Snow, snow, snow...it's all you hear about in these parts lately. Bet the folks in Antartica think we're being a little paranoid about it, inbetween times when they ask themselves "why am I in Antartica?"
Yes, it's been a snowy season in the Deep South this year, further proof (if you're a Republican) that Obama is sending this country straight to socialist hell or (if you're a Democrat) that the GOP is hellbent on turning everything to shit.
No wonder some nutjob in Arizona goes on a shooting spree...
I'm not here to say that the GOP is to blame, though God knows they do their fair share to stir up the hornet's nest of crazy mofos in this country. The Dems, much as I love 'em, are screwing the pooch.
Though to be fair, Sarah Palin puts a gunsight on your district and then you get shot? Got to be hard to ignore.
Anyway, on personal terms this has been a long month. I left my job at the hotel, then the snow storm and subsequent absence of hours at my other job left me thinking "hmm, perhaps I was a bit hasty to jump off that boat." I am available for weekend work, if any potential employers stumble across this, but I hope I'm making something out of nothing.
The fact that I went for a simple oil job yesterday and let myself be talked into spending $100 more on a new battery for my car even though, in retrospect, I didn't notice anything wrong with the other one...yeah, that doesn't play into my fears regarding my income at all.
Last summer, when I went so long between paychecks that I was begging and pleading for extensions on payments past due, I felt like I never wanted to be anywhere near this position again. So far, I've been lucky enough to not feel quite so pressured...until the loss of work due to the snow left me just a little aware of that feeling creeping back up.
So yeah, time to start working the pole again. My stripper name? "Misty Rainz"
I will continue to fight on, of course, sending off stories or essays until one gets published (one did, on OverthinkingIt.com, all about possible presidential candidates for Hollywood to make movies off of. Robot president, anyone?). God knows my good looks won't pay my bills unless people who judge these things suddenly get myopic.
Though, for the record, I am one sexy beast. :-p
Trev
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Duck's Arse Part One
I can distinctly recall the worst haircut I ever got, without necessarily recalling the specific year. I know it was in the summer time, I might have been between middle and high school or maybe just middle school terms (it was definitely after my sixth-grade year, because I was now wearing the glasses that I'd gotten that previous birthday pretty regularly. Before, I'd tried to conceal my glasses by only wearing them when I sat at the back of a classroom, unable to see the board otherwise. The little grooves on the sides of my nose gave me away). Anyway, it was definitely at a point before I got into the Beatles and decided that I liked having long hair. Prior to this, if a strand fell onto my lower neck, I panicked and rushed to the nearest barbershop.
My stepdad took me, my sis, and little brother to this place in downtown Clemson, an older-than-dirt barbershop where the guy running the place was an ex-Marine (you could tell by the infinite pictures of him in uniform, standing on some battleship deck with his platoon, ready to fight the infernal Japs or something). My little brother was up first, and he got what my stepdad wanted him to get: a flat-top. I laughed at my brother as his hair came buzzing off. Then it was my turn.
Like I said, I was wearing glasses at this point, I was blind as a bat without them (still am, matter of fact) and I had no idea what was going on. The snickers of my sister and freshly-shorn brother were an indication that, whatever was going on, it wasn't my usual "short back and sides and top and front, sideburns half what they are now". It wasn't until I got to put my glasses back on and missed the usual tug of hair on the side enveloping the ear pieces that I saw what had happened.
A fucking flat-top.
I'd never been a hat person much before, but the entirity of that ride home was spent with me encased in a baseball cap and refusing to take it off for my a-hole siblings, who enjoyed this a little too much. Thankfully it was the summer, which meant I didn't have to be seen in school like this. I did, however, have to be seen in Sunday school like this; having not quite acquired the ability to lay out of church that would later serve me so well (being unable to find a clean shirt, perhaps, or taking my sweet time showering only to find at the last minute that I was running behind and gosh, why don't I just stay here while you guys go?), I went into the little gym behind the main church anxious about being seen. For an adolescent boy, appearance matters as much as it does to the opposite sex; we live and die by what our peers think of us, and it's all about surface appearance. I already had two strikes against me, as puberty had not been kind when it doled out my ration of zits and pimples and I also had the new insult of eyeglasses with heavy lenses and old-school frames. Now I looked like a pimply GI Joe, the one dubbed "Sacrificial Man" who appears at the bottom of the toy rack and usually fulfills the role on a mission of being the one guy that COBRA soldiers can shoot at accurately and kill.
