New Frontiers and Stress

What, we're drunk(ish)...(what's new, really) we have most of a post done...but we haven't all been able to weigh about how we all feel about The Boyfriend (@mr_jmm/James) becoming our live-in boyfriend. We haven't done this is in over a year...we figured we would never again live with anyone but us, considering all the changes in the last year, our being public with our mental illness, and accepting it, wanting a life as us, destroying The Other Girl, and writing about our life so we can survive (seriously, without this blog...we'd be dead...you don't even know).

He's moving from the UK you know, on Tuesday evening he'll be here...it's a little stressful. We've always been the one to move for someone else, to bend for others...but...other than the logical ways that it can go wrong...what can go wrong? Yeah, everything. Our willingness to try, some mutual love, and ...well...it's gonna work, right? We want to be positive, but...it's hard.

Stress. It's pretty much the theme of the the last 9 months, if not year (yeah, year). We're moving in November, James and us, to live with The Mother...and then there is new stress...but we have to move, we have no choice at this point.

We hope to sleep for days once we unpack and crash in her (The Mothers) basement...again. We know it's a pipe dream to think we can sleep for more than 8 hours...even that is an achievement.

People don't get how much of a failure it makes us feel to be back, pretty much at square one, over 8 years later...moving back in with her, towing a boyfriend behind...again...especially now that we are 32...almost an inverse number from when we last had to do this.

Mental illness is not easy...and we never want the "easy way out"...but we also need a break again...the back pain, the mental struggles...the last year and a half -to- two years...two years...have just been too much. Too much. TOO MUCH.

*sigh*

We hope tomorrow we can all work together to finish the post we have been trying to complete for weeks...but we can't make any promises about that. We just know, that despite the stress, the changes...by 2012...it'll be a completely different and new frontier for us all...James, and us...and we are thankful we have been able to write for almost the last year...because when a lot happens in our life, a lot also gets lost, it's hard for us to sort it our; and we are lost enough most of the time.

~Ivy

We Put In Our Three Weeks Notice

Okay, so we never got the three weeks notice/resignation in...we ran out of time on Friday to bring it to the "boss". We will on Monday though...

So, yesterday, aside from saying goodbye to Fuck Face quite unexpectedly…we also had a hell of a day at work.

About three days ago the one guy we work with in our kitchen station got upset, because when we leaned down to get something out of the fridge by his knee, in the thick of rush service, we put our hand on his side to let him know we were there. He jumped to the side, partially tripped over our kitchen clog, got angry and wore because he thought we were pushing him.

First, anyone who knows how a hotline in a kitchen works when you are getting slammed knows you are moving around very quickly, and it is not unheard of to put your hand on someone to let them know you are there, especially if you need them to move aside and you don’t want to risk any “below the waist touching” on accident. Plus, what could we gain from pushing him in the middle of a rush? Ignorant little twat.

So we could tell something was up because he wasn’t friendly or nice to us for the next two days. Which is fine, because we are leaving in three weeks, and fuck him, he’s a stupid kid; we just want to get our job done, make it through the day and get the fuck away from people.

Then yesterday we were going to put in our three week notice because we have not heard anything about the paperwork/short form they tried to push through last minute and we wanted to make sure we end this job right (because we never have before) in case we make it back to this city with a valid work permit, and want to be employed.  We’re pretty much the master at walking off of a job with no explanation.

But then the sous chef (the sous chef in a kitchen is the one who is right under the chef as far as kitchen management goes) took our station partner to his office while we were cleaning up at the end of service, and following that he took us aside, sitting us down in his “office”, which is just one are of the building where donuts are sold, right off of the kitchen.

The first thing he asked was about us saying something on the hotline.

“Did you look at a bill and say ‘god damn chicken’?” (a “bill” is the receipt/written slip of paper that has the order on it)

He could see the shock and confusion on our face. We, at that point, and still, don’t remember saying it.

“No. Did I say that?”

He responded with a “never mind”.

It’s possible, we figure…but also, if it was our kitchen partner, or someone in the vicinity that “complained” it could have been a misunderstanding and us saying “I’ve got tha chicken”. We remember saying that this week during service, to indicate we were going to put the chicken in. Don’t know how we remember such a small detail…but we do.

