Tuesday, December 22, 2020

45 Years Of Hate

No shock to anyone who has ever read this blog, but I hate myself. Like, I've never really liked myself, not for longer than a little while anyway, and most days, I hate who I am. I hate being fat and ugly, I hate switching between needing attention and quietly pouting, I hate being a needy momma's boy who lost his momma when he was ten, I hate being just smart enough to realize that I should have been much more successful in life if only I had motivation and direction, I hate the way I hate all men because I'm jealous of them, I hate not being able to satisfy my wife, and before I met her, I hated chasing pussy and valuing women only by whether they were willing to fuck me. 

In this year of coronavirus, I was in the midst of very slowly establishing a routine to get healthier physically and work on the most enduring aspect of my self-hatred, my obesity. I started working out at a gym a few years ago along with my wife, who had a couple of health scares that motivated her to join a gym and drag me with her. She had stopped going regularly because it's hard and because she was dealing with her own food and life issues. I haven't gone to the gym every single day since we joined either, but I was hitting the treadmill about once or twice a week while hitting the weights every weekend, in addition to my Wednesday night bowling league. When I really hit the gym and started eating better and dropped about thirty pounds in 2018, I noticed the change, and so did people around me, and I felt good. I mean, what obese person wouldn't feel good about losing weight and getting compliments? But we went on a cruise for Christmas that year, and I went cray cray at the buffets and really took the opportunity to relax and lay off the workout routine, and I found all the weight I lost by next spring. 

I was working back into a routine I could handle without wearing myself out, and the weights were a big part because it gave me better strength bowling, which lowered my handicap ten full pins. And I was starting to pump up the routine a little at the beginning of this year in anticipation of a family trip to Mexico in June. I wasn't trying to lose thirty pounds again, nor was I eating as restrictively as two years ago. I just wanted to be in my best shape so I could enjoy the trip without feeling worn out, and if I lost a noticeable amount of weight and started getting random compliments again, awesome. Then COVID-19 stopped everything. The gym closed because of local restrictions, the bowling league canceled the rest of the season because people weren't going to come, and suddenly I was left with self-motivation and home workouts if I wanted to keep my routine. But without a high level of discipline (and also I had a swollen ankle for a week), I fell off. I've been keeping a log of my workouts, and I didn't do a damn thing for five weeks after COVID hit our country. Then I got coronavirus myself, which ironically pushed me back to exercising regularly because my doctor said not to let the virus settle in my lungs. But I haven't been back to the gym, so my strength is wasted away, and I don't work out very hard here at home because I guess at the gym I'm motivated to really go for it since I made the effort to drive there and all, plus the circulation and A/C is much better. Or maybe those are excuses I hide behind to avoid how lazy I am. After all, in case you missed the top of this rant, I hate myself, and I always have.

I want to say that in this, my 45th year, I will do a better job of forgiving my shortcomings and trying to improve those areas where I can improve. But I know who I am and what I am. I'm a chickenshit afraid of my own shadow, and I'm mired in a lifelong routine of lying down wanting to get up and do for myself but not able due to some sort of emotional paralysis. Let me explain what happens most times when I want to do something. Take my wife, for example. I can't make myself be forward with her. Next year will be ten years of marriage, and yet I still cannot take her by the hand and lead her to the bedroom, not without an extraordinary amount of courage which takes me forever to build up. I feel like a man with confidence in himself can easily make his moves on a lady. Not me. I have to pretend I'm The Rock or some other sex symbol. It's a very taxing feeling. I don't think my wife feels like I love her very much, but I've always been like that. If you talked to "Karen," she would laugh recalling how I sat on her couch until 2 in the morning holding her hand, refusing to make a move on her until she went to bed and took off her own clothes. Same with "Grace," the one night stand who had to announce to me that she was going to kiss me as we sat on her couch. And "Sarah" had to pull her own bra off after being in my apartment, and The Co-Worker Who Shall Not Be Named had to pull me into her body with her legs while we were horsing around on my loveseat. You get the drill. It works the same way with exercise. Most days I think long and hard about getting up and putting on my cross trainers and putting on a workout video, then nightfall arrives and I get in bed and watch TV. And every time I do, I hate myself. And every time I think about grabbing my wife and showing her the physical affection we all crave and I fail to do so, I hate myself. I will never know how disciplined, motivated people do it. I mean, I guess I did it for a year working out and eating better, but then I broke and went back to my old habits.

