cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And maybe I'm going clean out a closet Holy shit am I ever exhausted. I worked a solid 18 hours this past weekend. The class went extremely well. These have turned out to be more grueling that I had expected on account of standing on a concrete floor for hours on end while I supervise students with metalworking tools. I was strangely pleased with the fact that our students were so exhausted at the end of the first day. It felt like an indication that we had given them their money's worth. These were definitely the best student-built rifles that have come out of our shop yet. Both were extremely accurate right away. We had them quickly shooting 1.5" groups at 100 yards and one of them finished up with about 1" groups. This is before the barrels have been broken in and without trying various bullets and loads to see what the rifles perform best with. I think that if the students do their part to break in the barrels and try out other loads, they are easily looking at 3/4" groups. Both of them look really good, too. One of the students copied my last build almost exactly. Same paint job, same stock discs, same cartridge. I was flattered. A house style is starting to emerge among the rifles that we have been producing. Black and tan paint jobs, vintage stock discs mounted into synthetic stocks, etc. Its a good look. However, I am fucking exhausted. I've been going too hard for too long. Every weekend its something like this and I have my day job on weekdays and I have to work on the book in the evenings. All I do is work and sleep. I'm getting worried about meeting my deadline. The house looks like shit. Utter shit. Trish has done NOTHING for weeks and it shows. Every single dish in the house is dirty and we effectively have no kitchen. The heaps of dirty dishes and pots covers every counter surface, the kitchen table, the stove top, and overflows out of the sink. This when I have to finish a chapter of recipes by this weekend. Filthy laundry is heaped up everywhere and she has not done a single load of laundry in 5 days. She's also putting on weight. I have begun to actively despise her. Once upon a time I would spend every Saturday morning cleaning up the mess that she and the kids made over the past week. I just don't have the time any more. I effectively have 2 and a half jobs, while she has none. I'm wondering what, if anything, there is for us to salvage. Our poverty has led us to this point. If we'd had more money, I could have bought a house that would be easier to keep in decent condition and perhaps I could have hired someone to come in once or twice a week to clean. If I had more money, I could pay a vet to diagnose and treat our oldest dog's recent incontinence. If I had more money then we could get a babysitter and go out together once or twice a week and have an actual conversation. If I had more money they we could have central heat and AC so that the kids could sleep in their own rooms instead of everyone needing to cram into the one bedroom every night with the space heater or window AC unit. We have, effectively, no relationship whatsoever. Coordination of bill-paying and looking after the kids. A few joint social engagements. That's it. I come home and she holes up in some other room with a laptop. She won't even eat dinner at the dining table with me like a proper human being. Probably 50% of the times when I come home, she does not bother to greet me. She resents me for what success I have had over the last year. She resents this because she has accomplished essentially nothing in her life. Here's the truth: Unless I manage to make a considerable amount of money in the next 3 months, we will probably get divorced. I don't really know what I can do for her. We don't have the money to send her off on the 4 week language program in K0rea that she wants to do. I can't make her successful and productive. In a last-ditch effort to do something fun with her, I asked her today if she would come with me on my next trip to MA to work on the book. Just her, with the kids staying with grandparents. She cited a list of other commitments, any of which could have been changed around. What can I do? If she doesn't want to spend time with me and doesn't want to make some kind of effort to salvage our marriage then I can't force her to change her mind. In the last few weeks I've hardly gotten to do anything with the kids. Working this much, I can't. But working less is not an option if I'm going to keep all of them fed and clothed. Not until my day job ends on August 31st. The crux of the problem may be that I am an anachronism. A male head of household who is the sole breadwinner. This is very rare among my generation and younger. I am desperately trying to provide a reasonable standard of living for one wife, two children and three dogs. But the world at large has no respect for this any more. I'm not seen by either Trish or anyone else as they guy heroically toiling away and sacrificing everything to support his family the way I would have been 50 years ago. The tropes have changed. I am now the asshole workaholic who 'isn't there' in some wishy-washy therapist way. Yet if I failed and we lost the house and had to go on food stamps then I would be equally condemned. Right now I am feeling very pessimistic about all of this. I gave someone 15 years of my life. My entire adult life hitherto. I handed her almost every cent I have ever made since the age of 17. I held her hair when she threw up, picked her up in the middle of the night in God-forsaken places on short notice, stayed by her side as she gave birth twice. She actually vomited all over me at a cafe only a few weeks ago and I didn't complain. I never raised a hand against her. For all of this, I find myself in this situation. She resents me and I'm pretty sure she's trying to come up with a way of walking out on me. I expect that she will take the kids and move in with her parents by November. If I didn't have children and dogs that would miss me then I probably would have killed myself by now. No close friends, no money and a cold wife who is probably about to leave. An endless void of cold, gray misery lies in front of me. There is nobody out there who is going take me by the hand and lay down beside me and tell me that its all going to be all right. 3:25 p.m. - 2010-07-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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