It's been almost five months since I created this page and spent a fair amount of time designing it for a novice in such things. As I commonly do, I lost steam early in my project. Unlike the old days of journaling as a child and teenager, in spiral notebooks I would spend hours decorating with stickers and then end up throwing away or losing in the tiny cavern of my room, this website is still here for me when I'm procrastinating, when I'm done, and and when I'm enough over my embarrassment to admit what a big fat procrastinator I am.
This is why I've never become any lucrative type of writer or creator of anything. I am not disciplined. I have a lot of potential to achieve a lot of great things, even though I am overweight and even though my twenties feel like they are melting away before my eyes, even though I am unemployed and even though I hated the job I spent months preparing to get, and thought might be my dream. Truly thought about it and was truly crushed when it wasn't. Just another job. Just another glitzy call center that gets you in the door with verbal champagne and strawberries and then drops you on the battlefield with little ceremony or attention to your humanness thereafter.
I have spent my working life embroiled in and excelling at a line of work which seems to have ultimately unhinged me from who I thought I was. Do I love to do what I am good at? Do I love to follow rules and toe the line, show my coworkers up in the nicest way, in the hopes of getting promoted? Do I love to hang out with the smokers and listen to their yikkity yak as a way of hearing all the important rumors in management? Do I love to find covert ways of bending the bonus structure in my favor and casually hide them from my less likeable peers? Do I love to tell off a customer who really deserves it here and there if statistical probability indicates I'll get away it? Do I love to give a customer free money now and then if they make me laugh, rap for me, or otherwise (rarely) improve the quality of my existence?
I surely do both love and hate all these things. In call centers, I met and talked to people from all religions, races, and walks of life. I talked to Messianic Jews, Pagans, Evangelicals, and a Muslim man who very gently explained to me that he couldn't shake my hand because of his religious beliefs regarding the interaction of men and women. I have met wealthy old retired businessmen who were bored for company and dirt poor teen mothers who barely spoke English. I have gotten in two verbal altercations at work with two very interesting wayward coworkers, one a self-identified racist who was attempting to explain to me the difference between describing someone as "black" or the ole n word. I have been yelled at by bosses, praised by bosses, sometimes the same one. I have heard Every Excuse Known to Man over the phone for why a person does not have and is entitled for someone else to give them money. I have been sung to, proposed to, threatened with death, and asked questions about my public transportation habits. I have cried and been cried to. I have had the Bible and various Rush Limbaugh broadcasts read to me in part. I have opened my mind to amazing names the likes of which I did not believe existed - the Quintabithas and Johnqueshas of the South, 15+ syllable Indian names, and more spellings of whitebread names like Ashley and Brittany than I ever cared to know. I have a fixed a lot of "broken" shit - cell phones, computers, tablets, credit cards, human brains. I have answered my personal line with a pre-recorded greeting from any of an array of workplaces. I have performed at both the top and the bottom of the pack, worked days, nights, weekdays, weekends.
It's hard to imagine ever giving all of this up when one is away from it and it's hard to imagine dealing with it one more second when one is involved in it. Right now I'm out, so I'm thinking about getting back in, while elsewhere other opportunities await me. We'll have to see what I end up deciding to do. Hopefully if I get myself involved in some consistent routine I'll have an easier path out of the blah mood I'm in.
