Vulture

Am I going to convince anyone to not shop on Thanksgiving and/or Black Friday?
...not really.

I accept that.

However, I feel at least I can give out some tips coming from my accursed life of working retail. (This may mainly be Macy's things, but just go with flow...you might pick up a few things.)

1. Don't assume everyone who works there can work the register. If they say they can't check you out, don't bitch about how they're lying. If they trained all workers to work the register, then Support and Recovery people will be checking customers out while people complain about how the store is a wreck, there's no new merchandise and everything's signed wrong. A Catch-22 ala consumerism.

2. If they're out of the product, they're out. Don't yell at the workers. Don't start huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf...get over it, those $19,99 boots weren't going to mend your dysfunctional family ties. Trust me.

3. I won't ask you to be nice to the workers ...they'll all assume you will be at your absolute worst. How bad? I always assume the shoppers just got back from their Satanic meeting of chanting for their devil spawn like from Rosemary's Baby. Try to surprise them and be humane.

4. Stop complaining about your feet hurting and carrying all these heavy bags. Guess what? It's 4am, it's optional and YOU chose to be there. The workers? Hurting, stressed, pissed beyond all beliefs and they're forced to be there.

Final thing from me (but FAR from final):

5. I'm repeating myself, but none of the workers want to be there. NO ONE. Time and a half means jack shit when staring into the eyes of a ravenous shopper, foaming at the mouth for Cashmere sweaters.


 I'm shocked nobody's made this day a horror movie.

Fuck The Fuck Off

This particular picture, though I had no idea why, pissed me off. The idiocy of trying to explain the custom of wearing a wedding ring on the left ring finger by saying, "it's the only finger with a vein connected to the heart."

Excuse me while I take out this comically sized bullhorn:

*ahem*

"BULLSHIT!"

Wikipedia, if you please...

"Before medical science discovered how the circulatory system functioned, people believed that a vein of blood ran directly from the third finger on the left hand to the heart. Because of the hand-heart connection, they chose the descriptive name vena amoris, Latin for the vein of love, for this particular vein.
Based upon this name, their contemporaries, purported experts in the field of matrimonial etiquette, wrote that it would only be fitting that the wedding ring be worn on this finger. By wearing the ring on the third finger of the left hand, a married couple symbolically declares their eternal love for each other."

"Before medical science discovered how the circulatory system functioned..." BEFORE. Wait, it gets funnier to me. What about the left hand?

"In Western cultures, a wedding ring is traditionally worn on the ring finger. This developed from the Roman "anulus pronubis" when the man gave a ring to the woman at the betrothal ceremony. Blessing the wedding ring and putting it on the bride's finger dates from the 11th century."

"In medieval Europe, the Christian wedding ceremony placed the ring in sequence on the index, middle, and ring fingers of the left hand. The ring was then left on the ring finger. In a few European countries, the ring is worn on the left hand prior to marriage, then transferred to the right during the ceremony. For example, a Greek Orthodox bride wears the ring on the left hand prior to the ceremony, then moves it to the right hand after the wedding. In England, the 1549 Prayer Book declared "the ring shall be placed on the left hand". By the 17th and 18th centuries the ring could be found on any finger after the ceremony — even on the thumb."


....

When I get married, I'm wearing it on my middle finger, just to tell people what they can do.

Psycho Bitch

I have no idea why, but I feel especially antsy tonight. My body refuses to shut down so I'm just stalking family members on Facebook just to see if they're as miserable as me.

SPOILER ALERT: They're not.

I keep thinking about the Richards Klan (like I said in my previous post...possible KKK affiliation)...particularly my siblings. I no longer feel anything for Norman, the man who screwed and impregnated my mother.  However, but I still feel a few strings attached to Sean and Hallie, not to mention my late brother Steven (died in a car accident due to seizure), who I visit on an irregular basis. Despite Sean calling me a crazy bitch when I openly said on Facebook Norman Richards was a horrible man who already lost two of his kids (Steven and I), I still think what if...I still wonder what would happen if he actually accepted me as a family member. I just hate being the only child when I have THREE (or who knows how many holes Norman has plugged up) siblings!

Why can't I be apart a family that accepts me?

Fuck my REAL family doesn't accept me...no wonder I'm a juggalette. I have 50,000 "fam" members who would have my back.

All because one man 24 years ago looked at me as a baby and decided, "Nope...that didn't come from MY seed."

Cemetery Girl

As I try to sleep to possibly three good solid hours before I have to get up to go to Macy's, of course by body tells me to write. What do I want to write about? My family (Of course! Makes perfect sense!) More specifically...my newly appointed High School Freshman cousin Noah. I want to tell him, being the closest in age to him (apart from 4 year old Ava) everything I learned, but there's a catch: he's so far away and I'm a self-described recluse.

