Ever have one of those days? || 2003-10-12 at 10:19 p.m.
Bear with me. I'm hoping this funk will leave me soon, and that I'll stop with these "pity me" entries. But they're how I feel at the moment, and I can't change that....
Today was one of those days. You walk into work reminding yourself that it's only five hours, only five hours, and that's the only thing that gets you through. The only thing. And yet what happens the moment you clock in? Carla asks you to say four hours longer. So you're sick and angry and suddenly you're tired of your job, just like that, just when you're finally settling in. You game has been off, but you don't care anymore. You just don't care. You're so tired of it because you're there all the time. You spend more time in that godforsaken store than you spend at school, and that scares you.
That scares you because you start thinking about Sheri working at Linens -N- Things her whole life, that being her career, and you remember that when you were working there it did feel like forever. Like every shift was your life, stretched right out in front of you, never ending. And that's how you felt right then about Safeway, and you thought about your mother who had started working there at just a scant two or three years older than you, and you imagine being her age, still working there, and that scares you. But she loves her job, and you hate it. And yet no matter how much you remind yourself of this fact, of how much you want to graduate from college, you remember your bank balance and the semester estimates of the college you want to go to. And you remember your mother's promise that she will get you through college, but that just makes you remember your combined household income. Then you think about your friends, the ones who are getting a full ride from their parents, and how one remarked, "I should probably get a job" like it didn't really matter at all if she did or didn't. And that made you come close to tears, so you had to compose yourself in the checkstands several times. But you didn't want to. You just wanted to curl up with your grief and cry and cry until you were out of this funk. And you saw Roger in the liquor department, bald Roger whose little bit of hair is grey, and you see yourself in him. Just a queer working at Safeway their whole life. And as you're doing carts you just keep thinking about this, and you can't even smile at people and say, "Have a nice day" because of this fine mist of angst that is hanging around your head, turning every thought in your head into a reason to sob endlessly.
And you just want to cry because it all seems so useless and futile. You'd be the first person in your family to graduate college, but maybe your family just isn't meant to go to college. And you get angry at all the people in the world that have scholarships and don't need them. And you think about how you have to work twice as hard as them to go to school, and they don't even appreciate how lucky they are.
And to top it all off, you start to think about how you don't appreciate how lucky you are. You live in a nation that is actually allowing you to go to school, and even though you're working your ass off, you're still doing it. You have your meals, your house, your family, your health.
And then you think about the cancer drive at work, and how Gwen had that biopsy and how on the day she found out that lump in her breast wasn't cancerous, they started that breast cancer drive. And you remember the remark that Kelly made that all those slips of pink had Gwen's name on them. And then you remember that you pledged to help Cynthia with the hot dog sales, volunteer an hour or two to raise money for the breast cancer drive.
And you start to feel slightly better.