Y'know, working this job: I don't think I've gone through a single day where someone hasn't interrupted my reading on a break.
Like. That's how I spend my breaks. I eat, I read. I go to the bathroom if it's available, which it is occasionally. But I read. I read as much as I can. I read whole websites worth of short stories and reviews, I bring books in when I'm confident that no one will try to rob me. And every. Single. Time. I am interrupted.
Sometimes it's a forgivable attempt to build up friendship, albeit a misguided one. The guy who sat way too close to me, and folded his newspaper on top of my book to ask me to do a crossword with him? He was just trying to be nice. The bagger who rants at me unbroken and breathless for all fifteen minutes about all the different computer parts he's bought? He assumes I'm interested, and I'm too anxious to tell him otherwise.
But sometimes the interruption gets ridiculous. I remember once when I was trying to fight a depressive spell by getting into the crime novel I was reading. And suddenly that one cashier comes up to me and starts telling me a depressing story, like she always does. I say "Mm" and "Ah" but it's clear that she's not really noticing that I exist. I have to pay attention, though, because she'll notice if I'm not. And she runs the drawers so she can undercut me in ways I can't report. We have to have a good working relationship and that she always tells me these stories, without any prompt, while I'm reading, shows that that relationship could collapse at any time. (I remember when she made me clean my belt five times in a row even though the Store was dead, because if that belt wasn't clean, she couldn't leave early like she does every day.) I wish I could be people's therapists because honestly she is not a bad person, and I do like her. And people need compassion. Always. Especially when they're haunted by deep demons. But also. Also. I am reading.
I don't read for fun at the Store--I do, but I don't. I read to survive, because I can't stop to think about the reality around me for more than a few minutes without my defenses coming into question. Hopelessly and irreparably. That is not a justification for ignoring someone when they tell unrelentingly depressing stories. I am without compassion for a fellow depression-sufferer because of my symptoms and I hate myself for that. But. I read to survive. And instead of daring robberies and bold thrills and idiosyncratic, dynamic personalities as my companions, it's the usual that creeps back into that breakroom (which is always too cold, by the way): it's that norm of illness, of poverty, of regret, of missed opportunities and dreams turned to naked bone.
So she told me once this story from many years before I was hired, of how she had diamond earrings from her grandmother that had been in her family since the dawn of the 19th Century. They were beautiful and one of the last few things she had to remember her grandmother by. Well, one time she had to take them off for whatever reason to wash up in the bathroom. She left them on the dining table in the breakroom. When she came back, someone had stolen them. We don't have cameras in the breakroom and the managers questioning everyone revealed nothing. This precious family heirloom, one of the last things that made her happy, was now gone to be lost in the endless sea of Twin Cities pawnshops.
Why?!
I mean, first of all, why would we on this team of ours steal from each other?!? I realize that diamonds must be awfully tempting to someone in need--which is all of us--but that's such a terrible, disgusting thing to do when we're already being robbed. Second: if you know I have trouble with depression, why would you tell me such a horrible story?! I feel guilt swell up from judging someone for that, and for not communicating properly, but that was my break, was hearing of how someone suffered emotional devastation at the hands of a cheap, ugly individual. This was after someone on the team had committed suicide, for God's sake, which thrice proved my theorem that there is not a customer alive who will notice or comment if you are openly crying while moving their load. (His death will haunt me forever, and I hope he's at rest now.) Was this her grief? I can understand that, I guess. We all grieve in different ways, and emotional trauma, I believe, is concentrated in one area of the brain, and so grief is often so profound because it awakens the proximal memories of previous periods of mourning and loss. Similarly, it's easy for those of us with depression to slip from tremendous happiness to deep anger or sadness because "opposite" emotions are similarly proximal to each other, enabling high neural activity to slip just a bit over to the "side" and trigger another intense emotion. So when we undergo severe mood swings it's not going from high to low, it's going to side-to-side--I found that interesting and so I like to share it, perhaps to make up for the fact that I don't have the energy to be the breakroom therapist.
She's a grown woman. She should be seeing someone for her concerns, like I do--but that's always another issue. Geography. Insurance. Time management. Energy. Pain. Stigma. Gas money. All of these things can be the hair-line divider between access to mental health resources and, well...an unfortunate percentage of mentally ill Americans.
