MY LIFE - MARCH
Friday, March 2, 2001
My mail has become an assortment of bills and those credit card solicitations that everyone over 18 gets. It wasn't always this way either. I guess that's how you can tell when you're getting older. If the number of bills is greater than the number of any other kind of mail, that's a sign that you're now a full fledged adult.
Now, I don't get as many bills as my mom does, but I'm getting more than I was getting a year ago. A year ago I had my pager, my computer, my credit card, and the occasional car insurance. Now I get my cell phone, my computer, my car, car insurance, credit card, college tuition, and the occasional telephone bill (which will soon become mine once my mom changes it from her name to mine).
As I said, not as many as my mom, but more than I probably should have. But hey, I got myself into these messes.
Anyway, the more bills you get, the more of an adult you are now. At least that's how it seems to be. You start out small. For some, their car payment and insurance is their first bill. For others, it's a credit card (or cards in extreme cases), pager, or cell phone. As time goes by, you may find yourself with the occasional medical bill, especially if you start working and get benefits.
Before you know what hit you, you have seven different bills to pay, some of them for services you don't even use anymore. It gets to the point of being ridiculous, but that's how the American culture works. You keep buying on credit and continue to pay for things. This is how I've paid off two cars and am in the process of paying on a third one (although I have no plans to get a new car anytime soon). I've spent thousands of dollars on things I don't even have anymore.
Sometimes you can tell I've lived with women. I keep buying and buying even though I shouldn't. I have over 100 CD's and five different game systems with over 30 games for those systems together. I never needed any of those things, but you see something you like, hear a song or two that you like, and bam! It's over. It's in your hands and you're done X-amount of dollars for something you could live without.
It's a material society we live in though. People are judged based on how much they have. You live in a big house and your family has four cars, you're looked at as living pretty good. Whereas those who live in a tiny apartment with ten children and have to take the bus or walk everywhere are frowned upon. It's not right, but it's how it is.
That's why I've never looked at my family and thought things were so terrible. Not even when for a brief period we were on welfare and using food stamps, or when we didn't have a car and had to walk or ride bikes everywhere. We still had a nice house with more things than we should have had. Things weren't great, but we had it a lot better than most people.
It amazes me the number of people who are on welfare nowadays though. Having lived through it in the past, I can't believe that someone would want to stay in that position. If I'm in a family on welfare nowadays, I don't think I'd want it to be known because it's so frowned upon now. A lot of it is people who just don't want to do anything and that's the thing that bugs me. It's one thing when you really can't get a job. It's another thing when you're capable of it, but just don't feel like.
I hate it when I see people wearing fur coats and driving fancy vehicles, then they hand over their medicaid card for prescriptions. They have a coat that costs thousands of dollars. They drive an expensive car, yet they need to get their medication for free? That's the kind of flaw that bogs down medicaid and welfare. The people who abuse it and get away with it. And they can live with it.
Or people on worker's compensation who ride motorcycles around. It just drives me up a wall to see things like that, yet I've seen it. I see shit like that everyday too. Welfare and worker's comp are for people who really can't function, not for those who just want a free ride. And people have opposed making changes to both programs. I can understand trying to protect those who are legit, but not those who are quite capable, just incredibly lazy.
That's the kind of society we live in though. Take what we can.
It's become pretty clear that I've grown on the people I work with now because most of them now display clear disappointment when they find out I'm not working with them. This happened yesterday and today. Yesterday, Peggy wanted to know if I was working Saturday morning with her. I told her no, that I had the inventory meeting to go to and would be stopping by, but not until later on. Then today, Darlene asked me if I was working Saturday and was also disappointed to hear that. In both cases, they said it directly to me.
I'm not entirely sure on the reasons why, but I'm pretty sure it's because I'm competent in what I do and I'm not a person who raises a huge ruckus when things get crazy. I'm sort of a stabilizer at work because things don't get to me. I've had more than one person tell me that they wished they could be as calm as I was when things were nuts. I just don't let things get to me. I know what I'm capable of doing and if I can't get something done, then that's all there is to it.
