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For the first time in a decade, I have a roommate. We moved into a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment. Now, we have two TVs. Initially, we planned to put her larger TV in the living room and my smaller one in my bedroom.
My bedroom must also have an office space since I work from home. At the same time, I tried to accommodate the placement of the TV. It perched on the bookcase, facing opposite the bed. Then, once we moved the desk into the room, I had to rotate the bed 90 degrees, which meant it no longer faced the TV. Not only that, the TV cord didn’t reach the outlet. Plus, with two TVs, we’d only get one cable box and would have to pay extra for an additional cable box. Or we could pay a one-time fee for a streaming app.
I figured all the TV considerations had just mentally taxed me because it was moving day and I was tired. Yet, upon further reflection and rest, I had the solution: get rid of my TV.
I’ve not had a TV in my bedroom since college. The reason the TV doesn’t comfortably fit in my bedroom now is that it no longer belongs there. It hasn’t belonged there for 3 decades and cannot easily invade that space. This coming from someone who can happily read in the living room on the sofa while the TV is on because now, that’s where that contraption belongs.
This is an external example of “compartmentalization.” Certain activities take place in certain rooms. As I proved to myself within the first 24 hours of my new place, there’s more to it than merely putting a TV into a room and plugging it in. The entire dynamics of a room changes to accommodate a TV. What’s the point of having one in the room if it cannot be viewed comfortably?
My bedroom arrangement maximizes sleeping and, during the waking hours, working and reading. If I want to bask in the presence of a TV, the living room is where that worship takes place.
For the past week, I’ve taken a daily dose of CBD oil along with a dose of an anti-inflammation booster after exercising. At the end of the week, I attended my usual Friday noontime Bikram power hour class and discovered a breakthrough.
According to the Bikram dialogue, yogis should only stretch as far as we feel a pain sensation due to stretching–not sharp, shooting pain. For nearly ten years, I thought I’d done just that. Perhaps when I first started the practice, I had.
Then, this past Friday, I went deeper into every posture. Apparently, my “stretching sensation pain” was actually inflammation pain. The CBD and booster worked on my endocannabinoid system, which effects all other known body systems of beings with spinal cords.
So, I started taking CBD to alleviate the pain in my permanently injured left ankle, but all the inflammation in my body has been lessened. Not only that, but I’ve slept better, have had better concentration, and, if I’m not mistaken, my allergies, which the city of Austin had given me, has all but disappeared.
Not bad for taking two products. Since I’ve become an Ambassador (sales rep) for the company, I get them wholesale. Another perk is that I have the opportunity to make money 7 different ways as an Ambassador. One of the ways include residual income. That was definitely a plus since I wanted an opportunity to make money where I wouldn’t be dependent on trading time for money.
Then, the company has wonderful bonuses such as making car payments for a Jeep, giving us money for the sole purpose of donation, paying for healthcare, then something that has no appeal, but I’d take it if I got it: a motor coach.
As a matter of fact, when I attended the presentation, I was so impressed with the business opportunity, I signed up as an Ambassador before I’d even tried the products. I could clearly see how this entrepreneurial opportunity had fewer moving parts for me, plus support, with the added bonus of offering products that aren’t hard sells. And I know hard sells, such as health care discount plans over the phone.
I’d heard that the 7th day would be magical since we offer 7-Day challenges of CBD mini bottles, so people can see how well they like the product. Now, I’m looking forward to the 90th day. That’s another point where CBD consumers have reported significant changes, especially those of us who take the weight loss booster.
Granted, I’m not obese, but why wait until I reach that point? As everyone eventually discovers, as we age, it’s more challenging to maintain our weight. We can have the same diet and workout routine and gradually gain weight. I’ve not gained so much that I need to buy a bigger size, but some clothes are fitting snugger than they used to.
I look forward to seeing in 3 months how much microdosing CBD has affected my postmenopausal marsupial pouch. I’ve even heard men marvel at how the weight loss booster has melted away their back fat, love handles and thighs.
