NO GLASS IN THE BATHROOM. But for some reason, just exhaustion, I think, I have kept my mouth shut about him keeping his shaving powder in a jelly jar that is perched precariously on a glass shelf that isn't even attached to anything. It's just sitting on some brackets, but not held in place by anything. I know this has happened before. It's either a total glitch in the matrix or I remember his jar of shaving powder breaking and glass being all over the place and me stepping on a sliver of it. I'm pissed off. I'm hurt. I think I got the glass out, but I'm not sure. I think it's just sore because it went so deep and I really had to dig it out. I have a big puncture wound in my foot. It doesn't look so bad, but if I step down in a certain way, it really hurts. A lot more than you'd think it should. And everytime I step down in that wrong way, I get pissed off. This is just a great example of my relationship with him. And that is making me more angry than maybe I should be. He does something bad, he says he takes care of it, he doesn't REALLY take care of it, I have to clean up the mess, and although he gets to walk away with barely any issues from it, I end up getting more hurt than I should have and I have to deal with it for a lot longer than he does. And usually the cat is a little traumatized too. This was an accident, so I'm trying not be pissed off. But I am. This should have been avoided. Could have been. I am mad at myself for not saying to put that powder in some tupperwear or something. He says he's sorry. This put me in mind of something my mom used to say. If I said I was sorry about something, but she was pissed off still, she would say, "Sorry doesn't feed the bulldog." I haven't thought about that in ages and ages. But when I was very young she used to say that often. I've never heard anyone else use that phrase. But it's true. Sorry doesn't feed the bulldog. Or the cat. Or does anything. Sorry doesn't do a MF thing. Often times it just makes things worse. It's better to avoid having to say sorry in the first place, which is what I think that's supposed to mean. And I'm trying. I'm trying not to be a jerk about this, but I am sick of getting hurt, of not being able to walk properly from injuries. My ankle hurts from when I first stepped on the glass and instinctively jerked my foot to the side. My other foot hurts from having to compensate from walking weird. And the bottom of my foot is bleeding and sore and still hurts. I'm trying to live in the now Zen bullshit whatever but this is just making me focus on everything. And mostly everything sucks. I gave myself a year from when we got here to see if this relationship was going to make it though all the shit. It's been longer than that. When we got here I wasn't even sure if we could be friends anymore. I have tried to be understanding, patient, considerate. I've failed sometimes, but I am dealing with a hell of a lot. I feel like an unattended percolator. It's burning and boiling over and it's going to totally ruin the stove. Whatever the stove is supposed to represent. I am going to get rid of the glass shelf. I have been looking around for some wood to replace it with. We have brackets and screws, and some saws...I just need to find a plank of wood that I can do that with. I'd do it today, but I honestly want him to help me. I hate doing that handyman stuff, and I think he should have to do SOMETHING. But I don't want to have to work side by side with him today. I'm hurt and pissed off and I don't want to do or say anything too aggressive. I have an entire kitchen full of dishes to do. I need to get a grocery order in. The only vegetables we have are lettuce and carrots... I am so exhausted of having to do everything around here. Even if I ask for help, I may or may not get it from him. If I lived alone, it would be a given, but having to cook and clean up from two people plus a cat is just too much for me. I am sick of having to do it. I am fed up with the inequality not only in this relationship, but all of my relationships. I do these things, because I want clean dishes. I want to be able to eat good food. The cat needs someone to care about her, and if I let the bathroom go until he decided to clean it, well...he just wouldn't. I asked him once if I didn't clean it, if he would eventually get sick of it and clean it...like if he lived alone...and he said that he honestly wouldn't clean it very often. Part of why I get so angry about this, is because a few years ago he was hyper-vigilant about cleanliness. He was psychotically taking 6 hour showers, constantly cleaning everything with high acidity vinegar, yelling at me that I wasn't help keep things clean enough and it's part of why the "bugs" were on everything. There were no fucking bugs. I am thankful he finally realized that. But now he has no concern for cleanliness at all. I am really fed up and really confused. One extreme to the other. I can't keep up. Not sure why life has to be this way. It's all bad, just a different kind of bad. I can tell myself that thankfully I'm not homeless and thankfully I'm not in the mental ward or in prison or stuck in Colorado or...the list goes on. I used to tell myself at work that at least I wasn't a brick carrier in India or a Mica miner or a sex slave and that made me appreciate my horrible job more. I am so tired of having to say it could always be worse. Just once, I'd like to say that my life is OK. And I feel like a whiny, privileged person just wanting that. 3:36 PM - Sunday, Jan. 22, 2023 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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