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Showing posts from January, 2012

Continuing the conversation

5:24 pm: I've managed to stay positive in the past hour and a half and to tell myself not to be negative with the customers. They're here to pay me, after all. It just means I have to dance around like a person approaching a black hole, stretched by the gravity of competing needs. "We can't go on together with suspicious minds," sings someone who isn't Elvis Presley over the XM Radio. The signal cuts out every time I have to use the microwave. So far I've cooked four dinners. There are eight people here. None of them are noticing that the faux Elvis is cutting in and out, even though I'm not cooking at the moment. There's a football game on the television and I'm ready to be here tonight, to have fun and be positive no matter what. I'm here by myself, which is always stressful. I can get through it. I don't know what's going to happen. All day I tried to imagine what my life would be like without being here. And, I'm

Candid assessments of an evening at Court Square Tavern

5:57 PM:  I'm over the grumpiness, at least. There's a certain tension as I walk the two blocks from one job to another as I realize yet again that 5:00 is not the end of my day, but the beginning of an open-ended shift that does not have any certainty. Both of my jobs are similar in this regard, in that I never have any sense of finality. I'm required to work until the work is done. What's worse are the nights when I don't even fully finish the first job before moving on to the second. As I type this, I'm waiting edits to come back from the paper so I can post a story. But, as I said, I'm over the grumpiness and I'm not going to worry too much about being here tonight.  I am going to worry about my future here, because something about working here is unsustainable if I want to remain an upstanding member of our community. 7:09 PM: We're in that weird section of the night when everything is taken care of. It's not actually busy. The c

On the recent lack of posting and searching for a way forward

I've kept this blog for several years now after keeping one for a few years in the late 1990's before the word was coined. I'm not sure I'll be very prolific in 2012. There is a value in having a forum to write out my most important thoughts for others to see. I've tended to feel less lonely and more connected to people by being able to write out what I think about things. These days I'm writing privately rather than publicly. I have so many drafts in blogger that I don't really want to be public. I get the impulse to write about what's going on in my life, and then I think better of hitting publish. I've lost the sense of what this blog should be about now that I mostly use Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to get my thoughts out there. I'm currently not nearly as interested in writing about running. This could be because I've not raced since Thanksgiving. I'm currently not interested in writing about Court Square Tavern because I