Christmas in Retail

This is the first year I've been at my job from the start of the holiday season (which began about two hours after Halloween ended) to the end. I worked on and off at a grocery store all through college, with the intention of getting a job worthy of my degree upon graduation. But graduation came and went last December, and here I am a year later, still stuck at a job for which I'm way too smart and viciously overqualified, ready on a daily basis to do battle with hateful customers as they vow one by one never to return to the store our manager seems determined to run into the ground.

And it's worse at Christmas. Dear God, it's terrible at Christmas.

See, that schmaltz about "good will toward men" is checked at the door when you work in retail. Of course, there are the rare gems: the German ladies admittedly a little disgruntled that you don't have the white chocolate she's looking for but realizes that it's that time of year when everybody wants white chocolate and it's not your fault you're out; the little old men who still say "Merry Christmas" from their motorized scooters even though it's not politically correct anymore; those saints who stand outside and ring the Salvation Army bells and say "hello" to you even though you've walked past them six times on your way in and out from the smoke hut; the ladies looking for turkey basters because their husband needs one for getting oil out of a machine at work and they're cool with the cheap-o kind because all the good ones have been snatched up by last-minute Thanksgiving shoppers and the shitty kind is the only kind we get in on a regular basis during the holiday season. They're not bad. Some are even downright pleasant.

And then there are the horror stories. We've all heard them. Some of you may have actually been them. In which case, shame on you. We're doing the best we can.

We cannot, for instance, order something for you that we normally don't stock, just because you bought it in Georgia and can't find it here. We cannot produce the kind of Keurig K-Cup you're looking for out of thin air just because someone "always manages to find them in the back" for you when you demand the brand-name kind and nothing else. We cannot scrounge through a tractor trailer full of boxes haphazardly thrown in because oh my God, it's freezing out here and I don't have enough feeling in my fingers to stack each box neatly on top of another for the single nutcracker you need. And dear Lord, if I have one more middle-aged man trying to sweet-talk me into letting him look through the eighteen four-foot-tall boxes of Hot Wheels backstock on a shelf ten feet in the air just so he can find the one collectible car he must have, I swear I'll take a shit on somebody's windshield.

You learn to pick and choose who you ask "can I help you find something". There's just that look that all difficult customers have. Normally it's a scrunched-up face as they stalk back and forth in front of the same four-foot section of shelving. Maybe venting to a total stranger about how "this store doesn't carry anything I want anymore." I know I shouldn't, but these are the people I normally direct to Walmart. After all, they probably don't have a manager who's an asshole and doesn't like to spend money on certain things (on, say, turning the damn heat on) because it comes out of his end-of-the-year bonus. I'm sure you'll find whatever you need there.

The absolute worst - and I mean, the absolute worst - department to work in during Christmastime is...well, every department. Nobody's exempt. If it's not a shortage of baking supplies that have the customers' panties in a bind, it's a lack of the Christmas lights that "I must have or my whole Christmas will be ruined and I'll personally blame you, lowly shelf-stocker who has no control over what is whipped every week and what isn't." Or it's this type of "Frozen" doll that "my child will literally die without." And don't even get me started on the assholes who scream in the back room (or, even better, march through the doors that say "employees only" and start looking themselves), "DO YOU NOT HAVE ANY MORE MILK?!??!?"

Perhaps you should not have come at 8.30 on a Saturday night - notoriously the busiest grocery-shopping day of the week - to buy that one product that nearly every household thrives on. I fail to see how this is my fault.

If I didn't value my meager paycheck, I would have told so many customers by not that no one is forcing them to shop at our store: if they're dissatisfied with the products we do or do not carry, go the hell somewhere else.

But I'm not allowed to say that. I get paid minimum wage to stand there smiling like an idiot and take abuse from inflexible assholes who think it's my personal responsibility to have their favorite product on hand at all times.

"I just stock the shelves, ma'am. Write to our manager. Though he just got transferred to another store and doesn't really give a shit either, so you might be better off to just keep griping about it while you continue to shop here."

