analoguechild

"A video for Slow Club, featuring dancers Ryan Francois and Remy Kouame performing an homage to dancers Al Minns and Leon James. The music in no way “matches” the dancing, and yet creates such a beautiful juxtaposition."

First day at the new job was yesterday. Included quite a few things that were stressful, beyond just first day stressful. Had very little sleep but that was self inflicted stress. Got out the door late because furnace checker was here for inspection. Got off on the wrong exit. Was about 3 minutes past the time I was scheduled to work when I got there. Could not clock in because my employee number would not work. Got to Starbucks and found that my boss (who was supposed to be with me for the first 75% of my shift and train me) was pulled into a Team Lead meeting. The meeting lasted at least 2 hours. Got the girl who was there when I got to the Starbucks area to teach me how to use their espresso machine before she disappeared because it is totally different from the one I do know how to use.

The whole area behind the counter, while vaguely similar to what I am used to, is quite different. I find myself reaching for things like straws and have to do a complete 180 before I find them. Or some things are in the right container but... where my store would store the coffee grounds we have the coffee beans (not ground yet) the grounds are out in plain sight, not stored away. And the whole process of doing dishes is completely different as well. But whatever.

To add another layer of stress to the day when I finally got to see/speak for a few seconds with my boss he tells me that the Starbucks District Manager is going to be here at 1 pm and he's going to be with her for a while in a meeting! And for a while was around a few hours. One good thing is that this District Manager is a whole lot more friendly and personable than the last one we had (who I never got to encounter, I've just heard horror stories. I've met this one if you can call it "meeting" when we only met for about 3 mins at my old store).

At this point, remember when I said my employee number wouldn't work? Yeah, that meant I could not log in to the registers unless I had someone else do if for me or if they printed me out a quick scan log-in bar code. But every quick scan bar code I got from other employees would not scan for me! I kept running over to the pizza hut folks and having them come over and type in their numbers so I could ring up guests. So Frustrating. I had three or four different people print out their quick scan bar codes for me including my boss and none worked. I'm thinking it was the scan gun not the printed bar code 'cuz they printed it out at different registers for me. Anyway, my boss finally just wrote down his own supervisor number and pin on a piece of paper for me to use the rest of the day.

By they way, when I worked today, it still was not working. Thankfully I still had his number stuffed into my apron and not at the bottom of a trash can which is where I should have tossed it after the shift yesterday. Thank you subconscious mind for not tossing it! Saved my life. I was not working with him or anyone else today. Worked the open shift all by my lonesome. Think I figured everything out and got what I was supposed to do done. If I didn't well my boss was the barista in after me and he'll leave me a note. But over all I'm feeling slightly comfortable with my new job.

I just miss the familiarity with all the people (employees, bosses, and guests) I had at my old job! Everyone here is a stranger new person to me and there is not a lot of opportunities to get to know other employees here because next to no one is cross trained for Starbucks and the store is super busy and huge and everyone's got their hands so full that they can't stop and chat. :/ Very unlike the laid back casual attitude of my old store. *sigh* I know, it just takes time.

Day off tomorrow. Supposed to grab lunch or dinner with the roommates. Their last summer semester final should have been today. Haven't seen them since I got up this morning. Maybe they are out at a bar celebrating right now, who knows. We're going to get to know each other better and set up some rules/chores/schedules maybe? I dunno. It's kinda nice having the apartment to me and the kitty though.

Sometimes it feels like I'm never going to find the spot that I fit in with people here.

A girl I find pretty cool, who is a new hire where I work, implied that I am very conservative. This baffles me. Now she doesn't know me very well, at all really, and she herself seems to me to be very liberal because she has a full sleeve tattoo and a nose piercing and... I don't know, just the way she talks about things sometimes. But when I was telling her of my roommate/apartment hunting woes she said something along the lines of having me room with her sister, that she thinks we'd get along well because her sister is very studious, conservative and hey she loves cats too!

I'm probably over psychoanalyzing this one sentence. But it's just bugging me. And of course, being me and not wanting to rock the boat on anything whatsoever, I just nod my head when she asks me if she should see if her sister is in need of a roommate. Well I do want a roommate & want to move out of my parents house fairly soon. My brother is going to be moving back in with mom and dad too, come the end of July and it's going to be quite the full house here. And I can totally live with someone who is conservative for a year but what if I want to have my gay and lesbian friends over?

I'm afraid that if I do live with someone very conservative I'd get by but they'd end up pissing me off one way or another and I'd be suffering my pissed off-ness in silence because I don't seem to speak up for myself very well.

So I am going to edit the things I'd like to have in a roommate(s): Must like cats and definitely not be allergic to them & must be open minded? Must be ok with Teh Gay Ppls? Must not force me to adhere to their political and religious beliefs? Must not mind, if given advance notice of course, boys & lesbian women staying over on the couch or otherwise? :/ Something along those lines perhaps.