On the business side, I will evaluate whether I’ll still need to work my daytime hustle. Being on CBD has made that mindless job more pleasant. I still make the most of it by watching training videos and reading books in between calls, minus the mental strain that comes with customer service. It’s just ironic that now I’m doing better at that job and hitting my numbers for bonuses. That’s going to make it a little more tempting to leave, but since there’s no residual income, I’m sure my “last straw” will eventually arrive.
At one point in my life, I changed apartments 9 times in 10 years. That was also over a span of 5 countries. Such an easy way to be adventurous, simply pack up and move.
Then I landed in the fertile grounds of Austin. It’s easy to assume that with age and maturity, that I settled down. In actuality, I’m still adventurous. I just don’t have to pack up everything. There are pros and cons to both approaches to adventure.
When I was on the move, nothing made the cut that wasn’t used within that past year. Yet, staying in the same place for nearly a decade allows for things to get squirreled away, and covered with dust bunnies.
There are pockets of past projects and hobbies tucked away in closets and drawers. Books filling the bowels of my bookcase that I’ve no intention of rereading. T-shirts fighting for space in my drawer.
Every weekend in the month of July, I’m dropping off some no longer useful things at my local Goodwill before continuing to my Sunday midday yoga class. I cleanse everything else, why not my apartment?
The energy changes when there are no longer dead zones of clutter. The last time I had such a serious decluttering occurred a couple of years ago when I moved my desk and bed around in order to create a home office. The thick carpet of dust blanketing everything that I’d shoved under my bed disgusted me. From that point on, once my bed was in its new location, I never put anything underneath it again.
Yet, this next apartment cleanse has been long overdue. Some of the possessions no longer even reflect the life I currently lead. I still had my mini-fridge and microwave that used to be in my classroom from 6 years ago. Then I had far more smooth pressed cardboard from cereal and soap boxes than I ever remember consuming from an era long ago when my plan was to practice painting on them.
I laughed when I saw the almost new looking flower pot with a half bag of cactus soil in it from the time I was growing a moringa plant. Some call such plants the new miracle food. The only miracle I witnessed was how I managed to kill it in a short space of time. I gave the pot and soil to a green thumb friend.
I’d love to say that from now on, I’ll do an annual “Spring Cleaning,” but I don’t want to get into the habit of lying to myself. What I’ve done in the past is tidy up a small area at a time. That’s spared me from being a straight-up hoarder. Yet the accumulation of 9 years worth of spot tidying has finally caught up with me. The least I can do is have my current possessions reflect who I presently am. All the other things need to be donated, recycled or thrown away.
Even though Nature abhors a vacuum and works against the organization of things, I feel very empowered to organize and cleanse my immediate surrounds that I influence.
At the time, I was a Peace Corps Volunteer because water was far too precious to waste on perming my hair. This practical approach to the limited amount of freshwater turned out to be a lifelong commitment to dreads.
“Commitment” may be the wrong word because that usually implies sacrifice and hard work. What I found was freedom. From routine. From high-cost maintenance. From worrying about the weather messing up my hairdo.
I’ve learned that dreads thin out like ropes in chronic dry weather like Denver. Severe stress will cause hair loss even for dreads like when I taught my first year in Honduras. And over time, dreads tend to migrate, which causes me to redo them from time to time.
Sometimes, I need to braid a few skinny ones together. Other times, I need to prune fat ones that haven’t locked up after about 3″ of growing out of my scalp, which makes them look unkempt. After cutting off the locked part, the remaining hair is like a soft, short Afro. I divide that patch of hair and make two braids. Over time, those skinny braids grow into luscious dreads and starts the process all over again.
This time, the catalyst for a mass pruning turned out to be those feisty gray hairs. They had a mind and texture all of their own. And like cantankerous old ladies, they were so set in their ways that they disrupted whichever lock they sprouted in.
Of course they got their way. I chopped off most of the dreads in the front and shedded no sentiment as I did so. Once I braided the remains into mini braids after the butchery, I had a mullet.
My maternal grandmother often said that a woman’s hair was her crown and glory, especially after she saw my dreads for the first time. She’d wanted me to reverse them–as did every other older female relative. She even laid on a heavy guilt trip. “I never told you this, but I always thought you were the prettiest one.”
Well, I’m still beautiful. Even with a dreadlocked mullet and cool girl shades.
