The Straight Dope On Holiday Shopping At One Big Box Retailer

WARNING: this post is a very candid battle plan for Christmas shopping at a particular retailer.  It may be offensive at times, and it is completely honest.  Read at your own risk.

OK.  The big-box retailer where I work normally hires a small army of seasonal help to staff the store for the holidays, but not this year.  We only hired five seasonal employees, and of those five, only one is a cashier.  So.  You know what that means.  We are shortstaffed for the holidays.  There aren't any noticeable additional cashiers.  And regular employees are working very few hours.  I'm at fifteen hours per week right now, and I'm cool with that because my scar tissue, which is swirled throughout my abdominal cavity, hurts when it snows.  I'm OK with only working a few hours per week because I hurt, but lots of other employees are feeling the pinch.

The store is what we call "light."  It helps amp up profits by keeping the overhead low.  Keeping the overhead low by not paying very many employees for very many hours allows the store to keep rolling back prices and being one of the cheapest places in town.  What this means for the customer is that, if they want those low prices, they're going to have to put up with some hassle.  And the employees on staff, as stressed-out as they are, are not going to be forthcoming with a whole bunch of sympathy toward nasty people.  The store is staffed with members of the Cache Valley community, for one thing, and Cache Valley people don't like whiners.  For another thing, the empoyees there are working at 100% capacity, and they don't have any extra energy for sympathy.  It won't help anybody's case to moan about all the empty registers.  The only day of the year that we use them all is Black Friday.  We don't even open them all the day after Christmas.  Either shop there or don't.  Your choice.  If you choose to shop there, you'll have to pay with some extra patience.

There are, however, things you can do to alleviate your hassle.

1)  The best solution is to shop in the morning.  I know how hard is is to get up early (believe me.  I know.) but it's the best way to avoid crowds.  When I get to work at 10am, the cashiers are all standing around, bored.  By 11am, they are hard at work.  So if you get there in the morning, you have a good chance of checking out without a problem.  Whatever you do, avoid shopping in the afternoon.  You'll have to fight your way to the register, even with me directing traffic.

2)  If you can't get out there in the morning, the middle of the night is a good plan.  3am is a good time to shop.  But only one cash register is open during the night, and it's the one right in the middle.  So plan to walk to the middle register, and get a scooter cart of you can't walk it.  Just kidding.  We all know you can walk it.  I walk that stretch of concrete hundreds of times during my workday.  It's fifty feet of smooth floor, so quit whining and just get it done.

3)  If you're up to it, shop on Sunday.  It's the slowest day of the week.  If that's not your bag, at least avoid shopping on Saturday and Monday.  Those are the busiest days.  Shop in the middle of the week, in the morning, and you should have an easier time.

4)  Somehow or another, the cash registers are subject to a rush at any time of day.  The place will be dead, and then all the customers will show up as if someone blew a whistle and called them all to the front.  For most of the year, I would recommend dilly-dallying for a few minutes, check out the jewelry display case, do a little dance, and in a few minutes the lines will die down.  But this is Christmas, so normal rules don't always apply.  My best advice for this situation: bring a book, or headphones.  Plan to wait.  Know that it will happen, and make it playtime.  Sing along to your favorite song.  You're not any weirder than anyone there.

5)  Choose to be nice.  You'll get better service that way.  My job is to direct people to the shortest lines, but I literally walk away from nasty people.  I apologize for the inconvenience with my voice, and then I go help someone else.  I get paid minimum wage, and it's not enough to charge the beast.  I run away.  And I don't care that people judge me about that, because here's the thing: my job is to help people, not to take abuse from them.  I'll bend over backwards and walk all over that store to help nice people, but as soon as they start to be abusive I stop caring about their problem.  So the most efficient way to interact with me and get your needs met is to just be nice.

6)  Shop somewhere else.  Go to DI and get everyone books for Christmas.  Make the kids a homemade coloring book with simple drawings and make copies of it.  They don't know the difference between good and bad artwork anyway.  Give goodie plates instead of presents.  Last year I made a huge batch of soap for everyone, and it was easy.  I don't know if anybody really liked it or if they were just faking, but it filled the gift obligation.  Get gifts online during the year instead of waiting for the Christmas shopping season.  Give the "five hands": handmade, second hand, a helping hand, time hand in hand, and hand me down.  Your loved ones, for the most part, already have too much stuff.  They have cupboards, closets, garages, backyard sheds, and storage units bursting with stuff they never use. They don't need or want more cheap crap that was made in China.  They're not going to like the smell of that bath products set, or the colors in that cosmetics set, and it's just going to sit there and get all gross until they throw it away.  UNLESS!  you're one of those lucky bastards who can afford to give high-end electronics for Christmas.  Everybody likes TVs.  And cars.  And boats.  If you can afford it, you can buy people's love with that stuff.

