May 18, 2020

You friend Behr is very happy today. My 1988 painting, Man Changes Underpants After Difficult Bowel Movement, sold at Sotheby's today for sixteen million dollars.

Nothing feels as good as making tons of money through my literary and artistic achievements.

God bless.

What it's like here, today.

I've been fled for a while, but a quick recap is that I'm working in medical diagnostics, which, as you may imagine, are considered an essential business at this time. I support manufacturing which means I need to be in the plant most of the time to keep things running smoothly.

So in general, my experience of this period has so far been a little more normal and business as usual than most. I have a job to go to everyday, I have slightly customized but normal banter with the usual cast of characters. Being introverted and somewhat workaholic, what else would I be doing, anyway?

I had my freakout moments when they announced the first cases inside my workplace, when they started taking our temperatures at the door.

The grocery store is an uncomfortable experience. Skipping family celebrations for Mother's Day, My sister's birthday, my nieces' birthdays was uncomfortable. Likewise having to explain why I wouldn't come when they all gathered to celebrate, dealing with thinking about them all together, it felt weird that they don't have the same level of concern and caution that I do.

Emotionally, it feels weird.

I'm disappointed. It's difficult to think of the future, normally, one of my coping strategies for stress is to look forward to trips that I have planned, events, the future as a whole, but for now, the future is in fog. Will I be able to go camping again? Will I be able to see people in person again? I mean, yes. But I can't plan on it, I can't navigate to it.

At the same time, though, I'm doing fine, I feel incredibly privileged to have solid employment, mainly for the income but also for the opportunity and obligation to see humans in person.

Until today, non-essential businesses have been closed to the public, and non-essential workplaces have been required to close and either have employees work from home, or if this is impossible, furlough them. Essential businesses include healthcare providers, groceries stores, liquor stores, pharmacies, hardware stores, and catch all department stores like Target and Walmart. It also includes manufacturing and critical supply chain for many items.
It doesn't include (famously) hair styling, manicurists,

Starting tomorrow, the governor is implementing "phase 1 reopening" of the Commonwealth. Some workplaces like non-essential construction and manufacturing will be allowed to reopen, provided that these workplaces comply with social distancing, wearing masks and various other restrictions. In his speech today, he tentatively gave a goal of May 25th for limited personal services like hair and nail salons.
We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

Match, check. Gasoline, check. Bridge, check.

It has been a strange and awful week for me.

I responded to my dad's suggestion that I apply to an advertisement pasted in the newspaper -- the newspaper distribution company needed a new person to handle a certain route. A few hours per night, a few hundred bucks per week. I figured, great, I'm good at waking up around 3 AM, this will be easy-peasy.

What I'm not good at doing is saying 'no' to people who are nice to me.

So, I applied for the position, and the recruiter told me up front that the job begins at 1 AM each morning, and I'm like yeah sure, I can handle that, while thinking to myself, can I actually handle that?

And then I started my training at the warehouse and...there were lots of people not wearing masks. Including the guy training me.

I should have said "Ah ha ha sorry I'm outie goodbye" but, like I said, not good at saying no to people who are nice to me.

And the same guy called me after the first day and he asked if I wanted to continue and I said yes because I thought I could tough it out.

Which meant that, as the training went on over the week, I was unwillingly going to bed at 7 PM so I can wake up at 12 to go to work at 1 and I'm quickly breaking down from the emotional stress of that sleep schedule, because I feel like my evenings no longer belong to me, and that every time I go to bed it just means my workday is beginning again, so in some ways the job never really ends...

Plus the fact that I stuck around because the people training me are nice, and I didn't want to stick them with this route again abruptly. The job has physical demands, moreso when you're driving a stickshift car like I do. The job killed my leg every morning and it might have been killing my car.

Every morning. As in, this was a 7-day-per-week job.

Now, I had the chance to read the contract well ahead of time, and it specifically said that I had to give them 30 day's notice before quitting or they'd fine me five hundred dollars -- and I signed it because I didn't want to bail on these people because, again, they were nice to me.

So I was kind of scared by that particular paragraph and didn't want to tell anyone that I wanted out of the job because I figured their wrath would come down on me because, after all, I signed the contract -- it took a phone call from a friend to help me realize that this kind of contract might not actually be legally enforceable, and that the job objectively sucked (250 per week for up to five hours per night? Not good enough).

So I tell my dad I'm thinking of bailing and he's like "do what you want but I'd be very disappointed because I feel like you're not applying yourself well enough to finding employment" so alright fine I'll stick it out, Dad. Because I'm not good at saying no to my parents.

So I spent a week getting more and more stressed and --

quit this morning by text because I hadn't had the gumption to raise the issue with the company beforehand and I couldn't go another night of the same sleep schedule and I wanted my evenings back and how the hell was I supposed to stay in the job for thirty whole days anyway?

And I wanted to no longer worry about posing a health risk to the people I live with.

So now I may have caused them a great deal of consternation for doing this all abruptly. Maybe moreso depending on how my state handles the workplace safety violation report.

I have to wonder if they were being nice to me after all, and if I was being nice to them.

And I have to wonder if I just set myself on fire along with the bridge, or if I had already set myself on fire before reaching it.