Then he asked if we had any pain.

We just stared at him for a moment.

“This is all off the record” he said to us, in his Sri Lanken accent. “I’ve just noticed some days you move in the kitchen like you are having pain.”

So we tell him about our back, share with him brief details, but not excessive amounts, about the car accident, tell him about how one of the instructors in culinary school (one he knows because he had graduated the year before us in school) said we wouldn’t last 10 years in the kitchen. A tear came to our eye when we say “So far it’s been 7 years since the accident”

He agrees that it’s sad; he knows we love cooking, we are good at it. He loves food and cooking just as much.

We continue to talk and he tells us that we are a nice person, and friendly, but sometimes when he looks at us, he sees something…”There is something going on in there” he said to us.

All we think is “crap” and “If you only knew” and then…we’re even more sad. We’ve only been at this job for 5 weeks, we’ve tried to put our head down and work, get the job done…during service we are focused as we can be…but, it comes off as bitchy. And sometimes we bitchy.

He is far too perceptive we suppose…he references mood as we being to talk, asking about anything in our personal life, we explain to him it’s probably the back pain.

Basically he likes us working in the kitchen though; he wishes we were not leaving. He’s just concerned about our back, and also agrees that sometimes that might be why we are short with people, because of all the pain. But we also know that sometimes we are a bitch, even though we try to control that from happening.

He only knows half the story, and it’s okay. We’ll be one from there soon…and we can try again at another job, we suppose.

We discuss other problems in the kitchen, which we site, and he agrees, as communication problems. The meeting ended well, he shared stories about what he had done before culinary school. A nice guy and we are fortunate to have him as a sous chef for the next few weeks.

So, we were stressed even before meeting with Fuck Face for drinks last night, but then that took it to a whole new level.

We told James we don’t think we will ever be able to have a job, all of us, together…and we don’t know how to do about it. We need to find some online work, so we can work where people can’t see our eyes, our face….the thing that gives us all away; it’s impossible for us to hide anymore.

We’re no good with real life situations…and it’s okay, because we prefer the life we have (livesd mostly behind closed doors), if we could only make money to live not working with people…because it’s so difficult, it hurts. We get so many headaches at work these days…and our back literally feels like someone is setting it on fire on a daily basis now.

So, that’s the conclusion of our week. If we were staying at this job we’d probably get fired down the road, that’s clear now…so it’s a good thing we are moving away from this city. We also said goodbye to Special Someone on Thursday, and yesterday Fuck Face told us he loves us, after all this time, and that he always has.

It’s no wonder we drink, and amazing we don’t drink more.

Life Set In Limbo

We're in limbo.

Our boss today told us that they (Human Resources) are trying to push some paperwork through (this is in regard to Fridays post, about having to leave our job, and therefore move)...some short form or something that they had used for another "immigrant worker"...he said in a week and a half, to two weeks, they will know for sure if it's been approved; but we're not feeling optimistic about it, for a variety of reason. They are trying to keep us on at work...should it be approved we are faced with a decision.

We hate decisions. We fight about decisions...we all have a different idea and outlook.

Do we stay, or do we go?

There are many options...and we've come to peace with the idea that we have to leave, and we have someone looking at the property we own, on Saturday, who is interested in purchasing it. We have made a list, talked to James...we have set in motion the plans for leaving (which, if you know us, is a great deal of work even up to this point).

Do we stay?

If we stay we will keep this job, a job that is killing our back (we have major back problems from a car accident) and we haven't been there an entire month (the pain...is like someone is setting our back and neck on fire all through the day...it hasn't been this bad since March or so)...and in addition, given our job history...it won't be long until we can't contain Us at work. Yesterday we already started to visibly front (that's a DID term), things were awkward. Things have gotten even more awkward feeling as the days go by, and it's been only a month or so.

We are good at what we do though, and the people we work for can see this, it's why they pushed the paperwork through anyway, even though we are on a three month probation, as anyone hired there is...we know that they wouldn't go through the trouble if they didn't have faith in abilities.

Do we go?

We are pretty excited about traveling around the United States, and introducing our boyfriend to America. We want to write, to paint, and work our way across the country, and we have the means to do it, if the house sells; we also want to work in restaurants around the country.

