(This uninspiring titling of my notes is starting to become a habit. Sorry.)
It's been a strange week. A bit up and down - and no, pervs, not in *that* way. My hormones are all over the place, and I've spent much of my time lying in the bath, or lying in bed, or lying across the kitchen table, because my kidneys hurt and flat is the most comfortable position for me. Of course, there are times when I have to sit up straight - I went to class yesterday, and I had to sit in a straight-backed chair for two hours, and then wait for forty minutes at the bus stop on a slanted seat that I kept falling off - remind me never to wear a velvet jacket or skirt to class again; I slip off the seats too much - and that was pretty agonizing.
The other main downfall of the hormone surges, of course, is that I've eaten half the Halloween candy, and as soon as I finish here I have to go to Tesco and buy some more.
Class was good, though. I brought lollipops for everyone to eat, which was fun, and I'm really warming up to our teacher, as well as the other people in the class. About a third of the original class seems to have dropped out - either that or they've been ill for several weeks - and we're now down to about 15 of us, so we sit on two big tables and are very loud (and probably slightly obnoxious, but nobody seems to mind, although Magdalena - our teacher - doesn't always seem to get our humour). All in all, it's a great class. It seems wrong somehow that you should have so much fun LEARNING. Part of me wonders if I'm going to walk away from the class knowing anything at all, since half the time we seem to chat and laugh, but then at the same time I do feel like I'm learning quite a lot. It's a challenge, and I like that; it's been too long since I did something that used the learning part of my brain.
It's always a long night - class is only two hours, from 7-9pm, but with all the buses I usually leave the house at 5.40 and get home about 10.15 - IF the buses come. I'm supposed to take the 9.28 from Hatfield to Alby, and then the 9.56 from Alby town to home, but not once in four weeks has the 9.28 arrived. Which means I end up on the 9.45 (which is usually a few minutes early), panicking the whole time about whether I'll make the 9.56, or if I'll have to wait another hour - because the S3 (or is it S2?) only comes once an hour at that time of night - or take a cab, or walk. None of which are particularly nice options, because either way it means I don't get there before the Chinese takeaway closes.
Luckily, though, I've always managed to make the 9.56, although a couple of times that's only because I took my shoes off and ran for it. So my Tuesday nights have so far always had the same routine - class, buses home, pick up some chicken chow mein and a can of Lilt, go home, say hi to Mom, take a bath, and eat my noodles in bed while I read a good book. Wonderful.
Monday I went to Homebase and bought paint. I'm painting my bedroom pale pink. It hurts to paint it, a little - the peppermint green has seen me through a lot of good and bad times, and when the colour changes and I put away some of the decorations, and buy a bed, the whole character of the room is changed. And you all know how I hate change. I last painted the room back in summer of 2002, when we moved back into the house after living in Spain, and I've been holding off redecorating for several years because of all the memories.
When you keep things looking the same, you can remember better, and there's a lot of things that happened in that room that are worth remembering. Not all of them are particularly happy things, but all of them are events that helped to shape the person that I am today. Part of me is scared that when everything looks different, then I'll be different too, and I'll start to forget all the people I've known and loved in the last seven years. If they were all still part of my life, it would be easier, but some of those people are long gone. I suppose the issue isn't really the room at all, it's the fact that I miss them. I miss Richard, and Curt, and Sanjit, and everyone else who's no longer a big part of my life.
No matter how much I tell myself that change is healthy, change is a vital part of life, I still hate it, and probably will until I die. But I do it anyway, because it needs to be done. :)
So the green is going. And the mattress on the floor, where I've been sleeping since Richard was sharing the room with me that summer, is going too. My cardiologist said that I have to have a bed, so I'm getting a bed. After much deliberation between a couple of very different beds, I decided to go with the one that I wouldn't normally pick. Usually I go for natural woods that are simple and low to the ground, and admittedly those are the ones that I automatically gravitated towards this time. In fact, I had one all picked out, until I realised that it was an almost carbon copy of Curt's bed - or at least the one he had when I last saw it, a few years ago - which freaked me out a little.
