No Shit Sherlock: Sick of the Bullshit

I was woken up at 6am on some bullshit council business. It doesn’t help that I definitely caught a cold from my one and only visit to my neighbor’s church, so I slept like shit since I could barely breathe. As secretaria of the council, I have been charged with making all official announcements in our community chat.

Then, because the rest of the fucking world in Guatemala starts functioning at the ass crack of dawn, most people have been up since 4am. 6am is regular hours as far as they’re concerned. This aspect of life in Guatemala is, in my opinion, for the birds. Shit in the Colonia popped off at 6am, and it was a constant barrage, which meant I wasn’t going back to sleep, at least not anytime soon.

I had sent 3 announcements by 8am when I got a text from my neighbor asking me, oh so not helpfully, “What’s going on in the Colonia?” Like she hadn’t just read the official announcements I had just sent. Fishing for gossip, and I’m not biting. So I reply, “What isn’t happening in the Colonia? I can’t even sleep in peace, I got woken up at 6am.”

Which is when my neighbor, doing her best to detect the obvious, says to me: “A word of advice: don’t turn on your phone until you’re fully awake, and set a timer to respect your phone’s hours. Otherwise, people will message you whenever they feel like it. Everything has rules and schedules.”

No Shit, Sherlock. What a fucking novel piece of advice. That’s super helpful, never. Least of all if my phone is my alarm, it’s garbage day, so I need to get up early. My being available at 6am was never an issue when it was for her.

Did it occur to her that I wouldn’t have a problem if I hadn’t caught a virus from one of her diseased parishioners who felt it was more important to show up and share their illness than stay home and keep it to themselves? Oh, I know all about what motivates a churchgoer to decide to show up despite the opposite being true: the judgy attitude of other parishioners. I know this is true thanks to the eight-year stint I did in the evangelical church in Virginia. So don’t act like you don’t know. I told her I caught this shit at her church, and she wasn’t even sorry about it. Stop inviting me. I’m never going back.

I am so pissed about being so tired, I don’t even know where to begin. The last several days have been consumed with finding solutions to the mess the man behind the curtain created. I’m sick and fucking tired of having to steer the council president from her scorched earth policies just because she is pissed at the subhuman piece of shit that is making our lives miserable and has the Colonia held hostage, all because he refuses to step down and hand over the security software and database with everyone’s personal data.

I’m sick of it. I’m sick of her worrying and speculating all the time about what other people are thinking or saying. Especially when she took herself out of the very chats that would have answered those questions. I’m not in them; she was literally the only inside source we had. Strategically, it was a bullshit move considering she won’t stop obsessing over it.

I’m fucking sick of my neighbor being jealous that I’m involved in something she clearly wants to be involved in. The proof is that she repeatedly feels the need to point out that she’d be involved, except her son tells her she should stay out of it. She literally dropped this passive-aggressive bomb on me yesterday: Well, I guess you’re not available for anything anymore.

I know what I got into when I volunteered. Excuse the fuck out of me if I’m not allowed to complain because I’m sleepy. Excuse the fuck out of me if I’m not allowed to be annoyed that the police have to enter the neighborhood at the crack of dawn to raid some house, I guess, and I have to send a message to the community telling them to stay the fuck away because they’re a bunch of nosy bitches.

Excuse the fuck out of me if the construction work resumed today without notice despite us asking the municipality when they were physically here fucking inspecting the work. But communication isn’t a universal skill, sadly, and we got an hour’s heads-up that they were resuming work and people needed to move their cars out of the alley.

Jesus fucking Christ on a cracker. I can bitch about whatever I want. I’m cranky. I’m tired. I’m sick. And I don’t need anyone telling me obvious fucking shit, tap dancing on my last nerve.

Thanks, but no thanks, Captain Obvious. I’m handing this No Shit, Sherlock Award to my incredibly unhelpful neighbor.