The first Sunday after my haircut, I went into the gym and made a beeline for the bathroom, to see if my hair (or absence of hair) was as bad as I thought. No, it was not...it was worse. Dressed up in a button-up shirt and jeans, I looked awful. I resolved to stay in there until Sunday school was over; I could avoid the taunting and jeers of my peers if I stayed put and played a little trash-can basketball for thirty minutes. A few more Sundays of that, and I got good at trashcan basketball, though judging from the reactions of my fellow Sunday schoolers who saw me hanging out in the men's room the entire time class was in session, I may have acquired a reputation as gay.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, except in the adolescent hierarchy of summer-time church-ordained school activities in which "Bible Jeopardy" trumps the secular, real-life variety (What is a Godless athiest that will burn in hell, Alex?).
Anyway, I bring all this up because when I was younger, I didn't have much control over my body. I had no say in when my zits would go away, or what methods my grandmother would use to hasten their exit from my face (think "medieval Spanish torture chamber" and you're on the right track, at least according to my memory), but I could control my hair. I thought I could, anyway, by showering at night before going to bed and thus avoiding the hassle of showering in the morning (because the water was cold or I was sensitive or something). This lead to years of me looking slightly greasy until (I'm ashamed to say it) college, when it hit me to reverse the time of day during which I washed my hair.
I will muse on this some more at a later date...
My stepdad took me, my sis, and little brother to this place in downtown Clemson, an older-than-dirt barbershop where the guy running the place was an ex-Marine (you could tell by the infinite pictures of him in uniform, standing on some battleship deck with his platoon, ready to fight the infernal Japs or something). My little brother was up first, and he got what my stepdad wanted him to get: a flat-top. I laughed at my brother as his hair came buzzing off. Then it was my turn.
Like I said, I was wearing glasses at this point, I was blind as a bat without them (still am, matter of fact) and I had no idea what was going on. The snickers of my sister and freshly-shorn brother were an indication that, whatever was going on, it wasn't my usual "short back and sides and top and front, sideburns half what they are now". It wasn't until I got to put my glasses back on and missed the usual tug of hair on the side enveloping the ear pieces that I saw what had happened.
A fucking flat-top.
I'd never been a hat person much before, but the entirity of that ride home was spent with me encased in a baseball cap and refusing to take it off for my a-hole siblings, who enjoyed this a little too much. Thankfully it was the summer, which meant I didn't have to be seen in school like this. I did, however, have to be seen in Sunday school like this; having not quite acquired the ability to lay out of church that would later serve me so well (being unable to find a clean shirt, perhaps, or taking my sweet time showering only to find at the last minute that I was running behind and gosh, why don't I just stay here while you guys go?), I went into the little gym behind the main church anxious about being seen. For an adolescent boy, appearance matters as much as it does to the opposite sex; we live and die by what our peers think of us, and it's all about surface appearance. I already had two strikes against me, as puberty had not been kind when it doled out my ration of zits and pimples and I also had the new insult of eyeglasses with heavy lenses and old-school frames. Now I looked like a pimply GI Joe, the one dubbed "Sacrificial Man" who appears at the bottom of the toy rack and usually fulfills the role on a mission of being the one guy that COBRA soldiers can shoot at accurately and kill.
The first Sunday after my haircut, I went into the gym and made a beeline for the bathroom, to see if my hair (or absence of hair) was as bad as I thought. No, it was not...it was worse. Dressed up in a button-up shirt and jeans, I looked awful. I resolved to stay in there until Sunday school was over; I could avoid the taunting and jeers of my peers if I stayed put and played a little trash-can basketball for thirty minutes. A few more Sundays of that, and I got good at trashcan basketball, though judging from the reactions of my fellow Sunday schoolers who saw me hanging out in the men's room the entire time class was in session, I may have acquired a reputation as gay.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, except in the adolescent hierarchy of summer-time church-ordained school activities in which "Bible Jeopardy" trumps the secular, real-life variety (What is a Godless athiest that will burn in hell, Alex?).
Anyway, I bring all this up because when I was younger, I didn't have much control over my body. I had no say in when my zits would go away, or what methods my grandmother would use to hasten their exit from my face (think "medieval Spanish torture chamber" and you're on the right track, at least according to my memory), but I could control my hair. I thought I could, anyway, by showering at night before going to bed and thus avoiding the hassle of showering in the morning (because the water was cold or I was sensitive or something). This lead to years of me looking slightly greasy until (I'm ashamed to say it) college, when it hit me to reverse the time of day during which I washed my hair.
I will muse on this some more at a later date...
Saturday, January 1, 2011
1/1/11: Get On Your Knees and Kiss Your Ass Goodbye
I kid, I kid...