It would be nice to live in the United States again, where things are affordable...and we can visit family. The Grandmother is ill, and senile...we'd like to be in the same country when it comes time to say goodbye...we never really got to say goodbye to The Grandfather (more to be written about that when the time comes).

We have many reasons for going, just as we have many reasons for staying.

Faced with this week and a half wait, we don't know if we should continue carrying on with our plans of moving from here in November, or if we should stay put.

What does our gut instinct say?

We have too many opinions, too many gut instincts. Staying would be the easy option...but we're not familiar with easy. Life is short. We've almost died once (the car accident), we've been through terrible experiences (our entire life)...to say what could go wrong would incite possibilities, but we feel like we should ask "what could go right?" (...that positive little bitch in us who wants to paint the world...). We don't know what to do.

So, we're in limbo. We won't know exactly how to feel until the final letter from the government of the country where we are currently living comes in. If it's denied we only have once choice, if for some miraculous reason it is approved then we have choices. We're uncomfortable with that.

Do we stay, or do we go?

~Frank et al

Why Our Twitter Account Name is “Me” and not “Us”

Yep, we're copying a Tumblr post over....why? Because we had a bit of a stressful night and day.

We got about three or four hours of sleep last night, it was hard getting to sleep because we were thinking about moving, and things we have to do to prepare and kept getting interrupted by some of us who are sad to be moving...and tears. Then it was hard to stay asleep and of course we woke up every hour and were awake before the alarm went off (which, btw, these days is:

Some of us like our apartment, like the city we live in, especially the part we live in ... and we're moving to live in The Mothers basement. We don't even want to take the room she keeps for us there...that's The Other Girls room...and is right across the hall from The Mother and The Stepfathers bedroom...so we plan on taking The Angry Brothers old bedroom, where he slept when he got in some trouble and had to go stay with The Mother for a couple of years. That's what happens when you create broken children..it's a revolving door of having to help them when they need time to figure shit out. It's why parents should do a good job the first time and try not to fuck their kids up. It's why we don't plan to have any. We'd surely fuck up some poor soul that would be born with amazing potential...and we could never bear the guilt.

We're scared of this move, even though we are excited, because it's almost the middle of nowhere, compared to where we live now...we're scared because whenever we visit her all we want to do is eat, and that's going to make us fight (some of us hate when we eat). Ant it's going to be an everyday battle, and there are no jobs in the town/city where she lives...and...there is just so much. But it'll be less stress than the last year. It has to be.

I'm nervous, but today not paranoid. We got stressed by the tenants that live in our house...who were not happy to hear we were going to be selling it soon...but that's a story for another day.

We decided to move the Tumblr post that Ivy wrote this past weekend over to here "The Big Blog"...so here it is.

Frank and I are going to drink now, because we need to be able to fall asleep tonight and it seems that wine does that for us, eventually...help us fall asleep.

~Catherine (& Frank...she's here too)
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We get a lot of people asking…

“Shouldn’t your account be called @JustCallUsFrank?” or why isn’t it.

If you read our blog you know that the one of us to start the blog, and this account (The Other Girl, our core*, who no longer exists) did so trying to hide who she was, and who we were. Once she started the account, that was linked to our “Big Blog” then we decided not to change it. Too much work, and we were under a lot of distress to worry about such things. Now…it’s pretty much stuck.

In addition, while we are many of us, we wish to be treated like any other person, be treated as one. We don’t want our illness to define us. Mental illness should not define anyone.

If you’ve read our boyfriends blog you know what a struggle that can be for him, treating us as one. It shouldn’t be hard for you people on Twitter to deal with. Just do it.

At any given moment we are a different person, and sometimes more than one at once…for those of you who don’t read our other blogs that makes no sense….but in the meantime, our desire to be treated as one makes us appreciate having our blog and accounts named Just Call Me Frank…because we don’t want people, outside of our boyfriend and super-close friends, calling us anything else (and even then, only some of us want to be, and are allowed to be, called by our real names)

Plus, it’s a user name. Get the fuck over it and deal with it. Do you use YOUR real name? No. So we choose to use only one of our names. There are nine of us, just like in real life, we have to use The Other Girls name (the one of our birth certificate), here we have to use Franks. How hard is that really to understand?

