Fuck it. I’d say “YOLO,” but I’m not sure I believe that. I don’t really want to right now, anyway. So I guess I will tell this story, too.

If you’ve already read the piece below, you’ll probably recognize that I’m filling in a lot of missing pieces. If you haven’t read it, you can consider that sort of a sequel to this one.

So, let’s start with a few Tuesdays ago, where I woke up at 4:30am to get ready to take the first of several planned pregnancy tests over the course of the day.

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Something about lonely, wide open roads, nothing around you but magnificent landscapes, foreign to me but in brief visits, in awe that anyone could see that every single time they woke up in the morning.

I dreamed about moving to Arizona. Maybe New Mexico or even Wyoming. The desert and the colder mountains seemed to call in the same way, and all of that probably comes from the same set of experiences, that trip I took with Grandma and Papa when I was eight to Wyoming and Arizona and California. The empty Arizona road we drove down. At this point, the visual portion of this memory that I see in my head is probably completely reinvented, but I know it was beautiful. It held such a promise of freedom, a need for it that I don’t think ever left me.

I’ve been back on Facebook more in recent weeks, deciding to set aside my dislike for the platform in favor of keeping in better contact with people I know IRL while I live so far from most of them.

Yeah, Facebook is still as obnoxious as ever, but it’s not the people I’m talking about (not all of them, anyway). I mostly asked for at least some of my eye-rolling experiences by continuing to follow some of these groups that I also don’t want to leave, because the content is just too juicy. You know what I’m talking about. There is practically nothing posted in my favorite of these groups directly related to their original theme that doesn’t also include something leftist-activist related in the most stereotypical manner imaginable.

There’s always something you like about the things you hate obsessively, though. What is it about them? They’re the people who exemplify what I partially blame for *gestures at everything*. So many of us do. But it’s because I know them better than their mutually declared enemies do, and understand their motives. I believed in the heart of most of the messages that I thought they simply communicated poorly until I got smarter and realized they were a different breed of political person with entirely different values. But you know the story.

The point is that I can tell they don’t understand their opponents the same way because they seem to misinterpret every motive of every action they witness. They don’t even know who they hate. MAGA, AI, any of it. They are proud of their bubble and sincerely confused about what exists beyond it.

I could not help but also get sucked back into some Reels here and there before I finally went back to keeping the scrollbar of them hidden. Jesus, what a goddamned timesuck. But I was sick for a few days, so you know, it was kind of fun to go back to when there was nothing to do and everything else hurt.

The Reels algorithm has been really focused on showing me videos of unconventional people of color. The gold-toothed rapper-looking guy who sings emo songs. The Texan from Iran. The Asian cowboy stand-up comedian. The British dad with the Alabama son. Okay, I guess those two people are white, but you get it. The Asian male country singer. Tomboys who still identify as women and are funny about it.

Liking too many of these reels apparently told Meta that I’m a woman of the right, because I guess people on the left aren’t supposed to find redneck Koreans and black emo dudes and self-deprecating Iranians and self-aware masculine chicks funny, idk. But damn if my Reels algorithm isn’t just a mess of low-effort “libtard” jokes now.

Then there’s this book I’m reading, The Courage to be Disliked, which is basically just Adlerian psychology and not the kind of Japanese self-help like it looked like when I saw it at Target. So far, anyway. Talking here about loneliness, doing one of those nonsensical lifehacks about how things are really supposed to be used, saying the real definition of loneliness comes from feeling alone among people. Not from being literally alone, or without friends or loved ones.

Loneliness, when defined this way, is just downstream of envy. I don’t agree with this definition and neither do any dictionaries. Feeling alone in a sea of people is a trope for the ages, a constant in music and books and film and television. It’s emphasized that other people are around because that’s the only way using the word makes sense since one cannot be physically alone in a sea of people. This guy can think what he wants about this condition, but I think we’ve collectively decided otherwise.

Envy stemming from loneliness, though, is real. The FOMO. Reorganizing your living room because the board games requiring more people than are ever at your house are just starting to make you angry. You move them so you don't light them on fire and curse your former friends who gave them to you, instead.

I remembered why I have only gotten through one full season of American Horror Story (the first one) by watching the entirety of Season 12 of American Horror Story. It’s not really horror, is it? It’s just different contexts in which monsters exist (probably inside of celebrity bodies) and no one believing the women who tell people the truth about them. People falling for blatant lies and gaslighting. Over and over again. Can we write anything else yet?

Scrubs. Sigh. Another re-quel, reboot, reunion, whatever. Scrubs is one of those shows I never watched in its entirety when it was on but it was such a cultural touchstone that I knew enough to be intrigued about the new one. I knew better, but. Two episodes are out and I watched them. Yeah, some of it is actually pretty funny but you know they couldn’t do it without some characters being on their soapboxes to tell us how to think. It’s so annoying because I usually agree with them, but that’s not why I watch Scrubs or any other show. My god, how many times do people have to say this?

It is why I watch The Connors, though. That show is like the geek group I can’t leave, for the same reason. The trans drug test, the black wife in the military, the biracial daughter Becky has when she’s like 45 with a younger immigrant working in the kitchen of the diner where she serves. The gay kid who will do anything to get out of the trap of generational poverty he was born into. The whole reason the show was created and replaced the original reboot, literally killing off the titular character for her racist tweets.1 It’s all just too much. I can’t not watch this show.

Dawson’s Creek continues to be Dawson’s Creek, a fine trip down memory lane and a good excavation of what was real and dramatized about my generation and teenage life. Were we all really that obsessed with sex? Well, looking through my old diaries, yes, yes we were very much that obsessed with sex.

This other book I’m reading now, one that I didn’t intend to read but my Kindle app told me I could read for free before the release date in a month, is something. It’s In The Great Quiet,2 a story about a wild young woman claiming the legacy she’s always dreamed of by setting out to homestead during the Land Run of 1893.

A young woman setting out on her own to build a life of her own in the wilderness! Right up my alley! One of those quick reads that’ll put me back in a more storytelling kind of mood and teaches me something new in the process.

Due to some of the language in the beginning, I thought at first that this book might be unbearably woke, but it turned out to be only occasionally woke but also mostly just a romance set in the late 1800s with completely unrealistic characters, despite allegedly being based on the author’s great-great grandmother. It was a book I’d read a thousand times, only with a different setting.

What I really wanted to read was something more like Hattie Big Sky, but for adults, or the Deep Winter series, but for girls. Maybe just Where the Crawdad Sings but dustier. But now I know more about the way the Lawman smells than I do about how in the hell she built the tar paper shack or the cellar. I know more about the way Lawman’s sweat pooled as he helped her dig the well than I do about how they actually built the well itself, with the exception of the digging part because she had to describe how his muscles looked doing it and how she felt watching him. I wanted to know more about her trips into town on horseback to resupply, how she built that wood floor over the hard packed dirt, how her bartering in town went when she traded the horses for what seemed like way too much in extra supplies, because that’s where a good historical fiction author might work in why horses were worth so much in that region, in that time. I was promised Wild West homesteading stories!!

Our heroine is, of course, a plucky and unconventional young woman, in her early twenties, determined to make it on her own, disavowing new friendships and relationships for reasons we later learn to be completely juvenile nonsense, believing she will do nothing but hurt people she cares about, blah blah blah.3

We know nothing about her appearance except that she’s a brunette, because that’s how these books work whether they’re romantasy smut or innocent-enough historical fiction “for women.” Her personality is exactly what you expect: stubborn, especially for a young girl of her era; only interested in “boy stuff” and idolizes her father for teaching her everything she knows about it; comically incapable of anything traditionally feminine and hates feminine clothing; refuses the affection of boys and treats them with disdain until the misunderstood cowboy finally wins her over by proving his loyalty. Her one female-coded hobby is… painting. It is always painting.

Minnie goes on to reluctantly befriend the neighboring black family after the insistent wife continues dropping by to socialize with her famous pie, a family who Minnie, in 1893, somehow refers to as “formerly enslaved folks.” She then befriends a young Osage woman from their land near the border of hers. She goes to their settlement and is quick to learn the real history of what happened to the Osage and other indigenous tribes during the land runs, and she apologizes to the tribe after being caught hunting mistakenly on their land. She is welcomed by the daughter and eventually the whole family and tribe, and told to return anytime. This is important information to include in a novel about such a topic, but it comes delivered in what’s practically a land acknowledgement instead of a story.

They make fun of white girls who insist their great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess, but my half-Cherokee great-grandmother was an alcoholic with a speech impediment and a brief D-list acting career. I don’t think anyone ever called her a princess. She died before I was born though so maybe everyone I know really did just make it up. A tradition you don’t get fully initiated into until you have kids of your own or something and the Real Cherokee Princess of the Past floats down to you one night and tells you that, as penance for what the white man did to her people, every white family must bestow to their children this noble lie of Cherokee ancestry, and the Pretendian Councils of the future will vote every few years to sacrifice one to the Cultural Cancelation Squad to restore the fragile balance. Elizabeth Warren is a notable example of such a sacrifice.

God, it’s so easy to pretend to have a completely different life than the one you have, sometimes. Constructing a whole new identity, or one at least focused on something else. One simultaneously more honest but also necessarily shadowy. Who wouldn’t want to do it in real life, for real?

But Minnie is lonely, despite her wizened 22 or so years telling her she’s better off alone — until Lawman comes along, and her “formerly enslaved” neighbors, and the Osage a short ride away, who we are also to believe she calls “Natives” in the late 1800s.

But everyone wants to avoid loneliness on the frontier. Even the loners, in the end.

The 1893 Land Run was wild, though. This is why even the lame woke kind of historical fiction that is really just a romance novel with a sensitivity reader in disguise is okay sometimes. The author may frustrate me by not bothering to put her research into the pages to tell us what it’s like to build those tar paper houses, but at least I can google tar paper houses, which I wasn’t thinking about before I accidentally (kept) read(ing) this thing. There’s a lot to learn about the different types of structures people lived in back in the day. Building structures was something a human simply had to do for themselves, and more importantly, could do for themselves. How many regular people can do that anymore? God, we’re barely even allowed to, anyway.

How impermanent housing was at times, though, by design, even in what feel like more modern centuries and decades, especially during times of expansion and pioneering and natural resource booms and economic upheavals. Sometimes they were permanent but mobile, like the riverboats of the Mississippi during different periods of American history. No one can say for sure how many shantyboats traveled along the Mississippi for work during the years between 1893 thorough the Great Depression, but they, too, formed community on the river; boats were tied together, forming caravans; women would help each other with childcare and chores. People formed ties and traveled together and worked together and looked out for one another on the water.

The post Civil War expansion period’s land runs allowed absolutely any adult – male or female, black or white or Chinese or even members of indigenous tribes who previously owned the land – to claim their own homestead, free of any usual government restrictions of the time about who could own what, as long as they could get to it first. It was true that former slaves, nearby natives, white settlers, and all manner of people wound up neighbors and often friendly acquaintances in a time when you didn’t expect that to be the case, and that is indeed fascinating history that shouldn’t need to be taken with a spoonful of white guilt to properly absorb. The kind of history that’s actually interesting to people when the history lesson isn’t cloaked in a moral lecture where at least half the audience is being scolded at any given point.

Alas. Much of this was lonely; all adventures to begin anew, to start a new life, to make a better life for your family or yourself and fulfill your dreams and find whatever it is your soul is searching for – it’s all lonely. The desperation for community, the lengths people will go to find it en route, when they get there, even if they went there to be alone. Because you can’t survive alone. You can’t, at the very least, thrive.

Nada by The Refreshments. I used to go drive around Minneapolis at night listening to this song on repeat, chain-smoking, thinking about how to escape. Roger Clyne and all of his various projects were a backdrop, maybe another inspiration, to my earlier desire to live in the desert. My wizened 19 or so years telling me I should escape for the mythical west on my horse (leased Chevy) with a bottle of tequila, a tent, and a dream.

Ah, to have those again.

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At one point some of us decided we needed nicotine on top of all the caffeine and boxed macaroni and cheese we had so far consumed— all of us in a circle, hunched over with our spoons, eating the orange noodles directly from the pot like feral new humans, completely leaning into the vibe of this frenzied moment in time. One of the girls had a fake ID, so she went to the gas station to buy us cigarettes. I stood outside with her chain-smoking until everyone else joined us, and we started rolling around in the front yard in our pajamas, pretending to shoot each other with air guns making “pew, pew” noises at each other, “playing Vietnam.”

The sun came up and we were all extremely... on NoDoz. We all went to class together, in our pajamas,2 feeling extremely confident, even excited, about the essays we were all about to absolutely crush. We filed in one by one and I shriek-babbled at warp speed to Mr D about how great we were all going to do on this exam because we stayed up all night studying. I went on and on, grass still on my pajamas from playing Vietnam at 3AM, eyes red and dry from not sleeping for over 24 hours. He stared at me, head tilted melodramatically, until I finally shut the fuck up and he asked me, loudly and theatrically, “what are you on?!”

Every single person in my study group failed the essay that day. With flying colors.3

I never got good grades in that particular class. It was infamously difficult and Mr D was one of those teachers who told you on the first day that half of you would fail, and that was, in fact, how it inevitably played out.

There was one essay on which I got a particularly good (for that class) grade, though, and before you finish reading it below, allow me to preemptively echo your likely follow-up question: how the fuck did I get anything other than six consecutive F-minuses on this paper?

I told ChatGPT to read and grade it for me with the original essay prompt, which was to explain and categorize different political ideologies, and that the author was a 17-year-old senior in an IB US History class in 2001.

It gave me a 6/20.

The fact that my actual teacher, the performative “I’m either your best friend or your worst enemy” type whose class I almost actually did fail that year, not only gave me a 17/20 but also said “Very Good April” is so mind-boggling after rereading it a couple times just now that I’m considering sending him a Facebook message to ask him wtf he was on.4

Anyway, join me on this annotated journey of trying to figure out how in the hell I managed a B on this paper:

Wherein I define “totalitarianism” by calling it “totalitarian”

According to Ebenstein and Fogelman, Totalitarianism is when a single-party state, which is a state with a totalitarian rule,5 has a ruler or dictator who is in control of all aspects of human social life. Typical totalitarian leaders sought to unify their country and bring national pride to the citizens. Economically, totalitarian countries also wished for independence, but rather than achieving that goal, they seemed to always depend on the help and trade of other countries, otherwise they became poor. In a totalitarian society, the military was very important, being a constant source of mobilization for the country.6 This helped the country to have influence in other areas that could be of use to them. An example of all of this is Hitler’s rule in Germany. Germany was a single party state as soon as they elected Hitler, because he turned the country into a dictatorship where there was a curfew for certain people (i.e. Jews) and rules that must be followed, or there were serious consequences. This was shown in the movie “Swing Kids” when the main character’s father was “turned in” by someone to the Nazi army. He was labeled a traitor to Germany and to Hitler, and he was eventually killed.7 In “Swing Kids”, there were also many images of national pride shown. In the Nazi army school that the boys attended, they watched films that portrayed Jews as the “rats” that supposedly infested Germany’s purity. They called themselves the “master race” of people in the world and tried to make the teenage boys and other army members, besides of course the citizens of Germany, believe this. This helped their totalitarian state gain more power, according to Ebenstein and Fogelman, with almost half of the German citizens voting for Nazi party members in political ballots.

Peronism was based on the ideologies and beliefs of the ruler of Argentina at the time, Juan Peron. He was in favor of unions and the people working for each other. Peronism, like Nazism, was based off of Fascism, which is a style of ruling where everything is subject to be under the control of the leader of the state or country. Fascism started with Mussolini in Italy, and spread to Germany, where Hitler changed it into Nazism. Nazism comes from the Nazi party, where, as explained above, the Nazi’s8 would capture and prosecute9 anyone not following their beliefs or loyalty to the “Fatherland”, which is how they referred to Germany.

These two political ideologies are different from Fascism, which they both originated from, because Fascism in general, is based mostly on equality of all people,10 because of the control that they are placed under by their dictator or ruler. Nazism and Peronism are based on Fascism, but the leaders of the countries in which Peronism and Nazism was dominant (Argentina and Germany) made a few changes in which to perhaps personalize the fascist style of their ruling.11

The part where I confidently invent an entirely fictional left — right political spectrum from scratch

On my chart, I placed Fascism as the furthest to the left on the spectrum. I placed it here because out of the different political ideologies, I find it to be the most politically, economically, and socially controlling, depending fully on the government and military, and other forms of control. In a fascist society, the individual’s role is the same. All people are, as stated above, equal,12 and must abide by the same rules and government. There is one class of people with one dictator who controls the lives of everyone in the society. I believe that the individuals initially like the idea of fascism,13 because humans are very dependent by nature. In a fascist society, the government takes care of everything and the people have no choice but to be dependent on the government.

I consider Peronism to be second from the left on the political spectrum, because I think it is merely a step away from fascism. Peronism is, afterall, based on the concept of fascism. I think that the only difference between fascism and Peronism is that Peron had more overall emphasis on the military’s influence on Argentina. The individual did not seem to mind the military’s role in society; it seemed as if because of the charisma of Evita and the ruling style of Peron that the people of Argentina did not mind the strictness and harshness of the political system. The individual in society simply lived their lives as they were told,14 completely dependent on Peron’s society and government.

I consider Nazism to be next to Peronism, slightly less strict, government-wise, than Fascism and Peronism because, although it is based on fascism, it is Hitler’s own interpretation of fascism and how it should be. The military was very influential in this society, but the citizens in general were not under such strict control as they were in a fascist or Peronist society. The only exception to this were the Jews.15 But the people that Hitler considered to be the true citizens of his Germany were treated fairly and with more freedom than the Jews. The role of the individual in the Nazi society was like the teens in Swing Kids. They were to have pride in their country;16 they were to show their loyalty to the Fatherland and fight for what Hitler told them was right. If they did not, they were severely punished, more often than not, they were sent to work camps or put to death.

Where I accidentally predict MAGA Communism

Stalinism, Maoism, and Marxism, to me, seem to be on the same level. These were all forms of communism in some way,17 and I believe that these fell further to the right of the political spectrum,18 because although a communist society relies fully on the government, the concept of equality and fairness that the Communist society is based on only leads to chaos and hunger, and complete opposite effects of what it was supposed to be.19 People’s true nature effects20 what it was supposed to be. People’s true nature shows in a communist society: people are lazy, and want to be handed out whatever they want, and not work for it.21 This is shown when they are expected to work for their food to support themselves. Of course everyone will not contribute their share.22 They will expect people to do the work for them. Well, this in the end leads almost to anarchy,23 because the citizens of the communist society do not follow the rules and expectations of the government that they would be best suited for. I personally believe that if human nature did not exist in the way that it does, and if communism were to actually work out the way it is planned, that it would be the ideal political ideology. Everyone is equal, the government is to be run by the people, and there are no social barriers. But of course, we are subject to the nature of ourselves and this society will never work.24

The doomer asf conclusion

Capitalism to me is the furthest to the right because everyone is responsible for themselves. If you do not work for what you want, you do not get it. This is the same with working for the things that you need. If you do not work for them, you do not get them. Therefore, you do not survive. It is survival of the fittest and only the fittest make it, because due to human nature, not many people will look out for you. It is every man for himself, and with a lack of large and controlling government, the people will eventually turn on each other and only the strongest and most successful will survive.25

The Final Judgment.

Here’s what ChatGPT had to say to justify failing me where Mr D did not. It says what you'd probably expect (and likely say, yourself):

The title of this paper intrigued me immediately when I found it, and despite how terrifically bad it is, I am happy to be reminded of my own insistence and the confidence with which I stated my opinions back then, no matter how incorrectly rooted in reality some of them may have been. I was actively trying to make sense of things, see patterns, figure out where I stood. In some instances, I can see how my own internal logic made sense to me at the time, but in the end what I think most of what made this paper so unfathomably bad and yet also somehow receive a good grade was that I probably waited until the night before the paper was due to write it (as was tradition), and my teacher was a standard-issue commie-hating Boomer who was probably just impressed that I managed to retain that particular lesson of his so enthusiastically, if nothing at all of Vietnam.

More seriously, though, while this was an unintentionally hilarious(ly embarrassing) discovery, it made me think about schooling more broadly.

When are kids really ready to learn, and about what? What would have made me take school more seriously at 17? Why did some kids take this material more seriously than I did at the same time, and why were others less motivated than even I was? Are thirteen years of coed schooling a great idea for kids while they’re going through puberty while trying to learn things, or is it better overall that they learn to socialize with each other in this way, at this age? What eventually sparked my post-school interest in the same material and how can it be replicated with teens in classroom settings? Why does “classroom setting” feel so gross to say now and what does that mean for the future of early and secondary education if others feel the same? How do we best teach a classroom or other cohort full of kids who all learn at different paces and are motivated by different things? Why do some homeschooled or alternative school kids “turn out” so much better educated and overall better off than others? Can we decentralize and diversify K-12 education in ways that still maintain (or hopefully improve) its quality? And why did an IB teacher let me get away with that?!

Oh, for the record, this was the same teacher who refused to watch my presentation on ads for menstrual products, just four years earlier.26

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Or like when we rail against things like OnlyFans and other kinds of sex work or pornography and the women who make money doing it, without mention of the men who account for almost the entirety of the demand. Whole podcasts exist to humiliate OF women, but there are not, as far as I’m currently aware, any comparably popular media to display and mock the stereotypical negative traits consistent in the men who give these women their money and keep them incentivized to keep at it. It's only the women meeting these men's demand who are routinely and most viciously socially punished for their participation in the industry.

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There’s also the one about single mothers and how they raise their kids. The offhand remarks some people make about how awful single mothers are because they can’t properly do both the jobs of mothers and fathers and inevitably fuck up their kids, all on their own. And then, of course, their daughters — the ones with “daddy issues.” How they pick the wrong men, how they’re slutty, have annoying abandonment issues, and all manner of other negative commentary and warnings to avoid them. Sometimes you might see a guy be nice about it, but that’s usually just him saying girls with daddy issues are easy to fuck because of the whole “slutty” thing.

Again, though, no mention of what — or who — made them that way from these same men: the actual father. The one who failed to provide his daughter with the one thing that she needed to avoid turning into the girl with the dreaded “daddy issues”: his presence and leadership in her life.

The target of these snide remarks are always the victim or the least responsible, and they rarely include sympathy for her situation, just scorn.

Cluster B personality disorders are another one I've seen mentioned lately. Some like BPD are known to be caused by external factors — namely, other people’s mistreatment of the disordered person. Close loved ones of addicts often exhibit some of these traits, likely due to being exposed to and needing to engage with the cluster B traits of an addict — either a precursor to their addiction, or necessarily caused by it. elaborates on the lack of empathy in this Note:

Interestingly, though, like “daddy issues,” we tend to blame only the people afflicted with these personality disorders rather than those who cause the conditions for them to bloom.

There are certain issues that I think we all have that can make us react a little irrationally and with less objectivity than we might otherwise, probably because of personal experiences or those of someone close to us. If anything, it’s hard for me not to go into snark-overdrive mode, vicious and nuance-lacking as ever when I end up in those conversations and they go a certain direction. Single mother discourse, especially the “daddy issues” part, can easily become one of those things for me.

It's rare, of course, for any one person to be able to be objective about everything, if not impossible. I think that's important to remember, so I’ll try to be nice here, but I make no promises. These are my experiences and, since ’s recent viral piece about disliking children1, I’ve been thinking more about my own feelings about marriage and having children and how they’ve both stayed the same and changed over the years, and also how, despite not really ever thinking about too hard about the kid aspect, I still always expected to be married from a young age (upcoming follow-up essay alert).

I’ve written before about how I was raised by a single mom, with my dad almost entirely out of the picture — his decision, not my mom’s — and how we dealt with a lot of difficult issues common to families like mine during this time period.2 You probably know the story, at least if you’re of a certain age or demographic.

This is the part where embittered deadbeat dads and their apologists will usually chime in, saying things like, “sorry for your experience but most of these mothers choose single parenthood and cut the fathers out of their and their children’s lives,” they will insist, among other excuses for abandoning their own children to the women they claim to believe are too dangerously insane for a grown man to interact with.

