girlofprey

( Difficult stuff )

I went to see Spiderman again today, because Michael Keaton is amazing. I still spent a lot of it wishing someone would slit Tony Stark's throat, but the bits with Adrian Toomes were amazing.

My mum got a call on Sunday night from my sister's neighbours. My nephews were apparently in the garden yelling and throwing stones and throwing stones at cars that passed, and my sister was coming out occasionally to call them morons but not do much else. Apparently, my nephews have been doing plenty to these neighbours, such as weeing in a bottle and throwing it over their fence, and throwing stuff over the fence in general, and throwing large amounts of stuff from their bedroom windows into the garden, or into a gap between their garden fence and their conservatory. The woman who lives their used to teach my ON at his school, and they're very sympathetic to the kids and my sister, but they say they've been living in that house for 42 years, and now it's just like being in hell.

So that's nice.

The thing of it is, it's not even like the kids had been in all weekend and were going stir-crazy. My parents had my MN on Friday night, as they usually do, and he slept over, even though there was no football the next morning. Instead he had a presentation, and all of the kids went to that, even though my ON was a bit weird apparently. Then they came back to our house for a few hours. And on Sunday their dad had them, and took them out for the day. So what else can be done? Frankly?

Based on that, my sister/mother called a meeting with my sister's social worker, which went...okay, apparently. The neighbours, on my mother's advice, reported the kids to the police for anti-social behaviour, and now they're not sure how far that's going to go. But it sounded like there was stuff the social worker didn't know, like genuinely how often my parents have the kids. So maybe something will come of it? But who knows. At the moment we're mostly preparing to have their dog, Frank. I wish I was more excited, because I do want a dog, but again I wanted it to be my dog. And all I can think about is how this is going to disrupt things for the cat, if they never get familiar with each other, and how we can never have the doors open when it's hot in summer again, and we're going to have to have a walk schedule and someone's going to have to pick up after him, and etc. But apparently she's still forgetting to feed him, and she hasn't had his coat clipped in months, so I don't know if there's much else we can do. In good conscience. Other than call the RSPCA or send him to the pound. I'm sure it'll be lovely. He's a lovely dog. But it is basically just cleaning up after my sister, again.

I called the doctor's yesterday, to see about talking to someone about my mental health stuff. Apparently I can't book an appointment, because all the pre-booked ones are now taken until the middle of August. The best I can do is call them in the morning to try to get a same day appointment. Which means getting up to call them at 8am, just to see if I can get through, and if I can get a suitable appointment, and at the moment rushing around to change my routine at short notice isn't going to be good for my stress levels, to be honest. But it is the best shot I'm going to have apparently, so I'll probably try to do it later in the week, or next week or something. I also looked into one of the helplines my mother recommended, and it was closed down, but I told my mum and she said she'd just spoken to them a few days ago, and it turned out I had the name slightly wrong. So there's always that if things get bad.

But still. You've got to laugh, haven't you?

It was my mum's birthday yesterday. Apparently, she got woken up by her sister at about twenty to nine in the morning - her sister is in her seventies, had a stroke a few years ago, and her only daughter is currently in hospital recovering from an operation to remove a brain tumour, but they were expecting her to come out of hospital a few weeks ago. Then my mum had to go to a CPR training session. And after that, she decided to let my ON come over, because it was her birthday and because he normally comes down on a Tuesday, but she was working today. And - I didn't get the full story of this, but it was something like; a community/school nurse was at my sister's house, and wanted to weigh the kids and measure their height. My MN and YN weren't in, so my sister either asked my mum to go look for them, or my mum was just driving away with my ON and saw them. Much, much further away from the house than they should have been, considering my MN is 8 and my YN is 5. Apparently, when she stopped to pick them up, my YN was crying, and saying something about how a man had chased them, threatening to call the police, because my MN was throwing stones. My MN, at the time, just refused to get in the car, because he'd found some older boys to hang around with. It was around this time my mum's sister called her again, crying. But, after that was all done, we went out for a meal, and it was pretty nice.

Today my mum had a twilight shift at the hospital, which basically means she's working from 12pm to 12am - pretty much all her shifts are 12 hours these days, but sometimes she does day shifts, which are about 7am to 7pm. She normally only does one a week, but for some reason the shifts have fallen, this week and last week, so she's doing two on consecutive days. So she did the CPR session yesterday, is working a twilight today, and is working a twilight tomorrow.

So she was up this morning, getting ready for a 12 hour shift at the hospital, and apparently my sister called her, asking her if she could look after my MN for an hour, because she wanted to get ready for a Jobcentre appointment, which had been rescheduled from last week after she was 15 minutes late and they refused to see her. Because my MN is still not at school till tomorrow, because she didn't sort out his transport. She apparently said her appointment was at 11:40, and "you're not at work till 12, are you?". At which point my mum had to point out that no, she had to get to work for at least 11:45, to be ready for the start of her shift. In the end, she agreed to watch him, and my sister said she'd just meet her before she went into work, and pick up my MN then. Let's hope that worked out. Before that - I essentially woke up to mum telling me my sister had called her, while she was getting ready, and she also told me that my MN had apparently said that while he was out on his jaunt yesterday "an old man had forced him to smoke weed". When my MN came to our house, the story had apparently changed to it being one of the older, 12 year-old boys he was with who'd forced him to smoke weed.

