The Big Picture

Things with Barry pretty much righted themselves after about a week, although I'm still keeping him on a very tight leash with money.

The Big Picture is this:  one, my depression and anxiety are not being properly controlled.  I need to see a new psychiatrist ASAP.  I am still taking the lamotrigine (generic Lamictal), but a low dose, 125 mg a day.  (The bad psychiatrist had had me on 400, up from 200.)  I lowered my own dose because after my meltdown and after reading up on the drug a little more thoroughly, I decided that it's a nasty thing to have in my body and I only wanted to take a minimal amount until my med could be switched.  But Barry, who does my doctor research because he has the time, has had trouble finding a network psychiatrist who's taking new patients and who has hours outside of 9-5.  At this point, I told him any hour will work for me -- I just need to see someone.

The second point of The Big Picture is that I worry about money every waking hour.  I used to tell one of my therapists that I was bad with money, and he always said the same thing:  "No, you just don't earn enough."  It took me a long time to understand this.  The point was not to be perfect with money -- the point was to have enough that if you weren't perfect, it wouldn't be a disaster.  I'm not earning close to enough.  Even during a month without a financial catastrophe like having to replace a computer, we don't have enough money.  It doesn't help that our monthly nut just went up $200 -- $100 for my therapy, and $100 for my carfare (the Back-to-Work job retention program paid my carfare for 90 days).  There is absolutely nothing coming in except my salary, and even though I now consider myself good with money (WAY better than I used to be), there just plain isn't enough.

I find I have to poke at Barry all the time to look for work, take classes or see a counselor at FEGS, try to sell our unused CDs to someone on Craigslist, etc.  I think he feels that his doing all of the shopping, cooking, doctor appointments, etc is enough.  I don't know how many times I have to freak out and yell that we need more money coming in, that he has to get something, anything, part-time, minimum wage, I don't care.  That generally buys me one day of him saying, "I looked at Craigslist this morning."  A few times over this past week, I took some time at work to look at Craigslist myself, and forwarded him a dozen ads each time.  That shouldn't have to be my job.  (Of course, there have been plenty of times in the past when I've said "That shouldn't have to be my job" concerning something that Barry wasn't doing, and I've always realized that if I don't make it my job, it won't get done.)

So the upshot of The Big Picture is that I cry almost all the time.  If I'm not crying, I'm close to it.  I usually don't cry in front of other people except Barry and my therapist, but I cry walking down the street, in the subway, alone at work.  I went through this once before, toward the end of my time at Penguin -- also an impending-doom scenario.  It's mostly just silent weeping, tears pouring out of my eyes without much sobbing or fuss.  If I feel particularly agitated, I take a lorazepam (generic Atavan), which is my anxiety-rescue med (as needed, no more than twice a day).  Some days I don't take it at all, some days I take one or two, or even three or four.  (Each pill is 2 mg.)  But I don't want to have to do that.

I don't know how to make more income happen.  I've even looked around for a part-time job that I could do evenings or weekends, but haven't found one.

In addition, our Medicaid runs out at the end of September.  My employers promised (in writing) to provide insurance when my Medicaid runs out, and for Barry as well if he is not yet working, "estimated at $3,600."  I think that was my low-ball estimate because I didn't want to seem too grabby.  $3,600 is nothing.  Even if they pay more and get me a decent plan, I'll have co-pays, which I don't have now.  Or I may have to pay in to the cost of insurance, which I can't possibly do.  This in and of itself is enough to cause constant weeping.

I am supposed to visit Jannah this weekend if I can manage to hang on to $30 for train fare.  That would certainly be a much-needed break, and I think I could actually stop worrying about finances for a couple of days.

My Amazon Associates widget is again not working, but I am reading The Help -- the movie based on it just opened very successfully.  The book is a little on the liberal-southern-chick-lit side, but not bad.  I'd really rather have seen it told exclusively from the points of view of the African-American maids, since the white protagonist kind of makes me grind my teeth in embarrassment.

I am mostly crying

Honestly, I think I'd rather be in desperate financial straits on my own.  That wasn't how I felt before this past weekend.  I thought that Barry was helping: looking for bargains, making dinner, even running to food pantries (which is how bad our situation is).  But now I have to wonder how much money he was siphoning off for things we can't afford:  cigarettes, chips, soda.  Maybe our finances aren't even that bad; maybe he's just been misspending too much money.  But it's exhausting to have to police him on top of everything else I do.  Plus, I don't really trust that he's doing that much as far as job hunting.  First and foremost, he absolutely needs to be working, whether or not I leave or kick him out.

