Now That It Is Sufficiently Late...
Jewelry is a game. And I am a keeper of the jargonous keys.
It approximates tolerability in a way that being slowly ground by the nonthreatening soul-eviscerating tedium of corporate giant Books-a-million never will. To elucidate: I love books, and when you work in a corporate bookstore, books, like the customers themselves, are your enemy. You are quickly spun into an unhealthy cycle in which you love books but hate books and cannot fully fathom what you truly feel. Also: when you work in a corporate bookstore, there is no constructed role for you to play that really separates you from the customer. You could easily switch places, the customer and you, for you are both not so different, except the customer is a festering idiot-lunatic and you are a lunatic who knows where all or most or just some of the books are located.
But jewelry, there's a fine game. I play the expert, carefully dispensing cryptic words about luster and brilliance and carats while also, in the great spirit of P. T. Barnum, sell you on the esoteric meaning and inherent symbolic value of this particular arrangement of colors and shapes. And often, we also engage in the joint purchase of the grandiose fantasy that this jewelry is not only beautiful; it is beautiful on you. We ignore the unibrows, the long stray hairs on the flabbed female chins, the graveyards of teeth, the oversized ill-approximation of a human body, the eyes just significantly too far apart, and dammit we dream together that jewelry is something you need. Because it is gorgeous. It's harder to switch roles here; I'm wearing a suit and you're wearing too-tight velveteen sweatpants and I'm hoping this choice of clothing is not a reflection of your budget. I have psychological protection, with my suit and the keys and the fancy words as my talismans protecting me from identifying with the very culture of the mall which I am a part of but that I despise, for in that culture is the embodiment of everything in the human race that depresses me. Parking lots are doubly emblematic of the malaise of humanity. As long as I can keep from identifying, I can keep it from depressing me too badly, I can keep from thinking about the terrible depressing nature of the mall as I leech off the vital nutrient of money that will one day buy me out of this entire societal system.
Of course, playing this game ties me down, anchors me with responsibility. And I feel the tug of wanderlust, the burning need to engage in "andare"--vado!vado!vado!--to journey, to travel, to lose and be lost and find and be found whatever can be, maybe you know what I'm talking about, this need to escape...but I am due in my suit and with my shiny lingo right on the dot of six in the evening, so the keys stay on the end table, the coat stays in the closet, and I wait for my time to come and clock in. That is the downside to playing the jobs game. Always has been.
It approximates tolerability in a way that being slowly ground by the nonthreatening soul-eviscerating tedium of corporate giant Books-a-million never will. To elucidate: I love books, and when you work in a corporate bookstore, books, like the customers themselves, are your enemy. You are quickly spun into an unhealthy cycle in which you love books but hate books and cannot fully fathom what you truly feel. Also: when you work in a corporate bookstore, there is no constructed role for you to play that really separates you from the customer. You could easily switch places, the customer and you, for you are both not so different, except the customer is a festering idiot-lunatic and you are a lunatic who knows where all or most or just some of the books are located.
But jewelry, there's a fine game. I play the expert, carefully dispensing cryptic words about luster and brilliance and carats while also, in the great spirit of P. T. Barnum, sell you on the esoteric meaning and inherent symbolic value of this particular arrangement of colors and shapes. And often, we also engage in the joint purchase of the grandiose fantasy that this jewelry is not only beautiful; it is beautiful on you. We ignore the unibrows, the long stray hairs on the flabbed female chins, the graveyards of teeth, the oversized ill-approximation of a human body, the eyes just significantly too far apart, and dammit we dream together that jewelry is something you need. Because it is gorgeous. It's harder to switch roles here; I'm wearing a suit and you're wearing too-tight velveteen sweatpants and I'm hoping this choice of clothing is not a reflection of your budget. I have psychological protection, with my suit and the keys and the fancy words as my talismans protecting me from identifying with the very culture of the mall which I am a part of but that I despise, for in that culture is the embodiment of everything in the human race that depresses me. Parking lots are doubly emblematic of the malaise of humanity. As long as I can keep from identifying, I can keep it from depressing me too badly, I can keep from thinking about the terrible depressing nature of the mall as I leech off the vital nutrient of money that will one day buy me out of this entire societal system.
Of course, playing this game ties me down, anchors me with responsibility. And I feel the tug of wanderlust, the burning need to engage in "andare"--vado!vado!vado!--to journey, to travel, to lose and be lost and find and be found whatever can be, maybe you know what I'm talking about, this need to escape...but I am due in my suit and with my shiny lingo right on the dot of six in the evening, so the keys stay on the end table, the coat stays in the closet, and I wait for my time to come and clock in. That is the downside to playing the jobs game. Always has been.