I am way too young to dread coming into work on a daily basis.

A work study job at that.

I certainly value the education I’ve managed to seek out at NYU, but I frequently wish I went to art school instead.

Leave it to the ONE PERSON who doesn’t recognize Spike Lee to ring him up at the register.

I wasn’t giving him a faculty discount because he didn’t have an NYU ID and he was giving me that “…you don’t know who I am?” expression and smugly asking me to ask the manager. I wasn’t exactly hiding the fact that he was annoying me after I ran the register for 2-3 hours nonstop after cashiers called off/were late. I would have respected him more if he just said “oh okay” instead of demanding that I ask the manager.

Amy: “You just rung up Spike Lee.”
Adrianna: “That explains his ‘you don’t recognize me?’ attitude. He was rude.”
Amy: “….yeah he was”

I’m standing my ground. I’m probably one of the few people who hasn’t kissed his ass in the last ten years and I hope he got a piece of humble pie.

After all that, he saved about $2 on his refurbished DVDs.

Strangest nap ever. I fell asleep while listening to music sometime around 9pm or even 8:30. I remained flat on my back and woke up at 11pm and then again at 2am. I never sleep on my back let alone with the lights blaring in my room. I was on the edge of my tiny bed because most of it was covered in the clothes I’m tailoring.

It’s 4:50am. I have to show up at work in five hours. Christ.

I’m strongly reconsidering working there over winter break because  I drove myself crazy there over the summer.  It’s a good part time job but I keep going home angry if I work a shift over four hours.  I shouldn’t let this type of stuff bother me but it does.  It’s one of the lowest work study jobs but significantly more demanding than sitting in a computer lab and watching people swipe their IDs.  I’ve stayed there for this long because I like my department but Friday made me crack when the assistant manager fights with me like I’m a bad employee.  I’m not going to be taken advantage of without talking back just because cashiers keep calling off and come in late.

I try to be focused on my own responsibilities there and ignore the bullshit, but I can’t if I’m pulled into it and then disrespected in the process.

I’ve invested way too much time and energy into this nonsense than I ever should have.

This semester freaked me out enough to look into counseling at NYU but the convoluted and vague website was enough to spark a panic attack, especially when I tried to decipher the freaking winter break hours. I don’t want to read a water-downed definition of “major depression,” I want to fucking know what to do about it.

What are the symptoms of Major Depression?

• Sadness, anxiety, or “empty” feelings
• Decreased energy, fatigue, being “slowed down”
• Loss of interest or pleasure in usual activities
• Sleep disturbances (insomnia, oversleeping, or waking much earlier than usual)
• Appetite and weight changes (either loss or gain)
• Feelings of hopelessness, guilt, and worthlessness
• Thoughts of death or suicide, or suicide attempts
• Difficulty concentrating, making decisions, or remembering
• Irritability or excessive crying
• Chronic aches and pains not explained by another physical condition

Of course, everyone has some of these symptoms at certain points in life; that is normal. You should become concerned if you are feeling five or more of the above symptoms for longer than two weeks.

Two weeks? Try ten years.

The problem is as a former psych major, I know psychology is a load of bullshit and educated guessing. At 16 I was so desperate to “get rid” of my depression/suicidal thoughts that I basically repeated that convoluted definition to be prescribed antidepressants. That was the problem on my side, I wasn’t necessarily 100% honest but I didn’t know how to even describe what I was experiencing – but it was a bigger problem on the medical side, that my word was enough to gain access to pharmaceutical drugs. I was just so desperate and self-destructive at that point.

Prozac helped for a few months but it was a downward spiral because I’d have to increase the dosage every few months and it essentially caused more harm than good when I stopped taking it cold turkey. The psychiatrist was a Korean drug dealer who barely understood what I was saying for the five minutes that I met with him.

I’ve approached a number of professionals over the years but no one wanted to truly deal with my problems so all I ever got is “you need therapy and medication” and no actual help. I’d list traumatic events/experiences that fucked me up and no one would take the initiative to do something.

The charges I filed never made it to trial because the female prosecutor didn’t believe me. I wouldn’t recognize the male detective if I saw him, but what resonates with me was his expression and how much all this disturbed him.

It makes a lot of sense as to why I have little sense of authority any why people’s titles and positions at work mean very little to me.  The people of authority, uniform, and higher positions have only betrayed me and made me hate the world even more.

I have a lot of displaced anger and I just don’t know what to do with it anymore.

This morning I slipped on some ice right in front of my apartment building on my way to work.

That should’ve been the sign to turn back around and call off.

I’m tired of going home feeling like shit.