At least on my own, I would know exactly who was handling money well or fucking it up.  I would not have to discover that someone who was allegedly helping me was actually doing harm.  I felt a lot of love in pitching in together in this very bad situation, and absolutely heartbroken that he was actually working against me.  And it's not just the cigarettes or the money or the lying:  it's also that I'm the one who would get to nurse him through emphysema or lung cancer.  It's spending money we don't have on something very harmful.  I quit a cigarette habit twice as bad as his -- I smoked twice as much -- and it's been six years.  I'm not asking for something I wouldn't and didn't do myself.

I was really, finally feeling settled into this marriage, feeling a lot of love and appreciation despite a lot of lacks and problems (like no sex for many years), but now I really want out.  I want to be responsible for myself, period.

Of course, the big problem here is that there's no way to separate.  We have one reasonably priced apartment and one job.  I'll be trying to set aside money to move, although it's really not my preference, but he has no income and can't really stay alone or move.  (I'm not close to being that mean.)  So we're stuck together for the time being, which is really awkward.  I might even consider staying together in the apartment if he gets a job, and has some of his own fucking money to waste.

Barry is in denial.  He met me at the subway yesterday, which he had been doing some in better times, and I asked, "What are you doing here?"  He said, "I came to meet you.  What's wrong?"  I said, "I'm trying to decide whether or not I can continue to live under the same roof with you."  So he turned and walked home, then got into bed.  Didn't get up to make dinner or anything else.  He takes to bed when there's something he doesn't want to deal with.

I guess there's not much else to say at this point.  I'm going to Jannah's for a weekend a week from tomorrow.  All of these discussions with St. Ann's people are depressing me dreadfully.  Some of them want to meet.  But as much as they share the problems they had at the school and their feelings of worthlessness, they're all achieving now and I'm not.  These are not friends I want.  I don't need any help feeling bad about myself.  And I really wish they would all stop asking if I still write poetry.  Considering the fact that Emmett Jarrett, the teacher who edited the literary magazine, only saw fit to publish one of my poems in all those years (and it wasn't even one I considered one of my best), I can't imagine how these people identify me as someone who wrote poetry.  Everyone wrote poetry at that school, and a lot of them still do.  It's been many years since I even tried...in the early 90s, I may have tried my hand at some song lyrics, but that went nowhere.

still not much happier

I feel like this whole issue is really dragging me down.  Barry is in total denial.  I think he's just looking at the current event, not the many times I've found cigarette ashes and butts and cellophane pack-bottoms here and there in the apartment ("It's not!"  "It's old!"  etc.).  In fact, earlier in the day that I caught him buying cigarettes at Rite-Aid, I'd found a cigarette ash on the computer keyboard, which he claimed was from a joint.  He never has enough pot in the house to roll a joint rather than smoke from a pipe.  But I let that one go.

But how do I live with someone who's working against me?  Of course, I don't hate him enough to throw him out with no income, or to move out leaving him with none.  Honestly, I hadn't been thinking in terms of "his money" and "my money" up to this point, and I know we spent a lot of "his money" last year -- his inheritance from his father.  But "my money" right now is what I'm going out and earning every day.  He does a lot of chores and housework but he doesn't bring in a cent.  In fact, he has to borrow money that I have to repay (I have no idea how long he owed that $15 to Alfonso, but it must have been a while ago since Alfonso felt he had to remind me).

He has gotten better about bargain shopping and doing without most luxuries this year, since the unemployment and my Dweck job vanished, but I guess he still doesn't understand that payday means unlimited wealth.  He also doesn't seem to understand that doing chores and housework doesn't mean that he can stop looking for work.  We walked by a cell phone store the other days with a "Help Wanted" sign in the window -- why should I have had to be the one to say "go in and get an application"?  I can't work *and* job-hunt for him at the same time.

I can't seem to work or to get much done at all, although I did a frantic cleaning of the kitchen sink on Saturday afternoon.  He washes most of the dishes most of the time, but not the sink or the area around it, which was really gross.  I'm trying to get the place clean, bit by bit, but he never goes past the maintenance chores.  I've been waiting for him to put up a towel rack in the bathroom for eight months or so (and have reminded/complaining from time to time).

