Good Intentions Will Always Bite You In The Ass

It’s been about nine months since I started my not so new job, and about that long since my OBGYN told me I’d hit menopause.  I’ve been trying to deal with both as graciously as I possibly can but I’m not going to lie, dealing with the physical and emotional rollercoaster that is menopause along with having stupid people trigger my shorter than usual temper, it’s been a struggle.

Fatigue-O-Rama

It’s like this, I’m tired, I’m always tired it seems and I can’t find the energy to ambition to push forward to try and get some exercise.  I use to run, hell I use to run a 5K almost every day in about 45 mins on my treadmill.  I use to do yoga and I enjoyed the exercise routine I started on my weight loss journey.  But now?  I struggle to get out of bed, and sometimes I just don’t which means I call into work and take a vacation or sick day to stay home and sleep more.  Or just stay home and watch television and sit on the couch with Charlie and at times just fall asleep again.  And when I am at work and I have a lot going I’m so tired by the time I get home I don’t have the energy to make dinner.  Not that I have to make it but I do so to bring lunch for the next day.  I’m sick and tired (pun intended) of feeling this way.  My doctor told me I could feel fatigue or I could be one of the women that don’t get it as bad.  But of course, life decides to deal me the card where I get everything that I had a 50/50 chance of getting.  You know what I wish I could do?  I wish I could sucker punch Mother Nature right in the goddamned ovaries, that’s what!!  I made a doctor’s appointment to find out if there is anything I can do to combat this damned fatigue I feel because it’s causing me to get really irritated even faster than I use to. 

Points of Irritation

Since I work for a research department and not an academic department, I thought I’d be spared some of the idiots I use to deal with in previous employment.   But no such luck, there is a idiot faculty member that was funded by another space grant in Montana.  But she’s housed and teaches here and I’m thinking the stupid bitch might be on the spectrum or she’s just arrogant because she got her doctorate from Oxford University in the UK.  She isn’t from the US, she’s from India but was educated in England, Cambridge University to be exact.  Either way she’s already gotten on my bad side and there is not turning back.  So, she comes with attitude and you know that shit isn’t going to fly with me.   She’s an astronomy professor and she’s young and entitled and she couldn’t be bothered to remember my name or my co-workers name even though we’ve gone out of our way to help her dumb ass when she couldn’t get a classroom for the Spring semester.  She only has eight students so my boss being the nice guy he is, let her have her stupid class in our conference room.   And she’s been nothing but bossy and self-entitled ever since, that is until last week.  She received a package from Amazon and she had it delivered to our office, it had those plastic pillow air cushions in it.  My team and I were on a video meeting with a new recipient of an award and all of a sudden, I hear loud popping noises coming from the conference room.  After the fifth one I excused myself, turned off my camera and walked into the conference room and yanked the damned plastic air cushions out of her hand and told her that this was a business office, NOT a classroom and SHE NEEDED to respect it as such and this behavior would NOT be tolerated!  I mentioned that we were on a video meeting and her popping the air cushions was making it hard to hear.  I took all of the plastic bubble wrap with me and told her that if she didn’t start respecting our office protocols, she’d have to find somewhere else to have her stupid astrology class.  Then she corrected me and said it was astronomy, and I turned around to her and said “Whatever class you teach as long as it’s not here.”  She looked at me in shock like I’m the one that had done something wrong.  I’m trying really hard to not allow things to stress me out or make me angry because I can feel how it’s affecting me right now with all this menopausal, physical distress I’m going through.  But this bitch takes the cake, she’s ungrateful, rude and has no regard for anyone else other than her own interests.  My boss had a talk with me about being a bit nicer to her, but I did mention that if she’s in our office she needs to act like it’s an office and not an academic setting, if she didn’t like it she needs to find another location.  Of course, he said that he was “helping” her out with letting her use our conference room but I did say (nicely of course) that its one thing to help someone out but it’s another to let them take advantage of that help. 

