GP and I went out with my dad for Father's Day today. We had a lot of fun and my dad and I drank a lot of beer, but it probably would have been a lot better if the two of us hadn't so obviously been thinking about his surgery tomorrow.
I'm alone in the apartment now, for the first time ever. It's very strange, because it's not really my space, despite the fact that most of the stuff in the apartment is actually mine. (GP's a minimalist, I'm a pack rat.) I'm feeling very alone right now.
I'm also rather frustrated by how the whole "Callahanian Live Journal Community" thing is going. I keep wanting to ask people to be more careful about what they post to the group -- we can all *see* people's private journal entries just by clicking on the friends button at the top of the page. OTOH, I'm glad that people are posting stuff and sharing their joy and their pain. This seems to be much more effective at giving people a forum for their lives than the IRC channel. I can't comment about the newsgroup, because I can't get a newsfeed going here (but that's a whole separate rant). But at the same time, aside from a couple of "Thanks for doing this" messages I've gotten on the group itself, all I've gotten is negative feedback. I'm not really qualified to do this kind of shit, and I just tried to set it up in a way that I thought would work well for everyone involved. Looks like I was wrong again. Oh well. You'd think I'd be used to it by now. I just wish that people weren't so ... sarcastic about it.
I'm probably being a lot crankier and more sensitive about this than I really need to be. It's not like it was all that much work or anything. I guess I'm just a lot more frightened about the surgery than I thought I was. I know that nothing really bad is supposed to happen, but they *are* putting him under general anesthetic, and there is a chance that something really awful might happen.
I'm also feeling really guilty because I decided to stay in the city tonight instead of going out to Tracy with him. But I really need to work, and if the employment agencies call me at 7 tomorrow for a job at 8, I can't really make it in time if I'm in Tracy, and there goes my paycheck for the day. ::sigh::
I hate this not having any money thing. I'm really good at living within a limited budget -- I mean, that's what I do at school. I'm really *not* good at not having any money for anything ever. I've got exactly $7.18 to my name right now, and I'm living off of GP, which I promised myself I'd never do. I'm running a fucking tab in my head against the money he's given me and the bills he's paid for me, and I'm just never going to be able to pay him back. I hate that. It's also really frustrating to me that he thinks that this is "small change." I mean, I know he makes a lot of money, and that the $600 or so that I owe him probably isn't that important in the larger scheme of things, but since I don't have a job and I don't have a job during school, *and* I'm going to wind up both running up the money I owe him now *and* oweing him even more during the year because of my damn cell phone, it *is* important to me. I don't like being in debt to people.
I'm just sitting here in front of my computer and wondering why it is that everything I've tried to undertake this summer, be it private or public, has turned out to be such a mess... I mean, I know that it doesn't really have a damn thing to do with me, but I can't help feeling like somehow, somewhere, I made a major Karmic error and it's coming back to bite me in the ass right now. I wish I knew what it was I'd done, so I could try to fix it by working it out with the person who I'd done it to. (No suggestions, please, I know I've hurt more than enough people in my life that at least *one* of them must be reading this now.)
I think I should probably shut up and go cry myself to sleep now, but I can't, because I made GP promise to call me when he got to Tracy. I guess I'm being kind of pessimistic and stupid, and trying to get as much "talk time" in with him now as I can, in case something unexpected and horribly bad happens tomorrow. I hate being frightened.

Guns go bang.

GP and I went out shooting with Madji today for his birthday, and I had lots of fun. Well, as much fun as I ever have doing things that I'm really not very good at and don't ever think that I'm going to be good at.

I really had a lot of issues going shooting the first time. I mean, I'm a hell-bent for leather liberal, and I've always supported measures to restrict gun ownership and all of that. So I can't really believe that I enjoy taking one of these things and shooting the hell out of a target with a little plinky gun. (A .22 long, for those of you who'll have a clue what I'm talking about. For those of you who don't, the bullets are about... 2 cm long and about 5 mm across.)

So I now have in my pursebag a target with about 60 holes in it. We ran out of targets, and I took the last one and just put all the rest of my ammo through it. I didn't even do that badly.

Of course, GP and Madji were shooting big manly men's guns, which was kind of funny... Just for the noise comparison. Theirs were about 2 and 3 times louder than mine, so it was rather amusing to listen to us shooting, especially when the guys next to us came through with a .357 Magnum (which holds about the same relations to GP's gun as mine does to his).

I still kind of have issues with this whole shooting thing. I mean, I enjoy it, but I'm not sure that I'm not going to continue to support gun control legislation etc. (Of course, GP's going to have fits when he reads this.) But that's not really going to stop me from going, I guess.

GP and I had a very funny conversation on the train on the way back from the range. I was trying to explain to him why women are uncomfortable when it's an ex and the new girlfriend. (Madji had foolishly invited both myself and an ex-non-girlfriend-non-fling of GP's to the range, so there were some very minor and low-key issues.) And he would up concluding "So women have no self-esteem because society feeds them all this bullshit all their lives, so they wind up trying to play head games with each other over men in order to attempt to fulfill the ridiculous conditions that society has put on them so that they can pretend to have some sort of self-esteem, even though it's not really based on anything inside themselves?" (Okay, so that's a paraphrase.) And I wound up having to think about that... And that's pretty much right. I feel sort of better about myself now.

Okay, well, I'm using Madji's computer and the smell of the gun cleaner stuff is making me ill, so I think I'm going to go outside and wait for them to finish, so we can go and have beer and hamburgers and maybe play pool. (There's some issue with me being able to go to the pool place because I'm not 21 yet. Feh. It's only 2 months, really... ::Sigh::) So off I go. :)