Don’t get me wrong, here — I have personally known quite a few men, all around my age, Millennials and younger Gen Xers, who are devoted fathers to children they had with “crazy bitches” who want to keep their child from seeing them often, if at all, for what I know to be pretty nonsensical reasons that have nothing to do with legitimate concerns like safety, abuse, addiction, etc.

The rage I also feel toward that type of woman is, I’m certain, due to the fact that I cannot stand watching someone we need — good men trying to do the right thing by their children — be prevented from doing it. In the cases of my friends who need to fight to see their children, the kids will, at least, always know that their dad has been trying, even if he doesn’t succeed every time. Those guys didn’t decide it was too hard and just give up, leaving their kids to wonder why their dad didn’t care enough to try harder, later.

These experiences helped to shape how I viewed parenthood, what I expected from it, and what kinds of risks I was willing to take as I got older and determined what kind of life I wanted to, or should, live.

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I spent seven years bitterly angry with Nichole, as we're calling her over here, for the way she ended our friendship in 2017. For the reasons why she ended it, and especially because I felt not only misunderstood, but maliciously and intentionally so. She didn't just decide she didn't like me anymore one day; she made sure everyone else she could convince didn't like me anymore, either.

She apologized to me for all of this late one night in 2024. I accepted her apology, shocked to receive her drunk phone call. I like to think of myself as a forgiving person, but maybe I'm not so much, because here I am, still letting it get to me.

“I took things you told me in confidence and used them against you. That's what I'm most sorry for,” she said. Yes, she did, and despite her regret, it's because of that that I'll never trust her again. It's for that reason — and the fact that she hasn’t actually changed at all — that our interactions now are basically limited to discussing cosmetic procedures and trading anti-aging lotion recommendations on Facebook messenger and will never go deeper, at least on my part, again.

Now it’s been eight or nine years since that first fight with Nichole and I'm angry again, without closure again. I'm bitterly angry now because Todd, as we’ll call him, my first friend in this not-new-anymore state where I moved in 2017, let his girlfriend of eight years, Katherine, end our friendship without so much as a word from his own mouth. Todd, who I (and my husband) had an easy friendship with early into our move, had changed quite a bit after these years with Katherine. She became my friend more by default than by initial desire, but there was a lot I admired and shared in common with her and we became closer. She called me her best friend and I mostly reciprocated the sentiment, if only because she was my closest local friend, even if I didn't feel we were as close as we could have been, or would have preferred from someone to whom I'd give such a title.

These are the women I attract into my life, the women I fall into “close” friendships with, the women who other people would pull me aside to ask, in disbelief, “you actually get along with her?” The ones everyone else thinks are “bitches.” Maybe it's because, since they come off as so hostile at first and I'm one of the only women who will be nice to them right away, they soften toward me.

I used to think that I got along best with other women who were also mostly only friends with dudes, like we were some kind of club of misfit women who could only relate to each other, but maybe the rest of the truth is that I’m so frequently friends with the women who are like this because other women are cutthroat enough to reject them immediately. Maybe those women don't feel the need for the satisfaction brought by winning the challenge of making a mean girl, or mean person in general, like you.

Nichole taking a liking to me felt pretty good at first. She was one of those people, though, for whom her awareness of her own intelligence made her utterly insufferable to be around sometimes, always finding an excuse to talk about how smart she is or even was as a child. She was a judgmental person, too, and it does, for a little while, feel particularly validating when judgmental people “pick” you. They hate everyone, but not you. There must be something special about you.

Katherine was 24 when I met her, and she was just starting to question what she'd been raised to believe all her life. Meeting Todd, an easygoing and independent 37-year-old ex-Mormon, helped ease her from her mother's and their church’s infantilizing grasp, where she'd been her whole life. She was becoming more secular, more socialized, more normal, until she zoomed past normalcy altogether and, through the unholy combination of being a little weird and isolated while also being smarter than average and addicted to TikTok, did the predictable personal and ideological 180 and became a religious zealot again, but this time for the leftist identitarian sect.

Like Nichole, Katherine was no longer just a fun fellow hipster-ish kind of nerd to hang out and connect with, but someone who felt compelled to insert the political outrage of the day into every conversation, an accusation of racism, misogyny, or especially transphobia at the tip of here tongue, waiting to be lobbed at any misspoken phrase or suggestion.

I’m pretty good at being exactly the kind of in-person communicator that Nichole and Katherine and people like them claim to hate, which is the kind who tries earnestly to phrase things nicely and without too much contempt, trying to avoid direct conflict with everyone but those closest to me, with whom I — for better or worse — feel more comfortable being fully expressive. I’m a passive-aggressive kind of bitch, myself, I guess, and in that way, if I felt strongly enough to counter a statement, I would do so using those principles (or pathologies, however you want to look at them) and push back gently and with examples I thought she could relate to.

I think this is actually a pretty decent and healthy way to go about handling potential social conflict in the moment, but I’ll be the first to admit that it can go too far and lead to a boundary-less world of looking like — or actually becoming some version of — Aaron Burr from Hamilton.

This is probably something of an overcorrection, trying to avoid mimicking others’ tendencies to see the world in strict black and white terms, lacking the ability to see nuance in arguments, already a strong pet peeve of mine. But in doing so, I attract the very kind of people who are intolerant of this fairly conflict-averse and curious way of approaching others, and I fail to draw lines, eternally indecisive about what’s best because I want to steelman everything.

(Lyrics)

I’ve always appreciated my own generally open-minded and affable, friendly nature, which allows me to easily get along well with most people. But I’m learning that this personality trait is really not something to value uncritically in oneself; there is a fine line between beneficial and pathological in its practice. There can, indeed, be an excess of nice.

I think everyone is, or feels, misunderstood to some degree, and it’s something of a lifelong pastime of mine to try to dig into whatever it is about whomever it is that’s being misunderstood. The main problem with this otherwise innocent intention is that you end up attached to some of these people because you see the nuance in there. And that’s what I mean by having an excess of nice. Once you have that empathy, it’s hard to cut it off, or to cut them off, and that’s why I think it’s somewhat ironic that it’s those who loudly perform their empathy who are so often the quickest to cut people off and end friendships over what other people would find trivial.1

Ultimately, though, I am realizing that this is some kind of recurring theme, this desire for the approval of people who seem to hate everyone else, or people who hate people like me, somehow earning exceptionalism among any given person or group, like it’s a game I’m competing in against myself. I’m often the only woman in a group of men, the sole straight person in any given social circle half the time, and even on Substack, I’m often one of maybe a few lefties in the spaces I “inhabit” around there, surrounded mostly by right-wingers and right-leaning moderates and extremely religious folks. It’s a habit! One I laugh about, but an occasionally frustrating habit, nonetheless, and one that probably isn't the most beneficial all the time.

I alluded to this tendency of mine in an earlier post about dating, standards and, most importantly here, types. I named a couple types of guys, in particular, and why I am not their type but how I often ended up with them, anyway:

Very Serious Academic: I annoy the shit out of these men. I am not serious enough, I occasionally engage in pop culture and know who Morgan Wallen is, I am a bit too over the top emotionally for them and I am probably not ambitious enough. This Type of Guy reliably accidentally falls for me, anyway, because he will mistake me for One of Them at a party after I impress him by knowing what the Large Hadron Collider is or something, which is more than he can say for everyone else he’s spoken to tonight, at this party his roommate dragged him to that I’ll never be able to get him to go to again, the whole evening setting miserably unrealistic expectations for both of us as we mutually trick ourselves into a relationship.

These could also be Very Serious Artists. The point is that they are Very Serious, and I am not. They are big snobs, and I cannot maintain serious snobbery for long without arguing myself out of it. They are disciplined, and I am impulsive and impatient. I am also not dumb, so they tend to like me if they meet me under the right circumstances where my other Very Annoying Qualities are not on display, but they inevitably become exasperated with me, as though I am their annoying little sister who they have unfortunately grown too fond of to leave but must still criticize at every opportunity in the name of trying to help me Be Better.

I suppose it’s an easy enough puzzle to solve: obtaining the admiration of men like this (or whatever your version is) is invigorating exactly because you shouldn’t have been able to do it. Not because they’re bad people or too good for you or something, but because you know you’re not their type, they’re a bit snobby and exclusive with whom they give their time based on their own criteria, and gaining their attraction and desire to be with you feels like winning and being recognized for something special.

Consistent attraction to a certain type of person in either the romantic or friendship senses is probably not an accident and, as it would seem, I have had a not-infrequent habit of seeking such exceptionalism from both types of relationships throughout my life.

I’ve just accepted this realization as mostly funny history, as none of these relationships really ended too badly and I’m not in one of them now so I feel like I can just poke fun at the dynamic, like in the above descriptions. But realizing that it’s also been true for many of my female friendships is something of an interesting revelation now that probably explains a lot. Being seen as the reasonable one of any given group is addictive.

Friendships are not as intense as romantic relationships and can be dragged out much longer without as much pain and suffering, unlike being perpetually unhappy with someone you’re living with. Putting up with the latter forever eventually begins to feel psychologically impossible, and those relationships tend to end once it gets to be too much for at least one party. Emotionally exhausting friendships, on the other hand — aside from the ones where the emotional exhaustion stems from them being exceptionally needy with your time — can at least be part of the multitude of your friend-and-acquaintance quilt, lessening the burden. It’s easy enough to deal with friends like that remaining in your life in some periphery or another.

And perhaps that’s the problem — being unwilling to just do the hard thing and cut it off when it becomes untenable. Because after a certain point, when you’re doing things like carefully choosing your words and avoiding a growing list of conversational topics, walking on eggshells around certain people, or hiding your entire Substack publication from someone you’d call a “best friend,” you’re not even real anymore. The desire to keep the peace can turn into completely erasing yourself to the point that you know they wouldn’t even like you if you stopped. And, ironically, that’s what Katherine misinterpreted about me when she ended my friendship with her and Todd: her perception that I reacted poorly in response to her showing me the “real her.”

In the end, Katherine was right about me. Not that I didn’t like “the real her,” but that maybe I actually am a little bit fake. Not strictly out of a desire to be and remain “accepted,” but also a feeling of social necessity and cohesion, a desire to treat people in a way I consider baseline respectful, and an aversion to personally being mean unnecessarily (and a low bar for what constitutes “mean”), because hurting people’s feelings hurts my feelings.

But that niceness needs to be carefully calibrated, or it becomes self-defeating, both literally and figuratively. You can’t let avoiding conflict rob you of the feeling of being free to express yourself, or you’ll lose that self entirely.

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Tired of this route on my most recent trip back to Virginia, I decided to switch it up and take a more intentionally scenic (and lengthier) series of roads back to Virginia this time. My rough plan was to take the Great River Road as far south as it made sense, initially aiming for St. Louis, then cut east over to Virginia. I did some kind of confusingly thrown-together, absurdly long hybrid version of this in the end (it would end up taking me five entire days to get home).

I planned my first stop in advance and booked a hotel in Dubuque, Iowa through my credit card rewards app. I thought it made a good stopping point, only five and a half hours or so away, right on the river, so plenty of time to stop and take photos along the Mississippi on the way.

The Canfield Hotel — Dubuque, Iowa

The first thing about the Canfield Hotel was that I remembered it. After I saw photos of the inside of some of the rooms on Google, I realized it was the same hotel that I remembered being so uniquely cute when I stayed there in 2010 with my ex and a few of our friends on a trip out there for a gig they were playing.

Thinking I remembered the place well enough, I didn’t do a lot of research about the specific part of Dubuque where I’d be staying, and I maybe only barely skimmed the reviews. I was just aiming for cheap and this place was one of the cheapest available, plus it had the added charm of not being your average Comfort Inn or Motel 6 or whatever; it was independent and quirky, and it also appeared to have a karaoke bar downstairs (it was sadly, but not unexpectedly, closed that evening).

...So it was definitely a little different than I remembered, but I probably had drunk-colored glasses on the first time I was there, not noticing the... less cozy... elements of the place at the time. It also could have changed! Who knows. But anyway, I’ve stayed in some weird, run-down, sketchy motels and hotels on road trips in my day, but none that gave me such weird vibes as this time in this one.

Once I got settled in my room, I heard some muffled footsteps and noises in the hall outside my door.

This is a good time to note that the door was locked only by one of those twisty doorknob locks. No deadbolt or chain or anything beyond the knob lock. I am not exactly a fancy hotel-stayer, usually prioritizing low cost over luxury like I said, but this was unsettling. Your “average Comfort Inn or Motel 6 or whatever” would definitely have both a deadbolt and a chain, or chain-like extra lock, whatever those are called.

When I checked in, there were three or so youngish guys hanging out in the waiting area like they might hang out in a friend's apartment living room in their twenties for lack of anything better to do, and I am not altogether unconvinced that these people didn't actually live there. Despite this, the lobby was pretty quiet aside from my conversation checking into the place with the employee who basically yelled across the lobby that I was staying there alone (although I guess that would be obvious enough to anyone paying attention, which was, in fact, all of the dudes sitting in the lobby). So when I heard the pair or small group of guys stop outside my door and start talking in quiet voices like they were talking about me but didn’t want me to know, I got pretty freaked out.

This is also a good time to note that I had just smoked a bowl out in my car and was stoned as hell.

Subsequently also paranoid as fuck, I grabbed my phone with one hand and my pepper spray with the other, aiming both at the door, not even sure what I was expecting to happen. After awhile the guys seemed to have moved on, and I was getting ready to consider putting down my makeshift weapons for a minute, when suddenly, someone actually knocked. I froze, no idea what to say, so absolutely not expecting someone to actually knock on my door, and finally manage to yell a really bitchy-sounding “WHAT” at the door.

“Rude. Nothing,” a male voice scoffed. Footsteps down the hall and a door closing.

I had a number of thoughts at that point but the overriding one was get the fuck out of here right now, everything else be damned. So I packed up and went downstairs and handed the physical key on the diamond plastic keychain to the guy behind the desk and told him something like, “I really just... don’t like it here. I’m going to go somewhere else,” thinking of the Comfort Inn or Motel 6 or whatever directly across the street. He pressed me on why, so I explained the person knocking at the door, and the lack of deadbolt on the door.

At this point I was teary-eyed and sniffly because I was freaked out and also embarrassed to be so freaked out, and I probably looked a little silly, but he said he was sorry and that he could just move me to one of the larger suites on the other side of the hotel. One with not only one deadbolt on the regular door, but one on the bedroom door, too. I thought this over for a minute and agreed. I didn’t want to waste the money/points I’d already spent, as I knew I wasn’t getting a refund, and it seemed safe enough. He called the room phone a couple minutes after I got up there to make sure everything was okay.

As I gradually stopped being so damned high, I thought about what that guy who knocked on the door might have actually wanted from me. It occurred to me that he probably smelled the weed on me as I walked past and up to my room and that maybe he thought I’d be cool and want to smoke with him or something. Maybe he was going to offer me a beer and also be cool and I was being a huge high, paranoid jerk. Many such cases, I’m sure.

Comfort Inn or Motel 6 or Whatever — Richmond, Indiana

Oh yeah, this was some kind of “business and conference center” or something on the far eastern end of Indiana on the Ohio border. I found it halfway through Indiana and booked it. I remember next to nothing about this place because it was so blessedly normal and boring that nothing registers in my mind about it anymore. I went to Red Lobster across the street and had a “specialty cocktail” that was basically just a strawberry coconut smoothie, came back, showered, and went the fuck to sleep in my deadbolt-doored, basic-ass room.

The Arnott House B&B — Spencer, West Virginia

This was when things started to get hairier, because everything is hairier in West Virginia. I’d spent this whole ass trip trying to figure out a way to avoid the more mountainous parts of West Virginia (I've since learned that the only way to do this is to simply avoid West Virginia entirely), and I thought I had it figured out multiple times, but I kept changing things up so the options that fit my strict parameters (no freeways on cliffs I can see over, no night driving, lowest visible elevation changes possible) kept changing, as well.

I was paying close attention to the sunset times in each of the places I was headed because my night vision is abysmal so I don't drive in the dark, and my usual method here is to stop in the first larger town I came to about an hour before sunset to find the nearest place to sleep. This method has been reliable for the past several trips! It continued being reliable through exactly this particular B&B, where I arrived just in the nick of time, the sun in exactly that torturous place where it actively tries to blind you and is at the perfect location in the sky to evade all sun visors, sunglasses, and hats you may have to protect yourself from it.

The B&B was incredibly cheap for what it was (less than $100!) and up on, of course, a crazy hill that no one who isn’t a local could drive on without sweating buckets. I made some wrong turn because I didn't see the proper entrance (thank you, malicious sun position) and had to drive up an even steeper and narrower driveway and managed to finally get into the parking spot behind the house. All I wanted, at that point, was a beer and some crappy bar food, but I had no idea what to expect around these parts. The room was lovely, though, and not knowing what else to do yet, I decided on a bath.

After my bath, I did eventually decide to venture out of the room and into “town.” I saw exactly one bar that was open that allegedly also served food, but I was a little sketched out after my experience in Dubuque and decided that my pepper spray and I would just walk across the street together to the gas station for a microwaved burrito or something. I really didn’t know anything about this small town of Spencer, West Virginia, and I’m a small lady with crappy night vision, so I didn’t want to take any chances.

As I was waiting to cross the street, I saw a man approach from the other side. After Canfield Knocking Man, my nerves were still on edge and I gripped my pepper spray a little harder. He passed by me, saying a quiet “how are you” and kept walking, and I relaxed, responded in kind, and kept walking, myself. I decided that was as good a sign as any that I could just pass by the gas station and walk the two more blocks to the bar.

And boy, am I glad I did.

I walked in to find what I had come to expect during my occasional trips through the back roads in the sparsely-populated hills of West Virginia, which was a pretty run-down establishment decorated like someone’s half-finished suburban basement from the 1980s, old wood paneling on the walls with handmade signs affixed to it, thick carpeting going up the stairs to a room that seemed to serve both as a private billiards room and also the bar’s storage closet. It was delightful. There were exactly three patrons aside from myself, one at the bar and two at the video gambling machines, plus two employees behind the bar. The woman sitting down in front of a light box doing her diamond art thing (the owner, I later learned) didn’t look up at me as she declared, with a no-nonsense tone that said she’d seen plenty of trouble ‘round those parts, “I’m gonna need to see your ID.” I gave it to her and ordered a Coors Light.

Eventually I had eavesdropped on enough of the bartender’s conversation with the very drunk man a few seats away from me, clearly a regular, and decided to join in the conversation. I asked them about the town of Spencer and what it was like. I asked about the decorations in the bar, some of which were Vikings themed, which made me happy as a native Minnesotan, and also the only thing that made Diamond Art Lady smile when I asked who the Vikings fan was. Even telling me that the Marines’ portraits on the wall behind her were her sons didn’t make her smile the way she did at the mention of the Vikings.

Billy, the increasingly drunk regular next to me, started opening up and slurring to me about his life. He explained that he used to run a bar a couple counties over but simply did not anymore. When I inquired further, he looked dramatically around the bar, checking every direction and, finally deciding it was white enough, told me, “I’m a little bit racist.” That didn’t really answer my question (although it provided a few hints), but eventually it came out that he’d been “beaten within an inch of [his] life and left for dead” by these Baltimore folks who’d come through town, causing him to be hospitalized for a month and not being able to go back to work for a variety of related reasons. It was then that the bartender rejoined the conversation and explained that Charleston, WV has a pretty big problem with Baltimore drug dealers coming in to distribute pills, of which one of Billy’s adult daughters had been clean from for just over a year now, which he told me after explaining that he has several children and grandchildren and doesn’t know how many siblings he has, himself, since his dad was kind of a ho.

Billy kindly bought every round for me except that first one and we took turns playing country and old rock music on the jukebox until Diamond Art Lady yelled at us to pay up because it was time to close, four hours before Google said they closed, because this was small town West Virginia and you do what you want when you own a bar there.

The B&B was great, can’t stress that enough. The next morning, I slept through breakfast even though I should have probably taken advantage of it, but I was so damn tired and I had a long day of driving ahead of me. I went down to settle up with the woman running the place and grab some coffee on my way out.

After learning about Connie's bad hip and her children and her favorite bicycling young gay couple who she hosted a few weeks ago, the 79-year-old woman helped me with my next moves, telling me with confidence which parts of the interstate to avoid and where to get off to ensure I didn’t end up on the high-elevation, high-speed, winding roads I so wanted to steer clear of. I followed her advice and it was perfect.

Then my phone lost service and everything went to shit.

Unlisted Cabin at a campground in Monterey, Virginia

This one was definitely not planned, but it was by far the best.

I was using my reliable ol’ method of stopping in a town an hour or so before sunset to look up where I should stay for the night. At this point I was only about three and a half hours away from home, but it was getting dark and I simply could not make it back on those crazy roads with that lack of light. I pulled into a market on the main street and pulled up Google Maps to see what was around.

...Absolutely no hotels or motels, it turned out, only B&Bs, and these ones were not the cheap kind I’d found in West Virginia. Not having any other options, though, I started calling them, and they were all booked, every last one of them. It was then that I realized it was Friday night, and also that if it hadn’t been for a glitchy problem with Google Maps that had me backtracking on these same hairpin turns up and down the mountain, wasting at least an hour of driving time, I could have made it another hour to Staunton, the nearest “big” town, which contained many a Comfort Inn or Motel 6 or whatever.

I had absolutely no idea what to do.

I was driving between various parking lots along the main road, looking for the best one to safely park and sleep in my car for the night, because I couldn’t think of any other option. I had all of my camping supplies with me, but for whatever reason — perhaps the weather with temps getting down below freezing that night, I don’t know — it did not occur to me to look for actual campgrounds, and I figured I’d fare best in a church parking lot, or maybe the fire department lot I saw down the road. I was in the middle of panicking at my predicament and lamenting my own poor planning when my friend texted me the link to the campground just a couple miles down the road after I complained about my predicament. I called them, unable to hide the fact that I’d been crying.

The couple who owned the property told me to come right down and they’d set up their private cabin for me, which was both available and very affordable, especially compared to the prices at the already-full B&Bs in town. I got there just as the sky was getting dark, and pulled up to the cabin on the beautiful property and was greeted by Annette, one half of the couple who owned the campground. She gave me a little tour and her husband brought me fresh water, and she gave me some tea and handed me a book, telling me that she had written it and I was welcome to read through it if I liked, and if I wanted to buy it, no pressure, I could do that, too, as it was her pride and joy. She had a slight accent I couldn’t place, but realized it was German once I started digging into the book, which I did, in fact, buy from her the next morning.

The cabin was beautifully constructed and the bed was unbelievably comfortable. I did not even mind the freezing-cold trek to the outhouse in the dark; I was just so thrilled not to be in a parking lot that everything I encountered felt like pure luxury. When Annette’s husband asked what my circumstances were that led me to finding myself stranded without a place to stay in this small town in the Virginia Highlands, I had to sheepishly admit that I had simply planned this portion of my drive very poorly and that, usually, I was much more capable of taking care of myself than my tearful and panicked demeanor might suggest.

They were very sweet. I highly recommend both this campground and Annette’s book (although the cabin I stayed in is not usual absorbing). Everything about this place was so right up my alley that I felt right at home instantly. I might have to go stay there again sometime, but more on purpose.

It took me another few hours, but I made it home in one piece the next day.

It was a beautiful drive overall and I did relish the me-time after a couple months of having pretty much none of that in Minnesota... and I didn't have to pay a single toll.

I still might fly next time, though. As a treat.

Let me back up here. I had picked up the Q-tips in a sort of sloppy, confusing way, but on purpose. Because, you see, my brain told me that since grabbing them in that sloppy manner was my first instinct instead of the more efficient way I thought of immediately afterwards, that I needed to follow through with it to ensure that I would not alter the course of events in the universe.

So I decided I needed to straighten them before tossing them into the garbage can but also without setting them back down on the counter, because if I threw them away in the haphazard manner in which I was compelled to pick them up, I would be dooming myself to chaos elsewhere, in more serious realms in my life.