My wrist/hand is recovering from completing my last final. If you’ve ever taken an exam next to me, (..or had a class.. or a heavy-note-taking lecture) I’m that obnoxious who cracks their knuckles.. and neck/head.. and limbs… This year I got in the bad habit of cracking my neck by pushing my chin to the sides and it’s SO satisfying but probably looks so unattractive considering the looks I get from people. If I feel like freaking people out, I push my chin with one fist in one direction, and grab/push against the top of my head in other direction with my other hand. Ohhhh so satisfying.

I do this one thing where I even freak myself out – my intention is always to crack all my knuckles against my skull (when I’m lacking a hard surface to push my fist against to crack them) but I end up what feels like shifting my head in one of my top vertebrae, “C1″.

Digression aside, I don’t really know why I have to twist my right wrist during intensive writing to get that cracking sound. It’s not exactly cracking, almost like I’m popping either my “palmar carpal ligament” into my “flexor retinaculum” to relieve pain from my “median nerve”

This blog is getting really fuckin’ educational

My attention span in lecture is incredibly nonexistent, but moreso because I can’t sit still in one spot.  Whatever the professor is saying might be fascinating, but my God, I just wanna get up and MOVE so my leg is shaking and shaking and shaking and I’m scribbling and scribbling.
I frequently just burst out in sprints around my apartment – believe me, it helps that there’s a long, narrow space across the entire apartment that makes this possible. I had no patience to walk across a pretty big house in the Poconos so I literally sprinted and slide across the floors and developed a weird coordination of breaking. All my socks were worn through the soles because of it.

I just don’t want to admit that I’m going to be bored out of my mind for the next five weeks.

I totally signed up for my Immigrant Comparative Literature course because of the word “immigrant” in it but I ended up really enjoying it despite the actual length of sitting in a room from 12:30-3:00 and some of the pretentious ideas that were thrown around. It makes more sense to have a class once a week given the 6 or 7 days to prepare a significant amount of reading or work beforehand.  Admittedly I regretted taking it at first because I thought people were reaching far too deep to pull stuff out of their ass and call it an “idea.” I remembered why I hated previous literature-driven courses my freshmen year because I really had no idea how people were getting some elaborate ideas out of a group of words. — And this is coming from someone who spent the last ten years of her life behind a book.

Maybe it’s because I liked the general topic of the course, or that I forced myself to put in the time to really find the message in between the lines because I made the commitment when I signed up for this course — or maybe after two years of college I did take something out of it after all — but this class reminded me what college is about or what it should be.  Something clicked about the fifth week in and I had a big “…OH” and it oddly started to make sense — and genuinely interesting.

College should be beyond spitting back words you furiously wrote down in lecture or read the night before the big exam.  Why are college exams multiple choice? Aren’t I supposed to be tested on the ideas I learned and my ability to interpret them?  Unfortunately then grading becomes overly subjective and some professors really fail at grading one’s ability to develop an idea rather than grading the idea. One of my current professors really aggravated me because while her assignments were very open-ended, she graded you down because you didn’t pursue the same line of interest she would have. It got to the point where her marginal comments were practically telling me what she would have written instead of whether or not I was effectively arguing my point. Well, go.. write ahead!  (hah, pun)

This semester flew by, which is odd considering that these have been some of the longest days I’ve had in years. Wake up at 5, do schoolwork in the library, go to class, go back to the library and/or go to work. I’d be gone from my apartment well over 14 hours at a time. I hated this semester from a emotional/mental-health standpoint. I think I truly lost my mind for about three months. Either way, it was certainly my favorite from an educational viewpoint.

That said, thank God for winter break – I’m burned out.

grezakster: OKAY i’m at nine pages. how the fuck will i bullshit another page
grezakster: ::cries::
Amsterm2290: wghat is it even on
grezakster: bullshit 101
grezakster: a story in Danilo Kis’s book
grezakster: i talk about snow way longer than I ever wanted to
Amsterm2290: write taht snow is pretty
grezakster: i wrote that it gets dirty, trampled by mankind
Amsterm2290: werite about yellow snow
grezakster: “The soldiers relieved themselves on nature’s purity before going out and slaughtering 60,000 Jews”

Guess my age!

I certainly complain about the customers that shop at the nyu bookstore (whether it be tourists or students or professors- all compete for the #1 spot for over-demanding customer) but majority are either pleasant or simply forgettable. Most understand how to ask a question and say “thank you” after you find them the book. Most of all, 99% don’t raise their voice in public.

Staples (the one that closed in SoHo) was retail hell. I literally had no training before I was put on the sales floor, well, copy center.  The assistant manager I had the most issues with constantly complained that “I wasn’t trained” (am I supposed to stick out my paw when you extend your hand? Do I urinate indoors when I’m supposed to lift a leg outside?) But most of all none of the managers/assistant managers was taking the responsibility to – gasp – train me. That fell on my jaded co-workers who barely had the time to give me a dirty look let alone play Manager and train an employee.  The copy center printers were literally broken most of the time or a couple of the copy clerks wouldn’t run orders until the store closed so they could lie that they were broken and avoid getting more orders. (Wait, what?) I’d be in the department alone without a password into the system so I couldn’t even ring people up when they came to pick up their order. I dreaded any time anyone came to pick up an order I wasn’t familiar with because there was no functional system to organize orders. The first time I cried on the job was when some lawyer spent 20 minutes berating me over an order I didn’t run and being really nasty and sarcastic about the fact that we didn’t have  another oversized box.  Back then I swallowed all of this with my leg between my legs.  Today these kinds of people get a “No.” and I walk away.

