Yep, that figures! While this little blog was in transition, I had so many things I wanted to blog about. I finally get it moved over to its new home (here!), all spiffed up satisfactorily, the epic backlog of posts and photos posted, so I’m finally feeling free to blog regularly… and I suddenly have nothing to say.
Then I’ll be driving to/from work, or in the shower, or something – anywhere i can’t type or write anything down – and remember everything I wanted to post, and come up with six new great ideas… but as soon as I stop the car or whatever, nothing. My mind is instantly blank, void of any eager scrap of creativity or inspiration! Of course!
In the last week or so, I’ve been through this cycle so many times that I at least can remember the topics I had in mind, broadly, but still have nothing to say about them! Or I just, at that moment, think they’re incredibly stupid, uninteresting ideas no longer worthy of being bloggified.
So after musing on that predicament for a while, I decided that it was, itself, decent [if viciously meta] blog fodder, and here we are. (Yes, it now seems kind of silly and stupid and not nearly as interesting as it did ten seconds before I started writing. But hey! Words.)
Vaguely dystopian sci-fi with suspense and an intriguing plot. The setting was indeterminate, regarding time (I’d guess some point in the future, but no telling how far) and place (a city, probably American if it’s a nearish sort of future but could have been elsewhere, even another planet, we don’t know). The main characters had epic adventures and a believable, non-nauseating romance. The dialog was articulate and witty, snarky and heartfelt at all the right moments. It was so good, that when it ended, coming back to reality actually kind of hurt. I still wanted to know what happened next, or at least go back and watch it again.
But no diceā it was a dream.
It played like a movie. A really frakking awesome movie, that was bound to be a genre favorite, maybe even a “blockbuster”. I wish I remembered it well enough to actually make that movie, or perhaps write it out as a book, but like anything I’ve only watched once, I can only recall the basic gist (and I do mean basic), a line or two, and few “snapshot” images. You’d think, being that the writer, director, “cameraman”, and heck, all of the cast/characters, were, in fact, my brain, I’d be able to remember a little better what happened, or at least re-create something similar. But no.
That lovely film was created by my subconscious, who is apparently much more intelligent, creative, and accomplished than my conscious mind, and absolutely refuses to share its brilliance with its conscious counterpart, who could in turn share it with the world…
…’cause my subconscious is a bitch about intellectual property rights.
Mom likes to talk at me when I’m trying to work. A month or two ago, she was asking if I wanted to go see Mary Poppins in Philly with her and Daddy.
At that moment, I really didn’t care much either way, because I:
was trying to work.
am mostly indifferent to the alleged allure of Broadway/Philly-wanting-to-be-Broadway shows. I like plays and musicals well enough, but I just don’t get that excited to see a story I already know acted out, unless I know some of the cast.
don’t plan that far in advance if at all avoidable.
But they need to get out more, and I like to encourage them when they’re willing to go into the city for fun (they both work within the city limits, but seem to have an aversion to going downtown otherwise, which they like to deny/blame on each other) so I said, “Sure, why not?”
I figured for the price of the tickets, it must be a nice venue, worthy of dressing up a bit, probably digging the dress slacks out of the closet. But yesterday, mom feels compelled to point that out.
“No jeans or sweatpants.”
Of course, I took that as a challenge.
The show was tonight, and I babysat earlier this afternoon, so I was wearing sweatpants, and if you add my extreme fondness for this pair of sweatpants to yesterday’s “just because you’re 22 doesn’t mean I trust you to dress yourself” comment, there was no way I was taking off these sweatpants.
However, contrary to my mother’s opinion, I do know how to dress properly, and do know better than to go into a nice theatre looking my usual around-the-house hobo self.
Paradox resolution: the grey skirt.
The grey skirt is long. Floor-skimming long, and heavy enough that it drapes nicely even over a not-nicely-draping extra layer. And it’s shiney-ish and pretty– perfectly respectable evening-out-wear, paired with the black tank I was already wearing, a nice black cardigan, and cute black heels. Also, perfect sweatpants camouflage. o/
The show was pretty good too, by the way. š (And there were totally people wearing jeans.)
2011 has, thus far, continued its trend of not completely sucking. And I am [technically] keeping up with my tentative resolution to blog every day, and thus the actual resolution to blog semi-regularly.
Small victory. \o/
Church was interesting today… they finally announced that a fairly significant* change is about to start happening. The possibility has been brewing, officially-though-quietly, for a couple years now. I smelled it coming a good deal sooner than that, but didn’t realize it at the time. What is actually going to happen is yet to be determined, but things are officially set in motion now… so it will be interesting* to see what goes down in the coming months.
Entirely unrelatedly, I went to a wedding a few days ago. On Wednesday. It was a decidedly odd time for a wedding, and slightly inconvenient, being smack in the middle of the holiday week (though not according to Job #3…), but was a lovely celebration and a good excuse to take a couple days off and actually have a little time to enjoy the holidays.Ā Initially, I thought it was far enough away that I’d have to spend the night somewhere, so I requested Thursday off too, and then it turned out it was close enough that it was easier to just drive home afterwards, so I had a legit day off on Thursday, and Friday was the official holiday for New Years, so between those and the weekend I had a nice little mini-break. (Of course, I worked at Job #1 yesterday and scattered hours for Job #2 throughout, so I wasn’t totally free, but at least I got to catch up on sleep a bit.)
Back to the normal unpleasant schedule tomorrow, bright-and-way-too-early.
