Full Time Care

The last few days have been really crappy. I would’ve used a stronger term there, but I try not to swear unless there’s a real need. It has more effect that way when I actually do swear.

My lady’s drinking problem isn’t getting better. Three days in a row, one day off, drinking again this evening. Nearly three bottles of wine this time. And she was in a horrible mood because she hurt her back the other day - with no inhibitors on her frustration and pain, thanks to the alcohol, she spent several hours bitching about everything and verbally laying into me. Great.

Add to this her complete unwillingness to understand that our financial situation sucks, that having spent two hours walking today (for cat medicine and shopping) I was very tired and in a lot of pain and that I really don’t need to hear all about her asshole ex-boyfriends for the fortieth time, and you have a pretty good picture of how my evening was.

Yup, it sucked.

On the other hand, I found my DVDs of Stargate SG-1 season 10, which I never got around to watching. So I at least have that to look forward to while she sleeps off her hangover tomorrow. Though I do have to go collect the cat’s medicine (she has cystitis again), which means another ninety-minute walk. Such is life.

I also found some of my old encodings of CDs. Years ago, I converted a lot of them to MP3 format for simplicity and so I could listen while gaming. Among them was my catharsis song: The Kiss, by The Cure. It’s on the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me album and is absolutely wonderful for blowing off steam. So I put my headphones on, jacked the volume up and let it scream through my head, blasting away all the bad stuff and leaving me feeling a lot better.

This has been bugging me for a couple of days now and, combined with my connection going toes-up again, has restrained me from blogging here. It’s a combination of an email and living as a FTC, as I do. So what’s the problem? I feel like a second-class citizen.

The feeling’s been there for a while and has regularly been simmering, without a proper name, just below boiling point. A couple of days ago, it boiled: firstly, I had an email from the people at Today following their regular, 3-day review of content. They go through regularly to look at “quality, productivity, popularity, and potential” and basically decided that this blog isn’t good enough on one or more of those fronts to warrant the dollar-a-day payment.

This is, in many ways, understandable. Although I would like to believe that the first two criteria are not a problem, personal blogs rarely get a large number of followers and, of course, are unlikely to bring in vast quantities of advertising revenue. That’s the main reason that the advice to people wanting to make a living through blogging is to pick a commercial subject rather than a personal one.

In my case, however, this rebuttal attached itself to a moment of introspection, when I was looking at why I often feel so stressed and annoyed. On further reflection, it occurred to me that I feel unappreciated. No, not that - I feel as though I don’t exist in the same way as my partner does. Let me explain.

If she wants something, she only has to ask. If she’s doing something, I don’t interrupt. If she’s tired or sick, I take care of her. When she talks, I listen, often for hours. I cook, I clean, I shop and so on. Now, the other side of things: if I want something, I get it myself. If I’m doing something and she calls, I drop it for whatever she wants. If I’m tired or sick, I take care of her. When I talk, she listens for thirty seconds, then starts talking again. She doesn’t cook (except occasional masterpieces in the form of chocolate cake or omelettes!), she doesn’t clean unless the house is a tip, she doesn’t shop or whatever.

Heck, I once left an empty sachet of cat food exactly where she’d left it in the kitchen, to see if she would throw it away. Three weeks, it sat there. In the end, I chucked it in the bin, before it grew legs and tried to take up permanent residence!

Now, I don’t mind looking after her. I’m a carer, that’s what I do. But I need things as well. I need to do stuff for myself, to have her do things for me, to share and exchange. I don’t want to be her parents and watch her live like a teenager, always counting on me to do whatever it is that she doesn’t want to handle. The list of jobs I have to deal with at the moment is well over twenty items - and it rarely gets any smaller. I guess I have to stop sacrificing quite so much and slowly teach her (not literally) that she’s an adult and can do a lot of these things for herself. That she needs to stop treating me like a combination of whipping boy, housekeeper and personal assistant. That she has to let me be more than a second-class citizen.

If she doesn’t, and this carries on much longer, I won’t know whether I even exist.

I had a really nice note from someone who reads one of my blogs this morning. Apart from being very complimentary, he asked if I read any other blogs and what sites I frequent: he’d read a few of my various posts and thought it sounded like I spend a lot of time online, wandering around.

He’s right, of course: I do spend a great deal of time connected to the Internet. I’m a geek at heart and my virtual life has almost as much importance as my bricks-and-mortar one. So I thought I’d go through a short list of places I hang out.

