Tonight's content will consist of....

Yet another episode of Bitscape's wandering musing about the course of his life, and other potentially foolish silliness.

Where to begin?

My job. More suckiness there during the past few days. Thankfully, today was a day off.

I'm honestly beginning to wonder how much longer I can keep going back before I crack up completely. (See also: News bimbo scene from The Worst Scifi Prequel Ever.) My intuition tells me that it is only a matter of time before my tolerence levels are exceeded, and one way or another, I'll have to get out of there. Exactly how long until that happens, I'm not certain.

There are some moments when I want to say, "This is it. I can't handle any more. It isn't worth it anyway. Screw it all."

Then I focus, breathe deeply, and tell myself calmly, "This too will pass. Just keep going until the day is over, then I can rest. Tomorrow will worry about itself." And I make it.

How many more times can I do that before my trust in such self-assurances erodes, and indeed, I find that it is no longer worth continuing?

One of my coworkers is leaving next week. He will work his last day in the deli tomorrow. He and a tribe of people he knows will be embarking on a long-term wilderness survival mission in Montana. They intend to journey out into the middle of nowhere, and live off the land.

They will leave all traces of modern technology behind. No cell phones. No walkmans. They won't even bring any matches to light their campfires. They've been making their own clothes out of animal skins. Everything they will have will be made from scratch by their own hands.

Part of me thinks my coworker is crazy. How could he and his copatriots ever make it? It's idiotic.

Part of me also envies him, even if he is crazy.

He used to be known as a hard worker. He used to be a hard worker. But lately, everyone talks behind his back about what a slacking piece of dead weight he has become. He still does his chores, but his spirit is obviously not in it. (But deep down, whose is really?) He talks on the phone for long periods of time, even while clocked in. He takes extra long breaks. He's slow in getting things done, and doesn't help as much. He logs overtime regularly, despite the fact that store management has been asking people not to work overtime. (I've discussed that particular issue in prior ramblings.) But he doesn't care. Why should he? He'll be leaving soon anyway.

All of this has drawn the ire of other deli workers, although, to my knowledge, nobody has said anything to his face.

He'll be gone after tomorrow. He has said he's sick of it here. Maybe it will be better for everybody when he's gone.

There's another coworker. She's sick of it too. Usually the cheery, perky one; she was the person who taught me a good 80% of what I know about deli work. Initially, during my time there, it wouldn't have been a lie to say that I developed something of a crush on her, despite the fact that she's a few years older than I. But I got over that quickly enough. She has a husband, and 4 kids, all of whom she loves dearly.

This week, not a day has gone by in which she hasn't talked about quitting. Yesterday, she elaborated to me about the specific reasons. Besides the general drag of the place that everyone seems to be experiencing, the schedules usually assigned to her allow very little time to see her husband or kids.

She gets a lot of evening shifts, like me. When she gets up to go to work in the afternoon, her kids are in school. By the time she gets home, they've gone to bed. Yesterday, she considered herself fortunate to be going home at 8pm, which would have allowed her to see her kids for an hour or two before their bedtime. Usually, she doesn't see them at all on days when she works.

So she says she wants out. One can hardly blame her. It's going to suck even more if she does leave, because besides being a generally fun person to be around, she works her ass off in that place. Frequently, in addition to getting her own assigned cleanup work done, she finishes early and helps others with their tasks too. Efficient, almost to a fault.

But she has her limits too.

Then there's me. What's my role? As a rule, I've been fairly tight-lipped about my own discontent. I tell myself that I have good reason to hide my sentiments, at least until I am absolutely certain of any actions I intend to take. Look what happened last time I started babbling here, there, and everywhere. (At least this time, I can speak freely in this web page with a fairly high degree of confidence that no one at work will read it. I haven't even informed them of its existence.)

I know I'm not very happy there, but in order for any sort of intelligent analysis to occur, I need to figure out why. Others have told me why they don't like it. But what about me, in my specific case? If I don't truly understand my own motivations, chances are that even if I do leave, I may very will find myself in an equally undesirable situation six months later.

So I have to ask myself, independent of what others have said. Why?

Listing the reasons, where do I even begin?

• Customers. I hate them. Or even if I don't hate all of them, I hate dealing with them and their petty idiocy, day in and day out.

