bitterfig

Tomorrow I fly to New York and despite my considerable trepidation I am rather looking forward to having some time off.  Between work, and my burgeoning (and occasionally bludgeoning) efforts to increase my social interaction I’ve been pretty busy lately and am getting pretty worn out. 

 

During the past couple of days I put in two late nights, staying out until 1:00 and 1:30 a.m.   Monday night I hung out with Tycho after work.  He’s going to be out of town for a couple weeks and I’d really wanted to see him again before he left.  On Wednesday I ended up spending a couple of hours at an impromptu party of Whole Foods employees on the roof of the parking garage.  I didn’t drink anything because I was driving and also exhausted from work and mainly because by the time you get to be 36 years old getting drunk on the roof of a parking garage has severely limited appeal however I talked to a couple people I know by sight from around the store but have never really had a conversation with, sort of expanded my horizons a bit. 

 

The reason for the impromptu Wednesday night party in the parking garage roof was that everyone needed to do some serious decompression after a particularly hellish day at work.  I work at the Lakeview Whole Foods and that afternoon the Lincoln Park Whole Foods which is a couple of miles away was closed down on account of health code violations.  Or as the tenants used to say when I worked in the property management office “Mices!”   

 

The closing of the Lincoln Park Store resulted in an inundation of customers from that store (which sort of baffled me—I don’t mean to question the loyalty of our customers but I’d go to the nearby Trader Joes or Stanley’s Produce Market or even Jewel or Dominiques which are on the way before I’d haul all the way from the Lincoln Park store to Lakeview store in rush hour traffic) and a frenzy of panic cleaning least our store too be inspected and found wanting.  I lucked out on the cleaning end as I’m in a department that does not actually handle food.  “Deep-cleaning” the registers only took about half an hour longer than the usual closing routine however people in other departments like Prepared Foods and Seafood were running an hour and a half to two hours over the usual time they finish. 

 

Lincoln Park finally re-opened on Saturday afternoon but Friday was extra busy with a lot of indignation over the closing.  “What an embarrassment,” one customer sniped.  I had a hard time not snipping back, “It’s not an embarrassment for me.  I don’t work there and I don’t shop there.”  Also, I know enough about agriculture and pre-modern hygiene and food production that I really can’t be shocked to realize that there are such things as rodents and pests.  There always have been and there always will be until food is grown and prepared in sterile labs. 

 

In addition to all this other stuff, I’ve been doing a lot of biking- in the last week I only used my car three out of seven days which I’m quite proud of.  Still, I have to be careful not to over do it.  Fatigue from too much riding on restricted calories was definitely one of the factors that contributed to my accident last summer. 

 

On Thursday, my last day off, and again yesterday when I was working a closing shift I ended up spending most of my free time during the day sleeping.  I have today off as well which is good. It’ll give me time to pack and take my cat over to my sister’s house where he’ll be staying during my visit (he actually lived there for a couple years but I doubt his little cat brain remembers that far back).  After I get the kitty squared away I’d like to do some cleaning.  I don’t vacuum as often as I should because he hates it.  Nor do I sweep as often as I ought because he tends to get in the way of the broom.

I have the next two days off thank goodness.  I just finished a fairly grueling three days where I was working at Biff’s office from 8:00 a.m. until noon followed by a mid-afternoon to close shift at the market. Taxing, but it’s worth it to secure my financial peace of mind through the next paycheck.

In all honesty I sometimes think overwork might be good for me. It doesn’t leave me any time to worry or feel bad about myself, I feel like I’ve accomplished something when I get through the day and I don’t need to wear eyeliner because I already have dark around my eyes.

When I went into Biff’s on Monday morning I found out that one of his dogs, the poodle he’d adopted two years ago, had died. Poor little thing, he was such a happy, hyper dog and only three years. It’s especially hard on Biff and his husband, Jorge, because when it happened the dog was away being trained (he tended to bite when he got too excited). Biff says they treated him well there but apparently the stress was too much for him. Really sad. Biff got him from a shelter and he’d been abused by his former owner. His coat was overgrown and ungroomed to the point where he literally had poodle dreadlocks and when he got cleaned up he was scrawny as a lizard underneath. For the first week he was very scared and shy but then he realized he was safe and going to be fed and started bouncing off the walls. I’m glad he was at least able to have two years of being pampered and running around like a maniac.

Biff is currently doing Weight Watchers and feels a bit ambiguous about it so I lent him by copy of Wendy McClure’s book I Am Not the New Me. McClure is a Chicago woman in her 30’s who I’ve seen at a couple of book signings and literary events around town. She writes a column for Bust magazine and in her book talks a lot about her experiences in Weight Watchers, which she has very mixed feelings about. I’ve never attended Weight Watchers (though several people have suggested I should) but apparently the cultish/cheerleader aspects strike a sour note with people around my age who have a skeptical, ironic take on life.