So.  My point is, you don't even really have to do very much shopping.  If you must go do Christmas shopping at the retailer where I work, try to schedule it for a morning or late at night, and bring a book in your purse.  Wear comfortable shoes, because you will most likely walk several city blocks' worth of distance inside the store, and another couple blocks in the parking lot going in and out.  If you are unable to walk on your own (in all seriousness, I know that some people can't) plan to bring your own mobility solutions from home, because the more people there are in the store, the more competition there is for the scooter carts.  Plan to find things on your own for the most part, because the store is light.  And try to look at the positive and summon as much Christmas cheer as you can, because store employees will give top priority to nice customers.

All right.  Go forth and celebrate.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things.

I walked down the hill from Aggie village in a drizzly rainfall, wiping water off my brow every few seconds with my hand and then smearing my hand on my already-sodden pants, as if that did any good.  I didn't mind walking in the rain, really.  I mean, I'm from Seattle.  But on this particular day, I had broken my own rule that states I must always have real pants on when I leave my house.  I have plenty of pairs of pants, but only one pair of elastic-waisted ones, and I'm not up to wearing stiff waistbands again yet.  So I had left my apartment in a pair of knit pajama pants that just didn't seem to hold up to the water as well as ordinary blue jeans.  The rain collected in my hair, spilled over my forehead, and sent a single drip right down my nose.  I wiped it away.

At the bottom of the hill, I entered the Tesoro station and went straight back to the restroom.  I knew I needed to buy something, so I selected a spicy hot V8 and took it up to the register.  I produced a payment card.

"Is it debit or credit?"  Asked the teller.

Horrified, I stared at the card.  I had no idea.  I knew my confusion and hesitation must be obvious, so I started doing the exactly wrong thing: explaining.

"It's my husband's card."  I told her.  "He gave it to me to do laundry, and then I got locked out of the house.  Then I had to go to the bathroom, so I came here, and..."  I noticed a spot on the card where it said it was a debit card.  "Oh, you know what?  I says Debit right there."

"You can run it as either debit or credit."  She told me, and it didn't register at first how helpful she was really being.  "That way, if you don't know the pin, you can just sign."  Ah.  There we go.  If she ran the card as debit, I would be embarrassed and stymied because I didn't know the pin.  She was helping me out, I realized.  "Let's do credit."  It worked swimmingly and I signed the receipt.  She handed me a second receipt.  "Wait...do you keep one of these, or do I keep both?"

The checkout girl reached across the counter and delicately plucked the signed receipt out of my hand.  "There ya go.  Yeah, I'm...totally with it."  I took my leave and fled out into the parking lot with my beverage, only to stand next to one of the outside garbage cans and drink it so that I could throw the bottle away properly.  This accomplished, I set out to return home, back up the hill.

But now I had a new problem, because it had gotten dark.  I usually dress carefully in light colors if I am going to walk at night, because I don't trust Utah drivers to really actually look for pedestrians.  I cautiously crossed every driveway into every apartment complex, and a couple of SUVs really would have mowed me down if I hadn't been a defensive walker.  Avoiding being hit by cars is something I've been good at ever since I got run over at age four.  I learned that lesson but good.  I use crosswalks and walk signals, but I was dressed in dark purple pajamas and a black SUU sweatshirt.

I hadn't even intended to leave my apartment complex!  I railed and no one in particular.  I just wanted to go to the laundry room and wash some clothes!  But I hadn't been able to make the new card-op laundry system work, and when I went into the housing office they had told me I had to call the repair man myself.  I had to go home to get my phone because my pajama pants don't have pockets, and that's when I learned I had locked myself out.  Shayne wasn't going to be home for another couple of hours, and I was unwilling to ask housing to let me back in because they would charge me a dollar and I have exactly $1.57 to my name right now, and I don't want to give my last dollar to housing.  I already pay to live here, and I helped pay for that spiffy new laundry system that costs more per load, and it's not cleaning my clothes because it doesn't work, even though other people's laundry is spinning merrily in the machines, and I didn't even bring a book to read while I wait for Shayne to come home.

That's when I hesitated to walk to the gas station.  See, I don't like to go walking around town in my pajamas.  Heck, I don't even like to go to Walmart in my pajamas.  I'm not an expert in fashion or beauty, but I do have standards.

As I walked, I hoped that my pajama pants would just look like printed blue jeans under the streetlights.  Maybe, with a little luck, that would happen.

Heading back up the hill to Aggie Village, I made the only smart decision I had made all day.  I arrived at a bus stop just as the Aggie Shuttle was opening its doors, and I knew that if I got on I would just have a pleasant ride around campus which would culminate in the bus letting me off right in front of my apartment.  Instead, I chose to walk up the hill.  The docs prescribed walking as the very best form of exercise.  All the squillions of docs I talked to agreed on this point.  They all urged me to walk.  So I pretended that I was just out for an invigorating tromp, in my sleeping clothes, on a rainy night.  Yeah.

Shayne was home when I got back and was able to let me into the house, thankfully.  Unfortunately, the laundry is still dirty.  I'm considering driving it out to another laundromat in town.

The Night Morning Never Came

It was the year 1999.  I was working at a corporate pig farm that lay about fifty-odd miles outside of Cedar City, which was where I lived at the time.  The work was very hard, but I was perservering.  I was determined to succeed at the silly job, even though it was evident that the job was all wrong for me.  I mean, I went to work there because I love animals, and I naively thought it would be fun.  It was a factory farm.  Ha.