Shouldn't be. AND it should[n't] matter to you. (she wrote while drinking...we had to fix that with brackets...)

Thanks for reading. This was inspired by yet another person asking a stupid irrelevant question…and 140 characters not being enough to explain it.

~Ivy (and some et al)

P.S. The harshness is a bit of an edge from a bottle (+) of wine…but anyone who knows us knows we're not angry…just…us

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*that's a DID term...which you can find more information about, if you care to, on one of our other blogs...http://wearejcmf.blogspot.com/ (the terms are on the left hand side)

Our New Adventure - The Decison Is Made

 

Regarding Fridays post, where we talk about where we live and why we might have to move.

We've decided no matter the outcome of the work permit renewal we are headed back to our land of birth. So, somewhere between November and January we will be headed back to The United States of America...where we will, along with our British boyfriend James, take a stop for a week, to a couple of months, and live with The Mother (we'll see how long that lasts before we go bat shit crazy).

Following that we will be working on a way to work and travel around the United States, we hope to start out around April 2012. James has never been to the United States, so we figure it will be a good geography lesson for when he has to pass his citizenship test. Does anyone know what's on that thing anway? Probably a lot of stuff an average American can't even answer, we're guessing.

 

Hopefully we will be spending no more than a couple of weeks to a month in any single big city. So far the list includes stops in Illinois, Ohio, New York, Florida, Kansas, Arizona, California, Oregon and Minnesota.

On our tour of the United States James and us would like to stop and see some of the Tweeple who we have come to regard as mutual friends...some of you know who you are. We also plan to "hop the fence" and see some our Canadian Tweeple who live along the borderline.

In the process James and us will get a good idea of where we might want to move to in the end, what city we feel most suits us, where we can stay and...who knows what. Build a future together.

We definitely will be blog about it...just as we do everything else.

We've decided we are tired of the struggle we've had and the money we've spent trying to stay in a country that seems, now, hell bent on making it difficult for us to stay, over and over, even after we've put in blood, sweat and tears...not to mention love.

It's given us some calm, peace of mind...or maybe we've just lost our last marble. 

Granted not every one of us is thrilled, some are nervous about living with The Mother and The Stepfather, and they will be the catalyst in a speedy departure, to be sure.

We're excited, we're nervous, we're apprehensive...but feeling oddly optoimistic to be moving "home".

We have some loose ends to tie up where we are now, and we'd like to be able to stay here, as a visitor, once our work permit expires (October 6th)....we'd like to stay here until January.

This is the most spontaneously non spontaneous we have ever been. We're not good with making plans...but I feel like that with James...anything is possible.

Hopefully we will figure out how to make that happen, the move, the trip...without too much stress. The Father is coming with a trailer whenever we are ready to help us move, which will make it much easier.

In the meantime, we'll be finishing out our work permit at our current job, putting a house up for sale that we own, and working on some of our paintings, continuing to write and hopefully finishing up the last few years of the story of our lives so we can move onto the future, and trying to be positive about the whole thing...taking two cats, the man we love, and the whole of us...embarking on a new adventure, to a new life. 

~Frank et al

Where We Live and Why We Might Have to Move...Again.

Here’s the thing.

We live in a country not our own, but it feels more our own than our country of birth. If you are a reader of our blog, and have actually read some of our life stories (which we need to complete yet) then you probably have figured out where we live. We're still not saying though...just because it's risky.

We have lived here, in this country, for seven years (come December of 2011). We went to school here on a study permit for three and half years, we stayed here on a work permit and opened a catering company which we’ll write about sometime in the future, then we worked at our last job, which we’ve written quite a bit about, and now this new job…a job we love, despite the physical pain it puts us through…we do enjoy it.

The work permit is the problem we are facing now, it is a type they started offering graduates of this countries Universities and Colleges the same year we graduated. This permit is not extendable on its own, which means we need a new work permit…and as far as we have been told by the Immigration Department a few weeks back.

This is also the reason we were very anxious to get a new job, because you can’t get a work permit without a job offer, and since we already live here what is better than a job offer for being eligible for a work permit than already having a job?

