Daily Thoughts

This is the email I received from Google today:

Hello,

We understand that you are concerned about the payments of your AdSense
account. As mentioned earlier, a credit of $x.xx was applied to your
AdSense account for your earning for the current month and also $xxx.xx from the stopped check was credited back to your account balance. You will
receive a check this month for your finalized earnings.

Please know that Google is not liable for bank fees due to stopped checks.
According to our Terms and Conditions, publishers disabled for invalid
click activity may not receive any further payment and therefore,
payments on any outstanding checks may be stopped. We appreciate your
patience, and apologize for any inconvenience. If you
have any questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://www.google.com/adsense/support, or contact us at
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

What a load of BS. They screw me out of my adsense money, cost me overdraft fees, give me BACK my money (pretty much admitting they shouldn’t have done the aforementioned in the first place), then hide behind their policies to keep from paying me back a measly $8. This is my reply:

Sorry, not good enough. I know you aren’t going to listen, but a lot of other people are, because I’m putting this whole story, every letter, on my blog. You’re coming across sounding very arrogant and unconcerned with the pain you inflict on others.

I understand that according to your policies, you aren’t liable for bank fees, but this was YOUR fault, not mine. It would be a good moral gesture, and since I’m blogging all of this, it would be letting people know that you aren’t so petty as to make a mistake that costs someone money, then to use your policies as an excuse not to compensate them for YOUR mistake. I don’t even know why you closed my adsense. You’ve never given me a reason, just a nightmare. I tell you what. I’ll put up a poll, and people can vote on whether you should give me back my measly little $8.

It may be legal for you not to pay it, but your morality and general business sense is what is in question here. I can see not paying it back if I was the one at fault, but (by your own admission) I wasn’t, was I? Should I get punished for trying as hard as I could to obey the rules?

Your call, but your company is already getting a very bad rep with the government, so I read. Good will goes a long way.

Sincerely,

I’m sure it’s not over yet. They seem to possess a seemingly endless repertoire of canned BS to toss out when the occasion suits.

I will not give up. I want my money, and I want my $8, and I WANT IT NOW!

I have a gardening blog on Blogspot. As many people do, when they’re experimenting with page layouts, etc., they create a “test” bloglet to get it perfect before finalyzing the real blog. So I had a test blog for my potential “About Me” page. I had it set so nobody could see it, like I’ve done other test blogs, and I’ve never had a problem.

So today, I get an email from Google:

Hello,

Your blog at: http://cg-aboutme-test.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=xxxxxxxxxx…

Your blog will be deleted in 20 days if it isn’t reviewed, and your readers will see a warning page during this time. After we receive your request, we’ll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. Once we have reviewed and determined your blog is not spam, the blog will be unlocked and the message in your Blogger dashboard will no longer be displayed. If this blog doesn’t belong to you, you don’t have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won’t be affected.

We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577

Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

P.S. Just one more reminder: Unless you request a review, your blog will be deleted in 20 days. Click this link to request the review: http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=xxxxxxxxxx…

**Heavy sigh**. Google, please get your act together, and stop seeing boogey men where there are none! First I’m a danger to your advertisers, now I’m a spammer. Funny thing was, there was NO text on this blog, so how on earth could it have been spam?

Perfectly ridiculous ending to a perfectly horrible day.

Yeah, thought that would get your attention.

Seriously, though, I have considered it. I won’t lie. The suicide rate is rising among middle aged Americans.

I’m pretty whacked out right now. I’m middle aged, and I don’t see my life ever getting much better. I’m tired of struggling. I’m taking up space and air that some more motivated, much younger person could probably utilize to better advantage.

Some days, I seriously don’t know what keeps me going, except that I don’t want to die with a dirty house. Not that anyone would really care, but I can just see them whispering around kitchen tables for years about how messy my house was when I died.

My grandmother had a nervous breakdown once because she couldn’t get the floors clean enough. She lived in the country. It was the 1950’s, summertime, no a/c, and all the doors and windows were open. She literally went crazy because she couldn’t get all the dust off of the floor.

Now me, I’m going crazy because I don’t care if there is dust on the floor. Believe me, there are more cobwebs in my brain than there are on my ceilings, and I just don’t care. I don’t care about much of anything anymore.

I especially do not give a holy shite what people think of my opinions. Hey, Rush Limbaugh doesn’t care, and look where he is! I’d like to get rich and famous saying outrageous things.