Anyway, I came home from work one afternoon, exhausted.  Even though it was only about 5:00 PM, I decided to just go to bed.  I had worked my butt off that day.  I had to get up at 3:30 to go to work, so it's not like I was breaking any sonic barriers with my sleep.  I was too tired, so I went to bed.

When I awoke the next morning, it was already 8:00.  Holy crap.  I was already two hours late for work.  I frantically searched for, and found, the phone number to my workplace and called it on the archaic land line phone we had back in those days.  I got a recording that said this number had been disconnected.

Desperate, I dialed the operator.  She tried to call the number, then she looked it up and told me it was a cell phone from California.  I got out the phone book and dialed the farm's corporate office in Milford, but no one answered.  Bereft, and knowing I had failed, I dismally put the slip of paper away.  The phone number I needed wasn't listed in the phone book, and the corporate offices weren't answering, and I had somehow managed to write down the number to my farm wrong.  I couldn't look it up online because it was 1999, and even if someone in my apartment had had the internet I certainly wouldn't have known how to use it, or how to hack into their computer without the password.  I'm a child of the 1920s.  So I did the last thing left to me to do.  I went and sat on the stairs of my apartment and started crying.

Barely a moment later, my roommate walked in and asked me what was wrong.  I told her through my tears, relating the entire story in all its gory details.  I had done everything a person could do.

"It's too late."  I sobbed.  "I'm already fired.  It's a no-call no-show.  It's all over.  I don't know.  Should I drive in to work?  Should I try to explain what happened?"

My roomie was staring at me with a very strange expression.  She kept staring after I had finished speaking, and after several seconds it started to make me uncomfortable.

"What?"  I demanded.

"Um, Cydni?  It's 8:00 at night.  Are you really supposed to be at work at 8:00 at night?"

I didn't comprehend.  I probably made a very humorous facial expression, the one where my mouth falls open and my whole face goes slack.

"What?"

"It's 8:00 at night.  Do you think it's 8:00 in the morning?  Because I would be really surprised if you needed to be at work right now."

"It's 8:00 at night?  I repeated thickly.  "It's not morning?"

"No.  You're not late to work.  You're fine."

By now my roomie was struggling to contain her laughter, and as my comprehension dawned it brought with it crushing embarrassment.  Oh, hud, I thought.  (I really did think that.  I hadn't met any Hudsons yet, and in Cedar City many people used "hud" to mean, like, "shit."  So they weren't swearing.  And I was like that back then.)

I ran back into my room.  I probably fell to my knees and started dramatically praying, cause that's the kind of girl I was.  The humiliation was unbearable.  I had taken a nap and awakened three hours later.  I hadn't slept all night and ignored my alarm.  It was fine, except that I had thoroughly made an ass of myself.

Well, it took thirteen years, but now I can finally look back on it and laugh.

Also, this.

Happy Camper

Look at how awesome this thing is.  Really.  Look.

When I was small, my grandparents had this wonderful old Terry travel trailer from the 70's.  They pulled that thing all over the heck.  I remember camping with them in Oregon, going to Camp Meeting (Seventh Day Adventist religious revival meeting) or having them cozily living in their trailer outside our house for months at a time.  My grandparents were entirely free.

I keep having this recurring dream in which my grampa just gives me this trailer.  Free and clear, out of the goodness of his heart.  In reality, he sold this trailer long ago, upgraded, upgraded again, and I'm pretty sure he finally sold the last one and retired from camping.  But in the dreams, he always gives me this rad old thing.

I always feel delighted by the gift.  I dash inside and relive the old glory days.  There's the spot on the floor where gramma used to make a little bed for me and pad it with lots of blankets.  I would go to sleep feeling loved and happy and safe.  And I felt so privileged and trusted when she finally allowed me to sleep on the fold-down top bunk.  

I would make that thing so cute.

There's the prim double beds in the back where my grandparents always slept, that I would extend into one big bed for me and Shayne.  Of course I would redecorate a little.  I'd pick a breezy aqua blue color scheme and make new curtains and little crocheted rugs and granny square blankies.

Pictured: comfort.

It doesn't necessarily have to be granny square.

but the best part would be knowing that, now that I have a Terry, I never, ever have to be scared that I won't have anywhere to live.  Ever again.

The original interior, before I make it adorable.

A wild Terry in its natural habitat.

I immediately start planning to avoid paying housing bills by dragging this thing all over town and parking it in different places every week.

In reality, Shayne doesn't share my goal of living in a trailer.  Also, we don't actually have one.

This one costs $2,000 in Boise, Idaho.

And yet, I keep having this dream, and the yearning in my heart rages on.  What does it mean?  What does it mean?

The Beast In The Belly

So, it's some form cancer.  The GP at the student clinic told me she thought it was probably lymphoma, which was good news because lymphoma responds well to chemo and radiation therapies.  She sent me over to a surgeon at the hospital along with the urging to ask Shayne to leave work and come with me to the appointment.  He did.

