This will be the first night I have spent at home in about two weeks. For the past two weeks, I have pretty much been living with my best friend, helping him out, with the culmination of that help being his move to Charlottesville this weekend.
Today, I also took the first real step to leave Creatures Great and Small. I have worked there for four years now. I had to count back today and found myself a little shocked to find that I have been working for Katie and Louise since August of 2005. I have wanted to leave for awhile now, but between my dislike of change and my guilt for leaving when I feel they need me the most I have postponed my depature till it became finacially impossible for me to stay.
Don't get me wrong, I love my job. I, the girl defined by dogs, should work with them, at least for a while. It's no wonder that I love it there, but, as Katie once told me, I can't stay there forever. Only there is guilt.
Katie is sick. Very sick. She has lupus. For the first time I have seen Louise truely frighten. "I do not want to bury my daughter!" is what she told me and Beth when she was laying out the new rules about how we where to deal with Katie. Becuase of this, I feel that my leaving will make things much worse. I can do things that Beth can't be depended on to do, and I doubt the new women will be able to handle it either. I can handle coustomers, feed and give medications without prompting and tally up the boarding bills. I can run the shop when Katie and Louise can't be there. When Katie left us for a few days over the Thanksgiving holiday last year, I was the one who stepped up into her shoes.
But I can't stay there forever and my life needs to come first sometimes. Creature's has taken so much out of me this past year. The changes I wanted to make with my life this year are at odds with my job. Creatures has always been all consuming. The sceduale alone is enough to break anyone. I have no clue, when I go in in the morning, what time I'll get off. Somedays I can go in and be done in a couple hours, other days I'll be there all day. This makes it almost impossible to make plans outside of work. I used to spend weekends doing stuff. I think part of my estrangement with my mother and step father has been helped by the fact that I have not been able to do things with them on the weekends like I used to. I haven't been canoeing or skiiing since i started working there. I have only gone out of town three times in the past four years. One, an overnight trip to D.C. for which I only took off one day. The second was the only real vacation and the only reason I allowed myself to take it was because it was to go to my cousin's wedding. The third time was just this year and I didn't take off to do it. Not many people go out of town midweek unless its for something like a funeral. Those three trips are the most time I've spent out and about with Mom and Eric for the past four years. A complete change from the time before when I went with them often on their trips out of town. Before I started working at Creatures, summer meant canoe trips and other river trips. Every Christmas was spent with the extended family. I haven't seen Kerrys brothers in a few years either.
In the time before working at Creatures, I would often isolate myself, but those ties that I have let fade since working there where the only ones I kept by choice. This job was the main reason I almost lost one of my best friends from PVCC. It became impossible to hang out with Mike when I couldn't see him on the weekends.
I have grown since the time I first walked into those doors. My life has changed and so have my needs. I no longer need to hide in the back with the dogs. I need to get used to bosses who don't coddle me. I need to be able to function with a normal scedule that can allow for time to spend with people outside of work. I need to be able to take time off for things like vacation and sick days. I need to be able to go to work and have a reasonable idea of what will happen that day.
The finacial aspect is the biggest boot up my ass. Katie and Louise were both saying that they could give me more hours, if I wanted them. They are willing to give me more days on, they just thought I didn't want them. They are right when they thought I didn't want them. The main reason I don't want more hours at Creatures is becuase I like having three days a week when I know I control my day. It would be diffrent if they could tell me that I work 'x' hours a day, everyday. But they can't tell me that. They don't know what they will need from day to day, and I would not ask them to pay me for doing nothing around the shop just to get my hours and they cannot tell me a week in advance that I will deffinatly leave at 'x' time on a certain day.
The worst part of the irregualer hours is it has effected my work ethic. I spend most the morning trying to figure out how early I'll get to leave. Then I get cranky or huffy (although I try not to show it) when Katie appears with something else, something that wasn't obviously sceduled, to do.
In the beggining, my paychecks where enough. I could pay for my gas, my food, give some to dad and still have a little left over for stuff that I wanted. I could go to Best Buy or Plan 9 or the used bookstore after work on payday and buy what i wanted. I had the habit for a couple months of spending about $50 on Amazon about once a month and order DVDs and CDs. When I went to the grocery store I always could buy a toy for Pearl and treats for the dogs. For the past few months I've been barely able to make it through the two weeks with enough food, gas and ciggerettes. The added need of having to pay for the maintance on my car has been destroying the slight padding that I had depended on to make it through the two weeks.
I will admit that much of the problems have come from not budgiting my money better and trying to be out and about more often, but like i said, my job is at odds with the things I want with my life. Its bad enough that I am exhausted by my attempts to have a life outside of work, but the fact that I can barely afford it makes life even more difficult.
The worst part is that I don't feel like I'm asking for much. For me, going out is not about drinking a huge tab or going to expensive events. Its just about hanging out with someone. Yet I can barely afford that. The cost of gas, one or two beers and some food knocks out doing something like my laundry or buying food for a couple days.
Yes, there are things I could do to make life easier in that respect. I could quit smoking which would give me a nice chunk of my paycheck back. It wouldn't even cost anything, since I already have the patches sitting on my desk waiting to be used. I could budget my money better. Spend more time figuringing out my paycheck every week and decideing in advance where to spend the money.
The reasons I don't do these things are partly becuase I am stubborn and partly becuase I am frustrated and tired of seeing goals fly right out the window because I miscalculated. I don't want to quit smoking. It seems to me that thats the only thing that I used to do that I still have. It calms me, it's part of my identity, it's something I enjoy and damn the health problems. The budgiting frustrates me to no end. It never seems to work out right. Something always comes along that messes me up. It seems like everytime I do get it all figured out, dad comes up with something two days later that I need to pay for, or something happens to my car and I have to pay for that, or (and this is the worst) I just mess up the math and forget something and find out that I overreached myself. So instead of getting ahead and having something left over in two weeks, I just have gotten further behind.
I am tired of never having a back up. I'm sick of living paycheck to paycheck with no end in sight. The job I want is going to suck. It's going to be real questionable that I can do it without wanting to kill someone. But it pays and has hours. My goal to start is just to stick with it long enough to catch up and get a bit ahead. Get my car fixed and have something in my savings account. Get caught up on all my bills and maybe buy some things that will make life easier in the future. My main goal is just to have some finacial breathing room.
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