Open thread for personal stuff, March 2015 totally real elephants edition

WordPress really, REALLY doesn’t like me linking directly to my writeathon apparently. -_-

Anyway, a lot of good things happening here! Just signed our lease to return to New England, might be helping out a trans youth group make a comic tomorrow, and I’m just a flailing overstimulated ball of excitement right now. Kinda frustrated because our Internet is limited which kinda puts a damper on things but still! So much going on!

After a talk with one of my academic advisers about struggling with grades and attendance, I’ve decided to take a year out of uni. I’ve cried a lot about this decision. I have depression, social anxiety and autism which can make attending very hard, and the problem as my course has gone along is that more and more emphasis is placed on turning up to every class. If I miss one class on a bad head day, the ensuing anxiety about the earful I’ll get at class the next day = another bad head day = an endless cycle of hiding under my duvet feeling like the world’s worst person. The only thing I can do now is take some time to get better. I’m not sure if I’ll go back after the year, it’s Plan X but if I stumble upon some kind of Plan Y then we’ll see…

Financially, once we have benefits sorted out, we will be better off than we were with my loan to be fair. And at least now I have more flexible options for work. I’m going to look into being a stablehand at one of my many, many local equestrian centres and riding schools. I chipped in at the stable where I rode for eight years, so even though I look a bit ‘fluffy’ for the purpose, I am plodding and tough and I know I have the stamina for the work. And I love it! My hope is to get relatively steady work doing that as I don’t need a good wage particularly, and then I can look into volunteering, vocational qualifications, or similar in the fields I am interested in (social work, advocacy, therapy, befriending etc.). I’m excited about the possibility to get back involved with horses, because I love them and I’ve achingly missed it since I had to give it up.

I’m trying to keep positive but I’m feeling super drained about it all.

So I’ve been counseling this woman through a fairly nasty divorce. I dated her when I was working overseas, and I’ve always had a lot of regret over how it ended. I never expected to see her again, as she had close ties to her home and family, and her parents clearly didn’t want her seeing a foreigner.

In the interim, she was pressured into a quick marriage with the son of one of her parent’s friends. The new husband was from her hometown but worked in the United States, so two years after the wedding she moved over here to be with him. Then he dumped her almost immediately as he’d met someone else in the States whom he actually loved. She reached out to me because I’m the only person here she knows, and I’ve been helping her work through the divorce and custody of their infant son.

While we’ve been working through all of this, it’s become clear that we both still have feelings for each other. We haven’t had much opportunity to explore this as we live in different states and she doesn’t want to get romantic until the divorce is final. However, there’s still a real chance of us getting back together once this is all tied up.

This isn’t easy for me, though. Originally, I thought her life experience would make me feel different, but it really doesn’t – if anything, she seems a lot more mature now than when I knew her. If I had the chance, I think I’d marry her tomorrow and adopt her son. But at the same time, I’m having a really hard time shaking off this unrealistically perfect image of our future that I had in my head when we were first dating. I just never saw myself as the second husband of a single mother, and as much as none of that is new to me (there’s been plenty of divorce/remarriage in my family and I was myself adopted), it’s still kind of hard for me to deal with at this phase of my life.

I feel awful about thinking like this, but it’s a lot to process in not much time – all of this came out in the last two weeks.

RE: Andrew Johnston

I’d say that help her out, but don’t even THINK about the relationship until things are less hectic. You’ll need time for your expectations to become more modulated and realistic, and you both have enough shit going on without a possible new relationship going.

I mentioned this in another thread, but I recently raided my old hard drive for photos and found a lot of forgotten cat pictures. I feel like showing someone, so here goes. I’ll split it up into two comments. If they’re too long and too many pictures just feel free to remove them, I guess. 🙂

So, we decided to get a second cat. The owners of the mother sent us this baby picture.

http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/5da848fb-e918-41dc-8f8f-907d914f9119_zpsbosvqiko.jpg

After a few weeks he was even cuter.

http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/0b49c675-9719-42f5-913c-02c8c5ffbcac_zpsm7ofvyta.jpg

He was one of three, and his mother, Frida, is a calico.

http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/fc3feba7-1e4c-4efc-a45b-5890abd62fa1_zpszkw59via.jpg

We named him Fingie. Here’s my mom holding Fingie and his sister, Lisa.

http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/b20e2628-4dec-497c-82af-a4e474ba3fab_zpsc9kr3gty.jpg

