Category Archives: About Me - Page 19

If You Can’t Feed The One You Love, Feed The One You’re With

This idea came to me the night I was in charge of running my local Blimpie. The customer in there was complaining about women. You know, you can’t live with ‘em and whatnot. He’d gotten himself in a bind because he had a girlfriend or maybe a wife, and one of his other female friends slipped a phone number to him of her friend who probably wanted to get with him. The fact the guy was unattractive is completely beside the point, but does bear noting.

This guy thinks he’s going to get in trouble from one of these three women involved. I’m thinking to myself, “Feed ‘em!” You’re here at Blimpie and I’m in charge, wait, the owner’s back, so I guess I’m second in charge now. Get an extra sub for the woman, whichever woman you’re going to see next. That will show you care.

I made a promise to my GF a long time ago that I would always make sure she would be fed. There was a period of time where she was schooling full-time with no income. I kept my promise. I cashed in tens of thousands of credit card reward miles for Longhorn gift cards and with those, she ate and studied at the local restaurant. It was such a frequent thing for her that the wait staff gave her a corner of her own so she could eat and do schoolwork unbothered.

Back to this guy and his woman issues. Showing affection with food is something that works on every relationship level. It keeps the relationship healthy (even if the food itself isn’t healthy). Obviously I feed the GF well, but I also have a close friend that I gift food to, and another co-worker that I treat specially as well. And it’s become a two-way street with gifts of snacks and candy going back and forth between all of us. In addition to that, there’s social interaction over work cake (and it’s curious to see who participates and when and who huddles together devouring the spoils).

Although I consider myself more of a financial provider in my relationships, I can totally understand how women, mothers especially, get so much satisfaction from feeding people. With the holidays here, I’ve somewhat taken on some cooking duties. I’m not complaining, it’s a great thing to be able to do. My skills are limited, but I am becoming a specialist in mashed potatoes. I will not apologize for choosing such a specialty.

Evading Death

Posted by anachostic on December 13, 2017 No comments

Story time.

It’s been very cold here recently, which makes me think of snow. As I was working on my previous post regarding driving, I remembered a story that I shouldn’t have lived to tell about. This was a long time ago when I was in “college”. Let’s see how many of the details I can remember.

Back then, I would have been driving… what? It was probably a 1987 Dodge Lancer (turbo, of course). I probably had recently gotten rid of my 1969 Mustang (fastback, of course). The car is sort of important if you want to imagine what the result of my youthful stupidity could have looked like, but it doesn’t factor into any details of the story.

I was “going” to “school” at The Art “Institute” of Pittsburgh (for music production, of course) and we were coming up on a holiday break. Probably Christmas, considering the weather. I never really got close to anyone at school. I was pretty much a loner and I had an apartment kind of removed from the school, which was downtown. Other students were all in a common apartment building near the school so they had opportunities to socialize. But whatever. Me being a loner is nothing new.

But, fate was doing some weird shit that holiday. The last day of class, before leaving, I happened to talk to the class burnout. This guy was a major acid user and always complained about his back hurting. (Minor research says that the pain was nothing involving spinal fluid and was probably muscle tension, which is contrary to what we all believed at the time) So, in my rare discussion with him, I found out he lived in a city less than half an hour from me. And he had no way to get home for Christmas. So I offered him a ride, since I was driving almost two hours that direction anyway. And he accepted. We’d never spoken much before and now we were going on a car ride for a couple of hours. That’s not exactly normal for me. I’m probably going to be driving with someone tripping on acid. Again, not normal. I mean, I was the only person in my entire circle of friends that didn’t smoke pot, but acid? That’s another plane of existence (for both of us).

School’s out, we’re loaded up in my car and we headed north. Winter in the wasteland means it gets dark early. Like nighttime at 5:00pm dark/early. And it’s interstate driving the whole way. And it’s winter. And… we enter a blizzard. There’s hardly any way for me to really explain the gravity of this. I drove, me and this burnout doper, we drove through this blizzard in near white-out conditions, at full fucking highway speed. I drove at probably 70 miles an hour, for at least an hour. There was not a single car on the highway. There was not a single snowplow truck on the highway. There was nobody out but us. For at least an hour. If there was anyone – anyone – out on the highway, we would be dead. Snowy roads with near zero visibility at 70 miles an hour. No one would be able to avoid a collision or swerving off the road to their death. For most of the drive, I don’t think we spoke much at all. The snow flying over the windshield was like a hypnotic screen saver (in the days before screen savers). Maybe my passenger was tripping, I wouldn’t know. But if he was, the visuals would have been stupendous.