At this time of year I am truly grateful to have a job. I look around and see so many other people who don't, and it's especially evident at Christmastime. But my time at this job has run its course, and while my job hunting has been put on hold as planning a wedding, buying a house, the recent bombshell with my parents, car troubles, working two jobs, and now the Christmas season have taken most of my attention, come the first of the year I'll start hunting again. But for now, I stock the shelves, build the displays, and handle the customers in whom the Christmas season brings out the worst.

A plea, dear friends: don't be "that customer." Retail workers are people too. We're doing the best we can in the busiest season of the year.

Merry Christmas, dear friends. 

The Tallest Man on Earth

A letter to the tallest man on earth:

You talk about living hell like we don't know what that is. You say you're stressed, you think it's hopeless, your heart is in pain.

How quaint, to suggest that you're suffering through any of this.

Living hell is when you hold your mom up while she bawls over a broken heart. Living hell is having the life ripped out from under you and the one who did it is standing there with it dangling from his hands, talking like you're the one to blame. Living hell is when the man who you thought could do no wrong, the one with all the answers, the tallest man on earth who taught you everything about money and God and cars and beer and work and travel and people and life is a liar and a fraud and a manipulative greedy spiteful son of a bitch.

Living hell is having to scrounge up an answer for your mother when she asks you at 1:30 in the morning why we weren't good enough for him.

I've asked myself the same question so many times.

You always pop up - never announced, never fanfare-ed, just 'pops up.' Like nothing has happened. Because to him nothing has happened. Everything's the same: we talk about the same things in the same clothes we wore before to the same jobs in the same places and we come home again to the same house with the same people and the same song-and-dance about love and devotion that doesn't mean jack fucking shit. Nothing's changed. Except it's like that iPhone 7 commercial: every goddamn thing has changed. In the house that was a home we have to calculate what we say like we interpret what we hear because what we don't immediate anticipate to be lies will be turned into an untruth to ease the pain of the man who started it all. Nothing simply said, nothing simply heard. Complications. What did you say? 'Semantics.'

You say we're having meatloaf, I get my spoon in preparation for chili.

You told me that a wise man said she's not my problem. My role is not to hold her together by the fraying seams, it's not my responsibility to pick up her pieces. Unluckily for you I read what that wise man really said, and it sounds a lot more like, 'it's between mom and dad and God.' He said nothing about being there for the one who's falling apart and so far that person hasn't been you. You seem incapable of change - the one who told me to constantly reevaluate myself to ensure constant growth. And so for now my relationship with you remains at the stalemate you've seen for the past month. I hope it's what you're ready for.

Then again I don't really give a fuck what you're ready for. We certainly weren't ready for the bombshell you got to launch from a comfortable million miles away.

You've been in Florida for a few days and it's been so nice knowing you won't 'pop in'. I'm actually dreading Thanksgiving this year and the thought that we might have to sit around a table together and pretend that everything's fine when we'd all rather being doing something - or in your case, someone - else. How will we handle Christmas because I don't know about the rest of them but I won't have gotten you anything. Maybe the empty cigarette packs that she's smokes over you. One for every time she's asked me why she wasn't enough for you.

Do not come home for Thanksgiving - this isn't a home anymore. You can pull that whole 'I'm here because my name is on the mortgage' card. Maybe the one about 'a man's home is his castle' again, that was a gem. No one in your kingdom wants to see you. And if you're the honorable 'king' you think you are, you'll honor your subjects' wishes.

I doubt you will, though. You'll do what you want. You always do. Why should this time be any different?

I hope you're getting the rest you were seeking in Florida. You certainly must be exhausted from your half-baked piss-poor attempts to make progress. Don't forget your sunscreen.

R.E.M.

Another end-of-the-world prediction is upon us. Supposedly a 2.5-mile-wide comet will smash into the earth in the next few weeks, thus marking "the beginning of the end." Don't worry: I've got my Spam hoard ready.