I don't really have the time or energy to do the shopping on top of everything else, but I've had to cancel some doctor's appointments so I can do it.  I can't just give him money.  Let him feel like a fucking hobo.  I feel like a fucking idiot.

And all bets are off on any kind of "misbehaving."  As far as I'm concerned, I'm moving out of this marriage, and much as I'd like a single life, I could probably do a little more at this point than bat my eyes.

this is a bad state of affairs

I seem to be having a marriage problem.  If I sound surprised, it's because I am.

It goes this way:  Barry supposedly stopped smoking cigarettes about two years ago.  I had stopped some years earlier, and the smoke was starting to bother me, and the smell of smoke, and the health issues, and most of all the price.  We had an agreement that he would stop when it went over $10 a pack, and then it went over and he didn't tell me.  So I blew a fuse and gave him 30 days.  I did say that if he wanted, he could mooch one if he was with a smoking friend, but that was it.

Now, I've caught him here and there with a pack in his dresser, or trying to mooch from people on the street, and have done my share of yelling about it.

So, on Saturday, my pay hit my account, and we went out shopping.  For about a week before, I'd been making lists of what he needed to buy when I got paid and the costs.  So when we went out on Saturday, I had a very set shopping list, a very set amount I was taking out of the bank, plus I was going to buy a one-month unlimited Metrocard for myself and put $35 on one for Barry. 

We were going to do most of our shopping at Rite-Aid -- we have a 20% off card there, so we buy a lot of housewares there as well as pharmacy items.  As we were walking to Rite-Aid, Barry asked if I would give him $20 to walk around with, "So I won't feel like a hobo."  I gave this to him, which made me remember that he owed $15 to a guy in a local deli.  I said, "We can stop at Eagle on the way back and you can pay Alfonso, since you have the $20."  He said something like, "This 20 is for me, we can give Alfonso another 20."  I explained that I was counting every dime because I was, as always, very worried about money, and didn't want to be tight at the end of the month yet again.

So we get into Rite-Aid, I get a cart, and Barry says there's something he wants to look at, he'll catch up with me in a minute.  So I go down one aisle, then up another, and I see him at the checkout, and I hear the guy counting out eight-odd dollars in change.  I yelled, and I hope the whole store heard, 'WHAT ARE YOU BUYING???"  I yelled until he said he'd return it, and when he did, he found that this did not solve the problem.

I yelled all the way home, called him a liar, said I couldn't trust him, and said he'd broken my heart.  I said he would only be handled small sums of money any more, and I had no idea when this would change because it was a matter of my being able to trust him again.

So that's a deal -- I'm only giving him a few more bucks than he needs for a particular payment of shopping trip, and making him show me receipts.  Fuck of a lot of extra work for me.  (And that's before we look at the fact that I'm the only one working, and it;s MY money that he was trying to spend on cigarettes.)

Since then, I speak to him, but there's no affection.  I sure don't feel it.  I haven't touched him or kissed him or said I loved him, and haven't worn my wedding ring.  I actually had a nice present for him on Sunday which he did not get.  The whole birthday thing may be off.  The whole marriage thing may be off.  How I am going to live with someone I can't trust?

Mostly, I want him to get a fucking job, so I won't be paying for his bad habits, and I can move out without leaving him flat broke.  I'm at least that kind.  But even if it was a "spur of the moment weakness," as he claims, it's happened before and will happen again.  I've found evidence of smoking in the house and he denies it, acting offended.  Now I'm the one who's offended.  There's really no way for him to make this right or to make it up to me.  Once you've done something you're never supposed to do, how do you fix that?

We basically have a partnership at this point, not really a marriage.  Delilah is on hold, because I don't think I want to start any kind of "together" project with him.  This one may have broken the back of our marriage.  I've been tolerant with a lot of little things, but I can't overlook this.  It's really bad.

a message to my St. Ann's friends

This was sent by personal message to a group of 26 members of the St. Ann's Faculty/Alumni group of Facebook, in response to a long message by Dave Samuels:

Dear David and friends,

David, I appreciate your honesty and clarity. My feelings about Stanley and about St. Ann's as an institution were also very mixed. I became quite troubled after about age nine, when my parents divorced just before the great divorce boom; none of my other friends had divorced parents, and I was lonely and confused. Stanley was not sensitive to this, was not supportive of my being in therapy. There was relief, and even joy, in my classes and with my fellow students, but I continued to feel quite alienated and unnoticed by the institution. I was also someone from what seemed a more average family than many of my peers -- we lived in the Heights, but in a modest rental. I was on half scholarship, and my parents struggled financially.