  I could go on at length about specificly annoying ones, but... suffice it to say that after you work in retail for a period of time, you realize that there is a certain breed of people -- definitely a minority of the population, but a significant minority -- whose primary purpose in life is to make the life of any person who stands behind a counter into a living hell. This is not an exaggeration. They are few in number, and I could probably count them on one hand, but they come into the store every day or two, more often than most normal people. You just know that when a certain familiar face walks up to the counter, the next several minutes are going to be torture. (Sometime, maybe I'll go into greater detail about the grouchy old lady who wears an orange scarf, or the obnoxious euro-fuck snob, or the gleeful late-night bitch with the dreadlocks. But I want to finish my other points before the end of the night.)

  Most people are relatively normal, and generally friendly, but even they get on your nerves after a while. Sometimes, you just want to hunker down spend a chunk of time doing something without being bothered every 2 minutes. That's not an option in this job. Perhaps this part has more to do with the personality of this writer. I don't consider myself a "people person". Sometimes, I'd just rather be left alone.

  One day or two of it, I can handle. But month after month of spending 8 hours a day dealing with an endless stream of random strangers grates on me. How much more can I take?

  Time will tell. OR... I find another, non-catastrophic way out before it breaks me.

• Low pay. This wouldn't be quite as much of an issue if this job and my last one had occurred in opposite order. Things being as they are, I inevitably find myself comparing my current pay with previous earnings, and asking myself the question, "What the fsck am I doing, working twice as hard now for less than half the money?"

  I can try to tell myself not to think in those terms. The present exists of its own merit, independent of what came before. Therefore, we should appreciate each moment for what it is, without judgement based on a past standard.

  Whatever. Maybe if I repeat that enough times, I'll eventually start to believe it.

• Repetativeness. Lack of opportunity to exercise any creative ability. Doing the same mundane things every day.

  I could look at tbe bright side. In this regard, I guess it beats factory work. At least I'm not screwing the same widget in 100 times every hour all day.

• The freakin uniforms. I hate them. I want to wear normal clothes. The stuffy things cramp my style. Blah blah blah.

• The schedule. Though it's not as much of a sticking point for me as for the aforementioned coworker who wants to spend a little time with her kids, I don't like being at work when everybody else in the world is doing fun stuff. I don't like working weekend after weekend.

  The whole evenings thing also puts a serious cramp on any potential social activities. (Haha, don't laugh too hard.) Or other things one might want to do in the evening, like normal human beings do.

  Anyway...

A question arises. If I really am serious about all this, why haven't I put significant effort into finding more amicable work? Am I serious, or has the deli become just comfortable enough, despite its drawbacks, that I am not ready to do what needs to be done to get myself out? (Without landing myself in another crisis, ala last fall.)

A couple of answers.

Wanting to have a better job, and wanting to find a better job are two entirely different things. I want to have a better job. I loathe and despise the activities associated with finding a better job. In order to do what needs to be done to find a better job, my desire to have a better job has to be so ridiculously great that it seldom happens unless I find myself on the verge of starvation, homelessness, or other very serious straits.

Can I find the willpower to override my aversion in the interest of long term improvement? This is a question I don't yet have an answer for.

Also, there is another component. Although I am sincere about all the problems listed, there is a certain innate attraction to that which is familiar, and it usually goes unacknowledged. I may dislike much of it, but at least the job I have welcomes me. It is now part of my world. It keeps me from sitting for months on end in my own isolated corner of the universe, away from the rest of the human race -- a condition which tends to bring about its own forms of creeping insanity.

Even if the financial imperative to keep this job dwindles (I might soon have my debts paid off, which takes a little of the heat off of me if things become utterly unbearable), I want to avoid the path of simply quitting without having formulated a workable alternative for the future. I haven't done that yet.

So it is that tomorrow, I will find myself trudging back again. Every minute there will be spent in antipation of the moment when I can clock out and go back home. The time at "home" will be spent attempting to momentarily forget the dread I feel at having to go back in a few more hours, where I will repeat the cycle all over again.

This is not how I want to live.

And so it seems especially feeble and pathetic that the only phrase at the tip of my consciousness comes as a reflection of all the chop socky crap that I've been re-filling my brain with for the past 4 days. lol.

WWXD?

I think I've just drawn a blank.