With all the recent baloney going on in the world these days - Syrian refugees, cops versus blacks, gay marriage, and the subsequent inability to have a public opinion unless it's the same as the majority - people all over my Facebook are begging God to come soon. (Since, you know, God doesn't take requests and professions of faith seriously unless they show up on His News Feed.) You would think by the time my generation came along that we'd be past all of these shenanigans of intolerance and petty argument. But with each new generation comes old wounds, passed down from parents, ready to be rehashed fresh again.

Old debates, new debaters. The same damn result.

I don't buy into the idea that "the end is near": I'm pretty sure we're closer than we've ever been, but I'm inclined to agree with the words of God Almighty that nobody can know the exact date. And while we're taking Biblical hints and turning them into predictions of worldwide destruction, let's flip to the end of the book and look at what is explicitly said. We have the "man of sin" to look forward to (and no, I do not think it's Obama. I don't like him but I'm not about to turn him into the Antichrist. Some people think it's the Pope but I don't have the authority or the energy to say one way or the other), and I'm particularly interested in the mass animal deaths (polar bears and honeybees, anyone?). The point of all this, though, is not for followers of Christ to panic and hole up in bunkers with crackers and Tang. A woman asked my mom the other day if her pastor was doing his part to prepare his congregation for the end times.

Be aware, sure; but fear isn't the right response to something like this.

If we're supposed to be different - and that is the essence of true Christianity: to be different from our natural tendencies and the world around us - then the proper reaction is not to throw our closed-minded, dogmatic opinions into the chaos, only to have it lost in the social media battle that's more focused on who has it loudest than who has it right. We should be doing what we can to ease the worries of those focused on the perils of the unknown. Talk is cheap, and at this stage in our history, talk is expendable: the more there is, the less potent it is. Try doing something instead. Quit panicking about the end of days and try using that energy instead to love people while we still have time. That "repent, the end is near" schmaltz doesn't work. It never has. So how about we try a new tactic and make the way we believe a little more appealing by focusing on the love part that was so emphasized by our God on earth and leave the spreading of fear and gloom to those who hold man's religion in higher esteem than genuine faith?

It's a novel concept, but it might fucking work.

Foosball

Dear friends, if you work best to music, you should check out Jason Isbell. A lot of his songs have the same style, but it's that calm, methodical rhythm that makes it easy to listen to music and write or do homework at the same time. The quality of his voice is country but his songs are folk-y, and you can tell that autotune hasn't been turned loose to ruin his authenticity. I've been listening to him for two days straight and I love it.

Saw a school bus trundle down my road this morning. Which is major throwing me off because it feels like Saturday and in my early-morning stupor I thought, "Why the hell is there a school bus on Saturday, there can't be that many kids for detention already." When I signed on to my computer I realized that "Getting Started" weekend at my college begins today. And it suddenly hit me that, for the first time in nearly twenty years, I won't be going back to school this fall. I haven't been scoping out what color notebook I'll pick in the back-to-school aisle at work. I haven't packed up the shit I've packed for the past four years and loaded it in the back of my mom's Yukon to pile into half a dorm room. While this summer has just felt like a normal summer, today it is coming clear: I am officially a graduate.

Though I have found that I like working much better than I do being at school. Which is comforting because I was only a student for a limited amount of years, I'll be working until I die and I might as well like it.

I've been having epiphanies left and right in the past few days. I'm starting to view this period that I'm in as merely a pause, a redirection of my focus while I'm sitting still between decisions. And trust me, much is going on during this pause - you know that saying "still waters run deep"? But I've been putting all of my focus on my employment status. And really, I'm ahead of the ball game compared to a lot of people. I have a job. Whether I like it or not doesn't matter when I look at the fact that I'm becoming financially independent and bringing a little less than half of an income to the household Joe and I are about to start. (246 days, but who's counting?) It's certainly not what I had in mind after graduation - if I had gone with that game plan I'd be hating my life in a classroom right now and would probably be even more depressed than I am right now. Then again I didn't plan on planning a wedding and buying a house after graduation either, and look where we are.

