I realized that with the wiping/restarting of my blog, I wiped everything I’d ever written about Eric. An ex of his (henceforth referred to simply as M) recently got in contact with me, because she’s trying to get a protective order against him and needed my help. He’s since roped in some poor other sucker who’s just going to end up like the rest of us, and she won’t heed any of M’s warnings. I hope that with the mention of his name, this post ends up on Google’s front page for anyone searching for info on Eric. He’s a vile, evil, soulless person – who happens to be devilishly charming – and there isn’t nearly enough in a quick Google search to prove this fact to someone.

I was Eric’s second wife. We were together from October 0f 2005 to March of 2009. We were married for a year, and I left him after he was arrested for assaulting me. It wasn’t the first time he’d hit me, and wasn’t nearly the first time he’d hit a woman. To say he put me through hell is putting it nicely. He maxed out my credit card, drained my bank account, and put me into debt. He abused me mentally, emotionally, physically, sexually… you name it, I probably suffered it. He pawned off my personal belongings to feed his drug addictions.  And in the time I was with him, he scammed and fucked over EVERY SINGLE person he had business dealings with. Pro wrestlers and their promotions, UFC fighters, comedians, small businesses, musicians, I can come up with a laundry list of names of people he fucked. And now, I’m being told, he’s scamming children’s charities.

If you know him, you’ve probably heard him brag about how he’s worked for WWE, UFC, or Sirius Radio… none of these affiliations are legit. He’s probably also told you about his house on the beach in California or his ‘Vette stored at his mother’s house… none of those are true, either. He has two social security numbers and a criminal record in New Jersey. It’s only a matter of time before his bad karma and sour business dealings catch up with him.

And Eric, if you’re reading this — I know you are, because M told me that you keep internet tabs on me — you can bitch and complain and continue lying to yourself and others all you want. This is the honest to goodness truth. Keep telling people that all the women you’ve been with that have spoken out against you are crazy psycho lying bitches. The truth is in your actions, and it rears its ugly face to EVERYONE. Even if you have them blindsided at first with your charm, your true colors always shine through.

So, once again, I hope anyone searching for Eric’s name on the internet stumbles upon this, and that they’re clear-headed enough to see through Eric’s lies. He needs to be stopped before he hurts more people.

Oh, and in case you want a laugh, here’s a screencapped archive of the livejournal that Eric kept shortly after I left him. It clearly shows his manic nature, he openly admits to stalking a guy I was seeing socially, he harasses and threatens my friends who try to stick up for me, and he slanders me for being an alcoholic and a cheat. Come to your own conclusions.

To say I am stoked is a severe understatement. I am also nervous and anxious, but my excitement far out-shadows those  negative feelings. This is my first time traveling to a foreign country (outside of Canada, but they didn’t require passports when I went, so it doesn’t count), and only maybe the third time that I’ve traveled via airplane by myself.

I plan on just doing a lot of sight seeing while I’m there, and taking lots of pictures, but my dear friend who lives in London will also be treating me to entertainment and nightlife. I’m staying at a hostel in the heart of London, so I’m bound to make new friends while I’m there, anyway. I haven’t really set up an itinerary, so I took some guidebooks out of the library and I’m just going to wing it. Maybe I’ll formulate some loose plan while I’m waiting for my flight in the airport, since I always make it through security so breezily and have hours to spare.

I’m torn on whether or not to bring my phone with me, though I’ll probably end up bringing it anyway and leaving it on airplane mode. The roaming charges, I found out, are $1.49 per minute, with $0.50 for outgoing texts and $0.20 for incoming texts. On the flip side, my phone serves as my watch and alarm clock. Ah, decisions…

Anyway, I will see you, my lovely blog, when I return. I’m sure I’ll have much to regale. Until then, cheers!

Tonight, I have a hair client coming over for highlights. Tomorrow, a hair client for a color makeover. Friday morning I’m working at the salon and Friday night I’m at Walgreens. Saturday I’m at the salon all day, Sunday morning I have a client for highlights, Sunday night at Walgreens, Monday night at Walgreens, and Tuesday all day at the Salon. I leave for London on Wednesday evening.

So, as you can clearly see, free time for planning my itinerary (which I probably should have done right after I booked my airfare, but I’m quite the last-minute maven) is non-existent. Last night, I got myself so worked up over all that needs to be done before I leave that I almost gave myself a panic attack. I made myself an itemized list of things I have to buy/get done.

I’m relieved to see that I’m almost halfway done with my list, and I have my best friend by my side today to maintain my sanity (which she did quite well when I found my debit card missing this morning). Even so, I’m still feeling anxious and hard-pressed for time. Maybe it’s the sheer amount of work I’ll be doing in the next week before my trip, maybe it’s the realization that in only a week I’ll be in another country, across the ocean. Whatever it is, I don’t think I’ll actually be able to relax until I’m well into my trip. Here’s hoping anxiety doesn’t get the best of me before then!

Anyway, I’ve been practically living off of soup, tea, mentholated cough drops, and Alka-Seltzer Plus for the past couple days. It’s been helping, but I’m still dreadfully congested. I’m hoping to be all cleared up by Saturday.

In other news, I’ve recently started watching Sliders on Hulu. Man, oh man, I’ve forgotten how much I loved that show. And how much of an obsessive girly crush I had on Jerry O’Connell.

Well, Japan was promptly out of the question.

Then I started thinking about other places I’d like to go. Sure, there are plenty of domestic destinations that I’ve yet to visit that are on my list, but I have a passport that expires in 2015 and I’d like to start making good use of it. England, I thought, that’s an easy start. It’s only an 8-hour flight and they speak English there, so I won’t have to learn any completely new languages, just some new lingo. I also have friends who live in/around London, so I wouldn’t be completely alone.

