OH YES WE ARE DOING THIS RIGHT NOW

Books I read in 2010: Kind of in an order

1. Pale Fire, Vlad Nabokov
2. Tell Me, Kim Addonizio
3. Just Kids, Patti Smith
4. The Bedwetter, Sarah Silverman
5. Orion You Came and You TooK All My Marbles, Laura Henehan
6. Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Danielle Evans
7. The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories, Patricia Highsmith
8. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
9. Lit, Mary karr
10. The Blunderer, Patricia Highsmith
11. The Fates Will Find Their Way, Hannah Pittard
12. Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton

Man I did not read so very many books this year! But just now I did 200 situps. Beat that, smarts for brains.

Hey hey, it's another Saturday morning, and naturally I am annoyed at the world. Not the world so much as the store. Have you ever noticed that an Australian accent is really unpleasant on a woman? Well, that's not nice, maybe there is just a crop of unpleasant Australian women around here. Come to think of it I have never noticed any Australian men around here at all. I guess I am so annoyed because there is really no one I can get to work from 9-10am with me on Saturdays, and my therapist was adamant that the management should not expect me to work alone -- a young woman! alone! -- I mean she was really incensed when I told her this, but there's not a lot to do about it I said, the front desk is expected to take care of its own so it's my job to resolve or not resolve. And the resolution is that there's nothing really to do, even though I should say B. just came in at twenty after, which was nice of him, to finish organizing the section out front which is an unholy mess right now. Ugh this store is so tiring. I had a dream that I came in early and as I went to the back door to open up there was H., useless H., blameless H., standing there with her stupid hair just waiting by the door and expecting me to put her back on the schedule for that day, and I knew I had to do it because she's family and besides, no one can say no around here to anything.

Tired. Head hurts. Sent a probably ill-advised email to several managers on opening about how I'd rather not work alone in the morning like this, then quickly got a phone call from one of them which revealed that someone else was in fact in the store. Oh well. I guess I should deal with my own.

My morning routine includes driving to work in a mounting state of panic and annoyance, arriving at the store, turning on the lights, setting out money in trays, then finally unlocking the door, which introduces a period of at least two solid hours of hate and resentment while dealing with customers. By 2pm I usually feel somewhat more hospitable toward my fellow person.

While on one hand I find my dislike of these environs perfectly reasonable, some other part of me knows that my brain likes to focus on that negative state, and that plenty of people are mildly but not hair-tearingly dissatisfied with their workaday lives. There must be a way to focus on the positive, or to at least not dwell painfully on the negative.

What gets me lately is how it took everybody so long to realize they couldn't work as much as they said they would. S2 I can understand, as she was just beginning to negotiate a new courseload at school with working more than three days a week, and perhaps I should have seen her cut-back coming and planned around it; S1 has no excuse in my mind, as six hours a week at the family business does not seem incredibly onerous to me no matter what your workload otherwise. Family business is the burden one must bear, and of course in a corresponding way I will have to deal with her when she drops out/changes her mind/has some spare time and wants back onto the schedule.

Whatever. Really my beef is I hate training new people. I wish we could just download a disc of information into their brains and I wouldn't have to tell them how to do stuff right, or feel bad about repeating things or telling them to change what they're doing, or notice only after I've hired them that they have an unpleasant bodily odor. Seriously, that wasn't there in the interview.

I hate to admit it but I am just perpetually in a bad mood these days. At least at times when I am at or near work, which is six days out of seven and doesn't look like changing soon. Remember because everybody waited so long to tell me they were dropping out of their shifts, so now I've hired somebody but not for enough time, and even if I were supported in the venture of hiring another person to fill in, I'm just so tired and annoyed with the whole hiring process from the last round that I hardly give a shit. Okay, I'll take the extra shifts, whatever. It's your store, bucko; I get paid the same hourly wage no matter what I do, so if this place goes down in flames, it's your pile of money, and I'll most likely be out in the parking lot smoking and wondering what they'll put up in the empty lot.

I would not be such a grumpus if every customer were as nice as that last guy I just talked to. I have a soft spot for people who go digging for change in their pockets and produce nothing but a well-used red cigarette lighter.

Jesus christ, I don't want to do all these jobs. I would love to just peace out of here right now. So now the boss says will I call the new hire and tell him he got the job and do all that business, which I guess is not so unreasonable, andy after all called me to offer me this job, but I don't want to, it's like one tiny part of the job that I wish they would not add to the heap. I don't want to think about logistics, I am just tired, somebody else do it.

I am prone to these fits of hysterical anger related to job stress. I would almost rather work every day myself than have to train new people and change circumstances.

