put your frustrations into 4 letter words and let them out on mine, the most weathered ears in town

today. we've had uncharacteristically good weather the past few days...which is funny because all the papers predicted a heat wave for last week and it was cold and rainy all week and warm and beautiful this week. it's 11:10AM and i am sitting at my desk avoiding my projects and being generally a bit lazy - something i excel at.

i'm concerned because my estate agent has called saying they want to conduct an inspection of our flat. when we first moved in almost 3 years ago they told us they do them on a regular basis but they never have until now. steve and i are worried they don't want to let us renew our housing contract because steve is on unemployment benefits.

steve is struggling to grasp the concept that when the economy is tough you need to take any job you can get your hands on instead of waiting for the right job to come along. he is having issues swallowing his pride and applying to work at a starbucks because he doesn't want to go back to an entry level job. however it is frustrating to me to shoulder the financial bills burden of two people and have steve not pay his half. i'm very tempted to grab applications and fill them out for him. and i will next week probably if he doesn't do it himself. i keep trying to explain that no one will begrudge him his job choice during this time of severe economic crisis. it doesn't have to be a life-long career, he just needs to consider it a stopgap between jobs. i'd rather he be at a job making money than sitting home all day. mostly because it is grating to me and not to mention to his confidence and self esteem. i know when i had a 2 month unemployment gap a couple years ago it was devastating. i just felt like i'd be working at mcdonald's the rest of my life unable to get proper employment!

thankfully i have my job now that i love and adore. it's a challenge and very simple at the same time. people always tell me i'm too smart for things but when they say it...it sounds like an insult and not a compliment. this will sound awful but i'm not sure i've ever TRULY applied myself in any situation because the situations never seem to require my full attention (besides interviews). they always seem to come so easy.

i talk to rachel almost everyday, we like to have skype video chats that are very similar to conversations we'd have in person. we are chatting for 2 hours sometimes and maybe we've only spoken for 10 minutes. i'll be reading a book or listening to some music and rachel will be cooking dinner or something, it's just a way for us to be connected. i miss her tremendously, i truly feel like she's a big part of me.

i had my first grief counseling session yesterday and it was a bit strange. it was much more silent than the counseling sessions i am accustomed to. but it is very hard to cope with this monumental loss. everything feels so unfinished. even though dad always chose to take a non-active role in my life (outside of phone calls and emails) it still makes me sad that he'll never see me (or rachel) get married and start families. i guess part of me was always just hoping he'd finally step up to the plate and join my life completely instead of being so insistent on his outsiders perspective. i find it hard to talk about dad in general without turning into a blubbering idiot. something makes me cry every day, i never thought of myself as someone who used their dad as part of their identity but now that he's gone it's like i've lost a piece of myself and there's this gaping whole in my Self and in my life where dad should be. i don't know how to fill it up or even if i should.

i'm surrounded by people who mean well but i feel like losing a parent separates you from everyone, especially if it happens suddenly (it was so weird, i was talking to him, joking around and then 48 hours later he'd been paralysed and put into a coma...) and it's like there's now this division between me and everyone else. this dead dad's club that people shouldn't ever be admitted to but somehow we all end up there anyway. and everyone keeps saying that time will heal everything but it feels like the more time passes, the further away i get from the time he died the worse things are. there is no better, time makes things worse. it just keeps hammering away at the sides of this hole expanding it bigger and bigger until it feels all consuming. i worry that i'll start to forget, that i somehow need to do SOMETHING to carry his memory as if it wasn't already inside me and all around me.


i suppose that's it. that's how i'm doing right now.