We sat in the surgeon's office and looked in depth at the results of the CT scans.  This thing...it's huge.  So much bigger than what I would even think could fit in my body.  It goes from my uterus to my liver and fills up almost one whole side of my abdominal cavity and it pushes my organs around to make room for itself.  The bright side is, I'm probably not as fat as I thought I was.

The surgeon told me that the removal of the tumor should be fairly easy, and he felt there was a 90% chance I won't need chemo afterward.  He wasn't all that concerned with a biopsy or a detailed diagnosis of what sort of tumor this is.  His first priority is to just get it out, then worry about doing an autopsy on it.  Shayne and I found this hopeful, but I feel a sense of doubt.  The next doctor might tell us something different again.

Since part of the tumor is dangerously close to my baby factory components, the surgeon referred me to a gynecological surgeon in Salt Lake.  I have an appointment in a couple of weeks to talk to her and plan for the surgery.  I guess I'm assuming the obgyn can circumnavigate my other organs with equal skill.

I'm already planning the books and music I will bring with me to the hospital, remembering what C.S. Lewis wrote about how he learned to enjoy the time he spent recovering from various illnesses and injuries because it gave him an opportunity to read as much as he wanted.  I intend to to the same.  During the worst of it, I won't even have to take potty breaks.  This will be way better than the time I spent in the hospital when I was four, because now I can read whatever I want.  I probably want to avoid funny books, as the abdominal incision will make laughter painful, but...

I guess I'll see what happens.  Cross that bridge when I come to it, wot.

In Which I Attempt (And Fail) To Avoid Flashing My Undies At The CT Scan Technician

Today marks the date of my first ultrasound, which was performed in an attempt to diagnose a weird, owie thing in my tummy that I have lovingly named, "My Tumor."  It was my first serious round of testing where I didn't have my mother present, and where I didn't have health insurance.  I held out a long time for the insurance, but it turned out we couldn't afford the premiums, so that's cool.  Then I tried to hold out for Obamacare, but that didn't work out either because it freaking HURTS.  So.

It's incredibly awkward.  The girls at the front desk for IHC's radiology department are polite, but their mannerism suggests that they weren't expecting you and they're frankly weirded out to see you there.  I tried to give everybody my application for financial aid (in which I enclosed our current tax returns including all schedules, our last two pay stubs for both of us, W-2 forms from our taxes for all our jobs, my mother's maiden name, a sperm sample, and the zygote of our firstborn child) which embarrassed them all until one of the office personnel kindly showed me which office to take the app to.

The ultrasound was probably routine, if you're used to that sort of thing.  But my mind kept playing tricks on me.  The tech would be examining, like, my gallbladder, and I kept thinking I was seeing the form of a curled-up kidney bean of a fetus in the grainy, staticky images on the screen.  I'm probably just used to searching the scan my friend shows me and straining to find anything vaguely human in the dense impossibility  of snowstorm.  Maybe I can't shut that off.  When the tech finally did scan my uterus, I was relieved to find it comfortingly empty.  Although, the tech did ask me if I had a uterus -- a valid question, I realized, but it seemed strange.  She could see my whole tummy.  Being born without a uterus is rare, and and I would most likely have a scar if it had been removed.  What would it do, turn inside out and run away?

Dunno.  When she scanned My Tumor, I caught sight of a vaguely treelike form, like a placenta, heavily veined and yet strangely amorphous in the ultrasound screen.  It was inside me, feeding off my blood.

She called my doctor and made a report.  I heard discomfiting bits of conversation like, "She has a mass in her abdomen that's over thirty centimeters.  I couldn't adequately measure it...yeah.  I think she needs a CT scan.  Just to see what this is."  So the doc ordered a CT scan, and they managed to squeeze me in for a few hours later, which was wonderfully convenient.  I went home and spent the next several hours watching the clock like a stalking cat, drinking my contrast chemicals at correct intervals, willing myself to become the responsible adult I know I should be, right at this moment.

I got the chemicals all drunk at the appropriate times, but I showed up for my CT without the paperwork I had taken home to fill out.  Luckily, that was an easy fix.  I just filled out new paperwork like magic.  At one point, one of the front desk girls came up to me and stated, "You don't have diabetes." then added as an afterthought, "Correct?"  I experienced a variety of emotions in that moment.  First, I was all like, "Great!  Thanks!  I didn't realize anybody was testing me for it, but..." then, "Wait, what?"  What I actually said to her was, "I have not been diagnosed with diabetes, nor do I believe I have diabetes."  It must have sounded strange because the girl dragged out a shaky, uncertain smile.  "Perfect!"  She exclaimed.

A tech emerged from the bowels of the building and called me back ("Cyndi?"  Always, with the Cyndi.)  She was nice.  But as were walking into the scan room, she asked me my weight.  Rather than protesting that I'd already been asked for my weight, like, three times since that morning, I revealed the rather substantial number (I've gained about fifty pounds since we came to Logan).  She gasped, balked, and led me to a different room, I assume one with a sturdier platform to hold my ponderous weight.  I needed to remove anything metal, including my underwire bra and metal-buttoned jeans.  That was expected.  I worried about having to remove my undies and was relieved that I could keep them on, but this presented a new challenge.  Would it have been worse to flash the tech and radiologist my bum, or my cheerful, brightly striped undies?  I held the back of my gown closed by hand.

