Why a Blog?

Hello Cyberspace!

I'm cataloging the events and emotions that go along with being a "Mature" student going back to school.

The Mission:  To obtain a Bachelor's Degree in Secondary Education, that's right, I want to teach High School English.  I don't know exactly why I want to immerse myself in the High School scene, I hated it as a child, but to quote a friend, "Every day you're not in a classroom teaching is a crime against young people everywhere."

The Vehicle:  The University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

Here, let's give you my quick biography:

I'm 37, going to be 38 in just a few weeks, actually, I'll celebrate my birthday exactly one month from today. 

I'm not quite divorced yet.  I have been married to an academic for quite some time.  However, I went into a sort of coma or emotional paralyisis because I was never very happy being married to a man that, whether intentionally or not, I was forced to live in his shadow.  It didn't help things at all that he was an "enabler", one of those guys who thinks that it's his mission in life to save people.  Enablers basically save you until they finally kill you, literally.  It's like having your dream come true, nothing to think about, nothing to worry about, everything is taken care of which leaves you with LITERALLY nothing to do.  Then comes emotional paralysis, then comes death.  That simple. 

But as fate would have it, my married "bliss" would not last.

Being that my (soon to be Ex) husband is an extraordinarily busy man, I never really thought much of his work hours.  All I knew is that he was like my father, a man who put his job in front of his family. I would be extremely fortunate if he came home by 6pm, and if he showed up by 9pm, I'd just take that as normal.  Don't get me wrong, my soon to be Ex is great at his job.  He's just a really shitty husband.  He has no idea how to be a husband and I guess that's why he's failed for the second time at being married.  If we went out of town, his work cell phone stayed on.  If we went out to dinner, he'd be writing e-mails on his blackberry and really not paying attention to what he was working for to begin with, the ability to provide and spend time with his wife.  We have a private account for our personal cell phones, but he always uses his work phone.  Now, I rarely, if ever, talked to him on his personal cell phone.  He barely used it.  If I needed to talk to him during the day, I called his work cell phone but NEVER EVER did I call him on his private line.  But, late one December evening, I catch him texting on his private cellphone that only our parents and family members know the numbers.  His family doesn't text, mine certainly doesn't.   So yeah, you guessed right, I come around the corner one evening in December, and I find he's startled and hiding the phone behind his back.  I ask simply, "Who are you talking to?" He says, "Oh no one, just someone from work."  I saw the red flag go up, but I always thought he was happy.  But then he becomes all-engrossed with a girl he works with, and being that this is a public blog for everyone to read, I'll leave out her details.  But, true to form, you can guess what they were doing, I naively believed what he told me, that they were "just friends".  But, my "spidey-sense" was tingling ever since she called the house at midnight one January evening in a panic, right after the new year, saying her fiancee was going to beat her up.  I offered to go with him.  He said, "No, I'll handle it, she doesn't know you."  But then, I got a phone call at 2am telling me to pick him up from a hotel that, unbeknownst to me until much later, he paid $993.00 for 16 days so she could have peace while she moved. 

So, here comes April.  He's off to a conference out of town.  He's running out the door, but comes back because he forgot something, and there in his hand was his private cell phone.  Noticing he had his private cell phone in his hand going on his business trip, well, that set off another red flag.  So, being that I'm a computer whiz, I sit down and start going through the phone records.  I find 30 PAGES of text messages going back and forth from the two of them.  From ones at 11pm while I'm raiding with my friends in World of Warcraft to ones right after he gets up and runs out the door to work at 7am.  I found ones at 4am, 2pm, 9pm, 3am, all hours of the day basically.  But the majority of them went from 9pm (when I start my raid) until at least 2am (right before I went into the bedroom to go to bed.)  So, as you can imagine, I hit the roof.   The worst of it all is that he called her right after leaving the house for his business trip at 5am so that he could go over to her house.  His plane didn't leave until noon when he told me it left at 7am.

