This Week...

It was a cranky week.

Sometimes I'm content with my life right now.  Other times, as was the case this week, I am very much not.

About a week ago, my manager told me(*note: didn't ask) that I would be interviewing with our district manager this Thursday for a supervisor position at our shop.

I'd be interviewing for the promotion along with another co-worker: this 20-year-old punk who's been begging our manager for the position for weeks.  My manager got sick of his groveling, and so he relinquished the decision-making power to our DM.  If you ask me, it seems like a lot of fuss over something I didn't even necessarily want.

Once he discovered that he would be interviewing 'against' me, I started to notice a change in the way this co-worker treated me.  He'd loudly call me out on really random things in front of my manager; it's no secret that I prefer making drinks to working on the register.  I'm really good at bar, and the register's for newbs!  But suddenly this was spun into:

'Yeahhh, Alicia's really good at bar, but that's all she can do.  Put her on register and she freaks out.'

Huh? This went on all morning.

And then later that day, he was bragging to all of us about how he took a picture of another supervisor sitting on a stool and texting while she was on the register.  He showed it to our manager and told him that she's constantly on her phone on the floor, or in the back room on Facebook.  What are we, in high school?

If this is how he's acting before we even interview, imagine how he'd treat me if I get the job...or all the gloating I'd have to endure should he get it!

Yep.  This is my life now.

My interview was whatevs.  My heart wasn't in it.  Honestly, I mainly went along with it because I really don't want Tattle-Tail-McVee for a supervisor.

The last question that the district manager asked me was: 'How bad do you want this job, and what are you willing to do to get it?'  That really threw me off.  And I'm not a good liar.  I think I mumbled something incomprehensible, and I don't think he bought it.  In any case, we'll find out Monday.

I went with my roommate to Bible study on Tuesday - I know a lot of the people in the group, but  I usually work nights so I can rarely go.  At the end of the night, everyone goes around and shares their high and their low of the week - cheesy, but whatevs.  I bet you can guess what my low was.

You know you're pathetic, though, when your 'high' for the week is Ben & Jerry's Late Night Snack ice cream for dinner.

Have you ever just needed a 'win'?  Not in the Charlie Sheen sort of way.  Just anything semi-positive in you life?

I was talking with a different co-worker about my interview - how I really don't even care.  And how I don't want the position anyway, because if I get another job in the near-future I'd feel bad about quitting.

He called me out on my crap of course, saying that I do want it  -  like I want to get a good grade on a test or like I want to win a game - but I'm afraid of being let down again if I don't get it.

Ugh.

The other day, someone lent me this sweet book, Kisses From Katie, about this amazing 20-something woman who decided to spend a year between high school and college working with orphans in Uganda, and ended up staying there and adopting 14 little girls.  It's perspective-shifting, convicting, and all that good stuff!  And it's given me back some of that joy I've been burying under my lame-crankiness all week.

But it also made me ache to figure out my calling.

Caffeine Has A 6-Hour Half Life...

I don't like to drink things with caffeine.  No; the irony of the fact that I work at a coffee shop is not lost on me.

Did you know that caffeine has a 6-hour half life?  I don't remember where exactly I gleaned this little tidbit from, but I promise I'm not making it up!

Refer back in your memories, if you will, to your 5th grade science class.  Now, shuffle on over to the fossils unit.  Remember anything about carbon-14 dating?  Scientists are somehow able to analyze the amount of carbon remaining in ancient organic matter.  They also know that it takes a prescribed number of years for half of the carbon to leave prehistoric bones or whatnot.  Using this scale, they can figure out how old something is.  

Like I mentioned earlier, I typically don't caffeinate.  I don't like what caffeine does to my body.  It makes me feel all jittery and I can't sleep. 

For some reason that eludes me at present (3:24 a.m.), I decided that it would be a good idea to down a 26oz black iced tea at the end of my closing shift earlier tonight.  There's just something about a nice, big (free) glass of iced tea that makes all of your past knowledge of the effects of caffeine: experiential, academic, or otherwise, just disappear right along with that first satisfying gulp. 

That cursed first gulp took place at 11:00 p.m.  By my estimates, I have about 1 1/2 hours yet, before half of that stinkin caffeine leaves my system.

It doesn't help matters that in addition to the caffeine, tonight my head is full of other things (of an entirely non-chemical nature).

It has been almost 6 months since I started working at the coffee shop.  I began just as my AmeriCorps term of service was ending, full of the naive assumption that my stint as a barista would be short-lived. How long could it take to find my dream job that would simultaneously fulfill all of my idealistic desires for meaningful vocation?  A couple months and scores of fruitless applications later, discouragement started creeping in.  In an effort to stave off the apathy, I became vigilant in my efforts to make the best of where I was and what I was doing. 

I started being more intentional about getting to know the people I was serving on a daily basis.  It turns out that our regulars are pretty awesome, and I began to truly enjoy being part of their daily routines.

I need to have at least a couple people near me who I feel close to and with whom a mutual giving and taking of stories, secrets, joys, and pains can take place.  I deeply value some of the unexpected friendships that have grown out of this job.

6 months later, I can finally say that I am content with where I am.  

Which has its positives (as outlined above)...

and its negatives:  becoming too content/comfortable here, when my passions lie elsewhere. 

Yesterday, completely out of the blue, I was presented with a very tempting offer from some dear friends to leave everything behind here, pick up, and start over in another state.  So, in addition to the caffeine, this opportunity is rolling around in my head and keeping me up into the wee hours of the night (time check: 4:16 a.m. [45 minutes until half of the caffeine has left my body]). 

One of my favorite books is Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry.  Berry has a fascinating worldview; a true wordsmith, his novels read like poetry, and his poems touch your very soul.  In Jayber Crow, the protagonist/the book's namesake says:

'Now I have had the most of the life I am going to have, and I can see what it has been.  I can remember those early years when it seemed to me I was cut completely adrift, and times when, looking back at earlier time, it seemed I had been wandering through the dark wood of error.  But now it looks to me as though I was following a path that was laid out for me, unbroken, and maybe even as straight as possible, from one end to the other, and I have this feeling, which never leaves me anymore, that I have been led' (Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 66). 

I've always loved this image of the character in the novel being led throughout his life.  I feel it too.  I've also felt all that 'adrift,' 'wandering,' 'dark wood of error' stuff plenty over the past several months.  But looking back, beyond all of my 'wandering' of late, I can clearly see the path that has led me to here: it's that selfsame path that leads out and beyond here (wherever that may be).