Chapter 2

Now we resume normal chapter numbering as I think I have filled in the necessary blanks.
I began training for the new position as an ABA Therapist in July. This transition was both wonderfully exciting and very sad for me. Sad because it meant that I had to give up my position as Charlie's nanny and exciting because of the nature of the job. ABA Therapy, basically stated, is a positive reenforcement training method for developmentally disabled (usually children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, or Asperger Syndrome). The basic idea is that you teach Children by making them happy to do what is socially acceptable through some sort of external reward system. In my training, the most important aspect of this reward system was being personally loudly and energetically encouraging. That meant that when my student did something correctly, I needed to be jump-up-and-down, louder-than-a-4-year-old's-birthday-party, hooray-for-you affirming. While it has been clear to me ever since it occurred to me to figure out my own personality that I am not remotely a bubbly happy person, I had thought that I am generally encouraging and caring in that quiet way. Well, it turns out the quiet way is not what I was being paid for. So I began (with the help of those 5-hour energy boosters) to train myself in the ways of loudness. It was beyond exhausting. Mentally, and physically, I was stretching myself far beyond what I had imagined I could ever do. Naturally, this began taking its toll.
A couple of months after my training was completed the educational situation of my student was rapidly altered, and my position, to my relief, became obsolete.
As I had spent the past several months driving 45+ mins. to work each day, and had tired of the hated Summer Bay Bridge Traffic, I decided to look at a map and see if there were any towns worth mentioning a bit closer to me where I would be able to find a job. And so I found Easton.

Chapter 1.2

To facilitate living so far from where I worked it became necessary to purchase a car. As luck would have it, Jon had a spare sporty thing just waiting for me to swoop in and buy. For people how have seen my DVD collection and realize that I own the new "Italian Job" it's perhaps not too surprising that I like driving quick little cars faster than is strictly legal and that my turns are rather sharper than necessary. So it will be unsurprising when I describe the car as a sliver 2-door with rims and darkly tinted front windows that rode only a couple of inches off the asphalt. Jon and I affectionately called it the go-cart because you really did feel as though you were in nothing more than a turbo-charged cart just built for those drive-under-the-semi-stunts.

Chapter 1.1

It seems I have fallen out of chronology. Before I quit my coffee job my oldest cousin and his wife moved to the Eastern Shore of Maryland which is about a half-hour away from Annapolis. Because they have the world's most adorable two-year-old, and because they had twin girls on the way, and because their generous nature involves taking in homeless family members, I decided to move outta town.

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.

A Long-winded Adventure

My weekdays possess a sameness which causes them to blur into each other. Therefore it often happens that I have no idea which day contained particular events; that phone call was on Monday, or maybe Tuesday, but certainly I talked to her about that then... or maybe that was another day (you get the idea). And today started out like every weekday with the buzz which signals the impending musical wake up alarm on my phone, but of course, had it been like any other day, I would probably not now be breaking from my one and a half month sabbatical from blogging.
Friday
4:00 am. Buzz. Alarm. My mind quickly and sleepily "justifies" hitting snooze.
4:15 am. Buzz. Second alarm. Similar thin justification.
4:30 am. Buzz. Repeat above.
4:40 am. Buzz. Alarm. The realization that if I do not get up RIGHT NOW I will not be able to take my shower, and will feel gross the entire day penetrates my foggy mind.
5:25 am. Trumble [v. to simultaneously stumble and traipse] down the stairs, slap the temporary parking pass in the car, and drag down to work.
5:30-8:30 smile, serve, schmooze, repeat.
BUT THEN...
...the phone rings. My co-worker's face is one of bewilderment as she hangs up the phone and then tells me to go lock the front door. Then, in a louder voice, "if everyone in the store could please move toward the bathrooms, the police are dealing with a situation out front and have told us that no one may go in or out, and we must stay toward the back of the store." Looking out the bay windows, I did not see a drunken homeless man brandishing random cutlery as I had expected. I didn't see anything at first. So she pointed. "See that? That black thingy on the newspaper box? Someone called it in as a suspicious looking object, and so the bomb squad is on the way." Sure enough, perched right next to our garbage cans, where it had been all morning was an ominous plastic object. And there we were, the three baristas, George, Marie, Frank and five other customers I had never seen before squishing chairs into the corner of the store.

At first I wasn't at all concerned. I had seen a bomb threat called in once before in Boise. They send in a robot which then lifts the package and examines it, and it's all perfectly safe relatively speaking. But wait, I had seen that from across the parking lot, and it didn't even look all that dangerous and the robot was cool. This is different. That window is less than a hundred feet from me, and beyond it there is no one in sight. Not even an eager crowd of the morbidly curious.


Ahhh, and then the thoughts started winding through my head. I should probably tell Sarah that I'm in this situation. She's working just up the street right now, and if something happened, she'd have to know where to find me. I should clean that shelf while I'm back here, because it's not like I can be up front making drinks right now. How sad would it be if I died tragically working in a coffee shop? I should get my life planned out so that when I die, it will at least be doing something worthwhile. How bizarre would that be if something did happen? Is that bomb technician wearing a space suit? It's green. Like maybe a camouflaged space suit for special missions on some green planet.

An hour and a half of these sorts of spotty thoughts, and I had worked myself into some measure of nervousness. Still, I had the foolish courage to move toward the window the get a better look as the technician opened the case and flicked out a wireless stage microphone. Someone had obviously played a set at the bar next door last night, put the mic on the newspaper box to finish loading the van, and driven away leaving us a scare for the next day. So we let the imprisoned customers out to rearrange their appointments, and finished up the shift; some (ahem, that would be myself) with hearts beating slightly irregularly.

And that, my friends, was the tale of the day that was not the same as the rest.

For Summer