Dear Ridiculous Customer,

In response to your parting comment ("It's too bad people have to be so bitchy and mean just to get what they want."):

You'd have to pay me a lot more than 35 bucks in store credit to act like that.

Back from the Dragon-Infested Precipice at the End of the Earth

I've been quiet here lately, and I should probably continue that silence today, considering that it's already 4:00 in the afternoon and I have yet to get a single important thing done. (Well, I taught a class this morning, but whatever.) But for the first time in a while, I feel like sharing. I won't share the really interesting stuff, like the imaginative ways some of my students have been messing with me, or the passive-agressive conflict I'm entrenched in with a family member, or the over-the-top crazy customer stories I've been able to collect at the bookstore lately. Sorry. I'm trying really hard to keep this blog from becoming a sounding board for my anxieties and bad moods.

But today I woke up to rain, and drove to work in rain, and drove home in rain, and read a good book and intermittently napped in a gray living room. And outside, there was rain. There's still rain. Some people might be depressed by that, but I love it. I've never listened closely enough to that Blind Melon song to really know what Shannon Hoon was talking about when he said, "And I start to complain that there's no rain," but I like to imagine that the guy was like me and felt comforted by rain. (I'm sure Eric will correct me later.) So I've been taking advantage of the weather, allowing myself to be lazy and sleepy and lost in a story. I'm even going to put a positive spin on a negative part of my day. Watch:

The downstairs neighbor is recording a pleasant, bluesy guitar riff this afternoon. I'm annoyed that it's as loud coming from his apartment as it would be if I were playing it on my own stereo, and I'm not in love with the constant stopping and starting over again, but I'm not complaining yet. That's partly because it's not as bad as the rap that usually emanates from downstairs, and partly because he's been pretty considerate lately and I feel indulgent, and partly because I'm exhausted from all the complaining I've done in the past couple of weeks, since I decided it didn't make sense for me to just accept his noise as part of my own life. The effort has paid off, especially in terms of the bass level and the inappropriate hours, but I instinctively avoid confrontation, and it's hard work for me to be a bitch, even in the very best sense of the word. Which is, by the way, Tina Fey's sense:



So today I'm taking a lot of deep breaths to suppress the sudden spikes in my blood pressure that correspond with the rise of the guitar notes, and it's working. I feel relaxed and refreshed and ready to turn up my own music so I can plan my last three days of class (hooray!) and later on, cook comfort food (homemade macaroni and cheese), then watch the presidential debate and make snarky comments about John McCain (it's called having fun with political bias, and I'm not proud of it, but I do enjoy it).

Fine, Thank You

It was a good weekend. (Incidentally, "weekend," according to Amber and Eric's Post-Collegiate Dictionary, is defined as roughly Saturday evening through Monday.) The first half was spent with people: On Friday night Eric's youngest brother and his wife drove down from Fargo to sleep on our living room floor for a couple of nights, and Eric's oldest brother and our friend Nils joined most of the attendant festivities. I made simple but fantastic chicken on Friday (Thank you, Tyler Florence, for being both hot and genius.), and on Saturday we discovered a bar within walking distance of our apartment that has good food, good beer, good happy hour specials, a good jukebox, pool tables, and was not obnoxiously crowded or noisy. On a Saturday night. Impossible, but true. On Sunday we had the most amazing Chinese lunch ever, and then everyone left. And we proceeded to do nothing. Unless you count watching TV (Apocalypse Now, Gilmore Girls, and The Sopranos), reading, and napping as doing something. I actually don't.

So now I'm all peopled out and rested up for the hard work and diligence of the next two days, when I intend to do a lot of cleaning and writing and maybe even some writing about cleaning. And then I'll go to Barnes & Noble for a couple of days and do a little work in between social time with my coworkers and the customers.

I'm not sure this is really adulthood, but for the moment it's working for me.

Side Effects May Include

So the weird people mostly stayed home today, and I probably should have followed their lead. I'm on the fourth day of an illness that I suspect would be worse if not for the whole bag of zinc and echinacea lozenges I've consumed in that time, but it's still wearing me out pretty badly. Among its other symptoms, apparently, is the nearly irrepressible urge to flick annoying customers on the forehead. Or to use the step stool I had to retrieve from halfway across the store to smack the woman sitting on a much closer one. Or to drop to the floor shrieking when the ridiculously unintuitive computer program we use can't find a title because I'm misspelling a name by a single letter.

Good thing I only worked a five-hour shift.

I'm feeling much better now that I'm home, and since tonight is Eric's poker night, I'll be having a girl's night in with myself. And the cats. They're girls too. But they don't get to share my calzone.

Occupational Perks

Some days people are weirder than on other days. Or maybe on some days more weird people buy books. My favorite comment of the day, out of the mouth of a guy who until then did not seem weird, was, "I'm not a communist, so I watch Bill O'Reilly."

I Must've Been a Very Good Girl

I just swung by the Barnes & Noble where I work to do my last-minute shopping, and when I got there a few of my coworkers mentioned that my Secret Santa gift was in the break room, and that it was a huge bag of stuff. So I went back and opened it, and I don't know yet who my Santa was, but it's someone who gets me. The giant bag contained a little party: Asian-inspired trail mix, cheddar and scallion sourdough twists, dip bowls, plastic cups, beverage napkins, and a mixed six pack of good beer. (For those of you who are interested in these things, it contains Hacker-Pscorr Weisse, Golden Leaf Wheat, Peroni, Sierra Nevada Wheat, Singha Lager, and Sapporo. Ha! All lagers and wheat beers, which Eric doesn't like and won't steal.)

