It didn't take long after leaving Fred Meyer for me to begin feeling like a human again. Almost immediately, I began contacting my friends and getting work done towards going to grad school, cleaning up after myself more around the house, playing with the cat, and in general smiling a lot more.
People rarely treat me rudely anymore. There was a woman who cut in front of me at the supermarket (and I only had one item) but that's it. Nobody leaves when I'm in the middle of a sentence. They don't roll their eyes at me when I tell them something they already know. It's amazing how the absence of these little things can make such a big difference in my self worth.
Of course, if those people could know that their actions affected my self worth, they would know that they won. I don't think most of them try to do it on purpose. I think they're just impatient, angry, and selfish. Not evil people whose dearest ambition in life is to make uncertain clerks feel bad about themselves.
I didn't meet only bad people, though. When I started at Fred Meyer, I was both a clerk and a human resources assistant, telling other new hires what they needed to know. I always took some extra time to tell them a little about what to expect from the people. "Eventually, someone will treat you badly," I would tell them. "You have to keep it in perspective. Only one in a hundred are the mean ones. You just don't notice the people who treat you normally as much. But if you ever feel like the world is filled with mean-spirited people, try to notice the people just doing their shopping."
And then I would tell them the story of my first day of work, when I was cashiering for the first time after being trained. I didn't know any of the produce codes, and it was taking me a long time, as I couldn't even tell the difference between zucchini and cucumbers. I don't remember what else I did that was so egregious, but the customer I was serving had had enough and was eager to express her displeasure. "You're an idiot, aren't you," she sneered at me. "This is ridiculous." I was so shocked and frustrated that I began to cry, right in front of the woman and everyone else in line behind her. (Those of you who know me will know this is not a shocking occurrence, but notable nonetheless). When I was through with her and she was on her merry way, the customer who had been in line behind her said to me, "Wow, she's a mean old lady. You cry if you need to, take a few deep breaths, and don't worry about her a minute longer than you have to." I was probably too upset to properly thank her for being so nice to me. But I find that it's an interesting example of how you get the best and the worst of people in supermarkets.
09 August 2009
06 August 2009
Cemetery
It's always unnaturally quiet getting in the car after visiting the cemetery. The cemetery itself feels quiet, but the difference between the noise of the wind, the birds, and the insects that carry on unnoticing and the empty silence that presses on your ears in the car is unnerving. Thoughts of life and death that took over conscious thought as you brushed grass clippings from the headstone are displaced by the need to locate the correct key, turn the ignition, put the car in gear. It seems wrong, somehow, yet equally wrong to interrupt the new silence with the radio or a conversation. But of course, that feeling of displacement can't last forever. Eventually you start driving away.
05 August 2009
Blogging to Nobody
This blog is such an odd thing. I keep imagining it has all kinds of potential, but of course I have done nothing about that potential, and so I would never dream of imagining it would have any sort of readership, and without an audience, what can it be? It is public, so it can't be a diary. I wouldn't want that, anyway. Maybe one day it will simply coalesce into something worth reading.
We're about to move to Arizona. Saying goodbye to Chris was one of the hardest things about moving. We've had to scrape together money, eat whatever we could mooch off people, move heavy furniture, find a place to live and convince someone to let us live there. But saying goodbye is never easy. This is the biggest move we've made yet. We're going where we know no one and the people we do know are days away. And we're going where we can't look back. Once our paths sunder, I know it will be hard to ever bring them back together again.
Sitting on the grass in his front yard, looking up at the stars, it felt like a scene from a movie. Inside the house, we had cheerfully noticed it was getting late, we were all getting tired, and it was time to go. Stepping out the door and crossing the wet lawn to the car was like crossing from ignorance into denial. The moonlight and starlight that made me feel like I should be part of some epic coming-of-age story simultaneously reminded me that this night would soon give way to the morning. Tomorrow would come and deprive us, without comment, of a friend.
We stopped at the car. One of us said, "See you never." It was a phrase we had started saying when Jon and Ashley left for New York. We said it all the time when one of us would leave town. Saying it like that, flippant, like it was something you were supposed to say all the time, made the reality of it easier to ignore. We had already gone through this sort of goodbye before--the uncertainty when we would see our friends again. In the short walk from the house, the three of us had realized that this wasn't just goodbye for the night. This felt like goodbye forever.
