Who the Fuck Buys Cheese in a Snowstorm?

Listening: Half-Acre - Hem

I am holding half an acre,
Torn from a map of Michigan
And folded in this scrap of paper
Is the land I grew in.

Think of every town you've lived in
Every room you lay your head
And what is it that you remember?
Do you carry every sadness with you,
Every hour your heart was broken,
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with you?

~

LOOK AT IT OUTSIDE.

It's like Jack Frost and Mother Nature got really, really drunk last night, banged, and unleashed THIS fuckery upon us. I'm actually furious right now. I like winter and all, but I also like when it stops being winter and starts being that season that comes after winter. It's the end of February. Time for some post-winter weather. No? Not so much? Fine, you bastards.

So I'm sitting in the shop, being bored out of my skull, scowling at the world I can see through the glass door and scowling even harder at what people come in to make my life miserable. The boss is in Florida for another week or so, leaving the rest of us here to fend for ourselves (kind of). It's not normally so bad--unless you get a day like today, which is pretty much just an eight-hour voyage into annoyance and tears.

Normally I would never blog about this crap, but first of all, I'm really frigging bored, and second of all, I apparently actually have a following of blog-watchers (yes, I'm looking at you Harry Potter Kid/Hannah/Benji/Gen/Steph) who are (horrors) actually reading this thing. And some of them complaining about my lack of "real" updates. Never let it be said that I don't cater to my clientele, when I get my claws into them.

So Environment Canada says that we've got like 15 - 25 cm of snow attacking us from all sides, and high winds in the afternoon, which for me marks today up from just irritating to an assassination attempt. The chances of the shop closing are slim--I just got off the phone with the boss, who is sunning his tanned ass down in Florida as we speak, the bastard, and I have to call him back with an update about what else around the city is closed. Short answer, nothing. Long answer, nothing and I can forget having a social life by the end of today because this is the kind of weather that makes you want to watch the weather channel and hurl small objects at your television every time someone says the word "snow".

You'd think that when the world looks like it does outside, people would stay the farking hell inside. Apparently that's not the case.

First customer:
Him: Hi. I want a chunk of Mexicana and a chunk of jalapeno havarti.
Me: ...But why?

Second customer:
Her: I want about a third of all the dubliner you've got.
Me: *heaves a sigh* Alriiiight.

Third customer:
Him: I want a hundred grams of smoked gouda, a hundred grams of havarti, a hundred grams of mozzarella, three hundred grams of black forest ham, three hundred grams of turkey breast--
Me: Oh COME ON.

When I told the boss about the influx of people availing themselves of our tasty fermented dairy products, he laughed and said that the majority of people I'm seeing today hate their families and are just trying to get out of the house for fifteen minutes. I told him that he was a terribly cynical man, and he laughed again and told me that while that was certainly the case, he was telling the truth. Then the misanthrope told me to call him back in twenty minutes or so, because he was taking his daughter back to Disneyworld.

I hate him.

(Subtitled: I actually don't.)

So while I'm bitching, there is this prick who keeps coming to the shop five minutes before closing time on nights when I'm working to purchase the most inane shit. The other night for example: I had the door locked, signs flipped and unplugged, and was counting off my cash for the night when I heard a knock at the door. I looked up to find this guy standing outside. I pantomimed tapping my watch and mouthed "We're closed", and he got this really indignant look on his face and started rattling the door. I went over to see just what the farking hell he had his knickers in a twist over.

"We're closed," I clarified, opening the door a smidge and sticking my head out.

"No you're not," he told me.

Um, what? I spent like ten seconds just blinking at him like a fish that has been hauled out of a paradisial oasis and dropped onto a hot sidewalk. Okay, he had a point in that it wasn't quite eleven o'clock yet, but I think I'm entitled to shut the store down five minutes in advance so I can count cash / do paperwork / clean up without people tromping all over the store and fucking me up. Anyhow this guy just stood there staring at me until I stepped backwards, holding the door for him, and stumbled, "Umm... come in, I guess."

He never even said thank you.

So he came back last night. It was eleven o'clock by this point, so I wasn't obligated to let him in. I wallowed in it, too. When he banged on the door, I didn't even pantomime the watch-thing. I just went to the door, opened it, and said, "We're closed, sir."

"No you're not."

"Yes. Yes, I actually am. If you have something you need, I suggest you try Wal-Mart. They're open twenty-four hours now."

Victory.

Things have gone a bit to the chaotic side because now there seems to be something of a dilemma going on between who's coming in to work tonight and who's staying the fark home out of it. I had hoped to have plans tonight--party on the go--but if that's cancelled then I'm all for calling it a night and staying indoors, away from snow and people who insist on eating cheese in the snow. Whatever, I'll live.