I don't go spazzing over things and I don't go ordering people around. If I need someone to help me, I just flat out ask for it and if no one comes to help, I deal with it. I don't complain, I don't bitch, and I don't go around calling people names. It doesn't solve anything, so why bother? I think my sense of humor helps as well because it keeps people from getting too stressed.
Regina has told me more than once that things seem to be under more control when I'm around, whether I'm filling, typing, or on register. She's always saying that things are going to be interesting when I'm not around because I can do all three things very well and fairly quickly. Tonight she was surpised to see that there were five scripts waiting for her to check when just a few minutes early there wasn't anything. I told her that I had pulled them from rapid refill and then filled them.
I just get along with everyone though, even with Joann from time to time, although she does get on my nerves. I don't get involved with the other scuffles, I play the cards the way I should, and I keep myself in just enough trouble to keep things interesting. Only within the last couple weeks have they seen how I can really get and only Steve hasn't be surprised by the things I've done because he's used to me. He knows what I'll do and what can happen when I'm around.
In any case, I have the inventory meeting to go to tomorrow and that should be less than interesting. How it's going to go on for four hours is beyond me since I don't think there's that much to talk about. It'll probably be a bunch of bullshitting about how things are supposed to work and everyone will be thinking "yeah, right, like this is going to work." I'm up for it though. After the meeting I'll be dropping by the store to catch everyone up on things so that should be interesting.
I don't expect a whole lot to come from this meeting though. I have to find out, of course, but I like to make assumptions about things like this. I remember the last survey I took for the company. I don't think anything's changed since then, although I don't think the company's responded just yet. Last time they sent a memo to the employees after they received feedback from the employees and I haven't received any memo yet.
The biggest thing that I've gotten out of work lately? There's a lot of support for me to go to pharmacy school. So far everyone that I've mentioned it to thinks I'll be a good pharmacist. Regina mentioned that to me the other night, that she thought I'd be the pharmacist of the year someday and we even talked about pharmacy schools and who had a good program.
All in all, work's going good right now, even with the constant bickering between certain employees. As long as I stay out of things, I'll be fine.
I was taking a quiz at The Spark and it asked a question about whether I liked philosophy or chemistry better (I forget which test it was since I took a bunch of them; I'll mention more about these quizzes in a moment). I did good in chemistry, so I chose that as my answer. I know that I tend to think about things a lot, but I don't think that I'm philosophical or anything like that. Sometimes I can get really deep into a subject, but that doesn't happen often unless I'm talking with someone I'm really comfortable with about the right kind of topic.
I am a thinker and I am a writer. Those are the gifts I was given and I try to take advantage of them as much as possible since you're always told to do what you do best. I'm constantly thinking about things that have happened, how something might have been different if I had done this instead of that, and things like that. I wonder how different life would've been if I had what most people had and if I was more popular, ect. It's not that I don't like who I am or how I turned out. It's just that I'm curious about those sort of things.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad things happened the way they did. Sure, I had to deal with some tough things and I wasn't (and I'm still not) a tough person. Everything I dealt with made me stronger as a person. Growing up with three women primarily does strange things to you. It gives you a more feministic perspective of things. I've never been a macho guy. I've never been the kind of guy who does normal guy things. I didn't grow up around it. It's just never been me and I'm not disappointed by that. I'm a late bloomer and that's all there is to it.
I'm easy to get along with, if you manage to get past my intitial resistance, which a lot of people don't make it past. I don't trust people right off the bat. It doesn't always take much to earn my trust, but I don't just trust people for the hell of it. Too much stupid shit happens for me to do that. I don't want to be the next person you read about found dead in the trunk of a car. If I'm going to get myself killed, I'd at least like to think that I deserved it.
As I've said all along, my humor doesn't show up on this site as much as it can when you talk to me or know me. People who know me know how I can get. Even some of the customers at my store know how I can get. I can be very frank with my humor and I'm usually right to the point. I'm not embarrassed all that often by the things that I say or hear people say. I do blush (and this has been pointed out to me time and time again--thanks Linda), but I take it in stride.
