I'm still Somebody

The neighborhood where my family lived until I was in the 7th grade was brimming with children the same age as me. It was a great way to grow up because I always had other kids to play with.

We had moved there when I was three and from day one my mom pretty much tossed me out the front door every day by the seat of my pants and didn't let me back in the house until dinner time so I was forced to run loose like a little savage and ended up making friends with all of the other children who lived near us. They were all boys and by the time I started first grade it was well established that I was one of them.

I could build a fort and leg wrestle with the best of them. I was a smudge faced, scab covered, toughskins wearing, treehouse building little dare devil. I could spit farther, punch harder, and pop the biggest wheelies. I was a superstar.

But my badge of honor soon become tarnished once I started first grade and had the chance to be around other little girls. Prior to that I really didn't know any other girls but once I started going to school all day long, rather than the half day you have in kindergarten, it soon become clear that I was a freak and I had absolutely nothing in common with any of them.

Suddenly my long distance spitting skills and dirty fingernails were not winning me any friends. Only after being called "tomboy" and "bruiser" and getting in trouble at school for chasing Shannon O'brien* around the play yard with an earthworm until she cried did anyone (my mother and I) realize that this needed to change. Thus began my lifetime struggle to be more girly.

I begged my mom to buy me some dresses and white ankle socks with lace around the edges and black patent leather Mary-Janes. That year my winter coat was red velvet with white rabbit fur trim and I had a matching muff.

Yes, I said muff.

I loved that muff. I was going to search for a photo to post here but I was afraid to Google "fur muff".

Anyhoo... I thought these girly clothes would transform me instantly from Pigpen into Shirley Temple and Darla from the Little Rascals all rolled into one. The new clothes certainly accomplished the mission of my becoming more girly, but alas the year was 1973 not 1933, so I was in addition to being super girly a big giant goober.

In a further attempt to help me get in touch with my feminine side my mother enrolled me in ballet lessons. I was thrilled at the opportunity to squeeze myself into some pink tights and a tutu, swish around in soft pink satin shoes and bingo - no more tomboy. I couldn't think of anything more girly and feminine than ballet.

As it turns out these ballet lessons changed my life and I learned far more from them than simply the joy of the dance. I learned that I lack a certain self awareness. Whether or not the long term effect of this has been good or bad I still can't decide, humility is a double edged sword and something I think kids these days** could use a little more of, but I can tell you that the 6 year old me was devastated. I can also tell you that the 6 year old me got over it and decided that perhaps dance wasn't going to be her bag, but instead moved on to music and singing lessons which turned out quite nicely.

While the actual bad experience with ballet lessons that turned out to be a defining moment of my life was not directly caused by my usual favorite target of blame for all things psyche scarring, my mother, she did however sign me up for ballet lessons without taking into consideration 2 very key elements of the situation:

1. Although she signed me up for the right age group, the 5 and 6 year olds, what she didn't realize was that all the other 6 year old girls in my class had already been taking ballet lessons since they were old enough to stand. So everyone in the class had way more experience than me.

2. I have all the natural grace and agility of a water buffalo.

Combine elements one and two and suffice it to say that I was not successful at ballet. Now add to that my ballet teachers lack of compassion, her inability to be direct and my talent at being unaware of the actions of my own body.

To describe the situation I must assume that you have occasionally had one of those moments where things are going along smoothly but suddenly there is an irritating disruption and you're not sure where it's coming from? A cell phone ringing in the library, a car alarm blasting away in the middle of the night, or some horrible smell on the bus? It could be any number of things and you say to yourself who in the name of Christ could be causing this terrible noise, disruption or odor?

Well that's what happened in ballet class one evening. We had finished all of our little warm up exercises and had just started putting some of our moves together to form an actual dance. As we stood at the bar (or whatever you call that thing) the teacher was counting out slowly and naming the moves. She was not satisfied with our performance and kept shouting STOP! AGAIN!

Then she would start the counting and calling out the dance steps all over again. It's vague because I was only 6, but she must have done this like 4 or 5 times. Each time her shouting, counting and step calling getting louder and more shrill. Finally she had had enough of whatever was bothering her and yelled, "Somebody is completely out of step and ruining it for the rest of you!"

