As for right now, I need to get dressed and head to work. Maybe I’ll get lucky and sell something today. I need it, I didn’t sell anything yesterday. Seriously. In 7.5 hours, I made no sales. Today I only work for five hours so I really have to step it up. TTFN!

But then came last Wednesday. I typically have Wednesdays and Thursdays off from work and spend them doing homework and housework and catching up on being a real person. This past week, however, I got pulled into a training session that was scheduled in the middle of the day, losing about 2.5 hours. As I was working on studying that evening, I got a call from a coworker asking if I had been called from the store yet. That is never a good question to be asked. I have only once gotten a call from anyone at work and it was to ask that I come in on a day off to work helping someone else who had more work than she could manage alone. So at first I was just a bit worried that I was going to be called in again, but the coworker who called me sounded really stressed and anxious. She then proceeded to explain that all staff, everyone, no exceptions, must be at the store at 9. At first I thought she meant 9 the next morning and that we were just going to have a store-wide meeting regarding the recent audit. Then she explained that we had to show up at 9pm that night. Evidently there were other coworkers who thought we were all being brought in to go through a mandatory drug test. Yeah, that would be odd considering that none of us were drug tested prior to being hired and no one had been showing any kind of suspicious behavior that would warrant forcibly drug testing everyone.

So, for the second time on my first day off for the week, I traipsed across town to the store, picking up one of my coworkers on the way. When we got there we found that the regional manager, store manager, and a member of HR had called for the store to be closed early so all customers were being ushered out as we arrived and the doors were being locked. As we all filed in and formed a huddle, the air was so tense that I was certain each of us was going to start shooting off electrical shocks. That is when we were told that ours was one of 2 stores that was being closed in the region. None of us were to be actively relocated to other stores, despite there being enough openings to warrant the job fair that was held on Friday (2 days after we were told we were being shut down). We were told that if we wished to attempt to stay with the company, we’d each have to dive back into the pool of applicants and start from scratch. After being required to show up to a training session earlier in the day, having to show up again on my day off but this time being told I and all of my coworkers were losing our jobs. Yep, worst day off ever.

I feel like the list of things that happened should be longer. That may sound strange but as I’ve said before I feel like I’ve been spending a lot of the last year+ treading water instead of making any real progress. What’s really funny is the number of times I’ve tried to tell myself that sometimes in life you have to take a step back, press pause, and start again more slowly. That’s why I quite my full time office job back in May of last year. That’s why I went back to school the year before that. But the longer I spend moving slowly, the more I feel like I’m not actually moving. You’d expect this from someone who has a background in sprinting, right? But even when I was a competitive swimmer I was in long distance. So why do I feel the need to sprint through the rest of my life?

Whatever the reason, I have been tense most of the year trying to remind myself of why I’m taking things slow and trying to get by with less. But as the end of the year nears, I hear about New Year’s Resolutions again and being to think of goals for the next year. A better job, a new place to live closer in to the DC beltway and my friends, and maybe a stable relationship? I don’t really have a plan yet. I have spent much of the last week not even turning on my computer. Once I finished my final I decided I didn’t want to stare at the dang screen and feel like I needed to do something. Besides, as of January, I begin a full time course load in a headlong kamikaze run for the last two years of my degree. Yeah, that’s the terrifying part that I think is holding me up from setting any other goals. For now, I will continue to take the little chances I have to breathe and relax. If I’m not back with my typical exotic witticisms prior to the next holiday, I wish you all very happy New Year’s celebration and for a safe recovery from said celebrations.

So, as is pretty typical for the times, I took to the internet to see if it was possible to learn aerial acrobatics nearby. What I found was a pair of sister gyms that specialize in Parkour and Aerial Silks: Urban Evolution. If you’re unfamiliar with Parkour, you basically learn to become a Ninja . The whole gym experience they have to offer in two locations looks amazing. So much so, they have been added to my fitness wishlist. I really want to be able to join these people and learn to climb, run, and most especially fly. It would be awesome to put on my resume the newly acquired ninja skills.

Unfortunately, I can’t afford the membership cost for this activity any more than I could for any of the other physical fitness activity I want to participate in. So for now, I have to watch the activities on the internet and work towards getting a better job that might afford me the money to join sometime in the future.

I did get to take time off from stress on Thanksgiving and spend the day with some very good friends who not only opened their home up to me but also allowed me to do a little cooking. I miss cooking. The sink and dishwasher here haven’t been draining properly for several weeks which has basically killed my desire to dirty dishes in any way. Seriously, I hate doing dishes when the plumbing does work, if it doesn’t and I stand the chance to have water standing in the sink long enough to grow a skin I hate dishes even more. I tried getting dish washing tubs and filling them up to do dishes in and then tossing the water on the lawn but that got old pretty fast. Partly because the weather has chilled, partly because the damn mosquitoes around here have yet to go the hell away and leave me in peace, and partly because the kitchen is on the upper floor of the house and trying to literally toss the water off of a balcony was always awkward and questionable. So I have been having fun little adventures in food that need not heat, nor dish.