I went through the credit card records to find out that he has been taking her to breakfast every Sunday morning since December when he told me he was going mountaineering and hiking in Red Rock Canyon.  Worse yet, he took her out for Valentine's Day and I got dinner and not so much as a card.  AND here is the worst insult of it all, he bought her jewelry.  Ok, no man in his right mind gives another woman jewelry unless she really means something to him.  When I confronted him with it, I asked him, "Did the repercussions of your actions when I found out about this even cross your mind when you bought her that?"  His response was the worst insult a wife could get.  All that came out of his mouth was, "No."

Much less to say, I found all sorts of stuff.  Most of it would make the hardiest blanche.  However, it was a moment I was faced with, and still get sick about, that my soon-to-be ex is basically a lying, cheating son-of-a-bitch.  Worse yet, finally confronting him with it?  Yeah, he gave me his usual response, "You don't know what you're talking about."  So, the following Sunday, I wait for him to leave for one of his trips to "Red Rock" and lucky for me, what did I find in his private e-mails?  But a note from HER apartment complex about her lease.  Not but a day earlier, he had told me he had no idea where she lived.  Believe it or not, the son of a bitch moved his girlfriend not but a mile and a half from our home.   So, I patiently waited for him to leave the house, waited an hour and went over to her apartment complex.  What do I find?  His car parked right outside of her apartment.  So I parked my car right next to his.  I text (one of my rare moments) his cellphone and tell him, "I'm here at beautiful Red Rock Canyon and I'm parked right next to your car.  Get out here now."  He takes 20 minutes (you and I can only assume that he was getting dressed) to come out.  We of course get into it.  How could I not?  I just busted him at his girlfriends house!  There was an exchange and then he said, and I'll never forget this, "If your morality has gone this low, we've got nothing further to say to each other."  To which I replied, "Oh yes there is you son of a bitch, you're getting your shit and getting the fuck out of my house!"  So, I threw him out.

That was 4 months ago.

Since then, I made a decision.  My soon-to-be Ex put me in some idiotic class in Canada, where we lived for 3 horrible years, so I could get an AA in Graphic Design for the Web.  Now, let's just get this straight.  The class basically taught me nothing except for how to use photoshop, make me dangerous with HTML and confuse the holy hell out of me in Javascript.  I learned how to use Illustrator and all the other yummy Adobe softwares, but gave me really NOTHING to offer a company.  That AA was basically as useless as henshit on a pumphandle.  So after sending out 1000's of resume's over the last 5 years, I never even got so much as a nibble.  But over the last 7 years, I've been teaching in Online worlds.  That useless degree did have some fruit to it, because I spent tons of time teaching other people how to use the softwares I had learned.


My marriage broke up because I was more valuable to my husband for the paycheck I brought in rather than who I was as a person.  So if that doesn't tell you what kind of heartless man I was married to, nothing else will.  But, it's not all his fault.  I lost every part of me that he fell in love with so many years ago.  I just went comatose because he took care of everything and left me with not one ounce of fight left in me.  I look back now and I just shake my head at how much I truly dispise my soon-to-be Ex because he robbed me of my will to live.  Worse yet, and the thing I hate myself the worst for is that I ALLOWED it to happen.

But, he's gone now and I'm happier for it.

So, as soon as he hit the bricks in April, I got on the stick and started filling out paperwork to enroll at UNLV.  He took 7 years from me, now it's time for me to take my life back.

I got enrolled, oh, what hell that was, but, I got in, with 36 credits to my name from my days at the University of Central Florida where I slept through my classes on my Sorority House couch because I was working full-time at night.  Much less to say, I flunked out of UCF, but had enough credits to become a Sophomore at UNLV.

I think of my failed marriage and the fact that I'm going back to school in a simple quote by Madeline Khan in the movie "Clue":

"It's a case of life after death, now that he's dead, I have a life."

This semester's classes:

Nevada School Law
English Composition 102.