What does it mean?

I write it a lot, but what do I mean by it?

"Onwards"

Sometimes, it means "just keep going", whatever you’re doing. If that hasn’t failed yet, and seems to be "working", keep going.

Onwards is sometimes an instruction to myself. When things don’t look or seem right, or when they don’t go right, Onwards means "don’t give up"

Sometimes it’s just something I say, a sort of General Rule, a Standard Operating Procedure, SOP.

Sometimes it means "wait for it", whatever "it" is.

Today it means this:

Nothing in the email for days regarding Mentor, and I guess I WAS hired as a Part Timer, but at this point, I need all the work I can get. The car payments go back to normal next month – $363 vs. the $90 I’ve been paying for over a year.

I like my Credit Union, they’ve cut me a lot of slack on the car payments, but I haven’t made a dent in the Principle in a LONG time. If I’m going to be going to client houses, I need to be able to drive, otherwise, despite the good Public Transportation they have here, it will take too long to get anywhere – hours of extra travel time.

Besides, I really really want this car to be the last one I buy. I want it to last as long as I can buy gasoline. It carries a Lifetime Warranty on the drive train, engine, transmission, drive-shafts – the heart of the car. I’ve had since it was brand new, and have taken good care of it. It can be my long-term car.

But, I’ve got to get hours of work to pay for it.

Since I didn’t hear anything, I have applied to other places doing much the same kind of work. In May, my first interview this time around was with Adult Learning Systems of Oregon, ALSO, in Troutdale, at the mouth of the Columbia Gorge. I called and checked in with them on Friday – left a message, that is, and today they called me back and asked for another interview. On Wednesday at Noon.

I emailed Mentor that I wasn’t free on Wednesday, I had an appointment to keep, but was free the rest of the week, and, lo and behold, work came my way in the reply. Can I drive out to Cornelius again for 5+ hours a day, 30 miles each way and a couple of hours of Paid Travel Time, Tuesday and Thursday? The new client mentioned in passing last week, who I thought I would meet then, turns out to be in Milwaukie, "right over there". I proposed to meet him at 9 on Wednesday, before my "appointment".

ALSO is talking about an On Call position in one of their group homes, doing what I supposedly do, acting as a Life Skills Trainer and Responsible Adult, but with adults, not kids.

Onwards in this case meant I was kind of Passive-Aggressive; if you don’t have work for me, I will find other work elsewhere.

***

For 16 years, I have lived under a different situation. Before that hearing in 2001, that Child Support thing was taking half or more of my pay. I was, in effect, working for 2 or 3 dollars an hour, that Holiday job I had in 99.. I couldn’t keep that job because I was too slow, and it didn’t pay for shit after that deduction.  That bs went, in 2001, from 360 dollars off the top of my pay checks and $15,000 plus added debt, to fifty dollars a month ONLY on $8,000 or so of debt ONLY, no on-going Support orderded. I haven’t seen a tax refund in a very long time. That $303 from the state would have been very welcome this year.

***

Some time in the past, I posted a thing called "A sequence of events" that I had been writing since 1997, telling about that child support thing. At some point, after I met my supposed daughter in 2012, I made that entry Private, or something, and I can’t find it on OD.

wtf?

I have had to reformat this computer a couple of times in the last year, and I’m afraid I lost "my" copy of that piece. It is on disc and or floppy, but it is not on the machine yet, and I want to post it, as an introduction to that and for new readers.

I tend to forget you might not know what I’m talking about, whether you have been my reader since 2004 or not. I may not explain things I know by heart clearly enough, and, looking at the last few entries, I maybe have gotten dates misplaced and or events in the wrong times and places.

16 long years.

Ya gotta understand, this has been going on since mid-summer, 1997. It’s been Unfair. It drove me crazy. It almost killed me. I felt so sorry for myself that I got paralysed and couldn’t act. It gave me an attitude about women. I think it has something to do with not being able to – TMI! – keep an erection. It affected my Perspective. It diminished me.

I’ll find (I"m pretty sure I burned it onto a disk) that "Sequence of Events" and re-post it. I started that on my Amiga 3000 computer, 3 computers ago. I had kept it up to date, to the mid-2000’s, I think. Some of the language probably doesn’t apply anymore, but, that’s what happened and that’s the way I saw it.

You might understand that that whole thing was TOXIC to me, and it hasn’t fully hit me yet, that it is OVER. The money part of it, anyway.

My name is still on a birth certificate, and I am still a "parent" by Default; it was not "proven" that she is "mine", I was defaulted into it because I fucked up when this all began, thinking that that blood test comparison had cleared me and that "the truth was on my side". They claimed there was no record of any tests, implying that I was, not unexpectedly, lying, and tarred me with the "deadbeat dad" brush. I got fucked over because I … (Own it, Cat)… fucked up and did not immediately get a lawyer.

I thought I couldn’t afford a lawyer, that I’d be paying for years on some bullshit bill, and tried to do it myself, and did not do very well at it.

Yeah.  I’ll own my actions and how I screwed up – I can see that pretty clearly – and I’ll find and re-post – re-write, if necessary (I THINK I have it printed out too…) that piece, and you can more fully understand what happened.

In this case, Onwards means that’s my next project.

Onwards.

And, it is over – I’ll get full pay checks for the first time since 1997.  I have two days of work scheduled already, travel time included, and that could work out to 15 hours or so, depending on traffic.

Onwards, Cat, there

are things to do.

 

****