"...and that was when I realized I was a hippie." Part II

So, things have lulled.  We aren't lost in the whirlwind of moving.

Yesterday, we dug up some bamboo that had managed to form a little patch in the ditch across the road.  The ground was rocky, but I think we got a few decent root balls.  I've got some in a planter next to the trailer with a little solar lantern hanging next to it.  It's pretty, and it makes our little husk of a trailer seem homey.  It only takes one potted plant to feel home. LOL

My fiance made me this wonderful vegetarian dish for supper yesterday, because he's fasting and I've had too much meat lately.  In fact, lately, I've been reading up on raw food meals.  They just look good to me.

When I went to brush my teeth, I realized that I've been brushing my teeth with neem paste instead of regular toothpaste.  After reading up on soapnuts/soapberries I looked up a website where I can order seeds to plant a few of these.  Because I want to wash my clothes with golden berries.  It might be a bad idea.  For all I know the berries are even more toxic than the shit they put in detergent... yeah, right.  Who am I kidding?

I'd like to make some castille soap, but that's going to probably be a later project.  For today I'm going to make seasoned roasted cauliflower for my fiance and figure out what I want to do with myself in this new place.  I need to make yogurt soon.  So, if I've got enough money to buy both cauliflower and a gallon of milk, we might have some good yogurt soon.  So long as I can find a place to let the bacteria grow.

I guess I'll take a portion of today and go through all our packed-up belongings and start putting things in a donation pile.

And I need to exercise today...

Anyway, this is probably a very confused post.  The title refers to the fact that I'm once again noticing how very unconventionaly my life's become.  I'm very happy, but I wonder at just how very far I've strayed from "normal".  It's been so many little changes.

What would normal people think of a woman who washes her hair with apple cider vinegar, hates wearing makeup, prefers raw food to good ol' steak and potatoes, plans to build herself a composting toilet, wants to grow most of her food in the field next to her in-laws' house, and plans to give up most of her earthly belongings and live in a 17x8 trailer?

Have I gotten weird yet, or am I still halfway between here and there?  Does it matter?  I didn't do any of this to challenge society.  I did it because it seemed right for me.  It seemed right to my fiance, too.  Either that or he's just a very supportive, loving partner.  LOL.  Either way.  It's all good. :)

"...and that was when I realized I was a hippie."

In the chaos of loading all of our belongings (packed carefully away in boxes) into the van that would transport them to our new home, my fiance and I were both repeatedly impressed by how much stuff we have.

We'd already decided to discard or store away the majority of it.  There's not enough room in a trailer for all our junk.  If you've ever seen a cluttered tiny house, you'll know why we're resistant to letting more than what is absolutely necessary enter our future home.

Both of us have remarked at this point on what a cleansing experience it will be to let go of all the material excesses we've been carting around all day.  We don't need this much stuff.  In fact, it's downright embarrassing that we own so much stuff.  What's the point in having boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff, up to the point that we don't even know how much stuff we actually own because it's all been buried under more boxes of other stuff?

So we'll be garage-saling and ebaying and craigslisting away a lot of our excess stuff.  I look forward to this process.  I think my fiance does, too.  At first, it seemed frightening.  Get ride of that leather jacket I've never worn?  Get rid of that electric fireplace that cost me all that money even though I've only used it twice?

And then it just seemed like a relief.

And that was when I realized I've become a hippie.

It's been over a month since I've washed my hair the traditional way.  (Which isn't to say that my hair is dirty.)  My wishlist on pinterest is dominated by essential oils.  Just today I told my fiance we should give patchouli a try.  I want to buy lemon oil to keep away the spiders and lavender oil to spray on my clothes before I go hiking (to keep the ticks and fleas away).

I want to grow my food this summer.  I want it to be organic.  I want to harvest the seeds so I can replant next year.

We want to live off-grid.  Way off-grid.  We want a solar- and wind-powered house.  I want to turn our black water into manure that I can spread in the vegetable garden.  Today, when it rained, I looked at my future in-law's house and thought, "I wonder if they'll let me set up a rain barrel?"

I don't think any of these things (or even all these things in concert) necessarily make me a hippie.  However, I don't think the majority of the conventional/mainstream, non-hippie world will be able to tell the difference.

So that's that for now.  And now I need to read about organic soap nuts.

Moving

So, I haven't written in forever.  I need to take down the note that says I'll post something new every Thursday. At first I did.  Lately, I haven't.

Today, we packed all our belongings into vans and moved out of the apartment.  The cats are still recovering from the shock in the attic of my in-law's house where we're staying for the time being.

Now that I'm finally closer to the trailer (so I don't have to spend $20 in gas every time I go out to work on it) I can hopefully get some real work done on it.

In other news-- my fiance's parents have set out a plot of land for us to garden.  I don't mean garden as in a couple tomato plants and maybe a flowerbed, either.  I mean a GARDEN.  This plot looks like, maybe, a third of an acre.

So... expect posts on organic gardening.  (And wish me luck, because I'm not sure I won't kill anything I plant.)

Moving Prep, Death and Taxes

Well, it's Thursday, and about a month before my end-of-stripping due date.  I'm so broke.