I remember not taking him directly to his house, but dropping him off somewhere along the way. He said he was going to meet someone there who would drive him home. This is pre-cell phone era, so I don’t even know how this was planned. I don’t remember much after that. I don’t seem to remember him coming back to school after Christmas break. I didn’t stay long in school after that incident either. I’d become a little suspicious about how would there would be jobs for all these music production graduates, so I eventually dropped out.

But that shared moment was something that just defies reality to me. Foremost that we didn’t die, but also that it was a connection with someone that I never talked to before and never talked to since. And the circumstances of that chance meeting delivering us safely to our destinations despite all efforts to the contrary. I realize just how stupid I was and how I could have been just another headline in our shitty local paper.

It’s definitely an overused saying, but someone was watching over us that night.

My Year In Review

Posted by anachostic on December 11, 2017 No comments

This week is my annual review at my workplace. I’m sure anyone that has an office job understands what an ordeal this is. The post is already written in your head for those of you that have been through it. So, what I’ll try to do is just give some insight as to our company’s brand of ineffectual review.

The process starts a few weeks out from your anniversary date. This anniversary date is actually not your start date, because when you are hired contract-to-perm, the “contract” part of your time there is not as an employee. Your actual start date is when you convert from contract to perm employee. Yeah, I get it, I just think it’s kinda dumb. If I really wanted to be bitter about it (which I guess I am internally, but you can’t blame fate), I could say that the difference between my first day of work and my first day of employment also means the difference between getting an annual holiday bonus based on my pre-raise salary or my post-raise salary.

Timing issues aside, what you get is a self evaluation document to fill out and return. You need to return it something like a week before your review. I always return it within a couple hours of getting it. I never understand what the big deal is.

This eval form. Because our department is considered administrative, the things we do can’t be evaluated, performance-wise, the same. So we have a short list of statements and we have to choose how well we think we met the statement’s metric. Is the scale 1-10? No. 1-5 stars? No. It’s three options: Exceeds Expectations, Meets Expectations, or Needs Improvement. This is the second year we’ve had the 3-option scale and the second year that I have been unable to indicate where I feel I am good or bad. Everything is “Meets Expectations”. I don’t think I consistently exceed anything and likewise, I don’t think I suck all the time either (just lately). But there’s no way for me to say I suck a little, but that’s ok, because I make up for it in other ways.

On review day, we all meet in the conference room and the weirdness starts. I get a copy of the self evaluation I did, then I get a copy of an evaluation by my boss. And while my boss and his boss silently watch me, I read the evaluation silently to myself. It’s truly an awkward silence.

But what’s weird to me about it is that my boss consistently ranks me higher than I rank myself. Maybe that’s supposed to be good. I understand they want to find cases where someone thinks, “I am on fire” and their boss has a totally different perspective. BTW, the only time you can self-evaluate yourself as “I am on fire” is when the statement is literal and not colloquial.

So because of the useless ranking/rating system, what ends up happening is everything useful goes in the comments section, which as any programmer will tell you, is absolutely useless for extracting any useful metrics. I’ve mentioned before that I worked on a survey engine. One of the interesting sections of the report was a keyword search in the survey’s comment fields. One interesting application of this would be to see if the survey taker “spoke the lingo”. Anyway, that’s a pointless (and self-promoting) comment because we don’t do anything like that.

My comments are a list of higher-profile projects that I worked on the last year followed by some pity statements about how I didn’t meet my own expectations and that I’ll do better next year. I’m not sure if my boss’s review of me is based off what I said, which would make his part super-easy. But generally, it says kind of the same thing I said, just from a managerial standpoint, as if he’s pleading with HR to justify me remaining hired and even deserving of a raise.

And as time goes on – this is year 7 – this entire process becomes more and more irrelevant. We aren’t so huge of a company that any IT person is unknown to management. We all have high-profile projects. We all save the day at one point or another. Everyone knows who we are. I list my biggest projects for the year like I’m releasing a greatest hits album and people are like “Oh, I remember that one! Sick beat!” But the greatest hits releases are the moneymakers, because that’s all people care about – the hits. They honestly don’t remember the ones that never charted. And they probably don’t care, because that’s not where we are now.