The problem is, the things I would say aren’t really that outrageous, except to some bleeding heart, politically correct segment of the population who thinks you should be nice to everybody. I think there are some people you should not be nice to. Here are just a few:

Illegal Immigrants. Get ‘em the hell out of my country, THEN put up a fence to keep them out! I don’t give a holy crap what kind of jobs they do. Get rid of ‘em! Better yet, put them all into the military and send them to the middle east. Bring our American boys home.

Lifelong Welfare Recipients. Yeah, they supposedly got rid of those by passing laws with loopholes so big, an elephant could fall through. Make THEM do the jobs that the illegal immigrants we just tossed out on their asses used to do.

Child Abusers and Pedophiles. Just shoot ‘em and get it over with. Better yet, hang ‘em in the town square so we can all cheer.

Rapists and Wife Beaters. Send them all to some country where it seems to be acceptable to treat your wife and children like camel dung. I won’t name names, but I’m sure you could think of a few of those countries.

Drug Dealers Who Target Kids. Overdose them on demerol and watch them slowly suffocate while you’re pouring hot wax on their genitals. Yeah, I REALLY REALLY hate these people.

Well Off, Holier Than Thou SAHM’s. O.K., they don’t really belong in the same category with the above people, but they annoy me. I say lock ‘em up in a Head Start room with 100 screaming kids and Barney tapes playing for about a week. See how much better they are than us working moms then.

There are a lot of other types of people I don’t like, but if I put it all in one post, I will have nothing else to rant about, so I’ll stop here. Feel free to name some of your own.

My city is idiotic. They will not allow you to pay for anything online, on the phone, by debit card, or credit card. It’s check or cash, or you can pay with online banking (which takes 5 days to get there). I don’t guess they’ve been told that debit cards are safer than checks.

I was talking to one of their IT guys one day, and he said that IT has been bugging them for years to get online payment, or at least accept debit cards and phone payment, but nope, no go.

So I called one of our city council members the other day, and told him about this. I told him about how I was trying to pay my water bill. I’ve been having a little banking crisis, what with the Adsense check bouncing, so in order to be able to bathe, I called to ask if I could pay by credit card. Nope…not debit card either. WTF?

Back to the city councilman conversation (got a little lost there, sorry). He said he was not aware that this was the case, and he would look into it immediately. I explained to him that they were NOT running this city like a business, and that they needed to get over having a pay fees to process electronic payments. They could always make us pay a “convenience fee” if they don’t want to put out the money.Although, thinking about that now, this is the city that charged a guy $14,000+ in fines for not getting a $183 license for a $300 swimming pool. I kid you not. Read all about it here.

That “convenience fee” would be so large, nobody would use the stupid thing anyway.

Must be something in the water

This morning, I had the song “Slip Sliding Away” by Paul Simon running through my head, especially the part where it says.

I know a woman
became a wife
These are the very words she uses to describe her life
She said a good day, ain’t got no rain
She said a bad day is when I lie in bed
and I think of things that might have been

That pretty much how I feel lately, except that I’m not anybody’s wife…thank God!

So I decided to go to my favorite online forum. Someone has been blathering on for weeks about how people have left, somebody got mean, somebody got their feelings hurt. These are all reasonable adults, supposedly. So I’m saying I hope it wasn’t me who hurt anyone’s feelings, and that I hope everyone comes back. Then I get this email saying it WAS me who hurt this person’s feelings and ran everybody off.

Seems this guy was ragging on the U.S., and I told him that if he didn’t like the U.S. to go the f*** back to his country. I know, sounds harsh, but here’s the scenario.

I’m a patriot. I’m totally wrapped up in red, white, and blue. I feel like I have the right to criticize my government because I’m a citizen. It doesn’t matter how you get to be a citizen, you can wait your time and be naturalized, but as a citizen, you have certain inalienable rights. One of these is to not be happy with your government, and to express it as loudly as you damn well please.

I do not feel like these same rights apply to people who come here with absolutely no intention of becoming citizens, partake of whatever the U.S. has to offer, make themselves reasonably successful because of our great country, but still long to return to their native shores, and are only waiting for the opportunity to do so.

I have to say one thing here. I rant a lot about moving to Jamaica, and I would do it. I would go somewhere I could be more at peace in my life if I found I couldn’t find that peace here. And if that country allowed me to be happy and reasonably successful, I would not be bitching about how horrible it was. I would be thanking my lucky stars that there was a country that took me in and allowed me to flourish.