Oh, A-ha! I eyed my fellow tiny dancers suspiciously thinking, yes one of you is really screwing up and annoying our lovely teacher, who would do such a thing?

Our teacher was really, really pretty and had been a runner up in the Miss Ohio pageant (or some such equally impressive contest to my 6 year old mind, but as I mentioned my memory of such detail is a bit fuzzy) the year before. In hindsight I'm sure she was nothing more than an economy sized bitch who had no business working with or around small children, but at the time I wanted nothing more in life than to please the pretty, pretty lady.

By today's standards I'm sure she would have been prosecuted, tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, but like I said, it was the 70's and back then verbal abuse and psychic scarring, and hell why not, physical beatings were not only considered good solid parenting practices but encouraged and bragged about by most adults and educational professionals.

The ballet teacher then gave some more specific instructions to the culprit, "Somebody needs to keep her neck straight. Somebody needs to stop looking at her feet! Somebody needs to pay attention!!"

Yes, I thought, Somebody really needs to do that!

If you haven't figured it out based on the title of my post I am Somebody. It was a defining moment in my life because I have spent the rest of my existence on this planet trying to avoid experiencing that moment again. That moment that makes all the blood drain from your face when you discover that you are the last person in the room to recognize that you are being a tool. It's my cell phone ringing. It's my car alarm going off in the middle of the night and the horrible smell on the bus is the dog shit on the bottom of my shoe.

Discovering your own oblivion is rather circular and the philosophizing required to ponder it further is beyond me, but I have noticed this:

The decibel at which you complain out loud, the number of people who hear you complaining and the amount of obscene language used directly corresponds to the degree of likelihood that you yourself are the cause of the disturbance or strange smell.

*Not really her name of course. Actually I can't remember the kid's name, but she was Irish.

** Using the phrase "kids these days" automatically qualifies me for old fart status, a senior discount and membership to AARP. I'm going out to get fitted for dentures and big giant wrap around sunglasses this instant.

GPS = Going Postal Shortly

Saturday morning I stumbled out of bed, waddled to the kitchen and pressed the button to start the coffee (I always make it the night before so that I don't have to count out scoops and pour water because I'm not the most graceful of creatures when I wake up - I think I mentioned some stumbling) and looked out my kitchen window to see a glorious display of sparkling sunshine. I did a double take and threw my glasses on to make sure the thermometer outside the window really said 60 degrees. It really did.

Suddenly I was wide awake. I knew that the sun shining on the thermometer was probably giving it a few extra degrees, but still, not quite 10am on a shiny Saturday morning and it's almost 60? C'mon, we gotta get out of here.

So I burst back into our bedroom and leaped on top of MDH, who was still snoozing, and started jumping up and down and jostling him all over. Wake up man (bounce). It might be our last day of sunshine and warmth before we're snowed in for the next 5 months (bounce-bounce). Get up, let's go, daylight is a wastin'!

Props to my sleepy head darling. He always seems to come through with no fussing on such occasions as an exuberant, overly perky wife bouncing on his head on a Saturday morning, demanding that he wake the hell up, throw on some clothes and a ball cap and get the hell out of the house.

Originally we were just going to go for a little walk around our neighborhood, several blocks down to the farmer's market and then on to our favorite little brunch spot (my personal favorite is the Hash Benedict found on menu page 4 (with potatoes, of course)), but I decided instead to go for something a bit more outdoorsy. I know. It's out of character for me. We ended up driving a few towns over to a big park with paved walking and bike paths that meander through beautiful woods and over trickling streams and such. We had never been there before, but it didn't look that big on the map I printed from the park website. Even considering my fucked up ankle it seemed do-able.

So we walked and walked, and walked, and walked. It was great. Up to a point. The point at which it stopped being great was when I realized that we had been walking for almost an hour and everything had started to look the same and we had not encountered another living soul for quite awhile. Not even a squirrel.

More significantly, at the same moment I also realized that I was starving and I had to pee - now. I stopped abruptly and declared victory on our outdoorsy walk in the woods assuming that we would of course be turning around and walking back out the way we came in.

Alas it was not going to shake out like that. No.