Tonight, I came home and asked my dad if he'd heard about mum's exciting morning, and he said he'd had an exciting afternoon, because he'd gone over to my sister's for something, and my MN was acting like a lunatic. Apparently he was running around with a mop, and then my dad took it off him, so he started jumping on furniture, trying to push things over. My sister didn't react much to this, so my dad told her to do something with him, she tried to tell him to stop, he told her to fuck off, and she ended up kicking him. After which he ran outside, picked up a brick, and threw it through a window of their shed, smashing it. There are three windows in the shed, and he's broken them all, apparently. My dad then started talking about how my MN needed to go away, just go away somewhere, probably to a padded cell. And how my sister's been ruining my dad's life since she was 13, and it's all just bollocks.

And I'm not doing very well, to be honest. This might be obvious from the posts I'm making lately, but...this is just exhausting. And awful. And honestly, it might not be so bad, but given everything that's going on with my job at the moment, I just don't know what's going on with that either. If I could be confident that I could stay at my job, getting my wage, for as long as I wanted to, until I chose to leave, at least that would be something I could feel secure about. But, even though there's no particular indication the new company are going to let us go, I can't feel secure about it, not until we get some concrete news one way or the other. So I don't know what's going to happen with my family, and I don't know what's going to happen with my job, and I don't know what effect either of those things are going to have on my mental health. And I'm just really tired, and I can't tell if it's because the weather changed over the weekend and everyone's tired, or I ate too much, or I'm just actually not sleeping enough, or it's my hormones. But I just feel miserable. I cried at porn the other night. It was this really good dubcon, which was mostly overall consensual, just a bit pushing, but wasn't just about the 'empowerment' of complete submission, and it crystallised some of my attitudes/issues around dubcon. It was around the same time I saw a post on Tumblr shouting out to and supporting our new label, 'hypersexuals', who are apparently people who have kinks that upset or disgust them, have sex all the time, and have sex as a form of self-harm with people they don't like. Maybe? Maybe all of those features are supposed to be separate? I don't think they should necessarily be lumped in under one label anyway. But I definitely don't think it's helpful to just put them under one label and passively accept them in a way that lets people avoid talking or thinking about subjects, rather than thinking or talking about why people have those feelings or do those things. I'm sorry, I'm not being very progressive right now. I probably just don't understand tumblr, or young people, and how supportive but also critically-thinking they truly are.

Anyway. That post annoyed me. But they crying thing, I genuinely don't know if it's because it crystallised a few issues for me, or because I'm feeling incredibly emotionally raw because of everything that's going on at the moment. I got a bit teary last night, because my mum turned 68 and started asking if she was an old woman, she wasn't an old woman was she? And my dad started reminiscing about when he was young and used to punch people so hard he detached their retinas. I think they both miss their youth, and it upsets me to think in ideal circumstances, I will outlive them and they'll die and I'll have to live without them. And also their present is so awful, and that upsets me when I think about it, even though we've all kind of accepted it as normal at this point. I followed that up with a dream last night where my sister was younger, and just had one young kid, but kept coming into our house and insisting she should stay with us and eat our food because she didn't have any food for the kid at home, and she tried to make this up to us with beautiful singing, and I had to tell her that no matter how beautiful the singing was, it did not in fact make up for her invading all of our space and our house, and shouting at her that she was an awful cow and she was ruining all our lives. I told my mum about it this morning, and she was like "that was no dream".

Anyway. This sucks. I don't really know what to do about it. I could go see my doctor, but I honestly don't know what they can do for me. I'm already on anti-depressants, that I'm pretty sure I should have been weaned off of this spring. Other than that, I don't know that I have time for counselling or anything. I could call Samaritans to talk about this stuff, but they can't really talk back to you about stuff because they aren't trained, so it wouldn't really be like having a conversation about it. I'm just...I don't know if I should just hunker down, and hope for the best, wait for it to sort of get better. I've already had to take a step back from video game news, because it's just too stressful given what some arseholes on the internet think. I feel like crying right now, but I don't know if it'll help to just let myself be emotional about it. Because at what point do I stop? I should probably talk to my mum about this. But I don't really want to put any more on her shoulders. But I don't think I'm coping super well at the moment, and it might help the both of us to talk about it.

I booted my computer up as usual today, and when I clicked to go on the internet it chose to open an infinite amount of Firefox windows. Bold choice, computer.

Truth be told, I'm a little concerned about it. The fans - or something - have been squeaking more lately, even when it isn't hot, and the whole computer keeps crashing, I think when it's trying to download new graphics drivers or something. It definitely did when I tried to watch a livestream at E3. I've only just built this computer, and it cost a lot of money to do so. Don't be broken, computer.