So I pushed the changes, and now the one that I've picked is very different. It's metal, ivory-coloured with brass bedknobs, and very Victorian-looking, but not ugly. Perhaps if it were a dark colour it might look weird and gothic, but the ivory-colour makes it quite pretty and elegant. It'll go well in a pink room, and Mom bought me a new door handle - pale blue, with a crystal effect to it - and I'm going to buy some matching knobs to put on my furniture. And I've been saving pretty things for years, that I've got as Christmas and birthday presents and have never been able to put out because they didn't go with the decor before. I have an antique-effect oval mirror with enamel dragonflies at the top and bottom, and a butterfly jewellery box, and an incense burner with crystal beads, and at least fifty beautiful candles. I have photo frames with silk and beadwork, and crystal prisms to hang in my window, and silk pillowcases with lace. I have beautiful white Egyptian cotton bed linen with a broderie trim that makes me feel like a Victorian bride, and beige-and-raspberry silk bed linen with Japanese cherry blossom on that Mom gave me last birthday. I intend to paint the frame of my boring wood-effect long mirror in a pretty sky-blue colour, and possibly to paint the melamine dressing table and nightstand, which I've had since I was seven years old, to match.
It's been many years since I had a girly bedroom, and it's never been *this* girly. I had flowered wallpaper when I was seven or eight, but since I started choosing my own decorations when I was about ten, I've gone for things that are more androgynous. My room at the moment is a nice room, but if you didn't know who lived there you might not know whether it was a girl or a boy's room, aside from the clothes and jewellery and stuff. I have bright colours, splashy pillows, African and Native American masks on my walls. For a few years, though, I've been yearning for lace and ribbons, and my fear of losing my memories has held me back.
(Quite ironic, if you think about it.)
But I'm doing it. I'm making the leap. And it's going to look beautiful. I just hope that any friends I have staying over - guys, really - don't feel like they're going to break things. Guys always seemed to like the unisex look that I went for, and I'm a little bit worried about how my male friends will react to the change. It should be OK, though - they seem to have reacted positively to the changes in my person over the last few years (or at least most of them have). And even if they react badly...hell, it isn't really their business, anyway. It's *my* room. I don't know why I even worry about this stuff.
OK, what else? Class, room...hmm. I'm not sure what else there is to report for the last week. I came into town today to use the library and pick up work, and found that my last paycheck didn't go through, which was a pain in the ass. (Yes, Paul, that was a direct dig at you.) So I'm overdrawn at the bank again. Unfortunately I didn't find this out until AFTER I bought a couple of things, because I was relying on the paycheck being there. So now I have to go home, sort through bank statements, borrow money from the savings to put in the bank to cover the overdraft so I only get charged once, and then come back tomorrow or Friday to put the money in. I'm really pissed, because there should have been enough money to go to CeX and buy some games for my DS, and now there isn't. Bleh. I wanted to do some more Christmas shopping, too. And I wanted some more songs from iTunes.
Yesterday I finally caved into pressure from Kell, and agreed to model for him. We did a Halloween theme, so it was actually a lot of fun, and while my costume was skimpier than I'm used to wearing, I didn't have to do any nudes. (Thank God - I'm not comfortable enough with my body yet to get back to doing that. Although I probably will have to force myself to be, because I need the money.)
Unfortunately we finished late, so I didn't have a chance to change before I went to class, although I did manage to put on a slightly longer skirt and a cami under the jacket I was wearing. So I turned up to class in an ankle-length black velvet jacket, cut low to show plenty of cleavage, and held together at the bust by only two buttons, then flowing down to show the skirt underneath, along with smoky grey and black eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara and blood-red lipstick, with red flowers in my hair and on my handbag. God only knows what the people in class must have thought - I tend to be pretty conservative in my clothing, and as for makeup I rarely wear more than face base and eyeshadow, with a little blush if I'm looking peaky that day. Certainly lipstick and mascara are things I wear maybe twice a year, and eyeliner not much more often.
Despite the embarrassment, it was actually quite fun, and I looked kind of neat. So I'll probably repeat it again on Saturday for the trick-or-treaters.
Ah yes. Candy. Don't forget to buy candy. Damn, I'd better check and see how much change I've got in my purse.
I've been reading a lot of Poe for the last week, and I'm nearly finished with the book I bought last Wednesday, so today I bought the matching book - "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque". I've never read most of the stories in it, so I'm really looking forward to it. Although I may have to take a break for a little while; some of the stories in "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" really unsettled me. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was very haunting, and "The Masque of the Red Death" and "MS Found in a Bottle" gave me intense flashbacks to nightmares that I've had for my whole life. By far the worst for me, though, was "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", which makes me shiver every time I think of it.