So, because I really want to beat this topic to death so I never have to talk about it again, I will say that we tried something to catch the failed hits, so they wouldn’t be forgotten at review time. Or at least, they wouldn’t be a time bomb building up so your review wasn’t a shit shower blasted from a fire hose. We tried quarterly, informal reviews.

This process was walking into my boss’s office, him asking “You got anything?”, me saying, “Nope.” and that was it. To be fair, I was a lot more engaged when these reviews started, but there was more to talk about then, too. Our team is quite stable and we all work well together, so there’s no changes worth discussing, like how the new guy is working out or OMG, there’s a female working with us now.

So by the time I got to the point of saying “nope”, they had scrapped the whole idea and the truth came out that these reviews were only implemented because some managers refused to talk to their subordinates. I assume that problem cleared itself out through attrition.

But anyway, this year, I have an ace up my sleeve. I’m taking the entire department out to lunch for the holidays and it happens to be on my review day. As long as there is no food poisoning, I can’t lose.

Back To The Fringe

Posted by anachostic on December 8, 2017 No comments

It’s been over five years now that I ditched Opera as my browser. In that time, I’ve been using Internet Explorer and everything has been going quite well. Believe it or not, I’ve never gotten a virus or malware using IE. And I’ve also gotten it to do everything that I needed with JavaScript and custom protocol handlers.

Despite this, the writing has been on the wall, in kind of an inverse fade where the message grows bolder as time goes on. The final straw was when Flickr displayed this message:

So, I guess that’s it. IE is starting to get the same treatment I was getting when I was using Opera: You are not welcome here. So I figured the natural replacement would be MS Edge. I didn’t like Edge initially because it seemed to be a very stripped down browsing experience. But then again, it’s been a few years, certainly they’ve made improvements since then?

I launched Edge and immediately got to work writing Extensions (which weren’t supported before) to add the functions I needed. I was successful converting two of the three functions, so I was satisfied for the time being. I started using Edge as my default browser.

Within a week, I became disenchanted with Edge. The thing that kept brewing and finally boiled over was the bookmark management. Can you believe there is no way to edit a bookmark in Edge? After over two years, you still can’t edit a goddamn bookmark? And more than that, the bookmarks aren’t anywhere outside the browser where you can edit them either! The whole “modern” app design that Microsoft has adopted where everything is self-contained completely works against Edge. So, I went on the hunt again.

My options were the same as before: Firefox or Chrome. I’m not using Chrome out of the same distaste for Google that Chrome users have for Microsoft. Firefox just never seems to have their shit together. Firefox is a great backup, but I can’t see it as my daily driver. So, given those two options, I went back to Opera.

No, of course not. But I kind of did. I downloaded Vivaldi, which is made by a company of the former Opera owner. It’s the spiritual successor to Opera. You want options, you got options. Everything can be changed, and some in ridiculous ways. But the things I really needed, Vivaldi gave me. And it’s built on Chromium, so I get Chrome without being beholden to Google.

If there’s a testament to make here about going back to your home, here’s mine. I downloaded Vivaldi and started setting it up like I used to when I used Opera. Within two hours of using the browser, I started using mouse gestures like I was back on the classic Opera browser. The gestures were already built in (no plug-in needed) and worked just as I remembered them.

My previous post’s argument about having tight integration with the mobile environment turned out to be the biggest letdown, since Microsoft abandoned Windows Phone. Microsoft seems to be embracing Android, so I guess at some point in the near future, I’ll get some non-Google Android phone and put all the Microsoft apps on it. but on the desktop environment, I guess I’m going to return to being independent and use Vivaldi.

In Retaliation

Posted by anachostic on December 6, 2017 No comments

AK: “When are you ever going to blog again?”

Me: “I just posted yesterday!”

Much later…

Also Me: “When am I ever going to sleep again?”

Still Also Me: “You have to post something today. Post now, sleep later.”

Today I got to visit a couple houses of insanity, each made further insane by the current season. The inimitable Pier 1 Imports and its evil cousin Bed, Bath, and Beyond. In the former, I was searching for holiday placemats specifically. In the latter, I was searching for a secret Santa gift.

