5 days in retail

   I've been working at the yoga studio for eight months and it’s been great. Monotonous, repetitive, tedious but great.

Bored but happy.

   I was making the province-approved minimum wage at half the hours an adult works per week. The job was cushy but following the imposed budget was not.

   Broke and boozeless, I applied to dozens of jobs online but it seems my on-paper skills are worth nothing and all I've got on my side is the keen ability to shmooze.

   In a fit of desperation and/or mania, I applied to a Canadian outlet retail store that caters to vapid young adult women and really young mothers and their kids. It's like someone invented everything I can't stand and made me sell clothes to it. Banter and jocularity are not appreciated like they are in more laid-back workplaces.

   My first shift was a four-hour shift and I came home and cried. No, I almost made it home; I sobbed on my way home without any sense of dignity or self-awareness. And, because they don't let you wear supportive (read: ugly) shoes at this store my feet were giant stumps of elephant-man pain from supporting my dumb body-weight in flats.

   An nonagenarian-lady came in to shop for shoes on my fourth day. Old ladies love me and I was thrilled to talk to someone whose physical age is so close to my emotional age. I enthusiastically began to help her in her search for a pair of shoes

   She later yelled at me for having red hair.

   While shopping, practice common sense (sēnsus commūnis) and courtesy (kur-tuh-see). Retail people are supposed to help you find stuff and with product knowledge but not be your servant. Put things back where you found them, mind your offspring, and use your god damn manners.

Also, don't switch tags to get a deal. Which decade do you live in where everything isn't catalogued on a computer?

   On my fifth and final day, I entered the sales floor with a quiet peace in my heart. I robotically unpacked pashminas with a dreamy (some might say creepy) smile on my face. I was kneeling to reach the bottom scarf-hangers when the assistant manager came over to tell me not to sit while working. She was tapping her toes and had her arms folded and looked the way humans look when they're assholey. I was too far-gone to care.

and I waited. My lunch break came at 2:30pm and I left. I walked home, turned off my cell phone, took off my work clothes, put on my pajamas, and never went back.

Like an adult.

October 27 & 28 Review

    I was sick this past weekend. I reached out for support and was offered every home-remedy ranging from rest and tea to Nyquil and beer. I decided to beat the shit out of the sickness with the unbridled power of yoga:

    Regular bodily functions are a terrible thing to have in spandex among ten fit strangers; gassiness, coughing, and having an unstoppable itch are all natural things that are amplified in a quiet and zen room. Having a case of plugged-sinuses made me feel incredibly self-conscious and justifiably gross:

  

   After sleevin' it for the rest of the class, I was relieved to unwind in the least judgemental place on Earth — the city bus.

   A year ago, my friend taught me how to crochet. I vaguely remember her becoming frustrated with my slow learning progress and threatening me with physical violence. She can't hold a candle to this crochet-shaming bus-monster:

   This lady noticed my craft and confided that she too knows how to crochet.

   “Do you know how to make a chain?” she asked sweetly/menacingly.

   “I think so,” said I with trust and foolishness.

   “Here,” she said while taking my yarn and stick away from me.

  I didn't realise I had been crocheting all wrong. This is how I crochet:

when I should be crocheting like:

   There's this hand-contortion that you're supposed to do to make the process look effortless. It's something like:

and I just couldn't get my hand to stay folded in that position. If left unsupervised, the hand would unfurl and go back to groping and mishandling the yarn.

   The lady kept taking the crochet from me to demonstrate. Each time, she would walk me through the steps, hand the yarn back, and look around the bus to make eye contact with someone so she could shrug and shake her head like “Can you believe this girl?”

can you believe she actually said that?

  But really, the lady was incredibly adorable during the entire bus ride and, as a bonus, we used the impromptu lesson to ignore the drunk, dishevelled vagrant who was yelling to us.

Oct 20/21 Review / A Cat.

   

   This weekend I met up with a friend from college to wander around the city to see what we could see. 

   We went down to the Market where something NFL themed was going on. We watched children pathetically throw footballs through tires and they were awful at it.

   

   I looked for the giant pumpkin but didn't see it which means it clearly wasn't big enough.

   Another thing that's happening is that my friend, Dustin, is moving Out West to be a cowboy or an oil tycoon or a Chinese immigrant or something. In doing so, he's leaving behind this wittle orange kitty, Minnie.

    Minnie is a furry little beer-swilling dumpling of complicated emotions. She is definitely on the spectrum. She avoids eye contact, doesn't want to sustain a cuddle, and is incredibly non-verbal. Also, it's probably unrelated but she might also have a mild case of micrognathia.

    Right now, she's living with Dustin's roommates and is reportedly happy. However, the big move Out West presents a need for Minnie to have a home with regular and present guardians and maybe a friend to hang out with...

I propose:

 

   His name is Biggie and her name is Minnie. It's fate.

    They've met tons of times and it always goes really well.

    They're like a fuzzier and more idiotic version of Milo and Otis. Who in their right mind would pass up that opportunity for a pairing?

  Fools would.

  It's true that Dustin has already raised a cat with my friend Jessica and so has hastily decided that she would be a good choice to take care of Minnie. 

 

  I want to destroy her.

  Jess is awesome but I will besmirch her character and throw her under every bus until that cat is mine.

  I've already started spreading little white lies around the cat-community to undermine her capabilities as a suitable cat-owner:

   “I once saw her pull on her cat's tail for no reason.”

   “She drove her last cat to the brink of cat-madness.”

and

   “She once strangled a cat.”

the cat community is also the knitting community

   The whole project is incredibly time-consuming. 

#TeamMiggie