Legitimate Gripes

Here's how it started this time.

Yesterday morning, on a day my aging mother goes to the senior center day program, we are waiting for the para-transit bus to come pick her up. We hear a loud knock on the door. The driver is the knocker, she says she's been waiting at the street for my mother. So, my mother has to walk to the street to catch the bus. See, the driver doesn't want to pull into the parking lot, says it's too hard to maneuver around parked cars. That's a lie.

We had been waiting at the street awhile back, we quit doing that in the winter because of rain and cold; plus, we're standing out there in the element, my mother is 83, and sometimes waited while the driver was an hour late.

So, I call her supervisor. The supervisor takes this condescendingly arrogant pretentiously calm tone with me. I take the I'm-going-to-report-you-to-whoever-I-can tone.

So, bad day. Exhausting. I woke up at 2am this morning, then went back to sleep about 5 or 6, finally got some sleep, which I rarely do.

So, I have some legitimate gripes, and I intend to list them. All of them particular to the town I live in.

1. The transit system. I guess I sort of covered this. But there's more. The regular city bus comes every hour; in some spots, if you're lucky, every half-hour. On some days, for months, in certain areas, certain routes don't run at all. This means you are either walking a longer distance to the bus, and also means everything gets scheduled on the bus schedule and you might be waiting a long time in places not too accommodating. Not good for the poor, the elderly, working people. Tells you a lot about this town.
2. Jobs. All low-paying, all with high expectations, all with abusive co-workers and/or bosses. I haven't experienced an exception to this yet. 
3. Ignorance. This town is full of backward bigots and closed-minded people. Probably the most frustrating part of it is they pretend it isn't so. One time a guy told me how a Chinese guy put up his blinds incorrectly; another guy told me how an N-word, maybe a Mexican, stole some beer from off his delivery truck; someone else I know got mad at a store-keeper and said she shouldn't even be in this country (she was Chinese). That's a small list that doesn't even touch upon the true magnitude of stupidity I've encountered in town. Dumb. Backward.
4. Pretense/Identity. The fake liberals, the conservative family-values camp, the pretense, the facade. Too bad they don't mean it. If the rhetoric ever matched action, there wouldn't be homelessness in this town, there wouldn't be the struggle, the petty tyrants, the low-pay, the abuse, the hateful bigots. Also, they all wouldn't be so bland and boring, uptight, rigid, and hypocritical. Can't have style in this town. It's against the unwritten law. Sorry. So sorry.
5. Heat. This town is in the valley; hot air, pollen, mold gets trapped in the valley and it's suffocating. In the summer it reaches a hundred degrees and above, staying in the 80s and 90s most of the summer. There's only two good months of mellow weather, in March and April. Between October and February, it dips down to 30 degrees. Yuck.
6. No diversity. This is another one where the people won't admit it. Racially, intellectually, life-style-wise, no diversity. For someone like me, different all around, in my thinking, in what I want to do, in my ethnicity, it's a horrible place. Yuck X2.

         So, it's good to establish what the problem is. What's next?

What to do. Here's what I say, so far.

1. Find out where I want to live. It will be by the ocean, not in the valley. It will be diverse, at least, of thought. Won't be uptight and bland, like where I'm at now. Will be some forward thinkers. Please.
2. How to live. Well, this is in line with what I want to do. I refuse to do what I used to do, working at a thankless job, constant pressure, constant abuse. Not worth it for any reason. In fact, the whole stupid game of finding employment turns my stomach. Writing is the main thing. Internet writing. Still looking into it.
3. Plan. Make a plan. How to escape. Escape plans are fun. Aren't they?