Calling Me A Bitch….Isn’t a Bad Thing

When in grad school I wrote a paper called “The Only Child Syndrome” because at the time my mother was in better health, my dad was still around and my brother was somehow a source of pride for my parents.  He’s the only boy, I mean there are only two of us but I had the fortune or misfortune to be born first.  My mom is a narcist, and the world should have revolved around her but since it didn’t, she took that out on me.  When I got divorced, I had no choice by to move in with my parent’s, with two out of three of my boys.  My oldest stayed with his dad because he was starting high school and wanted to stay in that school with his friends.   I contributed to the household expenses as much as I could and although my brother and his idiot wife and two ungrateful kids also lived there, they did not.  After two years of living there my brother finally got a house and moved out.  Then seven years later he lost his house to foreclosure because he trusted his idiot wife to pay all of the mortgage but she did not.  Only sending in half payments.  So since then, he’s been back with my parents languishing in his own pity because life has dealt him some very unfair blows (his words not mine.)   So, because he’s a selfish bastard who was enabled by my parent’s he does next to nothing to help my now elderly mother.  He lives with her but doesn’t help her or offer to do things around the house like clean the yard or even clean up after himself.  I’ve told my mom that his actions now, his behavior and attitude is a direct result of how she and my dad raised him.  She doesn’t like it when I point that out to her because I didn’t turn out that way because she was hard on me and expected that I could find my way through life without her guidance. 

Fast forward to last month when my brother kept calling me over and over, drunk telling me he’s tired of the job he has and how his kids are selfish and only call him when they need something.  I listen to him and I have to cut him off because I’ve heard this story over and over.  Then one day he called me to read me a jury duty summons because he didn’t understand what the verbiage meant.  After he was through, I explained to him what he needed to do and then asked why he just didn’t fill it out online instead of mailing in it in?  He said to me that it was easier for him to do it that way and I let it go.  Then he continued with the same old song and dance about his job and blah, blah, blah.  Being as short tempered as I am now, I had finally had it, it was the last straw and I told him that if he was so tired he needed to change his life and no one was going to do it for him.  I also told him he needed to got get his GED because the mofo never graduated high school.  His response? “Well I’ve made it this far without it” and I said “So how’s that working out for you so far?” He’s been an over the road truck driver for 12 years then he lost his CDL because he got a DUI an assaulted a Texas State Trooper.  He just got his license back and he needs to take his HAZMAT class to be able to get to driving hazardous material again.  He shouldn’t drink but he does, he needs to get his life together but he doesn’t. 

So, when I told him he was ignorant, uneducated, belligerent and computer illiterate he got offended.  Yeah, can you believe that?  He got offended and then I told him he does nothing to help my mom out and she still has to support him financially because the job he has right now doesn’t pay him squat.   So he got even angrier and he told me that just because I had two degrees and worked for NASA didn’t make me better than him.  Now that made me laugh and I told him that it, indeed did because I recognized that I had to do for myself and did so after I got a divorce.  He called me a bitch because he said that as his sister, I should be more understanding of his situation.  I told him as my brother he needed to act like a fucking adult and stop feeling sorry for himself instead of blaming the entire world for his lot in life.  I hung up on him and in true fashion he went and told my mom, so I waited for her call to defend myself against his accusations and her scorn because of how I treat my brother.  But that call never came, but the next day I spoke to her and she said when he told her about what I had said she agreed and told him he needed to start taking responsibility for his life.  It sounds harsh to say that your sibling is less than useless but as someone who had to pick up the slack because my brother was spoiled and indifferent to my parents, I don’t feel sorry for him. This is why I feel like an only child, looking after my mom, making sure she’s okay, that she’s eating, taking her meds, keeping her doctors appointments and just being her caregiver even if I don’t live next door. Because even though my brother lives with her, he’s useless in helping my mom out.

So, I took my mom out to lunch for her 80^th birthday to celebrate that it only took 49 years for her to see that my brother……is an idiot.

Until next time……this is the Huntress, saying…”Don’t be a Moth Around a Dim Yellow Bulb, Be a Moth to a Flame, Make it worth the Burn!”

Advertisement