And the 90 Degree Days Keep on Coming!! (One Single Mom Suffers From Gentrification)

So I moved in at the end of July and it has been a really rough start in my new place.

If you are not from Hawaii, it is kind of hard to explain the sub-standard conditions that we deal with in order to live in Paradise.

The last place I lived in housed a mentally ill meth-head and it was a highly traumatic situation for me because I had no control over the living space outside of my room. Anything that I left out was promptly, lost, broken or stolen and it got worse the longer I was there and the more I fought back.

The reality was, however, that at $600/mo, that was the best option I could find for the price.

Rents in my neighborhood have shot up dramatically over the last few years. The little two bedroom I WAS paying $1250 for in 2014 is now $1750. My neighborhood has become gentrified and the only people who can afford to live here are those who are solidly part of the upper middle class (40,000/year is considered VERY low-income here and I make about half of that) or those who are on section 8. The waiting list for section 8 has only opened once in the last decade and I was lucky enough to get on, but I am still WAITING over two years after I applied.

With two young children, it is not easy no matter how you slice it, but I am trying to be something different in today's world of overworked and emotionally unavailable single mothers, I am HERE, home with my kids the way a married stay-at-home mom would be. I feel like I need to be here for them because I am the only parent they have, their father is a lost cause and I think more damage is done in single-parent households, not because of lack of father, but because mother is also AWOL in her own personal bullshit. I refuse to be that.

Since I get no child support, I HAVE to work and since I have no reliable baby-sitter, it HAS to be from home. I feel like I could pull that off much better if I was in a stable living environment. That is the one thing that has been lacking for me for the last couple of years.

I thought the last place sucked, and it did, but at least the landlady took care of broken things around the house and kept it in working order. I lasted a year there until the neighborhood crack-heads started stealing parts off of my car.

We found a room in the house I am in now. The room itself is nice, but the house is trashed and our new landlord promised that he would do a number of repairs before we moved in.

I was upfront about the fact that I have children and pets and that they are messy and loud like kids tend to be. Looking at the state of the house (filthy, in need of major cleaning and some cosmetic repairs) I figured I could clean it up and we would be fine here.

I was wrong.

A couple of days after we moved in a lesbian couple took another one of the rooms. They seemed like nice people and I spent a few hours talking to them and getting to know them. It was maybe three days later that they started their fighting: screaming, hitting each other, one pinning the other down while she screams and cries to be let up.

Needless to say, I do not want my kids around this shit, so I ended up confronting them which got me into an almost fight with the physical abuser. I went to the landlord and pleaded with him to do something, and he gave told me to stop coming to him "for every little thing." Wow.

After this happened, I knew we would have to move again, but I was hoping to kinda look in a leisurely manner and find something better. Dude gave me 30 days on monday and now I have like three weeks to find a new place. I would really like to move by the 25th, however, because we are paid up until then and I do not want to give this fucker another dime.

Makaha Mountains Still Smoking After Great Brushfire of 2018

Meanwhile, it has been 90 degrees every day for the last six weeks or so, and with no air conditioning, it has been unbearable and my motivation level has been next to zero.

I did the move in this heat up two flights of stairs. The heat got worse when the whole town nearly burnt down during "The Great Brushfire of 2018." The heat (and humidity) stayed with us during the whole ordeal with non-hurricane Lane and all of the ensuing drama. I have been dealing with this dumb heat while driving back and forth to take the kids to their school which is now in another district. Since A plus is full, I have to be there to get them at 2 and it is wreaking havoc on my work schedule.

I feel like it is becoming damn near impossible to make things work here and the only reason I am staying is to be close to my family, who really isn't helping much. Like I am not sure things would be ALL that different if I moved towns or states. I don't particularly love this area, and I HATE the summers and I feel like I get maybe four productive months a year and the rest are spent fighting headaches from mango blossoms, heat and VOG. I have more of my childhood friends in vegas than I do in Hawaii at this point. I know I can have a whole house out there for what I am paying for a room in a slum here. It is a sorry state of affairs I swear.

It has been a stressful few weeks to say the least. Hoping things let up here soon so I can get out of survival mode and back to my creative endeavors.