This guy was not happy with Obama being elected President. I don’t really remember the conversation. The thread was deleted, and it was close to the time my mother died, so I seriously don’t know what I said or did back then. I could have shot someone and not remembered, I was that upset. So my nerves were raw, and someone who isn’t a citizen at all had the audacity to attack our next President. I probably lost it.

But to be honest, if my mother were alive and well, and I wasn’t financially and emotionally stressed to the limit, I probably still would have let go on him. Like I said, I have the right to do what he did, he doesn’t. That’s how I feel. I will never change that feeling. If you hate this country so freakin’ much, go the hell back to where you came from.

Nevertheless, I apologized, simply because I did not at the time remember what I had said, or why. I also left the forum. I loved that forum. I had been posting there since 1999. Now it’s lost to me, because someone went behind the scenes whining about how abused he was, and how hurt he was (oh for Christ sake, buck up and be a man!) and turned people against me for saying what any patriotic American could have and probably would have said.

When it comes to this country, I am well aware of the faults and fallacies and downright lies we have to face every day. But I’m sick and tired of bowing down to people who come here for our freedoms and protections, but don’t want to pledge their allegiance to this country, in hopes they can some day go home. In my opinion, political asylum should be abolished. Terrorists have come into this country for years claiming political asylum, and disappeared into the population. From there, they blew up our buildings and killed our people.

This is my country. I don’t care if I hurt your feelings. If you don’t like it, get the hell out! Go back to whatever freaking country you came from, and don’t come back here ever!

If you’re new to this story, read here.

So you’ll remember they wrote to me saying that my money was back in my account, and that I would be able to “view my balance” this month. Not good enough! How about I will be able to SPEND my balance this month? This is my latest correspondence to them on Nov. 29. O.K., so there was the weekend, but I haven’t heard anything yet.

In view of the fact that I was vindicated as to illegal activity, I would really consider it a gesture of good faith if you would overnight a check to me for the full amount in my account, plus the $8 overdraft fee I lost when you wrongly stopped payment on the other check. I need to get this resolved immediately. I’m still overdrawn at my bank, and I need to pay my water bill. I’m sure you don’t want me to have my water cut off. I’m in a “dead zone” as far as cash flow is concerned, as I am a freelancer, and only get paid at certain times of the month.

Please advise asap.

So far I’ve closed most of my gmail accounts (even ones I forgot I had and had never used), all my Google Pages accounts, and several Blogger accounts. I’ve opened Yahoo mails in almost all of the gmail account names I wish to keep, and am in the process of moving everything on Blogger to another site. When I’m done, except for watching YouTube, I won’t be using anything Google anymore. Don’t watch that much YouTube, so you catch my drift.

I know they have hundreds of my personal emails stored on their computers, and even though I know it will do no good, I’m going to ask them to remove them. Can’t hurt to ask, right? I mean, if you delete an account, all the content should be gone. Of course, that’s in the real world. In GoogleWorld, they can do whatever they want for as long as they want. From what I hear, it will be 2083 before they’re deleted from their computers.

Guess all I can hope for is that something really evil happens to their computers, and all their data is destroyed. That could happen, right? There has to be some hacker out there somewhere capable of wreaking havoc on Google’s database.

O.K., I’m not advocating this, just in case someone might think I am trying to get someone to attack their computers. I’m never in favor of extreme measures. I’m just saying that with the way they are treating publishers and customers, there is bound to be somebody one day who is capable, and who is pissed enough with Google to do it.

The hackers did it to Microsoft, remember? And Microsoft wasn’t screwing people out of money on a daily basis with no reasonable explanation, other than “It’s in our terms of service, and our policies, so we can do it.”

Someone even hacked into the Pentagon computer once. It was a kid, I think, who just sort of stumbled into it. Didn’t cause any damage, from what I remember, but got in a lot of trouble.

So mark my words, one day Google will piss somebody off just enough to set this chain of events into motion, and then all hell will break loose! Half the data in the free world will be in the hands of evil forces…no, wait…Google is the evil force aren’t they?

I’m not really a victim of the economy, more a victim of my own stupidity. Even though it was truly for a good cause, I quit my job. I was being harrassed, but I could have stood it. I chose not to. I ignorantly thought I could make a living from my websites, which I couldn’t.