Unfortunately, while school has been a bit more relaxed this session since I’m only taking one class, work has maintained an average stress level that has made me wish I had the ability to just stop caring. Honestly, it can be hell to be that person that insists on being able to take pride in work because it really just makes me want to start putting Irish Cream in my coffee before I head in.

Overall, what has happened is that I am stressed, but not busy, and it has killed my ability to create. I can’t think of anything beyond just trying to get a better job, finish my classes and stabilize myself financially. I haven’t taken any new photos recently. I haven’t written anything beyond mini-reports for class, notes to my bosses and the updates and revisions I’ve made to my resume. I auditioned for a female vocalist position in a friend’s band back in September but wasn’t what they were looking for.

The only saving grace to the water treading madness of this year has been the little moments of sanity regaining friendtime that I have had about once a month. Sometimes twice. From what I can remember recently: I had a day in DC at the Natural History Museum with friends in October, a lovely lunch/movie date with another friend before Halloween, the Thanksgiving shindig, and just this past weekend a shopping/dinner/beer day/night with another friend who is currently living in Germany and only in town for a brief stay for work. I also get in some time doing laundry with another friend once a week (our washing machine doesn’t work here at the house), and I will get out this next weekend for some parties for the holidays so I will have even more sanity restoration. Wow, it’s funny how everything does really seem to compound around the end of the year…

I am trying to find motivation to push myself to create and get out more. Sadly, I now have a schedule that keeps me working from Friday through Tuesday so I no longer have a day off in common with any of my friends so any creativity that does come my way will have to be expressed solo. I’ll deal somehow though, I’ve had a lot of practice at flying solo.

For now my lovely readers, in order to find something more positive to do and a more positive way to express the more positive things I will do, I will bid you good night/day and wish you a very happy end of the year festivity of your choosing just in case I don’t get around to posting again this month.

Now, back to the missing year at hand. Last seen it was full of promise of a new, stable, full-time job, held the possibility of an exciting relationship and adventures with friends, and was wearing a smile of optimism. If any of you have seen this particular year, please return to me as soon as possible. If further Identification of this missing year is needed, please let me now in the comments section of this blog and I will contact you back as soon as possible. Thank you.

Honestly, I have plans for my Thanksgiving Thursday and am quite excited for it but I have no plans for Christmas or New Year’s yet. The reasons for lack of further plans mostly involve my hatred of all people and entities who skip over Thanksgiving in order to push Christmas into the faces of everyone in America as early as Halloween. Yeah, let’s not ignore one holiday in favor of another, thanks. You’re ruining my yearly milestone tap-dance. For this week I will see friends and make potatoes. I’m also planning to take an experimental dessert with me but I don’t know if it will work out. That’s the nature of experiment, though.

For those of you celebrating Thanksgiving this week, I hope it is a truly special one. And if you’re wondering, getting into a store just after dinner in order to get a sale on a flat panel TV combo pack, well, no. That’s not the kind of special I mean. I hate that kind of special. For any of you who aren’t celebrating a holiday of that nature this week, try to give thanks anyway. To be truthful, we should all be thankful for each day we wake up on the right side of the pavement.

At the store this morning, immediately after opening, the few newspapers that we typically stock were attacked by customers wishing to keep documentation of the polls results. We sold out of newspapers before 8am. Beyond the first couple of hours, there wasn’t much talk of the election results. It was just another day.

The week of the reset, there were no options for anyone at the store to control any ordering done. We didn’t have a choice in what we received or when we received it. We got shipments every day that week (typically shipments are only received M, W & F). With daily shipments, a perpetual flux of shelving, piping, construction supplies, cement, and various other new fixtures our back room was terrifying to walk through at times. Honestly, I felt like going back there was akin to voluntarily walking into the trash compacter from Star Wars. On top of all of that we were yanking thousands of items from the shelves that the company was no longer going to be carrying and trying to reduce them for expedited sales. Now, with all this chaos going on in in the back room, you would think that the company would allow for more of that marked down merchandise to be placed in bins in the open space on the sales floor, especially since after this reset we have much more of it than we used to. Well, this company is not known for logical processing so as you may have guessed from my cynical tone, that marked down merchandise is just sitting in the back taking up space. Ugh. To run this down again we have: incoming and outgoing fixtures of various sizes, thousands of marked down items, double the incoming shipments, and tons of items that are being forcibly back-stocked simply because there’s no room for them on the sales floor. All of this is sitting in the back room at work waiting for the trickle-down processing to move it somewhere.

