Ouch.

This post very well may get on your nerves. It's self-indulgence, pure and simple. I need to stay pretty vague, non-specific - but I need to write something because I need to vent, to get this anvil off my chest. Skip it if you like; I won't be offended.

I just got some bad news, some really bad news that I don't feel that I can share with you because it involves another person whose privacy is paramount. This person isn't a blogger, doesn't even know this site exists, but still - I was asked for confidence and confidence I will deliver. Suffice it to say that this news directly impacts on me, and makes me feel like a big old pile of steaming shit, for something I didn't even do.

All the details aside, I'm viewing this news as a watershed event. If you knew me personally, if I could sit down with you and narrate the screwball black-comedy that has been the last two years of my life, you'd understand when I say that this phone call was the capstone on a very large pile of unfortunate occurrences. I think I must be going through one of those major life-change cycles (no, not menopause) in which one generally finds one's self ripped away from the comfort zone of the past. I'm moving (painfully and slowly, like a birth) into a new phase, in which I find myself in sudden and unexpected financial trouble, with no friends in the area, no job, an immediate family member with a recently-diagnosed chronic debilitating illness, two children that are preparing to fly the coop and one barely in britches, and now this vague thing that I can't talk about but is really, really awful - everything about this one-two punch of irritating bullshit depresses me, which tends to make me push the people I do care about just that much further away. Or irritate the fuck out of them, by being Bad-News Betty all the time.

In my experience, change is usually for the better. It never seems like it when you're in the curve, though, when you're in the process of changing your life. It can be scary and weird and just downright unpleasant, no matter how well-adjusted you are, because forging into the unknown, while cool at twenty-three, is a nightmare on wheels when you have children to feed.

Anyway. I'm doing my damndest to pull myself out of it and get back to regularly scheduled Queenie programming. I'm generally a fairly happy-go-lucky person in real-life, despite my penchant for swearing like a naval seaman. It's happy cussing, usually. Unlike my daddy, I'm not a fatalist. The glass is almost always half full, even if the stemware is tacky as hell.

Give me a few more years like the last two, though, and ask me again...