Chapter 1

I had been working at the Green Hut for not even ten months before I looked down and realized that much of my soul had been sucked from my body. This was naturally disconcerting. And so I sought the exact cause of my misery. The answer is as old a capitalism. It is the hateful nature of the corporate beast to ignore the individuality of its parts in favor of a uniformed whole. Therefore all the "cool" people to work with had already quit or been "released", and my own unique ways of working were being threatened into extinction. The final straw landed when I began to be graded on customer interactions. Oh yes, that's right; I said, 'graded on customer interactions.' This meant that my manager literally sat down with a piece of paper and watched me as I placed the finished drinks on the counter and informed the customers that their drinks were ready. If I didn't happen to make eye contact with the under-caffeinated grumpy old guy and say, 'thank you,' then it got marked down as an incorrect interaction (presumably to be used as a an excuse when it came time to give me a raise).
So to make a potentially self-indulgent whiney story short, I quit my job at the coffee shop and began to work as an ABA Therapist.

Hello, hello again.

On September 29, I received this email from my mother.
RE: June 5‏
From: Mom
Sent: Sat 9/26/09 8:21 PM
To: Valerie (long-lostish daughter)

Last blog. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

And that was it. No hello. No I love you. But considering that this was an admonishment email and that I didn't even do anything about for another two weeks, I suppose I don't deserve the greeting or love.

It isn't that I haven't thought about blogging. Of course I have. I miss the delusion of entertaining my followers (all three of you) with my witty soliloquies. I miss sitting down to my green table of an evening tea close at hand, coaxing my computer into cooperation, and telling you of the trivial and not so trivial happenings in my world. The obvious snarky response that I'm sure you've already formed is, "if you love it and have missed it so much, why haven't you done anything about it?" Let me justify myself. There are three forces of nature which have utterly trumped my joy in writing until now. The first is mind-numbing occupation. I was simply too busy to write, working mostly ten-hour days, and taking the weekends to return to something of a normal person so that I could do it all over again the next week. The second force is procrastination. When I said that I took, "weekends to return to something of a normal person," that should be more accurately translated to "I procrastinated as though it were the only activity which could prolong my life." The final, most powerful force, was that after a month I was embarrassed that I had not posted in so long, and my embarrassment grew in proportion to the time away from my blog.

So what brings me back after such an absence? Although my mother's email was something of a gadfly, it was the fact that the first two forces abruptly dissipated and the third didn't have the strength to stand on its own. So I am back.

There is also a frightful number of fairly significant events which have transpired between the previous post and this, so I'll attempt to bulletinize them in the next few blogs to get everything up to date.