MDH has never been a man who likes to take the same route twice and consulted the GPS on his Blackberry for a route that would not require turning around. He announced that we were almost out of the woods anyway and that we had only to keep going a little further and would "soon" encounter a cemetery and after that a "neighborhood" which would provide a "flat", "paved" route for us to walk back to our car.

Yes the quotes are there to denote exactly the words that MDH used and also to emphasize the fact that our route back to the car was none of these things.

It was not soon.

Once we found the cemetery what we encountered next was certainly not a neighborhood and definitely not flat.

Although the road was indeed paved it was so busy with speeding traffic that I was forced much of the way to walk in the gravel berm (over several different lumps of roadkill of various species and states of decay).

All the while MDH, who recognized his blunder, kept flapping his lips and saying things like "almost there" and using words like "adventure" and "excitement". Again - it was none of those things.

Our exciting, almost there adventure caused me to become two things I truly hate to be - sweaty and dirty - at the same time. Plus after stepping in what I'm pretty sure used to be a baby rabbit I wanted to burn my shoes, hurl them into the woods and incinerate the whole goddamn place. I didn't do that of course, but if I had had my purse with me I would have used it to beat MDH senseless.

Eventually we made it back to the car and the outhouse style smelly hole in the ground toilet with no tissue that I had considered using before we started walking but had decided to wait because it looked like a smelly hole in the ground that probably didn't have any toilet tissue. So after all that time I had hold it in just that much longer so that I could trek back to the car to grab some of the surplus fast food napkins that thank baby jesus I always store in the glove box in case of such emergencies.

Anyhoo... I lived to tell the tale. I'm feeling as inspirational as that blind guy that climbed Mt. Everest. I might even write a book and there will be a Lifetime Original movie about how I managed to survive the elements, skipped breakfast and used Wendy's napkins for toilet paper.

Background Check - I was a nerdy little girl

Yesterday my blogger friend The Vegetable Assassin posted about how one of her blogger friends had hand written a post then the Veg hand wrote a post. It was intriguing to me because handwriting is very personal and you can tell a lot about an individual by her or his handwriting style.

Actually I can tell a lot about a person by looking at handwriting because the summer I turned 10 I was (a big doofus? still playing with Barbies? dreaming I'd grow up to look like Olivia Newton John only with bigger boobs?) obsessed with graphology - otherwise known as handwriting analysis.

At the time I fancied myself quite the little amateur hand writing expert. The Nancy Drew (with bigger boobs) of graphology if you will. I read everything I could possibly find about handwriting analysis at our local public library and even asked for and received a graphology book for my birthday.

Then I bugged all my friends and everyone in my family for handwriting samples and proceeded to analyze them and give them each individual and detailed personality assessments based on my vast expert knowledge. I'm sure it wasn't annoying at all.

My little sideline kept me out of trouble and I think my friends and family should just have thanked their lucky stars that I wasn't into phrenology or black tar heroin.

The graphology book I once treasured is long since gone, and I have come to realize that many real experts think that handwriting analysis is a bunch of hooey, but here are some generalizations of the craft that I vaguely remember and if anybody out there thinks the items in the bullet points below are incorrect, I was too lazy to verify most of this stuff, so you are probably right. It's all from memory and I smoked a lot of pot and ate a few toadstools in the late 80's:

• Large writing = obnoxious bastard
  


• Small writing = a shut in



• Writing tends to slant downward = the person is generally a bummer



• Writing tends to slant upward = Pollyanna



• Legible writing = nun



• Illegible writing = whackjob



• Writing that is extremely neat and tidy = serial killer
  


• Words spaced far apart = jackass - the person thinks what they have to say is very important
  

All I've got of recent handwriting samples of my own are shopping and to-do lists and those are in print not script. I'm not sure I even remember how to write in script. It looks weird when I try.
Here's what I think you can tell about me from my handwriting samples above (all but the post it note, which was wadded up into a little ball and hiding on the floor behind the waste can in our office, were found folded up in the pockets of my various jackets):

• I have a cat
  
• My lower case R's look like V's


• I cook a lot


• I eat fairly healthy


• I like Mexican food


• Sometimes I buy cake

The Wicked Witch

Ever since MDH and I moved to the suburbs I have looked forward to passing out candy to all the adorable little trick or treating tots at Halloween each year. I usually carve a jack o'lantern and choose just the right candies and run excitedly when the doorbell rings to fuss and squeal over all the adorable costumes of the little rosy cheeked munchkins who look up at me with such wonder and appreciation as I happily toss mini bags of Sour Skittles and Reece's Cups into their plastic pumpkin heads. I look forward to it, but it never seems to turn out like how I envision it.

