Skip to main content

OhJeezOhJeezOhJeez.

What a waste of a good title. Oh well, can you tell I'm nervous?

I have an interview at Starbucks this afternoon (in under four hours from now, to be exact). Funnily enough, I'm somewhat less worried about the interview itself as what might happen when I get the job.




See, the company profile emphasizes customer service and quality or some such. American Eagle is kinda nuts about customer service. Like, being friendly and real, helping customers find what they'd actually like to wear and getting them the sizes they need and outfitting them basically before they even needa ask for anything, and so on. And, given how small, low volume, and otherwise handicapped my store is, we need amazing customer service to survive. Fantastic training, really.

This also isn't my first coffee shop job. I used to work at The Gryphon Coffee Co. in Wayne, PA. When I worked there we still hand-tamped each shot of espresso and emphasized quality somewhat nuttily. Like, I once had to remake a cappuccino 3 times (for a regular, ultraloyal customer, fear not) until I got the milk foamed just right (it should look like white paint not tapioca pudding).

Also, apparently, due to manager drama/madness, this store is really really shortstaffed. "Desperate" might even be a good word here, apparently. So I should be pretty well qualified at a store that could really use some extra hands.


So what's got me scared is my usual anxiety about job-ness. That I'll fail. That I'll let them down. That I will disappoint my manager, whose esteem apparently determines my entire self-worth.

This store's downtown; it's a bit of a hike on the metro. They're opening shifts are at like 4:45am and the metro doesn't even open until 5:00 and I couldn't hope to get there before 5:40.

But even with that aside--I don't know if I trust myself enough with getting up that early to be able to make any promises. Like, I wake up at 6:30am every morning to take my meds, but usually go back to sleep until 8:30am. I've been known to wake up to 4am alarms when needed, but how certain can I be??

Do you see what I'm doing here? I'm psyching myself out. I don't even have the job yet, and I don't even know if they'll need--nay, demand--me to open, even. For all I know they'll be understanding and schedule me mostly for later in the day. For all I know I won't even get the job at this store.

Who knows! And yet I'm already freaking myself out. Over nothing. Over unestablished events and possibilities.


This is how I con myself into avoiding stuff. My terrible habits of avoidance are already fairly well documented here, I believe, but this is how it can often start. Worry, plain and simple. I'll end up skipping class for months, but start off scared of some tiny uncertainty or hesitating pathologically because of it.

It's so stupid. And it almost always turns out to be nothing--and even when the worry is fulfilled in some way I survive it, as it turns out.

So I'm going to go get ready and head out early. At the least I won't be late today and I can get a feel for the area and store and stuff. Maybe even write or pray some to distract myself.

Everything's gonna be okay. I just gotta let it.

Comments

Other things that might interest you...

On aging, and fear.

To begin with, I’m not sure you’re aware of it, but I’m middle aged. Oh? What gave it away? Using a blog as my primary literary medium?¹ Hm. But in fact, the APA defines 35 years as the end of “young adulthood.” Yeah. I found out via some shitpost on twitter when I was already 35, so it didn’t sit well with me then either. But my worries about aging began much sooner than that. See, even in my 20s, I feared I’d been wasting my life. I’d struggled with school and life and everything since graduating high school, arguably sooner, and nothing seemed to be going anywhere meaningful . I felt I had a limited social life, a dead-end job, no money, no great travels, a limping love life; I was, generally, a loser, wasting away... There were none of the usual hallmarks of success or happiness. And that scared me. Would my life have been worth it if I continued in this direction? Would it have been a “life well lived” by the end? So, this is my existential struggle. Even now, as I lurch ever nea

Changing lanes.

I was driving home in some traffic last night when I drifted, in my mind, a long way back (about 20 years) to high school. I was caught in one of those periodic traffic slowdowns as I floated back; you know, those waves of congestion that seem to pass backward through the columns of cars in each lane. (I've heard they start because someone switches lanes, and in response, a rippling emergent slowness travels backward and outward as the cars behind it accommodate the change, one by one.) What drew me back to those younger days was that, back in high school, similar phenomena of congestion took place in the halls between classes, when eddies of young humans would get caught in and around those clumps of those chatting by lockers or retrieving books. Occasionally, backups would occur when groups of people got caught in these eddies, or collided with other groups by the lockers, and slowdowns would ripple back from there. Maybe it's not exactly the same, but as I drove it seemed si

On phases and fixations.

My fixations are powerful, but they can also be maddeningly ephemeral and fleeting. And I hate that; about them and, honestly, about myself. But I’ve never really  asked why I feel that way... I'll commit immense amounts of time and energy and even money to a fixation for a few weeks, maybe even a month or two, sometimes rebranding my whole personality around it, then just...move on. I'm not sure when I first noticed this pattern—if it was always there or if it emerged and intensified over time—but it's been part of me for a long while. And every time I do, I feel such guilt and shame. Who even am I if I can't be consistent, dedicated, substantive? How disingenuous is it that nothing I care about lasts? I’ve always just accepted those feelings; I’ve never poked at them in earnest. If you can’t tell from the recent flurry of activity on this blog, I have been fixated on blogging; I mentioned in a recent post about this blog that I had a compulsion to revamp the whole bl