As far as blogs go, I maintain three, as you may know. Firstly, there’s Wordophilia, where I talk about writing online. Secondly, there’s this one. Finally, and most recently, I started Daft As A Brush, reviewing films, books or whatever else I happen to be doing to amuse myself. I try to post on them all once a day.

There are only a couple of other blogs I visit regularly because my connection isn’t very good, so I can’t visit loads. I’m a subscriber at Bloggercises, because Chris is an excellent tutor in a lot of the basic essentials of blogging. He’s been doing it for a while and consistently comes up with useful comments, exercises and thoughts on the scene. He’s also a very amusing and friendly guy. I also subscribe to Back To The Eighties, because that’s the period I remember the most from growing up and I just love to drop in and read about things I may have forgotten.

My final subscription is at Sex, Lies and Dating In The City. I came across this one as part of my daily LinkReferral visits to keep Full Time Care reasoably high in their blog directory for a few extra hits. What can I say? I immediately added it to my favourites. SINgleGIRL, the owner and author, writes in an incredibly engaging, honest style. She’s funny, blunt, profound and silly by turns. The stories, advice and ongoing dating battles are intriguing. She always replies to messages and comments, stays true to herself and openly talks about a very interesting subject. I love it. Simply can’t get enough.

Other than those three, I spend a fair amount of time at MyLot. That’s a PTP site (paid to participate), much like a discussion forum where responses earn a cent or two as well as being useful. Some days it’s really interesting, others it’s a bit bland. It’s not the best-designed site in the world - the list of interests and categorisations of conversations is horrible, for example - but there’s some really nice, helpful people there.

I also answer a lot of email. I get about thirty or forty a day from various places, which is significantly less than the hundreds I used to have to deal with (thank goodness for spam filters). A lot of those are project updates from GetAFreelancer, where I keep an eye open for odd jobs to bid on. I drop in at Helium, Associated Content, Constant Content and HubPages when my connection permits.

Finally, I go through the LinkReferral blogs, thirty per day as I mentioned: it takes time, but I take that seriously. Some sites I stay on for a minute or two, others I’ll read a whole ton of posts: it depends how good they are. I’ll also skip through the list each day, not just hit the thirty at the top. I like seeing some of the ones lower down. Hidden gems.

And that’s about it online. I’m a creature of habit, but I’ll wander off elsewhere if one of my regular visiting spots has a link, and sometimes I’ll keep link-hopping. Most days I have too much real life stuff to do, so end up doing the shopping, cooking, looking after my partner, watching a film or reading a book. It’s not a bad life.

I noticed something again yesterday which has had me fuming for a while now: supermarket prices. Most folks barely notice the price changes that occur all the time, since they do one big shop on a regular basis. When you’re spending hundreds, the pennies are less remarkable. Personally, I shop every day or every other day (because I can’t carry much) on a limited budget, so I see things in a different light.

The change that annoyed me was at Waitrose, which then made me think of one I’ve seen at Somerfield. For the uninitiated, Waitrose is an ‘upper class’ supermarket. In other words, they think they should only stock high quality items - and charge ludicrously high prices for them. Somerfield is at the other end of things: cheap and cheerful. As always, certain things cost less in one place than another, so I tend to shop in three or four stores, picking up the best bargains in each.

Yesterday, I needed some green beans. My partner loves them with garlic. I normally pick up six tins (I’d rather buy fresh, but the prices are insane) at 33p each. That’s a couple of pounds total. Yesterday, Waitrose had done their regular price check and - presumably because people have been buying a lot of beans - the price had gone up to 52p a tin. Now, I understand supply and demand, but a 19p (57%) price rise from one week to the next is just taking the piss.

That, in turn, reminded me of the cheap noodles at Somerfield. You know, those little packs of instants that are in their basics range? We buy those to put with other stuff and, at a normal price range of 9-11p each, they’re dirt cheap. The weird thing is that they change price every week as well. I’ve seen them at 7p and I’ve seen them at 19p. From lowest to highest, that’s a 170% increase! How crazy is that? Same with basic baked beans: minimum 17p a tin, now at 34p (last time I bothered to look).

