Everyone has problems. No one wants to hear mine. No one cares if I woke up as a giant bug this morning.
I wish I would wake up as a giant bug.
My problems are never clear. It’s not what’s happening to me right now, but the whole history of what has ever happened to me and the persistent nagging conviction that all the bad that has ever happened before will recur, all of it at once.
My problems are evil and conspiring to repeat simultaneously, to end every shred of happiness I’ve ever stored up, at precisely 25:01 on the 33rd of Novembruary, or some other time.
Do you remember the Ash Wednesday Earthquake? That’s a component of my problems. That same earthquake will restart at that minute, on that day, in that month. At the very same instant, my apartment will flood with 6 inches to a foot of sewage, just as another apartment of mine did in the ’80s. I will escape with my belongings only to have them destroyed outside by torrential rainfall.
Why do bad things happen to good people? My guess is it’s because some day a brick is going to fall out of the sky and land on your head. Thanks to a lifetime of wrong, when you wake up from your coma and hear what happened, you’ll be able to say, “sure, that sounds about right.”
As much as I believe that, my problems still wear me down. How can I explain this?
Maybe it will help to analyze one small component of my problems, to see where the difficulty lies.
I live in housing operated by SHA, the Seattle Housing Authority. Every month I pay my rent on time, as I did the month of January, 2014. So I was surprised when, on the 13th of January, 2014, my building manager said she was writing up my eviction papers for non-payment of rent. The rent check had been mailed ten days earlier. But SHA hadn’t processed it, so it was as good as unpaid.
But I’d sent the check! So I called SHA and asked whether they’d received it.
They couldn’t say. You see, the check comes into their system and it’s delivered to some desk for processing, but they can’t find which desk and walk there to see if the check is there.
So I went to SHA headquarters, prepared to write out a new check and hand it over personally. The plan was, they’d give me some paper to show that I had given them the check, and I could take that back to the building manager and delay the eviction process.
But no. SHA will not take checks in person. They have no such office. They have no cashier to accept cash or money orders in person either. The only way they would let me repay the rent, having lost one of my checks already, was the same method that had already not worked once. I had to send it in the mail.
So I stopped payment on the first check, costing me $33. I called SHA again to inform them. Don’t cash check number such-and-such, I said. I sent a second check.
Three days later SHA found the first check and the second check and processed both checks the same day, ignoring my instructions, and ignoring the fact that both checks bore the note “for January rent.” The next month my rent bill was $18 higher than usual because I was held responsible for the first check bouncing (what stop payment orders are freaking for).
Total bill to me for SHA temporarily losing my first rent check: $53 and 4 days of undeserved eviction threats.
See the problem I have? It’s so hard to explain to people why I live in fear of undeserved eviction every month until the rent check finally clears.
I just want the dignity of having problems I can easily point to. Look at me, I’m a bug.