WELL I suppose I've been snorting on too much DUST connecting all these universes to write about it--but I assure the literary world, that I haven't been up to nothing.
I fear I am ending my little love affair with the West very shortly, and I mean that in several geographical, scholarly and philosophical ways.
I'm off tonight to sneak into hot tubs and watch classic films with old friends and new ones. Tomorrow will be my only day off until I'm completely done working at all with Peet's and Barnes and Noble. What a trip these two vocational adventures truly have been! I don't think I'll ever want to work at a BN again, because the young ladies that were my fellow booksellers were so conniving and intimidatingly mediocre--and the gentlemen were just too dweeby and overconfident--for me to relish the job. It's a particularly Redwood City BN thing, I'm sure, but my decision is made. I'm creeped out by a bookstore whose higher ups ridicule customers as often as they gossip about one another to one another.
My shifts at Peet's, however, almost always end tearfully. :) I always have a blast with customers, and likewise with the Peet's crew. And I'm not sure why, but I think the Redwood City Peet's is as much a delightful misnomer as BN is a dreary anomaly. I don't know what pleases people so MUCH about my little Peet's on Broadway in Deadwood, but I feel it too. A little shy and excited by the charm and confidence of the typical Peet's barista. Laura, the manager, asked me from her big desk in the back storeroom behind the Garuda and Aged Sumatra beans whether I planned on coming back after my adventures in Africa, and hastened to add that I would be welcomed back. That I was well liked, and that if I found another Peet's that I'd like to work with, that she would put in that good word.
I thanked her, truly, and told her that I honestly didn't know. And that honestly, I loved it here.
I fear that my memories here will fade into "it was all a dream, I used to read Word Up magazine"--and I'm probably right to assume that they will. My surrealist journey into the SF Bay Area has been......surreal. A series of disconnected and mismatched instances whose single constant variable has been....myself. Haha.
TRULY silly that I haven't blogged more.
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I don't know if you will read this in Mamma Africa, but it is so strange to me to go back and read these, now that I live here for real. Strange, because I know how you feel and also strange because I so distinctly do not feel that way. I suspect this has something to do with life times; I have moved here as an "adult", forever, making my home in this strange place for "reasons" like jobs and grownuppy sounding things. I have an apartment and a fellowshippy job thing and this for me seems so exciting but so unmagical. Not fun. There are no pool hopping adventures...there is only hooking up my water and paying $800 dollars to register my car, and reformatting my article to publish in September, and deadlines and payments. And aloneness. Life is so strange.
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