It's a new year, and Facebook isn't working, so I guess I'll have to do some random rambling here. No New Year's Resolutions per se, though those will come later; like most people, I have to think long and hard before I decide which things I'm going to say I stop doing but actually don't.
2011 doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "2010," but it's shaping up to be a big year. By that I mean, well, it's one year removed from 2012, so you know what that means:
Palin Watch '11: To Run or Not to Run
I won't bore you with predicting whether Sarah "I Run from Responsibility" Palin will run for prez in '12, that's not what this blog is about. It would require me to desist from navel-gazing long enough to consider other things. But I will say this:
You can't spell "Tea Party" without KKK
Anyway...
This is my last weekend slinging hash at the hotel I have worked at since mid-July, on account of having a full-time job in Clemson and wanting my weekends back (and now that I'm reasonably financially sound for now, knock on wood and kiss my four-leaf clover). I said I'd stay through the holiday season, and dammit all the holiday season is over.
I feel good about leaving, this is the first time in years I've actually left a job of my own choosing and that time worked out pretty well (I went from hating myself at Ingles to liking myself at the Clemson library and thinking too much of myself at the Seneca Daily Journal). Still, I will miss some aspects of the job: I actually learned to enjoy the drive down here at five in the morning, on account of having the roads to myself except for the odd cop or less-odd drunk. My confidence took a hit after being fired from the library, so finding a place where I could not only do the job but do it well helped a lot. And I never met a co-worker I didn't like while I was here; everyone has been nice to me and treated me pretty good.
The downside? Football season; so many hungry, entitled mouths, so little time. But it's not all bad; I do enjoy the rush of having to take care of a lot of things within a short timespan. It makes the downtime I've had this past month all that much more enjoyable; I've earned the right to goof off primarily because I worked so hard to keep thinks going during football season.
So I'll miss this place, and I'll probably miss the paychecks as well (I'm hoping to get something going on the writing front, more on that later), but I'm glad to get out when I am. I'm not averse to being tied down to one place, but I want to do more with my life than what I've done so far. Every job I've had, I've taken something away from it (in the case of Ingles, they still don't know about how much "free" ice cream I used to eat), and this one gave me a place to get back on my feet, survey the damage, and start cleaning up. For that, I will always be grateful.
Don't forget to tip...
It's a new year, and Facebook isn't working, so I guess I'll have to do some random rambling here. No New Year's Resolutions per se, though those will come later; like most people, I have to think long and hard before I decide which things I'm going to say I stop doing but actually don't.
2011 doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "2010," but it's shaping up to be a big year. By that I mean, well, it's one year removed from 2012, so you know what that means:
Palin Watch '11: To Run or Not to Run
I won't bore you with predicting whether Sarah "I Run from Responsibility" Palin will run for prez in '12, that's not what this blog is about. It would require me to desist from navel-gazing long enough to consider other things. But I will say this:
You can't spell "Tea Party" without KKK
Anyway...
This is my last weekend slinging hash at the hotel I have worked at since mid-July, on account of having a full-time job in Clemson and wanting my weekends back (and now that I'm reasonably financially sound for now, knock on wood and kiss my four-leaf clover). I said I'd stay through the holiday season, and dammit all the holiday season is over.
I feel good about leaving, this is the first time in years I've actually left a job of my own choosing and that time worked out pretty well (I went from hating myself at Ingles to liking myself at the Clemson library and thinking too much of myself at the Seneca Daily Journal). Still, I will miss some aspects of the job: I actually learned to enjoy the drive down here at five in the morning, on account of having the roads to myself except for the odd cop or less-odd drunk. My confidence took a hit after being fired from the library, so finding a place where I could not only do the job but do it well helped a lot. And I never met a co-worker I didn't like while I was here; everyone has been nice to me and treated me pretty good.
The downside? Football season; so many hungry, entitled mouths, so little time. But it's not all bad; I do enjoy the rush of having to take care of a lot of things within a short timespan. It makes the downtime I've had this past month all that much more enjoyable; I've earned the right to goof off primarily because I worked so hard to keep thinks going during football season.
So I'll miss this place, and I'll probably miss the paychecks as well (I'm hoping to get something going on the writing front, more on that later), but I'm glad to get out when I am. I'm not averse to being tied down to one place, but I want to do more with my life than what I've done so far. Every job I've had, I've taken something away from it (in the case of Ingles, they still don't know about how much "free" ice cream I used to eat), and this one gave me a place to get back on my feet, survey the damage, and start cleaning up. For that, I will always be grateful.
Don't forget to tip...
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