Death of a stranger

On Sunday night I got a phone call from Melissa.  She called to say she loved me, and that a friend of her’s was killed the night before in a car accident.  While I did not know him, it seems I know so many people who did.  While Melissa was not extremely close with David, our other friend Felicia was.  My boyfriend (they used to work together) said hi to him 30 minutes before the accident, and Melissa hugged him goodbye 20 minutes prior.  Felicia was at the scene when it happened.   This is not the first time I have been in a position of watching friends say their unexpected and final goodbyes to someone who otherwise had so much life ahead of them.  I am one of the lucky ones who has not had to live through the torment of burying a friend.  It would tear me apart.  It is difficult not knowing what to say, but I am grateful I do not truly empathize with that specific grief.

No one plans on the death of a loved one, but there is a knowing that grandparents and parents will eventually pass, a natural cycle, definitely not an easy one, but a necessary one.  It is different when it is the unexpected tragedy of a young friend, a brother, a son… in my meager attempt to offer kind words or otherwise console my grieving friends I kept hearing them “what if” everything? Grief is a difficult emotion, not one feeling but more of an event encompassing all human emotions: anger, guilt, regret, love, hate, sorrow; it comes in waves, some slapping harder than others against the faces of our understanding.

I write this mostly because of the trite message that lies within it, that there is a lesson in every tragedy.  While maybe the death of David could prompt an extensive list of “wear your seatbelt” and “even if you think you’re okay to drive, call a cab” or “respect the machine that you trust your life with”, I think the message was said best by Melissa.

We sat next to each other in a dimly lit bar with a beer in front of each of us, appreciative of the friendship that no one fully understands but everyone experiences.  Felicia was on the other end of the bar shooting pool, oversized sunglasses hiding eyes so sore from tears she kept saying they were going to bleed.  It seemed like everything was bleeding, from hearts to thoughts, to the condensation on the pint glasses.  Through her own teary eyes and our attempt at small talk, Melissa turned to me and said,

“Everything’s just so petty, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “Yeah,” I agreed. ” It is.”

I saw a quote on a marquee this past summer:

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. 

Its time.

It has been over two months since my last blog.  The quick update is a new job, a wonderful man who I deeply love, and going back to school. It is a rather positive experience of continuing my education in an institution which has stirred my mind and shaken my thoughts in a way I never expected.  I look at the world a little differently now - I am increasingly aware of how we are destroying it.  Now this is not some outright liberal message for everyone to get involved or buy a hybrid.  You’ve heard all that before.  I am just stating my point of view from a cynics perspective on the world.

I believe it is a combination of things: FGCU defining sustainability for me;  News articles describing daily the effects of global warming (species extinction, the autumn leaves not changing color, etc.); the awareness of exactly who the future is.  Pictures of friends’ babies and children, especially Mira, are stark images of beings who hold the capacity to learn our ways or learn new ways.  They have been born in an interesting time: a  world of overconsumption altering to a world of just enough; a country who’s proud red white and blue is about to turn green.  They say green is the new black.  I disagree; it should not be a fashion statement or a trend. 

I am almost certain everyone is tired of hearing about all of this ecological necessity for change.  But its not coming from treehugging hippies or PETA activists anymore.  What seems to be overstated is only the prologue to a story we can try to predict; we can assume outcomes or define it as fictional nonsense.  This is a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ kind of story though, one in need of a collective page turning, and one in need of writers, not an audience.

Lately I have felt very detatched from my friends, my family, my past.  It is my own fault.  I have been quite distracted though and will likely remain so.  I hope to be distracted with involvement, not some extremist who becomes an environmental evangelist, but as one who realizes we all owe the world.  There are so many of us who say “I’m only one person: what can I do?” I’d rather say “I’m one person and I do what I can.”

After all, it takes only a small push to make a movement.

Would you like a shopping cart? (Part II)

Today’s scecnario: I call work an hour before my shift. I say to my department manager, “I will not be coming in today.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Actually, I will not be coming back. This job is not for me, I can’t work for Nazi corporate America.” He apologized, stating that this is exactly what he did not want to happen. I briefly explained it was not his fault, he had been doing his job the way he was trained to do his job. I reminded him that I had worked corporate retail and had been in management, and I needed to quit before I got fired because I could no longer hold my tongue.