Also I don't know exactly what it is, maybe my bourgie upbringing saddled me with the assumption that I would find something other than retail work to do after college, isn't that why I always told the therapist I didn't want to kill myself when they asked, because I was vaguely and optimistically interested in college and things after that? And I know intellectually that 1) this is a phase of work and the sheets will smooth out once you ruffle them; and 2) even if this isn't a phase, if this is all I will ever do (my god i hope not), the bourgie upbringing was lying to me, not everyone is destined for greatness, don't be so presumptuous that your brand is anything special.

Ugh I am just tired of standing here.

Did I tell you about my plan to get out next summer? I probably didn't tell anybody except my therapist and my cat or something, so of course you don't know. Thing is, I hate very nearly every single day here, just find it grinding and grating and disappointing -- in myself and the management and the behavior of customers -- and the idea of getting out is seriously the most exciting thing going on in my head for possibly several years. So. August 2011, get used to the sight'a my backside, or a cloud of dust, or an empty porch swing wheeling forlornly on the wraparound, because homegirl is outta here. Only ten months left. Ugh.

Man I hope no one actually reads this blog.

UGH.

Naturally I got here late, just at the crisp of 9:30 when we're supposed to open, despite having left the house at 8:15 which seemed like enough time. Not plenty of time mind you, had I really been trying and thinking about the welfare of the store like it was my goddamn useless baby I woulda left at 8, or even minutes before 8! Such is the devotion necessary to swaddling and keeping safe a crazy house such as this one.

UGH I HATE MY JOB.

The cleaning man who is nearly a thousand years old and very congenial but who I have of course soured to is very keen on saying "Should I open er up?" as he leaves in the morning after his weekly cleaning routine, meaning he is exiting through the front door and is kindly offering to unlock the outer door on my behalf; the only problem being that I am or Sarah is on occasion (most of the time) still setting out money in register trays or fixing pieces of paper in their proper places or god forbid mixing granules of sugar into a sour cup of coffee, and of course my weak protestations to this effect do not deter Cleaning Man Sam, he is just so excited at the prospect of unlocking a door on his very own and being The Guy Who Opens The Store that no gail forcewind will prevent him putting key to lock. I just want to punch that guy in the face. Go out the back door, old man.

And then, new contemplative paragraph, I feel bad being an asshole to the aged cleaning man, his adjective and noun being both factors in that feeling though perhaps moreso the noun as I don't want to be classist, sniffing at the actions of the help so to speak, but in truth we are all in some social subservient service work position here, and also sometimes you just don't like somebody regardless of their social position, so it is.

And I was and perhaps still am a hair's breadth from sending an annoyed and most likely annoying email to be upper-boss to the effect of "Make him stop doing that!!!!" but after all that is unwise I guess because didn't Upper Boss say a while back that part of this job is managing people, duh, and I oughta not be so uncomfortable with that? Didn't?

Ugh. If I were Geena Davis I would tell this job to suck my dick.

I wonder if I can just run the fuck out of here without anyone noticing.

1. People who shop at this store are annoying as shit. They can't find anything. I want a job where I don't have to talk to these assholes.

2. Admittedly I am not well today.

3. That does not change the fact that this job sucks. Apparently there is a study where thirty percent of people are going to leave their jobs when "the recession" "ends." It might be twenty years but I am leaving next July, you can bet on that.

It's like I have some kids, and they are disappointed in me.

Christ, the internet is confusing. You can follow me on twitter under the name seldomavailable. When I say "you" I mean about three people. Two of which already know all that. Good lord, what is the point.

You know what movie I really enjoyed? "Withnail & I." I am having a sneezing fit at the moment.

Orders of Business:

1. Not everything is my fault.

2. Fuck you, place where I work, I'm allowed to take two days off in a year when I worked all the extra days you asked me to, I came in on my day off after I had to take a fucking standardized test I didn't even want to tell you about, so I can apply to something else and get the hell out of dodge; I can take two days off to visit my best friend and not have to make up one of them on my day off, thus giving me a six-day work week coming up, the shittiest of fates. Oh, wait, I can't? Okay, sure, I guess I'll work that day, too. I don't care what fucking program I get into, I'm leaving you.

3. Diplomacy implores me to go back and take out some of those fucks, but, hmm, no, I think not. I'll take out those fucks when you learn that it's not beneath your other employees to operate a cash register, when you decide that maybe you could hire enough staff to cover for my TWO DAYS OFF oh no, that's asking too much, that's when I'll take out those fucks, that's when.

4. I'm gonna start writing poetry again, that was the only thing that made anything worthwhile. Kinda.

5. Seacrest out!

6. I might also have the flu. Still I'mma leave in all those fucks. Also I don't blame B. for any of this; he deserves days off too. I'm just saying, there are other people in the world, and maybe some of them could help out from time to time. JUST SAYIN.