Interestingly, I mentioned the fact that a lot of my nightmares seem to have come out of Poe stories that I'd never read - I'd previously only read a few of his that I know of - and she told me that she thought she might have read him to me when I was a little girl. Certainly she said she remembered reading some of the poetry to me when I was learning to read. Which is something I never ever knew before, and brings up the question, WTF? Who on earth reads Poe to a two-and-three-year-old?
Well, apparently my mother does.
...I don't want to give you the impression that she's a bad mother or anything, she's just...I don't know. She has a lot more faith in me than I deserve. She's always had this assumption that I'm so much more mature and intelligent and capable than I actually am, and I've never wanted to disabuse her of that notion, so whenever she did something with me as a kid that probably wasn't age-appropriate - like buying me "Pretty Woman" for my sixth birthday, to teach me the facts of life - I just sort of sat and got on with it. Truly, I probably didn't realise until I was nine or ten that not everyone grew up the same way that I did. I always thought that the kids loved coming to my house because they liked me, but in hindsight I realise that probably a lot of it was due to the fact that they'd get an education that they never got at home. That said, my Mom was always overprotective when it came to letting me do things alone, and she was much more involved in my life than any of my friends' parents. She certainly wasn't neglectful or anything; in fact she was quite the opposite. But some of her ideas of what kids should and shouldn't be exposed to are...well, liberal, to say the least.
Which I suppose I should celebrate, since my upbringing has made me into a person who's generally happy, generally confident, and can cope with just about anything, despite the nightmares. Very little surprises me, even less shocks and horrifies me, and there are very few things in the world that I can't deal with. And if the price for that is a slight aloofness, a slight sense of distance from the rest of the world, and occasional accusations of being unemotional and too cerebral...well, it's not a high price at all.
It's not like I don't CARE, after all. I care. I'm just not controlled by my emotions.
Although that said, I had a pretty freak-out moment today. I found a child. I was in Wilkinson, buying masking tape and potato chips, and I came across a little boy sitting in one of the seldom-used aisles at the back of the shop, playing wiith the displays and eating a packet of custard creams. He couldn't have been more than three, and I'm guessing it was more like one-and-a-half or two. And I had no idea what the heck to do. He didn't seem to belong to anyone, and I searched up and down a couple of the aisles on either side, looking to see if his parent might have left him there while he / she was getting something one aisle over, but nobody was there. I couldn't walk away to find the security guard, because he was right at the other end of the (fairly big) shop, and the kid might have moved by then, or got snatched or something. If he'd been crying or seemed upset in any way, I'd have picked him up and taken him to security, but he was just sitting there happily, eating his cookies and playing by himself, and I thought that if I picked him up I might upset him. So I just stood there for ten minutes or so, waiting to see if a parent would appear, and none did. So I sat down next to him, and asked him if he knew where his Mummy or Daddy was, and at first he didn't want to talk, but then he said he didn't know. I asked if he was here with Mum, and he didn't know. And I asked if he was here with Dad, and he said no. And I asked if he was lost, and he said he didn't know. And I just kept thinking, what if I take him to information, and while I'm doing that his parent comes back to find him and thinks I'm trying to steal him?
I should mention here that I have NO idea of how to relate to children. I'm not a kiddie person. I like them well enough, and I can feed them and change a diaper and stuff, but aside from the physical needs I really don't know anything about how to take care of them. I especially don't know how to talk to them, and tend to treat them as very small adults. So I didn't know what else to ask, so I just sat there and played with him for a little longer.
I suppose if many more minutes had passed, I'd have had to take him to the information desk and see if he knew his name, and have them put out an announcement. Luckily a frantic mother showed up a couple of minutes later. Turned out that she'd turned around to pick something up, and in that half a minute the kid had toddled off, and she'd been searching the entire store for him for the last twenty minutes. God knows how he'd gotten all the way to the back corner by himself. And I felt kind of bad about that, because if I'd taken him in as soon as I found him then she'd have got him back sooner, but hell, I did the only thing I knew how to do. The whole episode scared the crap out of me much more effectively than anything Poe's written.