I did this carefully using only the hand that was already holding them, because using my other hand to help would be cheating and not consistent with the messiness of life, similar to why I didn't change course in the beginning and pick them up off the counter in a more sensible manner.

I slowly twisted my fingers around them in such a way as to make them line up perfectly next to each other without dropping either of them. If I dropped either of them, then any future surgery I might need would be performed by an under-slept, uncaring surgeon who would fuck up a delicate procedure and I would die as a result.

If I could do this carefully and succeed in getting them both in line before tossing them away, then the future imagined surgery would be successful.

High stakes!

I succeeded, thankfully, ensuring successful medical interventions I hope I don’t need and keeping my anxiety in check for another half hour or so.

I’ve written about OCD before:

From the end of Tornado Movies and TV Psychics:

Magic words again, telling me this time that I was not magical after all, and neither were my obsessive thoughts or my weird counting, blinking, tapping, and rearranging habits. Something clicked then and I eventually became much better able to reason myself out of nonsensical thought patterns after that. Sometimes they still pop up, but then I remind myself: you are not magical, remember? They aren't exactly magic words, but they do tend to act like it, most of the time.

Well, it turns out these things are apparently so embedded in my psyche that it just happens naturally and I rarely even notice anymore. Now, though, when I do catch myself, I can usually laugh and turn down the anxiety, reminding myself that such things are not under my control, things like how I pick up Q-Tips from the bathroom counter are not analogies for broader future life events, and I am simply not the powerful sorceress I wish I was (or have convinced myself, somehow, that I am during these moments).

I do wish I got the kind of OCD that made me more likely to dust the ceiling fan more than once every 4 years, though. That would be a lot more convenient than hanging out in my mother’s bathroom longer than necessary in order to play a made-up Q-Tip game.

Upgrade for only $25 annually!

Tip Jar

I remember when Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera kissed Madonna during a performance for some reason and Katy Perry wrote a song about how she liked kissing a girl with cherry Chapstick, and T.A.T.U. was doing their thing and dudes were absolutely obsessed with the spectacle, or even the possibility, of seeing two hot girls make out in real life. I had nearly forgotten about all the performative lesbianism or bisexuality going on back then, in the mid-aughts, until recently.

Now, for whatever reason, nearly all my closest female friends have been bisexual. At this point I have just come to expect it; I guess bi women are my friend archetype! I say this to illustrate how bisexual visibility kind of exploded when I was coming of age and how, now, it’s kind of become a forgone conclusion about many women of a certain demographic. Most of the polled increases in reported bisexuality are probably a result of folks being more comfortable being open about their sexuality due to increased social acceptance, while some others are maaaybe more performative or experimental and likely to revert back to a kind of default hetero preference when they get over it after college or whatever.

I think this is pretty natural, and there’s also the theory that women’s sexuality is more fluid than that of your average man [pdf], meaning even if we consider ourselves straight, it may still be easy enough to be turned on in a sexual situation with a woman under the right circumstances, like a threesome with your boyfriend, or when you’re drunk at someone’s 21st birthday party kegger, or after Donald Trump is re-elected and you go 4B. You know, the usual times. More women do, officially, identify as bisexual or pansexual than do men currently (and that’s almost always been the case), so it’s not too surprising that our sexuality would be, in general, more fluid1. I don’t know, but this study about what sexually stimulates women is all over the place, so combined with my anecdotal evidence, I find this easy to believe. We'll come back to it.

Back in 2005, between crazy boy and band drama and other fun stuff I had going on that year, I was also, for a time, completely obsessed with trying to get straight guys to kiss each other. I think maybe it had something to do with my eternal quest to challenge gender-things in public and try to shock people into making them think or something, but I do suspect it had its real roots at a kegger where I first made out with a girl when I was eighteen.

If I am remembering correctly, it was, indeed, someone’s 21st birthday and there was a keg in the garage. The people I was with were coworkers at the photo lab and friends of friends. One of the girls, Heidi, and I started talking about whether or not we’d ever kissed girls before, and I said that I had, just once, a peck on the lips from my best friend at the casino on my most recent birthday. That friend had told me then that she’d casually kissed other girls at her school (in a suburb affectionally known for their large gay population), and then kissed me. It was pretty much nothing, and we went about the casino doing freshly-eighteen-year-old casino stuff.

So anyway, I can’t remember all the details anymore2, but I am pretty sure it was Heidi who said something to the effect of, “let’s make out!” and of course this was in front of like 15 dudes around our age and a little older in the midst of Girls Gone Wild and TRL and the Madonna incident, so naturally, they all egged us on. I’m sure there are pictures floating around somewhere, what with half the party’s attendees being photo lab employees obsessed with photographing every moment of our lives.

I’m pretty sure the guys surrounding us were, in fact, the whole point, and we knew that just as well at the time. I’m not even knocking this performative bisexuality; I make fun of it in that self-deprecating Millennial way, but whatever, man. It's practically become a rite of passage at this point and now I look back and just think it’s funny.

Anyway, later during the party I got chased around by this thirty-something South American lesbian named Irena who had insane cleavage bursting through a very sexy red top who wanted to take me on a date after the party and texted me a few times over the next couple weeks until I finally managed to convince her I wasn’t interested.

All of this, I think, feeds directly into my later obsession with trying to get straight guys to make out with each other3. See, in my burgeoning literally-egalitarian feminist mind, there should have been no intrinsic difference between two women kissing for the benefit of men, and two men kissing for the benefit of women. I did not accept that there were any real, tangible sexual differences between men and women in that particular way that weren’t purely a product of social influence and gender essentialism. I wasn't even sure I personally wanted to see two straight men make out all that badly, but goddamnit, I was determined to see it happen. For equality, or something!

So several years later, after I had turned twenty-one myself, another friend and I (another friend with whom I had also found many opportunities to make out in front of our boyfriends) were at a big warehouse party together. Millennial emo girls in side-swept, black-dyed bangs and studded belts were making out with each other left and right, cheered on by dudes with matching haircuts and dye jobs, so Nichole and I decided to see if we could find any guys who were willing to make out with each other for a change.

We hung out just outside the entrance with the smokers, asking every dude who walked up if he was willing to do just that for us. We just really want to see, we whined, as cutely as we could. After a few quick rejections, we quickly realized we needed to up the ante and offered to make out with each other as a trade. Some paused to consider this briefly but always shot it down. We continued bargaining: we make out for thirty seconds, you make out for five. While the pauses grew longer and more frequent, still, no one bit. We wrote it off as a loss and rejoined the rest of the party, disappointed that none of these dudes were willing to be reciprocal in the performative gayness of 2005.

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It made sense, though, when you go back to the sexual fluidity thing. While women’s sexuality can be more fluid, men’s tends to remain static throughout life. If we thought it would be fun enough for whatever reason — guys wanting to see it was usually a fun enough reason back then — making out with each other was not really gross, or it didn’t have to be. The guys, though, probably had a higher ick threshold to cross before being willing to kiss another guy.

...Somehow, though, about ten years later, suddenly straight dudes everywhere seemed to be making out with each other, and more, like it was suddenly no big deal at all. Bragging about it, even. Everyone was exploring their sexuality (or proving it by publicly acting in the opposite manner of what it really was) and Lady Gaga was singing the entire soundtrack and it was, honestly, a pretty cool moment in time. People weren't taking themselves too seriously, and we were all less self-conscious than ever.

But the interesting thing about that was that while it was, in fact, pretty hot at first, probably due to the still-taboo nature of it being two men instead of the “sexier” combo of two women, it didn't take long before it got boring and none of us formerly-enthusiastic girls cared about seeing two masculine straight dudes with beards make out for a minute anymore. It was performative like the girls’ contextual bisexuality was, only for seemingly different reasons: to demonstrate that they were one of the good ones, not riddled with toxic masculinity: so comfortable, instead, in their masculinity that they were easily willing to kiss another dude without thinking it makes him gay, or caring if it's assumed by onlookers.

It was a signal to women that they were a good guy in the same way that women making out with each other was a signal that she was up for a good time and willing to please. Funny how, for a brief time, heteros, especially of the progressive and Millennial varieties, signaled homosexuality to each other as a way to gain favor with the opposite sex.

It makes sense that signaling to women that they weren't tainted by toxic masculinity was the only way to get straight men to make out; women, if we're to buy into the sexual fluidity theory proposed by Lisa Diamond and others, would make this easy for women to do with much lower stakes. Women's sexuality being more situational probably lent an ease to fooling around with each other for the dudes, while men needed different motivations to be willing to cross that line.

But the women-led displays of pretend bisexuality had to end, or morph, eventually.

More women report being bisexual than ever nowadays, but the performance of bisexuality, especially by (probably straight) women for men in particular, has markedly waned since its mid-aughts heyday. There's no need to perform it when everyone pretty much just accepts that women are at least a little bit bi these days, even when we’re not4. These days, ostensibly straight women doing a little making out with each other looks more like the boys of the 2010 now, at least in intent.

Just like no one cares if you smoke pot anymore and it’s become gauche to wander around in public looking like Towelie and everyone thinks you should just stay home with that shit now, so, too, has society decided that overzealous, almost-certainly-not-really-bisexual women theatrically making out with each other for attention is actually just kind of outdated and a little trashy now. Now we keep it to the planned orgies instead of every random garage kegger; it isn’t 2005 anymore!

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She wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t promise me that because she had no way of knowing whether or not it would happen, and she wouldn't make a promise she couldn't be sure she could keep. In the incredibly unlikely event my fear came true, she didn’t want me to grow up thinking my dead mother was a liar, someone who broke promises, maybe even died overnight on purpose to spite me.

I begged, pleaded with her to just promise, just make me that little promise so I could go to sleep. She wouldn’t, ever.

I was always afraid of death: everything was a catastrophe or one in the making, I was wracked with existential terror for no real reason at all, always looking over my shoulder, always wondering when I might just drop dead for no other reason than accidentally making God angry or something. It was the time of sensationalist TV talk shows and they kept me in a steady diet of all things new and old to be afraid of: AIDS, tuberculosis, cancer, glaucoma, hurricanes, bullies, tornadoes, hell, earthquakes, aliens, David Bowie, biblical Armageddon.

The fears evolved and shifted, some gaining more prominence over others depending on the circumstances of the season, but it wasn’t just myself I was afraid of losing to the unknown, the dirt, the sky, whatever place I thought or hoped we went after that inevitable end — it was her, my mom, especially. The reasons are obvious now, of course; I remember a fair amount of my first three years in Missouri and immediately after coming to Minnesota, but nothing from the move itself. The move, and the circumstances that preceded it, were abrupt and, I am sure, traumatic for a child of any age, and my mother in her condition, heavily pregnant with my little sister.

My dreams always have the backdrop of imminent doom, no matter how otherwise pleasant, and have for as long as I can remember. I don’t know that I’d call them nightmares; that’s just their vibe. This is around the time I started remembering them.

My sister was born and we moved a few more times over the years, first to an apartment up in Northwestern Minnesota that had a chicken pot pie waiting for us in the oven of the dimly-lit kitchen when we arrived late one snowy night, which were the weather conditions under which we seemed to arrive everywhere during this period of my life. We stayed a few months, not too long, just long enough to endure a harsh Northwestern Minnesota winter with what we dubbed the “Wicked Wind,” the wintery plains’ howling nighttime gusts that whistled through every crack in the window or wall. I hid from the sound in the bathroom, lying curled on the floor, face to the rug, covered in a towel as my blanket. It was the only room without windows.

We moved to Minneapolis next, staying with more family, Grandpa and another aunt, one of my mom’s three older sisters. We would stay there for a few years while my mom got a degree and a job and then a house of our own, just a mile or two away, the final house I can say I grew up in. It was a few blocks from the high school I’d later attend, which was across the street from a cemetery, which — of course — scared me. I looked out of my attic bedroom window one night that first summer we lived there and saw the glow of the high school’s stadium lights coming from the direction where I knew the cemetery to be and was afraid, thinking they were the lights of a UFO sent to that cemetery, to use as a sort of base, to start rounding up the humans of my little neighborhood, one by one. I was sure of it.

I was seven when I went to Arizona for the first time to visit my dad, one stop included on a longer, epic road trip with Grandma and Papa, one that Papa wanted to take with me because he was dying and it would be the last time he could. He’d taken my cousins, his older grandsons, on camping trips and wanted to have the experience with his granddaughter, and for me to have that memory with him. I didn’t know he was dying then and wouldn’t find out until he did die several months later, so I was excited for this trip and its many side quests, being chosen to come along for the adventure, culminating in the acquisition of a family heirloom located in Victorville, California: an old grandfather clock that had been in Papa’s family for generations. We went to Wyoming first, to Jackson Hole, and we camped in the RV in what I remember to this day to be the most beautiful natural place I’ve ever seen, the wooded mountains we nestled into next to an ice-cold stream of clear running water that Grandma would use to cook with and wash my hair.

Papa trusted my mom with the secret of his illness, his former daughter-in-law who’d taken on the role of single motherhood because his son wasn’t up the the task of doing his part. They loved her and helped us financially when they could and made sure we spent time with them since their son wasn't there to help facilitate it. Too young to take care of the family he created, too tied down for his own good, lured away by the temptation of Brenda, the atheist vegetarian writer in Arizona with cages full of pet birds and a penchant for horseback riding and Stephen King novels. Intellectually and artistically seductive, if in no other way, as the woman's utter lack of physical attractiveness or even pleasantness were quiet but open agreements amongst family, but you couldn't deny her wicked intelligence.

Sometimes I imagine being Papa on this trip, soaking in what only he and his wife and his former daughter-in-law knew at the time to be probably his last camping trip on this beautiful land he grew up on and around, waiting for the sickness in his lungs to eventually take him, something he’d accepted quietly, with grace and discretion, because he didn’t want to leave his family in debt and, being a spiritual man and a Christian Scientist, believed perhaps prayer could help, instead. Family lore says this was beginning to work, if not for external stress that caused the heart attack to kill him before the cancer could.

How do you enjoy anything knowing that’s what the future holds? How does anyone? I wondered for a long time, the knowing, and the living despite it.

After the camping trip, we headed down to Arizona to see my dad and meet Brenda. This was supposed to be a surprise for me, but someone let the cat out of the bag early, and I was instructed to act surprised, and I was preoccupied with making sure I was convincing, though I cannot remember if I was when Grandma finally told me on our last day in Wyoming inside of one of those Western supply stores full of belt buckles and boots and leather fringe. I was, however, extremely excited, and extremely nervous, to see my dad. He had become mythical to me in the years since I’d last seen him.

I think I’ve only been to Arizona maybe twice: this trip, and another driving through it to get to Southern California some years later, but it still feels like more. Something about the state’s familiar landscape, maybe my memories borrowed and merged with images from those yearly calendars, each month a tribute to the beautiful geography of one or another of the country’s states, the memories driving down the highway, a picturesque, empty road ahead of us, carved into red canyon rock, sitting on the truck’s bench seat between Grandma in the passenger seat and Papa driving, coloring in my coloring book and explaining to them how I stay in the lines so good, how it’s because I outline the shapes first and the wax acts like a bumper to keep the color in, see? Grandma and Papa laughed at me and I couldn’t figure out why. Didn’t they teach this technique when they were in school? I kept coloring.

Dad’s house that he shared with Brenda in the Phoenix suburbs was normal, bigger than ours in the city, a typical suburban layout, decorated in exactly the way I imagined a vegetarian hippie obsessed with horses might decorate her house, and that’s good because that’s what Brenda was, that’s who my dad blew up his previous life for.

The yards in this part of Arizona weren’t “yards” as I’d come to know them, but patches of dirty-looking sand surrounding the house, some scraggly brush here and there, a dead cactus lying on its side in front of the house, a pool in the backyard to match those in every other backyard in the neighborhood, coming standard with each home; I could only assume this was the case, anyway, by their sheer ubiquity. And horses, those seemed to come standard, too, but my dad always had horses and would always find a way to keep at least one somewhere, even in a suburban cul-de-sac.

We stayed there at my dad’s new place for a few days and I rode the horse and made crafts with Brenda. We decorated horseshoes, of which they seemed to have a never-ending supply, with raw wool and pieces of ornate metal and other trinkets and symbols she told me were important, and she explained her vegetarianism and animal rights beliefs to me. She’d converted my dad to vegetarianism and he didn’t watch football or drink alcohol anymore. He looked skinny to me, but maybe he was always skinny back then.

They had a large fish tank, more like an aquarium, something that seemed excessive but in a way I could brag about to impress other kids later: “My dad has a giant fish tank. I went to my dad’s house and saw it.” Being able to say my dad, someone who existed in the present tense, like it was just a normal part of life, showing that hey, I have one of those, too. That felt exciting, important. I filed it away to store with the handful of other memories I could pull out when I needed a dad story.

I remember how luxurious the central air conditioning, not really necessary in Minnesota back then, felt after being outside in the most oppressive heat I’d ever experienced in my life so far.

The stars seemed bigger there, somehow. It was the suburban desert, but it was still the desert, and I remember the night sky felt like it belonged to another planet, butted up against a harsh landscape that provided nothing, with the house aquarium feeling incorrect but brave, and the reverse climate control concerns and the animals. It was like a window to the parallel universe where my dad wanted us, my sister and I, to have that life with him. It felt almost like it could be my real life, like maybe I could travel there sometimes, like lucid dreaming before I knew what lucid dreaming was.

I didn’t want Brenda as a stepmom; she fit the “evil stepmother” stereotype most of the time when she didn’t spontaneously come out with crafts and haughty hippie life lessons once in a blue moon. The life, though, at least sometimes, now that could be cool. Who could I be down there, over there, in Arizona? I went home with a pile of horseshoes that I would slowly decorate with hot glue and whatever I found outside, with Brenda’s rules and tips in mind. I imagined myself a real Western Girl.

I would never visit them there again.

Papa died when I was eight, the winter following that last camping trip with him. We drove down to rural Missouri for the funeral. It was snowing all night, the whole six hour drive down, and the single-wide trailer Grandma and Papa lived in was crowded with family, most of whom I didn’t recognize. Dad had come up for it, Papa being his father. My little sister was barely a toddler, being held by my mom at her hip; Dad hadn’t met her yet because he left when she was pregnant with her.

“Daddy! Look! Look! It’s my sister! She’s born now! Daddy!! Look at her!”

I was waved away, my childish interruptions annoying my parents, whom I hadn't seen together in years, trying to have a serious conversation for the first time in just as long.

I imagined often what my life would have been like in Missouri, too, in the alternate timeline where my parents stayed together and we didn’t move to a northern city, or him to the western desert.

It was usually an exercise in imagining the worst life possible for myself, especially as I got old enough to become a snob about being from the city instead of the country.

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My sister and I were probably unusually outdoorsy for “city kids” in that, beyond the usual bike-riding around the neighborhood at all hours of the day and night that you’d expect from urban and suburban kids in the nineties, we also had a lot of natural, woodsy areas and lakes nearby, plenty of parks and hiking trails, and kids were still allowed outside by themselves. We, like the country kids, could go play in the woods, bike down to the river, make a fort by the creek, build an illicit fire somewhere remote enough, even set up tents and camp in each other's yards. We had infrastructure close by which lent a security that I did not take with me into the vast emptiness of the Northwestern Missouri fields every summer when we’d visit.

The relief I felt leaving the eerie, desolate farmlands of Northwestern Missouri was palpable every summer, away from the wide-open death potential I saw everywhere and back into civilization.

I always preferred the city.

My dad moved a few more times, again in 2012. My sister and I hadn’t been in contact with him for many years, not until that year right around Valentine’s Day when Grandma died and we drove down to Missouri in an ice storm and saw him at the wake. He came up to us, gave us gas money, hugged us and said it was good to see us. We left later, bewildered, our father’s money in my sister’s wallet, his phone number in both of our phones, text messages with him next to those from our mom. Is that what it felt like to have parents, plural? Seeing both “Mom” and “Dad” in your text history, after all this time? I was twenty-nine.

He met someone new, a woman he said was “not too far in age” from the two of us, who helped him understand the importance of reconnecting with us, and her insistence, as a woman whose own father ran off in a similar fashion when she was a child, that he try to repair the mistakes he’d made.

Now he, with his wife and young stepson and stepdaughter and more dogs and other pet creatures than I can count, live in the middle of nowhere again, close to the middle of nowhere that I visited during all those summers throughout my childhood.

I’m not afraid of it anymore.

It’s another home, now, where I feel comfortable.

No one lives in the house where I grew up. No one in my family, that is. My mom and sister live in the suburbs now, within walking distance of each other, and while my mom’s will always be “home” to me no matter where it is, my sister is the one with the house that has become the default gathering place, where I can rummage around the fridge without asking and borrow a random pair of shoes by the door that will always fit me. The house where the kids’ friends gather because it’s fun and safe and welcoming, just like our house was to our friends when we were kids.

I live in Virginia, because I’m like my dad in that I just had to go. I always just have to go. And the opportunity struck, so I left.

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They say you can never go back home and maybe they’re right, but I’m not so sure. It's true: people move on after you leave. Life happens to everyone else, too. Other people move away and you have fewer people to visit when you go back, fewer connections to the neighborhoods that shaped you, fewer reasons to go to certain places, for excuses to reminisce. People get used to your absence, they have kids, buy houses, quit drinking, come out, start businesses, and you’re not integrated anymore. You’re no one’s de facto Auntie or Uncle, not really, not like the friends and family who stayed.

But the smells, they stay the same. The windy plains and heavy air of Northwestern Missouri and the old, weathered barns falling down on the side of the road, the lingering odor of raw sewage in the more rural, underdeveloped parts as it mixes with the clay and the sticky summer air, curiously less unpleasant than it sounds. The crisp, pine-filtered oxygen of Northern Minnesota and the hot concrete scent emanating from the sidewalks of Minneapolis. The thick river silt permeating the air throughout Central Virginia, the way you can almost taste the foliage surrounding you, carried in droplets of unbearably moist air. The houses here, their ancient, saturated scents reminding you that they have seen entire revolutions. The way the forests near the nation’s capital carry the perfumed breeze of the flora they contain. The houses in Minneapolis, their distinct post-war aura that exists only there, not even across the river in Saint Paul, whose houses smell entirely different, who have completely different inner histories than those just to the west.

The smell of soil, though, the rich scent of earth, is no longer so scary. It reminds me of home now. Anywhere that is.

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I could not begin to tell you what initially made me so vain and neurotically obsessed with my appearance. I think I have simply always been this way. Sometimes I think it’s because I was a gawky and unattractive kid and teen and then psychologically overcorrected. Other times I think some people are just like that, I’m one of them, and it is what it is and I may as well just accept it. Sometimes I enjoy blaming my dad’s genes because he is nearly 66 years old and meticulously grooms and dyes his beard, has a full gym in his basement, and his third wife is 24 years younger than he is. Us Leos apparently stay vain for life; we can’t be caught un-cute at any time, at any age, as any gender. If I wanted to go full zodiac here, the Libra moon and rising are really easy to point to, as well. What a trio!

Maybe it’s just as simple as being a female in the culture we live in, taken to the extreme by someone with an obsessive personality.

I have been obsessed with the way I looked even when I hated everything about the way I looked, so perhaps “vain” isn’t the right word, but I don’t know a better one that isn’t hyphenated and I’m tired of hyphens. Maybe “concerned with my appearance” would fit better.

But it’s hard to say what, fundamentally, caused the shift in my perception of my own appearance from hate to appreciate. I like to joke that I followed the exact trajectory of one of those high school movies from the late 90s and early 00’s where the nerdy girl can’t get a boyfriend until one day she takes off her glasses and lets her ponytail down and all of the sudden they won’t leave her alone. Getting contacts was something of a milestone, but blunt bangs were my version of The Ponytail, only much harder to get rid of. Committing to growing them out felt like an entire after-school job. Ironically, when I saw the mother of all teenage makeover movies, She’s All That, for the first time, I was actually jealous of the main character’s “before” appearance for the simple fact that she didn’t have the burden of childish bangs to grow out.