I try. God knows I try to connect to the Weitekamp side of the family because, well, what else do I got? My Mom's side literally has four people: Me, Mom, Uncle Evan and his wife Rita (and I think they're recluses too.) We are more cursed and shamed than open and loved.

And the Richards? (The following portion of this rant has been stopped due to possible assassination attempts on my life on that side of the family. Trust me...it's wise NOT to anger anyone from that family. I'm 87 percent sure that side has Klan ties and would straight up drag me into the woods and kill me.)


I hope to someday be able to openly tell my family how I wish we were closer (and hopefully that's the same day my Great Aunt Verna FINALLY admits to killing her last two or even three husbands).

However, since that will never happen, here's what I wish I could tell Noah:

1. Watch Fight Club (Okay, not really H.S. related, but still. Watch it.)

2. Don't lose you virginity with a virgin ...unless it's your girlfriend (or boyfriend). Then do it when you're either under 18 or BOTH over 18...I refuse to have my poor cousin be filed as a sexual deviant when all he was doing was being intimate with his significant other.

3. Sparknotes: Learn it. Live it. LOVE IT! (Especially with that tricky, tricky Shakespeare, which I didn't read until college, but who knows? It may severely come in handy).

4. If you insist on playing Football, please befriend the Band. They are some freakishly cool people sitting in the stands playing your damn music in the cold with stupid flumes on their head...and DESERVE some respect! (And Hot Cocoa).

5.Try at least once in the four years you're stuck in H.S. to get a teacher to go off topic for a whole class, thereby making him/her unable to assign you homework.

6. Don't assume multiple choice is better than essay questions on tests: I got a 28% on a test that was all multiple choice, but a B- on a test that was to write an essay. I bullshitted my way to that B, despite having no idea what I was talking about, but the multiple choice? Statistics screwed me on that one.

7. Pajama bottoms is your friend with insane benefits ("Oh, I'm comfy all day? How nice...")

8. Tell your favorite teacher that he/she is your favorite. I failed to do that and the only way I was able to say it was in a written statement at his funeral.

9. Wear your sunscreen. (Speaking of quoting 15 year-old songs no one knows, DON'T quote songs in your damn Yearbook! I swear to God, if I read under your picture that your quote is "YOLO" officially retire you as the cool male Weitekamp.)

10. Learn to master the art of sarcasm. For real, I have told off so many people (including one teacher and assistant principal) and they never got it! Why? Sarcasm :-)

Hopefully now my brain can sleep, if only for a few hours.

Iron Jawed Angel

They say that creative people are messy. To be honest, I have no idea who "they" are, but I am a messy person. I have no idea if I'm creative, but messy describes me to a tee. .Picture, if you will, a room with too many different sized framed pictures in a room that's smaller than a jail cell. I have books, newspapers, rag mags, DVDs, candles, leopard/zebra sheets that are NOT on the bed, but a laptop that is. A movie is playing (Shattered Glass) that I'm listening to the commentary because, well, I'm a commentary junkie. My hair is up in a half bun/half bulked mass of snarls and knots and I'm typing on a refurbished laptop while cockroaches crawl on the ceiling (to be fair, they were in this shithole before I moved in.)

 

One of my professors said, "If you're writing now, your a writer." Then again, she also said, "if you want to be a writer, get a day job." I'm not a big fan of her pompous behavior, but I no longer go there, so it doesn't matter. I'm one of those people who say, "I want to be a writer," despite the fact the I already wrote published things (my Senior project from school). I have no self esteem in a generation FILLED with assholes who think their hot shit because they have a YouTube channel and 800+ friends on Facebook.....I have 265-ish. Oh, and when I say published, I mean self-published on Lulu.com

 

Still, it's pretty cool to hold a book that has my name on the cover.

 

"Disservice With A Smile"--it's a full length play that no one had bought. There's still a few mistakes in it (I failed to align the dialogue properly and I think I put a comma where a period should be. *smashing head repeatedly into my cell wall*)

 



Sometimes I swear I'm certifiably insane or possibly bi-polar. I get bursts of ingenious spats of writing in a few hours time then it'll take me weeks to write one line of dialogue. I go from topic to topic to topic: Family, Politics, Fidelity, Class, ICP. Religion, Faith, Fear, and Death could be in a simple twenty minute conversation just to keep the uncomfortable silence at bay.  

 

Hopefully, whenever I get antsy again, or angry about anything, I'll just explode via type, rather than scream it aloud at the top of my lungs, only to be ostracized for simply speaking my mind in the silence of the broken family.

 

They say creative people are messy. Maybe it's a thing about controlled chaos...or maybe I'll be on the next episode of Hoarders. Either way, I'll just keep at it until someone reads its, laughs and go on his/her way.