Oh sure we get a couple of rosy cheeked yada yada, but mostly it seems like I'm giving away treats to half assed lame-o's who barely blurt out "Trick or treat" and never seem to say "Thank you." It kind of sucks.

Well it's over. We're done with trick or treaters due to the sparse number of participants, lame costume ensembles and over all weak character of the slack jawed miscreants that visited our home this year. I informed MDH that next year we are shutting it down. Lights off. We're going to the movies instead. Fuck it.

What tipped me over the edge? The two teenage boys who not only had the balls to show up on my welcome mat wearing no costumes but also bearing 13 gallon kitchen garbage bags drooping with the weight of god only knows how much candy. I assumed that in order to have collected such a large haul that they were either driving around from neighborhood to neighborhood or tazing the smaller children and stealing their candy. You should think that no costumes and giant sized goodie bags would be irritating enough, but no.

When I opened the door to these asshats one of them was actually chatting away on his cell phone, having what appeared to be a pretty in depth conversation. And not only that. He gave me the one finger up gesture. Yes he did. The one finger up gesture as in, hold your horses nice lady who is trying to give me free Skittles and peanut butter cups, I'm very busy on the telephone right now and will be with you shortly.

I was stunned.

As the boy continued to talk on the phone I put the bowl of candy back on the sideboard next to the front door and did that smile that I have where my mouth is closed and my lips disappear. Turning back to the door I crossed my arms over my chest in a sarcastic oh take as much time as you need kind of posture. After another moment had passed and the boy was still on the phone I gave him my most withering stare and burst a blood vessel in my left eyeball as I restrained myself from saying, "That's a very realistic douchebag costume you've got on there kiddo."

Not much better, what I actually said was, Are you kidding me? In my head the tirade continued You're that busy and important that you can't be bothered to wear a costume or get off the fucking phone while you trick or treat? Really?

Actually I blasted out most of my passive aggressive wrath on the cell phone boys poor little friend, probably because he was not on the phone and therefore available to stand there and take my abuse. I asked him if he too wouldn't like to take the opportunity to use my front porch to catch up on his correspondence and maybe do some texting or update his facebook page.

Then I actually gave those two idiots some candy just to get them the hell out of my sight, at which point my head exploded and little green and red flame shitting demons flew out of my eyes and I ran away screaming into the streets and MDH had to answer the door and finish passing out the candy for the rest of the evening.

I fully expect very soon I will find myself stamping out a flaming bag of dogshit on my front porch and/or scrubbing graffiti that says "Psycho Bitch" from my garage door.

Yep. Next year we're going to the movies. I think it's better for all parties involved. Although if someone kicks my seat I can't say I won't make trouble.

You're Killing Me

Dear Tree Trimmer Guy Who I Paid With a Personal Check Over 2 Weeks Ago,

Hey man, what gives? Please end my suffering and deposit the fucking check already. Maybe I should thank you for reminding my why I so seldom write checks anymore and that reason would be that it feels like a crap shoot every time. Especially when compared to the immediate gratification and sense of closure I get from paying for things online, with cash or using my debit card.

I cannot imagine why you have allowed so much time to go by and still not yet deposited my check.

Are you trying to prove something?

Are you in a contest with yourself to see how long you can go without needing my money?

Are you trying to drive me insane?

Dude, are you dead? What the hell happened?

Did you lose the check? Hey, that's cool. Not a problem. Nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about. It happens to the best of us. Please call me and I will gladly cancel the check. In it's place I will pay you in lovely cash that I will happily withdraw from the ATM so that I can have the satisfaction of seeing the $200 drained from my checking account within a matter of seconds instead of obsessively, compulsively checking my fucking balance several times every day like a god damned lunatic to see if you have deposited my check yet.

Banks are located pretty much everywhere around town and every corner of planet earth. I will draw you a map if you need me to. Also I am led to understand that you don't even have to go to a bank. It's true! You can make deposits with ATM machines 24 hours a day and don't even have to get out of your car! It's crazy, but I promise, it's true!