I'm at my best when I'm describing something that happened to me that was funny. Like last night when I was telling Regina about my old car (the Cavalier) and how everything just kind of went all at once. I told her about how the window just disappeared one day as I rolled it up (it slipped off the track) and how one day when it was pouring, it fell off the track again and I ended up getting drenched. She said she felt bad for laughing, but I told her it was okay because I thought it was funny.
I do things like that. I talk about the bad things that have happened to me and let people know that I can laugh at myself, that I'm not above everyone else. I don't take myself that seriously. I don't have an ego and it makes it easier for people to relate to me. A lot of people think it's funny when I start swearing like nuts (I hate to admit it, but I love saying "bitch" all the time, not as a reference to women or anything, just to say it). I can go on a tirade and get everyone busting up laughing. I'll twist things and try and make something funny when it probably isn't.
Anyway, I took all these tests (IQ, Personality, Bastard, etc) and found out some things. When I took the personality test, I found out that according to the test, I was a healer. Which is pretty much the truth at times. I seem to be pretty good at helping people out and mediating situations that are kind of volatile. More than once I've helped ease a situation between two people and I seem to be able to give out decent advice (following my own is a different story).
It doesn't take long for most people to figure out they can talk to me and not worry about me not listening. I do listen and I listen very well. Again, growing up with three women (especially once my younger sister hit puberty) has a lot to do with that. You learn pretty quick what you can get away with and what you can't get away with.
I took the IQ test and feel stupid about this one since I should've figured it out sooner than I did. Especially when the questions started repeating. But it was at three in the morning and I didn't realize it until it was too late that the point was to stop before you got too far. So the score wasn't all that great, but it was funny to see how stupid I was.
I found out I'm 15% bastard, but that's well below the average of 75% for guys who had taken that test. I took the gender test and was greatly relieved to find that it figured I was guy based on my answers. That would've been kind of tough to swallow if it thought I was a girl (that's another thing about the internet, I doubt most of you would've been able to figure out that I use a lot of sarcasm).
Then I took the test for the match-making part of the site and it concluded that I was a boy scout. Girls who love nice guys would love me, but to everyone else I'd be an amusing dweeb. That pretty much sums it up too. I guess I am an amusing dweeb and I don't have a problem with that, as long as I stay amusing. If I'm no longer amusing, I should probably start running because someone's bound to kick my ass any time now. I'm surprised I made it through high school with the way my mouth can go. Then again, I don't think I ever said anything loud of enough for my intended target to hear.
That site is amusing though. If you haven't already, check it out. Another site, HOT or NOT is also neat. I put two pictures up and basically found out that I average about a 7.8 rating on a scale from 1-10, which isn't bad. Actually, it's a lot better than I thought it would be. Not that it will actually get me anywhere. I just did it to see what the results would be like. I figured I'd be like a 5 or something around that. So I can't complain.
My mom has to go to the hospital in the near future to have some tests done and this doesn't exactly spell great news for us. She seems to think that it means that surgery's just around the corner and that would be very bad because it would keep her from working and probably would mean that I'd have to do something to pick up the slack. I already did that once and it wasn't fun.
I really hope that she doesn't need surgery for a couple reasons. It would be very hard on her and it would be hard on us as well. She's the main source of income, so something would have to give. Teresa might have to work more and Lori would almost certainly have to straighten up her act. What I'd do, shit, I don't know. I'd probably have to work at least an extra day a week and try and scratch as many hours as I can on the schedule, even though it wouldn't be good for me.
I certainly don't want to do two jobs unless the second job is free-lance writing or something that I could do during the morning. If she does go to surgery, it could royally mess up my plans for school because instead of focusing on saving money for college and all that jazz, I'd have to do as much as I could to keep all of us afloat. I seriously think that things would rest on my shoulders if this goes down.
So right now, my mom's kind of uptight over this. She obviously doesn't want to go into surgery because she already knows how bad it could be for everyone involved, especially her. If she has to, she has to. There's not much more to it than that. Right now, I'm just hoping that the tests don't reveal anything too serious.
We've had enough bad things happen to us. I just don't want to have to deal with more crisis. Enough is enough.
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