Not long before I was finally old enough for contact lenses at 16, I had stopped wearing my glasses altogether, perhaps out of sheer adolescent exhaustion from carrying the unreasonable social burden of looking like such a frumpy fucking dork all the time. Of course, I was blind as a bat and couldn’t see a thing without them so I did have to bring them with me everywhere, but I took them off whenever I didn’t need to read a board or something and just dealt with a blurry world for a while in the name of feeling slightly more attractive.

The day I finally got my contacts turned out to be a massive disappointment. I had been looking at my own blurry face in the mirror for months thinking I could be reasonably cute without glasses and couldn’t wait to see everything with that same face, only more clearly. Unfortunately the first thing I saw was my own face very clearly, and I was actually horrified at the crystal-clear image staring back at me in that otherwise dark optometrist’s office mirror. What I was shocked to see in front of me were tiny, far-apart alien eyes accompanied by huge purple bags that my extreme nearsightedness had apparently blurred right out of the mirror before, like my own brain was applying a portrait filter to my face.

I immediately regretted my decision and felt my grasp on the magical transformation I’d been hoping for slipping away. I’ve been walking around just looking like this?! Now that it’s confirmed that I’m actually hideous, what else can I even do? Am I doomed to be ugly for the rest of my life?! I was seeing my whole, unobscured face clearly for the first time in years and I hated every millimeter of it.

I did keep wearing glasses once in a while out of self-consciousness, but I eventually got used to my face without the frames to hide behind and I stopped hating it so much, my increased positive self-perception directly proportional to the growing amount of interest boys were showing me. External validation straight to the veins. By the end of my senior year in high school, I actually sincerely thought I was kind of pretty. Just before we left to get my senior photos taken, my sister took this photo of me:

I thought it was possibly the best photo ever taken of me and it still might be. It was proof to myself that I could, in fact, be pretty and not just awkward and dorky with a couple of independently not-unpleasant features.

What I had learned by then was that people thought my face was interesting. I remember reading a similar description of Stacey’s face in The Babysitter’s Club books and thinking it sounded like an insult because it would usually be accompanied by something like, “she’s not exactly pretty, but she’s very interesting-looking.” Eventually, though, I came to feel the same way about my own face and it no longer felt like an insult. It seemed my face was either invisible or unimpressive to half of the male population while some other, smaller portion thought I was the most beautiful goddess sent straight from an elven anime or something. There seemed to be no in-between, although thankfully no one seemed to think I was ugly anymore, either.

From then on, I went about my twenties and the first half of my thirties pretty content with how I looked. I wasn’t always completely happy with my appearance, but even if I got an unfortunate haircut or gained a few pounds, I still considered myself to be somewhere on the attractive half of any given scale, and it was socially validated often enough.

It cannot be overstated how much easier life is when you are confident with your own appearance.

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The beginning of my return to self-consciousness happened in my mid-thirties, but not because of my increasing age, as one might assume.

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Okay, that’s maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but this was the kind of guy that inspired wild pubescent female fantasies so widely shared that girls wouldn't even fight over him or get jealous, they'd just be happy for you if he managed to so much as look at you, even by accident, like he was JTT or something.

Anyway, I had long forgotten about this dude when I was sitting at a bar downtown about fifteen years later, visiting a friend who worked there because I always got free drinks when he was working and I knew everyone there, and a random guy I hadn’t met sat next to me. We started chatting and, as we kept talking, realized that we had graduated from the same high school, three years apart. I asked him his name.

“Chad! Chad Michael!”

My mouth dropped open. There was simply no way this was true. I told him I did not believe him. He laughed and swore it was really him.

…You may be wondering how on earth I couldn’t have recognized this guy if he had been such an amazing hottie not that long ago. Well, he shaved his head. He had these wild, dark, spirally curls back then and absolutely no hair to speak of now. A very stark difference. That’s pretty much the long and short (heh) of it.

Anyway, I actually managed to have a class with this guy even though we were 3 grades apart: a music class. It was an “intermediate” music class, meant to bring students like me up to speed — that is, the ones who played an instrument throughout elementary school or had taken some lessons awhile back, but who were out of practice and couldn’t keep up with the marching band yet. It was also a class for learning instruments that were out of the ordinary for the regular marching band, like piano and bass guitar.

Chad Michael played the piano, naturally. It fit perfectly with his mysterious allure to be the quiet guy in the corner who didn’t talk to anyone but played the piano beautifully (I have no idea if he was actually any good; I’m sure he could have discordantly banged on the keys with his elbows and we still would’ve swooned about it). There were only nine students in this class, total, and we were in all grades playing a variety of instruments. It was an interesting and fun class, especially since I got to stare at Chad Michael playing the piano every day I had it.

I wasn’t even going to try with this guy. There was no way. Way out of my league and I was not about to even risk it.

One morning between classes, I was standing outside of a classroom with a couple girlfriends and Chad Michael walked by. I ignored him and kept babbling at my friends because I sure as hell didn’t have the nerve to say anything to him and I knew he wasn’t going to have anything to say to me. But after he walked past, my friends elbowed me in shock.

“Chad Michael said hi to you!!! Why didn’t you say anything?!” I was utterly dumbfounded. I did not hear him say hi to me. He was so far off my radar because I thought I was so far off his that I had completely discarded the idea that I could even be recognized out loud by someone I literally shared a very tiny class with.

So anyway, fast forward back to that bar downtown, where I did not believe I was really talking to Chad Michael. First of all, he didn’t look anything like the Chad Michael I remembered. Second, he was talking. The Chad Michael I barely knew at all in any capacity did not speak! Chad Michael was a mute mystery who only spoke in piano!

“I live around the corner,” he told me. “Come over and I’ll show you my yearbook and prove it to you.”

“Okay!” I said, because I’m very smart. We paid up and I followed him around the corner to his building, located exactly where he said it would be, and he led me upstairs to his apartment and promptly located the hardcover, textured red book I also had at home. He turned to the senior page with all the full-color professional photos and pointed to himself. Sure enough, that was absolutely the same Chad Michael that we all went crazy for.

“You know every girl at Henry was completely in love with you, right?”

He looked at me like I had grown three new heads.

“Haha, yeah right. I didn’t have any friends in high school.”

My turn to be dumbfounded. No friends? But he was literally the most sought-after guy in our entire school, at least during my first year there, which was his last.

He went on to explain that he was raised in a very religious family, described it as an actual cult, and said that he was forbidden from dating and as a result, never really thought of himself that way or looked at other girls that way back then. He also didn’t remember saying hi to me that day in the hallway, because yes, I definitely asked.

I went on to tell him about the way that the girls would talk about him and how everyone thought that he was just too cool for them and wouldn’t even try, thinking there was no way he’d be interested. He was stunned. He had literally no idea.

I think about this story a lot. How did this guy who had achieved mythical status among the young women in our high school have literally no idea that so many girls were into him? Man, religious indoctrination can have a lot of unpleasant side effects.

But also, you never really know how you are perceived by others until someone just straight up tells you, sometimes. And it’s kind of illuminating to know! Especially when it’s actually more positive than you expected. Even when it’s not, it’s something concrete and honest to learn from.

Once, when I was in my early twenties, I posted one of those anonymous surveys on my LiveJournal so that my friends could tell me what they really thought of me by answering questions I had chosen from the website about my personality and behaviors. Turns out everyone thought I was self-centered and immature. I got mad at them and wrote an angry LiveJournal post about how wrong they all were.

Sometimes it takes a while to learn how to accept criticism, even the kind you literally blatantly ask for.

Anyway!

I definitely kissed Chad Michael that night.1 Duh, I just had to. It may have been fifteen years later, but my inner high school freshman dweeb absolutely needed that story to later tell her best friend after he makes fun of her “type” another decade or so later.

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I started working at 14, as soon as I was legally allowed to get a real W2 job, but before that, I was always involved in some money-making scheme with my sister and our friends. We’d do the standard kid stuff like babysitting (lord, I hated that the most, which is why you never saw anything kid-related in my job history; supervising was as close as I got), mowing lawns and shoveling sidewalks, and whatever weird, creative other things we came up with, like hosting a “cat show” for the neighborhood and selling freshly-baked cookies and old McDonald’s Happy Meal toys to our very patient neighbors.

It was the 90s in the urban Midwest, and seemingly everyone I knew was being raised by a single mom, dads usually only around every other weekend or less than that, and my family was no different. While we never went hungry or without what we needed, there wasn't usually much left over. A job was necessary for spending money as I got older, and loans were necessary for a 4-year college, which was presented to us in the 90s and early 00s as essentially required for a decent income (of course it still pretty much is, depending on your career goals, even if it’s less guaranteed to provide that decent income now than it used to be, especially factoring in loan payments for those who needed them).

As someone who always leaned toward the creative side, particularly photography, I knew my earning potential had a high likelihood of being low if I decided to take that track, but I was a product of my generation and wanted to believe that I could do anything I set my mind to — that I could have a career I loved, not just a job I needed. I had never felt drawn toward anything else that seemed realistic, and I stubbornly insisted on pursuing the most expensive, “pure” path to get there and decided to go to a private art college after a semester at a technical college.1 During my second semester, I got into a car accident that took most of my money and ruined my car and subsequently my credit for awhile, so I couldn’t take out any more loans that I needed to keep attending, so I went back to work full-time, tail between my legs, and tried to figure out what to do next.

I spent most of this time taking pictures of local bands at shows nearby and partying a lot. Eventually, I quit the photo lab and got out of retail and got my first “grown-up job,” as I saw it: an office job in the first bank’s call center. It was around then that I stopped making an effort to see live music and mostly disappeared from the scene, and the next two years of my life contain so many fewer photos than any other time period of my life. Kinda lost my spirit there for a bit.

There are a few moments in my life that I consider to have “radicalized” me in one way or another, and one of the first was working in that Wells Fargo small business call center when I was 22 in 2006/2007. I’ll never forget putting a customer on hold to ask my team lead if I could get approval to reverse a late fee on their credit card.

“It’s their first one, and they got it because of how we just changed the statement cycle from 30 to 21 days,” I started, referring to the recent change that the bank advertised in very tiny print on the very last page of the statements that we all knew customers never read. “They’re a really good customer,” I stressed, wanting to reverse the fee for them. My lead turned around to face me.

“If they haven’t paid any late fees or interest, they are not actually a good customer.” I stared at him. “They don’t make us any money.”

This was an obvious enough fact that we all understood to some degree, but I had never before heard it admitted so transparently by someone in charge; we were supposed to pretend to believe the bullshit we told the customers when they accused us of the same thing. The truth of the statement, uttered so matter-of-factly, was a catalyst for the growing chip on my shoulder. This was an entirely rigged system, designed to keep even these educated, upper-middle-class, often credentialed business owners down at every opportunity; what were they doing to everyone lower on the economic totem pole, who I would later have to deal with at the smaller bank? As for myself, I'd end up paying the bank thousands in overdraft fees during my employment, both because I was terrible with money and also because their business model relied on exploiting that trait in their customers as much as they could get away with.

My time at that call center altered my perception of work in general and my later attitudes at many jobs. It wouldn't have been completely inaccurate to call me “entitled” at times, but I don't necessarily think I shouldn't have been, sometimes.

I always wanted to be sure that I was proficient at my actual job duties, but beyond that, I was not one to take direction well if the direction did not make immediate sense to me, or if it felt unjust. I would argue with any boss about anything, thankfully nearly always shielded from any negative effects from that due to being technically good at my job or just having an otherwise good, positive banter with management, although I suspect my unwillingness to shut the hell up sometimes cost me a few otherwise-deserved promotions.

When I mentioned in my bit about the fraud investigation job that someone told the local NPR station about the bank’s bullshit, I was referring to myself. I sent the emails to the station and told them what was happening, anonymously at the time. They reported on it. I did not, as you may remember, get fired, although my roommates and I (who all worked there together) did wonder, not completely unseriously, if I might get snatched up by some anonymous black SUV on my way out sometime that week. If the bosses knew it was me, they never bothered to do anything about it. I was always itching to get back at these places in some way or another for being exploitative to their customers or employees.

Anyway, I've noticed a few things about myself in the writing and subsequent binge-reading of my own series:

I had very little discipline or useful ambition. Aside from the standard party girl shit during my 20s holding me back with too many hangovers and poor decisions, I also just didn't look too far above my “station,” assuming I needed to finish college first before really trying for much more than a one-step promotion in whatever job. If a job description said they required a degree, I believed them and didn’t try. I could've branched out, but I'm not very good at that in a workplace. I need to feel competent in order to feel like I've come by it honestly or I'm likely to be too stressed out, feeling like an incompetent fraud, and quit. Aside from that, the mental drain of working those kinds of jobs (or any kind of job, really) makes the act of looking for another one that much harder when all you want to do is collapse onto your couch and engage in something mind-numbing for a while to forget about your day. I could be counted on to go to work every day (as long as it wasn’t a call center, where I would call in “sick” as often as I could get away with) and do my job to the standards required, but rarely little else. I worked 6 days a week in that post office and didn't call out a single time in a year and a half, because I felt a sense of obligation to my customers (and coworkers in other scenarios like restaurants) and felt it was simply my nonnegotiable duty, no matter how much I hated it. This wasn't the case when I knew my place answering phone calls in a queue would not be missed because there were thousands more of us.

I actually stole a lot more shit than I thought I did, damn. The magazines from Barnes and Noble and the cigarettes from Fred’s store when I was 15, all the prints and photo CDs I made for myself at the photo lab, other piddly things that I never really thought mattered at the time, which I still don’t think matter that much now, even though I’m not likely to steal anything these days. The way I saw it back then was that as long as it didn’t have a barcode on it and could be counted as “waste” when we did inventory, it was kind of just an extra employee benefit. I rarely made these determinations entirely on my own, however; they were always careful calculations made after observing my own coworkers and what they did and were able to get away with. I’d never steal a pair of shoes or a roll of film, but I was perfectly fine with printing photos for myself for free or eating a hot dog off the rollers or a breakfast sandwich at a gas station. Printer paper was “wasted” all the time, and everyone knows old gas station and restaurant food just gets thrown away when no one buys it. Either way, I have my own ethical framework when it comes to stealing stuff: don't steal from people, don't steal from small businesses, and what you do at Walmart is your own business.2

I have very little patience for rudeness and inconsiderate behavior. I believe this comes primarily from being treated badly by customers over the course of so many years of public-facing work, and it's extended to the rest of public life. My experiences gave me empathy, but they also gave me expectations.

The above note came in response to this thread, in which I argued that a customer service job is not only emotional labor but in fact the original definition of the term and how you describe the labor you perform at those jobs, and that if you hate emotional labor but work in a field that requires it, anyway, it is still your responsibility to be nice to your customers until you are able to find a job that is better suited to your temperament.

Frankly, I couldn’t imagine being so entitled as to believe I have the right to be rude or openly disdainful to people for simply walking into the place that has employed me. Aside from just being mean-spirited and directed at precisely the wrong target, it also makes your entire job even more miserable than it needs to be, and for what? So you can prove to these innocent customers how much your employer sucks? So you can start an argument you've been itching to have, just waiting for a victim on whom to pounce? What purpose does that actually serve other than making their day just a little bit worse? If you are so embittered that you cannot find it within yourself to be a decent human being to the other decent human beings in your daily orbit, I recommend doing literally anything else for the sake of us all. Yours is not the only mental health that matters.

I had that annoying combination of being both too arrogant and too insecure for anyone to take me seriously about anything other than the exact duties of my job itself, which I always made sure I was good at, perhaps as a way to protect my own ego, perhaps as leverage when I was being reprimanded for other shitty behavior, perhaps a little of both. This led to self-sabotage and staying stuck in dead-end positions for too long with no motivation or drive to propel myself forward or upwards. One example of this that I am embarrassed to recall is when I moved from the photo lab that fired me in high school to the one in the other mall across the river. I missed my old lab, I missed the weight of the paper, I missed the coworkers I had, I missed the familiar mall and the shorter drive. I didn’t like the new company’s logo, I didn’t like damn near anything about it at first, and I did not hide that fact. Mostly I was an immature 17-year-old, but also that’s just how I fucking was, and still am if I don’t stay on top of it. I can be a massively self-centered and ungrateful person if I don’t keep myself in check. This comes out most often at work, because I'm primed for it because I probably hate my job and am already feeling resentful about being there. At least I’m honest, I guess.

I drank way the fuck too much to sustain any kind of goals I ever had. I leapt into the party scene quick, as is wont to happen in the hospitality industry in particular, but also in plenty of other low-paid, low-status jobs that leave workers feeling tired and annoyed by the end of the week and wanting to let loose. The older you get, the more that catches up with you if you keep at it, and I did keep at it, and it did catch up. Working half-drunk after getting 2 hours of sleep after a random Tuesday night hotel party thrown by coworkers is fine when you’re 19; having a few too many glasses of wine while sitting on your couch watching TV on a random Tuesday and still being functional at work on Wednesday can be downright impossible when you’re in your late 30s. In the past two years, I have massively reduced my alcohol intake to about 1-2 drinks every 6 months or so on special occasions (usually trips back to Minnesota where alcohol can hardly be avoided) and have never felt better.

I was perpetually stuck in a victimhood mentality. After Wells Fargo, I knew shit was rigged and I had too much dignity to kiss the asses of the kinds of bosses who played along with the game without, at minimum, a conspiratorial “wink” to demonstrate that they were at least self-aware in their participation of the madness in which we were entrenched. This led to plenty of petty sabotage and whistleblowing which felt righteous, but it also led to a very defeatist attitude that brought me down everywhere else in life in addition to work. Occupy only solidified my hatred for work as a concept and my distrust for the capitalist economic system as a whole. I do not look back on Occupy or my involvement in it as misguided for this; I credit it with giving me more self-respect, even though I went (in my opinion) a little too far and needed that pendulum swing to slow down a little.

What got me out of this self-destructive mindset was a boyfriend with a very different background and perspective on money and class in general. While I can’t say the relationship was the most stable, he was responsible for catalyzing a lot of my own personal growth in this area. This was a guy who’d traveled all over the world, usually to some of the most impoverished places on the planet that changed his perspective in what “poor” really meant, and he would do anything he could to finance those trips that he loved so much. His family wasn’t wealthy, but they were solidly middle-class and he was always able to find ways to make it work. He had a lot more options than I did at his fingertips and that caused me to resent a lot his advice that seemed out of touch with my reality, but eventually it sunk in: if I care enough about something, I can make it happen. Not only that, but I am the only person in control of my own life and how I react to what happens in it. No one else has that responsibility, and I cannot force it on anyone else. That realization was life-changing. It would take a while to fully internalize this message, but once I did, I felt incredibly free, finally. I was not truly trapped by anything that was not of my own making, or by something that could not be unmade — also, and only, by me. A better attitude can often lead to better opportunities and more open doors. It was something I'd heard in one way or another my whole life and blew off as a cliché, but, as we do, I eventually learned firsthand why it exists.

I grew up with the example that you do what you have to do to survive. Even if your job sucks, you go to it every day because you have to. What I did not grow up with was an example of how to rise above your station in life, or how to chase my dreams. That was for me to figure out on my own. I was being raised by someone who didn’t have those luxuries herself because her husband left her with two young children to raise on her own, and she needed to figure out a good-paying job, fast, to take care of us. She abandoned her original goals and enrolled in a community college into the program with the highest reported salary she could find and got a diploma in powdered metallurgy, something she knew and cared nothing about but pursued solely out of necessity. There was no time for her to chase her dreams, only to do what had to be done, so there was no advice to give me on how to do anything differently. I don’t resent this; since recognizing it, I understood exactly why it was that way and, uncharacteristically, immediately thought more about how that had affected my mother than how it affected me (I told you I have a tendency to be self-centered). And I also understand that I’m the only one who can do anything about how it's affected me and that it’s useless to dwell resentfully in any direction.

A guy I dated once told me that upper-class parents act like managers to their kids, while working-class parents act like friends. He was part of the former group and was vaguely resentful of this fact that he’d observed in his own life and relationship with his parents, and I would see him talk to them on the phone and note how the conversation was always about updates about his life: how was work going? Were there any promotion opportunities coming up? Have you given any more thought to graduate school? Do you think you’ve saved enough for an investment property yet? He’d always end those conversations exhausted. He was jealous of my relationship with my mom, where we’d talk about our lives and the people we knew and how work was going for each of us, but without any pressure or subtext, just a conversation. Just hanging out. I realized then with some amusement that I was jealous of his relationship with his parents, thinking that having more of that may have pushed me to try harder, earlier.

I go back and forth between looking back on these experiences as a frustrating waste of time that took me too long to get past, and an amused pride in my ability to collect such strange and entertaining memories through even some of the stupider decisions I’ve made. Ultimately I am glad for all the varied experiences I’ve had, and especially the different people I’ve met along the way. Most of my friendships and relationships began from jobs (I met my ex-husband at that Wells Fargo call center; he sat across from me and would eventually lose his complete mind dealing with the place and started to tell customers things like “we spent your overdraft money on pizzas and ponies” when they’d get mad about their balances, and he eventually quit by simply never coming back after a smoke break). There’s a lot of value in learning how to read and talk to a variety of different people in a way that ensures a harmonious sort of interaction, and I’ve carried that with me, which is good. It’s important to have a good knowledge of what life is like in those customer-facing roles, too, for the more obvious reason of empathy.

I do wish job stacking had been a thing back then, though. I’d do it now had I not committed myself to this yoga and fitness track. But even though has his own framing for the practice, it’s also pretty dope left-wing praxis. Stick it to the evil corporate overlords! Get that bag while you can. Use it to buy land for a commune or some shit. If the wellness industry doesn’t work out and job stacking hasn’t been destroyed by said evil corporations yet, you can count on that being my next employment-related adventure.

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We made it! We're in the final stretch of all the jobs I've had so far (except the ones I forgot about). Catch up on the previous parts of my entire chronological online resume at Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.

TSA, 36

That was an experience.

Training took place in the most depressing room you could imagine: grey concrete walls, crooked motivational posters of the extremely old school variety, a dead plant in the corner. You buzzed at the door to get into the training room and waited as the grumpiest person alive (all of them were) let you in, usually rolling their eyes at you for the imposition.

Training consisted of 10 or so of us. Most of them were much younger than I was and, I would quickly learn, hardly remembered the event that caused their job to exist in the first place. Half these children didn’t even know that more than the Twin Towers had been hit, and we were four miles from the Pentagon and its 9/11 memorial.

They weren’t all bad, though; their youthful ignorance was kind of adorable. They were not all good, either: one girl picked me out of the whole lot to bafflingly try to bully in the most juvenile ways, like cutting in front of me in the microwave line and pointedly ignoring me when I politely told her I was next. Every time I, and only I, asked a question in class, she grunted or sighed impatiently. There was more nonsensical, clearly targeted behavior that I don't remember anymore, and I was glad to be assigned to a different checkpoint and schedule than her in the end, in disbelief that I’d already earned a random enemy at this place for no reason at all. It would seem that many people who worked there had only wanted the job for an excuse to be rude and aggressive to other people all day, whether that be the passengers, their coworkers, or both.

I worked on three different checkpoints; it was normal to get moved around often as you bid for new shifts every few months. Some were better than others, but one thing was consistent: I made zero lasting connections with any coworkers on any of them, which was very unusual for my experiences in different workplaces. I had started avoiding the break room during lunches because everyone talked and ate so loudly that I hoped a plane would veer off course during takeoff and crash through the break room window to end it all already, for the love of God.1

My coworkers were polite enough to me, and I to them, but I had next to nothing in common with most of them with the exception of one group of nerds on the night shift at my favorite checkpoint who would get dispersed too quickly to other checkpoints after the next shift bid. A lucky few got to go to baggage. Everyone wanted to go to baggage because there were no passengers in baggage. It was said that baggage was where all the weirdos went, and from what I saw when I got glimpses into their break rooms, I took that to mean “fellow unlikely officers who don't belong here and are just waiting for something better to come along” and, while I didn't hate the passengers, I knew I probably would eventually, and I didn't much like my checkpoint coworkers and I wanted in. My Minnesota luck for getting what I wanted even though I rarely deserved it would remain in Minnesota and I would not go to baggage.

