October 21, 2000

Hejira

i don't know how

October 21. 2000

some pics from home:

sunshine

leaves

kitty

stepping stones

Worked vexed me today, because not only was I working the rather brutal shift of 8-6, but it was dead. I didn't even have a customer until 10:30. Then Dan came in at 2, and I could've left then, because having two people back there was just completely unnecessary.

Now Dan...Dan kind of annoys me, but not deeply, kind of that surface annoyance that you get from high school boys. Which is what he is. He's a big guy (both vertically and horizontally), and constantly has his nose in a Dreamcast or Nintendo 64 magazine. Yes, he plays video games, imagine that. So a typical senario goes like this:

Bethany is busy cleaning up, making coffee, etc. Dan is reading a magazine. Customer walks up to counter. Bethany sees them, but has her hands full, and so signals Dan.

Me: "Hey, Dan!"

Dan: Looks up. "Huh?"

Me: Nods head in direction of customer.

Dan: "Oooooohh...." Lumbers over to help customer.

This senario is repeated a good ten times in the four hours we were working together. Arrgh.

I made the almost spontaneous decision to go home on Friday on Thursday night. After plans with John were postponed until next weekend, and I was left with an entire weekend off from work (such joy), and I discovered I needed some clay supplies, I decided to go home.

I also went home because I felt my parents needed to see me. My Dad lost his job a couple weeks ago. Things have been weird since then. I've been weird since then, too much stuff thrown at me at once - work, school, etc., and then having to worry about my Mom and Dad on top of that. So that's why this site has been sporadic lately...what's happened has changed how I'm dealing with my life and it's been....weird.

I sat across from them in the restaurant. The Anong Thai House is decorated tacky as hell. EVERYTHING is chintzy and plastic and brightly colored except the food, which is delicious and amazingly authentic, especially for somewhere like Lebanon. My mom's sometimes overbearing cheerfulness was turned down a notch, and my Dad's voice seemed on the edge of tears at times. They both looked like they had aged considerably in the last two weeks. They talked about my Dad's new job working with at-risk kids at a youth advocacy agency in Lebanon. They talked about updating my Dad's resume and sending it out to school districts. I felt helpless, I didn't know what to offer, and I felt like they were looking to me for something, but I don't know what I could give.

For a while, in the last few weeks, as my list knows, I wanted out of my family. This was an emotion I wasn't proud of and didn't want, but it was there nonetheless. I wanted to divorce myself from them and all the problems we were having. That emotion eventually went away, but I still am clueless as to how to help them. Everyone is telling me "your parents need you", but I don't know even where to begin.

I felt horrible leaving on Saturday morning to come back to Philly, because they both just seemed so glad to have me home. As I drove away from home, I was torn between wanting to get away from them and all the emotions I didn't want to face, and wanting to turn the car around and go back and hug them and telling them everything would be okay and back to normal. But I knew it would never be, so I kept on driving.

last next

One Year Ago:
I finally get the T1.