In a very low voice he said I needed to talk to one of the higher up managers and not to him. I told him he could relay the message. I’m sure he’s well equipped with a walkie. 

I can’t lie. It felt nice. I envision a Q next to my name on the schedule. How I love that permanant ink.

Would you like a shopping cart? (Part I)

I have mentioned before that I do not love my job. That was a gross understatement. I loathe my job. I dread going in and today I was driving to work in a fantasy state of mind. I daydreamed of walking in and telling my boss that this corporate nazi america micromanaged bullshit just isn’t for me. I pulled in to the parking lot, walked upstairs, put my purse in my locker and glanced into the manager’s office. There he was, looking miserable on the telephone but comfortable in his executive chair. He was viewing a spreadsheet on an oversized moniter and most likely discussing numbers and payroll trends with some uppety white-collar-oh-so-important person. So what did I do? I grabbed my walkie talkie and my name tag and proceeded to the drapery department.

I clocked in four minutes late. I no longer care that the letter “L” will be marked over my shift on the schedule in red indellible ink. “L” for “LATE”. (I should insist on management using lavender ink because the real world should be concerned about my feelings.) Never do they mark “SL” for “stayed late” to assist clueless customers in finding a product that does not exist.

I am tired of being looked at as someone who is incapable of performing the functions of a mundane job. I am tired of being talked to by people with absolutely no sense of humor and a stick shoved so far up there that in the rare instance it could be removed, the reality is they’ve grown quite fond of it. I am tired of getting my ass handed to me because I did not announce over the walkie to the M.O.D. that I would be straying seven feet away from my department.

Scenario of the day:

Customer walks by with a small item in her hand. Let’s say it was a spoon – it could not have possibly been larger than a spoon, so we’ll say it was a spoon. She was clearly browsing.

I said, “Hi, how are you?”

“Good, and you?”

I said, “fine, thank you.”  The customer continued to browse.

At this point, a manager came up to me. “Becky, what didn’t you do?” She asked, making it clear she witnessed the entire interaction.

“What???”

“You didn’t offer her a cart.”

I said, “Neither did you.”

“Well I was watching you to make sure you were doing your job.”

“I’m sorry, I must have slipped out of robot mode.” Thats right – we greet every customer and ask if they need a cart, even if it is just a spoon. I’ve said hi to the same customer 5 or 6 times and they eventually look at me like I’m a crazy person. As they should. But its my job. 

This afternoon I visited my boss from my previous job in corporate america. He is more miserable than I am, for he is that store manager on the phone with DMs and RMs and VPs and other abbreviated people. He is miserable on account of micro management and executive decisions made by people who look at reality through numbers on paper. Him and I have had plans for eight months to go get a beer. He’s too concerned about shrink and safety to frequent a bar anytime soon.

I do not want to be that girl stuck on the phone and concerned about dollars and HR and POs. I prefer to be the girl who leaves the – wait I must quote Kristen – “suck-you-in-till-the-memory-of-who-you-were-before-[retail]-is-just-a-vague-memory” job. I prefer to finish my education so that in case I ever go back to a title as dreadful as a “drapery specialist” I’ll at the very least be accredited in what makes me happy. I am determined that it will never come to that. I’ll be at the very least doing what makes me happy.

Loopy loops

I do not love my job. I am a drapery specialist at one of those large corporate retail chain stores. I do, however, love people, and love interacting with people. Especially people with a sense of humor. The majority of customers I assist on a day-to-day basis are women and occasionally a man who is all but dragged by his shirt collar by his wife into the department. The woman will hold out a drapery panel from the towering displays, look at it, shake her head, huff, and then turn to her husband, who is usually mapping out an escape route as she fusses over fabric.

“What do you think?” she’ll ask.

“Honey, I don’t care. This is your project. Yes, that’s nice.”

“Oh I don’t know… the color’s wrong,” she’ll say as she moves on to the next display, pulling out the panel like a rehearsed dance routine, asking for his opinion but deeming it worthless. He’ll jingle the change in his pocket and glance over at me – then suddenly gets the deer-in-the-headlights oh god please don’t let this sales lady come over here and ask if we need…

“Hi how are you?” I interject. “What kind of drapery are you looking for?”