Please don't make me call and ask you about it because by that time I will no longer be able to disguise my hysteria.

You have until Monday. Afternoon. Or maybe Tuesday morning. No later than Wednesday.

I'm serious.

Kindest Regards,
Lady

Employment History Part 2 - Talents and Trade Secrets Revealed

In my last post I wrote about my first job out of high school working in the cash office at Gold Circle. I really liked that job and totally lucked out because it didn't require me to sell anything, deal with the public or talk to anyone at all really unless I felt like it. I could pretty much go in, get my shit done and go home. It was part time and I was done by noon most days and that totally rocked.

On the other hand though the job had 2 major drawbacks:

1. It cramped my party lifestyle. I had to be there 6 days a week at 7am and getting up, dressed and forcing myself to be alert enough to concentrate on doing my job that early in the morning at age 18 when most nights I was out partying, drinking and doing god only knows what until scant hours before my shift started was extremely difficult. There were many days when I suffered through that job (or perhaps the job suffered through me) hung over or still drunk.

2. I already mentioned other major drawback to this job in my previous post, my cash office mate Missy, who found a way to suck every atom of joy from the air of the very tiny room we were forced to live in together for 5 hours each day but Sunday. Then again upon further reflection and after re-reading the last sentence of #1 listed above a couple of times over it has occurred to me that perhaps being trapped in a small airless, windowless room with a hung over or possibly still drunk teenage baboon like me may not have been exactly pleasant for her.

3. I know I said there were only going to be 2 drawbacks but upon even further reflection I am now wondering about the validity of #1 in total. I mean if I was going work hung over or possibly still drunk from the previous nights partying or god knows what then that probably negates the job cramping my style doesn't it? Sounds more like neither one had any effect whatsoever on the other. The job didn't seem to stop me from partying and the partying never seemed to prevent me from showing up and doing my job.

4. Fuck it then. The only drawback to my job at Gold Circle was Missy and frankly she may have had a point being nasty to me and giving me a hard time because I was a hung over, smelly drunk so who could blame her really? I mean, that room was pretty small.

I suddenly realize that I have abused my numbered bullet point privileges and at this point I'm rambling so it's time for an anyhoo...

Anyhoo... what I really wanted to tell you about was the job that I had after the cash office which I referred to as "the greatest job in the world". Are you still reading this?

I quit the cash office gig because I was going to start attending college and I needed a job with more flexible hours. I applied at several different retail shops, but the job I had my heart set on and didn't think I had a chance in hell to get because it was ranked pretty high on the coolness scale and I lived in a college town so there was always lots of competition for crappy paying jobs in cool stores was at a smaller but national chain that rhymes with Beer Ton Pimports*. Do you know of it?

It's a much different kind of store now. Back then it was only just morphing into the brand image it has now and many people (like my cousin J and his stoner buddies) thought it was a fancy head shop and sometimes when I told people (like my cousin J and his stoner buddies) that I worked there (oh, yes - in case you hadn't figured it out on your own - I got the coveted job) they would make bong and rolling paper jokes.

Beer Ton Pimports didn't sell bongs or rolling papers or any other smoking accessory except for Italian marble ashtrays and sandalwood incense. No. They sold the most beautiful and wondrous things. They sold rattan furniture made in Thailand, Japanese paper lanterns and jasmine scented potpourri. They sold cut glass Romanian stemware, bamboo fans from China and carved boxes made of teak wood from Brazilian rain forests. They sold English tea pots, Scottish shortbread cookies and itchy cable knit wool "fisherman" sweaters from Ireland.

For a young woman who yearned for travel, and didn't really see much chance of it happening anytime soon, it was a wonderland.

I started off as a cashier, but within a year was promoted to Assistant Store Manager. I love, love, loved that job. I got to be around all that cool stuff and between the shipments of new merchandise that needed to be unloaded from the delivery trucks, displays that needed to be built and the various trials and tribulations associated with working with the public, every day was new and different.

It's the only job I've ever had where I actually left smelling better than when I came in.