I think the worse part of hating myself and my bad habits all my life is, I don't allow myself to feel good about anything that happens to me. I've been trying to enjoy my new car in this first month of ownership, but the monthly payments and the fear that I made a bad buy make it difficult. Any carb I eat brings on self-loathing knowing that I'm a diabetic and I need to cut down, yet I remember how much I craved sweets when I cut down before. Any compliment on a haircut or shave or clothes never brings a sense of pride, but rather a sense of envy because I think of guys much more attractive and in better shape and I hate myself for being such a loser that any small change in appearance make people feel like they have to pump me up. And I hate having to get counseling to deal with these issues because I feel awful about needing help, and I also don't think it helps me much. Like the days in my twenties of filling my nights with sex, when it's over I'm still me and I feel worse sometimes. Same with counseling. I'm trying to look forward to 2021 being a much better year like everyone else is. But in certain ways, it's going to be more of the same. Even when I can go back to the gym, or bowling, or on trips and cruises with my wife, every night when I lay down to sleep, I'm me. And it sucks.

Wednesday, December 02, 2020

I Bought A Car! Wait, What???

In my sheltered life I have a number of things that most people experience earlier than me, and some things I never thought I'd do. Living in Chicago and not needing a vehicle, I didn't even bother to get a license until I moved here. And that was only because Grizzbabe had no interest in driving me to work every day, and where we live, public transportation to my job would be impossible. We existed as a one-car couple for several years. On weekends when I worked I drove the car alone, and when we both had to work, she dropped me off and picked me up. Then I scraped up the bottom of the car and Grizzbabe's uncle came to our rescue in his pickup truck, and he told us to keep it for as long as we needed, so when her car got fixed, I just drove the pickup as if it were mine. The plan was always to save up and get another car, but in the meantime, we put a lot of time and money into maintaining the 2001 pickup. Finally, in November the ABS and brake lights came on and the brakes felt very soft, like, I had to really force the brake pedal down to stop the thing. One repair joint replaced the brake hardware for $1400 and the lights were still on. Another place said they couldn't figure out what the lights signified because the truck was so old that they couldn't read the diagnostics. Then the dealership said that the ABS switch was broken but couldn't be replaced because no one made the part anymore. I asked if the truck was safe to drive, and the repairman said the truck was at risk of locking up since the antilock switch was dead. "I'd get rid of it," he said without a hint of care.

It was easy to drive my wife's car for the last few weeks because she works from home right now thanks to coronavirus. But I know eventually she will have to go back, so I started looking into what it would take to purchase a car. I knew that we had a couple thousand dollars saved because last year my wife made me start throwing $300 per month into a savings account with the purpose of having about $15,000 for a car in about five years. So I had those parameters: I can put $2,000 down and I can handle $300 per month. From there I just had to figure out what I wanted. I think when I started looking that I had the goal of something with less than 80,000 miles on it that cost less than $15,000. But a couple of factors made me come off of that mindset. For one, my wife got a used car a couple years ago that was certified pre-owned, which takes the process of wondering how healthy the vehicle is out of the equation because it's been fully inspected, so I refused to look for anything that wasn't certified. And second, being a big fat ogre, I was keeping all searches limited to not just mid-sized and larger, but only those with good safety ratings according to the Consumer Reports Buying Guide, and it had to have decent gas mileage. Basically, using those guidelines, it became clear that in my price range I was going to have to take cars that either were about five years old with way over 80,000 miles or something from last year or a couple years ago with 40,000 or so miles already racked up.

Then I saw a unicorn in the field: 2020 Altima, 4,000 miles, in my price range. Sent in my credit application to the dealer, traded phone calls, decided to go over there this past Friday after work. I'm three quarters of the way to the place when the guy calls me and starts stammering about "I-I-I got some bad news about your car, man." He claimed that another dealership got the car from them while they were putting together my deal, and by the time they contacted the other dealer, it had already been sold. I didn't like the smell of that tale, and my uncle was quite upset when I told him about it, calling it a classic bait-and-switch and suggesting that I write up a bad review of them. So back to the drawing board and using a broader search engine at the request of my uncle, two more unicorns come up, also in the 3,800-4,000-mile range, and guess where they're located? Yep, that same dealer.

Meanwhile, I had already sent another credit application to a Toyota dealer near the house because I saw a car that I decided would be good enough: In my price range with over 42,000 miles, but it was a 2019 Camry. It had been a rental, which explained why it had so many miles, and its second owner had hit an animal according to its Carfax report, and I decided that I was fine with that because it's still certified pre-owned, so whatever damage was done, it couldn't have been that bad. Looking back now, I don't know why I decided that was my car. When everything you're looking for comes in around the same price, seeing something one or two thousand bucks less must have popped me as a sign that I have to get this car. Smarting over my experience with the Altima dealer, I contacted the Toyota folks and told them I'd probably be there Sunday to talk. By that time, I saw another Camry at that dealership that was the same year for about the same price with maybe 4,000 less miles and no deer dings on its Carfax.