One might think that with all of these issues it might be a good idea to upgrade the attention with which orders are being placed so that absolutely nothing unneccesary is received. That “One” might also have the wishful thinking necessary to believe that Santa may deliver presents using the help of reindeer but has an entire stable full of unicorns that he hangs out with the rest of the year. The week of the reset I was off the day my shipment arrived (Friday).The first week after the reset was completed, I was not able to do my own ordering because I had to spend all my time attempting to correct numbers in the system. Typically an order is placed in the system on Tuesday and arrives on Friday but I was off on Sunday and correcting system numbers for M, T and W. That meant that I had a very large shipment come in that included quite a lot of items I should not have been sent. After spending 4 days correcting inventory numbers and min/max settings I placed my first order for a regular shipment the second week. That week I had a fairly small shipment because I only allowed what I needed to be sent. Hallelujah! I had time to work through more of the mess in the back after I finished putting everything I received out on the sales floor (and having almost nothing go into back-stock).

Last week, however, I was informed that I was never allowed to place orders for myself. I was very soundly lectured about how I needed to allow the system to place orders for me and only do minimal checking on the items being ordered. Buh?! I know what I need and what I don’t. Many of my thousands of items aren’t even programmed into the system for auto-ordering. Why can’t I place my own orders? Here’s the reason why I am beginning to hate my position: no one works with me. Literally. I am responsible for a HUGE portion of the grocery department but I don’t have an underling, a partner or a manager that works specifically with me in this “department” so I am all alone in the struggle. I don’t have anyone who will have my back and say, “hey, do you realize that in order to make sure that things aren’t being sent that aren’t needed we would have to scan every single item to check and see if the system was trying to order it or not?” I was basically told to keep my comments to myself. The system knows. Um… no. Just no. I had to pull both my manager and assistance manager aside and show them a few issues in order to illustrate the points I attempted to make before being told I don’t know anything. This little glass bottle of liquid that is diagrammed to have a single slot on a shelf is showing in the system as though it’s supposed to be stacked 11 high. Mmhmm. Okay, you find a way to stack it and I’ll stock it that way and allow 33 of them to come in. Oh, this cold medication has a maximum quantity in the system of 3, I currently have 4 of them, the forecasted sales for this upcoming week is 1 (4-1=3 which is the maximum) but the system has already auto-ordered 2 more of them. No, you’re right, I’m the problem.

Dealing with all of this at work and basically being treated as though my IQ is lower than my shoe size has done quite a number on my stress level.Thankfully, I don’t bring that stress home for the most part but stressing as hard as I do some days while at work means getting home and feeling as though I just lost a fight with Evander Holyfield. But, as is typically the case, there’s no rest for the weary. The two classes I was in were kicking my ass. Systems Architecture and Digital Crime. They were good classes and (sporks be praised) they are over now. I’m still waiting on the finals to be graded, though. I just began a new class this past Sunday and will hopefully get through it and this holiday season without being too stressed out. Only time will tell. For now, I am fighting to try and find a new job and survive the last couple of weeks of election-related BS. Thankfully, that makes my concerns somewhat minimal seeing as Hurricane Sandy left almost no damage near me. Hopefully the areas hardest hit will bounce back quickly.

So. As I began to plan the clothes and how I would distress/destroy them one thing occurred to me: when a woman dies and she is redressed for the funeral, does anyone put a bra on her? The point of us wearing bras is to give support to the large ones, direction to the small ones and be window dressing on the fake ones. But if the woman is deceased, she really doesn’t need any of those attributes, does she? My thought would be no. In an open-casket service she would be lying in a position that make a bra unnecessary and is likely being dressed in such a way as to deter anyone from noticing anyways. In a closed casket service, well, quite frankly, no one would know if the deceased is stark naked. It is therefore questionable to me that any female zombie would be wearing a bra.

Oddly enough, while watching shows like The Walking Dead, the female zombie still seem to be dressed completely normally as though they were never buried to begin with. Now, I grant you that in this particular show and the graphic novels it was based on, most of the zombies were not those that had arisen from burial plots anymore, they’re the ones that were newly created and never went through the whole death/funeral/burial/clawing-back-out-of-the-ground thing. So I guess maybe I just answered my own question. I would not be weird for still wearing a bra as part of a costume. It does make me wonder though: if zombies eat the flesh of various people and probably other zombies, why aren’t there more boobless female zombies? That’s a whole lot of flesh to be had if you think about it… Okay maybe you shouldn’t think about it. The Walking Dead really is quite graphic enough for the most part.

I shall content myself with destroying the outer layer of clothing only and keeping the necessary under things as they ordinarily would be for comfort sake. Now I just need to perfect the make up of the dead. Considering how many women do that daily and call it fashion it really shouldn’t be too difficult. No offense ladies but damn. I really have to agree that often times less is more.