Although guaranteed I will gleefully murder the everloving hell out of the next person to come into the shop and tell me, "Wow, it's nasty out there!"

NO. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF A SNOWSTORM. NASTY? ARE YOU SERIOUS? GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.

I'm going to cool my cynacism now by eating a couple of these Peach Ring candies. They're like Fuzzy Peaches, only with less surface area.

PS: I also maintain that if you guys are going to be asking for "real" posts, I should at least get some farking comments out of it.

Icarus appears to be channeling a combination of Yahtzee and Foamy.

Songs for a Moonlit Night

Listening: Beautiful Things - Andain

I forgot
That I might see
So many
Beautiful things...

~

I hope you are all out there somewhere watching the lunar eclipse. What an incredible night to see this: cloudless and cold and a breath of wind.

Here are some songs that every appreciative stargazer should have (in my humble opinion).

Anywhere In the Universe - Astronaut Wife
Darkest Dreaming - David Sylvian
Universe - Sarah Slean
An Ugly Fact of Life - Explosions in the Sky
Untitled 3 - Sigur Ros
Falling Down Blue - Blue Rodeo
Space Lion - Yoko Kanno (from the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack)
Under the Milky Way - The Church
Grissom's Overture - [CSI Soundtrack]
Dusting Down the Stars - Mobile
Tomorrow - Rosie Thomas
Me and the Moon - Something Corporate
Twin Moon - Sarah Slean
The House at Swamp Bottom - [Spirited Away soundtrack]
In the Deep - Bird York
January Rain - David Gray
The Dumbing Down of Love - Frou Frou
Sad Eyes - Bat for Lashes
Sleeping With Ghosts - Placebo
Since You've Been Around - Rosie Thomas
Night Time - Aaron Zigman [Mr. Magorium soundtrack]
Auriel's Ascension - Jeremy Soule [Elder Scrolls: Oblivion soundtrack]
Blue Light of the Flame - Dar Williams
Gravity - Vienna Teng
Nana de Mercedes - Javier Navarrete [Pan's Labyrinth soundtrack]
Liz on Top of the World - Dario Marianelli [Pride & Prejudice soundtrack]
Bones - Charlotte Martin

It's 12:49 a.m. Last stages of the eclipse. The moon is a sliver of light.

Enjoy this uncertain shivering vastness.

Icarus cannot be funny when beautiful things happen.

For Serious?

Listening: Forget It - Breaking Benjamin

Everytime I get it, I throw it away
It's a sign, I get it, I want to stay
By the time I lose it I'm not afraid
Of looking at you truly fake it.

How can I believe when this cloud hangs over me
You're the part of me that I don't want to see.

Forget it.

I really kind of abruptly looked at the date and was like, "It's February? When was the last time I blogged?" and then I looked at my last post and saw the words "One week 'til Christmas". Bad sign.

Anyway it's boring as hell over this way. Back in MUN for the semester, along with my favorite people. Not much in the way of anything interesting has happened, except for the fact that I'm stalking a boy in my Shakespeare class but he doesn't know it yet, shh. Oh and the occasional interesting thing that happens to us as a collective, which I will most likely begin enumerating.

Here, have a list of interesting things that have happened since I blogged last.

1. I have an established reputation at Jeremiah's.

I really have no idea how this one happened, but I enjoy that it did. It's come to my attention in a couple of ways. One of them was a guy who came in at one point asking if I'd fed someone any hot sauce. Since this little bit of sadism is part and parcel of my job (the only real reason my boss keeps half the hot sauces he does is so he can feed them to unsuspecting young bucks and watch them cry like little girls), I answered that yes, I had.

"Oh," he said with an air of revelation. "You're the Mistress of Death."

I thought that was the funniest thing ever.

Then just yesterday one of the women from the salon next door came in and brightened up immediately upon sight of me.

"I like when you're in," she said cheerfully. "The music is always good."

Since I've not yet had a shift where I didn't blast my iPod throughout the whole store, I considered that extremely flattering.

2. I told off a lawyer.

Fuck people who come in and are jackasses to you for the sake of being jackasses. Like the bastard who came into Jeremiah's yesterday. I was in a bit of a tizzy, because it was a Saturday morning, I was still trying to set up shop, and the orders were coming in thick and fast. That aside, I'd also discovered that half the work that my coworker should have done the night before had been neglected, so I had twice the work to do, and a pile of customers to serve. It was a bit dizzying.

Anyway I finally managed to get a handle on what needed to be done so I was just started to calm down when this guy comes in. He asked me, "How are you today?"

