A Rant about How Life sucks – corporations, government, and education
I don’t know if the stupid grocery store where I work insists on insulting me or if they just want me to quit working there? Yesterday is the third time upper management has asked me if I want to scrub their public toilet for a living. “Do I look like the sort of person that wants to work here, I am here because computer analyst jobs are in the toilet,” I replied. There has also been several occasions where I have been called to the back office to discuss why I don’t work as hard as when I started there in January. You have an entire workforce in society that is completely ‘demoralized’ working for minimum wage, what can a heartless corporation like Kroger offer those poor people? The managers have been forcing the employees to do these surveys about the working conditions in the stores but they are not anonymous. I am going to write the truth on how I really feel about working there if it has my name on it? If I could turn it in without being fired for saying the wages suck, the discount sucks, the managers suck balls, and the pay and hours are the worst thing in society. I have described working there to my co-workers as 1800s plantation slavery. There are the inside black people and the outside blacks who toil for next to starvation wages. There is not one person there who is making it on the hours and the pay that they offer the people that forcible told to smile at the customer. Lately the customers have gotten worse treating the cashiers and the baggers like they worthless. Last week we had such a customer removed by force by police. The whole incident started with the handling of crazy ladies eggs. We also had a customer on customer fight over the way they were treating one of the cashiers. The work performance by all the slaves gets worse the longer they are forced to live under the oppressive regime of the ‘corporation’.
A Rant about How Life sucks – corporations, government, and education
I have no idea what I am going to do next month if this student loan program is unable to bail me out of retail work. I think I am going crazy having to do the work of a simple person. Today I turned in my financial statement to the university showing that since 2009 I have had zero income. I filled out this one page form with zeros in every single question box. After I handed it to the trainee working in the financial aid office she gave me two options, either redo it in pen, or write over the top of it with black pen. “I don’t like either option,” I told her. I thought about how much I hate the grocery store and I started making a sloppy mess of the form which really had no bearing on what the government loans would be. I am hoping to qualify for additional loans because of living in poverty for so many years. My 2012 income thus far from my minimum wage job is at about $5,000… ironically what I used to make in one month.
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11am
I got out of bed feeling good for the first time in weeks because I did not have to go to work today. There is another reason for that too, I have cut way back on my alcoholism. I have been playing with different amounts for months trying to figure out how my body will shutdown with alcohol but not feel sick the next day. Well, its not going to work out that way and if I just set a predetermined amount of consummation and stick to it, I can get up early and feel great. The only problem is that my mind gets up about a million times before my usual wake up time of 11am.
Yesterday waking up was something out of a horror movie. The red ants are invading everywhere in Arizona and last night they tried to eat me alive. All of last night I could feel something itching at me and it kept waking me up but I thought nothing of it. The last time I was attacking by ants I was on a camping trip and the ants found a tiny hole in my tent and proceeded to bite me to death. Anyhow, yesterday by midmorning they lead their charge at me and I woke up screaming to ants all over my bed. When I went to put the blankets in the washer they bit my hands ruthlessly. When I brought the hamper to the garage, they were in there too biting at me. It was just an awful experience!
Today the first thing I did was check for ants and then stretched out my legs. It was time for the morning run and I had hoped that the stifling humidity would be lessened by last night’s midnight rain storm. I got off work at 11:30pm and I just made it home before the lightening came. I ran around the neighborhood thinking about what one of my less gifted co-workers said to me last night, “you have the body of an 18 year old body builder but your face is of 28 year old man.” I did not know what to respond to that comment and I suspect that he might have some mental retardation issues since he is been a bag boy for 5 years. The old manager told me several times to just be nice to him. I bit my tongue and let the comment sink in and I had to process it.
11:37am
I started lunch right on time and I really wanted to have tacos again. I just happened to get off too late from work to catch the meat department people. I like picking a steak and having them grind it up for me while I watch. Why? Pink Slime. Ever since I heard the reports of pink slime in the ground beef, I cannot stand the idea of having that inside me. I don’t trust prepackaged food anymore; I have to watch what I eat and the thought of ever eating at fast food restaurant, umm never going to happen. My rigid diet is also given me the hardest body of my life. Today while I waited at the salon I flipped through a copy of Muscle and Fitness and I thought about how obsessive I used to be about getting really big. I had all the products features in the magazine and I was a massive 212 pounds last July. I finally had to stop looking at the magazines and stop buying body building supplements. I did not look bad last year as many people have told me at the store for months but I was too big. I had no neck and I was much thicker through the chest and arms. Today I wore a t-shirt that I used to fill out and it clung to my lean body in the wind. “You are so skinny skinny flaco flaco,” said the girl at the convenience store today. Its hard to constantly be judged by my body size but that is what society is, it drives you toward an imagine of what your body should look like. I heard the other day a guy say, “I wish girls were not constantly thinking about being skinny.” The next words out of his mouth were something about how fat girls disgust him. The same thing can be said about men, I don’t like seeing a girl and guy together when they are equally bone thin. A man should have a chest and arms but also a brilliant mind.