My dad encouraged me to read a devotional book called The Disciplines of Life by V. Raymond Edman. (I've attached the link to an online copy below.) It's broken up into different sections on disappointment, declining days, discontentment, discernment, disease, delight, delay - altogether about 30 different "disciplines" (that all conveniently begin with the letter "d") that grow and develop us into the followers of Christ we are called to be. Most of the time I don't have a specific issue in mind when I randomly choose what chapter to read, but last night when I picked "the discipline of detail" I realized about halfway down the first page that it was exactly what I needed to read.

The chapter presented the structure of our lives much like the structure of a sentence. (How fitting for an English major.) Some are complex, some are simple; but all have a specific subject and specific reason. Edman likened the punctuation of a sentence to the direction of our God - commas being additions, parentheses being those unexpected moments of trial and difficulty that we could all do without, and periods being the finality at life's end, hopefully as a declarative statement rather than a question. By putting ourselves as the subject of the sentence, our purpose in life becomes very shallow and unsatisfying; whereas putting our God and His calling as the subject makes our existence as part of something much bigger than ourselves.

In essence, what we see is not all there is.

What I am at right now is a semi-colon - a pause in events, a turn of the head as I shift from one God-directed path to another. Edman offers the biblical example of Paul and Silas being called to Macedonia, only to be tossed in prison once they got there. There is no mention of them messing up along the way and so being imprisoned as punishment; it's just a hiccup that they encountered on their journey to do as they were compelled by God. Edman writes, "God's semicolon...means that He wants to change rather radically the course [of your life]...that He desires to enlarge its content, and not at all that He has cut you off from or forgotten to be gracious...The Lord is changing the direction of your life, not to close it, nor to constrain its significance within narrow horizons; on the contrary, He wants to make it broader, deeper, richer; and therefore He puts a semicolon after a given line of thought that you would have desired to have continued" (131-2).

This is no crisis at all. I'm not missing the point, and I'm not going astray. It's just a change of direction. This pause is teaching me to be patient, which I struggle with almost on a daily basis. And so I will wait. I say it with such conviction but I really don't have a choice. In the past I've waited as a matter of pausing until I heard my God's approval, but now it's simply out of...well, lack of choices. Which I guess is sort of the same thing: I'm holding off until my God fires up the spotlight and says, "Here, do this thing." Supposedly the journey is more important than the destination, and it's a good thing because right now all we are is journey, I see no tangible destination. So at this point I'll turn off the car, grab a cold Coke, and kick back until the GPS gets its shit together and gets me back on the road.

You know a little earlier when I said I was depressed? I'm actually not. I tell you right now, I have never been happier than I am right here in this moment. I am physically able to go to a job every day and provide for my future, even if it's not as much as I'd like it to be or doing what I want to do. I have made it a point to use my passion for writing as much as I can, refreshing my soul every single day. I am making the most of the time I have left living in my parents' house, where I have deep breakfast talks with my brother and share coffee with my dad in the living room and cook dinner with my mom and talk to my sister across the hallway while we're getting ready in our rooms. I get to see the love of my life every day and I am counting down to the day when I become his wife and start a life with my best friend. And while I've had my fair share of griping over my current situation, I know that this pause is merely preparation for something else. This is the training ground where my patience and my trust in a bigger plan are growing leaps and bounds day by day. And that, dear friends, gives this whole phase a much bigger spin.

If you're interested in reading Edman's book (which I would highly recommend), you can find it here: http://www.ccel.us/disciplines.toc.html

Game

This morning I stood on my back porch, preparing to write the biggest check I've ever seen, let alone penned myself. Joe and I are buying a house. Which requires lots of money. We've been smart with our finances so far and we have more than enough for the down payment, but still the worrier in me (which is basically all of me) sinks under the covers and wonders, "What if something comes up? What about hidden costs? What about my students loans? What if my car takes a shit again?"

All these "what if's" that threaten to make me back out of this house that we want so badly. It's exactly what we're looking for. It's perfect for us. And yet the fear inside of me grips that four-figure check and says, "Hang on to it for as long as you can."

