Living situation good, wedding good, kidney stones bad
The excuse I used to use about this journal was that I was waiting for Interesting Things to Happen before I bothered to write in it. For starters, I got sick of scrolling through endless entries about video games when I wanted to look through my own diary to see when something big happened and what I thought about it at the time. After all, with only perhaps two or three people who still take the time to read the things I type here, I figured I'd want to at least give them better food for thought than (say) how baffled I still am that I like Grand Theft Auto IV so much more than Burnout Paradise. Especially when typing about Grand Theft Auto IV would take away from the time I'd have to be PLAYING Grand Theft Auto IV, and typing interesting words takes considerably more thought and effort. (I'm not very interested in THOUGHT and EFFORT by the time I get home from work.) I'd have to be crazy to be more excited about typing words than driving shiny cars to exciting gunfights! I guess.
Lucky for you three, I finished Grand Theft Auto IV last night and for many reasons I am right now pretty crazy. Plus, some pretty Interesting Things have happened so that excuse is now beyond flimsy.
Here's what my world is like right now: my kidneys want this (these?) stone(s?) out of them very badly, but the stone will not go quietly. I'm in a terrible amount of pain, plus I have a headache that is probably from not eating, but it hurts much more to move around and finding food would involve moving around. There is a machine right across the street that is EATING TREES, and the sound isn't helping matters. But I am feeling sort of peaceful, as though I have escaped from reality into a world of pain, and even though it's a pain-world I was getting quite sick of reality.
This entry will suck because it's being interrupted by trips to the bathroom. SO MUCH WATER! FLUSH, DAMN YOU WORTHLESS KIDNEYS.
Incidentally, and feel pretty dumb that it took a doctor to reveal this to me, it is not a coincidence that my kidney stones (now: 4) happened to coincide with periods of me drinking a lot of soda all the time. Four times now I have had to say to myself, look, dude, don't drink so much goddamn soda. Hopefully "it makes you get kidney stones" is a good enough reason for it to stick this time. I can be pretty dumb. (But in my defense, Dr. Pepper is SO DELICIOUS. It is probably, no kidding, on my list of Top 10 Things, Ever, For Serious.)
Another Interesting Thing that Happened: my sister got married. Like, with a fancy dress, and a church. I really don't know what I think about it, and I suspect I never will. It makes exactly as much sense as anything else she's ever done. I haven't felt like the two of us were in the same world since somewhere around 1993. Sure she hasn't even been going with the guy for a whole year but her marriage will inevitably be a seemingly effortless success, because everything else she's done has been. It's not luck, and I can't really be mad about it. She's just a very logical person and she weighs all the variables and thinks about them until the right course of action becomes apparent, then she disappears down that path until she emerges victorious.
There was a lot of biblical talk in the ceremony, most of the attendees were from her church, at one point there was eating of Jesus blood and body, and I was wearing a dang SUIT. But I actually reached a level of discomfort that was like a nirvana (much like, um, right now) so it went by quickly. And the suit had a bow tie and was slightly too large (I borrowed it from Scott) so I was still a bit silly and that grounds me.
The groom-- a sort of concentrated ball of affluent only-childness-- exhausts me just to think about, so I won't say much about him except that he married my sister whose now-maiden name is the exact same as his own mother's maiden name, and that is endlessly funny to me. Also my sister has infinite patience and thinks he is funny, so this is surely a good thing for both of them.
The other big obviously Interesting Thing is that the reggae band guys have left, gone on tour, moved away to Reggae World for good, leaving behind only a small mountain of crap which we're slowly getting rid of. It's mostly gone now. Even their smells left more completely than I anticipated. (They said they'd be coming back in 'a couple weeks' to get 'the rest of the stuff,' but not a single person involved in that conversation believed it.) So now the house is all friends, gloriously geeky friends, all geeky in different ways which if made into a Venn Diagram would look like the old Krylon paint logo. Computer geek, music geek, video game geek, anime geek, and, uh, Paul. One of them is even a girl! (Hint: it's not Paul.) It's pretty great, really.
I saved the shittiness for last because I hate complaining, so you'd have to be really interested in me to even get this far down in all these words. As everyone probably guessed, it turns out I still hate working retail, even when it's in a different corner of the store. I hate that I seem to please most of my customers without managing to please any of the higher-ups. I thought I was good at my job, but it turns out that they just weren't complaining because I was New. Now it's been three months and I'm not New anymore and so I should be expected to be adhering 100% to the Staples Brand Easy Fucking Promise, where "easy" means putting a dollar in a machine to get a card to put in another machine in order to make ten cents worth of copies even though you're an old person and scared of machines. What's "easy" about coming in to get two papers laminated and hearing six pitches for unrelated services? They're coming down on me for not selling the stupid store membership cards, and I can't make myself do it. I'm not a good salesman even for things that I think are good, and getting a check for six Staples Dollars every three months in exchange for giving the company your personal information doesn't really seem like a good deal to me. I'm supposed to be using the Order Envelope for every job, which-- you guessed it-- involves getting all of everyone's personal information before I laminate those two papers. And this is all stuff that would be a problem even if every customer knew what they wanted and the machines weren't constantly breaking down and the replacement parts would arrive on time and the outside production centers didn't fuck up four out of every five orders. I could go on and on. (I suspect I already have.)