Let’s start with Pier 1. This store has a very unique atmosphere. I’ve tried to figure out what uplifting, empowering message they are trying to convey and the best I’ve come up with is: “There are many things you can buy in this world, some are cheap, some are not. Here’s as many of them as we could fit inside this building.” I’ve never been to a true “bazaar”, but because bazaar is so phonetically similar to bizarre, I envision that Pier 1 is similar to a bazaar. Shopping there makes me feel like I have ADD. It’s impossible to get through the store quickly, because there is always something somewhere attracting your attention. And at the same time, because you can’t focus on any one thing, you want to get out of there because it’s so overwhelming.

So, thank god I found some decent placements within the first two minutes of walking in. But as I was standing in line, the ADD hit me and I had a thought of a product I knew they sold that would be a nice stocking stuffer. I broke out of the line and walked the store, looking for this item. I never found it. After checking out, I found I had spent almost 20 minutes in the store. How the hell did that happen?

Later in the evening, the GF and I went to BB&B. As we were walking the parking lot to the store, the power turned off in the entire plaza. That’s not a good omen. We stood outside the store for a minute or two and determined this wasn’t just a small power blip. So we moved on to another shopping plaza and came back later. Power’s back on; we’re good to go.

The atmosphere in BB&B is slightly different than Pier 1. They are both packed to the gills with shit, but the difference between the two would be, Pier 1 is “chaotic” and BB&B is “claustrophobic”. BB&B is nicely organized into departments, BUT, there’s a whole bunch of shit that doesn’t fit into any standard department. That stuff goes in the aisles. It’s everywhere! The specific thing I am looking for is one of those aisle things, I assume, because it would be classified as a “beyond” product. I have to walk all the aisles, which is a misnomer, because there’s only one aisle that loops the store. So, I make a loop around the store and constantly dodge other people’s shopping carts. Like Pier 1, the aisles are organized utilizing using the excellent sorting algorithm, “shuffle”. There’s no rhyme or reason to anything, which means you have to look at everything.

Don’t get me wrong, I love treasure hunting. Ross, TJMaxx, Bealls Outlet, even flea markets. That’s all fun. But when I want something, I want to be able to find it quickly. And neither of these stores are made for such precision.

And as it turned out, the product I wanted at BB&B was not stocked in store. It was online-only. Which makes you wonder why retail stores are having such a hard time against online shopping. I really wonder why.

My Asshole Neighbor

Posted by anachostic on December 4, 2017 No comments

This is Grover.

Grover, a gopher tortoise, chose my property to build on. He’s dug two burrows that I know of. Grover’s name is a portmanteau of “ground rover” and has no affiliation with Sesame Street. Anyway, he’s an asshole. If he’s not hiding from you, he’s hissing at you. Let me tell his story.

The screen on my screened-in pool enclosure on my house was getting a bit shabby. The roof had a hole in it, the spline was falling out of multiple panels, and finally, a panel fell out because of the missing spline. So I made an appointment to get it all replaced.

A couple days before the company came to give me a quote, I walked around the patio. In the back was a large hole. What the fuck. Because my GF is knowledgeable in such things nature, I knew what this was. It was a gopher tortoise burrow. If this were the GF’s blog, she would insert at least five paragraphs here on the importance of gopher tortoises in nature. And I’d heard it all before, so I understood what needed done.

Gopher tortoises are a protected species. Don’t fuck with them. Knowing this, I called a wildlife trapper (not a pest removal company) and asked him if he could take care of my unnamed-as-of-yet problem. He told me that I needed to contact a trapper who was specially licensed to trap gopher tortoises, of which there were few in my state. That’s something I didn’t know yet.

I found a licensed trapper and called him up. Trapping was no big deal. It would cost probably around $300. Sure, no problem, let’s do it. But there’s other issues. You can’t just take the tortoise and drop him off in the woods. Anyone could do that, right? Gopher tortoises have a strong homing instinct. There’s a better than good chance he’ll just show up again and reclaim his burrow. Also, to rehome a gopher tortoise properly, you have to grant them enough land to claim as their own, without other competing tortoises. And they like to roam. So, what’s that mean? Finding a new home for the asshole would cost me $3000. Plus the trapping fee. Plus no guarantee he wouldn’t come back.

So, asshole got a name. He lives there now.

