Tuesday June 30

Social networking....

I often wonder how good this whole social networking thing has been for me. I have the whole shebang, myspacefacebooktwitter. A good way to keep track with my friends, but my worst fears have come true, they have become an obsession. I haven't always had them and as I recall, I was much happier w/o them.

I'm not quitting social networking, but as part of my bigger life plan, I plan to phase out the social networking. First up, is the one I go to considerably less than I used to, myspace.

July Reading List

After two months w/o it, I decided to bring back the reading list for July:

Young Stalin by Simon Montefiore

I Survived Cancer But Never Won the Tour de France by Jim Chastain

Sunday June 28

I think I'm having a motivation problem...

Lately, particularly at work, I'm starting to make mistakes that I had never made before. I got written up the other day for selling something below cost, I was critiqued for missing some things in the magazine rack at closing the other day and last night, some parts of my job were a little less than stellar.

It's not that I don't want to do well, I just wonder if my brain is functioning at full capacity. Generally speaking, it's not in my nature to half-ass things, even when I don't think they are particularly important, so I find these recent slips a little disturbing. Like my ability to pay attention to detail has gone totally out the window.

I don't think it's deliberate, but perhaps deep down I know that 90% of the stuff I do at Hastings doesn't matter. Some part of my brain, deep, deep down, is causing parts of my body to fail at the most basic of tasks.

I guess it's not surprising that it would eventually happen to a big picture guy like myself.

Wednesday June 24

I had another good day today. I had my doctor's appointment and, as expected, he said my blood work and CAT scan were good and that I'm still cancer free. What I didn't expect, however, was the bumping of my follow-up schedule from every 3 months to every 6 months. I didn't think that would happen for at least one more cycle.

I was kind of in a funk for a while, but things are started to happen again. Things are starting to go well again. If only it ever stayed that way...

Tuesday June 23

I don't know if I've ever had a day take such a complete 180 degree turn. I woke up in one of the shittiest moods I've ever been in. I've had a fairly brutal few days at work and frankly, I sometimes think too much is expected of us lowly Hastings employees. My close also got criticized a bit, which I happen to take a bit personally. I have very thin skin. I need to work on that. My body was also just achy. From what, I'm not sure.

At around 1130, however, I got the strangest text message that I've ever gotten, from a long lost old friend whom I thought had forgotten me. There's a very long back story here, and most of the people reading this blog know who I'm talking about, so I won't re-hash it, but suffice to say I was shocked. She wanted to have lunch. I went, and it was actually really great. We got caught up and the door was left open for a re-building of the relationship.

I know now what I need to expect from this friendship. Whatever we had, whatever we were, is all in the past and I would be more than happy just to be her friend. Never have too many of those, right?

Monday June 22

You know what grinds my gears?

People who don't understand the book business and then take the frustration stemming from that ignorance out on a lowly retail employee. We first had the book signing on Saturday which was a total fiasco since the author didn't seem to understand that corporate and the publishers are the ones who mark-up the prices, not me. You also aren't going to be able to get 20 bucks for crappy Kinko's produced binder full of genealogy garbage.. to do that, we'd have to price it at well over 30 bucks and I don't see why anybody would pay more than 10 bucks for it, to be honest.

Then there is the issue with the paperbacks... No, the paperbacks do not come out as the same time as the hardback. It could take as long as a year for that to happen if the book is popular. They do it for the same reason you are asking, because if they put the paperback out at the same time, everybody would buy that one and they wouldn't make nearly as much off of it. Is it somehow wrong for the book business to be concerned with the bottom line? Why? They make a product that people want and, especially in your case, isn't an absolute necessity. Why shouldn't they be able to make money off of it?

Seriously...

Saturday June 20

It's really a bad habit to go a whole week w/o writing something in the blog. Like my brother just said about studying for the PCAT, miss once and it just becomes easier and easier to skip all the time. Then, eventually, you quit altogether. The blogs I've tried to maintain are really a great metaphor for my life, start something w/ grandiouse intentions only to eventually get bored with it and quit. It always happens exactly the same way; I start out great, eventually slow, skip a few times here and there, but then eventually quit. Wonderful eh? I'm actually surprised I have been able to maintain this blog for as long as I have.

But then again, unlike some of the other things I've started, the blog is about something. It's about my post-cancer life and whatever comes P.C. (post cancer). Having purpose is important. If you don't really know where you are going with a project like this, it's easy to get discouraged and quit.

But that is a great segue into what I really wanted to say... on my myspace blog, I set out a list of certain goals I had wanted to achieve this summer. Most of it is stupid stuff, a movies list, a reading list, but other stuff is more important, like a weight goal. This stuff may not be meaningful in the strictiest sense, but in a way it is, it gives me a certain measure of accomplishment. It gives me a way to look back on this otherwise idle summer and say to myself, at least I did something, regardless of how important.

But so far, the list has been an epic fail. May was a pretty good month for it, but I don't think I've crossed anything off of it in June. I really need to hunker down and renew my efforts to get this list done. I may even bring back the monthly reading list idea I tinkered with in April, but never really followed through on...

More on this later...

Saturday June 13

You know what grinds my gears?