Once we leave the Pacific Northwest, we won't be home anymore. And we probably won't be coming back. We have to go wherever the jobs are. And then we'll want to settle down and have a family. And then we'll tell our children about our friends from college, the ones we visited when they were little, too little to remember. Their kids are just a little younger than you, we'll say. They sent a picture with their last Christmas card.
So it really wasn't like a movie at all. We sat in silence under the stars, occasionally moving to scratch an itch or adjust for comfort, listening to Chris's dog whining from inside the house. "I'm cold," said Chris, shivering a little. We sat a little longer. "I'm getting pretty tired. We have to go eventually," I said, sounding heartless in my own ears. We all stood up. I opened the car door. The inside of the car, suddenly illuminated by the dome light, seemed like a prop that had been accidentally left on the stage of our little drama. We stood there, unable to see one another's expressions in the dim light of the early morning. Andrew moved around to the driver's side, opened that door, too. I looked between them, unable to read their expressions. I sniffled. I needed a Kleenex. At last, I sat down in the car, leaving the door open. "Goodnight," I said. Not goodbye. "Bye," said Andrew. Nobody moved. Then he just got in the car, and we just left, while Chris waved and his dog whined in the background. It wasn't poetic at all. It was just like leaving every other time, only this time felt worse. This time, we wouldn't be coming back.
We're about to move to Arizona. Saying goodbye to Chris was one of the hardest things about moving. We've had to scrape together money, eat whatever we could mooch off people, move heavy furniture, find a place to live and convince someone to let us live there. But saying goodbye is never easy. This is the biggest move we've made yet. We're going where we know no one and the people we do know are days away. And we're going where we can't look back. Once our paths sunder, I know it will be hard to ever bring them back together again.
Sitting on the grass in his front yard, looking up at the stars, it felt like a scene from a movie. Inside the house, we had cheerfully noticed it was getting late, we were all getting tired, and it was time to go. Stepping out the door and crossing the wet lawn to the car was like crossing from ignorance into denial. The moonlight and starlight that made me feel like I should be part of some epic coming-of-age story simultaneously reminded me that this night would soon give way to the morning. Tomorrow would come and deprive us, without comment, of a friend.
We stopped at the car. One of us said, "See you never." It was a phrase we had started saying when Jon and Ashley left for New York. We said it all the time when one of us would leave town. Saying it like that, flippant, like it was something you were supposed to say all the time, made the reality of it easier to ignore. We had already gone through this sort of goodbye before--the uncertainty when we would see our friends again. In the short walk from the house, the three of us had realized that this wasn't just goodbye for the night. This felt like goodbye forever.
Once we leave the Pacific Northwest, we won't be home anymore. And we probably won't be coming back. We have to go wherever the jobs are. And then we'll want to settle down and have a family. And then we'll tell our children about our friends from college, the ones we visited when they were little, too little to remember. Their kids are just a little younger than you, we'll say. They sent a picture with their last Christmas card.
So it really wasn't like a movie at all. We sat in silence under the stars, occasionally moving to scratch an itch or adjust for comfort, listening to Chris's dog whining from inside the house. "I'm cold," said Chris, shivering a little. We sat a little longer. "I'm getting pretty tired. We have to go eventually," I said, sounding heartless in my own ears. We all stood up. I opened the car door. The inside of the car, suddenly illuminated by the dome light, seemed like a prop that had been accidentally left on the stage of our little drama. We stood there, unable to see one another's expressions in the dim light of the early morning. Andrew moved around to the driver's side, opened that door, too. I looked between them, unable to read their expressions. I sniffled. I needed a Kleenex. At last, I sat down in the car, leaving the door open. "Goodnight," I said. Not goodbye. "Bye," said Andrew. Nobody moved. Then he just got in the car, and we just left, while Chris waved and his dog whined in the background. It wasn't poetic at all. It was just like leaving every other time, only this time felt worse. This time, we wouldn't be coming back.
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