So yeah, it was a strange day. Strange week. I don't know what else is going on with Ryan's situation; Lauren isn't talking about it much. She and Chris have both had bad colds this week, and she's working so hard, and I think she's just lost the energy to fight. But she needs to fight, because the last thing that Social Services said was that if he was living with her, they weren't going to pay to support him. So basically they're saying that they're refusing to support a homeless minor. And I told her, you have to push them, and when that doesn't work, push harder. We do not live in a country where we let children go without home and food. You hear the liberals talking about all the starving homeless kids here, but most of it is bunk. The government isn't perfect - hell, it isn't even good - but they don't let kids live on the streets if their parents kick them out. They either go into the care of a family member, or they go into foster care, and either way the carer gets a government subsidy. And yet that's what they're saying to Lauren, apparently. "Either you support your brother, or he can go be homeless." So I can only assume that there's been some kind of misunderstanding, on either end. I'm not entirely sure what to do about it, to be honest. I haven't been invited to do anything about it, and on the one hand it's not really my business. Yes, this is what I do for a living, but Lori and Ryan aren't part of my work life, they're friends. And until she asks me to help, there isn't really much I can do. She's not even getting any support from her Dad - apparently he's been told that until the maintenance situation is sorted out in court, he's not allowed to give her any money, which is the biggest load of balls I've ever heard. If a parent wants to give money to a child to help them out with something, it's not anybody's business but theirs.
Then on the other hand, I worry.
*sigh*
This note has been overly long, I'm sure, and Tesco closes in a little under an hour, so I'd better leave you guys there. I don't want y'all to think that things are bad right now - they're really not. Aside from worrying about Lauren and worrying about Ryan and worrying about Mom and worrying about money, things are going pretty well. Class is great, the autumn is great, and hopefully tonight we'll get out the Halloween decorations. Normally we'd have had them up weeks ago, but we've all been busy and tired. I need to go to the gym tomorrow, and hopefully that'll give me a bit more energy. :)
I also need a date. It's been a while since I had one of those, and Chris - Chris Kennedy - has ordered me to take some time for fun.
Enjoy your Halloween! And give out treats - it's only once a year, after all. :)
It's been a strange week. A bit up and down - and no, pervs, not in *that* way. My hormones are all over the place, and I've spent much of my time lying in the bath, or lying in bed, or lying across the kitchen table, because my kidneys hurt and flat is the most comfortable position for me. Of course, there are times when I have to sit up straight - I went to class yesterday, and I had to sit in a straight-backed chair for two hours, and then wait for forty minutes at the bus stop on a slanted seat that I kept falling off - remind me never to wear a velvet jacket or skirt to class again; I slip off the seats too much - and that was pretty agonizing.
The other main downfall of the hormone surges, of course, is that I've eaten half the Halloween candy, and as soon as I finish here I have to go to Tesco and buy some more.
Class was good, though. I brought lollipops for everyone to eat, which was fun, and I'm really warming up to our teacher, as well as the other people in the class. About a third of the original class seems to have dropped out - either that or they've been ill for several weeks - and we're now down to about 15 of us, so we sit on two big tables and are very loud (and probably slightly obnoxious, but nobody seems to mind, although Magdalena - our teacher - doesn't always seem to get our humour). All in all, it's a great class. It seems wrong somehow that you should have so much fun LEARNING. Part of me wonders if I'm going to walk away from the class knowing anything at all, since half the time we seem to chat and laugh, but then at the same time I do feel like I'm learning quite a lot. It's a challenge, and I like that; it's been too long since I did something that used the learning part of my brain.
It's always a long night - class is only two hours, from 7-9pm, but with all the buses I usually leave the house at 5.40 and get home about 10.15 - IF the buses come. I'm supposed to take the 9.28 from Hatfield to Alby, and then the 9.56 from Alby town to home, but not once in four weeks has the 9.28 arrived. Which means I end up on the 9.45 (which is usually a few minutes early), panicking the whole time about whether I'll make the 9.56, or if I'll have to wait another hour - because the S3 (or is it S2?) only comes once an hour at that time of night - or take a cab, or walk. None of which are particularly nice options, because either way it means I don't get there before the Chinese takeaway closes.