Coupon users..... and you know who you are. Not the casual ones trying to save a few bucks, but the habitual ones who go to tremendous lengths to save 10 cents on a can of peas. Wal-greens is probably the worst store for this kind of thing because not only do the (old) people use 7 or 8 coupons at a time, they often get the wrong thing (different brand, wrong number of items, whatever) and hold up the line even further while they get the right one. I doubt a substantial amount of money is saved with these things. At least, not an amount that couldn't be saved by not buying one or two particular things that you don't need.

I run into these coupon users at Hastings too. Lately, there has been an increase in the number of people who don't seem to grasp the fact that coupons expire. On Tuesday, I had a customer who wanted to use a coupon on some books, but the coupon had expired the day before. She gave me some story about how she got the coupon at 10:55 (right before closing) on one of the days before and if I could possibly make an exception. Of course I couldn't. It's not a matter of me not wanting to, I literally couldn't. She then wanted a manager who told her exactly the same thing. He couldn't do anything about it either. If the computer won't accept a coupon, that's it, end of story. Naturally she left the store in a minor hissey.

Yesterday, I had another one of those who had expired coupons. This time, it was for CD's. You can't really use multiple coupons at a time, at least not the way she had it, so she asked if I could separate transactions so she could use her coupons. Naturally, they were expired and I told her such, but she STILL wanted me to do separate transactions in the hopes that new coupons would come out of the register. So, instead of 1 coupon for the transaction, she wanted to get several for all the transactions. I should have said no, since it was a Friday night and we were swamped, but I did it anyway. The irony is that there weren't even any coupons offered that day.

Bottom line is that coupon use is ok, but don't go overboard with it.

Wednesday June 10

You'd think I would know better...

I work in retail, so I deal with jerkoff customers all day. You would think that I would remember this fact when dealing w/ cashiers and people who work at a counter, but sometimes, alas, the lesson is sometimes forgotten. While I didn't get totally irate with the guy at Defined Fitness, I wasn't as nice as I should have been.

A simple fact of life, most of the people who work behind a register are not to blame for whatever problem you have. And most likely, they can't help you or fix it. The enemy is some cold, corporate structure in a city that is hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away... chill out dude.

Monday June 8

It was bound to happen...

I work there, she used to work there and still spends a lot of time there. We were bound to run into each other at some point.

I knew it was going to be awkward. I wouldn't know what to say, I wouldn't know how to act.

However, it happened sooner than I thought. Thankfully, it wasn't that bad. We made small talk and, although there was a giant elephant in the room, we were content to let it stay undisturbed.

It was kind of nice, in a way. I know for sure now that the chemistry we once had was gone and there was no longer any pressure. Maybe we will be friends, maybe we won't, but either way I was glad to get that encounter out of the way and go forward however I can.

Friday June 5

It's really the story of my life; I do the best I can, yet, most of the time I never feel it's good enough. Good enough for what, though? I guess I'm a perfectionist at heart and I hold myself and my actions to a very, very high standard. When I don't meet that standard, even though I've been doing all that I can do, I can be hard on myself and can't escape the notion that I've let others down. 

There has been two instances lately where I have been feeling it: one is at work where lately I've been assigned a lot of tasks during a shift. I try as hard as I can to get them done, but sometimes I just can't. I know it's not a big deal, again, I like to hold myself to a higher standard. The second place is with my RA job. I feel like I'm just wasting everybody's time and money. The guy is impossible to get a hold of, so I have not the slightest idea of what I'm supposed to be doing, however. He said he was going to call yesterday and update me, but, of course, he called when I was at work. Again, nothing I can do about that, but I hate being that guy that people feel they can't depend on and I feel that I am being that guy for the professor.

I really don't know why this is an issue for me. It's probably an issue of acceptance, I've never gotten very much, so now I feel the need to overcompensate. The best way to gain acceptance, naturally, is to live up to everybody's standards. Of course, that's not possible, so the best way to go about it is just screw this whole notion of "acceptance" altogether, be yourself, and hopefully end up with a few people who like you.

Easier said than done, of course. 

Wednesday June 3

Being raised in Protestant churches, its not a huge surprise that the Epistle of James isn't something that came up very often. I can see why, a lot of it flies right in the face of what Protestant churches try to teach (salvation through faith alone), but it's really a shame because there are some very practical and good stuff in here.

For the church as an organization, I think James is important because it discusses many of the flaws I've seen in the church. For one, it condemns gossip and tells us to control the things we say. We all know how it is, church is probably one of the worst places in the world for gossip and many churches don't even need newsletters, everybody knows everybody else's business anyway. It also talks about favoritism towards some people that just seems natural in our human relations, but is particularly true in church. Bad, bad, bad.

But also, personally, James has some very wise words about the future and endorses a philosophy that I have tried, sometimes unsuccessfully, to live by for a few years now. Too much long-term planning is really a crock. Recently, I've been trying to live by the idea of letting the future take care of itself, because all your plans really don't matter and we have no idea of what is coming next. James said:

But you do not know what will happen tomorrow! Your life is like a mist.

 and he more precisely defines the way we should all try to live:

If the Lord wants, we will live and do this or that

Interesting, no?