9:42 am - Wed 6/26/02
No Se Desanime

I want to at least start out on a positive note here...

The most unequivocally happy news I can think of since I last wrote is that Korea lost to Germany in the World Cup Semi-Finals.

Why is that happy news, you ask? Am I a major World Cup fan? Was I rooting for Germany?

Actually, I could care less about soccer, World Cup or otherwise. But the night Korea got into the semis, I was awoken at 3 a.m. by scores of yelling, car-horn-honking, Koreatown celebrants (As I told people at work the next day, I felt like "Middle Aged Man", wanting to shake my fist out the window and yell, "Shut the hell up, you hooligans!"). Anyway, after that I was rooting for any team that wasn't Korea to win. And hopefully, to win big (Though with the scores in soccer, I guess nobody ever really "wins big").

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I've been having some doubts about Diaryland recently...

Some of the stuff I wrote recently made me feel bad. I felt bad writing it, I felt bad re-reading it, and I've felt bad about it in the time since. I've been embarrassed and uncomfortable and afraid I've alienated people I would rather not have alienated. I've wondered if being so "revealing" isn't doing me more emotional harm than good.

But at this juncture, I'm making a decision to continue. And that being the case, I'm reaffirming my commitment to be as honest about myself in here as I can be.

If I ultimately decide this was an interesting experiment, but that I really need to go back to a private journal, that's one thing, but as long as I am doing this, I'm going to do it, if you know what I mean. Otherwise, I just don't see the point. As I said to Lauren in a recent chat, I may not know exactly what Diaryland is supposed to accomplish, but I know it's not about me being "cute and cuddly" all the time.

I have to have faith that people who really matter to me, that small-but-hardy band, will stick with me, and anyone else doesn't really matter. And maybe gain a little perspective; After all, how much does any of this really "matter" anyway?

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Well, in light of circumstances, I'm not sure it was the best timing, but I recently asked out Astrid, another woman I work with.

I haven't mentioned Astrid till now, because...well, I don't know why, exactly, but she's pretty and nice and seemed to like me, and while she's maybe a little young for me (28), she's not so young that I felt I'd be "robbing the cradle".

So anyway, I asked her out.

And she said no.

She was nice about it, and so uncomfortable to be turning me down that I started almost feeling sorry for her.

(The timing actually wasn't so bad, it turned out; Unlike some pain I've been feeling lately, I was over this little slap of rejection within an hour of having asked her. Definitely emotional small-potatoes.)

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I tried to write an entry a couple days ago, but it got deleted (Fortunately, it was one of thos entries that I thought kind of sucked anyway, and was therefore no great loss to me or my legion of "fans".)

But I did write something--from a couple notes I'd taken early that day at work--that I think bears repeating in here.

I was trying to get myself back to some semblance of rationality, asking myself why I was so upset by what Jane told me (Or to put it more "emotionally", by what Jane did to me).

Here's what I came up with:

1. A friend told me the truth.

2. Things I knew to be the case (ex. By and large, I'm not attractive to the women I'm attracted to) were affirmed.

3. A person who is unavailable to me is, in fact, unavailable to me, and something that was never going to happen is, in fact, never going to happen.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

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Thinking a lot about Borders lately...

There has been lots of change, and lots of turnover, in the less-than-a-year-and-a-half since I've been there.

The biggest change has been Marie, the GM who replaced Padric.

She's very energetic, knows what she wants to have happen, and seems to have the ability to get people to work for her.

One big change she's instituted is to have people assigned to sections, which is how things worked back at Schulers in Lansing, and I guess how things were at Borders until sometime shortly before I started there.

It is a change that was sorely needed. The store was a perennial, disorganized mess the way things were being done under Padric's regime (I won't bore you with all the details, but basically, while there were, and are, an official team of "shelvers", everyone was supposed to be responsible for everything, so of course, what ended up happening is that no one was responsible for anything).

So I actually agree with this change. BUT...

It's been a source of some frustration--not just for me personally, but for my coworkers as well--because they haven't seemed to want to actually schedule people the time needed to do the work they want done.

For example, it was weeks after this change was announced before I was scheduled for any shelving time (And we're talking about two sections--Sports and Self-Help--that were severely picked over, totally out-of-order alphabetically, and where the shelvers had fallen so far behind that, in addition to full bins in the back room, there were upwards of a dozen boxes of books stacked up against the wall).

(Because of this, I got a little "hot under the collar" when I came in one day recently and had one of the managers say, "FYI; You have a bunch of books stacked up in the back.)

Like I said, I think this is a good move--they should never have dispensed with the system of people having "sections" anyway--but you can't then say, "Okay, you have these sections that haven't really been tended in over a year, and haven't been shelved in at least a month, they're totally out-of-order, and we don't really want to schedule you time to do them...but get it done anyway."

But before you jump to conclusions, and think "Hey, Jim has a work ethic after all"...

While I think this change makes sense, and I actually want to do the job well, there's also a part of me that registers this as actual work, and while I'm obviously not averse to doing it, it's making me much more aware of how very little I'm getting paid (Given time to put things in order--at least the best order I can muster--shelving will not be quite such a Herculean effort. But as of now, it is w-o-r-k, and w-o-r-k I am being very poorly compensated for!).

I was thinking again the other day--It's a real shame that you can't make a living as a "bookseller".

While I'm not the reader I used to be, and no great intellect either, I really do think books are a wonderful thing, and reading is--dare I say it?--fundamental.

I had to work for ten years at Schulers, to earn what, by any estimation, was a very modest income. And I don't think I have that kind of time to spend at Borders.

What am I saying here? I guess I'm saying that, in my estimation, it's an honorable thing, to sell books; I realized, when the whole business of working in the cafe came up, that I have a particular feeling for selling books that I don't have for selling other things. That was reaffirmed just last night, when Marie called me into her office to ask if I was interested in working up in the music section (I respectfully declined).

But I can't live on what they pay me. I can't have a life. And they can pep-talk me till the cows come home, but nothing they say really matters, because what they're really saying is very clear, every payday when I open my paycheck and wonder how I'm going to get through another month. Every time my stomach knots when I spend money, no matter how trivial, or how necessary.

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I think I've known this for quite some time now, but something that really struck me the other day is how I spend pretty much all my free time trying to distract myself from the fact that I feel bad.

(And I know this isn't really the case, but my perception of things is that I feel bad about something-or-other on a pretty continual basis.)

It's apparent that things have gone wrong, if indeed they were ever actually right in that regard. And it's hard for me not to feel discouraged--I'm having a hard time shaking the idea, especially lately, that my thought processes, my emotional responses, are so off, so "out-of-whack", that I'm never going to figure out how to be have a life that feels full and productive.

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You're probably wondering (If you spend your time wondering about me and my life), why I haven't said anything about the "Circle X" theater company meeting at this point.

I'm not really sure, to be honest, except that my feelings about it are more "up in the air" than my feelings about anything else I've written about today.

Basically, the meeting left me feeling torn, uncertain about what to do or what I want to do. Intellectually, I'm glad I took the step to actually go, but I'm feeling a huge amount of disappointment over how afraid and uncertain I'm feeling.

I think it merits an entry in-and-of itself. And that being the case, and since I've blown most of the morning writing what I've written so far, I'm going to close now, and save "Circle X" for next time.

Ta-ta...

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