The next step was to inject more contrast chemicals via IV.  The chemicals I drank would cause my digestive system to light up one color, and the IV chemicals would cause my circulatory system to light up another color.  Excellent.  I lay down on the platform with only a slight pang of fear that I would cause it to collapse and splinter into high-tech kindling.  The technician began the process of finding and piercing my vein, a process with which I have familiarized myself via repeated blood donations.  No big.  The tech struggled to find the vein and wiggled that needle.  I grimaced, but I'm tough.  Then suddenly, blood welled up around the needled and streamed down the side of my arm, down the CT platform, and all over the floor.  I should have thought of a bloodletting joke, but I didn't.  Drat.  It wasn't quite epic enough to be like a murder scene, but it was still pretty awesome.  The tech apologized profusely and I was all like, "Are you kidding?  It's just a little blood.  I've had worse."  That last bit was, of course, quoting Monty Python.  Such are the jokes I come up with while wearing a hospital gown.

Then they sent me through the spinning portal, which I'm convinced is either a stargate or a door to Narnia.  It's really a cool machine.  I reflect on how most people who don't develop a qualifying condition don't get to see one or know what it's like.  It's like, spinning backwards into the void.  I lay there in the device and watched mirrored components inside it whirring, flashing, like tiny robots observing me and bustling about.

After a time, the tech came back and injected me with iodine, which, as she warned me, would produce a warm sensation, a metallic taste, and a feeling like I've peed my pants, but I really haven't.  Boy, did I appreciate that warning.  I told her so, too.  It was a perfect description of the strange sensation I got.  For a moment, I worried that I might throw up all over this beautiful machine, but I willed myself to be still and let the nausea pass.  It did.  I told myself to buck up and remember that if this all turns out to be cancer, this wave of nausea will feel like a vacation very, very soon.

On my way back into the bathroom to dress myself, I held the gown closed again, until I reached out to take hold of the door handle.  I felt the fabric billow out behind me, backside to the tech and the radiologist.  Awesome.

The tech told me to wait in the lobby for about twenty minutes while the radiologist read the resulting scans.  If I didn't hear anything in twenty minutes, she told me, I should go ask.  Sometimes the radiologist can...forget.  (Incidentally, that was the second time I'd heard a hospital employee tactfully tell me that the radiologist basically has no fucks left to give, and I have to light a fire under him to get him to help me.)  I waited for about thirty minutes of soap opera (Days Of Our Lives.  I'm not really a fan.) before returning to the desk, where the polite girls assumed the posture and expressions that indicated they felt they were talking to someone very strange, very unfortunate, and very stupid.  What did I need, exactly?  Some sort of update?  What were the results of...what?  I'm used to that.  Walmart customers give me that all the time.  It neither bothers me nor hurts my feelings.  But this situation was very different from me, standing there with a dazed expression, trying to remember where Walmart keeps the toothpicks.  Like, it's OK if you think I'm stupid.  It's OK if you think I'm socially incompetent, or that I'm three gallons of crazy in a two-gallon bucket (I am.)  But I came in here to get a CT scan done.  What else would I be asking about?

I didn't say that.  I embarrassedly tried to explain what I was still doing there, when the results were already being sent to my doc anyway.  The girls politely promised to "keep an eye out for" the radiologist.  I milled around another couple of minutes and then left.  I hadn't eaten anything since the night before due to doctor's instructions, and my cheerfulness was coming to an end with grim alacrity.  I went to Wok On Wheels and got something to eat, because really, what does it matter?  I've mostly managed to convince myself of -- and accept -- the idea that this is terminal cancer that has been exacerbated by my foolish decision to delay treatment in hopes of obtaining health insurance.  Any result short of "Let's start chemotherapy!" or "Go ahead and make your final arrangements" would be welcome.

In the end, I don't know.  I'll talk to the doc tomorrow, and hopefully she will know more.  I have an idea that a biopsy is coming.  If I don't qualify for the financial aid through IHC (after all, Conservice offers health insurance.  Why didn't Shayne just drop out of school and buy it?) I'll apply for Obama's pre-existing condition insurance.  And if not...

The End.

P.S.  I bet the therapists in the next life are a lot more effective, and I bet they don't even charge any money. And I could kick it with my dead pets.  They don't judge me for being crazy.

Listening to this:

I Think It Might Be A Little Hypocritical To Get All Upset About Bullying Or How Advanced Technology Is Changing The Face Of Bullying

Now this is the Law of the Jungle -- as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back --
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

                                                                                                   ~Rudyard Kipling

I spent most of the day yesterday pondering the video of the school bus monitor who got bullied by some kids on the bus.  My feelings fluctuated wildly from things like, 'now people can see what it's really like' to "this is just how society works, and if you take bullying away we will be lost as a people" to "we're only as weak as our strongest member," to "We're only as strong as our weakest member," to "lots of people who are bullied as children never grow up to be strong adults or find a good place in society.  Many of them are always on their guard, ready to fight whether the threat they perceive is real or not.  Society breaks its own members, then punishes them for being broken." to "Lots of people who are bullies as children grow up to be harsh adults because they've learned that this works for them."  Do I know the truth of any of these thoughts?  Not necessarily.  When I was in therapy I learned to examine my thoughts and to know that a thought is not necessarily true because I thought it.  Still.  Not everyone figures out how to heal and move on.  I'm living proof of that.