So we’ve been working on the paperwork, and talking with our boss about the paperwork they are requesting from his end, because the employer has to justify your hiring over that of a citizen of this country.

We’ve talked to Immigration in person and they said there needs to be a certain form filled out (something like a job market survey); our employer talked on the phone with them this afternoon too, and was told it’s not just a form; it’s an application for permission from the government to hire a non-citizen.

He seemed pretty put out that he was going to have to spend his time filling out the paperwork, and didn’t understand why they didn’t have to do this with the last foreign employee they hired, who hailed from China (this is a big place, our place of work…there are people working from all over the world). The paperwork is six pages long.

“This thing is longer than my mortgage application was”, our employer said, after he printed it off.

And we laughed it off because we had already heard the bad news we are about to share, and we were forced into a switch so we didn’t cry in front of our new boss; a couple of us DO NOT take bad news gracefully…

So what’s the big deal?

The permit expires in one month, which means in ONE MONTH we are here as a visitor, no longer able to work…so we’re going to be unemployed…AGAIN. Of course we can stay here, in this, the first place we’ve ever felt was our home…but we won’t be living in a building, we’ll be living in a box. And winter is coming, so that’s not so cool. And we are so tired of moving, we just moved into this apartment last October, and we love this apartment (we have had nearly 30 physical addresses in at least 6 states and 1 non-state).

The woman on the phone from Immigration basically told our boss this afternoon that if he had not posted the job listing in at least two places, which they require proof of, then the application WILL be denied. So, because he decided to use the government job board website to post the job listing, and didn’t post it in the local paper (which nobody reads) or on Kijiji, or some shit, we’re going to be denied our permit. (75% chance of denial, as far as we can tell)

For the first time we have a good paying job, and despite the pain we were willing to stick with it and work on some alternative pain reliever methods…and we had budgeted so that by the end of January 2012 we would have all of our debt paid off, as long as our only excess expense were a few bottles of wine a week (a bottle of what we drink regularly costs less than $12 after taxes). We gave up smoking in January, and we gave up marijuana a couple of month later (between the two we were spending over $600 a month on things we smoked) for a plethora of reasons, and we really don’t eat out, or much. Debt makes us nervous. Very, very, nervous. If you have read the stories of Us (THE CHAPTERS OF FRANK/HOW WE CAME TO BE US/ADDRESSING WE) then you probably know why from at least one of the stories.

More importantly, if this permit is denied we’re moving back to the United States by the end of the year, something we really don’t want to do…so we are probably going to be looking for a job in the United States…and we are willing to move just about anywhere. (New York and California are preferred though...maybe Chicago).

The economic state and employment outlook of the United States is really…making us feel we’re jumping from the fire into the flame…and all we want is to be in the pan. And we don’t know if we can even apply for unemployment there until we find a job, having been living “abroad” for seven years.

How much bullshit do we have to put up with? Really. It’s not as bad as it could be we suppose…we just have a “severe” mental illness, some of us suffer from depression and eating disorders, we have soon to be debilitating back pain* from that fucking car accident and we are basically unemployable.

We write though, and we paint. And if it wasn’t for those two things we’d be dead today.

At least we have our wonderful boyfriend, who is much too far away… (he iss selling all of his belongings to try to raise money to come to us as fast as possible)…

…And our family, who we called on tonight. We don’t ask for help. We never really have, but tonight I decided to tell them what we need. And we might need help. That’s what family is for, right? *sigh*

The Facebook message we sent to The Father, The Mother and The Brothers...a first.

~ Frank et al

…mostly Frank…everyone is freaking the fuck out right now. Emmie really wanted to spend some time out tonight…she, Ivy and Cassandra had what they thought was a very successful day at work. Emmie is pretty good at staying on task, and great in the kitchen because burns don’t bother her as much as the rest of us, and we burn ourselves a lot.

*was also told by the boss this afternoon that we move too slowly in our job position, he is thinking of moving us to a different department…one we don’t want to move to. Of course we didn’t tell him about out back pain or anything. We’re still on probation, must’nt give them a reason to find fault in us…we have two and a half more months left of that, if we make it past the work permit bullshit.

- Is that all coherent? Does that make sense? We've had a fucking week from hell...we're going to drink a whole shit load of wine -