When I started to cut classes and neglect schoolwork, no one noticed or acted on it. No private or family conferences with Stanley were called. I got away with way too much. I did not fulfill the requirements of some classes and was passed anyway.

Toward the end of high school, the institution and particularly Stanley seemed so hell-bent on getting us all into prestigious schools that no one noticed that I didn't have the skills. I managed to escape St. Ann's without ever writing a term paper. I had no study or research discipline. I was admitted to Oberlin, Wesleyan, and Vassar, but instead accepted admission at my "backup" state school. This was because I was 16, had no major in mind, and my mother was very concerned because my family could pay almost nothing toward college and she was worried about the loans I would have to carry. Out of our graduating class of 68, I was one of two who did not attend a private college (and the other had only been admitted to a state school -- she may have been more neglected than I was). Stanley's response to this was to refer to my mother as "an hysterical woman" and then stop talking to me for three months. I always felt like a failure and an underachiever after that, which is basically why none of you saw or heard from me for 35 years.

There is one more thing I've ached to write about, but could not share in our online group as someone involved belongs on Facebook and I believe is in our faculty/alumni group. When I was in art class one day, and left my purse on the bookcase where we all left our books, a change purse was taken from it, which contained a few dollars, and a ring and a pair of earrings I had left in it. I was about twelve. I had seen a few girls standing by that bookcase, and a few days later, I saw one of them brazenly wearing my earrings at school. I was terrified. At the time, I was focused on the fact that someone had done something wrong to me, but in truth, I felt unsafe and terrified. I was not a confrontational person, and I suppose that was a family trait, as my mother suggested that I take the issue to Stanley. I did, and again focused on the fact that I wanted my property returned (the earrings were not costly but they were one-of-a-kind, purchase by me from the Summa Gallery downstairs). He did not seem to understand that I felt unsafe, and sent me away with a vague promise to talk to the girl in question. A month later, I went to see him again, asking if he had spoken to her, and he had not. The subject was never broached again. He never suggested that I speak to her myself, or that my mother should call hers. I have my own ideas as to why Stanley would not confront or punish this girl, but that isn't the point. He did not restore my sense of safety and he permitted the unjust and unfair action to stand without any consequences. He did not do the right thing.

I had some teachers who changed my life, and I now have all of you: blessings beyond blessing. This would not have been the case without Stanley. But Stanley also failed to support me when I had emotional problems, neglected my academic problems, did not provide justice when I was wrong, and behaved childishly when I did not choose the college he wanted me to attend. Stanley was a mixed blessing.

Love to you all,

Jenn

strange changes

I have indeed changed the title and description of my blog, and if I do buy a domain name, it will be some iteration of the new title.  A lot of people are carrying the banner of Coney Island and of Brooklyn a whole lot better than I am.  That's not being hard on myself; it's just a fact.  I'm writing about other things.  And lately, it seems to be more opinion than memoir.  If you read way back, it's very memoir-y, but these days, not so much.

Yet again, I can't seem to use or see my Amazon widgets from my home computer.  Am I starting to hate Blogger again?  Perhaps.  I did figure out, though, how to change my job from book publishing to whatever it is I do now.  Actually, I love my job.  I kind of bustle around all day long, although it's mostly sitting at my computer, updating lists and documents, and especially reading and sending e-mail.  My phone rings maybe twice a day, but the e-mail just pours in.  Obviously, I adore e-mail as a form of communication.  All of that letter-writing I did from around 1971 right up to around 1998 or 1999 has done me some good.  (And the only reason I wrote letters that long was that I was very close to someone in Chicago who didn't have e-mail and was also a great letter-writer.)

My mind is wandering a little.  I've had a cold all week, and yesterday it was so severe that I stayed home, coughing and sneezing and nose-blowing all day.  Read a lot of the latest book on my Kindle, The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and someone whose name I could tell you if my Amazon Associates widget was working.  (Seriously, Blogger, whassup?)