While I was standing there in the morning summer sunshine, a cardinal landed on the tree just off our porch. Everybody knows that God takes care of birds, so how much more will He provide for you, but I've mentioned in a few previous posts that cardinals are a different signal for me: from sophomore year of college when I was angry at everything to the week before I started student teaching, the red birds have whispered to me, "You'll be OK." This morning, though, something in my heart started singing:

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father...

The minute we walked into the house, we knew that this was the one. Homeowners say they understand that feeling, and now we do as well. It goes even further back to last summer when I knew that Joey Gaut was the one, and that I wanted to be with him, and it didn't matter where. And for maybe the second or third time in the chaos that has been the last six months, I felt peace - delicious, unmistakable, wash-over-you-like-a-wave peace that this big adventure is falling into place in exactly the right way. We aren't acting on our own here. We are being guided and molded even as I write, and we are balancing being smart with being reliant on our God's promises.

If all goes well, we should move Joey into the house by mid-August. We both appreciate your prayers through this crazy process.

Happy Monday, dear friends.

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father.
There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not:
As Thou hast been, Thou forever will be.

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning, new mercies I see;
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided -
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.

Earth

You know it’ll be a good day when you roll out of bed with a rant in your heart.

As you know, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that gay marriage is constitutional in all fifty states. Which immediately sparked a good amount of contradiction on my Facebook newsfeed from people on both sides. I’ve seen unmistakable joy: “we’re finally able to practice our freedom to love and marry who we choose.” And I’ve seen disgust. I’ve seen flat-out anger.

And of course I’ve seen the threats to move to Canada.

But the best one – oh my Lord, this is better than I could have imagined – was when a lady put up an article on Facebook about how homosexuality is considered different from other sins (in that it is more accepted by society than others) and someone commented, “Here’s the thing, though: it doesn’t affect you. So why does it matter?”

Um, what?

Number one: perhaps if you had read the article, sir, you may have seen that it was an article written to Christ-followers on how to approach homosexuality in a world that accepts this sin that is still considered in the realm of God to be just that: sin. Just as lying and adultery and theft and hate are sins. And there’s nothing in the Bible to say to detest one sin more than the other; but as followers of Christ, we are expected to lean away from those things that have been, are now, and forever will be detested by our God. But that article wasn’t written by someone trying to sway the homosexual community away from sin: it was written by a Christ-follower to Christ-followers as a guideline for how to approach homosexuality when we and our ideals are slowly becoming the vast minority in our nation. Just as homosexuals were shunned for so long, Christ-like morals and beliefs are slowly being elbowed out of sight, and comments like this gentleman’s are forcing us into silence about the foundational beliefs that we cling to.

You know what, the ruling doesn’t directly affect me. I am a straight woman with heterosexual inclinations, and I don’t know what it’s like to be told that I can’t marry in the way that I feel drawn. And honestly, I don’t care. Marry who you like, be with who makes you happy – I don’t give a rat’s ass. But it kills me when the motivation behind all this is equality, and while you can start planning your two-tux wedding, I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut when I think that it’s flat-out wrong (in the unbiblical sense) for fear of being called “small-minded” or “prejudiced.”

Oh, so you’re allowed to take part in that equality by the way you live and throw that in my face, but when I try to present my perspective or (God-forbid) reveal that my opinion is different than yours, I’m the one expected to change my mentality or keep my mouth shut.

What the hell is equal about that?

And this doesn’t just stop at homosexuality, it’s everywhere. The minute you open your mouth supporting a belief that has been traditionally upheld in this great nation, you’re suddenly twisted into the closed-minded, needs-to-be-shown-the-light bigot who has no tolerance for anybody else and their beliefs.

Is that not the same thing you’re doing to me?

This post is not a cry against homosexuality. I’m against it, I think it’s wrong, but that’s not the point of this post. Because my job is not to sway people on what they believe, just as I don’t want to be criticized on what I believe. But I am sick and tired of watching others arguing about “well, you shouldn’t think like that” and “well, maybe you should take a different perspective” and – like my new favorite comment – “it doesn’t affect you, so why does it matter?” Why state an opinion on something that doesn’t influence you directly?