One of my co-worker that is 16 told me this week that he used to be morbidly obese. “It was 2 spring breaks ago that I looked in the mirror and I did not like what I saw. I was fat and I knew that I had done this to myself so you know what I did? I got on the phone and called my even fatter friend and said we have to go out and run right now. After that we ran every single day and I am still working on it now,” he said to me. What is different about this kid is he is wicked smart, I am talking quote the bible verse by verse or explain to you what the standard model is in particle physics. It sent my own mind into a dizzy spell wondering whether it was possible for regular IQ people to come to such conclusions about their own obesity. It takes a lot of balls to say enough is enough and stick to a unyielding diet. For me it was the simple sugars in my diet that have are the biggest pain and no bread. I love Coke and Pepsi to death but only in moderation now. I used to sit back with a 2 liter bottle and suck on it like mother’s milk. That is why I was fat kid and the fact that my family’s cooking was all based on Blue Mountain lard. If I had only known as a kid that my acne was being caused by my horrible eating, I could have been much happier. Anyhow, sometimes it’s just easier to be a big fat whale than to work hard at the things you really want – a better leaner version of your own body.
1pm
I still had money left over from my last week’s paycheck to the amount of $60. I did not have to go into work to pick up my paycheck but after reviewing my face in the mirror I needed a salon trip. The sun is really beating up on my face and its not a good thing. I do look more worn down than normal so I decided I would go in and get eye brows and facial. These are now luxury items I cannot readily afford so I am going to be cutting back on some of the bare essentials to cover the expense. Tooth paste, soap, and food you will simply have to wait till next month. That is why poor people always look so bad because they never have the money to take care of their bodies. I wont let my appearance fumble into the toilet on account of being in extreme poverty.
The store is only a ten minute bike ride from my house but by the time I got there I was a sweaty mess. I went up to the office to ask for my tiny pay check and the middle aged fat lady handed my check to me which I tore at wildly like a starved raccoon. She handed me the money and I could feel how much lighter it was with that missing 8 hours… the time clock malfunctions and the employees have to pay the price. Anyhow, the rear brake on my bike has been out for a day and it makes me nervous riding down the street without actual stopping power. Sticking out my flip-flop to stop fast is not exactly a science yet and in a college town you are going to have a lot of teenagers behind the wheel. I managed to avoid becoming tire meat on few occasions because drivers don’t look for bikes. I wish I lived in town that was more bike friendly like Portland or St Paul – that is where Fitzgerald was born. Before I left the store I said good bye to the nerdy computer science girl and all the baggers just pretended not to see me.
6pm
Nothing much happened out of the ordinary at the salon and I stopped to visit Jane at the convenience store and that was nothing but mindless gossip about her fat boyfriend. I rode the shuttle home counting how many of the passengers I had seen at the grocery store. Almost half of them had visited the store in the past week. I asked one lady that looked very familiar if I saw her yesterday and she just shook her head and I got all embarrassed. I did not make another sound for the rest of the ride home. I was nervous though because I kept thinking about paying for school with massive debt and how would I do that? Its no longer humanly possible to work your way through school like some people used back in the days of affordable state education. Unless you have the deep pockets of family funding your trip, your only reward at the end of it, might be garnished wages from a job that does not pay the rent. I cannot believe the number of people that I have meant over the years that are allowed to ‘graduate’ but their diplomas are the property of the banks. They will not receive the diploma till the bank gets its money for covering the education. Its quite sad that this is the world we live in now and we call ourselves a civilized nation? One nation under capitalism rule does not make us better, it makes us worse than every other social country on the planet. We should be ashamed to call the United States anything better than a third world country. The amount food stamp cards I see at the store are almost 90% at the beginning of the month and the last week its mainly cash and bare food purchases.
We need ‘social’
Higher education
Health care (every ones covered regardless of a mandate or tax)
We don’t need more ‘social’
Military killing people with drones.