So, to take stock of this week.  I tore apart the closet and put the vast majority of my clothes in storage, leaving out a few that I plan to take to the gypsy wagon.

I started writing a new book yesterday.  More of a pamphlet, really.  Anyway, I plan to publish it as an ebook and use it as an experimental how-to-sell-books-online kind of book.  It shouldn't take much time to write.

Yesterday, still frustrated in my never-ending quest for the perfect purse, I broke down and sewed one.  I'm still getting used to it (every purse has a breaking in period) but so far I like it well enough.  I think I should have sewn some cardboard into the lining to make it a little firmer, but as it is it's nice enough.

The living room is full of boxes.  And I need to work tonight because it's the first and the rent is due.  It will be the last time I have to pay rent, though, so that's exciting.

Less exciting is the fact that I still have to pay last years taxes and the taxes from the year before that.  And I need to find a new tax preparer because the lady who did mine last year charged me over $500 to do my taxes.  That's almost half as much as I owed in taxes to begin with.  So, yeah.  I'm pretty sure I got ripped off that time.

It's amazing how many people will try to rip me off once they find out what I do for a living.  I'm pretty sure this year I won't say.  I'll just tell whoever's doing my taxes that I'm self-employed and I have zero business expenses and my only deduction is the 500 freaking dollars I spent having my taxes done last year.

I'm tired of being broke.  I'm really, really tired of taxes.  It wasn't such a huge deal when I was employed like everybody else.  You take the form.  You fill out the form.  You do a little math.  You're done.  Now, I'm technically self-employed and there are so many freaking pieces of paper I'm supposed to be accountable for.

I feel very helpless at tax time.  There's more information than I know how to compute so I'm at the mercy of someone else to put it all together for me.  Then I have to pay out lots of money that I don't have on hand because I only ever seem to earn enough to live off of.  And then, if for whatever reasons the government decides there was something wrong with all the math and paperwork which I had hardly any control over to begin with, they'll send me threatening letters and harass me to give them yet more money.

Furthermore, no one seems to understand this conundrum because they only have to fill out W2s.  So every year everyone else is asking me why I never get money back, and I'm always explaining to them that my taxes are very different.  Instead of getting money back, I'm expected to somehow raise several hundred dollars which I then give directly to the government.  And that number changes from year to year.  One year it was $4,000.  Another it was only $800.  Everyone says there must have been a paperwork error on the $4,000, but is the IRS ever going to give me that money back?  Sure as hell they're not.

More likely than not, they'll notice that discrepancy someday and assume that I'm just lying about how much money I earn, and rain hell down on me while I huddle in my little trailer and wonder where the heck I'm supposed to get yet more money to give the government.

So there.  That's my rant on taxes.  I'd be so freaking happy if they just simplified it all down.  You earn X which means you pay Z% of X.  So much better than getting calls from my freaking accountant.  "Now are you sure you didn't use your phone at all to contact your customers or place of business, because we could deduct that for you."  For the billionth time, no!  Don't you people charge by the hour?  Stop asking me this.

Putting Stuff in Storage

I said I'd post a new entry every Thursday.  I lied.

Apparently, time's gotten away from me.  I don't know what I've done these last several weeks.  I don't know how long it's been since I accomplished anything.  I think I just checked out for a while.  Life went on.  I lived it. I did not think too deeply on it.

I finished the novel and sent a copy to my fiance for review.  He's been busy at work so it'll take a while.  The day before yesterday I went through the kitchen and pulled out all the implements and appliances that we won't be using once we're situated in the gypsy wagon.

It was a lot of stuff.  Several pots and pans.  Several cooking appliances.  More dishes than not.  Most of the silverware.  All of it is going into storage.  And more.  Today I hope to take it to my in-laws so we can start clearing out the apartment.  We have less than a month left before it's time to move out.

I read an interesting article on backpacking http://survivalblog.com/2012/02/all-you-need-to-good-you-can-carry-on-your-back-by-charles-m.html  By the way G.O.O.D. stands for "get out of dodge".  I had to look that up.  It was a very interesting article, and it definitely helped me reanalyze how I've been looking at the gypsy wagon.

There was a point at which I understood a transition would have to take place, but I couldn't quite wrap my mind around it.  I would have to put away in storage most of our belongings.  It sounds like a very simple statement of fact, but until I was actually going through the kitchen asking myself, "Keep or store?" over every item I touched, I didn't fully understand it.

I'm very excited about our life in the gypsy wagon.  I've finally stopped being afraid of parting ways with all our Stuff.  We aren't crippling ourselves.  We aren't short-changing ourselves.  We aren't giving up anything we can't live without.

We're simply cutting out all the excess.  And there's so much excess in this world.  In our lives.  And our lives already very simple compared to most.

For all I know we'll live in the gypsy wagon for a month or two before we've gotten completely sick of living so low-tech, but it will be an experience.  I think it might even prove to be an experience worth having.  The world seems full of things no one understands.  Where does my food come from?  Where does my water come from?  Where does my waste go?

