It’s My Variety Show and I’ll Write What I Want

Question
Does it count as “nesting” if your house is untidy and you feel no desire to clean it but you are set to drooling when you smell cleaning products? Or is that a late-stage craving?

I seriously want to lick someone’s clean laundry right now. It’s sick.

Good bye, Norma Jean
After completing my longest straight stretch in one office job – 27 months – I am delighted to announce that I no longer have to see other people on a daily basis unless I choose to. Much as I have grown to either at most love or at least, er, appreciate the eccentricities of those I worked with, (past tense!!) I don’t need to see most of them every day. There are very few people, in fact, that I need to see every day. I married one of them. I’m about to give birth to another one.

I worked in retail and customer service for 10 years. I really think this kind of work should be required for everyone who plans to live within society as a human. Nothing will prepare you better for the world than being trapped behind a counter, with all of humanity flying at you in all its crazy, non-sequiturial, mean, loving glory. It’s my experience that people who have experience serving other people, whether it’s at McDonald’s, The Gap or a small, strange cheese shop in a public market, are kinder to and more respectful of others and less likely to shove past a pregnant woman to get on to the bus first FIRST FIRST! Because It’s Important To Be First!

Ahem. Did I mention that not going to work again for a year means not taking public transit at rush hour? Can I get a hallelujah, please. Thank you.

That being said, customer service jobs pay really poorly unless you are a 6’2″ blonde, volleyball-playing waitress at a pub in Surrey. So eventually you might want to move on to the office job, which follows a lot of the same rules of a retail job but with slightly better pay and you get to sit down all day instead of stand up.

Rule 1: People are fascinating! Isn’t it amazing how everyone started out the same size, little mini cells in our mothers’ bellies and we’ve all turned out so Different! Vive la difference!
Rule 2: Sometimes differences display as apparent psychopathy.
Rule 3: Don’t argue with someone who isn’t listening to you or who doesn’t see you because you’re at a lower level. That person probably never worked in retail and will never see it your way.
Rule 4: The customer/co-worker may or may not be right. You are probably more right. But the sooner she believes that you think she is right, the sooner she will go away and you can get on with your day.
Rule 5: Suck it up. You can be right everywhere else. Just not here.
Rule 6: (There is no….oh, wait, yes there is.) Yes, sometimes it’s impossible to suck it up. In this case, pick your battles. Don’t fight the one about “no one ever replaces the water on the cooler except me.” You’ll just go thirsty. Fight the one about your boss misappropriating funds.
Rule 7: Eventually, something marvellous will happen – like a much wished-for layoff or another much wished-for layoff or a well-timed pregnancy – and you’ll get a change of scene. Or – you could always quit. Once you have experience, jobs like this are easy peasy to get.
Rule 8: Keep your job-hunting pants clean.

Hello Alien!
My new phase is starting! At 37 weeks along, I could give birth at any moment and start my new job. You know what’s crazzy? The job I just left took a year to get (and I still don’t have it!) The one I’m about to start only took 9 months to get and I didn’t have to write any stupid exams or participate in any role-play or do the job for 2 years and then apply for it again or ANYTHING!

Ways in which motherhood will not resemble my previous work experience

• I won’t be trapped behind a counter or desk, subject to the whims of people I see more often than my loved ones, or forced to answer the phone.
• I won’t have to wear clean clothes. (though in the past few weeks, who knows if my clothes were clean or not. I certainly couldn’t see them)
• I won’t go into the kitchen to get lunch out of the fridge and be faced with all the people I like least sitting around a table talking about The Da Vinci Code and then have to explain why I haven’t read it without sounding like an asshole. (“I just don’t really like…..adventure novels? Or bad writing?”)
• I won’t have to wipe down the toilet seat every time I go into the bathroom. Thus, I will not get the following poem in my head every time I pee: “If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie and wipe the seatie.” I don’t know where I first saw this piece of tripe but every time I have gone into the washroom at work and been faced with bodily fluids on the toilet seat, the poem has dislodged itself from a corner of my brain that is particularly poorly serviced by the maid who vacuums my cranial cavities. So hard to find good brain maids these days.
• I won’t care if it’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Sunday. (Even when it comes to TV schedules. I don’t expect to be able to watch live TV for quite some time. That’s why we have The Contraption That Records TV [TCTRT][oh-oh – TCTRT])

Ways in which motherhood might resemble my previous work experience

• I will have to deal with someone whose motivation and personality might not be immediately clear and comprehensible.
• I will have to do things I don’t know how to do.
• I will have to do things I don’t want to do. And procrastination probably won’t serve me as well with diaper changes as it has with filing paperwork.
• There might be days when I am sick of my own thoughts and I wish for a steady stream of weirdos to cross my path so that at least I have something else to consider. Of course, in this case there is the internet.
• My new boss might not let me use the internet.
• My new boss might not let me do all kinds of things. And appealing to a union rep won’t help one bit.

However, I do look forward to having the power to – baby excluded – turn off whatever it is that is annoying me; be that the radio, the television or the internet. (Sadly, this is a trick which just doesn’t work with other people. I have taken SO MANY customers and co-workers apart, looking for the “off” switch, to no avail.)

Which brings me to the point of this entry: What’s up with “North by Northwest”? We got up early-ish this morning and now I have another good reason to add to my list of “Sleeping in on Sundays: An Extensive List of Good Reasons.” Because CBC radio on Sunday mornings before 9 am PST? Shittttt-ayyyyyyy. First there was this annoying pseudo-jazz-folk band (Dr. Fishy? I think?) from Prince Rupert and the annoying pseudo-Shelagh Rogers host was IN Prince Rupert and it’s all about the local content. Then she made some on-dragging small talk with her weather guy or co-producer about the relay race one or both of them had run the day before. It made Rick Cluff’s pre-show banter sound like Garrison Keillor.

“Hmm, so you just put on those sneakers and ran, eh?”
“Yep, I sure did. Boy it was hard at first but then it got easier.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that that’s what happens in a race.”
“Right.”

Then she interviewed an artist from Haida Gwaii.

“So, it’s pretty rainy up there in Haida Gwaii?”
“Mmm hmm.”
“And it’s raining in Prince Rupert too! But it was sunny in Vancouver!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Well, there’s irony for you!”
“Yes!”

Then some more mournful folk music where a man with a guitar reminisced about growing up on a certain street and then going back when he was 37 and seeing life still going on and thinking, “wow, life goes on. even when I leave.” Not a poor sentiment or discovery, mind you, just one I’ve heard 4 billion times with the same guitar chords. As Saint Aardvark put it: “…it would be different if he went back to the house where he grew up and dug up all the bodies of the people he’d murdered as a teenager. That would make for a more interesting song.”