The Bipolar Post I Promised

So yesterday I was ranting about money and started into bipolar and it went on and on and on so I decided to make it a different post.

So, here's the background: We're talking about money, accumulation of debt, and spending.
Read on.

When you're on a high, you either don't consider the implications of spending money (not being able to pay a bill later) or you rationalize it (oh, i'll 'pay it back' after the next paycheck). Mania and credit cards are terrible, disastrous mixes. I have, personally, charged a single credit card to it's limit within one week, riding the mania wave, buying stupid things like trying to outfit my whole bathroom for $400 at Kohls and decided I needed this and that and this for the kitchen and buying $400 worth of clothes at Kohls (can you tell me + kohls = disaster?). At the time i NEEDED THAT STUFF. Dead serious. I felt if I didn't get those clothes, I would have absolutely nothing to wear. If I didn't get that iced tea maker, I would DIE from lack of something to drink.

Seriously. It's like the part of your brain that is wired for survival? You know, eat sleep defend? It gets somehow sidetracked into buying things. Instead of eat-sleep-defend, it turns into buy-need-spend.
And somewhere, in the tiny, itty bitty sane part of your brain, you KNOW you shouldn't be spending the money. You KNOW it will only lead to disaster. You KNOW you don't have it. You KNOW you're going to overdraft your bank account. And you CARE. You really care! It's not just "screw it". You really care.
But somehow, the idea of "this is going to get me in trouble" and the action of "buying this" does. not. connect.


It's like trying to fit a square peg in a triangle hole. Your mind doesn't connect the thought to the process.
It's the same thing with cleaning house. Either you're so mired in decisions (a whoollleeeeee 'nother thing) or you can't seem to connect wanting a clean house to cleaning. Or wanting the dishes to be done, to actually doing them.

It sounds totally stupid, but I swear, it's true. On a down cycle, I will tell myself, in literal words, "I have to do this."
And I will sit there and stare at it for a minute, and then walk away. There are times where I have told Ben "Tell me to do this," And he will, and I will be able to do it. But if I talk to myself, I won't do it.
Sounds a lot like being lazy. But again. I swear it's not. It's not that I don't want to do it. It's not that I'm trying to avoid it. It just doesn't connect.
And when I'm sane/stable/not down/not manic, I see this. I can type it out. But when i'm down? I don't notice. I seriously do not notice that I walk away without doing whatever it was that needed done. It's like I blank out.

Or even worse, the decisions. Oh god the decisions.

When you're up, your head is racing so fast that decisions are first-come-first-served. You don't actually 'decide'. You have a thought and act on if. If it's a question "What should I wear?" you go to the first thing you think of, regardless if it's a good 'decision'. Example: wearing a short skirt in the middle of winter because it's the first thing you thought about. And you don't consider anything else, because that first thought IS PERFECT. Or, another example, you find a craigslist a goat for sale. And it's PERFECT. Nevermind that you don't have fencing, feed, or anything else you need. You get that goat.

Later, when you come off the 'high', you're stuck with a goat who is starving and has no place to live.

When you're down, well, decisions are the other way around. You CANNOT decide. You complicate every little decision until you are totally overwhelmed.
Doing the dishes is not just 'wash the dishes'. It's "where do I start? Which dish do I start with? Maybe I should clear the counters first so I can put the dishes on there to see what I need to wash. But to do that I'd have to put away the stuff I used to bake with last night... and some of that is dishes, so where do I put those? Do I put them with the dishes? But I don't have room for the dishes!" ETC.
You can see how, after five minutes of standing there with THIS running through your head,  you'd get overwhelmed. And you sit down.

And that survival instict, the one that had morphed into buy-buy-buy when you were manic, dumbs back down to eat-sleep-defend. And nothing else.

A week later when  you're stable, you look back and go "WTF? Why couldn't I just pick up a dish and wash it?"

It's Cold. I Feel Like Crap.

I'm sick of being cold.

(Disclaimer: I'm on the low end of a bipolar cycle, and also haven't eaten all day = in a crappy, i-hate-life mood)

I am cold every day. Not just put-on-some-slippers cold. But five layer tank top - shirt - long sleeved shirt - sweatshirt - hoodie - COLD.

We wood-heat only. AND, thanks to a wonderful, lovely, screw-you cold snap in late Nov, we used a LOT of wood. Too much. Much more than we estimated. So we're running low on wood, and rationing. So, cold.

But I am S.I.C.K. of being COLD.
I love winter. I do. I'm a winter gal. I have no problem being cold outside. I'll go take care of the goats in the 27 degree weather and not notice. But inside? Inside = warm, in my mind. And when inside = barely warmer than outside, my mind refuses to comprehend.

My kids are driving me loony. I counted up the days since I've been without them, and came up with New Years. Which doesn't seem that long, really, but then Ben wasn't feeling good, so the last 2 weeks I have had them 24/7. I have woken them up, taken care of them all day, taken care of them after Ben gets home (oh, and taking care of HIM too), put them to bed, gotten up with them 2-3 times per night.
Non. Stop.

And I am so sick of them. And that's a horrible thing to say, really it is. Because since being on the new meds, I've been able to 'enjoy' them again. Snuggle them, play with them, etc. But now? I'm just sick of them. I took off for 2 hours this morning to the local coffee shop to work on some Russian, and that was REALLY nice. And I'm sure a lot of you are going "wow, 2 hours, that rocks, I wish I could have that!" but 2 hours doesn't cut it for me. I'm more of a gone-all-day-be-home-for-dinner gal. I just need more than a few hours to 'reset'.