Sunday turned out to be an eye-opening day. Remember, I never owned a car before, so all of what happened was new and I had no idea what to expect. My uncle had shared his bad experience buying his first car, getting exploited for 22% interest, so he told me that with my good credit I should ask for what kind of rate I would get before I go any further. My plan was to go to the dealer and discuss the numbers before I even looked at the car so as not to fall in love with it before I knew the real price. The salesman was smooth, of course, and brought the car around for me to get a peek. "You really need your wife here before you make a decision?" he asked, and I said yeah, because I never did this before and I was hesitant. He wanted me to take it for a spin, but he would need my license and insurance card beforehand. Insurance card? Why, I don't have driver's insurance. I've been tooling about town in my wife's car and her uncle's truck, and they have insurance, so I never considered needing my own. The salesman was bewildered. He drove me around instead, and informed me that no sale or test drive could happen until I got insured. I went home. I was flustered, so without shopping around, I decided that GEICO looked like they had pretty low rates and just like that, I signed up. Grizzbabe asked if I really wanted to wrap this up, and I said I think so, so she got dressed and we went back up to the dealer. I now had my insurance, but the salesman then informed me that I needed a second proof of address besides my license, and again, because I'm a 44-year-old child, I was caught offguard and couldn't produce any documents. I don't pay any of the bills or mortgage, and I didn't know how to access my pay stubs on my phone. Eventually I figured how to bring up my bank statement, but it look an embarrassingly long time to think of that. I was allowed to take my own test drive, where I noticed the gas pedal doesn't accelerate very swiftly and the inside door on the left felt a little flimsy, but I blew those concerns off not wanting to start this process from scratch. After all that, the finance guy whisked us to the back, where the paperwork was already drawn up on this electronic tabletop. That was what I was afraid of, because now whatever interest rate he gave me would have to be really bad before I got up and left. Indeed, it was slightly higher than what I thought it would be, but I was in too deep now. I signed my life away with my wife silently watching, and the deal was done. It was more of a monthly payment than I thought it would be thanks to the extra insurance I have to pay as well. But I am now the proud owner of a six-year car note. It is what it is.

It had started to rain rather heavily when I finally got the keys, so while Grizzbabe went home, I sat in the car for a few minutes trying to wrap my head around what just happened. It was a whirlwind experience. I didn't know if I had done the right thing or if I should have waited for something else, something cheaper, something with less miles, something roomier...as is my personality, I was swamped with doubt. Then I called my uncle, I guess expecting love and support for this decision as if I was still a kid. He couldn't hide his disappointment at the mileage and the interest rate, then he caught himself and said if I liked it and didn't feel ripped off, that's all that mattered. And you know what? I like the car and I don't think I was ripped off. I nervously babied the car home in the rain.

The stress of that process was what I called "adulting," or doing things that normal grown people have to do sometimes. I'm acutely aware of how un-adultlike I am and how I can get stressed and panicky about things most everyone does, like buying a car or working on my marriage. This Sunday buying the car reminded me of another day of adulting that I did in that six-year hiatus since I blogged. On July 19, 2017, the new owners of the student loan I co-signed for "Shelley" contacted me and offered to bring the loan to a close if I gave them about $3,200 cash. This would be in addition to the years I had spent sending in $100 per month while she paid zero. I was conflicted by the thought of coming up off that much cash to finish a transaction that I never started, but the thought of having the loan dead was very tempting. So without any legal advice, I took a shot at negotiating and I told them that I couldn't give them that much today, so I'd have to go back to sending installments, or I could give them $2,000 to close it, their choice. They conferred with their people and got back to me a couple hours later and accepted my terms. I don't care how dumb it may have been to give that much to kill off an eleven-year loan, I don't care if they may have accepted even less if I offered, I was over the moon that I was able to pull off the end of that long nightmare by calling my own shot. And I was proud of how I kept paying on that debt for years, setting the stage for having the ability to kill it off with only two grand. Not only did I do it because it was the right thing to do as the co-signer, but I did it because I wanted to protect my own name and credit for the future, and dare I say, I couldn't have financed the Camry if I hadn't taken care of that cunt's debt from 2005. So it all came full-circle. And BTW, the iPod with all the dozens of songs that I talked about in my last post? I connected it to the car through Bluetooth, and for the first time ever, I will have the ability to drive to and fro playing my favorite songs from childhood through adulthood as loud as I want. Like an actual grown-up.