“We’re fine,” husband says, just as wifey gives him the evil eye as though he were a misbehaving child. “Actually,” she begins, once more pulling the panel out toward her dramatically. “I was wondering if this color came in a tab top,” she explains so certainly.

The scene continues, as I walk the couple past the displays pretending to know precisely what I am talking about. If you say something with enough confidence…

Today I had the greatest couple ever. They were an absolute riot. They came to me and the woman told me she knew nothing. The husband admitted he knew even less. We started with hardware. Usually it is encouraged to choose the panels first, but they had specific needs and hardware it was. It was oh-so-easy. We made our way into the drapery room where husband, manly man in his burgundy Florida State polo and aged beard, explained he wanted to do loopy-loops.

This was a new one. Wifey explained – scarf valance. Now swaggy-swags or drapey-drapes might have clued me in – but loopy-loops… so we start off… “Wait!” wifey says. “Now lets just look at some of the other hardware honey.” He had a deathgrip on the shopping cart as if it would immobilize him, keep him safe from the shopping experience. But the nagging voice beckoned him, and like a good man he looked at every decorative rod we carry. I stayed behind. This was between them.

He returned to the shopping cart and said, “Yes those are options. But we’re getting these.” She did not protest. This couple had a strong marriage.

So we picked out a scarf and naturally I had to pull the display off to sell to them, explaining it would be easy to recreate this slip-knot. Only I was talking out of my ass because I personally had never made this particular type of display. Husband examines it. Wifey and I are holding the ends while he explains how to tie. “No, go over this way and around and through. Like a tie.”

Uhhh. He explained again. I tried. She tried. No knot. She tried again. He demonstrated again.

“Oh god, people are going to think I’m gay!” he says.

Wifey nudges him. “Don’t say things like that. You might offend someone,” she says through her teeth.

“What?!”

“Well you don’t know. I mean, this girl could be gay…”

Hello. Yes hi, I’m standing right hear and did not suddenly go deaf. “Um, I’m not gay.”

“Oh come on,” he says to wifey. “Even if she was  she wouldn’t be offended. I’m a man tying a scarf into a loopy loop like I know what I’m doing! I look gay!”

I had to help another lady briefly. When I returned the couple had disappeared. I thought that its a damn shame that someone would take offense to that while I thought it was rather amusing. I stand by my thoughts that people are too easily offended in this day in age, that there is probably a case in a court somewhere right now where a jury has to listen to a case like this, where someone will walk away with thousands of dollars because he or she had their feelings hurt because of a remark like this. Its not a hate crime, its a joke. And if you had met this manly man making loopy loops in the middle of the department, you might have laughed. And wifey probably wanted to laugh. Wifey is too concerned because of all of the cards people pull – its because I’m gay, its because I’m black, its because I’m a women. Whatever happened to its because you’re an asshole?

My hope is encounter more people with a sense of humor and more people who don’t say things maliciously, but lightheartedly. I hope to meet more people who do not embrace what could potentially offend them, but laugh in the face of human differences and, yes, sometimes even stereotypes. And if this offended you, I do not offer my apologies or sympathy, but hope that you will find a better channel for your anger and better things to do with your time.

In the mean time, I am considering wearing lipstick to work and flat ironing my hair. You know, so no one’s afraid of offending my (non)alternative lifestyle.

Lavender Ink

I remember elementary school. I remember big yellow buses with rips in the sticky brown leather seats and windows smudged with fingerprints and faces. I remember the busses ran on diesel fuel. To counteract the impact on the environment we turned paper grocery bags into recycling monsters. A bit ironic thinking back now on the amount of wasted construction paper glued to a brown sack to make it look like a cartoonish hungry-for-aluminum type creature. I remember the teachers were allowed to yell at us and feelings were hardly considered. If we misbehaved we were denied certain privileges, just like we were rewarded for good behavior. It was… oh what’s the word… discipline!

I think about this time in my life each day when I see a hybrid bus pick up a group of school kids, either playing with their cell phones or ipods (though I suppose it is this generation’s pager or sony diskman), and they are dressed in clothes that would suggest virginity is as obsolete as the floppy disk. I’m sure these hybrid busses smell of  sanitation and it would not surprise me if there was a dispenser of purell and a calming aromatherapy airfresher at each exit point.

Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against hybrid vehicles.  In fact I’m pro-many things. Pro-hybrid, pro-choice, pro-germs, (I say let them build a tolerance - in my days of school we had anti-bodies, not anti-bacterial), pro-discipline, and most of all, pro-red-ink.

I don’t know how many people remember the story that explained what was really wrong with the educational system. It was not that students lived in low-income and high-crime rate areas, not ADD or low self esteem or supressing the freedom of expression in children, it wasn’t even as valid as problems arising from taking art and music out of the cirriculum. No. The problems with the students occurred because of red ink. Some schools banned teachers from grading papers in red, instead instructing them to use lavender because its more soothing for the student to receive a less judgmental color. I might add, too, that schools banned games such as ’tag’ during recess to be replaced by games where no one is ever “out”. I suppose this limits everything from musical chairs to teeball.

A child goes to school to learn and be prepared for the real world. The real world is not made up of lavender ink and fairness. I learned from red judgements on my papers, I learned from being picked last for kickball, and I learned that being hit with a fuzzy red germ infested dodgeball meant that I was out. It meant better luck next time.

I’ve caught the blog.

A pre-blogging excerpt from the journal I have not written in nearly enough.  

Kristen tells me I should blog. Daily. Because it helped her to write regularly. Of course I spit off my usual excuses to her. “I prefer a pen”. I do prefer a pen but I am also aware that I carry a different voice within my writing when I hear the keys tapping instead of the scratching ballpoint against paper and my hand gliding – no – dragging across the page like a metaphorical typewriter ribbon of progress. Of course my hand drags because it is the curse of the lefty. But I digress.

Had I been sitting in front of my ever-so-slow Dell Inspiron, patiently awaiting the system to load and watching progress bars and reading about critical errors on page in a computer language I will never understand, I might just go to Wikipedia. It is, after all, this generation’s source of information, however unreliable or useless the information may be. I want to know about the blog. What the etimology of the word really is.  (side note: I did in fact look it up on Wikipedia. ‘portmanteau of web log’. ) Really it is just another source for all of us who have something to say get it out there. And we all have something to say. Its just not all worth reading.

I find it a bit surreal that there are writers and there are bloggers, and there are a few that are both. (side note: For the record, Wikipedia also mentions that a blog is an online diary, and people sometimes refer to themselves as diarists and escribitionists, which makes this so much more amusing to me).   For someone like Kristen, blogging is an exercise for writing, and I am certain that there are a few very talented writers who use their blog as a tool to practice the craft. Anyone can buy a hammer and nails, but that does not automatically define them as a carpenter. The word itself – blog – sounds lazy and gutteral, like something you would not want to encounter and certainly not something you would want to be.

I’m waiting to hear about the first meeting: BA. Bloggers Anonymous. Of course meetings would be held in chat rooms where one’s identity would be protected by the internet safety harness of screennames. Members would be seriously inflicted by the blog. The name sounds like a disease. “Poor Deborah. She caught the blog. They’ve diagnosed her as a blogger.”

I fear this word will take on more identities. It is already a noun and a verb. Perhaps in the next few years it will take on adjective-like properties as well. All the cool kids will be sooo blog, asking me if I saw the bloggest new movie. Perhaps it will progress into an adverb. But I blogly doubt it. Preposition? Over the hill, behind the tree, and blog the rock? Definitely not.

Just a strange word and a stranger phenomenon. I’m not a blog hater. Or a blogger hater. There are stranger words severing this already butchered English language. I often think that before there is ever a universal language there will be a recognized language called American. It will be a proud dictionary, not of the english language, but of the American language, a large proud book likely made with materials from the USA but assembled in China. It will be filled with slangs and slurs and it will be updated frequently with words similar to those that have in fact recently been added to Webster’s – words like ginormous and crunk. Yes, yes, new words are made up all of the time and I would be ignorant to think it happens only in this country or in this language. The American dictionary will have a section in the back catering to this technologically advanced yet ever present lazy generation currently constructing an entirely abbreviated language. People will stop spelling words altogether in text msgs. (and yes, msgs was both deliberate and habitual). A dictionary for texters and instant messengers and likely one for bloggers as well.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll become a blogger and will addicted to how many people viewed my something to say? I’d much prefer to fill up this notebook first, but I see wordpress coming into play.

Damnit Kristen.