I’m sure I wrote about this, but I decided to quit the day I was screamed at by 7 people at the same time.  That’s right, seven. I almost walked out 20 minutes into my shift. I stayed the day because I needed the money but it was my last day because I came in 2 hours before my shift and quit on the spot without notice.
Two copy clerks and a manager had to deal with the four Asian teenagers demanding a discount because they were put on hold when they called the store.  That wasn’t really working so they started to complain about the quality of the order, which can’t be helped if the images we received were low-quality. Three more customers started screaming at me because I wasn’t assisting them all the same time.  First of all, there was enough background screaming to stress everyone out. Second of all, Woman A was expecting me to find a mysterious order without giving me any information – no name, no indication of what the order was, etc. Woman B with her Husband were complaining that they’ve been “waiting for a long time” which apparently anything over 2 minutes is a long time.  My guess is that they were there 10 minutes at the longest.
So I’m trying to read Woman A’s mind while Woman B keeps complaining that they’re not being helped. After the second or third time Woman B complained and my response of “I’ll be right with you” wasn’t making her shut up, I approached her with “I’m sorry, what can I help you with?” I shit you not, she literally blew up and screamed “WHAT ABOUT HER?!” referring to Woman A. Wait, what? I was absolutely stunned and dumbstruck by such contradicting behavior. First you’re complaining that you’re not helped. Then you’re complaining that I’m helping you.

Now bear in mind this was when I first started in retail so I let all these people spit on my ego while I continued to kiss ass. I remained calm, I didn’t argue, I was more apologetic than I should have been.  It’s customers like these that really made me more jaded and stone-faced in retail.  A couple of people at my current job told me that I have a very “stern, no-nonsense” tone of voice when a customer is getting annoying. It stems from my Staples experiences b/c it’s really bothered me that I was cordial to screaming customers before and during their flip outs.  Being disrespected is one thing but then I’d feel like a complete idiot for not standing up for myself.

I certainly don’t pick fights like other people have in the bookstore – I don’t open any doors for an argument or respond to someone’s bitching. I literally repeat the store policy two or three times verbatim to the point where the person who is looking to blow a fuse at someone is annoyed at me that I’m just repeating myself instead of giving them an excuse to claim the right to argue with me.

Example:
“Where’s your restroom?”
“We don’t have a public restroom.”
“I’m a faculty member of this university, I’m astounded that you don’t have a restroom that I could use”
“We don’t have a public restroom.” First off, I think this was Grad Alley Day so we were busy to begin with. Second of all, if you carry an NYU ID, you automatically have access to plenty of restrooms on campus. Third of all, you’re a grown man, learn to go before you leave the house. This tenure professor looked more annoyed with me that I wasn’t allowing him to argue with me moreso that he had to use a restroom across the street.  He was about to say something but stopped and left.

In my experience I haven’t had trouble with customers when I remained “stern” and kept my answers short because it simply sounds like I know what I’m talking about in regards to store policies. If I engage in dialogue over some stupid complaint it sounds like I don’t know what I’m talking about and that I’m welcoming debate, as if whatever they’re demanding is possible. Cashiers are attacked for a reason – customers know they’re the lowest on the chain of power and therefore are “wrong” because they’re word can be overturned by someone else.

I can’t really think of other examples, but the nastiest people at the information desk are considerably older (frequently male) and expect me to serve them based on a generational/gender difference. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve started wearing dress shirts on days I know will be more crowded.  People stereotype dress shirts and assume I have some authority (or at least that I know whether or not we carry a specific book in the store) and don’t pick arguments.

Boss: “Hopefully at the end of your experience here –”
Me: ” — Oh, it’s an experience.”

It’s evident that I dwell over my daily life more than others but it’s also because I’m reaching a crossroads where I’m trying to figure out what the Hell I want to do.  Another bookstore so I can pretend to retain my anti-establishment persona by wearing jeans to work? Publishing to avoid Customers from Hell but to bend over for The Man in business-casual-attire? I guess this crosswords might come sooner than two semesters because the idea of the new bookstore scares me – if all these managers can’t handle working together to get through a weekend of inventory, how the hell will they open up a new store? Apparently the power structure and departments will be jumbled together which scares me enough. Just what I need – a female boss and a 30-something frat boy with creepy tattoos starring at my tits even more.