Now, I know we’re talking about pennies here, so price changes seem bigger. But consider this: I would buy half a dozen tins of beans and half a dozen packs of noodles. At their lowest prices, that’s £2.40 total. At their highest, it’s £4.26 - almost twice as much. Apply the same principle to a big (or even small-and-very-regular) shop and you’ve got a pretty damned scary situation.

Even worse is that there’s no reason or warning: the prices just change, and nobody says a darned thing. It always seems to happen on the popular items, too - those I’m buying half a dozen of because they’re cheap and fit in my extremely limited budget. Money-grubbing scumbag grocery shops. Bah.

My lady and I had an interesting chat this morning over our coffee, despite being half-asleep. With an interview coming up soon for some voluntary work, she was trying to figure out her ’schedule’ of drinking, so that she could organise the right day for the meeting and break the two-day cycle of alcohol at the same time.

It was while we were talking about this that she suddenly thanked me for being open to discuss the problem so easily. I’d never really thought about it like that, but apparently she finds it a huge help in her recovery: she can talk about when she wants to drink, how often and her plans for the days to come without fear of reprisal or of me getting upset and annoyed.

I suppose it’s partly down to my personality type: I’m not one to hold grudges or to dislike someone because they hurt me once or twice. I’ll assume, until proven otherwise, that they’re just having a bad day or that there’s some other kind of influence that’s affected them. This ability to debate the relative merits of drinking on certain days without getting all emotional has turned out to be a real feather in my cap, as it were.

So much for people considering the Capricorn traits of being cold and aloof as a negative, eh?

My head’s on a different planet this morning: yesterday went really well until the end of the evening, when it was slightly marred by my partner being blotto. This morning I’m still recovering from eating too much and a bad night’s sleep.

The day itself was cool: she was busy revising a bit for her upcoming interview and doing her Tae Bo workout. That’s my fault - I discovered Tae Bo a few years ago and really enjoyed it, so she gave it a try and loves it as well. Meanwhile, I was busy messing around on the computer and re-reading one of my favourite books. She managed to avoid drinking until fairly late in the day, making it (just about) to three days without a drop. After the day before’s nightmare of anxiety and stress from trying to resist, I was pretty darned proud that she’d survived and broken the two day circle.

The evening itself was iffy. She drew a little, producing something that should turn out really well, while I was trying to do a couple of blog entries over a very dodgy connection. We ordered in Chinese food from a local place that’s incredibly good quality and quantity for the price. Unortunately, by this time, she was drunk. So I had to sit there for about 90 minutes while she obsessed over a bunch of things before finally getting her to come and eat.

The food was wonderful, the film we tried to watch was brilliant (Mystery Men) even though she was having trouble focussing on anything much more than getting the food into her mouth without dropping it all over the place. She failed at that. Eventually, she decided she was too tired, as usual, and went to bed. Still, it was a pretty pleasant evening.

Unfortunately, again, I have a slight intolerance for monosodium glutamate, which tends to be somewhat overly present in Chinese takeaway food here in the UK. If I eat a full meal, there’s a very good chance I’ll wake up at four in the morning feeling like I’m going to die. I didn’t eat too much last night - I always order something simple like chicken and chips - but it still affected me, so I tossed and turned all night. Ho hum.

Today’s a slow day. I shall try to take care of some of the paperwork I’ve been avoiding and write some letters, but I have a feeling I’m going to be more of a couch potato than I should.

Yesterday was, of course, Valentine’s day. We don’t celebrate it as such in our house: not that it’s a celebration event anyway. Partly, this is because the fundamental idea behind the day has been horribly corrupted over the last decade or two: whereas it used to be a romantic opportunity to express one’s love for another person, it’s now become yet another commercialised bunch of utter tripe. In all honesty, it depresses me to see cards with “Happy Valentine’s Day” printed in them.

Whatever happened to the secret admirer, the blank card to be completed for a special person, the love poem? Marketing, that’s what. Now it’s all obligation and thoughtless purchases of standard text. Everyone seems to think that this one day in the year somehow determines how much we love our partner - nonsense. I have a friend who used to work in a supermarket before becoming an Oracle consultant and she recounts the experience there as defining the modern version of Valentine’s - an endless stream of young men coming in and buying a bunch of flowers, a box of chocolates and a pack of condoms. Brain in neutral, testosterone in top gear.