Due to various circumstances in years past, I hadn’t attended the family reunion on my mother’s side in nearly ten years. This year, all the stars aligned and I made it–late, but better than never.
Perhaps more accurate, “delayed.” Everything about this vacation back home had me wait past the time I expected something to happen: my airport shuttle, the check-in line, the connecting flight, my sister picking me up from the final airport. I’d love to credit the accumulated mindfulness of yoga practice for not being annoyed the entire time, but that was only part of it.
The impromptu conversations I had along the way, truly made the journey, starting with the three strangers who shared the airport shuttle. Apparently, one of them took long in getting her things together and caused the delay in picking me up. Any irritation or anxiety I had about making to the airport on time, quickly disappeared when one of them asked me, “What are the amenities at this apartment complex?”
That innocent question snowballed into a gentrification rant on my part, including the historical context of how people of color were forced to live on the East side with I-35 being the dividing line between whites and POC.
They all turned out to be in the Real Estate business, but none of them were agents. They’d attended a conference in Austin and were headed back to New York. Yet, they shared similar stories of racial divide and gentrification with the bonus addition of family residences, being sold for less than what they were worth to big-time Real Estate developers, changing the demographics of the neighborhood.
The driver, who’d joined in the conversation (after all, we were all POC), had assured me that given the time of day, the delay in arriving at the airport wouldn’t be a problem because there was no crowd at that time. Too bad no one told Delta Airlines.
I rolled up to a self check-in kiosk, typed in my information, paid a ridiculous fee for my checked luggage, printed out my boarding passes, and then noticed the tag for the suitcase was missing. I looked around, saw the line to the Delta counter, heard a cat meowing, then looked back at the kiosk, and back at the line. As my sense of logic wrestled with the reality of the situation, I noticed that half the people in line already had their boarding passes. Logic lost the wrestling match.
I entertained myself by people-watching when I saw a guy who wore the same expression I imagined I’d worn after printing out my boarding passes. “Yes,” I said, answering the question mostly like floating in his mind, “you DO have to wait in this line even though you just checked in.” We both laughed at the illogicalness of it all.
I didn’t exactly race to the security line, but whatever time I saved was negated by the line I chose to stand in to have my things X-rayed. When the TSA worker checked my passport, I joked that I was there to receive wine and chocolate. At least she had a sense of humor.
Even the TSA worker I encountered after going through the metal detector was in a good mood. “Happy Juneteenth!” he greeting me, reading my T-shirt. I bumped fists with him. (Who actually enjoys going through security like that?)
I regrouped, putting my laptop back in its case and my shoes on, then I dashed to my gate after a quick stop to the bathroom. I arrived to the boarding process already in progress. Instead of having group numbers, Delta boards by categories, which seemed over the top, given how small the plane was.
I joined a woman at a nearby table, who happened to be assigned to the same row as me. We laughed at the fact that she was listed as “Main 1,” or some such shit and I was listed as “Basic.” Essentially, “Basic” meant I’d board last. She remained with me until my category was called.
Our conversation leapfrogged around such topics as racial bias, privilege within the deaf/disability hierarchy, immigration injustice. I’d convinced the guy who sat beside me take the window seat so she and I could talk across the aisle, which wasn’t a loud conversation since the aisle was so narrow that two beer-bellied men could scarcely pass one another coming and going to the bathroom. We noted the challenge when one man loudly said to the other, “OK, we both gotta suck in our guts!”
We talked to one another the entire time, but she initially feared I’d talk to my seat partner when he stated that he was a music therapist. Imagine the richness of conversation we could have had if that guy wasn’t so determined to sleep on the plane.
We wished one another well once we hit Cincinnati. I did my usual layover routine: bathroom, bar food, booze. As good fortune would have it, I struck up another good conversation with a guy at the bar. I enticed him into a really good conversation after giving him my business card, which advertised the spoken word and storytelling show that I produce. One theme, “Too Woke Insomniac,” intrigued him.
What an invitation to discuss the extremes of political correctness and the lack thereof. We agreed that both political left and right have become too polarized to be rational. I even included the bonus conversation about how many poor and working class whites consistently act against their own self-interest due to racial resentment.