Back now to my total screen replacement. The crew arrives and I point out the very obvious burrow right next to the patio wall. I tell them this is a gopher tortoise burrow. It is a protected species. Don’t fuck with it. Everything went swimmingly well with the screen replacement. They called me one day and said they were all done and cleaned up. After work that day, I got home and saw that they really cleaned up. They filled in Grover’s burrow. What the fuck, indeed.

Of course, I immediately broke the opening up again, even though I’m pretty sure he could have burrowed back out on his own. That’s what they do, right? And by the next day, Grover the asshole had made his entrance even bigger than before, probably out of spite. Did I mention this illegal activity to the screening company? Yes I did.

Grover’s been there for years since. For our Hurricane Irma lockdown party, we put out a bunch of watermelon for him, which was gnawed down to the rind in short order.

He’s an asshole, but he’s part of the property now. These bastards live 40-60 years. He’s going to outlive me for sure.

The Roller Coaster Meal

Posted by anachostic on November 29, 2017 No comments

Over the weekend, the GF and I were out in Touristville and I made the decision to eat at Kobe Steakhouse. Kobe is a place we used to go frequently, and one I still manage to eat there every once in a while. It’s at a location we hadn’t been to before, like I said, right in Touristville, near the premium outlets. Don’t ask me why we chose to go to the outlets on Black Friday weekend. Some things can’t be rationalized.

So, we make our way to the restaurant through traffic that moved like sludge through a sewer pipe. I mean, it was shitty traffic. When we got inside the restaurant, it was unsurprising that there were plenty of people waiting already. The hostess says the wait is going to be 40-45 minutes. We’re only mildly hungry right then, so this will be fine for us to build up some hunger. We get the pager and sit down for an extended wait.

Five minutes into our wait, the pager goes off. Hooray for being a rockstar! Well, that’s not true. They never asked who I was, so my frequent flyer status wouldn’t have anything to do with this. Doesn’t matter, getting to eat now! We get seated at a table with another family of four. Each table seats ten, so there’s four empty seats between us.

I’ll take a moment to explain Kobe policy. You don’t get considered for seating until your entire party is present. It’s pretty obvious this family is dining with another family, so our table has a party of 8 and a party of 2. But the party of 8 is only half-there. There’s an actual business reason they won’t seat you like this, which is going to become obvious, very soon.

The server takes our drink orders. He asks about the people not there yet, and it is determined to just bring waters for them. The drinks are served and now orders are taken. The missing people can’t place their orders as they are not there. The GF and I are starting to think that we’re going to have a half-full table, which sucks for the chef.

The soup is served. The empty places get a bowl of soup each. The salad is served. The empty seats now have a soup and salad sitting in front of each of them. Soon, the chef will come out and these people haven’t even shown up to place their orders. Is this considered abandonment yet? The server consults with the family and they don’t know where their friends are, but they are sure to be here soon. I commented to the GF that our 45 minute wait was still in effect, it was just being applied after getting seated.

Then, a holiday miracle. The other family shows up. There’s a flurry of greetings and everyone takes their seats. There’s a small issue though. There’s five people. The party of eight, which was seated as a party of four is actually a party of nine. See, this is why you wait for the whole goddamn party to show up before you seat anyone.

Despite this, everyone crams the fuck in there and the server talks with each new person to get their drink and food order. Karmically enough, the issue of being short one soup and salad is never resolved. The chef finally comes out and tries to confirm everyone’s order. There’s confusion because he has two tickets, because the second party arrived so late. The chef is struggling with the orders and the number of people and I say to him, “You have 11 here.” Whether that helped or not, I have no idea.

He begins with the sauces. The table is designed for 10, and everything is planned for 10. He has 10 sauce trays. I try to help by saying I don’t want any sauce, so he pulls one tray back. Now he has 9 trays and there’s 10 people that will want sauce. This is simply not working out.

Despite this ridiculousness, things worked out really well for me and the GF. The other parties turned down a lot of the food. Extra rice, extra noodles, extra veggies – we were loaded up. Maybe it was for the best because I’m not sure they prepped for 11 at a table.

However, even though we were fed heartily, even good food can’t make up for your meal running into 2 hours. That’s just way too much. So, it was hard for us to tell if we were happy with the meal or not. The food was good, the experience was not as much.

