Short walk

I got off work at 7 tonight and decided to walk around a little before I went home.  It was still hot, but about to rain.  I miss rain.  I walked down along the Riverwalk and ended up in a mall--yep, when I try to go for a walk outside, I end up in a mall that has a river in it.  I came out a different side of the mall, totally turned around, in a very touristy area full of shops and neon signs.  But--wait, isn't that...?  Oh, right.

The Alamo.

I watched two Segway tours battling for cleverest dance-pose-while-rolling in front of the Alamo.  I kept walking, reached the corner and almost got knocked off my feet by a blast of wind when I left the shelter of the building.  It was a serious Texas-sized wind, y'all.  I had to lean forward to walk into it, putting my arm over my face because I was getting scoured by tiny pebbles and bits of dirt.  Just as suddenly, the wind flipped to the opposite direction and pushed me up the street, blasting the backs of my legs with the bits of dirt.  The sky got darker and darker, and I opted to head straight to my car instead of finding a bus stop--I would have had to take the trolley all the way around downtown and back up to the park-and-ride, so I decided to take my chances on getting caught by the bus stop police.  I figured--and I was right--they wouldn't want to be out in that wind.  Driving home, I watched the most intense electrical storm coming in from the west.  Then I sat on the patio for a while and listened to the thunder and rain.  

I won't be sorry to get away from this apartment--the water changes at random intervals from scalding to lukewarm.  Or, if you put it on lukewarm, it changes from lukewarm to fricking freezing.  Or!--like today, the water just got shut off with no warning.  My shower drain won't work properly, no matter how many times I call maintenance.  Oh--and did I tell you about the drip from the light fixture in the hallway?  There was a tiny drip coming from the light fixture in the hallway for a few days.  It made a tiny little orangey-brown dent on the hall carpet.  Then it stopped.  We assumed it was something leaking in the pipes, since they were working on the pipes that week.  Then John asked the upstairs neighbor, and he said oh right, they had one of their toilets back up and flood their bathroom and hallway.  WITH POO WATER.  Which dripped through our light fixture into our house.  So, the house search is on with a vengeance.

That said, we have the perfect patio for listening to a storm.  It's sheltered from the wind, so much that my wind chimes don't even jingle, and the rain doesn't come in unless it's really pouring.  I sat out there with The Dude and our latest patio cat, The Jesus, for about half an hour.  Then our Mexican delivery showed up and we had dinner while watching Parks and Recreation on Netflix.  I don't work again until next week.  Life has been worse.

Why

I got to go back to brass band rehearsal tonight, and I got to hang out afterward.  I haven't hung out for a while, because my depressing job had me getting up early, or staying up late, or just generally not cheery enough to want to hang out and drive home afterward.  Tonight I went out.

I really like my band.  Have I said how much I like my band?  I like my band.

They asked about my depressing job, so I told them a little about it.  I think, in the last twenty-four hours, I've tried to explain about five times why I'm doing the depressing job.  I guess it's not clear to everyone why someone with my career path and experience would take this depressing job.  I thought it was obvious--need money, get job--but so many people are asking me why that I'm going to try to explain.

My career--the music teaching one--is not really flexible in its hiring seasons.  Band directors are looking for teachers at certain times of the year; colleges are hiring adjunct faculty at certain times.  While they may be looking in July/August, they don't exactly put ads on Craigslist.  They hire, at that time of year, by word of mouth.  Often, some teacher has moved or gotten a full-time job somewhere, so his/her previous employers hire someone else they know away from another school, and that school hires someone else and so on until the very last school is suddenly in a desperate place, with band camp starting in two days and nobody to call.  They will ask other teachers in the area for names, and usually something will come up.  I have gotten all of my college gigs and most of my other teaching gigs in that way: someone asked someone else and got my name.

(There *are* jobs that require applications and curriculum vitae and auditions and interviews.  Those jobs are usually announced in the fall/winter and involve a search process, and usually result in someone getting a job and leaving some other school in the lurch.  Then the shifting process starts, some school down the line gets screwed in mid-July and I get a last-minute call for the gig.  I never get the jobs that involve applying.  Most require a doctoral degree, and even if they don't require it, many of the applicants will have one.  It's why I want to go back to grad school.  I will never get a full-time job, let alone a tenure track job, without a doctorate.)

I moved to Texas in July.  The perfect time for getting students and teaching gigs, maybe, but I didn't know anyone.  I still don't know many people.  It took four years for me to really get started in Georgia, and while I'm better at networking and promoting myself now, it's still going to take time.  I know that my name got out there at least once, in August, but the band director who got my name never called me.  I think he probably didn't recognize my name, so he tossed it in favor of someone familiar.  That is going to happen for at least a year.