The only example I had time to touch upon was how white men commit suicide by gun more than any other demographic, mainly because the gun industry heavily markets to them. White men who previously showed no signs of depression, will undergo a crisis–as what normally happens a few times in life–and impulsively reach for their gun. I pointed out that if black people encouraged white men to buy guns, knowing the statistics, we’d be accused of being racist, but the white community says virtually nothing about being targeted by gun makers. Even cigarettes come with warning labels.
Not only did he agree, but admitted that he was a gun owner who believed in common sense gun control and that the most conservative whites have a low tolerance for discussing the bad consequences of guns.
At that point, I had to pay up and head toward my gate. Yet, I enjoyed my delayed layover, thanks to that meaningful conversation.
Once I landed at Reagan International Airport, I had another good stretch of time to sit and read while my sister and her kids worked their way through a traffic jam. What a coincidence that as I read about Siddhartha rebelling against his father and family wealth to live a beggar’s life, I sat outside during a sprinkling of rain without much a care in the world.
At that point, the vacation had truly begun. All the meaningful conversations I’d had didn’t quite seem like the start of vacation since I do that on a regular basis. Sitting outside in the rain, albeit under a shelter, while reading seemed like the vacation.
Once my sister and her kids picked me up, that’s when the family reunion started. I loved the car ride home since I got to first catch up with a few family members at a time.
The next day, my sister’s family and I trekked several hours to the hotel where we normally stay during the Strange Family Reunion. The first day of our 3-day celebration is always the fish fry.
My extended family acted as if I’d been away for a much longer time that it felt to me. Some reactions reminded me of UFO sightings: not believing their eyes at what they were seeing.
One of my sisters and a 1st cousin, who were both members of the Strange Family Historical Committee,
recruited me to help update the family tree during and after the fish fry. Essentially, we snagged one of our relatives to write down as much information as they knew about their branch of the family tree.
My uncle, mother, sister and many others not pictured above,
all hailed from the Floyd Strange branch, which is one of twelve from the Strange family. From those twelve, our extended family has proliferated.
I’m more like my Great Aunt Gracie, who never had any children. I never met her, but to hear it from my mother, I have a temperament just like her. So in a way, I feel that I’m her child. She was married for about a month. By that, I don’t mean that she divorced him; she just couldn’t stand living with him and left. I, on the other hand, have never married, but would be more open to that if I didn’t have to live with him. Aunt Gracie definitely had the right idea.
This was the second year
that an African dance troupe performed at our family reunion. Brought back memories of when I used to take African dance in college and in my 20s.
As impressive as the troupe was,
I loved seeing this young woman holding down the bass line, a traditional male role.
After their performance, they invited members of my extended family to join in.
I tried to get my nieces and nephew to get up and join in. If they were less respectful, they would’ve said, “Hell no, Aunt Teresa!” As par for the course, my mother, who sat at the elder table, sent one of my cousins over to where I sat to relay the message that she wanted to me to get up and dance. I wasn’t about to wear out my gimp leg with some one-off physical exertion that it hadn’t been conditioned to do.
Yet, I redeemed myself hours later when I co-emceed the fashion show. The same sister who’d recruited me to help update the family tree, recruited me for the fashion show. Another cousin announced who was about to walk down the catwalk, and then I said the first thing that would come to mind–minus the curse words.
I kept the audience of friends and relatives laughing the entire time. Since we never rehearsed anything to begin with, even the models had no idea what I was going to say. Several times, my co-emcee would be so entertained by my commentary that my sister had to remind her to announce the next model. The models themselves would start laughing so much they could hardly finish their walk.
I’d love to co-emcee for next year, but I want to up the ante. I’d love to show them a short clip or something that I’ve made as a filmmaker. I noticed a screen at the shelter. I’m going to see how to make that happen–along with the other balls I’m juggling.
For the 7th year in a row, I reprised my role as newly emancipated slave,
Mattie Gilmore. Yet, this was the first time I was positioned near the front of the art exhibit part of the George Washington Carver Museum.