I was really reluctant to watch the bus monitor video, because I knew what it was going to be like.  I finally did watch a couple minutes of it, and rather than being shocked, I felt a sort of "see, I was right" sort of moment.  The thing that surprises me most is the shock and amazement that the media expresses.  Like, did they not know this happens every day on school buses?  Are newscasters pretending they didn't also participate in scenes like this, and that they didn't try to pummel their school's Omega into nonexistence?  (I use the word Omega in this context even though the meaning I intend is the one that applies to wolves, whose social structure is chillingly similar to our own.  I prefer it over human equivalents like "school geek" or "village idiot."  I will also sometimes apply the term "head shy" to myself, even though it is an equestrian term.  It mean a horse that's been hit in the face too many times, until it balks when anything, even a carrot, comes near it.  I relate better to animals than I do to humans.)

A part of me wants to ask, what's the big fuss about?  Nobody cared when this was happening to me every day on the bus.  This is how human beings treat each other, especially children.  This is how children are.  And you can't protect a kid from other kids in a school situation.  Everybody, everybody knows that.  That's why adults used to chuckle indulgently when I would tell them I was being picked on during bus rides.  Granted, it doesn't sound that bad when you put it that way.  I didn't have the language skills to fully express what was happening, maybe.  Adults must have thought I was just tattling.

And all of them must have thought it.  Every teacher to whom I tried to appeal, the therapist my mother took me to, the school counselors, the principal, everybody.  My mother told me that I just needed to learn to deal with it.  I remember seeing a sign posted in my classroom about how everyone had the right to feel safe at school, and if you don't feel safe you should tell a teacher.  I remember feeling the contemptuous, humorless smile on my face, knowing how profoundly apathetic those teachers were.  I had an older sister who told me that I needed to come up with a good retort and find some way to throw the harshness back at the other kids, or I was going down when I got to high school.  As an example, she told me about a kid in her high school that everyone hated, and the bullies had locked him in a garbage-filled locker for a three day weekend.  He didn't get out until the janitor came in the morning school started up again, and after that he killed himself.  So, that would be my fate if I couldn't get my shit together by the time I got to high school.  I'm still working on finding creative ways to throw the harshness back.

But, why is it OK if this sort of thing happens to a ten year old girl, but not to a sixty-eight year old woman?  I mean, the woman has decades of life experience behind her.  Shouldn't she be able to handle this by now?  When she was a young girl, she probably participated in the bullying.  (See how I am?  It's very Me vs. Them.  Someone is either the bully or the bullied.  And if she's never experienced bullying on this side of the equation before, she must have always been a bully up till now.)

Also, she's just going to get over it, right?  She's had decades of practice leaving hurtful things in the past.  She's survived childbirth.  So how are a few punk kids going to do any harm?  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.  She's the adult in this situation.  She'll get over it soon.

Well, probably not.  Shayne gets so frustrated when he unexpectedly reaches out to smooth my hair back, and I flinch.  I know I'm supposed to be over it by now, but I'm just not.  I'm still on my guard.  Seriously, where do bullies go when they grow up?  Do they magically become nice people who play well with others?  Those same children who raped their classmates with hairbrushes are now adults, walking around in public as if they belong here.  It's not safe.

Last night when I was pondering the scenario, I worked myself up into a froth by imagining storming into my middle school, twenty years on, and insisting that I went to this school and I felt like I was in danger every damn day and nobody cared.  you should just post signs that say "You're toast.  Sink or swim." because that's what's really true.  It didn't help to think that the school I attended twenty years ago must certainly have an entirely new faculty.  None of the teachers there now are responsible for publicly humiliating me.  But there is a new crop of kids, and they've picked out an Omega, and nobody sees anything wrong with that.  On the contrary, they lash back at me when I try to ask them to care.  What I need to do is just grow up and get over it.

The truth is that our culture thrives on bullying.  No, really.  It's true.  Watch a show on the Disney channel and see how many times a character insults another character, right before the laugh track kicks in.  Same thing for grown up sitcoms.  Humans clarify their relationships with others and find their place in the pecking order by insulting each other.  Take, for instance, Two And A Half Men, Charlie Sheen edition.  The brother who does most of the bullying is the one who is most successful in life.  The one who really wants to be a responsible person - well, he's imperfect.  His marriage has failed, and he can't afford his own place because of all the money he lost in the divorce, so he's forced to live with the verbally abusive brother who constantly insults him.  And it's high-larious.  In some episodes, Charlie threatens Alan with physical harm if he doesn't get out of his house, and the laughs roll in.

That's just one example, but I find that most comedies follow the same pattern.  The funniest part of the show are the zingers people throw back and forth at each other.  Or, if you look at a slapstick comedy like The Three Stooges, the jokes are all about them physically hurting each other.  None of it matters for the long term, and it's all in good fun.