Screw this, I just put more wood on the fire. I'm COLD dude. We'll buy wood if we need to. It's still cheaper than electric heat.

Our money is out of control. Well, actually, we don't have any money, so I guess it doesn't matter. I confirmed with the insurance company that we do NOT want OUR car fixed (we looked, it'll be $400 to fix it, less if we can junkyard the parts, so screw the insurance's $1000 deductible). Hopefully the fact that we didn't use the collision part helps our rates stay down. I also found out we're a "platinum" member for being with them so long and they have "small accident forgiveness" which I THINK means less than $500 property damage, but it might be more, so we MIGHT get off with no rate increase. Or very little. So that's awesome.

However. We're still not making ends meet. Or really we're making SOME ends meet. Just not all of them.
Dear lord let our tax refund be more than 3k. Know how awesome that would be? FREAKING AWESOME.

Why do people not talk about money? I never understood that. Ask me, I'll tell you how much we make, how much we spend, how much debt we have. Of course I'll ask Ben FIRST before I tell you to make sure he's okay with it, but really, I, myself, have no problem with it. I'll tell you upfront what I make! Zero. Zip.

The guilt is back. I'm here sitting at home doing dishes while hubby's out there making, you know, money. And money is society. Money money money. You can't turn on the radio, TV, look at the newspaper, or visit a friend without money coming up. We are so focused on money as a society and I am trapped in it even more than I want to be.

I hate having debt. I hate it even more because I feel 90% responsible for it. First off I brought a fair amount into the marriage. I remember Ben wanted to wait to get married until I got all my debt paid off. That was almost 4 years ago. I STILL have some of that debt. Plus more. LOTS more. It makes me want to bang my head on the desk. I blame the bipolar. And that sounds like a cop-out but it's really not.

I was going to go on and on about the bipolar thing but I think I'll make that a separate post. Otherwise this post would be 19 pages long. Yes, 19. Exactly.

Thanks for reading.

Hate Is Too Strong Of A Word

Except today.

My children (child?) drew on my less-than-a-year-old-expensive-tile-laminate-kitchen floor. I'm assuming it was yesterday. It is crayon. Can't be pencil, NOOOO, that's too easy to get off. Has to be crayon. Dark blue crayon. Crayon? Does not come off that floor. The last time they drew on it, it took two hours for me to hand-scrub with baking soda a one foot by one foot section. I kid you not. The tile has all the texture stuff on it, so there's millions of little nicks and crannies and places where crayon gets caught up.

Oh! And bill collectors! Don't EVEN get me started. Okay, I'm sorry, but I got myself started.
Just got a call from the one credit card that hasn't been paid. And I hate to sound like I'm protesting guilt, because I'm not. I'm a firm believer that credit cards need to be paid and not foisted off.

BRB, have to go water the goats.


Okay, back. Where was I? Oh yeah. Credit card.
So anyway! Firm believer that you get into debt, you find your way out of debt. Even if it means relying on your husband to pay your bills while you have two kids and don't work (ahhem.)
So this card, right? This one card has about $1500 on it. The minimum payment was $75, which I paid faithfully for 2+ years while paying off other cards/things. One month I missed the $75, so my minimum the next month was $150. Too much. So I called and asked them if I could pay off the $75 missed payments in installments, or have it deferred, because $150 at once was too much.
They said no. So I paid $75. Which make me $75 overdue.
Over. And over. For months. I called and asked again what I could do. They said nothing could be done. (By now the $150 had turned into over $300 as a minimum payment, despite me paying the $75 monthly).
It, obviously, went into collections.
Collector just called.
First off, I think he was put off by my grunts and 'uhhuhs' instead of actual words. I've noticed that puts off a lot of them. But once we got through the original "are you mrs doran, blah blah blah", he asked if my address was correct, yes, it was, and then asked me my work address.
Wha? I hung up.

I just NOW realized why this is different than the collections calls i've gotten before! It was from a collection company, not the actual card company. Duh. I get it.

Well, long story short, I hate bill collectors. Not the actual card companies - i've had really good experiences with Discover and Chase Bank, who heard me out and worked out stuff with me. Discover even went "You've never missed a payment, and we noticed you missed this month, so we wanted to make sure everything was going okay and give you a reminder" which was awesome because, yup, I actually DID forget.

So I hate bill collectors.

Oh! And what else do I hate? Picture this. The house is 52 degrees. You're in a nice hot shower. Mmmmsteam, nice and hot, filling the bathroom so you know when you step out of the shower it will still be warm and you can get dressed before you exit and FREEZE YOUR BUTT OFF.
Now, take that whole, nice, warm steam-filled room, and open the door, while you're still in the shower.
My kids did this to me. Cold air flooded in.
After figuring out they wanted more oatmeal, and shooing them out, I turned up the heat to get it nice and steamy again.
And they opened the door. Again. This time to tell me they were SO HUNGRY and I HAD to get them more oatmeal because they were STARVING and the one full bowl they'd already had was NOT ENOUGH and they were going to DIE.
I finally gave up, dried off and dressed in freezing air while shivering.
I'd lock the door, but then Morri would pick that 15-minute-time-slot to pee on something because she couldn't get to the toilet.


Okay, so I feel better after putting my rant into words. But it's still freaking cold in here. Screw it, I've been cold for a week straight, rationing wood... I'm going to build a nice fire and try to thaw.

Kudos