I proposed this to my mom, and after finding a round-trip airfare for $600, it was a done deal. I found lodging at a particularly-nice looking hostel smack dab in the middle of London, and for 6 nights it comes to ~$200 USD (the original price was in pounds, so I just converted it quickly), which is what I’d pay for one night at any regular hotel in the area. And because my mom is funding half of all of this, my total cost for the flight and lodging of this trip is $400. I’ll be on my own with money for food, entertainment, etc., while I’m over there, but I’ve got that covered.

I think it goes without saying that I’m super excited. This will be the first time I’ve really traveled internationally (Canada – before they required a passport – and the US Virgin Islands don’t count), and it’ll be the biggest trip I’ve ever taken on my own.

I’m going to the library this week to check out some London guidebooks and stuff. For anyone who lives/has been there, can you give me suggestions on what to see/do while I’m there?

In other news, I hate this weather. What month are we in? December? I’ve yet to see a snowstorm this season (or really any snow at all), and the temperature has been hovering around 60 degrees. What the actual fuck? I want cold! I want snow! I want a typical New York winter! Is that too much to ask, Mother Nature?

Finally – my little bit of positivity – I’ve started re-reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and every other sentence reminds me why I love Douglas Adams.

Amid an admittedly white-person-problem dilemma this morning, I posted on facebook that I had the hankering to bake cookies, but didn’t want to forage out to buy ingredients.

One cup peanut butter, one cup sugar, and one egg equal the best peanut butter cookies, Ashlee told me. When I asked her if she was serious, she replied, “I do not kid about cookies.”

Ashlee is probably the most knowledgeable person I know when it comes to sweet, sweet confections, so I took her word for it, and not fifteen minutes later had these tasty little morsels to show for it.

The spicing up that I did was to add a heaping tablespoonful of Nutella to the batter. These cookies are beyond delicious, and a must for every peanut butter lover out there.

The only reason PayPal publicly apologized and worked quickly to “make things right” is because of the massive amount of attention it garnered. Like April wrote in her most recent post on the subject:

And I think we all know that Paypal’s apologies and reversals were motivated by the intense scrutiny they’ve been subjected to. If I were Sally’s Soap Shack, I would be waiting out that six month hold right now and wondering how to make Ramen noodles taste like Christmas ham.

This is not the first time PayPal has screwed over a small business or an individual. I’ve heard countless stories from countless people about PayPal working against them instead of with them, being completely ambiguous about things, and then basically being like “sorry chump, that’s the way the cookie crumbles” when they completely fuck a customer over. I am not excluded, I’ve had my fair share of scorn, as well.

Several years ago, when I was still with Eric, he used my eBay to sell some vintage toys he’d come to possess. Granted, he exaggerated a bit on the item description and I should have reviewed it before letting him post it, but now it’s neither here nor there. The toys ended up selling for somewhere around $100, and the buyer, upon receiving the toys and finding they were not exactly up to the description standard (even though he ~probably~ could have seen from the picture), flipped out and opened a dispute on PayPal.

I spoke with a representative on the phone who asked me to email “my side of the story” to them. She gave me an email address, which I repeated back to confirm, and sent them a detailed explanation of what happened, and how if the buyer wants a refund, I would like my merchandise back.

I never got a follow up from PayPal, and they ended up closing the case in the buyer’s favor. He got to keep his money and the merch. I contacted PayPal over it, and they said they’d never received my email. When I read back to them the email address I’d sent my stuff to, the representative I spoke to said it was the wrong email address, and had a very “sorry, not our problem” attitude about it.

Because of that dispute, though, my PayPal account was negative about $75 and ended up being frozen/suspended because I didn’t have the means to pay it back. My eBay account was suspended, too, for failure to pay the subsequent seller fees that I was still charged even though I’d been completely fucked over.

After much bitching and complaining, and several months, they offered me a credit on my account “since [I've] been a good customer for so long.” It was less than what I lost over the dispute, but it was enough to bring my account into the clear.

A couple years ago, I started selling on eBay again, and since I didn’t have a bank account, I had a pre-paid credit card linked up to my PayPal. I ended up going negative again, only by a dollar and some change, and because I was no longer refilling the pre-paid credit card (it had been one of those ones they give you your tax return on), they froze my account again.

Once I opened up a bank account, I called them up to get my account un-frozen. They processed my payment for the dollar and change right there on the phone, and said my account would be unlocked within 48 hours.

Weeks later, my PayPal account was still frozen, even though the balance was no longer negative. I called them up and asked why, and they were just like “oh, we’ll unfreeze it now. Lawl, sorry, NBD.”

But it is a big deal. For some people, this is their livelihood that you’re toying with. I doubt PayPal will change their shitty business practices anytime soon, but with competitors coming into the scene, it won’t be long before they lose their customer base over their complete inability to have good customer relations.

I actually made this tutorial a few weeks ago, but I’m posting it here now because I have nothing else of substance to post today. Enjoy!

The problem is, during the time in which we were being shitty, my diet took a turn for the worse. I was barely eating anything, and when I was eating, it was garbage. The preceding holiday of Thanksgiving didn’t help kick things off either, so now I just feel like a bloated mess.

I want to get back on track with eating right, and I’ve been considering a cleanse regimen (like one of those 3- or 7-day colon cleanses with the strict, severely-limited diet to go along with it) just to flush my body out and get back on track with everything. Have any of my readers ever tried a cleanse before? Which ones would you recommend, or stay away from? What were your results?