But it's serious when a group of kids creates a similar scenario on a bus, with a monitor.  Don't misunderstand, I'm not holding up sitcoms as a bad influence that will turn kids into bullies.  Rather, I think human beings have an innate understanding that bullying is how they establish their place in society, and this is what causes us to enjoy the humor of sitcoms.  The kids on the bus were just doing what comes naturally to them.  Their parents do the same thing to gas station attendants and waiters.  The bus monitor was unable to fight back, ergo, she sank to the bottom of the pecking order.  Come on, guys.  This is the society we believe in.  Put a laugh track on that damn video.  Hand the bullies some brightly colored beverages to throw on their Omega.  (In my school, it was suckers.  Kids would suck their suckers and then spit on me with tinted saliva to stain my clothes.)  Afterward, everyone can sing a song.

In the end, I tried to give the adults in my life a pass.  After all, I didn't have the language skills to explain how bad the bullying was for me.  Also, this is how human society works.  The child who cannot swim will sink, and that's how we establish which children are best suited to be part of society.  The adult who cannot swim will also sink, and that's how we tell the future CEOs apart from the #destinedtobeawalmartgreeter.

But also, maybe the bus video showed things from a different perspective.  When I worked at call centers, my bosses would often record my calls and have me listen to them, then we would discuss what worked and what didn't.  My older sisters once called me into the room and struck up a conversation with me.  After several minutes, they revealed that they had been taping our conversation the whole time, and they played it back for me so I could hear how stupid I sounded.  I fled the room in tears, but I knew they were right.  I did sound stupid.  Sometimes when you hold a mirror up to a situation, its flaws are more easily recognizable than when the you were experiencing it firsthand.

I sometimes wonder if this is the key to understanding why we're all suddenly up in arms about bullying, whereas the adults I knew simply could not have cared less.  In fact, bullying has been happening throughout history, and no one has ever had a problem with it.  So what's the difference now?  I think it's that kids are using video technology to record their bullying exploits and uploading it to the web so everyone can laugh.  That never could have happened before this technology became commonplace.  Maybe that bus video shows people just how bad the situation gets, and how powerless the Omega is to really fight back when a pack of children scents blood.  We can all see how even an adult woman, who is a mother, can't hold her own when the bullying starts.  Really, despite her decades of life experience, the monitor does the exact same thing I used to do when I sat on that bus.  She cries and tells the kids they're being mean, at which point they lash back harder.  Nothing is funnier than hurt feelings.  But the result is that now even the people who are bullies can see how horrible they sound.  And even if they don't exactly feel sorry, (is a bully even capable of human compassion?) they can at least see that society now disapproves of that level of cruelty, so they need to at least pretend to be sorry and back off a little.  


But the truth is that bullying is not going to stop.  Even as adults, our favorite blogs are those that make fun of others.  By voting with our remotes, we make Judge Judy more popular than Oprah.  Shows like The Weakest Link and Survivor illustrate how far a person can go by being harsh.  My own personal favorite sports are hockey and roller derby.  We reward athletes for being violent.  And for me, my heart is not filled with love and compassion for my fellow humans.  After failing to get over a childhood of bullying, a couple of months ago I googled one of my old teachers, the one who really, really, humiliated me in front of my classmates.  I don't know exactly what I planned to do, but it involved a strongly worded letter.  For reference, this is the teacher who called me a wimp and tried to wave me back outside after I came in seeking help because one of the kids on the playground had just knocked out my front teeth.  I was bleeding at the mouth and she belittled me for not being tough enough.  That's not the only time she kicked me when I was down, but it is the most glaring.  That happened twenty-three years ago.  I would estimate I spent about half an hour narrowing my searches, trying to find contact information on the school's website.  


I googled my teacher at around the same time a child at my old school brought in a gun and shot another kid.  I was not shocked, nor was I surprised.  On the contrary, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often.  My fellow Americans, you have my mother's gun phobia to thank that I didn't have access to guns I could have taken to school.  As a kid, I imagined a gun would have been a wonderful equalizer, and it would have reversed the polarity and placed the power squarely in my hands.  At age ten I fantasized about taking a gun to school and just, you know, threatening the kids with it when they got too violent.  This was before Columbine, before any kid shot another kid in a school.  Based on the evidence I now see with my eyes, I think a video camera would have been a more powerful weapon.  


So I guess my point is...maybe kids should have cell phones after all.  Who knows?  Maybe this will all cause us to evolve into a kinder sort of creature.  Maybe when we can really see ourselves clearly, without any pretenses to nobility, we will learn how to really change.

An Odd Interaction

I had a thought-provoking exchange with a lady at work today.  She came up and asked for tortillas, and I was all like, "Here, let me show you."  As we were walking over to the tortilla display, she started in: "You guys ain't got no vegan food out here!"  It was an accusation, not a question.

"Well, we do have a little," I told her.  "We have a health food section, and there are vegan things in it.  We can go take a look if you want."