7. http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2010/02/learning-to-write-the-mfa-poem-by-nin-andrews.html

SCENE.

When I do something stupid, the problem is that I know I am always always always going to do it again, later on.

1. It annoys me how "the current economy" conversation makes me feel like I should be excessively grateful to have a customer service job. Because it's a job, everybody says, and not everybody has one of those! And while I do cling to my weekly paycheck, the eight hours daily that bring it about sometimes make me want to kill myself just a little.

2. Then I wonder if it's really classist of me to dislike customer service so much. Because lots of people do it for a brief period, and lots of people do it forever, and they don't complain, right? Or maybe they do, and nobody listens. Or maybe they devise a system in order to not hate everything every day. Or maybe they get married, and they go home to their spouse and pet the little lambs and look out a window or something. Or maybe other people just have a better attitude, and I am a jerk. But you know what makes you a jerk? Being unhappy and resigning yourself to it.

3. And aside from whether this feeling is or is not more classist than other activities in my daily life, I think maybe I'm just not suited to it, this kind of work. (Like other people are? Well, maybe.) I see coworker R. buzzing by every now and then, and she's always smiling and even when the most annoying customers are thrown at her, she's listening and going "Hmm, good question, let's see!" and swishing by and improvising. I heard she used to be in computer programming or something. Maybe she's "project-oriented." But when somebody asks me for a recommendation, my mind just goes blank. And it doesn't help that I'm not really allowed to leave the desk, so I never see the shelves and sections people are talking about. But maybe the larger problem is that I'm not a person who likes to talk to just anybody, and especially not the everyday volume of people standing at a front desk necessitates. I'd rather shelve quietly by myself. That kind of isolation bothers some people, and I'd love to trade jobs with those exact people.

4. For a period of an hour or two virtually every morning after coming in, I am really mad. Like, grumpy and annoyed and generally fuck-you at every single person in the room. I think this is because I am realizing daily that I have come back to this benighted place! And I get mad about it. Then by 2pm or so I feel fine, and kind of embarrassed that I was so mad before. I know it's an office cliché, but sometimes a cup of coffee makes me feel less hateful toward everybody.

5. This one guy looking for Harry Potter books with his child was super-nice just now. My ire is largely irrational.

6. No, my ire is not irrational. I will not stamp your fucking stamp card, get out of my face. You are not entitled to everything you think you are entitled to.

Creepy pincers.



Some more SALE-motif advotainment.

We got all these postcards and then suddenly the event was over, so I tried to use like two of them for something useful.



Flying eyeball has a long and sordid cultural history, so I heard.

Huggy Ferret loves you.

Rex Rankin sings it like it goes.

Dear blague,

Partly I really want to read that new Patti Smith book about her and Mapplethorpe hanging out in New York at the end of the sixties, being crazy kids and loving each other and making art and being bohemian poor and all that, and partly I don't, because I think it'll make me sad. I read a few pages when it first appeared, and oddly there was a scene very close to something that happens in Red Dragon (the book & movie, though it's omitted from Manhunter, go figure), in which Bob Mapplethorpe steals a Wm. Blake print for sale in the gallery where he's working, and then he feels so afraid of being caught that he shreds it up and flushes it down a toilet, which is pretty close to shredding it up and ingesting it, depending on how you think of bodies. I liked that part, but anyway I feel conflicted about reading the book because that camaraderie thing, that being young and foolish and loving somebody thing, that just gets me feeling sad because hello, I live with my parents in what are supposed to be the foolish & exciting years, I average one poem every six months if I'm lucky, and I don't even get in any impressive fights like Bukowski. Not that I really want to. But in the other part I read, Patti Smith said how she had come home early one day when she & Mapplethorpe were both unemployed (how they managed to keep the heat on is beyond my imagining) and made her special soup for him, which was just chicken broth with lettuce floated on top, and it's meant to sound kind of sad and sweet and raga--

Let me just interject, I don't know how my coworker gets to be sitting down and not answer the phone right now; the unspoken agreement is that if you're sitting and somebody else is standing, the least you can do is field all the phone calls and leave everybody else's hands free. But maybe that should be a spoken rule.

Whatever, my point is I find young unpretentious love stories depressing, especially when it's forty years later and the remaining half of the couple is still way cooler than everybody.

And then again, "unpretentious" is a malleable concept, because I know if I met somebody my age right now who was hanging around Rimbaud's grave and talking all mystical-poetry business, I would be like OH SHUT UP, because when it's somebody you perceive to be like you and not everybody's chosen punk-rock elder god, it's annoying. I guess my definition of being unpretentious is having highfalutin tastes that you don't tell anybody about, because you're doing it for you and not to impress anybody. But really, trying to impress people is a part of life, and so is talking to people about things that interest you, so what do I know.