I hope my Secret Santa's intent wasn't that I'd share...because I just don't think that's going to happen. You know, because I'm full of the spirit of holiday giving.

We leave for Eric's parents' house tonight...hope all of you have a wonderful holiday!

Bring on the Happy Music

I have a lot to get done today: cleaning, class planning, yoga to ease my spasming back, work at the bookstore late this evening. And all this while groggy from too much sleep (got up at 8:30, not bad for a Saturday morning, except that Crime and Punishment and I were asleep on the couch by 11:00 last night) and unwashed because of a continuing lack of hot water in my building. I'll be boiling bathwater on the stove again today, which should make me feel better (and less itchy), but not until after I'm finished with the sweaty vacuuming. In the meantime, I'll have to draw my energy from artificial sources. Like Beck and Modest Mouse and this otherwise pointless blog post.

On Not Feeling Like It

My to-do list for today includes an exciting variety of tasks, none of which I want anything to do with. And while I'll admit that some of that laziness is internally generated, I really think the fact that it's 47 degrees outside right now and I have no say over whether there's heat in my apartment (which there isn't yet) is playing a supporting role. Today is a perfect day for putting on a pair of fleecy socks, sitting underneath a big fleecy blanket and the pair of cats who refuse to relinquish contact with the fleecy blanket, and reading a good book while drinking cup after cup of hot tea. In comparison, cleaning, vacuuming, planning classes, and grading all sound like very cold activities for a cold day.

Tuesday is Brain-Garbage Day

Today is my first day off work since last Monday. That's seven straight days of eight-hour shifts at a job that's more physical than you'd guess, and today I feel kind of like I was recently in a fistfight. At least, this is how I imagine that would feel. Because it's a pretty funny mental picture--and those of you who know me can go ahead and try it out: me in a fight. Most of my coworkers knew I was working a seven-day stretch because one simply cannot be silent about injustice at Barnes & Noble. The managers are nice enough that they don't actually want to screw us over, but sometimes they just don't pay attention. So you make them pay attention. And it worked, because yesterday the general manager told me I'd better sleep in today (which I did, past 9:30 even), and the assistant manager who made the schedule told me to lie around and do nothing all day. Which I won't, because doing nothing usually makes me feel like a big rolling ball of crap. And also because if I don't go to the grocery store today, we may not survive the week, and if I don't clean the litter box today, the more fastidious of my two cats might fill up with poo and explode. But I've made a decently lazy start to the day, since it's almost one in the afternoon and my hair is still wet from the shower and I'm on my first cup of tea. In fact, the only thing really productive I've done today is schedule a meeting for Thursday with an instructor at the technical college where I'll be teaching. Because I decided to take that teaching job, like I knew I would. And I'm nervous about that, but excited too. It'll be a good change in my life, and I think it will be a good place to start teaching. So far, everyone seems supportive. So yeah, excited.

But you know what I'm also excited about? Finishing this rambling post so I can do my errands and chores, and read Anna Karenina, which--in more random news--is totally engrossing and much more modern than I expected.

Plan B

It's been almost a week now since the last of the small envelopes turned up in my mailbox. I found it as I walked out the door to work last Friday, and spent the fifteen-minute drive in stony silence, with Damien Rice filling up the hollows in my melancholy. The first people I saw when I got to work were two of the people I like most there, and when they saw my face, they looked concerned and Maggie said quietly, "Did you hear?" I nodded and sucked my lips in, trying not to cry. "Plan B?" she said. "Which was really Plan A in the first place?"

When I walked into the breakroom to put away my coat and purse, I actually did start to cry. I collected a hug from another co-worker, took some deep breaths, and refused to talk about it anymore, because people don't usually trust the recommendations of a crying bookseller, and I wasn't going to be able to talk about not getting into any PhD programs without crying.

By the middle of my shift, after a few hours of mostly solitary work and then reading to children in my pajamas (for Friday Night Pajamarama), I was no longer in danger of crying. But even now, a week later, I'm still confused. Maggie was referring to the plan I didn't want to detail here unless life really came down to that. For a while I wasn't actually sure what to hope for, because if I got into a PhD program, awesome, and if I didn't, I would get to try out this new plan, which I'd been kind of excited about.

So the plan is this: I have an opportunity to make money by writing for a friend's website--enough money, if I do it right, to go down to part time at work, and probably eventually quit. Writing regular articles for the website will take up some time, but not so much time that I wouldn't be able to write fiction and submit it to publishers. Writing fiction is what I've really wanted to do for as long as I can remember, and if I retrace my thinking over the past few years, I realize that my desire to be a college professor originated with a desire to have a career that would allow me time to write. Until recently, I've been ignoring certain bugs in that plan. For instance, if I have a PhD and I'm teaching at a university, I have to do research and publish scholarly writing. I kind of enjoy writing literary criticism. But. How much time and energy would that leave me for writing fiction? Probably not much. In a way--and you probably won't hear many people say this--getting a PhD would have been a cop-out for me. That was me playing it safe. Because jumping naked into a big swirling pool of pure writing? That's scary. There's no guarantee of money in it, and creativity is an unpredictable beast. Writers become alcoholics for a reason.

So this is Plan B. But yeah, sort of Plan A in the first place.

I'm not saying I'll never get a PhD, because I think it sounds like fun, and I think I will someday be able to get into a program. Also, not seeing graduate school in my tangible future has changed my self-perception slightly. Before, I was just passing time in a bookstore before I went on to more respectable things. Now there's a possibility I'm stuck. Getting unstuck will be a frustrating and painful process, and I won't lie: I'm scared. But if I can make it work...