Definitely Not Whining

I'm not whining, really, just saying.  My gas has been shut off yet again.  How do I not pay this?  I think they are scamming me some way, not sending me the bill and then sending me a notice a couple days before which doesn't get opened as I only open mail about once a week.  But since I don't pay attention to life's tedious details, I can't prove it.  Nothing else gets shut off.  I don't lose my phone or cable or electricity.  I have the money to pay.  But the gas. . . it's another matter.  Getting up this morning and having no hot water and no way to cook really bummed me out to a disproportionate degree.  What is wrong with me?  I need a handler.

Again, I am not whining (right?).  I guess I've opined a bit, then wondered.  I'm inching closer, I guess.  But this was on top of everything else.  I'm just tired, kids, and worn out with worrying and chores and deadlines.  And coming home to the cat.  And something else, too.  It is as if all lines of communications have been chopped.  I know the phone works and the email accounts, too.  I get the random advertisements.  But I can't get a callback or a response to my emails.  And I wonder--what did I do?

I'm sure it was nothing more than being myself.  It can get me into hot water.  More and more as times change and people become more stridently. . . just strident, I guess.

I showed an image I liked a lot to one of the successful artist's in my compound last night, one that I was thinking of making into a series.  I asked him if he liked it and he was strangely silent.

"Too gimicky?" I offered to get him off the hook.

"Yea, a bit."  He went on.

I really liked the image.  Maybe I shouldn't listen to him.  I wanted to offer up some criticism of his own work, but he hadn't asked me just then.  That's when I knew I was really conflicted what with wanting to strike back.

There are about a thousand other things, too, but they are just a big, inarticulate mass at present, things I am sublimating because I have enough to deal with just now.  But I can feel them in my nerves which are jumpy and twitchy.

So the gas is just the icing.  I'm not whining, though.  I 'm just saying.