Starting that job in March of 2020, right at the beginning of Covid, the airport was deader than dead. The internally infamous2 two-week training that took place down in Georgia that we’d all been looking forward to had been canceled and turned into a horrid Zoom thing where we had to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at our computer monitors before we started every morning.

It was extremely hard not to laugh during this ritual every morning, not having done it since I was in, like, first grade and finding it so over the top as an adult, but I’d literally taken an oath and signed up on purpose for exactly that kind of performative patriotism and I was a good sport. Despite the fact that all of us were pretty much using the job as a foot in the door for the security clearances that would hopefully qualify us for better jobs elsewhere in the agency, I still had some pride in being official federal officer Strike and at least tried to focus on the overall goal of serving people in some manner, grotesque as that sounds when I'm talking about a job that had me groping people and searching through their shit all day. Still, it would cost $10,000 and some jail time to assault me in uniform, which everyone openly hoped would happen to them in some mild but prosecutable fashion so that they could get the 45 paid days off that came with it. The managers would not threaten to fire you for expressing such a desire to not work like the deported Canadian would at the chat support job, because they all openly hoped for exactly the same thing.

Anyway, I was the least likely and least intimidating TSO in the entire airport. I like to think it’s because I was the only friendly person ever to be employed by the agency in its entire history, but really it’s probably because most people who work that job come from a security background, not a customer service background like I had and couldn’t help but fall into by default. Most of them were hard-asses and took no shit, albeit excessively, pre-emptively, and usually unnecessarily. Most of them were on a power trip or busy trying to get into the Secret Service, Customs and Border Patrol, or the Capitol Police (I had my eye on FEMA but didn't know what to do about it yet). It wasn’t unusual to see many officers walking around carrying gallons of water as part of whatever training routine they were on to qualify for one of the tougher branches of the agency.

The thing about the job is that it didn’t actually suck if you ignored the internal nonsense, like the rude coworkers, endless bureaucracy, incompetent management, and questionable existence of the agency itself. We rotated roles every 30 minutes to break it up (and to limit x-ray exposure), and I didn’t really hate any particular role other than the ones where I had to be completely alone with next to nothing to do, like manning the exit lane. That consisted of sitting there waiting for someone to accidentally start walking up the wrong way and standing up and telling them to stop. If you were lucky, a bored coworker in another station would wander over to discuss zombie books with you or something.

Patting people down was not as bad as I feared it would be. Like the old-timers frequently told us with bored looks on their faces, it would become rote very quickly. For one thing, few people ever cared, at least not out loud, and many just chose the full-body pat-downs on their own, not wanting to go through the body scanner. It was surprising how quickly the act of shoving my hands up a chick’s underwire through her shirt or firmly (it had to be firmly!) sliding my hand up an inner thigh till I hit the almost-vag would become a mundane part of my daily life (yes, we did have to practice on each other during training). Giving someone in a wheelchair with no arms or legs a full-body pat-down was sure an interesting experience, though. Thankfully she was at least used to it.

After you got used to the activity itself, the worst part about it became the quick, partial ones you did when someone set off the body scanner (please don't wear sequins to the airport), because you had to change your gloves after every passenger, and it was practically impossible to do this quickly and efficiently when it was busy and your hands were sweaty, but it was gross and also against the new Covid rules not to.

Because it was the nation’s capital’s primary airport, I got to screen a lot of politicians. My small excitements were searching a US senator's luggage, and accidentally yelling at Ivanka Trump for going the wrong way down a special lane when I thought she was just a normal passenger. I got scolded by a supervisor for that one, but damn, I didn’t know it was the back of her head until she turned around to glare at me after the second time I told her she was not allowed to go that way, not having yet seen the escorts ahead of her and her husband. And while I never got to meet him myself, a coworker told me Bernie was a very jolly passenger who always managed to get himself onto the emptiest commercial flights and spent a lot of time in the lounge.

Overall, I didn't mind the things other officers complained about the most, like explaining how things worked to passengers or helping them through the process, repetitive and annoying as it could be sometimes. I knew how intimidating it could be to be barked at for seemingly no reason by someone in a uniform and badge, no matter how little useful authority those things actually provided to us. They usually didn’t know that. I usually volunteered to do more time in the position everyone else hated where you stand at the tables before the x-ray and tell people, over and over again, what to take out of their bags and off of their bodies. I was nice about it and I never minded the opportunity to talk to people and see what kind of interesting new weirdos I could meet that day (and discover what kind of electronics people didn't realize were electronics, like entire desktop computers and Xboxes). I liked to think it was a disarming deterrent to look so many people in the eye and be nice to them right off the bat before they entered the rest of the security gauntlet, but who knows. I also got to spend most of my time in a terminal with two flights to Minneapolis during my shift, so I got to hear my beloved Minnesota accents once in a while and be reminded what it was like to talk to nice people again for a change.

The reason and way I stopped working there would honestly require a whole ‘nother essay3, and I’m still dealing with some of it because the agency is from hell and there is no other way to put it. I only don’t regret it because I had the best health insurance in existence through them and actually needed to use it when I worked there.

Suffice it to say, the place was about as miserable on the inside as it feels from the outside. I recommend buying Pre-Check; it is well worth the money for a much faster process through the gates of hell dealing with the angriest people on earth who come to work every day actively looking for a fight.

I would not smoke weed for entirety of my time here because they did random drug tests all the time. That first bowl I smoked a year and a half later after I quit was magical.

Cardiac clinic scheduling, 37

This shit wasn’t scheduling at all; it was a goddamned tiny call center in a private practice clinic.

I lasted one week. Well, four days total, since my first week included the 4th of July, which I had off. My new record for shortest time in a call center. If I’m ever desperate and dumb enough to try again, I’ll last about 30 minutes before probably running straight out the door to my car, crying, never to return.

Outback, 38

I went into this job kicking and screaming. I was done with TSA and needed to get my shit together, yet again. I had applied at the post office, thinking I’d be able to at least keep working for the government in a different capacity and get that sweet health insurance back, but their hiring process took one million years just like TSA's did. I went into Outback because it was seemingly one of the only places I hadn’t worked yet, I knew how to work at chains, and they had a busy bar. I bellied up and ordered a glass of wine and a baked potato and asked if they were hiring bartenders. I specified! I said motherfucking bartenders! And they all said yes!

I was hired as a server. I would be able to “work my way up” to bartender, which at this point I had believed just about as much as I believed a doctor when they said I’d only feel “a pinch,” which is to say not at all. I had mentally quit that job before I’d even finished my first shift, but I kept at it for about six months because I just couldn’t not have a job anymore.

The place would end up being another one that had an absolutely batshit owner4. This particular lady threatened to lock us all inside and not let us leave on Christmas Eve because someone played a good-natured prank on her involving hiding some stupid Christmas toy she brought in. A few days later, there would be a freak snowstorm and everyone’s power would go out for several days, so the other bitchy manager who let her 10-year-old daughter run around the busy, tiny kitchen every night brought in her pet turtle, put it in a plastic cover from some tray from the kitchen, and placed it in the food window under the heat lamp to keep him warm. I immediately took a picture. She asked me to please not share it anywhere.

I would try my best to stay on Nina’s good side because she knew my brother-in-law's oldest daughter's husband who used to work there in high school (small-ass towns, man), but it was impossible. She was the worst. Her contempt for all but one or two of her favorites was impossible to hide. The fact that my nephew-in-law (is that what we call them?) was one of her former favorites did me zero favors.

Back of house staff were exceptionally vicious at this place for some reason. That kind of shit used to be part of the funny, camaraderie-building eye-rolls about life in The Industry or whatever, but by this point I was so fucking over it I couldn't even try to find it amusing anymore. It was just straight up hostile and it pissed me off the way rude bartenders start to piss you off after you turn 30 when adults with unresolved attitude problems are no longer cute.

You quickly learned the one or two cooks who would be nice to you and try to communicate only with them as often as possible, hoping they understood enough English to do so and, once again, lamenting your decision to take French in high school, but it was pretty much guaranteed that you'd be treated like an idiot or worse by any of the rest of them, no matter who you were. Even managers were afraid of them. You'd bring them back a hockey puck of a steak that you'd rung in medium-rare and they'd roll their eyes and start swearing about it. I thought the dishwasher might straight up murder me in the parking lot for the first couple months if I put a dirty dish in the wrong place. I swear to god they recruited for that position straight from the nearest prison. And god forbid you ever needed to ask Miss Kim for a side of dressing or get her to correct a mistake she made or, worse, a mistake you made. That woman would lose her shit on at least one person per shift and regularly made people cry. She wasn't even anyone's boss.

The bartenders were usually busy and had a lot of regulars and all of them were some degree of hot, all of which seemed to inflate their egos and make them feel superior to servers, who they often treated as their de facto assistants and snap at us to get bread for their tables or straws or kid cups or something. One bartender was one of those Marines who never let you forget that she was a Marine, who made a big show of working out all the time and swishing around her constantly-tangled bleached hair and would come into meetings in leggings and a crop top and loudly complain about how tired she was after her exhausting run this morning preparing for the latest Marine 5k or whatever (there are literally so many Marine races out here, I cannot keep track).

She would go through a very loud divorce, start shacking up with one of the cooks, and scream at said cook in the kitchen in front of everyone about various new home life squabbles while the other cooks elbowed him and called him whipped. I’d never before encountered so many stereotypes wrapped into one person.

I would continue to clash with my bosses, get yelled at by BOH assholes, and be mostly ignored by my coworkers (with a few exceptions, like the pregnant 19-year-old who sold me weed who refused to believe I was twice her age, which made me feel both good and a little pathetic, and the 65-year-old cokehead I'd drive home on occasion) until I finally called in sick for a few days to look desperately for a new job so I could quit. I signed up with a temp agency and texted the hostage-taking boss to tell her I was done, figuring my 6 months of half-assed employment there was notice enough.

Temp work, 38

I spent one day driving auction cars around a parking lot in Fredericksburg for $16/hr. The post office called me after that. I still haven't unsubscribed from the temp agency's daily job texts, like a Depression granny who washes generic Ziploc bags and reuses aluminum foil until it crumbles. It's been three years.

USPS, 38

Here we fuckin’ go. The great, gutted, government temp agency.

This was one of those jobs that I loved for the job itself and the customers but hated for the institution and its nonsensical operating style, which was even more incompetent and backwards than TSA, if you can imagine.

It started out on a great foot: I was called to ask why I hadn’t shown up to orientation. I asked, “what orientation?” Why, post office clerk orientation, silly! We emailed you about it!

Actually, they apparently neither copied and pasted my email address like any normal person would, nor did whomever was in charge of sending that email know the difference between a typed lower-case “L” and an upper-case “I” and sent it to some other, wrong person. They put me in the next orientation class which started the following week. It was for carriers, but would be largely the exact same orientation.

(I would later receive the orientation invitation to the correct email address one year later. Better late than never?)

I went to Richmond for a couple days for training, where I took another government oath and was assigned to my post office: a satellite office of a rural post office a 45-minute drive from me in the middle of nowhere. It was then that I learned that my part-time position with the post office was actually four and a half hours a day, six days a week. The only days I’d have off were Sundays and federal holidays, when the post office wasn’t open. This was standard for part-time employees, which I somehow didn’t know until after I was hired. Well, no going back, I guess. I counted on moving up to a career position within the year and having two days off again, like a normal person.

Because I was the only clerk in the room full of carriers, when the union people came in to talk to us, I was told to leave because my potential union as a clerk would be different, should I choose to join (I did). I was told to ask my postmaster to set me up with a union orientation on my own.5

I started at my post office and was “trained” by the postmaster. I learned I would be there by myself every day, opening and closing it, as it was only open for four hours a day. We were what’s known as a “manual” office, as opposed to one of the larger ones with modern equipment. That means I had an old-school Pitney-Bowes scale and had to write out my transactions and cash receipts by hand. There was no POS or receipt printer except on the credit card machine which went out a lot because the internet service was unreliable way out there, and my cash register was a basic calculator and the open safe.

The post office was slow, but that was frankly wonderful. Since I could hardly use my phone inside due to the poor service, I got back in the habit of reading and managed to read 74 books the first year I worked there. I also got to know the regulars who had boxes in the tiny office, most of whom were very old. I made nice with the lady my postmaster warned me about, Mrs. Brayden, who I would end up winning over and became the recipient of many of her locally-famous baked goods. She had COPD and would often call me from outside in the parking lot and ask me to bring her the mail from her box because walking was hard for her. I happily complied; as against the rules as all that was, you made exceptions for your new adopted grandparents.

I would learn a lot about the history of the area from another one of my older customers, Mr. Ewing, who was a retired attorney and had every local fact catalogued in his massive brain. He had one of those old Tidewater accents that sounded so classy and old-fashioned that are rapidly dying out in favor of whatever confused Mid-Atlantic drawl-hybrid thing is replacing it. He gave me good-natured shit about being a Northerner and told me it took him a long time to trust Yankees after everything he knew about the “War of Northern Aggression,” but that he’d eventually married a woman from Maine who turned out to be his not-so-distant cousin (it was true, I looked it up; his wedding announcement was in the New York Times). He got the Wall Street Journal delivered to his box every day and for a while, he had duplicates of the paper and told me to go ahead and take the duplicate for myself every day to read. He donated to tons of charities and got endless piles of mail and calendars and other gifts from them that he’d also pass on to me. I have more 2024 calendars than I know what to do with. We exchanged a few postcards and letters, and I am ashamed to say I have not responded to his most recent one simply because I literally cannot read his old man scrawl and have no idea what he said to me. I’ll send him a Christmas card.

I worked alone all day and made most of the daily decisions that needed to be made, and that made it feel like it was my post office. I was The Post Office Lady for the whole tiny, unincorporated town, and I leaned into my role with some reluctant enthusiasm. I tried to make the place a more friendly stop for the folks who had to use it because everyone else who worked at the post offices nearby were grouchy by default (like TSA!), and this one was run-down and full of cockroaches and mice and grime and mold. I bought seasonal decorations myself and decorated the office for Halloween, Christmas, Spring, the 4th, whatever I could find at the dollar store. I brought in candy for the first Halloween but no one ate it because I failed to account for the fact that everyone was old and diabetic. I would leave the candy out of any future offerings.

My husband was getting into woodworking and was busy building planters for everyone in our zip code that spring, so I asked him for a small one to put out front. He brought it by and helped me plant tomatoes in them that I gave away to customers. He also built a bench for the post office and we put it right out front. Mr. Dunlap would notice it and later ask if my husband could build one for him and deliver it (he would). Mr. Dunlap was a grizzled old Vietnam vet who, after you told him to have a nice day, would reply, “and you do likewise” in the voice of Cleveland from Family Guy, which was just how he normally talked.

Mr. Johnson was another older customer with a box in the office, but we would immediately clash. He saw my vanity plate outside and asked what it meant. It was a variation of the word “uffda,” a Minnesota-ism, and I started to explain what it meant and how to use it.

“It's kind of like ‘oy vey,’” I told him, “only, like, more Lutheran.”

He gasped. “That could be considered anti-Semitic, you know!”

I was appalled. Since when was “oy vey" an anti-Semitic phrase?6 It was literally something I'd only heard Jewish people say, and it was a more well-known phrase than “uffda,” so I thought it was the perfect comparison. He went on to explain that just because Jewish people say it doesn't mean I got to. I was perplexed and defensive. We would continue to not get along, and then he died. The man went to the grave thinking his post office lady was an anti-Semite and now I have a guilt complex.

Uffda.

The relationship I had with my postmaster, who primarily worked out of the main location for that area, was a bizarre one. She was older than me by about fifteen years or so and had worked for the post office her whole adult life. She smelled like raw, unwashed butt almost every single day I saw her (blessedly less frequently as time went on) except once in a great while when she smelled like shampoo after what I assume was her once-a-month bath7. She was also astonishingly dumb, and I say this with as much respect for my elders as I can muster. She could rarely answer any of my questions that went beyond “what form do I use” and, kind of like the lady from US Bank who trained me in 2011, would not really understand how anything worked by virtue of having simply been there too long without ever having asked a single question about anything. She was possibly the least curious person I had ever met, perhaps even hostile to the idea of curiosity itself.

Plenty of absurd things happened there at the tiny rural office that would have shut the place down if it were literally anywhere else, like the canvas mail bags I had to use that were covered in mold until I finally complained enough and sent enough back that I finally started receiving ones without the spreading black spots all over them.

I would come in one day to notice that one of the front windows was broken and covered with a Priority Mail box taped to it. I texted my postmaster to ask what happened, and she would tell me that the guy who covered the day before when I had an appointment saw a bee, swatted at it with one of Mr. Ewing’s old newspapers, and shattered the apparently 19th-century single pane of glass behind it. The Priority Mail box would stay there through the winter and up until just after I left, a year later. One day part of the ceiling just fell down crashing to the floor a few feet behind me while I was sitting at my desk. It, too, would be replaced with Priority Mail boxes that would remain there until after I left. I tried to clean the bathroom once, and my postmaster laughed and asked why I’d even bother.

I would eventually lose my entire mind needing to be at this post office for 6 of the 7 days of my week, every week, for over a year now. I finally broke. It felt like I had no time to myself, and I had to share my one day off with the rest of the world. My postmaster looked at me like I was an entitled brat for not wanting to give most of my week to that place, which would again show me that these people have no dignity and accept everything without meaningful complaint. And what in the goddamned hell was that union even for if we still needed to be there 6 days a week? They couldn’t figure this shit out? 24-hour Walmarts (RIP) managed it, for fuck’s sake. I looked for other positions nearby and inquired about applying for career roles, but I realized this was all just going to be more of the same. Maybe I’d get placed in a different office that I liked more and have two days off, but more than likely, wherever I was placed would contain grumpy coworkers and all of the same bureaucratic nightmares of my current office. I’d hate whatever I did and wherever I went. I knew myself that well by now, anyway.

Serendipitously, just around that time, my husband had somewhat accidentally become the subject of a bidding war at work and came out of it with a raise that amounted to more than my entire salary from the post office. I plotted a potential course of action and asked if he minded if I quit my job to focus instead on earning certifications or credentials in another field so that I might find a job I didn’t loathe with all of my being someday. He said that sounded like a great idea. I gave the postmaster a month notice and this time it didn’t bite me in the ass and I stayed until my scheduled last day. Just in case.

I initially decided I wanted to go into data analytics and took a couple classes in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and SQL first, but once I started yoga teacher training in the middle of the SQL class, I decided I wanted to focus on fitness and teaching. Now, after a little over a year off, I am now a certified yoga instructor and working on certifications in personal training, group fitness, and nutrition coaching through NASM.

So here we are.

I know I said this is the last part, and it is! But you can probably expect some kind of wrap-up post in a week or so, because after going through all these jobs and their various memories and photos, I have some thoughts!

Thanks for coming along on my Jobs Journey. Until next time!

Tip Jar

Catch up here on Part One, Part Two, and Part Three!

Like I mentioned in Part Three, Husband (then-boyfriend) was offered a job in Northern Virginia and we decided to move together.

Before we moved, we were renting a huge apartment in a small building owned by one of my brewery regulars’ cousins, and we rapidly got two sets of our friends to move into two of the other empty units. It was a takeover. We had a 3-season front porch, a new back deck, a huge kitchen with the goofiest linoleum and paint combinations possible (we loved it), and 3 bedrooms. We paid $600 a month and I lived 6 blocks from work. It was 2016 and we were in our 30s, surrounded by all our best friends like it was a grown-up dorm. We swore we’d never leave.

…Six months later, we would leave for the expensive Virginian suburbs of DC, some 1200ish miles away, where we would definitely never pay $600 a month for a giant 3-bedroom apartment ever again.

I was excited by the prospects of living in the orbit of such a powerful and important city. What kind of work would I do there? Could I make a real difference somehow? Could I get a great DC job in the government somehow, with my strange and wide array of job experience? I thought maybe I’d be inspired to write more and get back into activism, maybe combine it with photography somehow.

I started looking online at jobs in the area before we left and found that seemingly every decent job required a security clearance, which I certainly didn’t have and wasn’t sure how to acquire. I resolved to figure it out.

Brewery and restaurant server, 33

Upon arrival in our new home, we quickly realized that our financial situation was going to remain precarious until Husband started getting paychecks from the new job and we had paid off the last straggling utility and other bills from Minnesota, so I looked for a job I could get more quickly while I explored the lay of the land to see what my options were. We were staying with Husband’s brother and his family in an exurb of DC while we got ourselves situated and found a place of our own, so I started there.

We found a cool brewery with a restaurant and trivia night in downtown Fredericksburg a few days after we arrived in the state. Because it was a brewery, I felt very confident and asked the bartender if they were hiring, and sure enough, they were, but not for bartenders, only servers. Of course. I was hired anyway and started a few days later, because why the fuck not try serving again despite my disastrous restaurant track record? But I figured I had a good shot of becoming a bartender soon with my specific brewery experience, so I thought I could handle a short wait time starting out as a server.

I lasted one slow lunch shift and about fifteen minutes of a Friday dinner shift before leaving in tears, apparently my preferred job-quitting method now, overwhelmed by their very lassiez-faire seating system and nonexistent sections. The fact that Virginia is a tip-credit state and I was only earning a $2.13 base wage didn’t help any — I was used to Minnesota, where tipped employees earn the full minimum wage in addition to their tips (Minnesota is one of only seven states to require this of their restaurants).

I learned my lesson. No more serving, anywhere, ever again, no matter how cool the place seemed. Especially not in a tip credit state. I needed actual paychecks.

Claims adjuster at a large insurance company, 33

Since I wanted to avoid any more restaurants and call centers and already got the first restaurant out of the way, I applied for the next most sensible position I could find: claims adjuster in the call center of a large insurance company. Naturally. We’ll just call them ACRONYM. They offered a higher starting wage than I’d ever earned at that point (if you don’t count the first brewery before I had to start sharing tips with my boss): $17.65 an hour.

I passed the phone interview and cleared the rest of the corporate hurdles and scheduled my “HR day,” which was several hours long and included a series of tests and interviews and acted-out scenarios and job-shadowing and waiting around. I did one of my assessments in a room full of computers, seated next to a young woman who couldn’t have been older than 21. She’d come from Alorica — a large 3rd party call center with a horrid reputation that would eventually buy the one I worked for doing Best Buy chat support, MNsure, and Verizon supervising in Minnesota. This gal’s contract was with Comcast; I shuddered at the thought. I asked her how much she made there. She told me, proudly, that she made $9.00 an hour, “but there’s so much overtime available. You can make so much money!”

I was appalled at every single thing that came out of her mouth during that conversation. She thought $9.00 an hour was good? She thought that working in a call center for even a nanosecond longer than 40 hours a week just to get a more livable paycheck was enjoyable? Was this region under some kind of mass delusion? Did they not understand that these were not reasonable wages for such a job in such a high cost of living area? Did these people have no pride?!1

I almost left the HR day before it began when I saw the signs all over the walls that said “hair samples required for drug screening.” They were framed and had tufts of cut doll hair to show how much they were going to take, which was a surprisingly thick amount. I quickly checked my phone to see how long THC stays in your hair: up to 90 days! There was no way I was getting this job; it had only been, like, 3 days since I last smoked weed after a few years of regular use, expecting only to need to pass a standard pre-employment UA, easy enough to cheat with those overpriced vitamin drinks you could get at head shops. Those don't work on hair.

I decided to stay and put myself through the pointless torture of the HR day and the hair test, anyway, just in case. I read the rules and, after the drug test surely showed up positive, I could reapply in 6 months. I was hired conditionally, awaiting the results of my drug test. I didn’t think much of it, expecting a phone call informing me that I had failed. I kept looking for jobs.

They called me a few days later to tell me what to expect on orientation day. It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. I still don’t know if the test was somehow faulty or if they just didn’t care about weed, despite it having been illegal in Virginia at the time. Eventually, as we in the training class started opening up a bit more, I learned I was not the only one who assumed they'd fail the drug test and had no idea how they passed. We compared bald spots from the hair we'd all had chopped off.

