palmerpink

This work crap has gotten a bit better but it still dogs me badly. At this point, I'm less absorbed by the agonizing worry & overthinking than I am simply painfully aware not meeting my own exaggerated demands. Slight improvement, yeah? This is literally what I look like at work. That is something, though. I've realized that much of this boils down to a few bad habits of thinking and a lot of anger. It's just got my head all wrong really; these bad habits of thinking prey upon something basic in how I operate. The result is the sorta-nervous-wreckness I've been experiencing the last half a week or so. Although my managers may want me to get dozens of people to sign up for credit cards each week, I only really need  about 5 a week. Anything more is awesome (more Macy's Money and stuff!) but as long as I can get 5+ cards, I = success. It's easy though to get caught up in my managers' expectations, to make their demands my own, to measure myself by...

Since I thought of a title for this post, I've kept thinking of that Radiohead song--"The Tourist"--and its refrain . Hey man, slow down. Lord knows I need to. For one, this last week has been crazy as hell. Like, "whoa, that's fucking crazy". Most of the week I worked mad hours into the night helping to get the store ready for Black Friday. One night, I started at 6pm and got out at 8am; I got to bed at 9:30 that morning and rolled outta bed around noon so I could be back at the store by 3pm; I got out that night at 3am. I think (?) I had a day off--oh, right, Thanksgiving! sigh.--before Black Friday. I got to the mall at 10pm Thursday night and didn't leave until 10pm Friday. Yup. 24 hours. So, what with the wack hours and sleeplessness, most of last week seemed to rush past me. I hardly spent any time with my grandmother and thanksgiving was simply a large meal between naps before work. I don't feel like that was particularly fair to anyon...

I think I figured out where I was heading with that post the other day . As I often do, in blogging as in life, I think aloud a lot. Perfectly harmless, mostly. So in case you couldn't tell I was struggling to figure out the point of that post as I wrote it and hadn't the sense to just save it as a draft and fix it later. All the same, I think I've figured it out afterall. It used to be that when I would tell someone about something or even the way I'd be doing certain things, there'd be something I wanted out of them. And that would more often than not shape how I phrased what I said--manipulation. Like, I'd tell them about some problem I'd solved, trying as subtly as I could to get them to commend my cleverness. Or maybe it would be a story of how awful something had been, and I'd hope to gain their consolation, sympathy. Like when I had trouble writing papers for a class. I wouldn't leave asking for an extension at just telling my profes...

It's been, what?, a week since I've last posted? Really? That blows. Here I was hoping the whole Cali thing might herald in a new era of my blogging....maybe it still can. I worked so much of the last week or so that I was beginning to ache even on my day off. Like, I musta worked at least 35 hours of shipment, man. That stuff is hard work. Especially when you work it like I do--fast and hard. On the one hand, it's nice to be appreciated/needed, I suppose. But on the other, while I know plenty of people work that many hours or more every week, it really took its toll on me. Like, on Monday, my arms were spaghettifying  while I was trying to haul about those boxes of shipment. Not good timing on the part of my limbs; no sir, not at all. (I guess I could point out that many of those people working 40hr weeks probably have lovely office jobs and those more blue collar brethren are probably more used to this kinda work than I am.) An interesting note: I don't beli...

So I variously fessed up to my managers that I felt I'd been slacking off at work recently. It felt really good to get it off my chest, even as they scolded/judged/otherwise sighed. It was tough. I don't like revealing moments of weakness--especially to authority figures (whom I invariably look up to, desperately). I don't like giving people the chance to think less of me. What's kinda funny is how my standards for myself are at least as high if not higher than my managers' expectations for me. That's all well and good (I guess....) but the moment I catch myself slacking or opting for the less tedious routine, those high standards come back to bite me in the ass and just demotivate & demoralize me. And then I start despairing--I've lost the confidence to even try again and it only gets tougher. It just came to a point where I didn't feel like "hiding" it anymore. See, I can be all too good at spinning bullshit just right so people ne...

Friday, I wrote about how bad April is for me . The last couple of days have, in their moments, continued to remind me why. Partly, it's a mean game I play with/on myself. Slight obsessiveness mixed with loneliness and indecisiveness. I've had an especially hard time shaking it this week. Like, there's this one guy I've known for a long, long time. And really liked him pretty much all along, too. Not just because he's oh-so-fuckable but out of legit respect for his mind and personality and so on. I think he's just awesome, but I don't know if he even knows I'm "here". You know, like that . I mean, I imagine he must know I like him. ...right? But it's like he looks right through me half the time--or is he just playing really really coy with me? Other times...he seems almost annoyed with me. But maybe he's busy. And what about those times he seems to set aside other goings on to talk to me? Can you tell I think about this way to...

I'll have to remember that title; it's probably wasted on this. Or maybe--just maybe!--this'll actually be the last time I mess up like this! Yeah! So Friday I was supposed to meet with my sponsor. Somehow I also got in my head I was finally going to get my Learners Permit renewed. (Yeah, about that. Long story. Try to suspend judgment until I can get through this. Speaking of which, why is this so difficult? It can't just be the whole honesty thing. I've gotten plenty good at self-effacing honesty--humility, too, evidently. Unfocused? Maybe. Probably. Oh well.) Maybe it was that my sponsor wanted to slide our normal meeting time up a little; maybe it was that old familiar irrational nervousness about the MVA; maybe it was trying to plot out things in the evening time-line. Whatever it was, it all went down like dominoes. I "dodged" the MVA even after securing ride possibilities from my dad to simplify things. I didn't get in touch with my spons...