Luckily, though, I've always managed to make the 9.56, although a couple of times that's only because I took my shoes off and ran for it. So my Tuesday nights have so far always had the same routine - class, buses home, pick up some chicken chow mein and a can of Lilt, go home, say hi to Mom, take a bath, and eat my noodles in bed while I read a good book. Wonderful.
Monday I went to Homebase and bought paint. I'm painting my bedroom pale pink. It hurts to paint it, a little - the peppermint green has seen me through a lot of good and bad times, and when the colour changes and I put away some of the decorations, and buy a bed, the whole character of the room is changed. And you all know how I hate change. I last painted the room back in summer of 2002, when we moved back into the house after living in Spain, and I've been holding off redecorating for several years because of all the memories.
When you keep things looking the same, you can remember better, and there's a lot of things that happened in that room that are worth remembering. Not all of them are particularly happy things, but all of them are events that helped to shape the person that I am today. Part of me is scared that when everything looks different, then I'll be different too, and I'll start to forget all the people I've known and loved in the last seven years. If they were all still part of my life, it would be easier, but some of those people are long gone. I suppose the issue isn't really the room at all, it's the fact that I miss them. I miss Richard, and Curt, and Sanjit, and everyone else who's no longer a big part of my life.
No matter how much I tell myself that change is healthy, change is a vital part of life, I still hate it, and probably will until I die. But I do it anyway, because it needs to be done. :)
So the green is going. And the mattress on the floor, where I've been sleeping since Richard was sharing the room with me that summer, is going too. My cardiologist said that I have to have a bed, so I'm getting a bed. After much deliberation between a couple of very different beds, I decided to go with the one that I wouldn't normally pick. Usually I go for natural woods that are simple and low to the ground, and admittedly those are the ones that I automatically gravitated towards this time. In fact, I had one all picked out, until I realised that it was an almost carbon copy of Curt's bed - or at least the one he had when I last saw it, a few years ago - which freaked me out a little.
So I pushed the changes, and now the one that I've picked is very different. It's metal, ivory-coloured with brass bedknobs, and very Victorian-looking, but not ugly. Perhaps if it were a dark colour it might look weird and gothic, but the ivory-colour makes it quite pretty and elegant. It'll go well in a pink room, and Mom bought me a new door handle - pale blue, with a crystal effect to it - and I'm going to buy some matching knobs to put on my furniture. And I've been saving pretty things for years, that I've got as Christmas and birthday presents and have never been able to put out because they didn't go with the decor before. I have an antique-effect oval mirror with enamel dragonflies at the top and bottom, and a butterfly jewellery box, and an incense burner with crystal beads, and at least fifty beautiful candles. I have photo frames with silk and beadwork, and crystal prisms to hang in my window, and silk pillowcases with lace. I have beautiful white Egyptian cotton bed linen with a broderie trim that makes me feel like a Victorian bride, and beige-and-raspberry silk bed linen with Japanese cherry blossom on that Mom gave me last birthday. I intend to paint the frame of my boring wood-effect long mirror in a pretty sky-blue colour, and possibly to paint the melamine dressing table and nightstand, which I've had since I was seven years old, to match.
It's been many years since I had a girly bedroom, and it's never been *this* girly. I had flowered wallpaper when I was seven or eight, but since I started choosing my own decorations when I was about ten, I've gone for things that are more androgynous. My room at the moment is a nice room, but if you didn't know who lived there you might not know whether it was a girl or a boy's room, aside from the clothes and jewellery and stuff. I have bright colours, splashy pillows, African and Native American masks on my walls. For a few years, though, I've been yearning for lace and ribbons, and my fear of losing my memories has held me back.
(Quite ironic, if you think about it.)
But I'm doing it. I'm making the leap. And it's going to look beautiful. I just hope that any friends I have staying over - guys, really - don't feel like they're going to break things. Guys always seemed to like the unisex look that I went for, and I'm a little bit worried about how my male friends will react to the change. It should be OK, though - they seem to have reacted positively to the changes in my person over the last few years (or at least most of them have). And even if they react badly...hell, it isn't really their business, anyway. It's *my* room. I don't know why I even worry about this stuff.