Despite being in yet another goddamned call center, I was excited for the training class because call center training classes were where you always made fast friends, and I was going to need some mere weeks after moving halfway across the country. Moving life hack!

This is where I met Todd, who I decided during orientation was going to be my first Virginia friend whether he liked it or not. He had said something in the large orientation group pertaining to the restaurant industry, which he had just left himself, and I sensed a kindred spirit, finally escaping the trenches for the first light at the end of many retail and food service tunnels: a call center. The worst job imaginable, but somehow preferable to food service for many. We would have many stories to trade.

I also met Corbin, who wore a beanie every day in class and talked like a very articulate surfer. He would entertain, happily, my constant insistence that he listen to Minneapolis hip-hop. We bonded over Eyedea and Abilities and Dessa. He introduced me to Aesop Rock.

It was out on the smoking patio that I ran into Justin, the server who was training me at the brewery the day I left in tears. Apparently he worked full-time in IT at ACRONYM and picked up the serving job for extra money. We said an awkward hello. Eventually Corbin, Todd and I started hanging out and organized training class outings to the very brewery where I’d gotten my first very brief Virginia job for trivia night (Justin would be our server) and Todd gave me the occasional ride before I got a car. I started buying weed from Corbin.

ACRONYM insurance claims training was like a crash (heh) course in Virginia culture. This is where I learned that a “tractor trailer” was not, in fact, a John Deere towing a U-Haul behind it but instead what normal people would call a “semi truck.” After a week of hearing about “tags,” I finally learned they were talking about “license plates” and not the stickers on them. They would also take the “h” in “vehicle” very seriously. None of them thought they had an accent, but they always giggled when I said something with the letter “O” in it, or the word “bag” (I relish this difference and refuse to let the entirety of my Minnesota accent disappear).

The trainer was a balding guy with those horrible old aviator glasses and a central Virginia drawl that I've since kind of grown to hate (sorry). He was a youth pastor who called things “retarded” when he didn't like them. All of this was utterly shocking to me, especially the fact that when I looked around, no one else seemed particularly bothered or even surprised. The fact that he talked endlessly about church was even bizarre to me. Minnesota, at least in the Twin Cities where I'm from, had a much more secular culture, and due to either a lack of participation or maybe a desire not to be pigeon-holed as one of those people, you never really heard that kind of casual church talk in a big corporate workplace like that. He never preached at us or anything; it was just so different from what I was used to. Not to mention that back home, saying “retarded” in a training class like that would've surely gotten him reported to HR. We were not in Minneapolis anymore, Toto.

Despite forming our little tight-knit groups in the beginning of class, we all dropped like flies not long after getting out onto the floor. It would be my shortest time in a call center (so far): not even five entire months. My tolerance for being attached by headset cord to a desk all day and micromanaged for every second of it was diminishing exponentially.

ACRONYM was well-known in the area for being a miserable place to work, no matter which position you found yourself in. There was a dark section in the back of the main floor with its own dreary supervisor, dotted with pinkish-orange Himalayan salt lamps set to varying dimness levels, a team created specifically for people with migraines, because they were so easily triggered there. There was also a “silent room” across from the cafeteria where you were not allowed to make a single peep; there were signs all over demanding silence be observed at all times, which included no eating. I did not need to be on Team Migraine, thankfully, but I did love the Silent Room.

Cell phone sales, 33

My ACRONYM health and vision insurance kicked in that May, and I desperately needed new contacts and glasses. I also desperately wanted to quit my job. So towards the end of April, I called in sick for the three days leading up to my scheduled ophthalmology appointment and, the day after it was over, sent an email to Renee, my feathered-blonde tanorexic supervisor from a bygone era whose email signature was in bright green Comic Sans, to tell her I was done. By this point I knew how to properly quit call centers: just go.

I thought perhaps my OccuPast might’ve been polite enough to stay in Minnesota and that it might be safe to start applying to banks again. I tried Navy Federal, PNC, and that crappy one inside the Walmart. I got phone and video interviews with Navy Federal, but they didn’t hire me.

So far, I’d managed to avoid going back to mall retail since the camera store and I was not looking forward to the possibility of returning, but after 3 days renting the basement of a grouchy Air Force lady's overpriced Alexandria townhouse and nope-ing back down to Husband’s brother’s house, we finally settled on an actual entire apartment down in Fredericksburg for the same price and we needed me to have an income. I took a job as a sales associate at a franchise T-Mobile store that was opening in the nearby mall (fun fact: it was the DC sniper mall). It wasn’t open yet, so after training in Richmond, about eight of us new hires were sent to other nearby malls to set up other new stores that the franchise was opening in the region and stayed for about a week each, cleaning up construction trash and Plannogramming2 the entire store for the first time.

Setting up the stores was kind of tedious, but I absolutely hated sales and I was happy to get paid to put off doing my real job for as long as I could. I liked the week we spent in the Charlottesville mall setting up that new store, because the long drive there from where we lived in Fredericksburg was stunning in the morning. Once you got closer, you could see the Blue Ridge mountains in the distance, and the two-lane country roads were misty and hilly and there were picturesque fields blowing around and horses eating hay. Just endless pastoral charm. The infamous march on Charlottesville would happen just a month later, on my 34th birthday, while I was camping drunk somewhere on the Potomac with Fiancé (as of that very night!) and Corbin.

(Just before that birthday camping trip, I applied to work at that very state park as a seasonal ranger and had a really great interview, but they never called me back. Might've been the loud drunken shenanigans and day-drunk Potomac skinny-dipping. I guess we'll never know.)

My store finally opened. I worked one shift during which we discovered that the store’s location was situated perfectly within the mall's dead zone, so no one’s phones worked the second they walked into the store. The Sprint guy a few doors down kept trying to get me to switch when I'd walk past in my hideous magenta jersey shirt.

You will be shocked to learn that that was my last day at the cell phone store.

The Pub, 34

This goddamn motherfucking hillbilly ass shithole.

I started patronizing the place because it was next door to the laundromat I used in the same strip mall. I was absolutely done serving, for good, but I hadn’t given up on bartending, which I was certain I could do without a problem after a little practice learning basic drinks. They all google that shit behind the bar nowadays, anyway. My experience behind the brewery bar had emboldened me, despite having only poured beers. I was a fast learner and I could talk to any random asshole all day long.

As I was saying, it was a fine place to hang out as a customer, at first, plus I was still a smoker then and they were one of the few places in that part of Virginia where you could still smoke indoors, which had been banned in most of Minnesota since 2005 or so. This was exciting to me. The bartenders, especially the loud one, Rhea, were a bit over the top, but they were friendly enough and welcoming. Eventually, I asked the fateful question: are you hiring… bartenders?

“NO,” Rhea yelled for no reason, “BUT IF YOU SERVE HERE, YOU CAN PROBABLY BE ONE SOON. WE'LL GET YOU TRAINED QUICK,” she blatantly lied through her lumpy brown teeth. She swore it was an easy job and the regulars were great tippers. I needed a job, so I nervously took it (she would go on to steal all of my tables that contained the great-tipping regulars).

I never did become a bartender; Rhea trained an even newer server to be the new bartender instead because, she told me, she had been a regular customer longer than I had.

The place was a shitshow. I’ll let my Facebook posts from this time period tell you the story:

Cut to three years later after being hired at TSA:

They would also refuse to give me my W2 for that year and, after I called about it, claimed they already mailed it, wouldn’t provide another, and hung up on me. I had to obtain it from the IRS.

I’m not bitter. Not at all. Why do you ask?

Ruby Tuesday, 34

I wanted out of that shithole and texted Todd and asked him what he was up to since leaving ACRONYM. He was back at his old restaurant bartending and serving. I asked if they were hiring. The Pub gave me a bit more restaurant confidence, and apparently no one else was going to hire me. Clearly I was just going to follow Todd all over the city wherever he worked.

I was ultimately there for almost three years, with some other jobs on top of it or in-between stints there. The money wasn’t very good, but it was easy as hell to serve there, unlike literally everywhere else I’d ever tried, and I loved every coworker and boss I had there. All my friends here pretty much came from ACRONYM and Ruby’s, with a smattering from Husband’s job.

Other slightly nicer restaurant, 34

I decided to pick up a second job for extra money again, realizing I was pretty much the only Ruby’s employee with only one job. I picked a nicer restaurant on the river downtown. One of the other servers who worked there was Sara, who was in our ACRONYM training class (I was beginning to learn that this was a small-ass town). She had, in fact, been my least favorite person in said training class. She was always the first to confidently raise her hand to answer a question, but she was rarely correct and still managed to be haughty about it. She was from Richmond and bafflingly wore a short nightclub dress on business casual day and treated the rest of us like plebs and wouldn't shut up about her boyfriend. We all hated her.

She said a surprisingly warm hello to me on my first day at the restaurant, giving me hope, and then proceeded to ignore me for every shift after that, occasionally shooting a nonsensical glare in my direction but never saying anything else. The people here continue to baffle me.

The restaurant was okay, but my coworkers were snooty and took themselves way too seriously (especially the bartenders — what is it with small town bartenders always thinking they’re the shit? Calm down, glorified DUI machines), I was in no mood to work two jobs and didn’t strictly need to. I didn’t know what had gotten into me. I quit before training was over.

Back to the brewery, 35

By this point in my Ruby Tuesday serving “career,” I was tired of the $35 lunch shifts and the stifling culture of corporate chains. I was hanging out at the old brewery where I'd worked for a shift and a half all the time, anyway, and decided that with my year or so of practice both serving and behind the bar (Ruby’s was the only restaurant to follow through on that promise), I could probably try serving there again and maybe make more money, back in a brewery environment downtown among my people — the hippies and lefty, artsy pagan nerds of downtown Fredericksburg. They were dumb enough to hire me for round two, and I was dumb enough to believe them when they said I could become a bartender after serving for just a little while.

It was just as chaotic as before, but I was more prepared for the chaos and handled it with slightly more grace than I had the first time around. I was beginning to realize, however, that I was an absolutely horrid server. I put myself directly into the weeds if I had more than two tables at a time (I rarely had more than two tables at a time at Ruby’s unless I was bartending, because the place was a relic that would finally officially die from Covid a couple years later). It didn’t help that it had turned into a “seat yourself” establishment with a haphazard way of keeping track of who got which tables, and there were no hosts.

I worked trivia and drag show nights and went out downtown afterwards with my coworkers. I liked the people I worked with, my bosses, and the clientele, but the job was stressful as hell and I made next to nothing unless I worked a night shift, which I rarely did unless it was an all-hands situation like the aforementioned trivia and drag nights. It was there that I would learn that everyone in the industry is on cocaine at all times. Maybe that was what I was missing. I would not test this hypothesis.

Besides not making me a bartender like they promised, they also wouldn’t even let me pour my own customers’ beer when the bartenders were backed up, which was all the time and often just because the bartender I most frequently worked with just didn't feel like doing it yet, causing the most absurd delays that constantly cost me tips due to no fault of my own. It was very annoying. It was difficult to explain that the half hour it took to get them their beer from 3 feet away was not my fault without throwing the bartender under the bus. I was beginning to believe that working for these smaller businesses might actually be worse than working for the soulless, giant megacorps.

Ruby Tuesday again, 35

New Year’s Eve, 2018 into 2019, I was celebrating at my former Ruby’s coworker’s house getting drunk in her basement family room with her, her husband, and the general manager of Ruby’s, Helen, because there are no boundaries in the hospitality industry. Eventually my friend and her husband went to bed, leaving my former boss and me on the floor, backs up against the couch passing a bottle of Fireball back and forth, drunk as shit. I recall asking her if I could please come back to Ruby’s because I had begun to hate the chaotic brewery so much. She said to ask me again after I sobered up. I did, a couple days later, she welcomed me back, and I put in my notice at the brewery. I wanted to leave on a good note because I wanted to be able to keep hanging out there, and I had no ill will toward them. I was beginning to learn that brewery owners really only know how to brew beer, drink it, and talk about it; they do not know how to be employers.

Helen said she wasn’t sure if she could get me back in the bar and I said that was just fine and to please never put me behind the bar ever again. While I didn’t hate the act of bartending itself and in fact quite enjoyed making drinks, I did hate that at chain restaurants like that one, bartenders were just servers with extra responsibilities, taking a normal section of bar tables as well as the guests at the bar itself and making all the drinks servers rang in. The doubled workload was not worth the small amount of extra money it netted to me.

Mold remediation company, 35

While I didn't totally hate my job at Ruby's and I loved the people I worked with, I was starting to feel antsy to make more money and have nights and weekends and holidays off again. I got on Facebook and asked for recommendations, saying I was willing to travel as far south as Richmond or as far north as DC, each 50 miles away, just so long as I didn't have to work anymore retail or food service ever fucking again.

The girlfriend of the head brewer at the very first brewery I worked at in Minnesota responded, saying her second cousin Sheila was looking for an HR and finance manager for the restoration franchise she owned near DC. I interviewed with her, which wasn’t exactly an interview so much as Sheila monologuing at me about her storied career in the military, why she left, and how she wanted to use her experience to be the great leader she never had (she would go on to tell me this story in painstaking detail several more times over the next half year). After over an hour of telling me her life story, she hired me on the spot. I guess she thought I was a good listener.

My job duties were pretty much invented by Sheila from scratch every day, but I did have a few regular responsibilities: I kept track of employee time cards and paychecks and child support garnishments, I filed bills and took care of things like accounts receivable and accounts payable and all the spreadsheet job stuff I’d done before, and I frequently went to court in behalf of the company in Fairfax, Arlington, and DC to sue customers who didn’t pay for their services. I drove to the post office daily and attended weekly meetings in Sheila’s tiny office where she and her co-owner husband would make me listen to them scream at each other for hours on end while my work piled up, like it was their foreplay or something. I would be called in to transcribe firings and write-ups, nervously wishing for literally any other responsibility because by that point, it was apparent that she was a fucking lunatic and I hated having to play on her side against the usually justifiably pissed employees whom she made a loud point to screw over at the first sign of perceived disloyalty. No one who left that company did so with any remaining goodwill toward her.

It was at around the 6-month mark at Sheila’s Bootcamp that I got a call from TSA, a job I’d applied for almost a year prior and had completely given up on by then. The application process was crazy long and took months, and although I’d passed every hurdle, I was just waiting on the official notice that there was an orientation spot opening up for me. The lady said I was scheduled to start in two months. Because of the nature of my position in Sheila’s discount army, I thought I’d be considerate and tell them right away, giving her a full month and a half to find a good replacement, and so that I could help train them in, making her and my immediate manager's jobs a little easier.

Sheila took my resignation personally. She literally refused to speak to or look at me for one entire week and told my manager to tell me that my month and a half notice was invalid and that I was only allowed two weeks. Not only that, but I was being removed from my position immediately, for “security reasons.” I was to move to the main office and become the marketing gal’s Google assistant. Literally I just sat there and fucking Googled shit for her, copying and pasting my findings into a spreadsheet.

After about a week, Sheila called me into her office and apologized for being “immature,” and assured me that she didn’t want to hold her employees hostage. She went on to inform me that because I has resigned — to take a much higher-paying job with much better insurance benefits and the security clearance I'd wanted for two and a half years, mind you — that she would never again trust a recommendation from family or friends ever again. She was apparently most offended that, because she had disappeared from the office the day I turned in my notice, I had given my resignation letter to my manager instead of to her, personally, which I thought was a perfectly normal thing to do, but okay. She graciously told me she had changed her mind and that I was now allowed to work through my original 6-week notice as Amy’s Personal Googler.

Okay.

Crazy fucking control freak would go on to be just like Rhea from The Pub and blatantly lie about my employment there to my TSA federal investigator, knowing full well that I could be denied the job for it because of her vast personal experience in how clearanced jobs like that worked, and told them that she fired me when, in reality, I just stopped fucking going in to be Amy’s Google machine a couple weeks before my planned last day, well beyond her original retaliatory 2-week restriction. She literally tried to destroy my entire future because I very considerately gave her an extremely long notice of resignation.

Thankfully, the investigator didn’t believe her, either.

I hope her husband cheats on her with a 20-year-old with real boobs.

Last but not least… check out the final (I swear… for now) Part Five!

Tip Jar

(Catch up with Part One and Part Two!)

Cocktail server at a chicken restaurant

My mom knew the owners of this place somehow. The details escape me, but she hooked me up with a job there as a cocktail server one night a week. I thought I could give serving another try, and that maybe keeping it to cocktails would make it simpler and more profitable.

That one day a week turned out to be “Liberian Lounge Night,” an accidental homage to that suburb's most prominent immigrant population who had just sort of claimed the place every Wednesday. That first night, I was thrown to the wolves.

“Just walk around with these shots and ask people if they want any. They're $4 each,” the manager brusquely instructed me. “They're usually $3 each, but they don't tip,” I frowned. “…so I overcharge them a dollar for everything and give that to you guys at the end of your shift.” I smiled. This was gonna be an all right gig, probably.

Lol.

I would proceed to nervously weave in and out of the huge crowd made up entirely of Liberian immigrants with bright, colorful clothing, who sneered at me for reasons I never could figure out as they considered whether to buy one of my shots. Bosslady was right: I didn’t get a single tip from anyone.

At a certain point I was to go around and ask everyone if they wanted to order the dinner special, some kind of Liberian fish dish that looked something like this. I don't remember what it was called, just that the intact fish faces were staring deadly at me as I brought out the dishes.

No one could make a decision, and I was barked at or waved away dismissively by about half the customers, and I couldn't hear or understand the other half. It was all very confusing. The whole atmosphere was so aggressive and bright and loud and so much more fast-paced than I was used to. Learning, once again, that I was not cut out for serving of any kind, I went to the kitchen and walked up to the manager.

“I… I… I don’t think I can…” I started to sniffle.

“It’s fine, I figured,” Bosslady cut me off, reaching into a bank bag to count out the “tips” I’d already earned. “It’s not for everyone!” she handed me the money and nicely told me to go home. I sniffled some more, thanked her, and got the hell out of there.

Call center supervisor, 29

The glory of Best Buy chat support couldn't last forever. After about a year, Best Buy pulled the contract and sold it to the Philippines or something, and they would soon be dispersing us typers amongst the phone-answerers. We were devastated, and a handful of people just quit, unable to fathom talking to these people with their voices. I didn’t blame them. We were a special kind of sheltered over in chat, especially if you were a call center veteran and knew what the alternative was like. We knew how lucky we were, and we saw the envy all over the faces of those on the phones during smoke breaks. They wanted to be us so bad and they couldn't help but smirk at our horror at acquiring their fate. I dreaded the transfer back to the phone world, but I stayed.

I had a vacation planned and didn't yet know which client they'd be sending me to. I was desperately hoping it wouldn't be Verizon, our newest, largest, and most infamously miserable contract, and instead had my eye on MNsure, the brand-new online healthcare marketplace that had been created for the ACA in Minnesota. I didn't know what the job entailed exactly, but I figured if I had to talk on the goddamned phone again, at least I'd get to learn about and do something more valuable than giving people order and product updates. (It turned out the company would pay me so little that I actually qualified for the newly-expanded Medicaid. While working the MNsure contract. The irony remains amazing.)

It happened, I was put in MNsure like I wanted, and it was truly awful for a person with any level of compassion. The website was brand new and a complete mess, wait times were at least 45 minutes for these customers so they were always angry and we were always busy. We got two days of very minimal training before being shoved into the phones and had no real way to help anyone with anything other than to tell them to try Chrome instead of Internet Explorer. People with cancer and other awful health issues were calling in and crying and all we really were was discount 3rd party tech support for the website itself. It was brutal for customers and employees alike.

Somehow, despite my continually poor attendance, I was promoted to supervisor after about a month of taking those calls. Supervisor training consisted primarily of watching inspirational Simon Sinek Ted Talks about novel new leadership ideas they would go on to never allow us to fully implement, and how to handle a stinky employee. We thought that last part was a funny thing that probably never happened (you know where this is going).

My attendance improved instantly — I had a mission now, and I became obsessed with my job and never missed another day. The Ted Talks apparently worked on me. I knew how terrible call center life was and I knew that MNsure, being a government contract, was incredibly generous with their availability codes. This meant that I could pull people off the phones for “training” and “coaching” much more often than other contracts typically allowed without financial penalty from the client. I used those trainings not only to teach them about their current job, but to set up shadowing sessions with employees in other, non-phone areas and gave them more tasks they could eventually use on resumes to get out of the damn call center. One gal who repeatedly locked herself out of the system we needed to take calls (I knew she did this on purpose but I could never prove it) was autistic and utterly miserable in her position, but she was easily the smartest employee I had who, when you could actually get her on the phone, would be my best, most knowledgeable and helpful CSR. For the times she was off the phone, I tasked her with writing a job manual for our department, collecting all policy and procedural information we’d learned over the months into a centralized location, something we desperately needed, and she was more than happy to take on the responsibility.

I couldn't make most of the material realities of the job better, like the pay or schedule or the nature of the job itself, but I was blessedly given the freedom to do a few things to make their days a little less miserable on that contract. I scheduled as many team meetings as I could get away with because, literally like the fucking meme, while they wouldn’t raise the base pay rate, they were always willing to spring for pacifying pizza and had a surprising amount of money allotted for “meeting food” worked into the department’s budget.

MNsure also ended the contract. It was a short-lived one, only 6 months or so. The actual state organization snatched up a lucky few members of the team and paid them properly as state employees, and the rest of us were shuttled to our ultimate fate: Verizon.

My team was almost entirely the same people I had in MNsure, only now including Mitt, who would be placed on my team fully to punish me for laughing during the stinky-employee unit of supervisor training: dude reeked. He always appeared to be kind of… shedding something, almost like that cloud of flies on Pigpen, and his clothes were wrinkled and covered in what I can only assume was a Swiss Alps amount of dandruff. He smelled vaguely homeless, almost like Clarence from the Bunny Store of Part One, but less boozy and more… mildewy. Now, fixing his personal hygiene had become my responsibility.

I have mostly blocked this entire mortifying conversation from my memory, but I know I tried to be a gentle as possible. I remember him saying defensively, “I take showers!” and that's when it occurred to me that I didn't think he actually regularly washed his clothes. The flaky old black metal t-shirts he wore every day just hadn't been washed since 1998.

His hygiene would not improve. Other employees would continue to complain to me about it. I turned I over to my own boss to handle.

Professional photo lab customer service, 31

Guess how I left the Verizon call center supervising gig. Just guess.

Anyway, after I exited the building in tears that fall after too many “exempt” 60-hour work weeks making less than my employees did working their own overtime, I applied to the real MNsure and a few other places, unsuccessfully. It was October now and places were just starting to hire seasonal labor. I saw that a professional digital photo lab nearby was hiring — one we’d heard about back at the old photo lab of my early 20s, a practically mythical institution of well-oiled photo production that paid much better than our one-hour mall lab.

I got hired for customer service this time, which I thought I wanted because it paid more. After settling into my new customer service cube, I immediately regretted it and longed to be in the lab. My job was to call customers whose photo orders had problems and asked them what they'd like to do about it. I got to use Photoshop and listen to podcasts and drink tea all day. It didn't completely suck, but my the end of the season, having made zero friends with any of the snooty customer service employees who ignored seasonal temps like we were a cold virus, I was already over being in a cubicle again. I didn't even try to get hired on permanently and decided to enroll in yoga teacher training afterwards instead.

That was a massive fail of a first attempt that I'll talk about some other day!

Beertender, 31

During yoga teacher training, I discovered a new brewery had opened up a couple blocks from my house on my walk home. I went in and seemingly without being able to control myself, asked if they were hiring. Sure enough, one of the owners wasn't interested in serving behind the bar anymore and wanted to hire someone. I was in the right place at the right time and was hired on to this very in-demand job, as breweries with taprooms had finally become legal in Minnesota and everyone wanted in.