A kitten is under consideration.  There is a cat rescue woman named Patricia, who sets up right across from Union Square, in front of Whole Foods, weather permitting.  She and I have become very friendly, since I show up practically every day she's out, and we are both great cat lovers.  She is a wonderful woman.  Anyway, I've been resisting, resisting, and resisting...really not easy, because she always has so many lovely and adorable kittens and cats.  But somehow, one of the kittens got to me.  She's six weeks old, a long-haired calico, and Barry and I are in love with her.  We had thought about the name Martha if we ever got another cat; Barry's mother's name in Poland was Marta (which was changed to Myrna when she came over here at age 8), but I thought Marta was a little harsh-sounding and suggested Martha.  And when I first saw the long-haired calico, I thought Coco would be an excellent name.  But of course, she has her rescue-cat name, the name Patricia's been calling her, which is Delilah.  So of course, we've been referring to her as Delilah, and I think if she comes to live with us, Delilah it is.  (That's how our middle cat, Lolly, got her name -- is was her rescue-cat name.  Xena and Maya both came to us without names, and I named them both.  I'm a pretty good cat-namer.)

Anyway, someone has already adopted one of Delilah's sibs, and may or may not want Delilah as well.  If not, Delilah is ours.  I've held her a couple of times, and she cuddles right up and purrs.  She's a beauty, and I've never had a long-haired cat.  Of course, we would then have four cats.  Barry didn't bat an eye -- I'm afraid I've made him into an even crazier cat person than I was or am.  He fell for her right away; he has a particular soft spot for calicos, ever since we got Lolly -- although I'm the one who spotted and chose her.  I'm a good cat-picker too.  I was the first one to spot Lolly, Xena and Maya, and brought Maya home without Barry ever seeing her first.  (This was after Tiggy died, and she and I were so crazy about each other it was pretty much a given that I'd be coming home with a new kitten at some point.)

I know four cats is crazy.  Tell me something I don't know.  That's what we get for not having children.

the question of congestion, and goodbye to Stanley

I'm home (8:41 AM) and will most probably be here all day.  I have something that is either a bad cold or the worst possible allergies, but allergy mes are not helping and it's been getting worse since Monday,  I can't stop coughing, sneezing, or blowing my nose.  I've e-mailed my intern and hope she can man the ship today; I can access office email at home, but I'm waiting to hear from Sarah.  I hope she checks e-mail before she goes to work (she usually starts at 10:00).

And I must say -- coming home last night was extra-miserable.  It rained, but since this was not in the forecast, I had no umbrella.  So I got drenched between work and the subway, and then got on one of those extra-freezingly-air-conditioned trains.  So I shivered, coughed, sneezed, and blew my nose the whole way home.  Still, I did finish that Preston/Childs books, and started The Strain by Gullermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan.  (Now Blogger feels like doing italics -- not bad.  Couldn't get a bold or underline to save my life some days back, but of course my text wasn't posting, so it didn't make much difference.)  I'll let you know if it's any good.  I may go back to Preston/Childs after that.

I went to Saint Ann's School for ten years, second grade through the end of high school, which was a school for gifted children -- fairly dysfunctional back then, better now.  It is in fact a highly regarded private (not religious) school at this time.  When I started in 1965, it had 63 students and was very experimental.  (The school was housed in the undercroft of St. Ann's Church for its first couple of years, which is why it has a religious-school sounding name.  You can't imagine how many times during my life I've had to explain that -- although these days, at least in NYC, the school is well-known enough that people actually know what it is.)

Over the past 20 years, until five years or so ago, when I mentioned Saint Ann's to parent-age New Yorkers, they say something like, "oh, with that guy..."  "That guy" was founder and headmaster Stanley Bosworth, who died three days ago.  The linked article pretty much says it all.  Stanley was brilliant and maddening and inappropriate.  He never hit on me, before or after school, but Beth Bosworth, "wife number three" as he referred to her in the article, was in my graduating class. Ewww!  To me, he was warm, difficult, and confusing.  And he pissed me off a few times.  But the bottom line is that he created a really amazing school, where I had some amazing teachers and amazing peers.  I was a bit of a social misfit when I was there, but have since become reacquainted with a lot of former alumni via Facebook, and I love almost all of them.  And just for that, if nothing else, I must be ever-grateful to Stanley.  As much as we in the Facebook St. Ann's Alumni and Faculty have bashed him and told bad-Stanley stories, there's a lot of grief there today.