Randomness

And I "am" very random, the more time I spend at school, the more I realize that. I started last January (January seems to be a theme in my life right now...) and I'm almost done. Only one quarter left. No clue if it'll pay off--it was an all or nothing gamble. When I first got here, my current job was a hiring trailer and I sort of barged in, told them to hire me, and they did, which made me part of the opening team. As restaurants go, they're rare because eighteen months later almost seventy percent of the openers are still there.

Seattle is weird because it's like a big bowl. The city sits in the bottom and the farther out you get--towards the rim--there are suburbs that pretend to be cities, and the "cities" get all unwieldy, and split off towns that used to be neighborhoods. I live in a town so close to the rim, there's one more bedroom community/town before you hit a whole lot of nothing.

Not a lot of anything going on, and jobs are rare.

I turned down the chance to get back into my old position at work--too tired and depressed, I'd lost my ability to play the game. And sometimes I look around, wonder if I did the right thing.

Since I'm not in line to move up, I'm in that tier of people who get "okay" hours, thank God nothing like the people classified as part-time, but nowhere close to the forty plus of people who've sold their lives to the company.

I just...really don't want to be part of a restaurant anymore. Even when I was mad at it before--during those bad days when I had perpetual work rage--I loved the head rush of working on the line. Maybe it's going from high volume to low, but it's not fun anymore.

What I do enjoy is watching my behavioral science class in action. I didn't like it while I was in it, but it's pretty amazing how much is true. The same with small groups. Lots of people in an enclosed space, lots of drama. Work is my fishbowl and I can watch it for hours. I was over at Fry's the other day, looking for a new mp3 player and while I was waiting for my kid to checkout, I got involved in the drama of the cashier line.

There are almost twenty cashier stations at Fry's, all in a row and each and every one is manned by a very earnest, geeky looking kid in a white button down. The lone woman was obviously the supervisor and wore the teeniest skirt. It was an interesting power play and while I was watching, my kid walked right past me. He had to call me from outside, "hey, Mom? You're getting old. I walked right past you and you didn't see me."

Nah, just absorbed in the drama, now that I know how to "see" it.