OK, what else? Class, room...hmm. I'm not sure what else there is to report for the last week. I came into town today to use the library and pick up work, and found that my last paycheck didn't go through, which was a pain in the ass. (Yes, Paul, that was a direct dig at you.) So I'm overdrawn at the bank again. Unfortunately I didn't find this out until AFTER I bought a couple of things, because I was relying on the paycheck being there. So now I have to go home, sort through bank statements, borrow money from the savings to put in the bank to cover the overdraft so I only get charged once, and then come back tomorrow or Friday to put the money in. I'm really pissed, because there should have been enough money to go to CeX and buy some games for my DS, and now there isn't. Bleh. I wanted to do some more Christmas shopping, too. And I wanted some more songs from iTunes.
Yesterday I finally caved into pressure from Kell, and agreed to model for him. We did a Halloween theme, so it was actually a lot of fun, and while my costume was skimpier than I'm used to wearing, I didn't have to do any nudes. (Thank God - I'm not comfortable enough with my body yet to get back to doing that. Although I probably will have to force myself to be, because I need the money.)
Unfortunately we finished late, so I didn't have a chance to change before I went to class, although I did manage to put on a slightly longer skirt and a cami under the jacket I was wearing. So I turned up to class in an ankle-length black velvet jacket, cut low to show plenty of cleavage, and held together at the bust by only two buttons, then flowing down to show the skirt underneath, along with smoky grey and black eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara and blood-red lipstick, with red flowers in my hair and on my handbag. God only knows what the people in class must have thought - I tend to be pretty conservative in my clothing, and as for makeup I rarely wear more than face base and eyeshadow, with a little blush if I'm looking peaky that day. Certainly lipstick and mascara are things I wear maybe twice a year, and eyeliner not much more often.
Despite the embarrassment, it was actually quite fun, and I looked kind of neat. So I'll probably repeat it again on Saturday for the trick-or-treaters.
Ah yes. Candy. Don't forget to buy candy. Damn, I'd better check and see how much change I've got in my purse.
I've been reading a lot of Poe for the last week, and I'm nearly finished with the book I bought last Wednesday, so today I bought the matching book - "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque". I've never read most of the stories in it, so I'm really looking forward to it. Although I may have to take a break for a little while; some of the stories in "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" really unsettled me. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was very haunting, and "The Masque of the Red Death" and "MS Found in a Bottle" gave me intense flashbacks to nightmares that I've had for my whole life. By far the worst for me, though, was "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", which makes me shiver every time I think of it.
Interestingly, I mentioned the fact that a lot of my nightmares seem to have come out of Poe stories that I'd never read - I'd previously only read a few of his that I know of - and she told me that she thought she might have read him to me when I was a little girl. Certainly she said she remembered reading some of the poetry to me when I was learning to read. Which is something I never ever knew before, and brings up the question, WTF? Who on earth reads Poe to a two-and-three-year-old?
Well, apparently my mother does.
...I don't want to give you the impression that she's a bad mother or anything, she's just...I don't know. She has a lot more faith in me than I deserve. She's always had this assumption that I'm so much more mature and intelligent and capable than I actually am, and I've never wanted to disabuse her of that notion, so whenever she did something with me as a kid that probably wasn't age-appropriate - like buying me "Pretty Woman" for my sixth birthday, to teach me the facts of life - I just sort of sat and got on with it. Truly, I probably didn't realise until I was nine or ten that not everyone grew up the same way that I did. I always thought that the kids loved coming to my house because they liked me, but in hindsight I realise that probably a lot of it was due to the fact that they'd get an education that they never got at home. That said, my Mom was always overprotective when it came to letting me do things alone, and she was much more involved in my life than any of my friends' parents. She certainly wasn't neglectful or anything; in fact she was quite the opposite. But some of her ideas of what kids should and shouldn't be exposed to are...well, liberal, to say the least.
Which I suppose I should celebrate, since my upbringing has made me into a person who's generally happy, generally confident, and can cope with just about anything, despite the nightmares. Very little surprises me, even less shocks and horrifies me, and there are very few things in the world that I can't deal with. And if the price for that is a slight aloofness, a slight sense of distance from the rest of the world, and occasional accusations of being unemotional and too cerebral...well, it's not a high price at all.
It's not like I don't CARE, after all. I care. I'm just not controlled by my emotions.