This job was easily the most fun I ever had working anywhere. Because of the newness of the brewery scene in the Twin Cities, the industry was extremely cheerful and generous and I could suddenly drink craft beer for free at pretty much any taproom I visited, and ours reciprocated happily. We basically treated each other like local royalty, and occasionally, so did our customers. I got recognized on the street downtown as “that Wabasha girl!” more than once. I didn’t have to actually serve people at tables, which was an absolute gift from the hospitality universe; all I had to do, serving-wise, was pour beer. I was, of course, expected to chat amiably with my bar guests, which came very naturally. Drunk people can be annoying when you're not drinking with them, but brewery customers didn't tend to get as crazy as a typical bar-goer. I made tons of friends that I’m still in contact with today. It was amazing until it wasn’t.

I’ll spare you the boring details, but after a number of changes culminating in a re-titling of certain management in order to allow them to earn tips so they could get away with paying them less, thereby cutting my income literally in half, I left. I still make a point to visit whenever I'm back in Minnesota, though, mostly for the jalapeño beer and the regulars. No hard feelings. Mostly.

Parks and Rec, 31

I discovered this job when I was still only working at the brewery a couple days a week and needed more money. I was pretty much the oldest non-boss there, surrounded and trained by teenagers who did this every summer because it was so easy. I was told that it was a pretty sure bet that I did get a full-time position there if I came back next year.

This job was really nothing like I'd experienced before: it was actually physical in ways that weren't just standing behind a register or a bar, but not too difficult or complicated for someone of my stature. I was sincerely excited for the change of pace.

I spent my days loading the various equipment into either the Mule or the city truck, depending on what we were doing that day, and driving from park to park, weed-whacking and picking up litter and setting up for events and cleaning the horrifyingly revolting public restrooms with barely-reflective metal instead of mirrors because they kept being broken. I literally loved every second. I was getting stronger from all the actual labor and I finally learned how lawn equipment worked. And that some people say “weed whip” instead of “weed whack,” which is weird.

My first day, I would be in charge of driving the full-sized city Parks and Rec pickup truck to one of our parks we needed to clean up. As we were leaving, I immediately backed into a large, decorative boulder. My coworker and I hopped out to assess the damage.

Great, I thought. I will be fired on my first day for crashing the fucking city truck.

My new coworker looked at the dent in the truck bed and shrugged. “I've seen worse. They won't notice.” (She was right.)

One of the most surprising — and oddly freeing — thing about the job was that we could drive those damn trucks anywhere. Well, more accurately, on anything. We did not merely park on the street next to the park; we drove over the curb into the park itself and parked directly next to the bathrooms, aggressively and enthusiastically. In my dented city truck, I could do anything.

I only left because the brewery wouldn’t cooperate with my Parks and Rec schedule, but the brewery also wouldn’t lay me off at the end of the summer, so they won.

Professional photo lab production, 33

By this point my then-boyfriend, now-husband and I had moved in together. He had recently separated from the military and I just had my tip earnings halved at the brewery. I told him about the professional photo lab where I’d worked for a season a couple years prior, and we both applied, this time for the lab. We got the jobs and had a great time working together. We were both offered full-time, permanent positions after the season was over, which we happily accepted, but then Boyfriend-Husband suddenly received a much better job offer out of nowhere.

We moved to Virginia three weeks later.

I’ll tell you all about my working life in Virginia, so far, in Part Four and Part Five.

Tip Jar

The end of my third decade had arrived, and many things began to change.

Welcome to Part Two of the journey of jobs. You can catch up with Part One here.

Accounting specialist at another bank, 27

After my 4-hour stint with the Clean Water Liars’ Club, I realized I no longer had any idea how to do anything else and rescinded my previous declaration that I would never work at another financial institution ever again. A friend worked at one downtown and referred me to an open position in an adjacent department. I was hired as an “accounting specialist,” which roughly translated to “stare at Excel and try to figure out what to do about the numbers.”

I replaced someone who retired and saw that all of my new coworkers were nearing that age, themselves; I was the youngest one in the department by a long shot. The woman tasked with training me answered most of my questions with some variation of “I’m not sure, that’s just the way we’ve been doing it for the past 25 years!” She ate at her desk, sharing a cube wall with mine, constantly and loudly, which made me want to violate every corporate rule against workplace violence.

My very first Spreadsheet Job.

A few months into that job, Occupy Wall Street happened and I jumped on board to help organize our own city’s occupation, which was happening right across the street from the bank. I wasn’t planning on telling my bosses about my involvement, but I joined the media committee and quickly gave several interviews on television, I guess forgetting that Boomers still watched the news. They mostly reacted with bewildered curiosity, and my boss called me into his office.

“Hey, what you’re doing is totally fine! Free speech! Just make sure you don’t do anything that would publicly associate you with your employment here, and don’t personally protest on bank property.” I was a little surprised at the casual acceptance of my conflicting extra-curricular activities, but relieved. The occupation was supposed to start that upcoming Friday, and I was bummed to have to miss the very beginning after doing so much to help plan it all, but my manager offered to give me the day off. “I know it’s a big day for you!” I was utterly perplexed, but again, grateful for the bank's bafflingly considerate flexibility regarding my involvement with the movement that essentially opposed their very existence from directly across the street.

An affinity group called Occupy Homes formed to fight foreclosures in addition to our other occupation activities. Turns out a bunch of the homes being foreclosed upon were owned by the bank I was working for, which limited my involvement in certain activities and marches, but I still wasn’t in trouble.

The OccuPirates was a needed bit of activist entertainment, the following video published on OccupyMNTV, a YouTube channel created by . I couldn’t publicly participate in anything associated with it for obvious reasons, but I got to satiate my need to participate in a mildly devious way by lying to an executive assistant to get the pin that the “banker” is wearing in the video. I met the guy downstairs in the bank's atrium and snuck the pin into his hand like we were conducting a drug deal. I’m pretty sure I cackled about it.

The official reason I was eventually fired, if you ask the people who made the final call, was because the bank was discriminating against me because of my political activities outside of the workplace. A bank representative never joined the call to dispute my unemployment appeal, so I won by default.

The real reason is much stupider. I had already been given several attendance warnings because I had been missing so much work, staying up into the wee hours doing various Occupy things like writing press releases, arguing about press releases, sending press releases, and arguing about who got access to the press lists.

I was also going through a divorce at precisely this time and had just moved. I was kind of a mess. I was given a lot of grace by the bank for which I was very grateful, but the manager had finally had enough. He told me that one more missed day would result in my immediate termination. I frankly didn’t blame him and was already starting to feel pretty bad about my extremely lacking job performance.

I made it about a week longer before my new roommate pulled out a baggie with something small and suspiciously crystal-ly in it one night.

“This is meth! Zane gave it to me. Wanna try it?”

The idea sounded utterly and completely retarded, so I said “yes, of course.”

When it comes to most drugs, I tended to have a “try anything once, except heroin” policy1, and that night in 2012 was my first, (and last) time trying meth. It tasted like gasoline and I felt nothing close to energized or euphoric, only a complete lack of desire to sleep (or shut the fuck up) ever again. I sat there at my laptop for hours doing god knows what and chatting away with my roommate until I was finally able to fall asleep around 5am or so. I clearly should have added a “not on work nights” clause to the policy.

Of course I slept through my alarm, waking up sometime after 10am; the latest I was allowed to get to work with my flex schedule was 9am. I went in anyway and was, as expected, immediately fired. My new apartment was just outside of downtown, so I used the Skyway for half the frozen walk back home instead of the bus (they confiscated my bank-subsidized transit pass), stopping at the overpriced liquor store inside of it for a bottle of coping brandy.

Macy’s, 28

I was finding it damn near impossible to find a post-Occupy job, like just about everyone in 2012, it seemed. My roommate had also been let go from his own job, so we were teetering on the edge of eviction and both rapidly running out of money. I’d finally given up on looking for jobs in or related to the financial industry, reasonably certain I’d been blacklisted. And anyway, there were hardly any left that hadn’t already employed me at some point. We both finally found jobs at a nearby Macy’s — me in merchandising, early in the morning, and him in one of the clothing departments.

I left that job after only a few horribly tedious shifts for a somewhat ironic reason: I was officially getting evicted. At the time, I didn’t have a car, but I lived in the middle of the city and just walked or rode my bike to work every day, but after we got evicted, I went to live with my family in the suburbs. The merchandising job was very early in the morning and started before any buses into the city were operating, so I had to quit. It all felt very silly, but I hated that job so I was not at all sad about it.

It was just after I moved back in with my family that I finally decided I should apply for unemployment. I really should've tried before getting evicted, but I assumed I’d be denied and never bothered. I didn’t see any reason not to try, now.

As I mentioned above, my unemployment claim was miraculously (and, let's be real, completely unfairly) approved after I appealed the initial denial. It was summer now, and I made a very bare-bones attempt at continuing to look for work for the season; I considered it my divorce/job loss/eviction recovery period. I was required to document employment attempts to continue receiving unemployment, of course, so I looked, but really only enough to fulfill the requirements. I mostly went camping instead. Like, every week. I've pretty much slept in every state park in Minnesota at this point.

Liquor store clerk, 29

Camping season was nearing its end, I had just turned 29, and I needed to get my shit together. With this goal in mind, I naturally found myself at a liquor store to buy some camping beer where I decided to ask the manager if they were hiring. In fact, they were! I got the job easily. Finally!

Cashiering has got to be one of the dullest kinds of work I have ever done in my life, whether it’s a gas station, convenience store, or liquor store. I was so goddamned bored here it drove me crazy. The only saving grace was that my coworkers were cool and my bosses were chill.

One of the other nearby locations in the liquor store chain just had their liquor license frozen for failing a sting, so corporate implemented a “card everyone, even if it’s literally your own grandmother” policy. As a result, I got to see a lot of people’s birthdates. Having been an astrology-obsessed preteen, I had long since been able to instantly know what sun sign any given birthdate was, and I started noticing certain birth months more than others on certain days. I wondered if there was anything to this, so I started keeping a tally of which zodiac signs came in next to the register for every shift I worked and I convinced whoever was working on the second register to do the same. After a few weeks, the results were in: there was a roughly equal distribution of drunk zodiac signs and I was completely imagining it. I was disappointed. Lirpa’s job-related statistical hypotheses about demographic purchasing patterns were now one for two.

I quit because I finally got a better job. Boring and low-paid as it was, the liquor store didn't totally suck, though. The ability to vibe with one’s coworkers and managers can really make or break a job experience.

Online chat support, 29

This job was honestly pretty epic. A random stand-up comedian gave me a ride home after his hilarious set that I saw with a friend one night, and he ended up referring me to a position at a third-party customer service call center that had a number of clients (he was on the Apple contract and said it was the best). I was called in for an interview for none other than… Geek Squad tech support. I sighed internally and prepared to be hired by talking up my prior Geek “experience,” be poorly trained, and stay long enough to find another, better job.

I knew I could type pretty fast, but I never took a class for it and still had to look at the keyboard. During the assessment I had to take a typing test, and it turned out I could get up to like 80wpm. I guess endlessly typing on a keyboard of some kind since the early 90s paid off. They made the last-minute decision to switch me from Geek Squad tech support to Best Buy chat support, which I didn’t even know was a thing. I was thrilled.

Chat support wasn’t technical, thank fuck. I was absolutely not interested in trying that again, and for the same company, no less. It was there to help customers find the products they wanted, tell them their order status, and repeatedly confirm that if the item they wanted said “unavailable,” that it was not, in fact, available, and then they would all-caps me, which was much better than being yelled at. We used what we called “predefines,” a Notepad document that had basic answers to all the most common questions that we could copy and paste at the customer. The best predefines would get shared around the team.

My closest rival in both typing speed (we had several contests) and most popular predefines wrote something in one of his chat boxes about how the customer he was talking to was a fucking asshole, or something (he was, though), then pasted a predefine over it to replace it, and hit send. Turns out it didn’t properly highlight the insult and pasted the intended text underneath it instead. He got fired.

The chat function was also frequently used by preteens to prank-chat us from middle school library hour (we all lived for that every morning, tbh) and they inspired us to start prank chatting each other. A bunch of us on the early morning crew decided what to do to the night crew and all went home that afternoon, logged in under fake names, and pretended to be searching desperately for a specific, obscure hot dog cooker with a built-in bun-toaster with great enthusiasm. The goal was to make everyone wonder why in the hell this random hot dog cooker was so popular all of the sudden and cause some kind of mass, hilarious confusion.

This started an epic prank-chat war that went beyond the hot dog cooker and lasted days until the Canadian (I don’t know why this detail feels important, it just does2) manager caught wind of it and shut the whole thing down, threatening write-ups if our great prank war continued. We went back to Magic the Gathering tournaments between desks and Nerf gun fights. That same manager would later threaten to fire every one of us on the chat floor for breaking out in applause once when the power briefly went out and shut down all our computers.

I heard he eventually got deported.

It seemed like everyone working there, on any contract, was some kind of cool, geeky Millennial, laid off from a better job during the recession or some other, similar story. We all formed friendships with each other quickly and easily in the training classes, as you tend to feel a sort of kinship with the people who sat with you in that boring room with unironic motivational posters on the walls for 4-6 weeks doing “ice-breakers” and learning about the new job you were all about to do. You probably went out after class together every Friday or something, or maybe to someone’s house or apartment. Maybe a few were already considering becoming roommates. At least one pair were probably already dating or hooking up.

There were also a lot of party drugs going around the office then — the first question we all asked each other on a smoke break during training was how everyone passed their drug tests. The 19-year-old chick I carpooled with for awhile claimed to have stuck a 5-Hour Energy bottle full of someone else’s urine up her vagina. Kind of disgusting/kind of brilliant, I suppose. I just used the overpriced vitamin drinks.

It would become very easy to find weed, or anything else one might want, during my time at that job. One of my coworkers had a roommate who was always ordering some new and interesting party drug from the Silk Road. One day she got ahold of something called mephedrone, or “drone” for short. We gathered some coworkers and met at their house.

…On second thought, I’ll tell that story another time. Behind a paywall.

Check out Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five!

Tip jar

This kind of feels like writing that absurdly long essay about my political trajectory that I can’t believe anyone actually read. It’s like a half hour long.

Suburban movie theater, 14

I worked here with my childhood best friend. We got to see movies for free (and bring all our friends!) and got unlimited free popcorn and soda. Us younger high school kids were only allowed to work the matinee shifts, and teenagers pretty much ran the place every weekend. It was a glorious first job. I made the state minimum wage, which was $5.15/hr at the time. I felt rich every time I got a paycheck.

Mall shoe store, 15

I lied about my age on the application for this job because you had to be 16 to work in mall stores. I got away with it because my 17 year old boyfriend was the assistant manager. I was hired to dye shoes, but never actually ended up doing that because the store decided to start going out of business and stopped the shoe dyeing service right after I was hired, so I was just a regular sales girl selling clearance footwear to old people. This is the job where I learned the Secrets of the Mall: if I went into Barnes & Noble and a certain person was working, I could get any magazine I wanted for free. He'd just rip the cover off and send me on my way.

Other friends worked in a clothing store a few shops down. After all the managers went home for the day, leaving the high school kids in charge, we'd give each other sweet deals like “two outfits for $100, cash only” in exchange for “two pair of shoes for $100, cash only.” Yeah, it was all just high school kids straight up letting each other steal from our respective jobs. I felt very icky about the shoes and clothing situation and did not participate in that particular grift. The free magazines and Auntie Anne's were okay by me, though.

Neighborhood convenience store, 15

My sister and friends and I used to ride our bikes to this little store all the time as kids to buy candy and chips and magazines and other junk. I was so excited to start working there after the shoe store finally closed for good. Unfortunately, I had to man the store alone every shift, the looming threat of robbery terrifying me. Fred, the crotchety old owner, would come in with shopping bags full of food from Cub, the normal grocery store nearby, hand me the price gun, and tell me how much to mark them all up before shelving them.

We sold beer, but it was Minnesota so it was only 3.2% ABV (regular beer is only sold in dedicated liquor stores). That was enough for Clarence, though, the ancient alcoholic who smelled like he bathed in fermented sweat and old urine and came in every morning to buy a 6-pack of Milwaukee's Best. Because I was only 15, I could not legally touch the beer cans to ring him up, so he'd do it himself. Then he'd hobble out and I'd take the can of air freshener from under the counter that we kept specifically for Clarence's daily visits and spray his stench out of the place (this would prepare me for later work as a postal clerk in rural Virginia).

My friends and I had just discovered cigarettes that previous school year (during track practice, no less), but we were not rebellious enough kids to actually know how to acquire our own and I was too scared to steal them from my mom. The convenience store did, of course, sell cigarettes, so I concocted a plan. I realized I could wait until the garbage bag was almost ready to take out to the dumpster, start stocking cigarettes, leave one pack in the nearly-empty carton, and toss the “empty” carton on the top of the garbage pile out of the security camera's view. When I’d bring the bag to the dumpster, I’d remove the pack, stick it in my pocket, and go back in as though nothing had happened. I waited for the right moment for several shifts and, after a few abandoned attempts, finally managed to snag a pack of Marlboro Ultra Lights. I didn’t really want to steal them, but being underage and also responsible for balancing the till left me no choice, really, or so I reasoned.

A few months in, I tried to quit the job by leaving a note on the door for Fred, explaining that I didn't feel safe working alone, encouraged by my shoe store boyfriend who now worked at the clothing store we used to trade with. When I told my mom what I'd done that morning, she was appalled. “You do not quit a job without giving two weeks’ notice! You go back there and apologize right now!”

I did as she said, fully shamed and dreading what I’d go in to. A vendor was there in the parking lot reading the note taped to the door. He saw me walk up and looked back at the note, remarking how that was bad news, not realizing I was the one who wrote it. I pretended I had no idea what was going on and opened the store like normal, covering for that mysterious flake who quit via taped door note. Fred never did find out that I quit for a couple hours that day.

One-hour photo lab, 16

This was the job I'd been dreaming of ever since I stepped foot in the mall for my shady shoe store stint. I never left the house without a camera and obsessed over being a famous fashion photographer someday and I desperately wanted the massive employee discount on film and developing, which was becoming a very expensive hobby. I interviewed a few weeks before my 16th birthday and they hired me, making me wait to start until I was officially 16. I stayed there until I was 22 and left as a wildly underpaid lab manager. The “wildly underpaid” bit is why there are still several more jobs to list during the six-year period I was with the photo lab.

Six years at what were technically three different photo labs (it’ll make sense in a minute) provided for some very interesting party-story fodder. There was the exhibitionist couple who got off on making us look at their pictures as many times as possible, so after learning how the developing and printing processes worked, the husband started manipulating it. He’d order doubles with one set matte, one set glossy, and then have them scanned to a CD, knowing each of those three things required a separate scan that showed the images on the screen where we color-corrected them. They appeared to be in their 60s and were very glamorous, and the photos tended to show them in upscale places where they would take pictures of themselves flashing people or doing other various “fun” things like peeing on fire hydrants in cocktail dresses or making strangers at gas stations try on a long fur coat that was just covering the woman’s naked body. Once, we got to see a Sprite bottle halfway up her vag. I was impressed.

Once, a woman came in with some digital media cards (this was 2002ish when that sort of thing was still new). She saw the lab full of young female employees, glared at us, and told the guys behind the sales counter that only a man was allowed to print her pictures. Confused and probably a little afraid, the sales guy who helped her readily agreed.

…Absolutely none of the sales guys any idea how to print a photo, so those of us in the lab hurried to open the images so we could see what on earth her problem was. The sales guys stood behind us, also eager to see. At first it was just a bunch of pictures of the hockey game the night before, but then we got to the real reason she didn’t want the ladies peeking: about a zillion photos of a naked Wild player in her bathtub after the game. Ope! We committed to the bit and pretended we never saw them, avoiding eye contact.

Hostess at Baker's Square, 16

All my friends and I decided we wanted to be servers. We heard that waiters and waitresses made way more money than anyone else in high school, so we all applied at nearby restaurants. Stacey and I got hired at Baker's Square as hostesses where we sat guests and bussed tables. We had to wear real ties, and my manager kindly tied mine for me on my first day since I had no idea how to do it. Bella and Matthew got hired at Denny's where they were made servers pretty much instantly. Stacey was quickly promoted to server at our restaurant, and they told me I needed more “hustle” before I could get there myself. I realized quickly that I hated working in restaurants.

I smoked weed by the dumpsters with the cooks, listening to Papa Roach and Eminem blasting from someone's tinny car speakers, and as soon as my tie, which I'd been loosening and re-tightening every work day, was finally too uneven to ignore, I decided it was time to go. I didn't want to ask my manager to help again and figured I didn't really need two jobs in high school in addition to sports and everything else and gave my notice.

The photo lab I still worked at was bought out by a larger camera store and moved out of the mall, rebranded, to its own building down the road. This was a larger facility and we had a newer, better printer that could handle both matte and glossy paper. I started to notice patterns in who was ordering what. We happened to be in the statistics unit of my math class, so I decided to make my project about which paper was favored by each ethnicity, gender, and age. I kept a running tally by the register. I got some weird looks from coworkers and my teacher. Anyway, Liberian immigrants overwhelmingly preferred glossy paper, and retirement-age white women almost always chose matte. Just as I had suspected.

This camera store was staffed by mostly other high school students, and most of the girls were obsessed with N*SYNC. They'd have fan club (!) photos sent to the outlab to make specialized photo products like plastic standees or keychains of Justin Timberlake or Lance Bass or whatever. They’d take them home, then leave the empty envelopes with the bar code in the bin to pay for later. We all did that for our own photos, even though we got a 70% discount on lab services; we would just wait until pay day and buy them all at once.

Then we got a new district manager. The store manager warned us that he was coming in and told us to either pay for our empty envelopes or bring the products or prints back in so they looked like they were still waiting to be picked up. I got the memo too late, didn’t have a chance to do either thing, and the DM fired me, the empty envelopes indicating that I had “stolen” from them.

After getting fired from my beloved photo lab, I promptly got hired at the competing photo lab in a different mall across the river, shortly before high school graduation. Not long after that, that photo lab bought the one that fired me and kept the district manager responsible for it. I bleached my hair and hid from him at the company Christmas party.

Gas station clerk, 18

My mom was working as a general manager for a local gas station chain and told me one of the stores was hiring, so I applied for a part-time job as a cashier.

It was the most boring job of my life, but I worked with two extremely cool dudes every Sunday who worked out a good deal: race to get everything stocked and changed and done at the beginning of the shift, then take turns going on hour-long breaks for the full 8 hours until the end when we'd race to finish everything for the overnight crew. It was staggered so that each of us would only have to actively work for 30 minutes at a time, at which point someone else would come in and relieve you so you could go back to chain-smoking in the parking lot for an hour.

Glamor Shots, 20

This was it. I was going to be a real photographer, getting paid to make people look pretty and then capturing it on film. I applied at the Mall of America location and, to my surprise, was hired immediately. I put in my notice at the photo lab and went into Glamor Shots for my first day of training, where I quickly learned that I was barely a photographer and mostly just a sales person who got to use a camera sometimes and was instructed to tell women to suck in their fat guts and physically touch them to get them into more flattering poses. I quit on the spot and took back my two-week notice at the photo lab.

A different gas station, 20

I picked up this second job to save money for something I don’t even remember anymore. I was working full-time at the photo lab and worked a few nights a week on the overnight shift at a different gas station chain. The most interesting thing about this job was the fact that it fucked up my sleep schedule so badly that I was up at all hours of the night and got to see what kind of weird shit happened in my neighborhood after dark.

One night, I was outside smoking a cigarette when I saw a shadowy figure out of the corner of my eye. I stood on the top step and peered around the bay window to get a better look, and slowly she came into focus: a very drunk woman wearing a leather coat with an American flag design on the back, pants around her ankles, stumbling around the front yard. She was doing something with her hands… holding a stick. She was shoving the stick into her vagina. Like a fucking dildo. I turned around and ran back inside and up the stairs to our duplex unit and found one of my roommates who also worked weird hours and was still awake, and he followed me outside. He managed to shoo her away and we watched as she stumbled across the street, trying to button her pants.

Saint Paul, capital city of Minnesota, full of caves and also bats that get trapped in your house and drunk ladies who masturbate with sticks in your front yard.

