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Monday - 03.27.23

People have said I've gotten faster at serving things up, and I have, mostly. Dessert days still screw me over really badly, though.

I kinda started off with a sort of idealized, 'ah, this is how things should be' mindset, but that's eventually been melted into a grim 'ah, this is how it is,' which is a little depressing, but makes things more manageable. Ex: "This is ridiculous -- we should have a larger cooler!" to "This is just what we have to work with." This is a necessary service for people in the community who need these accomodations. There's no point in complaining about any of this, because everything we do is ultimately to help them.

That said, everyone hates working here. Everything is mismanaged. We're extremely shortstaffed. There's a competition now to see who can recruit as many of their friends as possible to work here. On the radio, there are constant ads: "Please come work here!" There's a sign up sheet near where we clock in, begging people to take extra shifts.

On a more personal level, my employee email doesn't work (I told a coworker, I told my boss, I told a receptionist, I told the building director, I don't know what else to do...). In the kitchen, our day rapidly fluxuates between having to do a million things at once to literally just sitting down and playing on your phone for thirty minutes or an hour multiple times a day. No one is on the same page about anything. My boss called everyone else except for me to say that our meeting was cancelled (which is petty, but that really pissed me off because I was really stressed about how I was gonna get there, and then it was just cancelled!). People are constantly talking behind others' backs...

Apparently, the only reason people do stay here is because, somehow, other places are worse (dirty or disrespectful or pay less) or they've been here so long they don't know how to do anything else.

It's very sad, honestly. One resident was talking about how, "Staff try to do fun things, but it just isn't fun." Several residents also have very strict dietary restrictions that they're very upset about ("Why can't I have a full bag of chips?"). It's just a horrible situation all around. It's a necessary service that's incredibly flawed, but I have no idea how it could be implemented better... I think the workers do care about the residents and want to help them, but they're just exhausted...

乁(´• ‸ •`)ㄏ

I really just don't have anything to talk about in conversations. This website literally contains everything that lives in my head: namely, feminism, history, old books, Pokemon, ecology, old animes from my childhood, and that's about it. Since basically no one cares about that stuff, my real life conversations just consist of asking questions and vaguely related trivia. I don't have an interest in most popular media, either, so that's also not an option....

I feel like as a result, I don't really come off as a "person," if you know what I mean? I tend to just stay quiet and either listen to other people's conversations or space out. I'm also so horrible at putting thoughts together coherently, like trailing off or ordering information poorly in a sentence. I don't know if this is just an autism thing or not?

Like, I actually had a while where I was having regular several-hour long conversations with a guy on Tumblr about feminism, sexuality, gender, etc, but physically could not talk about anything else. And, y'know, there's only so much to say about any given topic and now we haven't spoken at all for months. I feel bad, but I literally have nothing to say....

Monday - 03.13.23

Over a month in and I'm still very slow at my job. Part of this is personal nature / fault, but the other part is... this is just inherently the most inefficient process ever! Like, for example, on Saturday, I had to serve three different tiers of desserts: chocolate cake, angelfood cake for people on a diet, and chiffon (some kind of mixture of whipped cream and jello, I think??) for people on a more extreme diet. For each of these tiers, there are some people who cannot eat a solid piece of cake / whatever and need their food chopped up in a food processor or pureed. I get that this is all necessary, and, like, that's fine and just part of the job. But, my issue is that then you have to take the leftovers of each of these desserts and individually wrap them up to sell later -- and when you're dealing with three separate desserts at once that takes a significant amount of time and, not to mention, space in an already packed, tiny cooler! Yesterday, I was already kinda running behind due to another excessively complicated dessert situation, and for the snack, had to open up 20+ individual packets of graham crackers to put in a food processor -- why can't we have a sleeve of graham crackers, at least!? It's such a pain in the ass trying to open all those packets and they're just sticking to everything due to static and it's just horrible, oh god!

I don't think it's physically possible for me to get faster at all of that, honestly! I'm not even at the point of doing everything required by my position -- I'm supposed to be doing all of my own prepwork and baking as well, but I can hardly even just serve things in a timely manner! (Again, it's also like we have so much extra time in a day, though. We normally take an hour and a half long lunch break and even on a bad day, I still finish the 8pm snacks before 1. It just feels weird to still be working when everyone else is relaxing...)

My boss asked if I would rather be a dishwasher. We have a number of dishwashers, and they complain about not having enough work to do. This position has far too much to do and the other has far too little... Also, we're very short staffed as it is, and when one of the main cooks gets a surgery next week, it's going to be so much worse. Regardless of how slowly I do this, it keeps someone else from having to do it, at least, and lets them focus on other things. The kitchen and facility as a whole really is just barely managing as it is...

...

I've also been thinking about: wow, I've kinda completely ruined myself.

Before Covid, I was going to a state university (that I could not afford at all and I have so much debt, fuck) and you can just feel that everyone around you is richer than you and has had completely different life experiences than you -- like, in a creative writing class, one girl wrote a story about how once her mom fell down the stairs and broke her leg and she (the daughter) was so upset: this meant they could only go to Disney World once this year, rather than twice like usual! It wasn't a social commentary or anything, it was played straight! Everyone in the class reacted with sympathy... What the hell?? I honestly related much more to the janitors than to my fellow classmates (who all claimed to be communists, by the way).