"A little stressed," I replied with a laugh, just making conversation, and in my brain enumerating all the things I had to get out of the freezer, and the vegetables to cut and meat to slice and condiments to replenish and where all the cigarettes go on the wall behind me, and wondering how I was going to get it all done between customers when things were this busy.

He got a funny sort of look on his face.

Then he laughed at me.

The asshat laughed at me.

"I pity you going out into the real world if this makes you stressed," he said, in that mocking, derogatory tone of voice that suggests that he feels sorry for you, because you must be very thick. "I own a law firm, and I don't get stressed out."

Immediately my good mood was eradicated. I hate people who do that, who exist only to make themselves feel good by looking down on people like myself, who work retail part-time and really don't want to hear about the number of digits he makes in a given year.

"Well, I'm glad you get your kicks making other people miserable," I told him sweetly. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have work to do."

And pivoted on my heel and left. When I came out of the freezer, he was gone. I was furious for the next half an hour, until Jeremy showed up with a hot chocolate for me, bless the man.

I hate lawyers.

3. We did battle with the Goth Queen.

For the sake of the innocent, I shan't name names, but ohmijeezus, there are some people who make my skin crawl just from being around them from too long, and this girl was one of them.

For the sake of argument, let's call her Porno Clown.

I knew from the day I met her that I didn't like her, but I'm not generally a person who chews up friends of friends, so I did my best to hide my discontent. As the days wore on and she continued to be present in my haven of friends and relaxation (that being the MUN UC) and just generally getting under my skin. My smiles became ever more pasted-on and forced and I never went looking for her to start a conversation.

What drama Porno Clown was capable of causing! Within a week and a half of being acquainted with her, I have no idea what the hell happened, but she'd somehow managed to cause several shifts in our group dynamic that made her comparable to a geographic fault. She was the sort of person who takes herself seriously to the point of no one giving a shit anymore. She talked as though there was a camera crew following her at all times, and every word out of her mouth was about her. I'm sorry, but I really can't respect anyone who uses the term "my dark prince" when referring to another person and doesn't mean it ironically or mockingly.

I was polite. I was decent.

Until I found out that everyone else hated her, too.

What a relief that was. As though I was Atlas, and the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders! There was no longer a need to keep up pretenses. Fortunately, I didn't have to. She ceased to be seen for the most part, discouraged by associates from making herself seen at the UC because, you know, no one liked her. Those were the halcyon days.

Then she moved away.

There was debate as to whether or not this was a stunt, but everything went through, and the world has settled into a sort of deep, restful peacefulness now that the tremors caused by Fault Porno Clown have begun to die. Yeah, there's still drama, some of it stirred up due to her presence, but now we don't have to deal with someone outlining all that drama and making themselves the center of it with a certain colloquial verbatim that makes the rest of us want to stab our eyes out with ice picks.

4. I've made a career-altering decision.

No, don't freak out, I'm still an English major. I've simply had a change of heart about the direction I want to take that in. I never was really gung-ho about journalism; it always struck me as kind of an intimidating profession, lining me up for my inevitable rabid dog-fight with the rest of those aspiring reporters, vying for a high-paying position and having to fight like an angry ferret to keep it if I ever did manage to land one. I quite simply don't have the guts for head-to-head battles like that. I'm non-confrontational like that.

This decision didn't come about until a few weeks ago when I was doing one of my favorite things: editing a piece of work by my dear friend Rae, who writes with a certain flow and word choice that I find positively delectable. Since I'm a picky sumbitch and she'd asked me to beta, I was giving her constructive criticism in the nicest possible way, because while I believe in doing an editing job thoroughly, I don't believe in ravaging anyone, friend or otherwise, to a bloody gruesome death over something they've put so much effort into. I try to go by that old adage and avoid it as much as possible: "A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded."

And I really like what I do. Which was why it was so incredibly appealing when Rae mentioned in passing, "You know, you should edit professionally."

And why not? Yeah, it's a competitive market, but no more so than the one I'd previously set my sights on, and if I'm going to go into something, why not make it something I enjoy?

So that's the new plan. I'm aiming for a career in editing. We'll see where it takes me.

4. I went out for coffee and to a movie with two different boys.

The movie was a friendly thing, though it's hard to think of it that way when your companion suggests that you wait out the hour and a half preceding the movie by banging in a bathroom.

(I think he was kidding.)

5. I finished Act Two of my longstanding, four-year-old romantic dramedy comic, Cronos.

This is an accomplishment for me. Be happy, dammit.

I think that about covers it. Hopefully I'll start picking up my little blog thang again. It just seems like nothing interesting's been going on, is all. If things pick up, you'll hear about it.

Icarus is really tempted to rewrite a song with the lyrics "Porno Clown".