my agent just fired me. this is not tragic. my agent is a curmudgeon who fires everyone all the time. he will want to hire me again in a month or so. but this is just the last straw in a long line of straw-ish things, so i need to change my life around. everyone in the profession and out knows what my agent is like, but this still means that i have to shop around for another agent while continuing to work on Prozac On Paws: The Tale of Three Spayed Females, a memoir about agoraphobia, service dogs and life.

i'm extremely depressed right now, and i need to tend to this. summers are a bitch for me. i cannot take the heat. i do stay out of the kitchen, btw. nor can i stand the humidity. we're allowed to have a portable air conditioner in our apartments, but i called around and searched Craigs and called Goodwill and such and there is nothing that i can afford as long as the dept. of Educraption is still taking all that money out of my monthly disability nut.

i was good and went waaaay out of my agoraphobic comfort zone to see the doctor and the mental health nurse practitioner -- both of whom are angels on earth who work only with poor people -- and gave them the dept of edu forms to fill out and send to that dept. they were loving and fabulous about the whole thing. and agreed to fill out the huge pile of privacy destroying paperwork that will follow. this will all take a long time and in the meantime i am down $160 a month when i am already poor. 

the good news is that i'm being weaned off the med that made me gain 20 lbs and will be put on another one that does not add weight for most people. i'm often in that 1 %. so my lovely nurse pract. told me that i am an Outlier on the Bell Curve. which i love!!! i'm both an Acquired Taste AND an Outlier. Yahoooo. shit, no wonder i have no human posse, just a canine one.

so i won't be having a portable air conditioning. i will make do once again with my fans. shit, i have no right to bitch. none. i'm blessed to have shelter, to have a roof over my head. i'm blessed to have food to eat, even though it's mostly peanut butter and cereal these days. and i'm so lucky to have my interspecies pack backing me up one day at a time. i wish i enjoyed bully sticks and pig's ears and kibble too, but i just don't.

i went to the therapy pool once again last night and did my aerobic workout. the pool is a blessing and a joy. there were no decrepit people there last evening and that was a gift. i end up playing court jester with them and it's exhausting.

instead i listened to my Hanning Mankell book on CD -- i closed my cd/mp3 player into a Zip Lock bag for waterproofing -- and marveled at how extremely incompetent this particular Swedish police dept is, in Sweden, and how looooong it took them to figure out who the killer is and then how loooooong it's taking them to catch him. i even went on Amazon, when i really love the book anyway, to see if any of the comments there included any that said, "love the book but worst detectives ever. what is up with these people?" but, no, all 4 and 5 stars. so i'm hanging in to see if they manage to actually apprehend this transvestite delight of a murderer.

the joy of the pool is that a woman, Kristen, that i knew in SE PDX from walking dogs together at the field behind Reed College is now head of the Swimming or Aqua department at the Jewish Community Center. last night i had a gorgeous but dull lifeguard. but it is often my lovely Sean -- my first lifeguard this time around -- or my wonderful Kristen. even if Kristen isn't on duty, i can go find her and she listens to my stories and rants and laughs at everything that is supposed to be funny and loves me because i'm not one of the myriad people who come to her to complain about this or that ad nauseum. so i have a In Person friend who is busy but to whom i am a refreshing break in the day. thank you, god/universe, this is a blessing and a huge gift!

but i am still seriously depressed today, so i know it's bad if it didn't respond to endorphins and good people. it's the prospect of the hot hot hot weather. it's the longer days, which mean that i will be increasingly outside of social life. it's not having a beach near by and not having the money or the mental health to get to one. it's my life on OS.

a whole lot of it is my life on here, and this is why i need to make some big big changes and focus elsewhere more and more. it's all my doing, it's all me and my very very very flawed self, but my writing has fallen off. it's a good part because of working on the other project, and it's another part that i just don't have the grit or the stamina at this time to write anything more than fluff. to me, it's fun fluff. i love to write about our interspecies family meetings, for example, but... shit, i don't know why that's not enough. it just doesn't feel like enough. i don't feel like enough to me, here on OS.

i don't read enough on here so my readership continues to fall off. i just don't have the energy to spend 4-8 hours on here reading and commenting when i have a memoir to write and, now, another agent to find, and tv addict mourning to do about having to wait until Fall for my shows to come back on, and immune disorders to manage along with the brain damage carp that makes writing and reading online come very very very slowly to me. i can read books pretty well because i can lie down on my side and relax and dont' have to comment and don't feel pressure and dont' feel that my readership depends on my reading a book. no one will be rating my reading the goddamn novel.

but mostly i'm just plain old depressed. my friends are having a very hard time. i hope i'm a good support to them. god, i hope so. i did something very brave for me and asked over and over again for some support with what i did from several other friends and they were waaay too busy to do that. god, i understand. i do. i used to be busy busy busy too. i remember all about it. so i never heard back from them, at all. so, if some people are monitoring this to see if i take a wrong step and they perceive me as lying or playing the victim, well, you can have a little victory party because i am at the bottom of the barrel. gushfinkti is what i call it. for no reason. it's just my word for something being fucked up. kind of like the army's FUBAR -- fucked up beyond on reason. or SNAFU -- Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. gushfinkti is my word. i have no idea why.

there are others. every morning i get up and say to my pack, after they've both licked my teeth for a while and ella has cleaned out my nostrils: let's get up. now i have no fucking idea why this reminds me of something French but someone my ear hears "haricot vertes", which i think is green beans. whatever. i have brain damage after all. 

so it's just seeming lately that being disabled and Poor and having the Dept of Educraption thing not solved yet since parts of government move at the rate of molasses and my not being able to find anyone to help me with this, and of course all of my appliances and other electronics wearing out at the same time so i need a new phone and my car is on its last legs as is my microwave, and my writing sucking and being just fluff and my readership drifting away sloooowly and painfully, since i LOVE writing, any kind of writing, and i came on here not to write weekly masterpieces but to write about my day and my thoughts and such and to read about the same from others and to be part of a community. but not one that requires me to be online at the very least 4-8 hours a day in order to keep and grow my readership, the fluff-liking ones at least.

it's all me. i got caught up in the whole "have a lot of readers, get a lot of ratings" thing when that was never ever what i wanted. i never wanted to be somewhere where someone could find it completely okay to tell me that my writing is inadequate when she really just wanted to dump me, which is fine. but none of that or the other shit that has gone down matters. i am just depressed for complicated reasons and needing support that people are unable to give me at this time because they have so much on their plates and because i've nagged them once too many times.

it's all me. it's all my responsibility. although i have to say that i do not control the weather and if i had my druthers, i'd require summer to be 80 degrees with low humidity at the most and that everyone on earth be given a portable air conditioner, whether or not said person writes in a disciplinedway. that and the self-esteem that should be the first gift that a newborn is given -- female newbies need to also hear that their bodies are fine the way they are and will be fine throughout their lives. and babies of parents living in areas where there is lots of grey and rain should receive S.A.D. lights to get them through those loooong 9 months of drizzling.

over and out for now.  

this is long and lacks discipline. please RATE it anyway, to help cheer me up.