Here’s Fingie with his brother, Messi. The brother passed away early. 🙁

http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/16f844b3-14bc-4cfb-abfd-1dc809a19ab0_zpsie3pd8zt.jpg

We already had a girl cat named Desmond. She likes radiators.

http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/a5322943-be56-4cea-ae35-eeecdd7c4ad2_zps6mcqvapx.jpg

http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/fab3dbe6-c831-4279-8ece-6e604a72f3da_zpsdkjytlhc.jpg

Like, seriously, loves radiators.

http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/3fc1b3b4-f53e-41a6-bb5c-46be8df8e9a6_zpsr8cobcln.jpg

She also does other cat stuff.

http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/65ccb3e2-0429-4554-90de-f03d872b93fa_zpsdc7jwteb.jpg

Oops. That was a two parter, but the first one went into moderation. 🙂

Regarding the picture, they’re dressed up as Babar and family (I love the little gold crowns). A tad obscure, but not totally random.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babar_the_Elephant

@K:
So they didn’t take your conditions into account and support you? That’s awful. I teach, and I recently had a student with Asperger’s. He notified me beforehand and gave me the e-mail address of his advisor, should I have any questions. I would never have dreamt of “giving him an earful”, if he hadn’t shown up for a class or two. I’ve also had students who dealt with depression. Although they had no advisor (and one didn’t tell me – I heard from someone else), I took that into account when they missed a deadline or something like that.

@Lordcrowstaff:
Ugh. And a lot of Germans actually like Putin, too. Like the conspiracy theorists who demonstrate for “peace”, or the racist shitheads who feared that 0.2% muslim population in their state would “islamise” them. This is from one of the “Pegida” (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident) demonstrations:
http://jungle-world.com/b2evo/media/users/thomas/putin.jpg?mtime=1421700053

(Poster says: Putin, save us from the corrupt enemy of the Volk, the FRG-Government, from America and Israel)

Also, an update from the previous thread. My cousin’s baby (born at 24 weeks) is doing pretty well. He is still on a ventilator, but it being fed (as opposed to IV nutrition). He’s one month old now and seems to be quite a fighter. My cousin has gone back to work, but she and her fiance are, of course, still spending as much time as possible at the hospital.

Finally, some good news from me. I passed my transfer meeting today, so I can be officially registered as a PhD student, instead of an MPhil, and I got a travel scholarship to a conference next month!

@K,

You’re totally not alone in needing a year off. I just recently finished my undergrad and still work on campus, and there are a literal ton of students who have had to take a semester to a year break. No, seriously. if you put all of them on a scale, we’d have more than a ton, and I’m working at a tiny campus.

College is stressful and scary, and you’re not alone. Sometimes taking a break is the best thing that you can do.

Enjoy your break, and good luck with the equestrian center! Horses are fluffy and wonderful, and can be such incredible goofs.

@Andrew

I’m also totally backing up LBT here. Another thing to think about is that right now you’re kind of her only support. Even though it might seem like a relationship is something you both want, it could be more of a subconscious holding on desperately to a safety net thing, and not a conscious “I actually kind of love this person” thing.

Like, not that either of you would be trying to manipulate the other, but emotions are tricky things, and things are hectic for both of you, and it’s really, really natural to cling to security, and you kind of represent security to her at the moment.

Hold off until you both get a little stability, and once things are on more of even keel, then maybe you can go there.

Yeah, K, I slammed through undergrad in two years, took a year off, and ended up dropping out of grad school. No shame in taking care of yourself! (And I can not ever recommend doing what I did in undergrad. I did it because it was the least shitty of my options, and I probably shouldn’t have done it.)

Sorry you got the flu, contrapangloss!

Oh man, I just signed my lease and bought my train ticket, I’m so excited to be GOING HOME! Even if the post office DID destroy one of our boxes and lose every single one of Sneak’s video games! (And Gigi’s one solitary game, which she is FURIOUS about.)

…Oh, and the IRS is obnoxious. They read a $ on one of the income forms they got as a 5, and sent me a statement saying I owed them 500 in late taxes.

I sent them a letter with a copy of all the forms saying, no, I didn’t get $5300 in income from a scholarship account last year, I got $300. Which covered about 3 textbooks, thanks. Can I not pay you almost double the amount I received from that?

They sent me a letter saying they revised my account and accepted my corrections.

They just sent me another letter saying you still owe us $500 and an additional $20 in interest.

Yep. I need to call them monday and go “Um, guys?”