the girl I mean to be

The girl I mean to be is an elusive specimen. Who knows where she goes when she's no longer attached to my body's brain stem. When I'm checked out, I think to myself, "she would have done it this way, but I don't have the energy."

That's it: I don't have the energy to be the girl I mean to be. I'm tired, dammit!

If I had the audacity to walk into work and be a completely different person, I might have more attitude, or break out into rap songs, or just plain ignore people when I don't feel like greeting them. I'm changing the tables of customer service--perhaps totally derailing the sensibility and decorum of what it means to serve the customer. Then again, maybe the public needs to be taught a lesson in customer service as well. We are not your serVANTS, but we serve. And there is respect involved on both parts. When the server treats the served with the kind of respect they receive, all HELL breaks loose. Well gee, people, can we learn anything from this?

Centuries long abuse from customers would suggest at the very least that we are still making 11th century decisions in a 21st century technologically oppressive, spoiled brat breeding world.

Am I a little sleep deprived? Yes
Am I a little cranky? more than a little


But the point of me saying any of this is not really to rant about how angry people make me, but to recognize that it's probably the many, many of us are deeply angry and sad about things that aren't clear even to us. We are prevented from being the people we mean to be--if we've even taken the time to cultivate an image of our ideal selves, which is unlikely in most cases--because we run into road blocks that we've not yet figured out how to get around. Knowing this, perhaps I can forgive the 3rd person today telling me that my job is ridiculous and my competence questionable. His or her emotional conflict and disquietude may well make my own look like a day at the park.

A Post-Modern Depression

I think my quarter life crisis is perhaps both a cause and effect of an insistent post-modern depression. My sister and I discussed our respective stomach knots and heart drops that plague our every day existence. Is it because we've achieved a certainty of survival, our needs of food and shelter have largely been met, that our default state of being is sadness? Is it that we have nothing but time to contemplate ourselves and the higher needs of community and love and trust are not being met?

Are people that are angry when they come into a place of business because...THEY are having the same existential crisis, the same poverty of the spirit?