It's kind of the same / opposite position here, at this job. I offhandedly mentioned something about college and a coworker asked, "What the hell are you doing here, then? Are you planning on going back? Do you really want to stay here the rest of your life?" I don't know, I've been struggling with that question for so long! I studied chemistry, thinking I liked my chem classes in high school and thought it was interesting, and, since it's STEM, I should get paid well and it'll be in high demand, right? But no -- chemists are paid jackshit and there are limited job opportunities, on top of that!

Also, things that are such a major part of my online circles (ex: feminism, LGBT issues, etc) are basically non-existent in real life. For the longest time, I've been thinking whenever a certain coworker was talking about "her girlfriend" she meant, y'know, romantically, but, it turns out she has a husband and was using it in the olden-timey platonic way? And yesterday, a coworker was looking at Tiktok (why are you using Tiktok??) and said to me: "'Top surgery'? Oh, does she want to be a boy or something?" and it fully dawned on me how much we live in completely different worlds...

I don't know if, at this point in my life, I have "peers." The closest I have are Tumblr mutuals, I guess? But we don't even talk or anything... I wrote a cringy poem about these feelings a while ago. The full poem is on ao3, if you were curious for some reason, but here's an excerpt:

but on top of it all
I just don't want to be alone

is something wrong with me?
I just wish this didn't matter so much to me.
but no matter what I do
I just cannot stop this voice in my heart
from talking about a place I long to be
that longs for me

Anything else I could say here would just be repeating that...

...

(...Oh, I wanted to change the names of these month folders so they'd be in number order rather than alphabetical, but oops! that ruined all the images and css. Looks like I'll just have to live with it...)

I just couldn't give up on my ultimate vision of this journal, where you scroll down into the grass -- it's too cool! It works decently on mobile Firefox, but gets a bit weird on Safari and Chrome and I'm not sure why! So I decided to just make two versions of this page, one for mobile, one for desktop. Since I only have these two devices to test on, it might very well look like garbage on every other platform, as well... For posterity's sake, here's what I want it to look like, at least:

So, if it's not like that, with weird gaps or anything like that, please save my dignity and use the normal version, linked at the top of the page, thank you....

Sunday - 03.05.23

Hello! Sorry that it's been a while since my last update! (And even longer for actual content on this site...) Work is kind of exhausting, I just come home and plop down on the couch and die. I've had this weekend off, though, and I have another three free days this week (but I still have to go in for a meeting on one of them). Hoping to work on something then!

...

For some more brief angsting about work: my feet are somehow simultaneously numb and in pain, kill me. Also, I don't necessarily think she means to be doing this, but the lady who's training me is so overly critical of everything I do and I tear up almost everytime she talks to me. On Thursday, I fully broke down sobbing... Whenever I ask a question, she makes me feel like an idiot and I'm told to just follow the menu or whatever the relevant is list is, etc, but they're often confusing, inconsistent, incomplete, or inaccurate...

The specific thing that got me on Thursday, though, was knocking over a few cups (some people need their liquids thickened to a certain consistency) while trying to rearrange carts in our narrow narrow narrow walk-in fridge. It wasn't really a big deal, I mopped it up quickly while the lady training me remade the cups that spilled, but it completely killed me and I went and hid in the broom closet and cried for a while. I tried to collect myself enough to go wrap the dinners like I was supposed to but when a coworker stepped in to help because she had nothing else to do, I ran off and cried again... I honestly have no idea what the hell is wrong with me: Anxiety? Neuroticism? Autism? I've just always been like this...

It used to be much worse when I was younger, actually. Like, I couldn't even write with a pen at all, and if I made a mistake while writing with pencil even, I'd have to rip up the whole page and start over again. I'd have panic attacks from being (or even possibly being) a minute late to school, even if my mom would call me in. Any slight mistake or perceived "failure" would completely shatter me as a person...

This is impossible to live with...

...

In other news, I spent all of yesterday fighting with Steam to try to move my save files for a certain game over to my new computer. I even copied and pasted the entire game folder over, but it still didn't work. It's a visual novel with multiple routes and bonus content when you finish one, and I was ten hours into it, but I guess I'll have to start over. :(

I also did end up buying a set of dice like I mentioned in the previous entry! (Not the one that I linked to, though, lol.)

These are "Bloody Skies" by FennekandFinch on Etsy. Pretty cool! You can't really see it in the picture, but if the light hits them right, they have a red shadow / reflection. I also printed out some solo ttrpgs I've been wanting to check out for a long time from one of the massive itch.io bundles a while back.

I've already played "The Estate of Baron Archambaud, an Ingrate" -- neat mechanics where you make a little dungeon with playing cards and each card corresponds to a scenario (a puzzle, an enemy encounter, etc) in the back of the guide book. I also like "Delve," which is a pretty straightforward roguelike that also uses a deck of cards. I just think the idea of a card dungeon is really cool. I have limited space on my desk, so I use a mini deck to make a more sprawling dungeon.