I finally turned to freelance article writing, and it hasn’t been what I thought it would be either. Maybe I don’t work hard enough, maybe I’m just not good enough, but I’m not making a living at it.

Add in the fiasco with Google Adsense, and you have a recipe for disaster. Adsense was my only really stable source of income, unless you count Associated Content, which honestly, makes me feel pretty worthless all in itself. Although it is a steady source of income, being paid between $3 - $6 for an article that takes me sometimes an hour to write (I’m a very slow writer) is not conducive to feeling good about your abilities.

I seem to be self-sabotaging. I want it all now, and when I don’t get it now, I give up and move no to something I think is better. These things unfailingly turns out not to be better, and sometimes worse.

I have clinical depression anyway, and have taken every med available, without success. Oh, of course except for Wellbutrin, which is unavailable to me due to not being able to afford it, and having no health insurance. I was on their free program once, but getting it was like applying for a job with the FBI.

So I can’t really concentrate, and some days I just sit here staring at the screen without a worthwhile thought passing through my head. If one does happen to pass through, it doesn’t stick around long. Guess it doesn’t want to be bogged down with all the negative thoughts kicking around in there.

When your life comes to this point, even small things become monsters. I need to get to the water company today, which is about 5 miles from my house. My car died shortly after I left my job, and since it was a POS anyway, I didn’t fix it, I sold it. So now I have to either catch a city bus or catch a ride with the only friend I have who is willing to take me anywhere. She isn’t willing to take me there today, so I will have to take the bus.

The bus system around here sucks. There is only one bus that goes down each route every hour. That means that I have to walk a mile to the bus stop, catch one bus to the transfer point, wait 45 minutes for the bus going to my destination, catch that bus, do my business, and wait 45 minutes again to do the whole thing again in reverse. This costs me $3 and a half day of my time, which I should be spending writing.

Add to that that it’s cold today, and isn’t going to get much warmer, and I have a horrible day ahead of me.

And for all you well-meaning folks who will want to suggest that I go to social services, we are only allowed to do that once a year, and I’ve used up my allotment for this year. I truly have nowhere to turn. I’m paying this water bill with the last $60 on my charge card, then I truly have nothing.

I know that as lives go, maybe mine isn’t so bad, but right now, it feels pretty awful. Everyone keeps saying I need to find a man to take care of me. That’s another story for another day, but suffice to say, that will not be happening.

If you’re sitting at home, safe and secure, with a decent income, not struggling, please take all those petty worries you have and toss them out of the window. You are blessed. Appreciate it, especially all of you SAHM’s whose husbands make good money, and who are still always bitching and moaning about this and that. Get over it! You are blessed.

For all of you who may have jobs, but who don’t feel your jobs are secure, or who are struggling like me, I’ll pray for you and you pray for me. Maybe we’ll make it, maybe we won’t. At this point, I am in real danger of ending up in the street, losing everything I own, but still, I’m alive I guess. They say where there is life, there is hope. It just doesn’t feel that way.

I have decided that I simply must set goals for each week.  Setting them is one thing, of course, and sticking to them is another.

I get lazy sometimes, and don’t do the things that I should. Today was a day like that. I usually start off my day by walking with my friend, but she had to go somewhere else, so I walked up to the grocery store alone.  

I don’t know if it was the change of routine or what, but I just couldn’t get into working and writing today. I ended up wasting the day watching old t.v. shows on Hulu, reading, and just messing around.

I hate wasted days. It’s not like I can make it up, and I’m having way too many of them lately, when I really can’t afford to. I made myself a promise that I would take my writing seriously, but so far, I’ve not been able to buckle down and treat it like a real job.

Psychologically, that’s bad enough, but financially, it’s a disaster. I’m torn some days as to whether I should work, or just work on selling everything I own and moving out of here.  But where I am wouldn’t change anything.  It’s not where I am, it’s me, and I know that.

Sometimes, discouragement sets in, like the fact that one site seemed like it would be a sort of easy source of decent money, and now has turned out not to be. I tend to put too many of my eggs in one basket, and then ending up kicking myself for doing so.

So today, I seem to have spilled all the eggs, and now have a yukky mess that I need to clean up. Where’s Mr. Clean when you need him? 

I’m a little TOO honest sometimes. I tend to just say (or type) what’s on my mind, without cranking up my moral editor first. Honesty is a good thing, when tempered with kindness, but there’s the rub. Most of the time, when we’re being brutally honest, we’re also angry or hurt. It’s very difficult to not be cruel when we’re hurting and want to strike back.