As for professional playing gigs, they are few and far between for euphonium and trombone.  When people get playing gigs, they sit on 'em as long as possible.  I've been volunteering for lots of free gigs, which would get me into trouble with other pro musicians (some believe it devalues what we do--but you know what?  I can't think of a playing gig that I've ever had that didn't stem from some free gig, like my brass band).  I've already done more in two months than I did in a year when I moved to Georgia.  Still, I need a depressing job.

In a week or so, I might have two.  Depressing job number 1 has cut my hours drastically--you know I'm heartbroken over that--and I had an interview at a chain bookstore the other day.  I got a decent feeling about it.  The two jobs together would likely not add up to a forty-hour week, but would create double the stress when it comes to scheduling.  After so many years of my nightmarish teaching schedule, I'm freaking out about two part-time jobs?!  It's because, when I teach, my time is my own.  I set the lessons, I pick the days, I say (usually) when I start and finish for the day.  I can cancel if I have to.  Chain stores and corporate hotels?  They don't care about my schedule.

Depressing jobs.  All jobs are depressing jobs.

Vaguely personal, yet vague

When I write blog entries, I try to be clear.  I tell stories.  When I write in my journal, or for myself, I write faster, closer to the speed my mind works.  Ideas and feelings zoom around inside my head, or they're just there.  When an idea occurs to me, ideas and associations well up quickly and blend together, which is why I sometimes make off-the-wall comparisons or strange statements.  Like this journal entry from when I was 18: "My toes fit together like Little Caesar's breadsticks."  It's ridiculous, but it still makes perfect sense to me--and now that journal entry is an idea itself, so every time I drive past a Little Caesar's, I think of my toes, and the cover of that journal--it was a pale watercolor of flowers on a desk, and I found the book in my luggage when I left for my summer at Interlochen, just before going to college.  My mom had stashed it in my suitcase.

All that is stuff I would cut from a normal blog entry (or at least create separate paragraphs).  It turned out to be a perfect example of what I was trying to explain.  My personal writing is stream-of-consciousness, more William Faulker and less Mark Twain.  I just want to get as many of the thoughts down as I can before something else grabs my attention and the thoughts get crowded out by new ones.

I was cleaning up my desktop this morning and I found this doc from back in August that I'd probably meant to incorporate in my journal at some point.  I'd been catching up with a friend, and sent him this message, and then found myself staring at the keyboard...just staring.  I mean, I was STARING at the silver, reflective button on my laptop, while strange, ugly thoughts went through my head.  The next two paragraphs came out of it.  It might not make any sense at all, but it's what I wrote down in my "talking to myself" voice.

- - -- --- ----- -------- ------------- ---------------------

Message to Mike: 

I have actually found myself fantasizing about going back in time...not just me, but like, everyone just waking up tomorrow and it will be a year ago. I would change one thing, and that thing would change everything. I really would. I don't need to go back to college and redo my life; I'll accept all of the stupid shit I did up to the age of 35, but I want to do this last year over. If there were any kind of god, he would let me go back. So fuck your god, lady, and quit trying to friend me when all of your activities are 'putting the christ in christmas' or 'evolution is a theory cause rick perry says so.'

Sitting here thinking about the whole past year, how it was so packed and busy and just fucking intense.  It was intense.  Everything felt so real, and I was so worried about money and the future, and suddenly everything went to hell all at once, and six months just…like, every day went by at normal speed, but the whole thing now looks like a video that I know was shot in normal speed, but from a distance it’s just a blur of events and feelings and so much stuff going on. 

So I just saw the ceiling fan reflected in the mirror-silver “click” button on my laptop…the long part of the button shows the blades of the ceiling fan turning at normal speed, but the blades are elongated and it looks like they’re turning really fast.  The end of the button where it’s a convex curve, the blades are short, and they spin slowly, so it looks like three-quarters of the fan is spinning faster than the last quarter of it.  Just a really weird optical illusion.  And that’s what this summer is—the leftover three months where time is just dragging by, while the rest of the year seems to spin by three times in the space of that one quarter.

Cincinnati

I got out of Texas for a few days.  First, flew to Atlanta, where I visited my friend, Tom, and then the two of us drove up to Cincinnati for the NABBA board meeting.  Did that for a couple of days, checked out Cincinnati's Oktoberfest, then drove back and I flew back to Texas.  Put into words, it is a much shorter trip than I thought it would be.  I'd intended to stay longer in Atlanta and see more people, but when I got the job at the hotel last month I decided to make it a shorter trip.

Re: the job: the girl who hired me has quit, so all those things I said in my interview ("My schedule is totally flexible!  I plan on working here for 3-4 years, at least!  I have NO OTHER commitments at all!") no longer exist.  I can act as selfish and temp-jobby as I want.  Not that I WILL, but I could.

The board meeting was only a little frustrating; we usually line out a lot of projects that never get any attention the rest of the year.  Next year we'll talk about the same projects.  The organization is largely about running an annual competition, and we always pull that off.  We did push through our agenda to finish early on Saturday, so I got some cool photos of the street festival.