I don't know why I stick my finger into these things, but once again: this. Is why. I read. I sometimes just can't stop the fingers from picking up a thorny knot of pain and turning it around, inspecting it, even as its spines just stick in my skin, and I just want a distraction. Perspective is always important. I always try to think about all sides, except when it's patently useless to do so. But I need to learn that self-analysis oftentimes is as useless as trying to come up with ways to reason with a Nazi. It can't be done, and if you try to do it, you will be driven mad by the revelation, except the problem is, there is no revelation. You learn about the problem until you know everything about it, but you only have so many currents in your brain and at least some of them need to be locked onto something good. They need to be, but that doesn't always happen.
I guess I kinda wanted to turn back to the guys who do it out of friendship; if they wanted to be my friends they'd talk to me on the line and not while I'm trying to read. I think I finally figured out why so many people just don't get that when I read I want to read uninterrupted. It's the same reason why no one sees the press yellow for credit sign on the PINpad, and why they always mess up the PINpad instructions. It's because in most people's minds there is absolutely no reason in America to read. It is not an overly valuable skill to most people once they're done with school. Now I don't mean to say that there's a boatload of Gen-Xers and Boomers running around who literally do not know how to interpret letters and words and sentences. But the ability to discern meaning in words beyond the obvious, the ability to focus on words and their meaning in context, the ability to recognize which instances and components of language are important and which are of lesser relevance--those are abilities that many Americans lack. Americans absolutely read. It's not like books don't get sold in this country. But there's a reason why Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler are bestsellers. And bestseller, like billionaire or TERF, is not a slur. Stephen King is a bestseller, both statistically and in the snobbishly-maligned stylistic sense, and he is still a great writer. You've got an easy example there for as long as that man is alive. But even with King in mind, and others like him, there are still a lot of authors who sell many millions of books who frankly don't deserve it. Yet their books are easy to read and deal with topics that interest people who conform. Men stereotypically like guns and war and technical stuff, and in a desire to conform to that model men are drawn to books like Clancy's and Cussler's that are full of guns and war and technical stuff. What I mean to allude to is the fact that most people read uncomplicated and non-experimental texts. They also have a tendency to focus either on modern bestsellers or the Western canon. They are unaware of or bitter towards texts that the media has told them are meant to make them feel stupid while arbitrarily making the author look smart. And sometimes this is justified--the masses are not always wrong and to say so would be ludicrous. Sometimes writers are jackasses who shouldn't have been published because they're fucking full of themselves. But reading is another aspect of our civilization that the majority of people just wants to be easy and without challenge to their lives. Sometimes it's taste. Sometimes it's because capitalism has us all burnt out, and art's always the first to get shot down when people start losing even more of their time.
But my point is that I think it really says something when people think I read exclusively because I'm bored, and I'm waiting for something interesting, like a conversation, to come along. To some of my coworkers it does seem a little bit of a shock to them that I read for fun or to take myself away from stress, and that I read at home, whenever I have the chance. When I hear about people reading things outside their usual range, or outside the common range of recognition or good taste, and they're proud of it, it's a special moment. I wish it was more normal for people to just casually read weird stuff--like really weird stuff--and to consume weird media in general. I know that then it doesn't become weird anymore, but some stuff--some stuff will always be weird. Some stuff will always be controversial too. And so in the meantime I do what I can to challenge what most people think is weird but really isn't, and also, to look into the stuff that will always be outside human comprehension or acceptability. Understanding those ideas is important if nothing else because it helps you keep your brain flexible for other tasks. Plus it's fun.
It's fun, on top of keeping me alive. It keeps me alive because it's fun. And it's so weird to me that so many people, however few they are in number, view this as nothing more than a school exercise.
Then there are the people who are opposed to reading because Fox News told them it would lead to liberalism and sin or whatever. And they interrupt me because they believe no one should be literate. These people are dangerous because they think life is a huge joke and if you aren't laughing, they'll hit you for it.
What makes me really mad, I think, is how I do feel like a jerk for not dropping everything and accommodating everyone. No one makes me feel that way but myself. Frankly, at my heart of hearts, I am bitter towards people like myself because I often need accommodations of some kind, even if it's just people not grunting angrily at me when I ask them questions. I expect to be treated how I want to be treated while dismissing others to go hide behind a book. I am not helpful. Once, I tried much more to set myself aside to help others and to be a human being in the heart of this place. Now that effort has exhausted me too greatly, and I just want to keep my head down far enough where if I have to hurt someone from my not being human, I at least hurt them in a way that won't bring their lives down beyond what the Store already does. I become moss on the Store's skin, and I hope to them I am just another entangled part of this big ugly machine that brings them pain, and not a person with plans and ideals. Because I think that, no matter where the education system goes in this country, we'll always be disgusted by people who believe one thing and do another. I can't help but feel that that's as it should be.
