Hi folks,

Been a lil while. Feels like a good time to do a little vent and info dump about what's been going on with the fat fox lately.

The last couple weeks I've just felt very stressed out. Not panicky, but just a tightness and a roil in my gut that I haven't felt in quite a while. It's been a combination of things just piling on together and it's left me kind of worn out and vulnerable.

Easy one, which got resolved last week, has been losing the house insurance. Some of you know I'm still living with and supporting my folks. They got the house loan from my grandparents years ago before they passed away because they were able to secure a decent loan and rate (though sadly, when they refinanced they forgot to get the life insurance option, so when they passed we were stuck with the bill). Well, Dad is on the deed but not on the loan so all we've been able to do is pay on it. Bout three months ago our roof was leaking for the umpteenth time so we decided to try and use the house insurance to help fix it. Yeah, wasn't a great idea. Inspector came out, told us the exterior had to be damaged, we got a whopping 7.25 after the deductible. Then a month ago we got a cancellation notice since my grandfather is dead. Lot of stress, since no insurance means we had to pay the loan off and there's still about 17k left on it. They went down and talked to a local insurance agency tuesday and, fortune smiles, it wasn't a big deal to add a new insurance on since Dad is on the deed. Crisis averted. Still stressful.

Next up mom's been sick, she has a number of health issues and this time they peeked with her legs swelling up, a sign of impending heart failure. So she had to get on a string of meds for it which cost a pretty penny and had to completely cut salt out of her diet. It worked, but it also ate into the household income (mom and dad both are on fixed incomes). So for me that means having to pick up the tab for extra costs, topping them up to cover bills and buying most of the groceries. This wouldn't be too bad except the next point.

Just paid off a massive credit card bill. On top of what I paid for last month with AC. Now, I can't blame AC on my stress, it was absolutely my choice to go and I had it all covered. I still do. It just -happens- that it was followed on by a big pile of extra bills to pay at once. Now some of these couldn't be helped, like the 200 for my new car registration or the 165 for snagging a room at FC (again, my choice). What doesn't help though is a 450 dentist bill that was about 170 higher than it should've been because the dental assistant neglected to mention when she offered me composite tooth colored fillings over the silver fillings I was getting that the composites were 85$ more expensive, it was simply a cosmetic question of 'you're getting these, would you prefer these? They're tooth colored'. Wasn't until I was ringing up the bill they explained it to me, which they agreed was wrong at the time so I may still get something back but it's been over a month with no word and no write up of what the insurance covered yet so I'm not banking on it :/ So yeah, stupid high credit card bill that just ate up an entire pay check and then some. Oh and my youngest sister and her daughter have moved in, adding to the household stress and going through food faster, so when it was just me and the folks we could get by shopping every week and a half or so, now we're back to weekly and the house is more of a mess than ever.

On top of that. Related to the money 'woes', had a lot of recent work stress. So, back during Anthrocon one of my coworkers left. A coworker with a higher paying job title (job positions themselves are fluid and rotated into regardless of title) Well, typically when someone leaves they promote a bunch of people up a level. Every one of my coworkers, even the gal leaving, expected me to get promoted up. Well, it's been 5 weeks now and no one has heard a peep. I took the initiative to rattle some of management's cages by asking some questions and I got an explanation of the process and then a lot of non-answers dodging my question. Super, super frustrating. At this point I've given up. If it's still in review, I might get surprised. If it's taken and no one is saying anything well, just have to keep my head down and wait for the next person to leave, which, given works' high turnover, won't be -that- long. But it's still super disappointing to expect it and then things change without any kind of notification. There was also a brief hope that a government billet was open for the job I do and I might be able to get pulled over onto civil service which would be a dream come true and turn this from just a gig to earn experience and dosh into an actual career. Unfortunately, parties were misinformed so for about 2 weeks I was riding on a hope high that came crashing down. :/ My customers would still like to try to get me hired but it would've been a lot easier if there were simply an open billet no one knew about. Oh, plus, that promotion is a considerable pay jump, I'd be making about 200$ a month so the fact that it may just be sitting there waiting for upper management to move their ass is doubly frustrating, for whoever eventually gets it.

Oh and we also had a network outage at work. -That- was fun. Management sends us home, says we can make up the hours working lunches and staying late. When it extended past a full day, we basically had to burn leave because my cheap ass company can't be bothered to cover for acts beyond our control. Luckily I had enough leave time left over from AC to burn it, some of my coworkers weren't so lucky.

