But do I bother going in on Friday?

I quit again. Granted, it was a job I should never have taken in the first place, and wouldn't have if I weren't so panic-stricken about the state of my bank account, but there goes another store that I will have to avoid for six months (the usual time it takes for the staff to turn over entirely, or else to forget my face completely). Quit over the phone, too, while she was yelling at me for calling in to study for my final. I suppose in the atmosphere created by the rest of my co-workers a bit of yelling is deemed necessary; I however, have never responded well to it, and instead I just told her that our continued association was not going to work out for either of us. "You mean you're going to just quit without notice?" No, of course not, however sorely tempted I am by the way I've been treated in your employ. Hopefully she'll want to get rid of me badly enough that she just won't put me on the schedule after this week. Quitting employees can never be trusted to show up for shifts, I learned that from Candace 'look at those new hires run' O'Neal. Terribly glad now that I kept the library job. Terribly sad that that's the only money I'm getting in for a while again.

Sigh

And it's over. I could've waited a few more years, Jo. Maybe it's the sort of thing a person should have to look forward to after a long and fulfililng life, because for some reason I want to crawl into bed for a week, and I think it's the come-down from the expectation rather than anything in the book itself.

Seriously, just a sign in the middle of a swamp

Dead relatives are far less likely to embarrass you in public. This is my conclusion after two months of research into my family history. First of all, the fact that I am acknowledging any of my family is something that several of my relations will not easily believe. I haven't exactly been subtle in avoiding the yearly gatherings, and I'm quite sure I have several new cousins or in-laws that have so far passed under the radar completely. It was a whim, to begin with, a website with a link to ancestry.com where I quickly found census records and linked family trees, all neatly categorized. That was where it hooked me. I am a nerd of epic proportions, and the idea that for the first time ever my family could be neatly written out and categorized, their complete insanity erased for the calm few lines that remained, well it made me happier than it should have.
I paid the monthy fee and soon I was making remarkable progress. I found an uncle of my mother's, a certain Howard Broussard, that she had never before heard of. An enterprising and helpful group of people have transcribed the tombstones for the Vermilion parish cemeteries, and I was able to find his grave, in the Cossinade cemetery. Despite 23 years of living in and around Vermilion parish, I had never heard of Cossinade, although my mom was fairly sure it "used to be somewhere past Kaplan." Armed with her cell phone camera and an umbrella against the sudden rain, we trekked out to this mythical forgotten site. Many of the roads off of Hwy 14 were flooded over by this point, but we had gone to far to turn back, and then there it was ahead of us: Cossinade, 3 miles.
All that remains of the town of Cossinade, it turns out, is that sign, and the small cemetery. Even the church was moved to Kaplan a few years after it was built. But there was Howard Broussard, who had been 25 when he died. He was buried in a plot along with an Orina Vincent, same date of death. No further information has been unearthed so far, but even if it turns out to be nothing more eventful than a buggy accident, I think it's nice, in a way, to know what happened to these people. Certainly the Broussard family will never be of any major interest to historians, but certainly Howard deserves some acknowledgement of his life. Even if that record is only this.
The next step is to travel to Memphis (voluntarily!? unheard of) and talk to my grandmother. Don't know if I'm quite ready to make the switch to living relatives, but she's the only one still alive, and I'll hate myself for not doing it. We can only pray the rest of them won't descend on me en masse and ruin my resolve, I still haven't forgiven them for the way they behaved the last time we went out to eat together.

cut and paste fun, originally Wed. 11 July

Alright, as I figure I'll want to tell all of you about my first day at my new job at some point, and as I also figure that if today is any indication I'm going to be comatose whenever I'm not on somebody's clock, I'm going to multitask (a word I have decided today that I loathe deeply) and write it all out while (supposedly) guarding the library basement from fiends.
I knew that going from jobs at a bookstore and a university library to a pharmacy/convenience store retail environment would be a drop of some kind in the, shall we say, intellectual calibre of my colleagues. But never have I been more disheartened than I was on finding that the note on the breakroom cupboard read "No one store is to use anything in store unless approoed by manager." At least, I was never more disheartened until I turned around and found that the corporate company newsletter had twice as many mistakes in the opening paragraph. I can get past this, I told myself, being a grammar nazi is no way to endear myself to my co-workers.
Photo lab training was minimal, as today was shipment day, and all of the regular cashiers were putting up stock. As a result, I know next to nothing about the 15 or so photo orders I "helped" with today, and I know even less about most of the people who share my shift. However this is compensated for in the fact that it seems I am shortly going to be well acquainted with all the brands and types of cigarettes, and will no longer have to ask the customer to just point to the one they want. Why are there three different kinds of Marlboro lights, in varying sizes, colors, and packaging? And why did every person who purchased them look at me archly and ask, "you don't smoke, do you?" I didn't even get that kind of condescension from literary snobs at the bookstore!
As a side note, CVS claims on every piece of training material they threw at me to promote giving their customers "A Longer, Healthier, Happier Life." I find this to be completely at odds with the fact that I'm selling cigarettes and alcohol ALL DAY LONG. Maybe someone's getting happier because of it, but I suspect they just want to make sure they've hooked their customers into a lifetime of trekking to the back of the store for prescriptions to correct the lung and liver failure, and for diet pills to counteract all the chocolate they cram into the front aisles.
I don't mean to be a snob here, I understand that all those non-English speaking construction workers today have 70 times more money than I do, and I can't be picky about someone willing to pay me, but there was a reason I applied to work in the photo lab and not as a regular cashier. I don't mind helping out, but I doubt being able to grab the correct box of Parliament Ultra Smooth blindfolded is going to turn out to be a majorly marketable skill.

Lots to say, so pay attention

After having abandoned my blog/writing scrapbook for over a year I have decided the time has come to hold myself accountable for Amy's executive decree #7,432: Amy will not continue to call herself a writer, or work toward that god damn creative writing degree until she actually picks up a pen or gets to a keyboard and composes something other than an email. I've issued countless of these orders to myself since I began at LSU in 2002, and to date I have failed in just about every one of them. It's all well and good to realize you've overdrawn your bank account and, in a blind panic, apply anywhere that's hiring for some extra hours, but that sort of attitude only lands you a job at CVS pharmacy working in the photolab, where you get no training and end up selling cigarettes and listening to the sort of people who, previously, you were too much of an intellectual snob to even acknowledge as part of your universe.
Maybe it was just the sort of kick in the ass I needed, though. Sure I've had retail jobs before, some of them rather crap, but if this is something I thought was a viable option for myself, no matter how much I needed the money, than something has fallen even more than my bank balance. It's a humiliation, I have to admit, as awful as that might make me sound to some people; this is not what I should be devoting my energies to, and I know it too well to even pretend that this job can be a good thing, "just to pay the bills." Granted, until I find something else and pay my (please God) last semester of college, I do have to stay there, but I intend to be as (silently) contemptuous as possible the entire time, so I don't forget how much I'm embarrassing myself. I wrote up an account of my first day there earlier this week, I think it deserves to be seen.