Here, we celebrate 15th February instead. That’s the anniversary of the day we first met, sixteen years ago today! It’s also the anniversary of the day I proposed to my lady. We won’t be doing anything dramatic this year, due to a rather severe lack of funds, but we’ll definitely order in some nice food, open a bottle of wine and watch something smoochy. Now that’s what Valentine’s day should be like.

I knew I shouldn’t have said things were getting better. It’s always the kiss of death. As soon as I’d posted that entry a couple of days ago, I had a feeling something was going to happen, and it has.

Quite apart from being treated like crap yesterday evening during my partner’s most recent bout of drinking, I woke up feeling awful today. When i went to check how things were at the bank, I got the surprise I’d been expecting: suddenly, the balance has dropped. The worst thing is that I don’t know why: like with most banks, they’ll quite happily reduce the available balance in preparation for something being withdrawn, but don’t immediately post the details. They wait until the transaction’s gone through to actually display what’s happening.

So today, I’m suddenly a big chunk of money short and I don’t know why. It looks like the tax rebate cheque I had deposited late was refused, so I shall have to contact the Inland Revenue to find out how to get another, for beginners. But that doesn’t explain everything. There’s still a lot missing. I have no idea why, but I have this ominous foreboding that something bad has happened. I hope it’s not something like the identity theft I went through last year - that was a total nightmare.

I hate it when banks pretend they’re being helpful with Internet access to accounts and so on, then deal with it in a totally old-fashioned, give-us-your-money way. It’s so two-faced.

I haven’t said much about my partner’s alcohol problem over the last week or more. This isn’t because it’s magically gone away, but because I wanted to write about more pleasant things than the ongoing torment of seeing her slowly destroy herself.

On the contrary, her addiction is back in full force. For the past ten days or so, she’s been drinking every other day. There’s always a good reason, of course: anxiety over a possible voluntary job, anxiety over her analyst being annoyed at her inability to get out and do stuff, anxiety over her parents’ possible reaction to a single sentence in a letter she sent, anxiety over our cat’s cystitis problem… you get the idea.

Bizarrely, I’ve been less affected by this resurgence of inebriation than I would have imagined. I suppose it’s partly because a lot of my other stresses have diminished: we have a little money in the bank, our rent is paid for the month, the house is clean, we’re not being evicted, the benefits are all sorted out and my back has generally been a bit better. That said, I’m in a lot of pain as an aftermath of all the housework for today’s landlord visit, but that’ll pass.

She’s still very determined to reduce her wine intake, too. It’s not as if she just says “Sod it” and opens another bottle: she knows that she’s dependent, she knows it sucks and she’s desperate to break the two-day cycle. That’s our first goal over the coming days. If we can break the chain, like she did at the start of the year, we can slowly increase the number of days between bouts. One positive influence is that the housework and exercise she’s been doing has helped her lose some weight: this will probably be my main way of convincing her not to drink. The longer she can go without alcohol, the more chance her body has of throwing away all that fermented sugar and continuing the weight loss process.

Saturday will be the difficult day. If she can avoid drinking then, we’ll be on the way.

Anyone else remember that episode of ST:TOS (that’s Star Trek: The Original Series for the less geeky among you) where Spock mind-melds with a rock monster, the Horta? He puts his hands on it and starts shouting “Paiiiiiiiiiin”. Well, that’s how I feel today!

We have our landlord visit tomorrow. Every six months, the agency sends someone round just to check that we’re not knocking holes in the walls, making virgin sacrifices in the shoe cupboard and generally keeping the place in order. So for the last four days, I’ve been doing housework - and it’s killing my back. All that scrubbing, mopping, dusting, hoovering (or vacuuming for the Americans) and washing is not recommended activity when your back is fragile.

Still, it’s all done now and everything is spick and span. Well, almost: I still have the loo to clean and the tiny front garden to tidy. Unfortunately, the wind blows crap into our garden all the time and, because it’s so small and right up against the path, adolescent (or drunk) passers-by tend to dump tings over the fence into a corner.

I also had a call from the local Job Centre today about our benefits. Apparently, I get to choose which ones I want, since I’m sick and a carer. I’ll go through that some other time, as it might help people in a similar situation. Suffice it to say that the lady who called was lovely, of course, since we used to work together. Actually, that’s unfair - I know she’s lovely to everyone she calls it was nice to speak to her again, though!

Enough for the moment. I have to go and move a huge pile of washing into the bathroom.