We have Ants. They are not cute when coming for your food in hordes. Apparently last year they did not start to swarm the dishwasher/sink area until July and stayed pretty localized in the dishwasher. All this week they have staked their claim to the dishwasher, the sink, the entire counter top around the sink, the toaster, and now the bread bin. We even found some in the living room apparently eating at the stain where the cat threw it's food/hairball up on the floor. It's so frustrating. They're sending out scouting parties to see if the side table in the living room can be taken as theirs or if the cabinet where the dishes are stored would be another good territory to claim. Ugh. The battle for the house begins.

My... lets call her the food area supervisor is off until the middle of the week and we have a launch of the new summer promotion tomorrow. She has tasked me with putting up all the signs and menu boards so that it is in accordance with the Starbucks "Siren's Eye" set up. Glad she trusts me enough to do this. I actually kind of like putting all the new display cases together and making everything look pretty and organized. I also put the order away today and found something we've been needing and sort of-not really-looking very thoroughly for. I showed the front end supervisor and we both got excited. Excited over cup holders. My life is boring.

Also this week we are finally getting our reviews and pay raises accordingly. What is not a good sign is that the girl who is overall considered the best worker at the pizza hut area: Efficient, Thorough, Timely, Goes Above and Beyond, Et Cetera... well she got one of the lower pay raises. Don't ask me why they were comparing pay raises. We aren't supposed to talk about how much we get paid to each other. Mostly because it's dependent on how we do and not on how long we've been with Target.

The only thing she got docked points on was her attendance actually. And the only attendance that she has missed was because she came down with bronchitis and the doctor said she couldn't work or be around healthy people for four days. Doctor's note doesn't mean shit to Target. Target will pay for you to get a flu shot but god forbid you get hit by a car and have to call in because you're in the hospital. At least my wisdom teeth surgery was planned well in advance, I should be fine on that front anyway. *worries about the rest*

Don't think I'm going to take a summer class. Missed the tuition deadline on Friday. Reason being they still have me listed as "out of state" and fuck it if I am going to pay 4 thousand for two summer classes. It's my fault really that I am still listed as out of state. I need to finish filling out the form for residency and get it notarized at the bank before I can send it in. (Note to self: finish that this week!) So I guess instead of easing my way back in with a summer class I am going to jump back in to academia head first, nose to the grindstone, both feet on the ground running come this fall.

Now if I can just not crash and burn again that'd be awesome. Focus & prioritize, that's what I need to do.

I love Dreamwidth. I do. I'm just starting to find things and people on Livejournal that I didn't know would have a journal. Also a few of my friends only seem to post to LJ when they have both LJ and DW, which saddens me. If you have access to both why not use both? I would rather spend money and time on DW because it's such a wonderful community and the creators are amazingly kind and honest and open to the people who use their site.

Been thinking about my move again. I may use this lovely DW journal more frequently up in MI to record my reactions to living in such a small community. I know its not all that small but going from a city with a population of around 400,000 to one of around 16,000 it's going to feel really small to me. Maybe writing through my transition will help me. Not sure how yet but it's a thought.

I had a dream the other night that I had gone to work, at Target. Although it is the right job my dream put me in the wrong area: in the clothing department (not at the Service Desk which is where I work in RL) and I was walking around putting away clothes and some purses when one of the ETL's (the executives; my boss is a TL, the TL's boss is an ETL) walked by, checking up on us. I then realized that I had gone to work barefoot and was afraid that she would see and write me up/reprimand me in some manner. * I tried to hide my feet by standing by a cart and eventually she went back to doing whatever the ETL's do, their rounds round the store or back to the stock room or to the offices in front, wherever. I then happend to glance down at my feet again thinking that the rule were pretty strict for a reason: close toed shoes are a necessary precaution to prevent injury by a dropped box in the store room or on the floor. Those boxes can get awfully heavy. Then lo and behold my bare feet that were standing on cold vinyl now had become birkenstock clad feet. Not a whole lot better. :/

That's all I really can recall from that dream. Very WTF.

* Just now typing this up I realized that Hey Target SELLS shoes, and I could have just bought some THERE. Common sense and dream realities just don't mix I guess.

Yeah, I meant to start posting once a day in the month of October but that seems to have gone to shit. Allow me start over? To rewind the month and pretend that this is the first?

Yesterday was a long day for me. All of my classes are early but on Monday and Wednesday I also have one class at five pm. It's a chemistry lecture, stuff I'm pretty familiar with but as I still need to pass the class I try to attend every one. Earlier in the day my Medical Sociology class our prof invited us to come see a documentary that he is holding for his Intro class on GLBT hate speech in high schools at seven pm. I thought that sounded cool and since I was going to be on campus that late anyway I would go. The documentary was thirty minutes long and stupidly simplistic. Those people who showed up came only for the extra credit in their Intro to Soc class. However their was some good discussion afterward about all sorts of issues concerning the GLBT community.