I took advantage of my proximity to the Juneteenth blurb on the panel, which hung on the wall across from where I sat. Instead of faithfully reciting the lines from the excerpt of Mattie Gilmore’s narrative, I started off my performance with a trivia question: What month and year did the Civil War end?
That question was a doozy. Only three people knew the correct answer. Most I directed to look behind them to read the first sentence of the Juneteenth panel.
Some people remembered that 1863 was a significant year, but thought that Texan slaves didn’t hear about the end of the war until two years later. They were close.
In 1863, President Lincoln wrote the first Emancipation Proclamation, but since the Civil War hadn’t ended then, it freed not a single slave. Two years passed and the South surrendered on April 9th, 1865. Texan slaves found out about it around June 19th, 1865. Hence why we celebrate “Juneteenth” instead of “Aprilteenth.”
After some variation of the above, I’d launch into my Mattie Gilmore excerpt. Sometimes that was after significant conversation. Other times, reading my audience, I’d zip into the excerpt and send the group of people to the next storyteller.
One Iranian visitor really got into the spirit of Juneteenth and stated that essentially the same thing happened in his country. He felt the key to equality was education. Not just formal, academic education, but also raising the younger generation to have self-respect. At this point, he described the sagging pants on young men. Although he got way off topic, I politely moved him along to the next storyteller, putting my call center agent finesse to good use.
I then was able to talk with one of my friends for a while until another group of people arrived. She stayed to listen to my narrative, then moseyed along when yet another friend spoke with me about his diabetes.
Several kids walked around the corner to escape upon hearing my opening trivia question, but many tried to answer and some even asked me statistics about how many died. One boy asked me how many Confederate soldiers started the war. My answer: all of them. At least the adults laughed. I confessed to him that I didn’t know the war statistics, but I’m now motivated to learn far more about the Civil War, especially the action here in Texas and Texan slaves.
Next Juneteenth 2020, I’m going to know more about the Reconstruction era since most people want to hear more than the sanitized history they learned in heavily biased public school history books.
From July 2012 to December 2018, I’ve produced and hosted The Austin Writers Roulette every second Sunday of the month without fail. Starting in 2019, I scheduled the show bimonthly in order to have more time to pursue other creative outlets. And yet, my sister and her husband STILL managed to visit Dallas-Ft Worth on the same damn weekend!
I also had the bad luck to wear a two-piece suit as my hosting costume for the show during 110-degree weather. I felt like the Grim Reaper. I even told the audience that the Grim Reaper was in fact a Black woman in a fedora.
After the show, I hit the road for the 3-hour drive, reaching the hotel close to 10 PM at night still in costume. As amusing as my costume was during the show, people were NOT amused to cross paths with me in the parking garage and on the sidewalk, leading up to the hotel. They cleared a path for me as if I were truly the Grim Reaper.
Magically, once I hugged my sister and brother-in-law in the lobby, others were at ease.
To the point that one woman, who conveniently wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt, asked to take a picture with me just to prove to her friends, who were in another state at a cosplay event, that she too was having fun with some cosplay as well.
As stylish as I looked wearing a fedora,
I left it in the hotel room the following morning when we toured the stadium where the Dallas Cowboys played their home games. Part of our journey there included cruising along Tom Landry Freeway, which was periodically decorated with his famous fedora.
This tour had been on my sister’s bucket list. She’s been a lifelong Cowboys fan although she and her husband are Redskin season ticket holders. When the Redskins play the Cowboys, her loyalties are with the Lone Star team.
This was the only part where I wished I had the fedora.
Yet, the entire guided tour was indoors, so being out of costume with a hat on would have been pointless.
My other sister wasn’t touring with us,
but she requested for me to send her pictures of Emmet Smith. This was the first one I came across.
To my surprise, a cement floor had replaced the grassy field.
I’d never known that all that lush grass rested on top of a layer soil, which covered cement.
Since everything’s bigger in Texas,
this was the biggest screen of its kind in the world–or something like that. Added bonus, if you zoom in and look to the lower right of the screen, you’ll see Emmet Smith’s name!
A football-inspired ceiling light illuminated one of the members only lounge areas.
Apparently Clinton became an honorary Cowboy when they won the Super Bowl during his term.