The server brought my check, and fortunately, I had a $10 reward that was applied to my check. I sent the bill off with my credit card and the server came back to talk to me. The manager felt bad about us being crammed in on a table of 11 and took an extra $20 off the bill. That was unexpected and quite pleasant. So the bill was paid and we got the hell out of that shitshow.

The rise and fall of expectations and reality left us completely confused as to how we should be feeling, other than full and tired.

A Good Time, Spoiled By An Explosion

Posted by anachostic on November 28, 2017 No comments

During the holidays, you are supposed to be reflecting on how your year has gone, for better or worse. Then I suppose you make future plans based on that evaluation. It’s like how it is at work for me, with my annual review being in December. I don’t really have much to worry about in my professional life, and my personal life has been pretty good for a solid number of years.

The GF and I have pretty much been loners throughout our coupledom. We share a friend here or there, but this year, we are both very grateful for new friendships. Well, one is new this year, and one was budding almost a year ago. It’s really weird to actually analyze how friendships form as adults, especially when you’re not really a person, you’re a collection of you and your partner. But suffice to say, the GF and I have been very fortunate this year.

And, like so many of my posts, that’s not even what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the time where there was a lot of promise and it just blew up in our faces. Literally. This couple was neighbors with the GF, and there was a huge falling out over an incident (not this incident) that is not my story to tell and these neighbors have since moved away, blah, blah, blah.

Now, it was a fall or winter evening, a cold night, and they had invited us over for a evening around a fire pit. It’s an activity I never really understood – staring at a fire and getting smoke in your eyes – but I know people love doing it, so I’m not opposed. And so we went over and hung out with them in their driveway, with what I assume was a brand new fire pit.

The pit was metal and round and was pretty ornate. It sat on the ground and had the decorative cut outs in the upper portion of the flat-bottomed bowl. The neighbors had built up a good fire by the time we got there and some drinking was involved. It was cold enough for jackets, despite the fire. (Another thing about fire hangouts – one side of you roasts and the other freezes. Fun!)

The night wore on and nothing was terrible at all. We got along pretty well. But, without warning, the fire pit exploded. Yeah, nothing more to say. It just blew up. The thing launched probably about 5 feet in the air and it began raining fire and ash down on all of us. No big deal, really. That doesn’t happen often to me, if ever, but in this specific case, my jacket bore the brunt of the cinders, melting holes in multiple places. The GF took some cinders to the hair, which lit on fire. It was fine, we got the hair put out without any disfiguration. And after the panic subsided and some neighbors came out to find out who dropped a bomb on the area, we took note of the damage.

There is a lesson to be learned here, and that lesson is, don’t put a flat-bottomed fire pit on the ground and especially do not put it on a concrete surface, like a driveway. Elevate that fucker. I deduced what had happened pretty quickly and it was confirmed later. The fire pit, resting flat on the concrete, heated up moisture and air that was trapped inside the concrete. With nowhere for the heated pressure to escape, it eventually exploded like a cheap pressure cooker. This is actually what launched the fire pit into the air. And underneath, where the fire pit had been, was a substantial hole in the driveway.

Fortunately, we have had no explosions with our new friends and as for those old friends, it was probably prophetic as to how it would turn out in the long run.

It’s The Small-Town Vibe

Posted by anachostic on November 16, 2017 No comments

Yesterday had a couple of curious events, especially curious to happen in the same day, both involving dining.

For lunch, a bunch of coworkers and I (plus one who got left behind) had lunch at a middle-eastern grocery/restaurant. Hardly really a restaurant, more like a deli with some booths and tables. For myself, I grabbed some tabbouleh and some pita bread and a drink, paid for it and sat at a booth. Everyone else all had their food from the kitchen. I wondered how everyone paid for their food already. They didn’t. And no one seemed to understand how payment was going to work.

So each of them just went up to the kitchen window, asked for food and got it and was now seated and eating it, whereas I went to the shelves and coolers, got food, paid for it, and was now eating it. No one else had any order slips, checks, or anything else to indicate what they got. The point I am laboriously making it that this restaurant operated on the honor system. Does such a thing exist anymore? Well, it worked out well for everyone, because I do have standards for my cohorts and honesty is one of them.

But, if that story is somewhat interesting, maybe mildly interesting, this one is better.

