So I saw Fear Factory the other night. Despite a lot of negative tweets, it really wasn't that bad. The show was five and a half hours though and that was a bit much for me standing in a bar wearing converse. The first band was pretty awful, the second band was a little bit better, I absolutely fell in love with Kobra and the Lotus.

She was amazing live..she's this tiny girl with an amazing voice.

I had alcohol, a lot of it, but by midset of Fear Factory it was all gone and I just got hungry and grumpy. There was a band before FF as well, and they were just awful with almost no interaction with the crowd til the last song. They played metal...very fast but there was no heart to it.

Toby went to the front lines for Fear Factory and though he claimed to only recognize one song, he had a lot of fun. I got to watch him get thrashed around and jump like a lunatic. In the end his reward was the bassist's guitar pick, so that was pretty cool. He felt bad for abandoning me through the set, but there's no way I can be one of those metal pit chicks. I'm too shy, too tender and I don't like a lot of people stepping on me and throwing me around. All in all it wasn't a bad night, just trying to get my hearing back in order today.

In other dumb news, my dad woke up with Bells Palsy and is not going to the doctor for it tonight because he doesn't want to deal with the emergency room on a Saturday Night. He'd rather wait til Sunday Morning, as if it's not going to be just as trashy. He's been having a lot of problems with his neuropathy lately and smoking again, so I'm sure that's not at all helping. He has an appointment with our family doctor but since he waited so long to become a new patient, we scheduled it back at the end of February but he wont be seen til sometime in May.

I guess I was going to write more..but I am in the need of finding something delicious to nom. Adios.

It didn't really happen much like this at all, but I have officially resigned from my job. Friday was a fucking awful day. It started off well, grabbed my Friday smoothie and headed into work for my half day. (5 hours.) About an hour into it, Lieutenant comes upstairs with his oldest son (6 or 7) and at first, I think he's joking with me. "Heard you got another write up." And so I freak out when I realize he's being serious. Turns out it's from eating in my mom's office while she is on vacation. He said that we have talked about this before, how I'm not supposed to be in there when she isn't, and that he doesn't even really like it when I'm in there when she is there, but he overlooks it. Now the "privilege is being abused."

I get a little hysterical. One, his child is staring at me all dumb-faced while this man is giving me a lecture about a write up that I knew nothing about and is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I've been eating lunch and breaks in there for however many years, this has never been a problem. I'm not going to spend my precious minutes going through everyone's files. He keeps going on about how we've talked about this before and I am crying my eyes out in front of his goddamn child.

We never talked about it. He saw me with her key once, as we were clocking out and he said "no no no, you can't do that." and walked out the door. There was no future discussion.

So when it comes time for me to get this write up, I write in the employee comments that 1) we did not have the discussion that I could not be in the office. And clearly it wasn't a problem because my mom's boss let me in there, my mom has let me in there and he SAW ME IN THERE MONDAY AND DIDN'T SAY A WORD. On the back of the paper, I wrote how unprofessional I found it that I was getting the lecture and information on the write up in front his child.

I kinda knew I would be in trouble for that one. He called me into his office not long after that and questioned me about what I had written. Suddenly he was yelling at me. "Because I have to watch my kid, I bring him up to the sorting room, that's unprofessional?" Uh yeah, dude. That place is dangerous. It's pretty awful that you bring your kid up there when your wife and other two children are sitting peacefully over at the rehab house. "It's not like he's a Facebooker. He's not going to go gossiping about it all." And I just look at him dumbfounded. It had nothing to do with whether or not his son was on facebook, it was the lack of disrespect. You have something to say to me, you bring me in your office with the people that need to be involved (they usually have Lieutenant and a "witness" to make sure nothing goes awry.) You bring me in to the office and if you have something to say that's going to make me cry, I'd like to do it around adults instead of having a child staring at me.

So then he really started getting pissed and kinda slapped his hand against my write up several times and gave me a lesson in professionalism. "Your hair color is unprofessional, changing it over and over again is unprofessional. But I overlook it. I choose my battles. Coming into work after smoking POT, that's unprofessional." (something I've never done.) "eating in your mom's office, that's unprofessional. And so you know what? If professionalism is the name of the game here, you're not allowed to eat in there anymore. You will eat where the rest of the employees do, there's no more joking. We're going to clock in, do our work and clock out. I don't need you gossiping around the sorting room, and I don't need you bad-mouthing me to your mom."

And I just sat there. Thinking how he was probably going to fire me. I sat there kinda dumbfounded because he wasn't breaking my heart about the office thing, it was just stupid. I'm not the only one that goes in there. The entire complex and my mom has the only fax machine in her office, very nosy, very stupid people go in there all the time when she isn't around. Joke around with him? The dude creeps me out, I try to stay out of his way. Hair color? So if my blue hair is so unprofessional, I guess all the girls with crazy weaves and hair styles surely must be unprofessional as well. The pot thing...maybe irresponsible, but I wouldn't say unprofessional. I wasn't dealing with life and death things. I was taking a sharpie to a tag and writing a bunch of numbers on it..but once again, I never smoked before going to work.

So I seethed at my station for the rest of the day and in the final moments I realized there was no way I could go back Monday morning. There is no way I could continue to ride it out the rest of the 6 months I have left there. Swallowing my self worth for minimum wage in a job I'm no longer appreciated for.

I discussed it with my family and they all found it for the best. It's going to take a lot of stress off mom with me not being there, as she has said time and time again that she can't wait for my sister and I to move on from there so we are no longer an issue among other employees. I just hope he doesn't attack mom for whatever reason. I guess I knew he would get pissed over the comment about his child being around but I had to stand up for myself. I think that was always his biggest problem with me is that I would challenge him on his new directions because many of them make no sense.