Oy. What a long week! I worked 8 of the past 9 days, and this week was all long shifts. So, yay for actually getting money, but boo for sore feet and tired me.
So here’s a funny story. Not really funny, really, but a story anyway. Yesterday I was supposed to work an 8 hour shift in the middle of the day – three hours overlapping with the girl who opened, 2 hours by myself, and then 3 hours overlapping with the girl who would close. I was supposed to take my break when the closer got in, but about half an hour before the opener was to leave, I realized I had to pee, and was really hungry, and didn’t want to wait 2 and a half more hours to take my break, so I asked her if she’d mind if I took it then, I’d just take a half hour instead of the whole one, and I’d be back when she had to leave. She didn’t mind, so that’s what we did. And THANK FREAKING GOD.
Apparently, the girl who was scheduled to close had called out, but somewhere along the line the wires got crossed and that little tidbit of information never made it to the manager who was actually working then, or to me, or to anyone actually working that day, and neither she or the manager she had talked to found a sub. So, about halfway through what originally would have been my break, the manager figured this out and called a couple people, but nobody could/would come in to close, so he asked me if I’d stay to close. Luckily for them, I didn’t have any pressing plans that would warrant leaving them with an unstaffed cafe for the rest of the evening, so I said I would.
It was only an extra two hours of work, but on top of an already 8-hour shift, that’s a long time to be standing around making coffee. And instead of two hours working alone, it turned into 7, and I still had to do the food pull for the next day (normally done at the end of the middle shift, when the closer gets in, so one can wait on customers while the other’s in the back), plus do all of the closing stuff, which is a pain in the butt to begin with. Luckily for me, it was pretty slow most of the night, so I was able to get it done anyway, and they sent some people over from the book side at the very end to help me finish up. So everything crucial got done, the place got clean, and I still made it out of there reasonably soon after the store closed. It wasn’t that bad, and the manager bought me lunch today for being willing to stay.
This morning I get in, working on the book side, and the other manager mentions I had forgotten to put more iced coffee in the fridge, but he had apparently been the one who had dropped the ball in the first place in not letting anyone know the girl wasn’t coming in, so it was all good. I said, “whoops, sorry, I’ll try to remember that next time,” and life moved on. I helped some customers, shelved some books, didn’t have to work the register much, it was a good day… until 5.
Then the girl who was closing the cafe showed up. From the very beginning, I could tell she was going to be stressful to work with. The other cafe workers warned me, the cafe supervisor warned me, every time I opened, I could tell if she had been the one to close the previous night, because everything was messy and half-assed, if done at all. I tried to be polite when I saw her, but was grateful that I only had to work with her twice so far. I didn’t think I’d have to worry about it today, since I was on the other side of the store, but I was wrong. Soon after she arrived, she wanted to tell somebody something on the radio. Instead of just turning on the one we keep in the cafe, she tells me, halfway across the store, toĀ pass on the message for her. She mumbles (rather consistently) so I couldn’t hear what she said, so I walk towards her and ask her what she said. Instead of repeating it like a normal person, she grabs the mic on my headset, while it’s still attached to me, and tells whatever to whoever herself, completely demolishing any semblance of personal space in the process. >.<
A little while later, I’m helping out on register, and she comes over and just stands there awkwardly… already I have a bad feeling about this. She rings up a couple people too, eventually the line dies down, so I try to head back out to the floor to finish the pile I was shelving, but before I can manage that, she corners me and starts going off on me about how bad I did at closing. At first I think maybe I did forget a few things, I was by myself and already tired, it’s plausible. But then she asks me how I got Sunday from Thursday (refering to the expiration stickers we stick on the food trays, everything gets either one or two days from when you pull them out of the freezer),Ā and then tries to claim half of it didn’t have a sticker at all. I admit to herĀ I may have missed a tray or two, but I’m pretty sure I gotĀ almost everything, andĀ IĀ know I didn’t put Sunday stickers on anything. (When in doubt, I just tagged it for the next day, to be on the safe side, so almost everything had Friday stickers.) It would have been one thing if she was correcting me on things I had actually done wrong, (and even then, she doesn’t actually have any authority over me, I would just have respected it since she has been there longer than I) but NONE OF IT WAS TRUE.
When I told this story to the cafe supervisor (who actually quit, effective yesterday, but we text), she confirmed that the girl has no room to talk… “A lizard could close the cafe better than her”… and both the managers who I’ve worked with lately told me I’m a good worker and doing a great job at my job(s), so I’m pretty confident that I didn’t screw up, and she’s just crazy.
Nonetheless, when she was done, I was so soĀ so very mad… Somewhere between shock and actual restraint, I managed not to say or hit anything, but that meant it came out as tears of frustration, so I went back to the break room, but there was a guy in there, so I stood at the sink and washed my hands so I had an excuse to face the wall and steam/cry a little… but this was like, 10 minutes before the end of my shift, so when I came back in to clock out and he was still there, I still wanted to rid myself of the grime of other people’s money and dusty books and computers that everyone-and-their-mom has touched before I got my stuff and left, so he gave me a funny look and asked “didn’t you just wash your hands?” and I was still barely maintaining my composure/sanity, so I just sort of muttered “yup” and some failed summary of the above explanation and left awkwardly.
But now I’m home, showered, pajama’d, and soon will be asleeeeep. And tomorrow will involve no work, but lots of funnesses.