It seems that in my life, I’ve sometimes taken subtle cruelty to an art form.

I learned under the unwitting tutelage of my mother (God rest her soul), who, while being the woman I loved most in the world, many times took a perverse pleasure in hurting other people. She was not bold enough to just say things to people’s faces, though. She would stand aside, just within earshot, and talk in a loud voice, saying the most horrific, hurtful things. Or she would resort to veiled criticism, which sometimes was the worst.

An example of her cruelty was what she did to my sisters and me. For all of our lives, she took pleasure in playing us one against the other, making us each hate the other for no reason other than what she led us to believe. It changed us. It somehow turned us into what she thought we were. I was the “crazy” one (I was actually the most sane, but nevermind that), my older sister was the stupid one (she had more common and money sense than any of us), and my oldest sister was the responsible one (I don’t even want to go there).

The saddest part of all of this is that while my other two sisters hated me, I didn’t hate them. In fact, all I ever wanted was for them to love me, and I spent 40 years of my life trying to achieve that before finally giving up. It was too late by then. The roles were set, the lines were drawn, and the rift between us would never be crossed.

My mother recently died. Her legacy will be that my sister and I, the only remaining living siblings, will never speak to each other again. The wounds cannot be healed anymore. There are too many, and they are too deep. We both know that this was done to us, but now, it’s embedded too deep in our psyches to ever be healed. When my mother died, I became an orphan.

But like I’ve always said, sometimes good comes out of the worst situations. My mother’s family — my aunt and her children — rallied around me and gave me an anchor, just when I needed one the most. My sister would say they are not worth having as relatives, because she thinks my aunt and her children are trash, and has said so on many occasions. So like I used to say to my son when he didn’t like something I was serving for dinner, “Good, more for me!”

Love isn’t something you can just dole out when you want to gain something from it. Unfortunately, my sister doesn’t seem to be able to learn that. At 68, she still blames everything in her life on the fact that I was born, and that she didn’t get to go to college right out of high school. It’s sad, really. For someone so intelligent, she is truly ignorant of the realities of life.

And the saddest part is that we can all see what she can’t — that she is EXACTLY like my mother.

I was going to give up this blog, because I was depressed about someone who was trying very hard to make my life miserable. Then I found out that this person is twice as miserable as I am, and I decided to do something else.

Today is going to my first positivity day. I’m tired of being down, and depressed (a physical condition, but I’m fighting it), and negative. I’m going to be positive from now on, and try to turn every day into rainbows and sunshine.

Yes, I know that’s impossible. I know some days I’ll get angry and depressed, but if I can carry one positive thing away from that, I’ll be happy with that day.

The first thing I’m going to do is to say to anyone I’ve had problems with in the past, I’m sorry. I fully accept my part in any problems that we may have had, and I am releasing all of that right now. For my part, you will see no more clinging to past hurts. Yesterday is gone, and there is nothing we can do about it. We may never be friends, but at least we can have a truce, a cease fire if you will.

I’m a creative person. Every day, I’m going to create something, be it a craft project, a writing, a garden spot, anything positive and creative. You can only change the world by creating, not by tearing down.

Don’t get me wrong, I will continue to fight injustice, such as the Google issue. I am sick and tired of corporate greed, and I see my struggles, and my triumph over those struggles, as something positive. Perhaps I can show those with similar problems that they, too, can fight the giants and win.

I struggle daily with financial issues, self-esteem issues, depression issues, and plain out old laziness. My life is just barely liveable. I intend to change that. I’m the only one who can. I’ve been sitting around like Rapunzel waiting for a prince to come and rescue me from my self-built prison tower. Today, I’ll leave the tower and see what good I can do in the world.

If each of us honestly tries to just do one creative, helpful, or positive thing a day, we can change the world. There are more of us than them. Just look at what happened after 9/11. Over 3,000 people died, but millions of people rose to the occasion and brought this country back from the brink of destruction.

Our country is in trouble, no doubt. It’s in trouble because of the greed and avarice of a few very powerful people. Believe me, these demons are laughing all the way to their private planes as they leave our government. Their main goal was to rape the economy and get out. So here we are, some of us, like me, in a real financial crisis. This country has seen worse. We have come back from worse. We can come back from this.

But we can’t come back by expecting the government to bail us out. We can only do it by taking positive steps in our own lives. Start today. Let this be your positivity day as well.