Like. That's how I spend my breaks. I eat, I read. I go to the bathroom if it's available, which it is occasionally. But I read. I read as much as I can. I read whole websites worth of short stories and reviews, I bring books in when I'm confident that no one will try to rob me. And every. Single. Time. I am interrupted.
Sometimes it's a forgivable attempt to build up friendship, albeit a misguided one. The guy who sat way too close to me, and folded his newspaper on top of my book to ask me to do a crossword with him? He was just trying to be nice. The bagger who rants at me unbroken and breathless for all fifteen minutes about all the different computer parts he's bought? He assumes I'm interested, and I'm too anxious to tell him otherwise.
But sometimes the interruption gets ridiculous. I remember once when I was trying to fight a depressive spell by getting into the crime novel I was reading. And suddenly that one cashier comes up to me and starts telling me a depressing story, like she always does. I say "Mm" and "Ah" but it's clear that she's not really noticing that I exist. I have to pay attention, though, because she'll notice if I'm not. And she runs the drawers so she can undercut me in ways I can't report. We have to have a good working relationship and that she always tells me these stories, without any prompt, while I'm reading, shows that that relationship could collapse at any time. (I remember when she made me clean my belt five times in a row even though the Store was dead, because if that belt wasn't clean, she couldn't leave early like she does every day.) I wish I could be people's therapists because honestly she is not a bad person, and I do like her. And people need compassion. Always. Especially when they're haunted by deep demons. But also. Also. I am reading.
I don't read for fun at the Store--I do, but I don't. I read to survive, because I can't stop to think about the reality around me for more than a few minutes without my defenses coming into question. Hopelessly and irreparably. That is not a justification for ignoring someone when they tell unrelentingly depressing stories. I am without compassion for a fellow depression-sufferer because of my symptoms and I hate myself for that. But. I read to survive. And instead of daring robberies and bold thrills and idiosyncratic, dynamic personalities as my companions, it's the usual that creeps back into that breakroom (which is always too cold, by the way): it's that norm of illness, of poverty, of regret, of missed opportunities and dreams turned to naked bone.
So she told me once this story from many years before I was hired, of how she had diamond earrings from her grandmother that had been in her family since the dawn of the 19th Century. They were beautiful and one of the last few things she had to remember her grandmother by. Well, one time she had to take them off for whatever reason to wash up in the bathroom. She left them on the dining table in the breakroom. When she came back, someone had stolen them. We don't have cameras in the breakroom and the managers questioning everyone revealed nothing. This precious family heirloom, one of the last things that made her happy, was now gone to be lost in the endless sea of Twin Cities pawnshops.
Why?!
I mean, first of all, why would we on this team of ours steal from each other?!? I realize that diamonds must be awfully tempting to someone in need--which is all of us--but that's such a terrible, disgusting thing to do when we're already being robbed. Second: if you know I have trouble with depression, why would you tell me such a horrible story?! I feel guilt swell up from judging someone for that, and for not communicating properly, but that was my break, was hearing of how someone suffered emotional devastation at the hands of a cheap, ugly individual. This was after someone on the team had committed suicide, for God's sake, which thrice proved my theorem that there is not a customer alive who will notice or comment if you are openly crying while moving their load. (His death will haunt me forever, and I hope he's at rest now.) Was this her grief? I can understand that, I guess. We all grieve in different ways, and emotional trauma, I believe, is concentrated in one area of the brain, and so grief is often so profound because it awakens the proximal memories of previous periods of mourning and loss. Similarly, it's easy for those of us with depression to slip from tremendous happiness to deep anger or sadness because "opposite" emotions are similarly proximal to each other, enabling high neural activity to slip just a bit over to the "side" and trigger another intense emotion. So when we undergo severe mood swings it's not going from high to low, it's going to side-to-side--I found that interesting and so I like to share it, perhaps to make up for the fact that I don't have the energy to be the breakroom therapist.
She's a grown woman. She should be seeing someone for her concerns, like I do--but that's always another issue. Geography. Insurance. Time management. Energy. Pain. Stigma. Gas money. All of these things can be the hair-line divider between access to mental health resources and, well...an unfortunate percentage of mentally ill Americans.
I don't know why I stick my finger into these things, but once again: this. Is why. I read. I sometimes just can't stop the fingers from picking up a thorny knot of pain and turning it around, inspecting it, even as its spines just stick in my skin, and I just want a distraction. Perspective is always important. I always try to think about all sides, except when it's patently useless to do so. But I need to learn that self-analysis oftentimes is as useless as trying to come up with ways to reason with a Nazi. It can't be done, and if you try to do it, you will be driven mad by the revelation, except the problem is, there is no revelation. You learn about the problem until you know everything about it, but you only have so many currents in your brain and at least some of them need to be locked onto something good. They need to be, but that doesn't always happen.