It was at this job that I discovered my uncanny ability to solidly and successfully assemble cheap furniture armed with only Taiwanese instructions, an allen wrench and wood glue without ever once bursting into tears. I would often return from having taken a few days off to find heaps of furniture left for me to make sense of by my frustrated and distraught co-workers who had tried in vain to assemble them in my absence. I was (and still am by the way) a furniture assembly goddess.

It was also at this job where I learned that working with the public is not for me. I continued to do it for quite awhile but eventually lost the ability to control my facial expressions enough to hide the disgust I was feeling behind a big shiny grin when confronted with:

• The woman screaming at me at full volume because I would not allow her to return a dress with filthy yellowed armpit stains and no receipt. She threw a ball point pen at my head.
  
  
• The children allowed to run loose all over the store and smash bath oil beads onto the floor I had just finished mopping while their parents argued over the fabric quality of $12 toss pillows.
  
  
• The wild-eyed man who banged on the door after closing time and tearfully demanded to be let inside. He shouted, "I can see you in there! I just need to buy a papasan!". Allrighty nut bag. Key indicator of nuttiness not so much the wild-eyes, door banging or tears but the word "need" used with "papasan" in the same sentence. Who in the hell has an urgent need for a papasan chair? He was out of his fucking mind and I called the cops.**
  

Mostly though it was a great job. I worked there for almost 3 years and made a lot of great friends. Here are some of my more fond memories:

• The morning my co-worker Jay broke all the jars in a spice rack and we used the jar labels instead of our name tags. I immediately snagged Rosemary and Jay grabbed Basil. As the day wore on some of our other co-workers including the store manager got into the act and we had Sage, Paprika, Nutmeg and Thyme all working at the cash wrap stand. I'm not sure why this was so funny. But trust me, it was. Epecially when you'd get one of those eye contact customers that make a point of reading your name tag and using your name when they pay. Thank you Nutmeg!
  
  
• After I moved out of my parents house I didn't need to buy groceries because I was able to live off of the free fortune cookies we gave away at the cash wrap.
  
  
• The time that I had excruciating pains in my abdomen and thought I was having appendicitis. My co-worker had just picked up the phone and started to dial 911 at the point in which I realized it was just some push pins that I had forgotten in my apron pocket stabbing me in the gut every time I leaned into the counter.
  
  
• Being in charge of the clearance book which gave me an inside edge into knowing all the items that were on 75% clearance. You see depending on the sales of an item we didn't always mark everything down as low as we could have. But using that book I was able to legally mark it down as low as possible for store employees. Handy.
  
  
• Our secret employee stash of full price merchandise that we all kept hidden wrapped in a tarp in the rafters over the stockroom. If we fell in love with something but couldn't afford it (and it was small, lightweight and pliable enough to be wrapped in a tarp and stored over hour heads) we would hide it in the stash and hang onto it up there until it hit 75% clearance. Brilliant.
  

*Perhaps some of you (who have made it this far and are for some reason still reading this post) may be wondering why I felt the need to hide the name of Beer Ton Pimports, but not Gold Circle and that would be because Gold Circle no longer exists as a corporation, but if balance is important to you may refer to Gold Circle as Cold Gircle as you continue to read this post.

**It's possibly the most useless piece of furniture known to humankind (it's a actually a tie between the papasan chair and the wicker bookshelf but for the sake of my post today papasan wins). It doesn't store anything, is flimsy as all hell, it slides all around when you even think about sitting on it and if you do finally find a way to get comfortable sitting in one for any longer than 90 seconds will give you curvature of the spine or at the very least a stiff neck.

Employment History Part 1 - The Cash Office

My young blogger friend Player wrote a post the other day about how much he likes his part time job working the fitting rooms at a big name clothing store. It was an excellent post that started my mind ticking back to some of the jobs that I had as a young person, most of which were also in retail.

I never had a job officially until the summer I graduated from high school. Before then I was kept pretty busy at home taking care of my younger sister, who was only 3 years younger than me, but mentally and physically challenged with Downs Syndrome. When my parents were at work and even when they weren't it was my job to bathe her, feed her, make sure she took all of her medications and generally keep her entertained and out of trouble. They paid me a small allowance for doing this and some other household chores which included cooking dinner every weeknight (my mother cooked on weekends), cleaning both bathrooms and vacuuming all the carpets at least once a week.