Basically, I'm not the employee they want in that position, and it's only going to get more awful before I quit or they fire me, and I'm not sure what to do about that. It's becoming clear to them that I am just not Copy Lead Material, and if I'm not the Lead then I can't be full time, in which case I don't get enough pay to survive. (In my defense, though, the only reason I'm the Copy Lead is because I was available full time and he asked me if I wanted to make more money per hour. Even if I'd had an idea what I was getting into, why would I turn that down? Ask me if I want to make more money, and that seems like a pretty easy question. He didn't ask me if I thought I'd be a good leader, or Easy Team Care Sales Associate.)
I don't have much of a safety net and it was only after months of searching that I even found this job. I'm thinking I need to make some Serious Life Changes (I'll spare you the fevered explanation as to how it was that Grand Theft Auto IV helped me come to this conclusion)... but how? Where? Is there a way I can, at this point, put myself through school? Financially and mentally, could I make it? Would I be better off? I know I was not meant to work endless strings of shitty retail jobs with an average of one hundred dollars in my bank account at the end of every month until I die, but that seems to be the only sort of "opportunity" I have ever found... am I looking in the wrong places? I make jokes about being lazy, but in truth, I'm just highly distracted. They have pills to fix that, but who'd be buying the pills? Just quitting soda won't pay for them. See, I just got distracted for about two actual minutes after typing that last sentence thinking about how much I want a Dr. Pepper, why it is that I could take or leave other sodas but I go so crazy for that one, blah blah blah BAH, it's a lot to think about.
Right now I'm just going to get these stones out of me. Then I'll probably have to end up borrowing money in order to pay my rent. And I'll have a series of increasingly uncomfortable conversations with my boss until I can't even think about the color red because it reminds me of work and makes me stressed out. But I'm not looking forward to the unemployment and the barely-scraping-by and the next shitty retail job.
But hey... think of how much more crazy I'd be going if I didn't have love! (Seeing as I still suck at typing about love, I'll just say that Kempo is still great, and we have amazing weekends together, and yay.)
I'm looking forward to one of the house-friends with a car getting home from work so I can go get my Vicodin and maybe some food without putting the general public at risk by getting behind the wheel in this state. Speaking of which, I think I'll replay the last couple GTA missions and get the Other Ending. And the machine is done eating the tree so things are looking up already!
Lucky for you three, I finished Grand Theft Auto IV last night and for many reasons I am right now pretty crazy. Plus, some pretty Interesting Things have happened so that excuse is now beyond flimsy.
Here's what my world is like right now: my kidneys want this (these?) stone(s?) out of them very badly, but the stone will not go quietly. I'm in a terrible amount of pain, plus I have a headache that is probably from not eating, but it hurts much more to move around and finding food would involve moving around. There is a machine right across the street that is EATING TREES, and the sound isn't helping matters. But I am feeling sort of peaceful, as though I have escaped from reality into a world of pain, and even though it's a pain-world I was getting quite sick of reality.
This entry will suck because it's being interrupted by trips to the bathroom. SO MUCH WATER! FLUSH, DAMN YOU WORTHLESS KIDNEYS.
Incidentally, and feel pretty dumb that it took a doctor to reveal this to me, it is not a coincidence that my kidney stones (now: 4) happened to coincide with periods of me drinking a lot of soda all the time. Four times now I have had to say to myself, look, dude, don't drink so much goddamn soda. Hopefully "it makes you get kidney stones" is a good enough reason for it to stick this time. I can be pretty dumb. (But in my defense, Dr. Pepper is SO DELICIOUS. It is probably, no kidding, on my list of Top 10 Things, Ever, For Serious.)
Another Interesting Thing that Happened: my sister got married. Like, with a fancy dress, and a church. I really don't know what I think about it, and I suspect I never will. It makes exactly as much sense as anything else she's ever done. I haven't felt like the two of us were in the same world since somewhere around 1993. Sure she hasn't even been going with the guy for a whole year but her marriage will inevitably be a seemingly effortless success, because everything else she's done has been. It's not luck, and I can't really be mad about it. She's just a very logical person and she weighs all the variables and thinks about them until the right course of action becomes apparent, then she disappears down that path until she emerges victorious.