I guess I kinda wanted to turn back to the guys who do it out of friendship; if they wanted to be my friends they'd talk to me on the line and not while I'm trying to read. I think I finally figured out why so many people just don't get that when I read I want to read uninterrupted. It's the same reason why no one sees the press yellow for credit sign on the PINpad, and why they always mess up the PINpad instructions. It's because in most people's minds there is absolutely no reason in America to read. It is not an overly valuable skill to most people once they're done with school. Now I don't mean to say that there's a boatload of Gen-Xers and Boomers running around who literally do not know how to interpret letters and words and sentences. But the ability to discern meaning in words beyond the obvious, the ability to focus on words and their meaning in context, the ability to recognize which instances and components of language are important and which are of lesser relevance--those are abilities that many Americans lack. Americans absolutely read. It's not like books don't get sold in this country. But there's a reason why Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler are bestsellers. And bestseller, like billionaire or TERF, is not a slur. Stephen King is a bestseller, both statistically and in the snobbishly-maligned stylistic sense, and he is still a great writer. You've got an easy example there for as long as that man is alive. But even with King in mind, and others like him, there are still a lot of authors who sell many millions of books who frankly don't deserve it. Yet their books are easy to read and deal with topics that interest people who conform. Men stereotypically like guns and war and technical stuff, and in a desire to conform to that model men are drawn to books like Clancy's and Cussler's that are full of guns and war and technical stuff. What I mean to allude to is the fact that most people read uncomplicated and non-experimental texts. They also have a tendency to focus either on modern bestsellers or the Western canon. They are unaware of or bitter towards texts that the media has told them are meant to make them feel stupid while arbitrarily making the author look smart. And sometimes this is justified--the masses are not always wrong and to say so would be ludicrous. Sometimes writers are jackasses who shouldn't have been published because they're fucking full of themselves. But reading is another aspect of our civilization that the majority of people just wants to be easy and without challenge to their lives. Sometimes it's taste. Sometimes it's because capitalism has us all burnt out, and art's always the first to get shot down when people start losing even more of their time.
But my point is that I think it really says something when people think I read exclusively because I'm bored, and I'm waiting for something interesting, like a conversation, to come along. To some of my coworkers it does seem a little bit of a shock to them that I read for fun or to take myself away from stress, and that I read at home, whenever I have the chance. When I hear about people reading things outside their usual range, or outside the common range of recognition or good taste, and they're proud of it, it's a special moment. I wish it was more normal for people to just casually read weird stuff--like really weird stuff--and to consume weird media in general. I know that then it doesn't become weird anymore, but some stuff--some stuff will always be weird. Some stuff will always be controversial too. And so in the meantime I do what I can to challenge what most people think is weird but really isn't, and also, to look into the stuff that will always be outside human comprehension or acceptability. Understanding those ideas is important if nothing else because it helps you keep your brain flexible for other tasks. Plus it's fun.
It's fun, on top of keeping me alive. It keeps me alive because it's fun. And it's so weird to me that so many people, however few they are in number, view this as nothing more than a school exercise.
Then there are the people who are opposed to reading because Fox News told them it would lead to liberalism and sin or whatever. And they interrupt me because they believe no one should be literate. These people are dangerous because they think life is a huge joke and if you aren't laughing, they'll hit you for it.
What makes me really mad, I think, is how I do feel like a jerk for not dropping everything and accommodating everyone. No one makes me feel that way but myself. Frankly, at my heart of hearts, I am bitter towards people like myself because I often need accommodations of some kind, even if it's just people not grunting angrily at me when I ask them questions. I expect to be treated how I want to be treated while dismissing others to go hide behind a book. I am not helpful. Once, I tried much more to set myself aside to help others and to be a human being in the heart of this place. Now that effort has exhausted me too greatly, and I just want to keep my head down far enough where if I have to hurt someone from my not being human, I at least hurt them in a way that won't bring their lives down beyond what the Store already does. I become moss on the Store's skin, and I hope to them I am just another entangled part of this big ugly machine that brings them pain, and not a person with plans and ideals. Because I think that, no matter where the education system goes in this country, we'll always be disgusted by people who believe one thing and do another. I can't help but feel that that's as it should be.
Comments
Post a Comment