Although that said, I had a pretty freak-out moment today. I found a child. I was in Wilkinson, buying masking tape and potato chips, and I came across a little boy sitting in one of the seldom-used aisles at the back of the shop, playing wiith the displays and eating a packet of custard creams. He couldn't have been more than three, and I'm guessing it was more like one-and-a-half or two. And I had no idea what the heck to do. He didn't seem to belong to anyone, and I searched up and down a couple of the aisles on either side, looking to see if his parent might have left him there while he / she was getting something one aisle over, but nobody was there. I couldn't walk away to find the security guard, because he was right at the other end of the (fairly big) shop, and the kid might have moved by then, or got snatched or something. If he'd been crying or seemed upset in any way, I'd have picked him up and taken him to security, but he was just sitting there happily, eating his cookies and playing by himself, and I thought that if I picked him up I might upset him. So I just stood there for ten minutes or so, waiting to see if a parent would appear, and none did. So I sat down next to him, and asked him if he knew where his Mummy or Daddy was, and at first he didn't want to talk, but then he said he didn't know. I asked if he was here with Mum, and he didn't know. And I asked if he was here with Dad, and he said no. And I asked if he was lost, and he said he didn't know. And I just kept thinking, what if I take him to information, and while I'm doing that his parent comes back to find him and thinks I'm trying to steal him?
I should mention here that I have NO idea of how to relate to children. I'm not a kiddie person. I like them well enough, and I can feed them and change a diaper and stuff, but aside from the physical needs I really don't know anything about how to take care of them. I especially don't know how to talk to them, and tend to treat them as very small adults. So I didn't know what else to ask, so I just sat there and played with him for a little longer.
I suppose if many more minutes had passed, I'd have had to take him to the information desk and see if he knew his name, and have them put out an announcement. Luckily a frantic mother showed up a couple of minutes later. Turned out that she'd turned around to pick something up, and in that half a minute the kid had toddled off, and she'd been searching the entire store for him for the last twenty minutes. God knows how he'd gotten all the way to the back corner by himself. And I felt kind of bad about that, because if I'd taken him in as soon as I found him then she'd have got him back sooner, but hell, I did the only thing I knew how to do. The whole episode scared the crap out of me much more effectively than anything Poe's written.
So yeah, it was a strange day. Strange week. I don't know what else is going on with Ryan's situation; Lauren isn't talking about it much. She and Chris have both had bad colds this week, and she's working so hard, and I think she's just lost the energy to fight. But she needs to fight, because the last thing that Social Services said was that if he was living with her, they weren't going to pay to support him. So basically they're saying that they're refusing to support a homeless minor. And I told her, you have to push them, and when that doesn't work, push harder. We do not live in a country where we let children go without home and food. You hear the liberals talking about all the starving homeless kids here, but most of it is bunk. The government isn't perfect - hell, it isn't even good - but they don't let kids live on the streets if their parents kick them out. They either go into the care of a family member, or they go into foster care, and either way the carer gets a government subsidy. And yet that's what they're saying to Lauren, apparently. "Either you support your brother, or he can go be homeless." So I can only assume that there's been some kind of misunderstanding, on either end. I'm not entirely sure what to do about it, to be honest. I haven't been invited to do anything about it, and on the one hand it's not really my business. Yes, this is what I do for a living, but Lori and Ryan aren't part of my work life, they're friends. And until she asks me to help, there isn't really much I can do. She's not even getting any support from her Dad - apparently he's been told that until the maintenance situation is sorted out in court, he's not allowed to give her any money, which is the biggest load of balls I've ever heard. If a parent wants to give money to a child to help them out with something, it's not anybody's business but theirs.
Then on the other hand, I worry.
*sigh*
This note has been overly long, I'm sure, and Tesco closes in a little under an hour, so I'd better leave you guys there. I don't want y'all to think that things are bad right now - they're really not. Aside from worrying about Lauren and worrying about Ryan and worrying about Mom and worrying about money, things are going pretty well. Class is great, the autumn is great, and hopefully tonight we'll get out the Halloween decorations. Normally we'd have had them up weeks ago, but we've all been busy and tired. I need to go to the gym tomorrow, and hopefully that'll give me a bit more energy. :)
I also need a date. It's been a while since I had one of those, and Chris - Chris Kennedy - has ordered me to take some time for fun.
Enjoy your Halloween! And give out treats - it's only once a year, after all. :)
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