losing every dime betting on the races

I'm just gonna get all the complaining out of my system at once, and I'm gonna give everything equal weight because once you get past a certain point, everything feels equally weighted, the ant bite on the toe just as tragic as the disintegrating valves on the bathtub (which have dictated the necessity of living without hot water until I can get a plumber in, which is not really any time soon on account of my roof has suddenly sprung not one but two leaks in the recent biblically-scaled floods, two leaks for which, BY THE WAY, I have previously paid money to have fixed). It's times like this I sincerely hate my life, hate having to prioritize repairs because my ridiculously limited budget only allows for one goddamned emergency at a time (if that), when in an ideal universe I would just be able to repair and move on. I hate having to save against the (distant) day that I can take a bath without having to heat water on the stove like Ma Ingalls (what I wouldn't give for laurelwood's taste for frontierswomanly hardscrabble adventures right now! I am a spoiled princess, I know, but knowing I'm spoiled doesn't exactly make me hate any of this any less, and plus it's hard to keep that tiara from slipping when I've got my head tipped back to gaze in dismay at the spot where the ceiling is probably going to fall because it WILL NOT STOP RAINING for long enough to get a roofer in place). And I hate that making these repairs means I have to also delay getting the house treated for termites. And that making them means, probably, another trip into my attic. And I hate that my clever picture display in the hallway, remind me to tell you about it when I'm not in a mood to just burn the house down and start over, has decided that it really prefers not to stay on the wall. And I hate that my cat and my parents' cat loathe and fear each other with a fervor that shows no signs of dissipating and wreaks all sorts of household havoc when I'm catsitting which let's be honest here should really be easy because the nice thing about cats is that they're low-maintenance, right? And I hate that fucking ant bite on my toe, I really do, because it itches with that bone-deep kind of itch I can feel reverberating halfway up my leg, and is there any reason, biologically speaking, for fire ants even to exist, people, I am sick of living in a world that springs these little traps, evolutionary and otherwise, on unsuspecting people just trying to live their lives quietly and read the Joan Didion book that they've been wanting to read for years now and that has just arrived by post, smartly-wrapped and free and ready to restore their sense of perspective if only they weren't too nail-bitingly distracted to just relax into it.

I think, looking back at what I've written so far, that I might possibly have consumed a little too much caffeine today. But WHATEVER. I stand by this post, my friends, with everything I am, even if I am mostly Diet Coke at the moment.

I also think I might be feeling a little better now. Thanks for listening.