After work, I decide to stop at my local Blimpie for dinner. You know Blimpie, there’s what, maybe a dozen of them around? I can’t seem to find one anywhere, but I do love their bread. It’s so fluffy. Anyway, that’s not what’s interesting. See, the guy who runs my Blimpie, runs/owns, I mean. Foreign as well, maybe Indian, maybe Pakistani. That’s all completely irrelevant. He’s a damn hard worker. He owns the place and is the only employee. He works open to close seven days a week. His wife owns/runs the dry cleaning location in the same plaza.

Now, I feel sorry for this guy, not only because he’s always there, but also because there’s never anyone else there. Maybe I’ll see another customer when I’m there, most often I won’t. But he always recognizes me and always forgets what cheese I want on my sandwich, so hey, I guess we’re friends.

Tonight, I get my food and as usual I’m the only one eating it there. The guy comes over to me and says, “Can you do me a favor?” He puts this paper down beside me. “I’m going to go over next door. If someone comes in, have them call this number on here and I’ll come right back.”

Yes, you probably understood that just as I did. I’m in charge of the store while he goes out. That’s quite a promotion for someone who’s not even an employee. So, since we’re friends, I say, “sure,” and off he goes, carrying a box from Amazon.

He had said he was going to be gone for just a minute, but I think it was something more like five minutes. And wouldn’t you know it, here comes a customer. As soon as the customer gets in the door, I hold up the piece of paper and say. “Well, you are the first person to come in and I have been told that he wants you to call this number and he will be right back.”

The customer is like, “Where’s he at?” And I say, “I assume he went to the dry cleaners. I think his wife runs it.” He’s just “Geez,” but he gets his phone out and calls the number on the paper I’m holding up.

“Hey.” “Yeah.” “Ok.” And the guy hangs up. Then he’s just walking around the lobby. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to make sure that anyone walking in doesn’t steal anything or not, so I ignore him for a bit, then try to engage in random talk. “It must be rough working open to close every day.”

The customer doesn’t seem fazed at all. “Oh, he and his wife run this and the dry cleaning business.” Well, then. I guess he knows what’s up. Blimpie owner comes back and he and the customer are just “Hey, how’s it going?” I guess they’re friends, too.

But the point of this is, I was trusted to watch a restaurant yesterday. Sure, I’ve run pizza shops alone, like 20 years ago. But I was an employee then. I’m a customer now! What’s up with this trust all of a sudden?

Anyway, Here’s The (Wonder)Wall

Posted by anachostic on November 15, 2017 No comments

When I went to bed last night, the word counts for my NaNoWriMo buddies were 539, 447, and 0 (granted, he’s west-coast, so I may not know). Me? All of 78 words added. Beginning week 3, Sustain week, the grind. And judging from all our performances, it’s the wall.

Speaking on my own experience, I opened up the document, looked at the outline, which ended with “Chapter 33 – Lin And Steven Negotiate”, typed “Chapter 34 – ” and stopped. I had no idea what the next chapter was going to be. No idea whose perspective it was from or any sort of plot. After a couple minutes of staring blankly, I walked away from my computer.

It’s not like I couldn’t write. I was inspired to do a blog entry that day, when I was expecting to go dry for a while. And I’m writing this blog entry now. I’m doing all of this instead of working on my novel. Recently, I commented on how writing the novel wasn’t really fun anymore. And I gave that emotion some thought and had another realization.

My NaNoWriMo profile identifies me as a “Pantser”: writing with no planning and flying by the seat of my pants. And that has worked out very well for me. I am always excited to see where my characters want to go. I only have detail in my head for one future scene and how to get there, and I have various long-range events that may or may not ever come to fruition. They all depend on how the short-term scenes play out.

However, lately, something has changed. In prior weeks, I would always be thinking about the story and what was coming up next. These last couple days, I haven’t given a single thought to the story. Yesterday, I only had my thoughts about the upcoming scenes from a few days ago. Today, I sat down and I had nothing.

So, how did I get over that? I chose to do some editing. I jumped back three chapters and read what I had written. In the process of doing that, I learned that my story isn’t actual shit, which I was increasingly convincing myself it was. I fixed some basic typos, changed some phrasing, and ended up with an additional 78 words for the day. More than that, I encouraged myself that this is a story and the story isn’t over yet. These characters still have things to do.

Today will be a long day at work, but when I get home, hopefully I will have the refreshed energy to take on another two chapters. Verbum Vomite!

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Anachostic