Best Buy camera sales, 22

After I finally left the photo lab world (yelling “I HATE THIS PLACE! I QUIT!” at my amused manager before apologizing and giving him a 3-week notice to make up for it), I had a hard time finding another job. I finally, very ironically, ended up selling cameras at Best Buy. During the interview, I told them about my experience at the labs and camera stores and said that I wanted to work in the camera department. I was regretting quitting the photo lab and my incredible disdain for resorting to selling cameras at a big box electronics store was written all over my face. They ignored that and said that while my camera store experience was nice and all, they needed someone in computers. I told them I didn't know anything about computers and informed them that I (an artiste) had an iMac, which they didn't even sell. They said that was okay, I'd learn. I insisted. They acquiesced and put me in the camera department.

Geek Squad, 22

After a few months in the camera department that I fought to get into because I didn't know anything about computers, I developed a crush on one of the techs from the in-store Geek Squad and decided I needed to work directly with him. His name was Kyle and his dark hair looked like one of those swirly Dairy Queen ice cream cones and he had bright blue eyes. His skin was like porcelain; he looked like a male Snow White. I was obsessed. I begged my manager for a transfer to Geek Squad and he literally laughed at me. I wore him down, though, and was finally allowed to take the exam to see if I qualified.

I failed the test spectacularly, but I quickly learned that everyone else did, too, even my beloved Kyle, and that because I was the only Mac user in the store who answered the two related questions correctly, I actually scored higher than both of my soon-to-be bosses. I was given the coveted Geek Squad jacket and clip-on tie and rewarded with endless dull hours removing Spyware from old desktop computers and blowing the dust out of them with an air gun thing. I found out Kyle was engaged, got sad, and started dating a much worse Kyle who worked in customer service. Worst crush rebound ever.

Bank call center, 22

My little sister got a job lead for a business banking position with a national bank’s call center. She was making a whopping $12.60 an hour, and I wanted in. Geek Squad only paid just over $10 and I was over it. I got the job. I did not yet know that everyone who applies at call centers gets the job. My grandma congratulated me on having a “good job” in a bank instead of the wildly-underpaying photo lab. She apparently did not know about call centers, either.

I made a lot of friends there, despite it being a terrible job. I got my row hooked on sunflower seeds and I took turns buying them for the team with the guy who sat next to me. We would later learn that he was one of the primary vectors of the Great Office Chlamydia Outbreak. I had thankfully only shared sunflower seeds with the man. Marked safe.

Red Lobster, 24

I quit the bank after a year and a half by driving in one summer morning, smoking a cigarette on a bench in front of the building, grudgingly walking up to the door, suddenly deciding I had had absolutely enough, and turned around and went back to my car. I drove directly to the liquor store, bought a case of beer, got shit-faced, and called my supervisor and left her a voicemail telling her I was never coming back, because fuck that place. I stayed drunk for another couple days and then got a job serving at Red Lobster, the first place I applied to that would call me back. I figured I’d give restaurants another shot and try to be a real server this time, where the money (allegedly) was. I used the new employment opportunity to cheat on Bad Kyle with a 20 year old fellow server, Tom, who would continue to send me random dick pics for the next five years.

Smaller bank call center, 24

I could not hack server life. After a few torturous months, I secured a job in a different, smaller bank's call center. I didn't bother giving Red Lobster a notice and just stopped showing up. No one ever called to ask if I was coming back, which I thought was strange. I would later learn that it was because that's just how everyone quits restaurants.

The smaller regional bank I was working for was pretty dismal compared to the national bank’s much larger, nicer, and brighter suburban facility. The smaller bank's call center was in the sub-basement of their building downtown and there were always yellow happy face balloons, slowly bobbing up and down in various cubes, rewards for good calls or something, looking down on you menacingly from the dimly-lit flickering ceiling lights like sadistic clowns. It was dark and the customers were much more angry and needed a lot of extremely basic things explained to them. It was endlessly grating. I set up a blog to complain about it.

If you've never worked in a call center, especially as a female, you may not know that perverted dudes love to call random toll-free numbers, asking innocuous and vague questions at first without ever giving identifying account information, guiding the conversation in a gradually weirder direction, finally ending it by saying something like, “I'M COMING RIGHT NOW” after you confirmed a branch's hours or something, grunting, and hanging up on you just as you realize he was jerking off to the sound of your voice, or to the knowledge that you didn't know he had his dick in his hand the whole time, or whatever it was that gave these dudes their kicks. It felt like someone just jizzed in your fucking ear and you wanted to take a shower immediately.

Anyway, this happened at Smaller Regional Bank so often that I started copying down these dudes’ phone numbers from the caller ID after they'd get off (heh) the phone. I knew this was against every rule, so I didn’t put their names next to them as a precaution, just symbols indicating the nature of their grossness. I had no specific plans for these phone numbers, but fantasies of revenge were in the back of my mind.

One night a few months later, my boyfriend and I were hanging out listening to music and having a few beers. I had a different job at the bank by that point, but I still had those phone numbers in the back of a notebook in my purse. I told Boyfriend about it and he grinned like a cartoon villain.

“Let me see those phone numbers.”

I gave him the sheet and he put his cell phone on speaker. He dialed one of the most recent numbers, someone I clearly remembered for being even more graphically disgusting than the usual pervs. Dude answered and Boyfriend began his act as an aggressive gay man trying to solicit phone sex. The dude who had previously said similar things to me was so disgusted he started yelling and swearing at Boyfriend until he finally hung up on him.

I threw away the phone numbers. My desire for revenge was satiated.

Check card and ATM fraud investigator, 24

This was a promotion out of the smaller bank’s call center and probably one of the more interesting jobs I've had, although it came with the biggest circus side show cast of characters so catty and insane that HR was up there every week trying to meditate our trainwreck of a department. Someone was always crying or bullying someone or fucking one of the bosses or telling the local NPR member station about their bullshit.

My favorite part of the job was catching people trying to defraud the bank. It was a pretty easy process: customer claims someone some their ATM card and withdrew money. I go find the video footage from the ATM transaction and compare it to images from other, undisputed withdrawals. I'd see the same person on each and deny the claim. They'd call back, furious, then scared, and ask if they were going to jail. No, we never did send anyone to jail for attempted fraud, but we did get reimbursed if the court was able to get any restitution for the claims we reimbursed that were actual fraud against the customer. We had a recliner and a large television shoved between some cubes for awhile, items a suspect had purchased with the stolen money we’d paid back to a customer who’d been defrauded, until someone figured out how to sell them.

A little over a year after I quit that job, it was 2012 and everyone was unemployed, including me, having just been fired from my third bank job after openly protesting the place for months during Occupy. I texted an old boss from that bank fraud job, the one who made everyone cry all the time, and asked him if he'd be a reference.

“You're very bright and you were a good analyst, but you're stubborn as hell and have no respect for authority. Absolutely not.” I found this hilarious and told everyone.

Clean water salesperson fundraiser, 27

Before this bout of unemployment, a few months after I’d quit the fraud investigation job, I decided I was never working for another corrupt financial institution again and decided to find a job doing something meaningful. Among many of my fellow progressive friends, fundraising was all the rage. I found a job with a couple friends at a nonprofit that focused on clean water lobbying efforts. My job was to call previous donors and ask them for more money.

This was in Minneapolis, but I was calling people who lived in New Jersey. The script I had to use instructed me to say things like “our governor Christie” and to vaguely mutter “mmm” when someone asked if we were calling them from New Jersey instead of “yes” (or, you know, no, since we weren’t). If someone needed a callback from a supervisor, there was a special cell phone with a New Jersey area code specifically for that purpose.

Anyway, because I hated sales and that’s all fundraising really is in the end, I loathed every second of that 4-hour shift and told the supervisor I wouldn’t be coming back at the end of it.

We’re getting close to being too long for email, so…

Check out Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5!

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The summer I was six or seven and living somewhere in that treeless path in the late 80s or early 90s, long before the tornado of 2011, my tornado fears had peaked to an all-time high. Looking back, it was probably the year that a tornado siren went off and my mom brought us down to the basement and then took herself back upstairs to finish browning the hamburger, sending me into a panic, demanding she come back downstairs with us where it was safe. She told me very plainly that if there was going to be a tornado, we’d need something to eat, and to go back downstairs with my sister, please.

My mom was in school or working during the day those summers that we lived there with my grandpa and aunt, and my little sister and I stayed at home with my grandpa. I would typically stay in our room reading or playing, or I'd go outside and play with the neighbor kids or wander across the street to play by myself at the park, but this one summer, I voluntarily spent most of the days in the basement. Because tornadoes.

First thing in the morning, I would find Grandpa’s newspaper and look at the back of the Metro section where Paul Douglas, my favorite meteorologist, had his daily weather column. If it was going to be sunny and clear, I was good to go. I could play outside or hang out in my room or do whatever I wanted! I’d check outside and make sure there weren’t any clouds — literally any, because in my mind, all of them had the potential to turn into funnel clouds — and then be off.

If there were clouds, or especially if there were thunderstorms in the forecast, all bets were off: I was spending the day in the basement as a precaution. There was a family room set up down there, adjacent to my mom’s bedroom, and I would turn on the small black and white TV in front of the wicker chair with the yellowish-orange cushion and watch Gilligan’s Island and I Dream of Jeannie reruns, or go through old boxes and find random treasures and generally just snoop around. When I’d get especially nervous about the tornadoes that never came, I would usually just start repeating some weird mantra I made up to keep them away, or praying (I would ask God to wait until I was at least 14 to make me experience my first tornado, the magic age at which I assumed I’d be mature enough to handle it). Other times I’d just start counting things around me, like letters. Each letter had a different value, so something like “BICYCLE” wouldn’t be seven letters, it would be ten, if I am correctly remembering my old alphabet value system. Ceiling tiles would do in a pinch. Seams in the concrete wall. Anything countable, really. It’s a wonder I never liked math.

Once my mom came home around dinnertime, I would go back upstairs, trusting her to protect us if there were any tornadoes. Plus, despite my mom having told us that she once slept easily through a series of three overnight tornadoes in Missouri when she was pregnant with me, I also trusted that tornadoes rarely happened at night, so I could relax.

I knew everything about tornadoes1. I read and re-read every encyclopedia entry, reference material, or school library weather book and ate up stories from my mom and other adults who’d experienced them. I knew how funnel clouds formed and I knew that the sky turned greenish when they were nearby and that they sounded like trains and that the air became eerily still before one hit.

I would use these bits of knowledge to quell my fears in the event that I had to be out somewhere that was not my basement on a day I had deemed too tornado-y to be on a main level: it’s breezy, so it’s not likely there will be one right now, I would think. The sky isn’t turning green yet, so we still have time. God forbid I heard an actual train nearby that wasn't immediately accounted for.

Being away from my basement — any basement — was a near-constant fear when we’d visit Grandma in northwestern Missouri, who lived in a single-wide trailer in a rural town of about 120 other people in various questionable housing situations for such a tornado-heavy area. There was a storm cellar somewhere on the property, but it was old and hadn’t been maintained and she didn’t want to use it, fearing it wouldn’t be safe. There was also a whole house across the driveway2, the one the family used to live in and where Papa taught oil painting classes and sold art supplies after they bought the mobile home, but it was also no longer structurally sound and Grandma feared it would also be unsafe in a tornado. She assured me we’d go up the road to the Baptist church if we needed to. I complained that we would never get there in time, but there was nothing to be done.

During every two-week visit, nearly without fail, would be at least one day of severe weather more intense than anything we typically experienced in Minnesota, and I’d have to have the TV turned to a weather channel or a local station that would have a severe weather ticker on the bottom or interrupt the TV show to tell us if anything was imminent. They didn’t have working tornado sirens out there in the middle of nowhere, so I needed to be sure I could keep track of any new developments.

One summer when I was a little older, we had my dad and his wife and my aunt and uncle and cousins over at my grandma’s, and we were all visiting and playing card games and had Sleepless in Seattle playing in the background. The weather outside was pretty wild, raining and thundering and windy, but I was able to distract myself with all the people around me and the fact that there was no severe weather ticker in the corner of the TV screen.

Must not be that bad if it hasn’t interrupted the show yet, I thought. That’s when my cousins, a few years older than I was, went outside to the gravel driveway to check out the RV setup where they were sleeping that night, and quickly ran back in to tell us they thought they saw a funnel cloud, or one that was about to turn into one. Panicking, I realize that the reason we haven’t seen any weather alerts is because the movie we’re watching is on a cable channel, not a local one, and we quickly turn it. There is, indeed, a severe weather report on, interrupting whatever was playing before.

The map showed the county we were in, Daviess, surrounded by other counties with warnings and confirmed touchdowns; we were the only who hadn’t yet been confirmed hit. The county map looked like a reverse target, the bullseye us in white, surrounded by tornadoes in red.

Everyone was calm but me, and it eventually passed and we went back to the movie and the game. I thought my cousins and aunt and uncle were nuts for going out to the RV to sleep that night, as tornadoes clearly did not respect the established no-nighttime-attacks rule in Missouri.

When I was nearing the end of 7th grade, Twister hit theaters. An aunt and uncle in Minnesota took my sister and cousin and me to go see it.

I can’t really say what about that movie exactly did it for me, but after we left the theater, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders: the movie had spontaneously cured my immense phobia of tornadoes, and in May, no less, just in time for the beginning of tornado season. It all literally just ended right there in the parking lot after I got done watching that movie, as though my psyche had said, “that’s it. This is exhausting. Time to give it up.” After we got back to our aunt and uncle’s house, we played “storm chasers” outside. Suddenly I was not only no longer afraid of them, but in my preteen mind, where the possibilities for the future were still endless, “tornado chaser” stuck there for a minute as a potential future career choice if I ever got better at science.

It’s a good thing I’m not really afraid of tornadoes anymore, because none of the houses around here seem to have full basements.

A movie about very very dangerous tornadoes and people dying and almost dying everywhere at the hands of them made me lose my overwhelming fear of tornadoes for some reason, but it wasn’t the last time something completely irrational would counter an equally as irrational fear.

When I was 8 or 9, an older friend told me some crazy theory she saw on the show Sightings about the world ending in May of 2000. Of course I believed her immediately and accepted this without question, and I got off the phone to go fold towels in the bathroom, because that was the first thing I could think of to do to prepare: start being a more obedient daughter. I definitely got a strange look from my mom after coming out of the bathroom, done proactively folding towels with a terrified look on my face for no apparent reason.

That very specific fear lasted a few years, strangely coloring a significant chunk of my childhood with the ever-present dread of “knowing” I wouldn’t make it to 17. I very literally believed this would happen. I also developed an adjacent irrational fear of neighboring South Dakota and Mount Rushmore, where I had understood the “source” of whatever would cause the end of the world to be. Like with tornadoes, if the fear in the background got to be too loud, I’d flip on the little TV in my room and distract myself with sitcom reruns and Jay Leno. Since I refused to tell anyone what I was afraid of, I got well-practiced at acting normal while I was a near-constant electric ball of anxiety on the inside for years on end.

Anyway, I got over that one, too, as I wrote about back in 2011:

The little girl […] saw something on television that, although it terrified her, made her stop and watch. It was the Montel Williams show, and Montel's featured guest was Sylvia Browne, the world renowned quack psychic he had on every week (the little girl actively avoided things like psychics, fearing that they would confirm her fears. She still maintains a healthy distance from such people). She was asked to predict when aliens would first make contact with Earth, in a way that no one could deny. She said it would happen in ten years.

This tiny little bit of TV talk show bullshit instantly convinced me that the Sightings guy obviously had it all wrong. The year 2000 was only three years away and the psychic said that it would be ten years until we met aliens! Nevermind being afraid of aliens; I did not care. The world wasn’t ending, after all! I got on my bike and went to my friend’s house, suddenly the happiest kid alive who’d just secretly found out she was going to live after several years of secretly believing she and the rest of the world were condemned to die horrendous, probably fiery or otherwise cataclysmic deaths in just a few years.

I did eventually get the OCD diagnosis everyone was expecting a couple years later, but interestingly enough, something similar happened a year or so after I graduated high school: I went into a Barnes & Noble bookstore at the mall and wandered around, found the psychology and self-help section, and then a book about managing OCD. I picked it up and flipped to a random page and my eyes drifted to the bottom, where I found a simple sentence about “magical thinking” that said something to the effect of, “you are not important enough for your actions to magically affect the universe in the way that you think.”

Magic words again, telling me this time that I was not magical after all, and neither were my obsessive thoughts or my weird counting, blinking, tapping, and rearranging habits. Something clicked then and I eventually became much better able to reason myself out of nonsensical thought patterns after that. Sometimes they still pop up, but then I remind myself: you are not magical, remember? They aren't exactly magic words, but they do tend to act like it, most of the time.

Anyway, the new Twisters movie looks fun, and so does the super country soundtrack:

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The path to not hating French class

We got to choose our classes for our first semester in high school at the end of 8th grade. I rode the same bus as the boy I had a crush on at the time, and I overheard him telling someone that he was planning on taking French at the same high school I was going to. Even though Spanish was a much more practical language to learn in the US and one I’d already started back in 7th grade, his declaration made up my mind for me. French, it was. L’amour.

I already knew he didn’t like me like that because I definitely already had a mutual friend ask him, but no matter; I was a Tina Belcher, sure, but when it came to daydreaming, I had the unhinged confidence of a future wannabe Topanga Lawrence, certain I would turn into a swan someday. Surely, he will love me eventually. I’ll get prettier and less dorky in high school, probably. French class will force my existence upon him and he will have to notice me and realize he’s been in love with me the whole time! I wrote a lot of tortured teenage poetry about it.

Well, he didn’t end up in my 9th grade French class, and all I remember learning were some random nouns like the animals and colors and a few basic sentences like how to introduce ourselves. Once, my friends and I heard the term “rimming” and had no idea what it meant. For some unfathomable reason, we felt it was appropriate to ask the French teacher after class one day, and for some equally as unfathomable reason, he felt it was appropriate to tell us the actual answer. So I guess it wasn’t all fruitless.

He wasn’t in my 10th grade French class, either. That one was taught by Ms. Rogers, a very… French-seeming woman. Maybe she was French by lineage, I don’t know, but she definitely played the part well from a romanticizing American perspective. She was an older woman in her late 50s or 60s, styled her gracefully natural grey hair in classy but understated updos, and she always wore very old clothing in pristine condition with a matching brooch or other statement piece, just barely out of fashion, but nice enough in quality to be forgivable to anyone who would notice or care. She told us she inherited her mother’s beautiful clothing collection and loved it, especially the shoes. Her wardrobe was massive and it was her stated goal to never wear the exact same outfit twice. She was very proper and graceful. Her class was also where I first thought that maybe I actually hated French, but also where I learned how studying worked.

We had a test coming up that I was absolutely not prepared for because I didn’t really care because I hated the class. A classmate told me about a trick they learned: write your notes in really tiny handwriting on a strip of paper and then wrap it in a spiral on the inside of a clear Bic pen, facing outwards. You can look at it during the test and your hand will cover the view from the teacher.

Brilliant. I did it. Stayed up all night making my intricate little strip of paper with miniscule handwriting and spiraled it carefully into the pen. The next morning, I nervously took out my pen and Ms. Rogers came around and passed out the test.

I didn’t have to look at the pen once. I aced the test from memory because I spent all night accidentally studying in the act of preparing to cheat.

During sophomore year, I was considering not continuing with French the following year. I had fulfilled my two years of state high school language requirements, and while I was in the IB program, I wasn’t yet sure if I wanted to go for the full IB Diploma, part of which required a language class all four years. In the end, I decided to give it one more try and thought that if I hated this new teacher, I’d drop it the second semester.

That was the magic year, as it turned out. He was finally in the class with me that year, although by that point I was pretty much over it and had moved onto other boy drama. The real magic by then was the teacher. She, like Ms. Rogers, was also very French in demeanor and appearance, but younger than our parents and had more of a cool-but-serious babysitter vibe. I recall very scandalized whispers among us one day when she was wearing a skirt that showed off most of her lower legs, and we could clearly see dark hair under her nylons. So European!

Anyway, she taught in a more structured manner that worked better for me than the other teachers’ methods had. It could’ve also been simply the common curriculum of languages each year, but learning how to really conjugate verbs was a game changer for me, and somehow she got it through to me very easily. Learning how to do it in French made doing it in English make even more sense. It made me appreciate the word “had” much more than I thought I would. I felt like I finally understood the backbone of language and could fit everything else around it to learn more easily and thoroughly because I finally saw the bigger picture of language structure, so to speak. I bought that giant French verb book and wrote the best sentences. I ended up in the advanced-level class by senior year and earned an IB Certificate in French.

Of course, I don’t remember pretty much any French at all anymore because there’s been no practical way for me to practice it, and I really should’ve taken Spanish, but nooooo, the boy I liked in middle school just had to pick French, altering my life’s language trajectory forever. I lamented this often, somewhat amused, when trying to communicate with kitchen staff at restaurants where I later worked, and even later our neighbors. The things we do for boys! I can’t remember if I ever ended up telling him, but if not, he will probably know now because last I checked, he is subscribed to this newsletter. Hi there! I took French for you! Sorry about the decapitated Barbie heads and processed cheese I put in your mailbox in middle school. I was just trying to get your attention. I (mostly) keep my obsessive stalkerish tendencies in check now.

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Tried and Stoned

The only other time I significantly cheated in high school (although I maintain that the first time didn’t count since I didn’t actually use my forbidden cheat strip) was in Health class in 11th grade.

The teacher was notoriously lax, and he decided we’d done enough work that semester and made the final very easy: a word find. If we finished it within the week — an absurdly easy task in an absurdly lengthy time frame — we passed.

…I never got around to doing it, and neither did my friend Matt. Our friend Lee did, though, and while Matt and I were at lunch panicking about not being able to finish in time, Lee rolled his eyes and told us to go ahead and photocopy his in the library. He hadn’t written his name on it yet, and he reminded us that we should write our names in marker and use the same marker to go over his circled words so that it didn’t look photocopied. We raced to the library, made two copes, and promptly failed to take any of the rest of his advice.

The teacher had us silently sitting watching a movie or something while he “graded” the finals. He called out Matt’s name. Matt looked up and Mr F. looked him in the eye and tore his word find in half.

He called out my name and did the same to my wordfind, then Lee’s. He caught on to our scheme right away; Lee was right. Ope. The three of us were summoned to the dean’s office where we were given a bewildered lecture about not only cheating, but cheating so stupidly, on something so profoundly easy as a wordfind and mercifully given the opportunity to do the entire wordfind in the next 20 minutes in order to pass. We all did so.

Mr F. walked us back down to the basement classroom and told us to stand in the front of the room, facing all of the other students. He handed the three of us a small stack of paper each and told us to hand them out to the other students. Baffled, we did so, and returned to the front of the room. Mr F. instructed the class to crumple their paper into balls. Also baffled, they followed his instructions and we all awaited more.

“Now throw them at these three doofuses for being idiots who cheated on something as easy as a wordfind.”

They nervously giggled, hesitated for just a second, and then began pelting us with the crumpled papers, gleefully participating in the “stoning” that we so clearly deserved for being such morons.

I mostly gave up on cheating in school after that.

…Speaking of being stoned for the first time, Matt, Lee, and I always got into various shenanigans. Lee, responsible and generous wordfind master that he was, offered to do the honors. Matt lived a block away from me, so Lee came to us and pulled out a joint. We walked down the wintry street to some nearby corner and each took a couple puffs. I didn’t think I felt much, but I was nervous that I looked or smelled high and that my mom would find out. I can’t remember which one of them suggested it now, but I’m pretty sure it was Lee who told me to jump in the snow in my front yard and roll around to get rid of the smell, which of course I immediately did as the two of them cracked up in that stacatto stoner-laugh. I got up and shook myself off, laughed with them, and went inside and quickly escaped to my room to write about the experience in my diary, explaining, in very disjointed handwriting that was missing several random letters and words, that I didn’t think it did anything to me, but wow, my hands felt like they were floating.

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