While I was in Ohio, John got a call from our real estate agent.  She was contacted by HGTV to be on one of their first-time homebuyer shows--My First Place--and she asked us to apply for it.  I'm not a fan of reality TV, nor of TV in general, but I'm a good sport.  I just asked them not to make me look fat.  (Good luck to them, lol.)  The schedule of the show looks like it might not work for us, anyway--they want to follow people through the entire buying process, but John and I have already started.  The show would want to film us over a 3-month period, but we want to be out of our apartment by the end of the year.  We'll see what happens.

Shut up, Texas (2)

I've thought it over, and I'm going to keep looking for another job.  Not quitting the one I have just yet.  Yesterday, I made an educated decision: though the hotel pays well, it is cancelled out by the time I spend driving, waiting for the bus, riding, walking, and changing into my uniform...then doing the same in reverse on the way home.  It adds two hours, unpaid, to every shift.  That means that an eight-hour shift pays about as well as any bookstore gig, and a shorter shift actually pays less.  There's a B&N less than 10 minutes from my house, not to mention dozens of other retail shops.  Short drive, no uniform, free parking.  It's a sensible thing.

Today, my work experience cemented my decision.  I went to work after two days off, noticed my schedule for the next week is totally workable--only three shifts: one evening and two overnights.  No problem there. For the past week, the hotel was slammed full of people for a large conference downtown--and yes, if you check the papers, you know what conference I'm talking about, and therefore which hotel I work in, but I'm hunting again, so who cares--and being trained on the job was a little sketchy.  There were three of us getting trained, and it was busy, so we mostly ended up stocking shelves and sandwiches.  I have a good work ethic in retail, so every time I needed something to do, I went to work on the shelves or the drink cooler, or I trotted to the bar to make sure they had enough sodas in the coolers, etc.  When the trainers looked around for someone who wasn't busy, they always saw the other girls, so those girls ended up learning more than me because they were handy when someone was ready to teach them.

Today was less busy, and I was told (just like I was told all week) that I would be training on the two most important areas: the register and the espresso drinks.  Well.  One of the other girls has been really stressed that she wouldn't learn drinks fast enough, so she has completely taken over the drink counter.  The second girl and I can't even get close to the drinks--the first one just keeps nudging us out of the way, grabbing the cups when they come up.  Also, the drink counter is a good place to be if you don't like stocking stuff (and who likes that?!) so the regular employees tend to park themselves there.  The register is where you get tips, so, again, the regular employees take over the registers.  And they refuse to train us using their own drawers--the hotel is SO strict about accountability that NOBODY will let anyone else touch their cash tills.  Even the woman training us won't let us run on her register, we just stand behind her and watch.  Customers love standing in line and seeing two girls in uniform doing nothing but watching someone else run a register.  And if the department head walks by, we can't just be standing there behind the counter!  We should be stocking something or cleaning something!

So I spent my time trudging back and forth, stocking the drink coolers and stacking sandwiches in various places.  Getting sandwiches from the kitchen on 2, bringing them down to 1 and lining them up on trays, taking some back up to 2 when they don't fit, bringing them back to 1 when we run out, checking 2 to be sure I got all the sandwiches, going back to 1 to see if someone bought a chicken salad while I was gone, taking the expired sandwiches back to 2, and so on.  Repeat for salads.  Repeat for pizzas. Repeat for fruit cups.

Today, the department head was there--she's my boss's boss, essentially.  She took us to lunch and told us some things we already had heard.  Said that they really want to "retain" us and they want to make sure we "succeed" at our training.  Then she decided, since we've been there a week, she would conduct our first evaluations on customer service.

She got a bartender to come to the coffee shop and pretend to order a drink from me.  I had to remember all the specific things not to say (don't say "help," say assist...don't say "sorry," say apologize...don't say "no problem"...don't say "hey"...don't say "have a nice day"...etc.).  Then I had to pretend to ring him up on a register, but I couldn't use the register because it had someone else's till in it--I had to tell that person what to do and pretend I was doing it.  She couldn't prompt me, which meant I couldn't do it, because I haven't rung on the registers yet, anyway.  I had to pretend to swipe his credit card.  Then I had to make his mocha, which was easy enough for me because I've made ten thousand mochas at another job, but I didn't follow their drink procedure and I didn't know where everything was, because I haven't been allowed behind the drink counter yet.  I told him to have a nice day.

When the dept. head came back from evaluating me, she held the chart where I could see it.  It said BETSY J. on the top and in big letters: NEEDS MORE TRAINING.

NO FUCKING SHIT.

I spent seven days as a goddamn gopher and then I got tested on the register.  Humiliating.  The head told me she knew it wasn't my fault, that we'd been "crazy busy"--well, yeah--then why did you do it?  I was pissed.  I cry when I'm really angry, and I wasn't going to cry in front of her, so when she asked if I had any questions or comments, I just said no and I left.  I have another two days off, and I'm going to spend them applying for other jobs.  Retain that, assholes.