January 18–23, 2002 — Getting my story straight

I can hear the person who lives upstairs playing video games. I think he had a new stereo installed a few weeks ago; now I can hear my door shake a bit whenever he fires a particularly explosive weapon.

So, to cut to the chase: I’m now fully entrenched in my life of working for minimum wage and trying to make ends meet. I still haven’t worked a real shift with real customers, but I have a uniform and a manager and a coworker or two that I don’t get along with, so I think that I’m off to a good start. I’ll just have to fight my way up to a salary that I can live off of and then work forty-hour weeks making smoothies so that I can come home and play video games until I’m ready to go to bed, making sure to not think about anything that might make me realize that I could possibly be making something more of my life.

But maybe I should expand on things a little bit...

Friday was my first full day at my first non-office job. I started in the morning washing windows and door frames (and getting yelled at by the superintendent for not disposing of cardboard boxes in the proper bin). Erin walked by while I was washing a door frame; we took a second to recognize each other and then managed a bit of an awkward wave. Erin is the one who told Nathan about the job openings at the juice bar; I went to elementary school and high school with her, but we hadn’t seen each other since graduation. So it’s a bit of a strange situation, all in all.

I worked until 5:00 pm, at which point training started and most of the other employees arrived. Including me, there were nine people at training that night; of the eight other people, I went to high school with three of them — Erin, Laura, and Nathan — and had met Karen, another of the eight and one of Laura’s friends, a few weeks earlier when she joined a group of us to see the Harry Potter movie.

After training, I went home and then straight to bed, knowing that I would have to be at work at 8:00 am the next day.

Eleven people showed up for training on Saturday morning. While our circle of acquaintances no longer made up the majority of the group, we were split into two teams for training, so we managed to form almost an entire team on our own.

(This is going to be one of my more random digressions, but nonetheless: While I was looking up the proper spelling of “acquaintances”, I noticed the entry in the dictionary for “AC/DC” a page over. I thought of Jeff’s copy of the Hillbilly Tribute to AC/DC and read the definition. And then I thought to myself, am I the only one who doesn’t know that “AC/DC” is slang for bisexual? That’s the sort of thing I would expect myself to remember if I were to hear it used in that context. So I’m going to pretend that it’s the Canadian Oxford Dictionary that’s out of the loop instead of worrying that it might be me who hasn’t been keeping up with things. Easier this way, I think. But anyway — back to regularly scheduled programming...)

We learned how to make juices and smoothies and how to work the cash register. The juice machine spat out the occasional lime wedge, but the juice tasted alright in the end. We learned to make smoothies by making one each for ourselves; one smoothie later, I don’t think I’ll be drinking anymore of them once this job is over and they’re not free anymore.

I left with my bright-orange t-shirt and my dark-purple apron in my bag along with a printout of the keyboard layout for the cash register. Then I went home and waited out Andrew’s pseudo-surprise birthday party at Elaine’s apartment.

(And while we’re on the topic, a happy [belated] birthday to Matt is in order; I’d’ve updated the Doublenaut site in celebration of the McCracken twins’ birthday, but I’m not quite that organized. Soon, though.)

I eventually met up with Johnston and went to Elaine’s. We ended up at a pub-like place on Queen Street for a bit. Then back at Elaine’s. Nathan was late arriving because he’d been giving out free, not-quite-sober haircuts. Elaine was fixing some of his handiwork as I left.

And then Sunday. Sunday was mostly an awful day.

First thing in the morning, I was in the shower shaking a bottle of shampoo to try and get the last of it out. Then a large glob of shampoo flew out of the bottle and landed directly on the surface of my left eyeball. And it hurt. Quite a lot.

After washing my eye out for ten minutes or so (during which it actually got worse before it got better; I think the shampoo started to foam up before it allowed itself to wash off), I finished in the shower. The phone rang before the swelling had gone down in my eye.

On the phone was someone trying to recruit me for a focus group for an Internet company. The focus group paid $65 for less than two hours of work and was located 15 minutes away. But, after asking me a bunch of questions, the person on the phone told me that I was too experienced with the Internet to be part of the group. I sighed a bit and tried not to think of the three (three!) CDs that I could’ve bought with my focus group money.

(Meanwhile, Johnston told me that he thinks plenty of people would’ve paid good money to see me writhing in pain as I tried to wash shampoo out of my eye, so the wheels in my head are turning and I might get those three CDs yet...)

The rest of the day is mostly a blur. Johnston got me started playing Final Fantasy VII a few days ago, so I wasted a bit of my day playing that. The last few days have mostly rotated around that, actually. I haven’t been in the highest of spirits for awhile now, and it’s much easier to distract myself with video games than to actually think about much of anything. It’s been awhile since I’ve needed distractions like this, so I’m a little worried that I’m just putting off dealing with things.

In summary, then, I spent most of Sunday through Wednesday eating, sleeping, playing Final Fantasy VII, getting caught up on email, reading, and talking on ICQ. All in all, I accomplished very little: I mailed a parcel to Kerry, and I went over to Jeff and Amy’s house to watch a movie, and I may even have bought up some groceries, but that’s about it.

I spent most of tonight cleaning my room. I’d like to think that I’m finally making my way out of this rut, but I’m not confident that this is the case.

Hopefully I’ll be back soon.