The hell it doesn’t affect me. This decision does affect me, thank you very much. It affects me because now I have to figure out how to say what I think without “being offensive.” In the country that says “In God We Trust” and historically puts so much faith in God when the shit hits the fan, now His followers are having to curb their opinions and hold their tongues when the foundational things that they believe are wrong are not only being upheld by that country’s highest court, but also being thrown in their faces as “right.” And I tell you what, it matters because of comments like yours, sir. I could totally stay in the dark and keep my mouth shut on matters that won’t directly influence me.

But is that not how your landmark decision was passed yesterday? Did it not start with people tired of staying quiet in their closets for decades?

Or are only the supposedly-innovative thinkers allowed to have their say anymore?

While you’re looking at old documents trying to figure out what’s constitutional, why don’t you run on over to the Bill of Rights – the tip-damn-top of that little text – and check out that “freedom of speech” amendment.

It’s constitutional for me to say what I think, and you don’t have to like it. Just like it’s constitutional for you to marry who you like, and I don’t have to pretend that I support it.

Son

The other day a coworker asked me if I am "burned out."

I'll be twenty-three in less than two weeks. My college degree is barely six months old. Everybody tells me that I "have my whole life ahead of me." I am about to marry the love of my life in a little over nine months. I had to explain to a loan officer recently that my grown-up life has only just begun in January, that's why I don't have any credit built it.

And yet people are already asking me if I'm "burned out."

I am too young to be this tired, this achy, this weary of body and soul. And yet I fall asleep on the couch at nine o'clock at night and dread getting up to go to work the next morning.

Am I ungrateful? No - I am blessed to have a job where I'm inside out of the rain and the summer heat, and I don't have to pick heads of lettuce or strawberries for my step-above-minimum-wage paycheck. But you know how you get tired of eating Raisin Bran if you eat Raisin Bran for four years straight? It doesn't mean you're not grateful for the breakfast all those boxes of Raisin Bran afforded you, but you're just ready for a change.

Yeah. It's kinda like that.

My problem these days is that I'm starting to care too much about what goes on between time clock punches. For a while I was able to see this as "just a job" - something I could leave at work and not take home ulcers at the end of the day. But I'm starting to care a little too much these days. I spend my shifts cleaning up after people who don't care to do things the right way and who don't mind that I'm following behind them to correct what they just did, and when I leave at the end of the day, all I see is what I could have done. Or, even more depressing, what still needs to be done. And while we focus on the little details and create new departments that are a sure-fire way to gather more business and more money, the basics are going by the wayside and the old departments are falling apart.

Some of our leads are working six and seven days a week because we won't hire new help, but let's go ahead and create another department where the employees sit around for 80% of their shifts.

The name of this game is not to take it too seriously. And that's what I've been told since I first started. I've had fluxes of frustration with this place before, and I've gotten over them because there's always been a light at the end of that tunnel. But not this time. Not as I near the end of the tunnel and the light is bigger and blinding and I still have no idea what to do instead. And the urge to care more and try my best to fix things and do my job 140% because that's how I was trained and I can't help that, is overwhelming my underlying thoughts of "almost done, almost done." My countdown is less than 300 days, and yet I still leave home four out of my five shifts frustrated because I feel like I didn't do anything to help further our department for the past eight hours - I was merely fixing what someone else spent their shift destroying.

I can't stay. My mom asked me why I wouldn't continue to move higher in the company, and I said I couldn't justify doing that. I wouldn't be someone who operated out of pettiness and spite to get ahead, but I've seen how "honest" workers survive. 

Or, should I say, don't.

The original game plan was for me to wait until after the wedding to find another job, but dear friends, I don't think I'll make it. I'm on the verge of opening my mouth when I should be biding my time, and I cannot justify going back to the blind following of orders now that I've seen what's wrong. I need something else - anything else. At this point I don't care what it is.

I'm too young to be this tired. And I'm too young to be stuck.

If anyone has leads on anyone who's hiring, please let me know. I would really appreciate it.