Retail Sucks

I'm sitting in my basement bedroom looking up to ground level and at the very dark very gray sky above, listening to it boom and thunder, watching the tree limbs whip in bursts, their weakest leaves being torn away, and I'm worried that when the rain does come (as tomorrow it is supposed to) am I going to be flooded in my basement. Logic tells me no, but after two flooded basements at my parent's house I tend to be a little leery on the whole subject.

I've also learned a very valuable lesson tonight. Retail sucks. I worked an eight hour shift today (9-5) which was monotonous and full of folding clothes and organizing cubes of folded clothes. Unlike the library gig of reshelving and shelf reading (it's funny, reshelving is not a word my spellcheck is telling me (neither is spellcheck...)) I'm not allowed to have my iPod on me to listen to books or music. I'm hoping tomorrow, in the moments before I go to work, I can be at a place in The Rider where I can be spending the long monotonous hours dictating passages of interesting prose to myself, which I will then scurry home to record from memory. I realized I had to work tomorrow and I groaned. First day on the job and I'm already groaning.

I'm hoping that if a work study job comes through (or this awesome library gig over at AADL) I can take it, because I'll quit at Steve and Barry's. The people are nice, don't get me wrong, but the work is just dreadfully boring. With every shirt I fold I ask myself, "Nathan, you have a bachelors degree. Why are you folding shirts for minimum wage?"

I'm at about 65 pages into the Rider rewrite right now (say that three times fast). The chapter I'm editing is one that got workshopped at Columbia in their Fiction Seminar class. I wish I could find the notes from there because a lot of really good things got said. I think I've got some of them jotted in my journal from class discussion.

I need to go grocery shopping, but I'm terribly nervous about spending money until I am sure that my loans are in place to help bolster the paycheck in paying for rent.

So instead I'm going to make a PB&J and watch the UM Women's Soccer play Notre Dame online.