Disclaimer post

I am not turning into a grumpy turd. I am not constantly selfish and feeling sorry for myself. Though I have been kind of a jerk lately, I do acknowledge that my life is pretty great and I am generally happy. There are customers that I actually enjoy and who are pleasant and have made a point of remembering my name and that makes me feel like maybe they are not all evil.

Though I do feel trapped occasionally, I feel lucky to be employed and to have a job that is not humiliating. I get to work with beautiful things and I get a discount. I learn about food and cooking and science and design and fabric and marketing. I love my co-workers; they are my friends and family.

Finding balance, taking the good days and the bad, this clerk will get by and it will be okay.

Customers are not unique like snowflakes; they are more like slush

If there are so many types of people in the world, everyone being special and unique, why are so many customers the same? We clerks can be similar because we have training and policy. Customers will say and do the same things over and over, each one thinking they are the clever one to come up with it. A classic example is gift wrap, but there are more.

When I go shopping, I barely speak anymore because I fear that I am mindlessly repeating phrases that clerks hear all day.

Diarrhea of the Heart

I didn't want to write too much about my heartbreak/break up/weirdness because I am trying not to dwell on it. And he could read it. But the damn thing is effecting me alot and at work too.

When it is slow and I am pacing or straightening shelves or folding napkins, I think about it. The thought that living closer may have made a difference eats away at me. I get intensely depressed when it seems that being poor and stuck could cost me happiness. My co-worker tries to console me with a story of her "Good thing, bad timing" romance, but it also depresses me because, when applied to me, I have no control over my crappy, simple, wage-slave life.

I want to run away. I was hatching a plan with some friends to move to a different city, but it seems the job scarcity issue could squelch that. So this is my life. I am the clerk: lean, poor, thrifty, and scrappy. I am surrounded by caricatures of consumers. My love might as well live on the moon.