I’d seen from afar that Ford had sponsored a floor,
but I couldn’t see the vehicles until we were actually in the space.
I mused aloud that the vehicles must have been helicoptered in via the retractable roof.
When the tour guide overheard what I’d said, she corrected me. “They open the windows (which are the biggest of their kind in the world, of course) and lift them up with crane.” None of us envied the crane operator who does that once a year to switch out this year’s vehicles with last year’s.
Before my mind registered the significance of the cotton, I thought of slavery.
Considering how many view pro football players, I’m not too far off the mark. Yet this symbolized the Cotton Bowl.
Once again, Emmet Smith’s backside.
And when it wasn’t his backside, he looked worn out.
En route from one part of the stadium to the basement, we passed by a storage area where banners from past events hung.
Sometimes, I know too much to enjoy things.
Yet, another woman in my tour group actually voiced a question in line with my thinking: “How much do the cheerleaders get paid?” Although the tour guide tactfully answered that she didn’t know and had to refrain from further comment, I knew I didn’t have to.
As a matter of fact, several of us knew that for all their hard work, they received less that minimum wage and had a stricter code of ethics to abide by than the football players. Plus, as the tour guide informed us as part of her script, these women had to try out every year. Tryouts had hundreds of cheerleading hopefuls, but the returning cheerleaders auditioned during the third round as part of a group of about 50 women.
Unlike touring the cheerleaders’ locker room, we received a word of warning before touring the players’ locker room: Do not sit on the wooden lockers. The tour guide stated that the quality of wood was like one finds on the inside of a Bentley. No such warning was given for the cheerleaders’ locker room since their decor was the quality of IKEA furniture.
I must admit: those lockers looked like inviting places to sit! But even the players sit in chairs and not their lockers.
Toward the end of the tour, we saw where the players run out onto the field. Hundreds of people line both sides of the lounge to root them on as they hit the field.
We got a closeup of the “field.” A soccer match had been the last event, which was why all of it had to be taken up in preparation of the next event. When sporting events aren’t taking place, the stadium also hosts concerts.
By the time we finished our tour, we had walked a mile and a half. Then, after leaving the facility, I drove us to the market to eat, followed by driving back to the hotel to get my things and trek back to Austin. That was such a full and exhausting day. All thoughts of working or even working out once I landed in Austin again were driven out of me.
Although I practice hot yoga several times a week, one of the greatest benefits is the mindfulness I’ve gained when outside the hot room. The beautiful thing about life is that one never knows when yoga practice will transform into a life-challenge strategy.
A friend invited me to attend a monthly storytelling show at a popular venue. Due to recent thunderstorms, the torrential rains damaged the venue’s AC. Even though the repairman fixed the AC unit minutes before the show began, the space was still too warm for most people’s comfort–except for me.
As we lined up outside to pay, one of the producers handed out appetizer-sized paper plates to use as makeshift fans. I declined to take one. He assured me that I would need one. I insisted I wouldn’t.
Envision the air becoming cooler, I suggested to some people before the show began, but without hot yoga training, they fanned themselves in frustration. Throughout the entire show, I felt encapsulated within a bubble of calm, sitting among an audience of agitated energy. I witnessed warm air futilely whipped around with so much aggression, I wondered if the fanning action itself negated their cooling process.
During intermission, the so-called heat worked in my favor. While everyone else flocked outside for relief, I used the bathroom without having to wait in line. I even helped myself to water and made an ice water for my friend without any waiting.
Keeping my cool under the circumstances enhanced my viewing pleasure. As usual, I want to extend that calm mindfulness to other challenging situations. How much more enjoyable could my overall life be without figuratively fanning the flames?
I failed at the next opportunity I had to test my mindfulness. As much as I hate working on Saturdays, I love seeing the extra money deposited by the following Tuesday. Mindfulness went out the window when that money didn’t show up in my bank account. About the only thing I managed to hold onto was professionalism when I communicated both in written and verbal form.
After the bureaucratic run around with my supervisor, the payroll company and my bank, I gave the same supervisor I’d begun the whole process with a summary of my efforts, which had solved nothing. I tried to calm myself down with the thought that eventually, the situation would be resolved. That was my rational mind at work. My subconscious took over as I fought the conflict in my sleep.