There was a lot of biblical talk in the ceremony, most of the attendees were from her church, at one point there was eating of Jesus blood and body, and I was wearing a dang SUIT. But I actually reached a level of discomfort that was like a nirvana (much like, um, right now) so it went by quickly. And the suit had a bow tie and was slightly too large (I borrowed it from Scott) so I was still a bit silly and that grounds me.
The groom-- a sort of concentrated ball of affluent only-childness-- exhausts me just to think about, so I won't say much about him except that he married my sister whose now-maiden name is the exact same as his own mother's maiden name, and that is endlessly funny to me. Also my sister has infinite patience and thinks he is funny, so this is surely a good thing for both of them.
The other big obviously Interesting Thing is that the reggae band guys have left, gone on tour, moved away to Reggae World for good, leaving behind only a small mountain of crap which we're slowly getting rid of. It's mostly gone now. Even their smells left more completely than I anticipated. (They said they'd be coming back in 'a couple weeks' to get 'the rest of the stuff,' but not a single person involved in that conversation believed it.) So now the house is all friends, gloriously geeky friends, all geeky in different ways which if made into a Venn Diagram would look like the old Krylon paint logo. Computer geek, music geek, video game geek, anime geek, and, uh, Paul. One of them is even a girl! (Hint: it's not Paul.) It's pretty great, really.
I saved the shittiness for last because I hate complaining, so you'd have to be really interested in me to even get this far down in all these words. As everyone probably guessed, it turns out I still hate working retail, even when it's in a different corner of the store. I hate that I seem to please most of my customers without managing to please any of the higher-ups. I thought I was good at my job, but it turns out that they just weren't complaining because I was New. Now it's been three months and I'm not New anymore and so I should be expected to be adhering 100% to the Staples Brand Easy Fucking Promise, where "easy" means putting a dollar in a machine to get a card to put in another machine in order to make ten cents worth of copies even though you're an old person and scared of machines. What's "easy" about coming in to get two papers laminated and hearing six pitches for unrelated services? They're coming down on me for not selling the stupid store membership cards, and I can't make myself do it. I'm not a good salesman even for things that I think are good, and getting a check for six Staples Dollars every three months in exchange for giving the company your personal information doesn't really seem like a good deal to me. I'm supposed to be using the Order Envelope for every job, which-- you guessed it-- involves getting all of everyone's personal information before I laminate those two papers. And this is all stuff that would be a problem even if every customer knew what they wanted and the machines weren't constantly breaking down and the replacement parts would arrive on time and the outside production centers didn't fuck up four out of every five orders. I could go on and on. (I suspect I already have.)
Basically, I'm not the employee they want in that position, and it's only going to get more awful before I quit or they fire me, and I'm not sure what to do about that. It's becoming clear to them that I am just not Copy Lead Material, and if I'm not the Lead then I can't be full time, in which case I don't get enough pay to survive. (In my defense, though, the only reason I'm the Copy Lead is because I was available full time and he asked me if I wanted to make more money per hour. Even if I'd had an idea what I was getting into, why would I turn that down? Ask me if I want to make more money, and that seems like a pretty easy question. He didn't ask me if I thought I'd be a good leader, or Easy Team Care Sales Associate.)
I don't have much of a safety net and it was only after months of searching that I even found this job. I'm thinking I need to make some Serious Life Changes (I'll spare you the fevered explanation as to how it was that Grand Theft Auto IV helped me come to this conclusion)... but how? Where? Is there a way I can, at this point, put myself through school? Financially and mentally, could I make it? Would I be better off? I know I was not meant to work endless strings of shitty retail jobs with an average of one hundred dollars in my bank account at the end of every month until I die, but that seems to be the only sort of "opportunity" I have ever found... am I looking in the wrong places? I make jokes about being lazy, but in truth, I'm just highly distracted. They have pills to fix that, but who'd be buying the pills? Just quitting soda won't pay for them. See, I just got distracted for about two actual minutes after typing that last sentence thinking about how much I want a Dr. Pepper, why it is that I could take or leave other sodas but I go so crazy for that one, blah blah blah BAH, it's a lot to think about.
Right now I'm just going to get these stones out of me. Then I'll probably have to end up borrowing money in order to pay my rent. And I'll have a series of increasingly uncomfortable conversations with my boss until I can't even think about the color red because it reminds me of work and makes me stressed out. But I'm not looking forward to the unemployment and the barely-scraping-by and the next shitty retail job.
But hey... think of how much more crazy I'd be going if I didn't have love! (Seeing as I still suck at typing about love, I'll just say that Kempo is still great, and we have amazing weekends together, and yay.)
I'm looking forward to one of the house-friends with a car getting home from work so I can go get my Vicodin and maybe some food without putting the general public at risk by getting behind the wheel in this state. Speaking of which, I think I'll replay the last couple GTA missions and get the Other Ending. And the machine is done eating the tree so things are looking up already!