We're on the second week of 'babysitting sometimes' for my sister, and it's already gone tits-up. It turns out what's actually going on is that she's got some sort of flirtation thing going on with the guy who takes my MN to his school (when he has transport to his school), and so she wants some free time on the weekends to see him. So who knows what's even going to happen with that, and apparently the kids' dad has heard about this and said if she has anyone round to the house, he'll come in and smash their face in. Which is lovely. But anyway, regardless, that's the reason she wants us to have the kids 'sometimes'. She was apparently meant to be seeing this guy last week, but he cancelled at the last minute, so now she's seeing him this week. So now we have all three kids, except my mum was so worried about what my dad would say about it, she didn't tell him till this morning. And since he was taking my MN to football yesterday morning, and we were going to an open-air concert yesterday evening, he had stuff he was planning to do today. So currently, my dad's at the tip, the kids refused to go with him, so my mum's downstairs cooking a Sunday dinner, while trying to keep an eye on two of our nephews outside. I would go watch them, but they're only going to run in if there's a problem, so I'd basically be standing sentry for no reason. My ON and I have just been up town, because it's my mum's birthday tomorrow and there's some stuff we needed to get at the last minute, and basically it's been a very busy weekend and there's not been a lot of communication. And my sister's currently off on a date.

It wouldn't be so bad, but like I say, we had my MN to sleep on Friday night, and then my parents took him to football yesterday morning, and then we immediately got my ON, who came to our house to play on the computer, then came to the concert with us, then slept overnight. It's not like we don't have the kids otherwise.

Soaps just seem to be full of rape victims being tormented by their rapists these days.

And on a similar note, the police were apparently around at my sister's the other day, because my MN and his arsehole little friend were 'perving on some girls'. On the one hand, I'm not surprised given that similar things have happened before. On the other hand, I genuinely never thought my nephew would be the type of boy who would hurt girls just to impress other boys. But here we are.

I finally married Shane in Stardew Valley. I found him a few mornings later in his little nook, contemplating whether to have a beer or a cider at 6am. I don't know why all our boyfriends have to be so unfulfilled and alienated.

My ON is down at the moment. Apparently his dad is moving out today. Or meeting with a landlord at least - my mum's not convinced he'll actually be gone right away, but still. It's something? Things moving on at least. We'll still have to wait and see how things are when it's just my sister and the kids living on their own, but yeah, it'll be a change. And I'm glad he's going.

I'm sort of happy about the next few weeks. After today, I have a short week at work, then another long week, and then I have a week off. And it'll be E3, so the current games news drought will be over, and we'll find out way more about a few games that have been announced lately. There's a wild shooter coming out that pits you against a militant cult in rural America, and apparently according to some people on the internet, that's true racism. Whereas previous games in the series being set in Africa, a South Pacific Island, and Asia, and having you fight Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Asians definitely wasn't. It's weird when people show how nothing they are.

And in the meantime, Wonder Woman is coming out, which I'm going to see, a new series of Camp Camp is starting, Tekken 7's out, the Elder Scrolls Online's Morrowind is coming out, and the Let's Play company I watch are bringing out a new game-focused podcast show, which is nice, because I was just thinking recently how much I miss the old one they did. The format of the new show seems a little annoying, but eh, we'll see. Of course, in the middle of that we're going to have an election (which I still think they should postpone), which will probably have a very depressing result, but. Apart from that giant blemish, it looks like a nice few weeks.

I wish there was some way I could show you the Justice League poster I got in a comic a few weeks back, and has been sitting next to my keyboard ever since. It's most of the male members posing like they're members of a boyband. And then just Batman being a freak. Never change, Batman.

I just spent 40 minutes trying to download a Windows 10 installation file to hopefully use on my new PC tomorrow, with my netbook struggling to load everything and unable to use a mouse because I only have one USB port and I needed it for the flash drive - figuring out the download tool, deciding which edition of Windows I wanted, researching my CPU to see whether I needed a 32-bit or 64-bit version - only for the download tool to repeatedly tell me I didn't have a flash drive attached to my computer, when I did, I could see it.

alskdjsalkfjaskdlvmnmd.

Also my MN spent quite a lot of today calling us all fat pigs and telling us he was going to kill everyone of us, merry Christmas.

I've been in London for a few days, seeing my friend Sarah and jekesta and alicamel and slemslempike, and not been sleeping super comfortably because we were mostly on couches. I was really looking forward to getting back to my own big bed, and I got in it last night - and realised my cat had been in my room and weed in it. And I had to go sleep in our little bedroom where my nephews sleep when they stay over.

I wasn't about to wake my mum about it, so instead she got what sounded like the quite scary experience of going in my room this morning, and seeing it empty, completely made up, and missing the pillow, because my nephews don't always love to be clean so I decided not to put my head on theirs. But anyway. She found me, and I told her about it, and hopefully it will all be resolved by tonight. It does mean I can't play on my PS4 though, because it's at the end of my bed, so I have to sit on my bed to do it.

Also my MN got suspended from school (/his special unit) again for punching a teacher, he had a CAMHS appointment today and my sister slept in so my mum is having to take him, my mum spilled superglue all over our fancy granite worktops in the kitchen, and everything just seems to have gone to pot while I've been gone.

London was lovely though.

My nephew is back.