In this triple-digit summer heat, some may feel sluggish, gasping for breath in the humidity-filled air, wondering how anyone can logically doubt climate change when every summer seems to be the record-hottest.
Even those climate change-denying enthusiasts who hold up a snowball as they willfully mistake “weather” for “climate,” are part of the most insidious evil machinations known to our democracy: the rise of the middle manager.
Make no mistake. Middle managers don’t arrive at their position because they’re the best, the smartest or even the most logical. Their sole purpose of existence is to provide denial plausibility for upper management, while unleashing the most asinine policies onto the overworked, underpaid masses. And if you’re merely thinking of the present administration, I’m sorry to tell you this disaster has been in the making for several decades now.
Unlike other epidemics, I cannot pinpoint a patient zero who infected all other workplaces, big and small, with this diabolical strain of middle managers. Those who get paid to regurgitate soul-zapping policies, which remind the huddled masses that the smallest man in the dick-comparing contest is in charge and must overcompensate by ramming the most logically-defiant practices down the throats of those who may risk a scream of protest.
Like any gang of moneyed thugs, upper management initiates the newest middle managers by giving them a hit list of bad shit to do to prove their loyalty. You’ll know exactly when the new bullshit hits. There’ll be this big announcement of congratulations to the newly minted middle manager. The company may even make some type of celebratory gesture. That’s merely the calm before the storm.
There may not be any actual poison in your cup, but make no mistake, you’re gonna drink the Kool-Aid—at least until you find another job. After a new middle manager’s jumped in, the mental and physical slow deterioration due to additional work-related stress starts to take its toll.
And the closer we get to the end of the world, the less sense the directives are going to make. It’s truly going to be a mad scramble to the death for the last of the available resources. And then what?
Will some brilliant woman Interstellar our way out of this shit? Will she even have enough autonomy and agency to do so? It’s bad enough that climate change deniers are hastening the end of the world, but these motherfuckers want to roll back women’s reproductive rights as well?!
Because what we need at the end of the world and its dwindling resources is even more mouths to feed, more bodies to shelter, and more children without health care. And in order to save money, we’ll stop vaccinating. That way, as the world burns, all those diseases modern medicine eradicated can now thrive and we can invite an asshole to throw a snowball at it. I recommend a middle manager to do the deed. They’ve got great arm strength from all that illogical shit shoveling.
As the diminishing population of sane humans look around, scratching our heads and wondering, “How in the hell did we get HERE?”
As a call center agent, I’d normally be very aggravated over the low call volume experienced this week. I took Memorial Day Monday off because I’m a good boss to myself. I continued being good to myself by not setting an alarm to sound at 6:15, so I could rush through the morning routine in order to plant myself at my desk as close to 7 AM as possible.
Instead, I got my rest, woke up refreshed, and progressed through my morning routine unhurried, but also not taking my sweet time. That only took a few minutes longer for all the running around I used to do, thinking I was saving so much time.
I’d long ago adopted the habit of reading a variety of things in between calls, but for this week, partially inspired by the slowdown, I began watching educational videos about real estate investment in between calls.
Talk about being even more efficient with my time! Stopping and starting a video between calls. I previously thought that experience would be maddening. I couldn’t do it for Netflix binge-watching; however, this worked pretty well for educational videos, which I stop and start anyway to take notes.
Another beautiful thing was, while I took notes, I fantasized about one day setting up passive income through real estate investments. No more trading time for money!
A year ago, I stated I was living happily ever after since I worked from home and set my own schedule. Yet, I realized after awhile that I wanted to make money without trading my time for it.
There should always be something to strive for in life. This is my new financial goal. I’ve got plenty of creative ones. As soon as I get this latest one off the ground, I’m going to invest more time in my creative projects.
In the meantime, I’ll continue being more efficient with my time. Plus, I’ve applied for another telecommuting job where I set my own schedule. I won’t be able to multi-task with that job and it’s not as monetarily lucrative, but at least it’ll help me become a much faster typist and give me access to many different conversations, which helps with writing dialogue without the trouble of eavesdropping on people in public.
