A bunch of little things (and some not-so-little) are bugging me right now. Like this morning when I saw that some idiot had dumped a 3-volume divorce case on me to process that shouldn’t even be my problem. Or when the courtroom assistant came in at 8:40a and said, “Sorry for being late,” when she’s always in at that time, so did her apology extend to cover every day for the past 2 years? (I didn’t say anything in response cuz I was rather baffled before I was annoyed.) Mr. W said my cloud of negativity started when I read the entire information enclosure that came with the Progesterone vial as he was giving me the shot yesterday (“insomnia OR sleepiness.” “excessive hair growth OR hair loss.” What? Make up your mind!), but I think it’s cumulative.

For example, although my opinions on things haven’t changed, I now FEEL stuff about them. They’re not just intellectual, emotionally-detached opinions anymore. Tears seem to always be in abundance and available JUST underneath the surface. I’ll be channel-surfing and come across some actress crying, and without even knowing the context, I suck up her (fake) emotions and *I* start crying. I get a touching text from someone. I start crying. I was frustrated this morning that I couldn’t just send water and food to the quake/tsunami survivors in Japan and right now charities are just setting up “general funds” for which I can’t even tell where my money would go, I can’t tell if it’d even go to Japan. Tears. Feelings of being personally wronged somehow in this helplessness to change the world.

So yes, I think it’s collective from a month’s worth of injected hormones, and about a month’s worth of sleeplessness. It could be the hormones that keep me wide awake in the middle of the night, but it could also be the fact that the stepkidlet has leapt, no, swan-dived, head-first into a small (approx 30 members) religious group that plans activities EVERY SINGLE DAY and she has not returned home before 1:30am for a month. Last night she came home at 3:30am. She says it’s always a religious or church activity, but if they’re planning events (Bible studies, group sessions, etc) to run into the wee hours of the morning every single evening, they have GOT to know how unrealistic this is to keep up and irresponsible of their participants to attend daily. The group is essentially requiring their members to never have dinners or evening plans with their family or with friends that is separate from that church group. Although she lives with us, we see Daughter maybe twice a week on her way out to another church event after we get home from work, and we hear her come home at 2, 2:30 in the morning, and now I’m totally wide awake and can’t get back to sleep. Mr. W has addressed this with her and told her she needs to cut this church thing because she’s dropped a class saying it was too hard, not cleaned her room for months, or been around, so when does she get time to study? It was a big fight as all she heard was that he was persecuting her for her religion and she yelled that her heart is with Jesus and she will never abandon Him. I can understand her incredulousness that her father would ask her to give up GOD, of all people and things, but that was so not his point. His point was lost somewhere in the screaming and tears that followed. Yesterday, she confided in me that her mom and cousins have also approached her saying she has not had time for her family since she’s giving all her time to her church activities, and she was instantly offended, texting back attacks that her mom abandoned her family for her work, her cousin abandoned his family to his recreational drugs, her brother abandoned his family to his social life and girls, so why don’t they look at themselves before accusing her of something she’s doing that she sees as positive? She again declared that she would never turn her back to Jesus. I gently told her that I don’t think this was her mom’s point, she didn’t attack Daughter’s religion or Jesus, she criticized Daughter’s time management skills. We discussed this a bit, and I also told her that the way Daughter drags in other people as collateral casualties of her fight wasn’t right; it’s something I’ve seen her mom do (I was personally attacked and called “ugly” by her mom in a text argument with Mr. W about money that I was completely not involved in) and that I know her mom’s sister does, because it had recently made a small tiff between two teens bigger and bigger until cousins, mothers, aunts, everyone weren’t talking to each other anymore because they were all dragged in and bad-mouthed in someone else’s argument, and it nearly canceled Christmas dinner for them. I reminded Daughter of this fight and I think she got my point. Nevertheless, she was already engaged in a getting-nastier-by-the-minute text fight with her mom because Daughter refused to have dinner there at a “reasonable” hour, refusing to take time from a church activity in order to attend said dinner earlier than 8pm. I doubt she went to that dinner at all last night, because like I’d already said, she got home at 3:30a so she must’ve been with the insomniac church group.

My supervisor had once had a stern talk with me regarding the time I arrived to work in the mornings. (This was years ago; I’m usually at least 15-30 mins early now, which means I’m 1 hr 15 or 1 hr 30 mins earlier than others with my position.) Later, a co-supervisor approached me and said that he’d had a talk with the first supervisor, saying he disagreed with the first supervisor’s criticism of my arrival time. The second supervisor said that plenty of other employees in my position arrived approximately when I did, but left 1 hr to 1.5 hrs early without permission, and this is well-known. I am not one of the early-leavers and was in fact often one of the late-leavers who didn’t claim overtime. So if the first supervisor was going to criticize me over my arrival time, the second supervisor figured, he should have a talk with all those other employees over their leaving time. I told him earnestly that I was aware of this discrepancy in “work hours” among our building’s work force, and that I agree with him that in a perfect world, everyone would be criticized equally for the same misdeeds. HOWEVER, the fact that others don’t respect their work hours does not take away from the fact that I WAS coming in later than the “supposed” work hours, and so Supervisor #1 was correct and I should make efforts to change my arrival time. The other people are separate issues from my issue, even if the issue is the same issue. I have no sympathy for people who get called out about something they’re doing wrong and their entire defense is, “Well what about so-and-so? Why don’t you talk to HIM? What about how so-and-so do THEIR things? How come they can do that if I can’t do this?” BECAUSE WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS WRONG, REGARDLESS OF WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING! ALL those people who threw rocks at Jesus were wrong; saying “That guy did it first” doesn’t change the fact that you did something you knew was wrong. (Okay, arguably, some of them didn’t know or feel it was wrong.) Just because fires broke out and you saw someone loot a convenience store doesn’t mean that if YOU loot the next convenience store, you aren’t going to get charged with theft just because you say “I saw someone else do it before I did it!” Don’t get me wrong; I was in younger days guilty of using this type of weasel argument when my mom criticized or punished me; the disparity of justice hits me hard. It still does. But now I just believe that although justice should exist, it is a SEPARATE issue from your personal actions, it doesn’t excuse you from your personal wrongdoing. I realize this is a societal flaw that I can’t do much about, but IT BUGS ME. Own up to your errors, people, and learn from them. Stop being weasels. (No offense to the actual weasel species.)

So, also bugging me: Just because everybody else you hang with stay out till 2-3am praising Jesus doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to do it if you can’t find time around these activities to have your room not look like an episode of “Hoarders: Buried Alive.” She has been sleeping in the living room (after swiping bedding from the spare room upstairs) for the past 3 nights because there is too much clothes and crap in her room covering every surface for her to walk into and sleep. Mr. W tried to go in to remove some bowls and dishes to clean, and found discolored furry things growing from now unrecognizable former-food items. He wrote her a very specific note to clean up her bedroom mess and to clean up the living room after herself, and since she’s officially on spring break, she should have no excuse why this can’t be done, right? Oh, except that she’s asleep all day since she doesn’t get home until practically the next morning, and by the time she gets up, it’s late and she needs to get ready and run out for another church-related activity from which she will not return until 2am that night, and when she does, I will hear it at 2am and be unable to fall back to sleep until 5:30 am, when I have to get up at 6:15 am to get to work.

Normally, I’d have the same opinion about all this stuff — Japan donations, people blaming others instead of owning up to their own flaws, people neglecting personal responsibilities to dowhat they want , but I wouldn’t feel personally offended by people doing this stuff. Now I stay up feeling offended, arguments circling in my head that I wish I could throw at them to make them understand where I’m coming from.

Zen! I need zen!