The discussion delved into how to help youth in private/catholic high schools, as well as the GLBT community's use of derogatory/opressive terms in a positive manner, and gender presentation being different than sexual orientation. Very cool things to be discussing with college freshmen, at lest they were listening to it if not understanding the points brought up by the profs. I would have picked a different video personally (maybe this but it's concerned only with religion and sexual orientation) but the discussion totally made up for it. I would have stayed and talked with my prof after, possibly, but I was the walking dead at that point and had not eaten dinner yet. ***I talked to him today at the National Coming Out Day event on campus. Go Non Introversion!***

After listening to the discussion I found myself upset that the Q&A group that I went to last semester was not getting together. Q&A stands for Queers and Allies. The girl who ran it last time isn't doing so this time and the new guy named at our last meeting is obviously too busy to set up the few emails needed to organize it. Saw Caleb just now and he says I should take it on myself and become this semester's president. As I've never been even vice president of anything this is frightening to me, though he said that all the group is a social org, there isn't really anything to do. But also I identify as an ally (who may be possibly questioning, maybe, a bit) and not a Queer so I don't know if that really makes any difference but for some reason I think it does in my little anxiety corner of my mind.

Well. I'll put that off for dealing with later. After I study study study for my Medical Sociology Midterm on Monday. Hopefully, with my preparing for it, it will go better than the last two exams I had. Biology was a depressing 77% and Chemistry, the class I've taken before and was getting an awesome grade in last time, I got a 78%! *headdesk* I really need to stop skiving the few classes I have and the time I've got.

I was in a bar, or some restaurant, eating dinner at a table with my (In Real Life) brother (very tall and overweight nerd). I got up from the table and walked around to the actual bar area, where they sold the alcohol and such. The important bit here to note was that the room curved around and the bar was out of sight and sound from my table. There next to the bartender was a man, Hawaiian floral shirt unbuttoned, white wife beater accentuating his protruding belly, who was laughing and drinking and sitting on a stool next to the register. I walked up to the general vicinity of man and bartender and causally inserted myself into their conversation saying something about it being my birthday and I was spending it alone (In Dream Life I apparently was a bit of a liar and attention seeker).

The bartender and man talked me into buying a lotto ticket, seeing as it was my birthday I might be lucky. Both the men assumed, incorrectly, I was not of age to actually buy a ticket legally so the bartender made an exemption for me, in my sorry state of loneliness. Low and behold I actually won some money, not the whole thing of course but enough to make them nervous about letting me walk away with it after the shady transaction that was my purchase. The man on the bar stool began telling the bartender not to give me my money because of my age, and told us he was actually an off duty cop. When I argued back that I really was of age to buy the ticket the man demanded to see my ID. For some reason I had gone over to the bar with only some money and left my ID on the table with my brother. (Perhaps because my subconscious knows I prefer not to drink).

I told the police man that I did not have it on me but it was "over there" I gestured around the curve of the room and started to move off, ticket in hand. Police man grabbed my arm and told me that he could look up my social security number on his little computer thing-a-ma-jig that, as dreamscapes are wont to do, appeared out of thin air next to him and I didn't question why he would have such a computer with him at a bar. Although I had presence of mind to know not to give him my full social security number. He agreed to look my age up using just the last four digits and my full name.

So I gave him the four numbers to him verbally and he typed them in to find that a Bertha Mont-something-or-other "age: 64" was the owner of that social security number. Thoroughly confused I peeked over at the screen to check the number he had typed in and saw that he had miss heard two of the numbers. I pleaded with him to check the correct numbers and repeated them aloud again. The police man thinking I had another trick up my sleeve said "No" and made threatening advances toward me indicating he was going to book me for identity theft, which would have far more consequences than buying a lotto ticket underage.

I started to freak out and finally made enough noise, or was gone too long, that my brother came round the room looking for me and found me. At least I think he did. At this point my anxiety of not being able to prove my identity and the emotional fear of being taken to the police station, as well as any kind of jail cell, woke me up from the distressing dream I was having.

~

I hate that in this word we have these numbers and slips of paper which define who we are. That without these numbers: Soc, Birthdate, Address, Phone#; we are lost in the system, undefined, we don't exist and we cannot move far without being stopped for not having the correct set of numbers that corresponds with another set of numbers in the system of records of the United States of America.

I don't know how other governments keep track of their people nor how we actually do but I wish there was no need to track people, that people could just be people and trust one another with common human dignity and respect. You may say I am naive. That we need these rules and tracking systems for very important reasons. You'd probably be right. I just don't like the idea of being a number in a very long list of other numbers and that after I am dead and gone only my number will remain.