"Naw, I ain't got time.  I'm on the road.  I'll just take these, and it'll have to do me."  Her voice was that really grating smoker's voice that always sets my teeth on edge.  She grabbed a package of white flour tortillas and started toward the checkstands with it.

"We do have things that are definitely vegan, in the freezer cases.  Well, I guess that won't really work if you're on the road."

"Naw, it won't.  I'm from California, and I ain't never seen anything like this.  This is just horrible.  I ain't never seen anything this bad."  What she was saying was kind of comical if you take the words by themselves, but she was one of those people with the unhappy talent of infusing her tone with such a depth of hatred and malice that I found myself taking up Utah's case.  (even though Utah and I are not friends)

"Well, I mean, this is a farming community --"  I began.

"Yeah, so there should be health foods."  She cut me off abruptly.  I wanted to explain that people here eat meat as a matter of course, because they are farmers, but I thought better of it.  She was too inexperienced.  She bleated on about how none of the states she has traveled through have any vegan food, and as we arrived at the checkstands she regaled me on how she never intended to come back to these parts, ever.

"Yeah, me too."  I told her and I turned my back.  I wanted to be finished talking to her.  Living here is already unpleasant enough.

I had kind of wanted to express to her that she had miraculously found the only person in the store who had been raised vegetarian, and who understood where she was coming from, and didn't think she was weird.  But she would have none of it.  (When I related the incident to a couple of cashiers who were standing in front of their registers waiting for customers, both of them had to ask me what vegan meant.  That's where we are.)  But, at least at walmart, I've come to really like the people I work with.  A lot of them are very simple people who live on farms and who work at Walmart to earn some extra money on the side -- an astonishing feat, since farming is, at least in my perception, widely known as one of the most difficult lines of work in the world.  These people have been putting in their crops during the spring planting, and now they go home from work and help tend the farm.  When harvest season comes, their workload will be staggering.  Many are college graduates, and many are college students who can't hear the message their coworkers are sending them, that their course of study won't help them raise their class, because they are so desperate for a better opportunity.

But I digress.  I was pondering these things while I uncomfortably waited for the lady to finish buying her tortillas and get out, and I realized why I resented her.  She was so obviously a lifelong smoker.  Her frustration rang hypocritical to me because she clearly succumbed to the nicotine monster every day.  Everything about her was tobacco colored -- her hair, her prematurely aged skin, her fingernails, her gravelly voice.  But she loftily refused to look at our back country health food section because she was so positive it wouldn't be healthy enough for her.  

Not that I resent her trying to be as healthy as she can, while she works on her issues.  And I have no problem with her veganism in general, except that she sort of seemed to wield it as a weapon of superiority over us hicks.

Had she given me the opportunity, I would have been the first to commiserate about how abyssmal Walmart's produce is, and I would have directed her to another store for better health food -- Smith's Marketplace, for instance.  But I didn't get that far.  She didn't give me that chance, so...whatever.

From The Catalog Of Five Million Useless Trivia Facts In My Head

In case you've ever wondered: The reason women's shirts button opposite of men's is because these clothing items were designed during a time when women often needed help to get dressed, whereas men dressed themselves. Women's corsets were so difficult to put on that they needed help from a maid to get them on. It was assumed by tailors that a righthanded person would prefer to push the button through the hole with their right hand. Men's shirts, designed for them to button up themselves, have the button on the right and the loop on the left. Women's blouses and gowns, which a maid would button up, have the buttons and loops on opposite sides for the convenience and efficiency of the maid. See, look:



This is a bridal pic, but it illustrates the process. Many brides still need help into their clothes because their dresses button up the back, and they often wear restricting corsets that prevent them from bending their arms around and fastening the buttons themselves. Before zippers were invented, maids had to do this every day. I feel so sad for Hill from Pride and Prejudice! (Incidentally, since Hill was called by her last name and not her Christian name, we know she was a lady's maid instead of, say, a scullery maid. It was higher up on the service food chain and deserving of the added respect of using her last name. She was still a servant, though, so she didn't get an honorary like Mrs.) Hill had to dress Mrs. Bennett, and maybe all of their five daughters as well. All. Those. Buttons.

Meanwhile, men's clothes were being made with all the closures in the front, so the men could fasten everything up themselves and ask their valet for help with the cufflinks.

He's the only Mr. Darcy I will acknowledge. This pic doesn't show the closures of his clothes very well, it's just gratuitous.

So...now you know.

The Tale Of The Baking Soda In The Neti Pot

Learn from my fail: I just irrigated my sinuses with a baking soda solution because I was out of salt and I didn't want to use to expensive gourmet sea salt I bought in Seattle long ago. I thought, baking soda tastes salty, so...here we go! The result: owieowieowieowieowieowieowie! Now that the searing pain is subsiding and death doesn't seem quite so imminent, I can only hope the infection felt the same way I did about the baking soda.

Side note: at least I didn't fail quite as hard as the roomie I had whose boyfriend convinced her to snort cayenne pepper when she had a cold. She actually lost her equilibrium and fell over. She was a fastidious girl, and we knew that if she was going to let her face touch that filthy kitchen floor, the grim reaper was standing over her even then.