To my dismay, my staycation is
coming to an end this weekend. Here’s what I did: Read an entire novel in one
day, got panhandled by a hungry llama at the Olympic Game Farm, took a trip to
Port Townsend and decided I am going to move there immediately and become a career
eccentric, got a long over-due massage and a long-overdue eye exam, had lunch
with a co-worker smack in the middle of
the day, leveled my new Khajiit rogue in Elder Scrolls Online, worked out, ate
out, and slept in until 8:00 a.m. every morning. I don’t know how I’m going to go
back to work, because obviously, I don’t have time for a job.
The other thing I did was
finally, finally complete the first, extremely messy draft of my novel! (Cue
triumphant air horns, confetti, cheering crowds.) I was amazed at how much I
was able to get done simply through virtue of having long stretches of time and
an abundance of mental energy to focus on it. I know that the traditional advice
for writers is to write every day, but that’s never worked for me. I don’t like
writing in short bursts; I need long blocks of time in order to get into the “groove”
or flow state or whatever it is that allows my unconscious to move the story
along. My job sucks every ounce of mental and emotional energy out of me, so
trying to write on weeknights is impossible. I have no will left at the end of
an eight-hour day. It was liberating to have a five-day block in which to
ponder and write for the full day.
Now I have to get something off
my chest. It’s been bothering me for a long time. At first I first I thought it
was just me, and this annoyance was an illusion stemming from my general
irritability with the world, but no. This is real, people. Having worked every
McJob ever, I don’t want to turn into the sort of person who complains about
service workers, but…can we all just agree to go back to the days when there
was an actual method to grocery bagging?
The last year or so, I’ve noticed that baggers have dropped all conceit of technique
and now just throw everything into bags completely at random. This usually results
in two gallons of milk, a box of wine (it's organic, so stop judging me), three
glass jars of spaghetti sauce and an entire case of Coke in one bag, leaf
lettuce and a two-pack of pens in another bag, and canned goods thunked unceremoniously
on top of the fragile packages of steak and salmon. And half the time, they
just leave items out of the bags altogether to fend for themselves like orphans
on the bottom of the cart. Every single time I grocery shop, I now need to park
my cart in the lot, remove all the groceries, and re-bag everything myself. What
happened to taking pride in your work? What happened to enjoying the small
satisfaction of knowing that you efficiently and neatly bagged your customer’s
groceries, ensuring that weight was distributed evenly throughout the bags, the
eggs were on top, and the meat remained unmolested by cans?
I can’t prove it, but I suspect
this behavior is somehow a result of the cloth grocery bag revolution. My theory
is not yet fully formed, but I shall posit it in detail when it is.
On a cheerier note, here are
some pictures of Port Townsend, and a zebra, and a shameless snack-hustling
llama.
--Kristen McHenry
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