But now I'm rambling.  (I woke up just a short while ago.)  So I'll stop for now.  Today I want to put a bunch of kitchen stuff in storage, and I'd like to go through my clothes and separate the clothes I actually wear from the clothes I don't.

That is if I don't fall back asleep first.

P.S. Woke up feeling very peaceful today.  I wish I could feel this peaceful every day.  I hope all the rest of the world gets a chance to feel this peaceful.  It's nice.  I hope I don't forget it.

Introspection

The last time I was at work, several of my customers advised me not to be honest on my resume for whatever future job I might pursue.  "If you tell someone what you've done (exotic dancing), they're going to want to fuck with you."  "So?" "Maybe I should be clearer.  They're going to want to fuck you.  If I didn't know you, I wouldn't hire you.  No one in corporate America would want to hire you."

As usual, my customers have the sweetest way of lending me their vote of confidence.  While I'm not necessarily inclined to believe them until I've tried and failed to get a traditional job myself, there's a part of me that's relieved.

I don't know how well I'd fare in a traditional job anymore.  I'm far too accustomed to being my own boss.  Maybe this will become my excuse not to waste times pursuing the traditional job-seeking model.

I don't know what to do next, though.  It's been suggested to me, and I have to agree, that our generation seems to be saturated with this sense of entitlement, regardless of our lot in life.  We've all been raised to believe we're secretly meant to be the superstar.  No one remembers that we all need someone to flip our hamburgers.  I haven't decided which of those two categories I'm ultimately destined for.  (Most likely I'll end up somewhere in between.)

But is my insistence on finding a job that suits me a symptom of the entitled attitude of my generation or is it my own perfectionistic tendency to demand that I'm always climbing to newer levels of acheivement?

Honestly, I have a cold, my nose is stuffy, and I don't care anymore.

I've spent the last couple days going over my novel.  Again.  It's beautiful.  But is it perfect?  Nothing's perfect.  And this will never be perfect enough for me.

I just keep running through it looking for flaws.  Again and again.  How am I ever going to publish this thing if I don't stop editting?

I'll finish this draft tonight.  After that, I'll have to give it to someone to read.  Probably my fiance.  And while he's reading it, I'm going to run to work so I don't have to pace around the apartment feeling uncomfortable while someone reads my less than absolutely perfect novel.

Stripping Pros and Cons

Worked last night.  Made exactly half what I'm used to making in the club.  This was on a Friday night, which makes it particularly depressing.

It seemed to be a bad night for everyone all around.  The bouncers had to herd some guy out the back door because he kept breaking our rigorous local laws.  And speaking of local laws, I managed to break one of those myself.  I thought I was following the rules through the normal course of my stage set, but I found out very quickly that I wasn't.  The bouncer told me right away that I shouldn't do that again, and then as soon as I got offstage, the manager was waiting for me in the back.  "I know you probably didn't know better, but if you ever do that again I'm throwing you out of here."

Message recieved.  Will not do that thing again.

It kind of startled me.  After four years of dancing, it's been awhile since I've blown it.  Of course, when I went to the manager to apologize once again and see if everything was cool, he told me that if there'd been a cop in the club, they would've shut us all down for a solid week.  Have I ever mentioned that the local government would use an excuse to get rid of us for good?

The good news is, everyone knows me there.  Everyone knows I don't cause trouble, break rules or even bend rules.  Which might be why I'm not out of a job as we speak.  It was kind of a startle for me, though.

So the night proceeded with its noticeable lack of money.  At one point the manager called us all to the changing room to remind us that the bathroom is for numbers one and two and not for shooting up or snorting coke.

And then, when my shift was up, I started to get dressed in the back room and happened to be there right at the time the managers came back there to scour a girl's bags for... drugs?  A stolen wallet?  I didn't hang around to find out.

REASONS TO QUIT STRIPPING: I'm tired of the crime.  I'm tired of girls I know getting drugged.  I'm tired of always keeping my eyes open to avoid getting drugged myself.  I'm tired of thieves, cheats, druggies, liars, prostitutes, etc.  I'm tired of chatting up people who assume I'm all of these things and stupid on top of it.  I'm tired of the shadow of the law hanging over every little thing I do at work.  I'm tired of being literal, physical inches from criminal charges.  And of course, the system is pretty unforgiving, because most of the people who operate in it will take any bit of slack they're given and stretch as far as they can and then some.

So that's today's rant.  There's plenty that's bad about my job and maybe if I write it all out and have it down on a piece of paper, when that day comes that I feel any slight nostalgia for my job, I can pull out that piece of paper and remember all the bad that came with the good.

However-- so as not to forget the good:

WHY I LIKE STRIPPING: The pole dancing.

Because I haven't been working as much, I'm terribly out of shape, but it still felt wonderful to be back onstage.  I miss the club in New Orleans with its thirteen foot brass poles, but the poles at the club are still slightly better than the battered practice pole I've got at home.

There's a pole competition coming up and our best dancer asked me if I'd be participating this year.  Last year I was first runner up, and I dare say she might consider me to be competition.  We both use some of the same moves, although her form's much better than mine.  I told her I wouldn't be competing since I believe the competition will be after April 1st.

And at the same time... it might be fun to try.