I was kind of hoping to once I nabbed the promotion I'd take the extra money to get some personal upgrades. my ancient flip phone is wearing out, the frame has cracked and chipped and for a while I was worried the hinge was just going to break completely on one side (luckily, not the case) and the battery is starting to show its age, where before I'd only need to charge every few days I'm down to about every other day, except the week before last when I was charging every day (fortunately, that was just because I needed to clean the contacts, that helped a lot). And I've grown kind of tired of my laptop being absolute shit for running games. I haven't touched WoW in a few months now because I'm just tired of running everything on min. settings and still hitting lag (my video card is absolutely shit. My fault when I bought the thing). Though, related, I also haven't been happy at all with how Warlords of Draenor has shaped up, it's been ultimately disappointing compared to how Pandaria had me hooked and regularly doing content daily. Still I'd also like to try a lot of new stuff like Guild Wars 2 which I picked up for cheap and Wild Star and Champions Online and go back to Everquest 2 a bit, but my laptop just can't really run it. Also running out of space, though part of that is having multiple seasons of Doctor Who eating up gigs upon gigs. Might just get an external harddrive exclusively for shows. But yeah, no promotion and all the massive bills has put the kibosh on those plans for the time being, though I'm still thinking I might try to drop some cash next month or the month after for a new machine, which is part of why I've been hedging off getting many commissions lately. Either way, just feeling pretty limited by my current tech ;9

So, that brings me to friends. Past couple months I feel like I've been getting the cold shoulder from people. Not necessarily that they're ignoring me specifically, though some certainly seem to be, but just that I'm hitting a lot more days where if I even see them, I say hello and get either no response or maybe a one word response and that's it. If i even see them, few folks have just completely dropped off the radar, for the most part. i get that life gets in the way and you can't always hang on chat programs all day, that's fine. But it doesn't take a lot of effort to keep in touch. It's even worse when they're not around but they're active on other mediums and just don't bother to talk to you, like not on chats but active on twitter and getting no response out of them. Or being told they're busy and seeing them trolling on F-list for tail or likewise. It's all just very, very discouraging. I feel like I'm just convenient to a lot of people, not explicitly a friend so much as just something to use to kill an urge and then be casually discarded. I dislike feeling like when I say hi to someone their entire reaction on whether they want to respond is tied directly to if they're in the mood to typefuck or not. I'm happy to just carry a conversation or even just cuddle a bit. And some of the folks ditching out on me I feel pretty strongly for, folks I go out of my way for to help, guys I'd really like in my life and instead I'm just left without so much as the time of day. Part of that is my fault, I know some of them I shouldn't get feelings for, that it's not reciprocated, but that doesn't make it hurt any less.

And just the general reaction lately to a lot of what I do. When I make a story or get a commission I am invested in it, when I share that stuff with someone it's because I like them and trust them enough to show them. When I get reactions like 'well yup, that sure is a story/picture' or 'ok' or just very flippant, one word responses that tells me they're completely and totally apathetic about it, thats kind of a buzzkill. No, I don't expect everyone to get up and rave about the latest nude fat fox pic I've got, I get that it's not their character and maybe not their kink, but I still think if someone goes out of their way to share something with you you can muster a little more than total apathy. Just tells me that it isn't worth sharing things with that person. If you can only offer interest when its something you want to fap to then why on earth should I try to cater just to your tastes? That's not fair. Especially for stories, something I actively put work into and will feel proud of til I hit the wall of lackluster apathy. When it's like pulling teeth to even get your work read, you quit pulling teeth and just go sweep up in the hallway and let someone else deal with that struggle.

I still have some wonderful friends that keep in touch with me and I know care about me so much. It kind of makes it more frustrating because I know I'm happy and grateful with them and I just let the above folks spoil things for me. I shouldn't have to feel that lonely or depressed when I know some of the fantastic folks I do. But still I get days like yesterday where I just bottom out emotionally and all I can do is just turn everything off and go curl up in bed for a few hours til my emotional reserves are back up enough to hide on invisible with a couple folks while I maybe plink at a game or two. I don't like feeling withdrawn like that. I like talking to friends, I like connecting with them. But the way I am the past few weeks, just feeling so vulnerable, I just keep pulled back. So I do apologize for anyone new that's wanted to talk, I just haven't had the heart for it.

So yeah. Just one of those times where everything seems to be piling on at once. I think the majority of it is passed, thankfully, and there's still some kernels of hope that could turn into something good. For now though, I just feel a lot of tension and waiting for a release valve. It's been a while since I've felt this kind of stress and I just don't have a lot of tools for dealing with it except to vent and ride it out, neither of which feel like great options.

I am still working on that journal game if anyone is curious. Unfortunately I haven't managed the speed of kicking out entries over the course of a whole day like I did when I first opened it but I'm still picking at it when I can, down to 9 entries now. For anyone curious to check out what I've got so far:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6915177/

Anyway, just wanted to get some of that off my chest. I'm hanging in there, just not very happily.