I got $20 per week for my labors, half of which I was supposed to use to buy my lunch at school. Is it really necessary for me to tell you that I didn't eat lunch for 4 years? Of course not. I pocketed that cash so that I could use it for whatever a teenage girl could buy with 20 bucks in the early 80's. Turns out quite a lot: records, make-up, movie tickets. Back before I started drinking, smoking and doing drugs life was pretty cheap.

Sometimes I was jealous of my friends that had "normal" teenage types of jobs working in fast food restaurants or bagging groceries at the local supermarket. They made more money and seemed to have a lot more freedom, but I didn't push the job thing with my parents because I realized that my friends with legit jobs also had to put up with such indignities as coming home smelling like a fry-o-lator or schlepping groceries across slushy winter parking lots for 25 cent tips. I had it pretty good.

What felt like mere minutes after high school graduation everything changed however. Suddenly it was expected that I would go out into the world and get a job. My parents started taking my sister to a daycare, hired a housekeeper and stopped paying my allowance.*

It was kind of horrifying.

At 18 I had no idea where to even begin to find a job. I had no idea what exactly I was qualified to do other than cook, clean and take care of my sister. The only thing I knew for certain, after listening to the complaints of my friends was that I didn't want to work in a fast food restaurant or a supermarket. So I spent most of June of 1985 trying to find a job worthy of my superior presence, a glamorous and exciting job that was also conveniently located on the bus line or within walking distance of our house because I didn't have a car. (I ended up getting a car later that summer.)

I wanted a job that didn't require me to lift anything, be seen by anyone, sell anything, get dirty or sweaty, move or speak to other people.

At this point you might think that I'm going to tell you that I was fooling myself and that such a job was not to be found for an 18 year old girl with no previous experience, who wore all black, an eye covering punk hairstyle, pale goth make-up and buried herself in books. My parents were certainly convinced that between my style and picky, priggish attitude that I was sure to fail. Perhaps I was being picky and priggish, that doesn't mean such a job didn't exist (Ha-ha!). Turns out there was such a job available (Ho-ho!) in the cash office of a local chain of department stores called Gold Circle (imagine Kohl's and K-Mart got married).

My new part time job in the cash office paid a whopping $3.75 per hour, which was a whole 20 cents above minimum wage at the time. As a bonus I got a 20% store discount. Ha-ha!

Every morning, Monday thru Saturday, at 7am I was locked into a tiny room containing an enormous walk-in safe, two adding machines, all of the store's cash register tills and another cash office worker. We spent the next 5 hours adding up and balancing all the previous days cash and receipts, refilled the tills with cash for the current business day and then prepared the bank deposits that were picked up promptly at noon by one of those armored car companies.

Every day literally tens or hundreds (during holiday season) of thousands of dollars in cash passed through my hands. It was a lot of responsibility and I like to think that my experience being responsible for taking care of my sister was what sold my manager on hiring me. Also I have an honest face. I do! Besides if there were any doubts about my integrity and ability to be trusted with buttloads of cash I had to go through some extra screening procedures and tests (including, if I remember correctly, a lie detector).

Anyhoo... that was my first real job and the only thing I didn't like about it was my cash office partner that I was locked into the room with each day. She was a girl named "Missy" with whom I had absolutely nothing in common. We got along, barely.

Missy, although only a year older than me, had dropped out of high school and was already married and had a one year old son. To be clear, it wasn't so much those facts that made me dislike her, but the fact that she was all superior about it. She was from a very small town where according to her being married and having a baby was the end all, be all of life's existence. She could die happy at 19 because she was married and had a baby. I was all like, big deal you've got a uterus.

I think perhaps because I wasn't totally jealous of her superior status as teenage wife and mother and frankly made no bones about my lack of interest or aspirations in either of those things (at any age), Missy thought that I was the biggest smarty pants asshole weirdo she had ever met and never stopped finding new and creative ways of letting me know how she felt. She certainly didn't like hearing about my taste in music, adventures in night clubbing and opinions about religion, politics or women's rights.

I might have stayed longer in the cash office of Gold Circle were it not for Missy. I was able to put up with her for about a year before I moved on to what I thought at the time was the greatest job in the world... which I will tell you about in my next post.

*I'm quite sure they weren't paying either the housekeeper or the daycare center a paltry $20 a week.