I wrote out my resignation and handed it to mom, I left a message on my supervisors answering machine. It's done. I've walked away from Salvation Army before, for much of the same reasons. I don't think I'll ever go back this time. Now comes the job hunting.

I haven't smoked in a little over 30 days, but I still have THC in my system, Toby got me one of those home drug tests and we discovered the results. I'll probably need another few weeks. I've put in a few applications already and tomorrow I'll hit up some non-chain thrift stores. Although I have heard that Goodwill is hiring quite a bit. It's just til I'm done with school. Six months and two days. I just need something to pay off the remainder of my tuition ($1000) and the four massages I must receive and the CPR classes. Mom and my sister said they would pick up the phone bill til I find another job. I'm not too worried..but it is really scary not having a job.

I guess I'll end this...I'm looking forward to the positive. And for now, I shall go watch the new episode of Game of Thrones.

So.

I went back to work this week. Last week I was suspended for smoking pot. Well, not at work or anything. What seems to have happened is a beneficiaary told the liutenent that I was acting like I was on drugs. So rather than talking to me, my coworkers or looking at my performance logs, they decided to drug test me. I was honest about it. Those tests are expensive, I wont waste them. I got ushered into the LT's office and was questioned. I told him I couldn't pass the test because I smoked. He gave me a weeks suspension, they intend to test me in 40 (now less than) days. He then questioned me as to why I was doing it and then gave me the greatest lecture ever.

Using pot...well, that's on my way to becoming a crackhead and before I know it, I'll be out on the streets selling myself for anything. Then end up in their dorm rooms for recovery. I stared at him. This religious little bastard fully believes that pot works that way. "No one wakes up saying, "I'm going to get addicted to pot!"

I'm sorry. It's not a gateway drug. More recent studies have proven that it is alcohol. You cannot become addicted to marijuana, and if it does have some mental hold over you, then you must be a very weak person. And if you think it's leading you to harder drugs, again. You must be a weak person as it is YOUR CHOICE to lead you to those drugs. I've never sat there thinking. "Man, this pot is pretty weak-sauce, I better do some coke."

So I've stopped smoking for now. It's really no big deal. I can use the money I was for the stuff to getting my tuition paid off more quickly. I didn't mind the week's suspension, it was a nice little bad girl vacation. I just didn't like him sitting across from me and spewing these things out of his mouth. How I was making poor decisions, that everyone can pick up on me being a pothead (even if I hadn't smoked that day or week.) And that shame on the dude I'm seeing for not stopping me down this twisted dark path. It was just bizarre to think that someone this young can be so narrow minded.

I am not saying I was in the right for smoking while working at a rehab, but I'm there 29 hours a week. I never smoke before I go in. I'm just thinking he's a self righteous little ass. He says if I still test positive in so many days, that I'm gone, because I have clearly smoked. Which is kind of a shame...with my body fat I'm not sure if I will be totally cleaned out by then, we'll have to do a wait and see thing. He boasts about his 14 panel drug tests, don't they pick up on the screens and masks and such? I don't know. I'm just not smoking and getting by somehow.

I don't want to get a new job at this point. I've already been here so long and I've got seven months before I graduate school. I just need to be at this shithole for another 7 months.

Osha finally took a tour of our piece of hell and declared it mostly fine. That we had to put a gate around our clothing chute and I was just amazed. I've gone over in great detail how disgusting and falling apart the place is. The floor dips and the wood is rotting and that's on the second floor where most of our production is handled.

Yeah, I'm seeing a dude. Toby. It's been an interesting and positive experience thus far. I think it's the first relationship where it wasn't long distance in quite some time and he works. Which is almost a near first and a welcome refreshment compared to Twitch. I hate going on with comparing him- or others to Twitch, because that was just a terrible situation I dragged myself into, but still. This guy is pretty fantastic.

It definitely wasn't completely unexpected. He was, but I just have always had this feeling that around the halfway point of school that I would end up having some sort of intrusion. This is a welcome intrusion. I never had a clear outline of what I want to do after school, beyond leaving the town... and I still don't. I don't know how he plays into all of this yet and that is kind of interesting. There's a lot I can say about him but the details are still too intimate, they are still mine for the time being. I thoroughly enjoy the time we spend together, a few days ago we went walking for seven miles and it was good company, it never really felt like that long of a walk. The time we're apart seems to drag on. He has a strange schedule this week, which looks like no overnight visits, I'll be able to manage, but it just is gonna kinda suck.

School.
I know I always go "I can't believe it's already been x amount of time." But seriously. I have seven months to go. They say it goes quick, and yeah it really fucking does. The last I checked I had less than 100 classes to go. I can't wait for October, I wish it was already here and everything I have to do is done. I paid off half of my tuition the other day and it was a painfully glorious moment. I can only imagine when I get the other half paid. That feeling of stuff on your shoulders? I just want that moment of relief. Like I said, I have NO idea what I intend to do once I graduate. I do want to be self employed because I cannot handle having another person dictate my life anymore when I'm not in their presence. I know that's just something I wont be able to just pass the test and do. There's the matter of EVERYTHING. This big, scary adult work that I'm about to leap into.

I've been trying to play Suikoden II on the emulator, but it's been angry and laggy. I have fucked with the settings many times and nothing seems to work. That's kinda what lead me to be able to post on here tonight, just sheer frustration. I've wanted to play this game for so long but waiting for the price to drop down is not going to happen. Four years ago it was going for the same prices on ebay, it's a limited print, I suppose. I hate being broke. Even if I was making decent money (say post graduation) I probably wouldn't be able to justify paying over 100 dollars for a playstation 1 game.

Guess I'll have more pizza.

Sorry kids, maybe another day. There's so much I want to say...but not the proper attention span and lack of thinkin' privacy going around.