azurelunatic

Looks like the other junior check-in chick is on vacation for a week or something, so I get to fill in. The first I learned of this was when the Check-In Princess (the senior one) asked me if I knew about it. I knew nothing about it, and suspected a leg-pull, except the Check-In Princess doesn't do those. At least, she doesn't do them for more than 30 seconds.

She dropped a note in my booth to call the Queen of Schedules today; I did so. I'm going to be filling in for the other girl, and there's really not much I can do other than that, given that things are how they are. I may see if I'm going to be in next Thursday...

I checked, and it looks like the insanity starts THIS WEEK NOW -- I'm check-in on Friday and Saturday as per the usual (often enough, Comic Pirate Super or Cute Geek Super is check-in on Saturday, but with the cute little chick gone and now Big Goth Super gone, and MOTLEY gone (again: wtf?), we're starting to get shorter-staffed in the supervisory department. Clone Name Super and Trendy Chick Super have been monitoring more often than not) but check-in Sunday evening and then check-in Monday afternoon, followed up by what looks to be a Friday-through-Monday stint as check-in again.

D00d.

I mean, I could get used to this, but ...

... this is also insane.

I anticipate with great pleasure the e-mail that will be in my in-box tomorrow, explaining it all in small words and pretty pictures.

I'm not sure what reminded me that some of the crucial books that I read in the early teenage years were actually sort of from school, but it suddenly popped into my mind.

Seventh grade was the start of the rough years. I had a teacher who was absolutely the best -- and then he got a job at another school midway through the year. So they got a permanent substitute in.

Substitutes for popular teachers have it rough, and this poor guy was no exception. He tried his hardest. Some of the class warmed up to him. Some of us (me especially) did not. I got busted for drawing a mean portrait of him. He confiscated my art (I was not happy), but it made a return at (where else) parent-teacher conferences. (Thus is the woe of being twelve or thirteen, precocious, and mean-spirited, and still thinking you're right.) I was made to apologize (I felt like dirt) and eventually the contents of the library he brought to share with the class warmed me to him.

I don't think I would have read I'm Eve otherwise, most notably. I don't remember any of the other books that I read that were this teacher's, but that one ... that one may well have saved my sanity (what precious little there is).

I dug about on Google, and managed to confirm that he was still in town, still teaching. The school district website gave up his e-mail address happily enough, though as it's his school address rather than his personal one, he may not get the e-mail until school starts.

This time, I meant the apology. I let him know that I'm not using my art skills for evil anymore. I let him know that I appreciated the books that I borrowed.

It's supposed to mean a lot to a teacher to know that they're remembered and that they've had a positive influence on the students. I hope the e-mail's read in the same spirit it was written.

I'm Eve made a distinct impression on me. I was already well on my way to fragmentation, with the two separate lives of home and school, plus all the teenage personality experimentation selves I created while trying to decide what "me" I was supposed to become...

The book put a name on what I was experiencing the edges of. There were other people out there like that. Chris Costner Sizemore had an extreme case. I decided that what had happened to her was too scary, and proceeded to make sure that there was harmony throughout the Collective, once it formed. The beginning stages had already been set for serious fragmentation -- I was Joan at school, Joanie at home. Two different cultures. Two different names. Eventually, two different girls. (One boyfriend tried calling me "Joanie-Joan". I abhorred the nickname. It felt wrong. In retrospect, it may have been self-preservation, to keep my selves separate, to keep the strategy working.)

After reading the book, the outlook on the world changed in a slight but significant way. Circumstances were no longer forcing us to keep creating new selves by default, and collapsing them into one or the other of us -- we could choose to create one of us to face something, and we could keep conflicting stuff that needed to be kept isolated separate from the rest of our day-to-day operating personalities. We could choose. We could control it. We could sit and talk to ourselves, and no one else, no one outside the Collective, ever had to know.

This proved invaluable when the depression first started hitting. I would later learn that I have a family background of depression, and that Dad did not get diagnosed or treated until after I left the house. The major opinion of home on mental health professionals was that they were more nuts than the people who went to see them, they would discover problems that you didn't actually have, make any already-existing issues worse, and that if one had problems, one would do well to keep them politely to oneself. And so the little poisonous thoughts, the ones that said, "You suck. Life sucks. Why not just die?" did not get aired to my major confidante, my mother, and remained rankling inside. (My riposte to Dad's homily about "a permanent solution to a temporary problem", which would have been, "Depression is a permanent problem," was fortunately never brought up in family discussion.)

Without Mama to turn to, and it being one of the things that Wasn't Discussed In The Family, not my sister either, who did I have left? My high school buddies? Ha. I learned within the first week that some things were safe and some things were not, and something that deep and vulnerable would not have been safe to talk about. That left ... me. Myself. I. Her. Them. Us. We.

It started out as writing in a notebook to myself, stream-of-consciousness. I wrote what was on the mind, and then the words started coming out weird -- not like an alien, but like a note passed back and forth in class. Two different streams of thought intersecting, in two different handwritings. It was a delight, having a friend I could tell anything to, someone who loved me unconditionally, someone I could trust absolutely. I was fourteen.

Gradually, two handwritings became three, and more. There was a babble on the pages, writing swapping from tiny to loopy to angular to smooth and everywhere in between. There were names, self-images, a whole cast of characters, all engaged in the somewhat scary struggle to get "me" (the main front personality) through high school intact -- and most importantly, alive.

OMG WTF BBQ WORK.

That Unbelievable Asshat phone goon has done it again -- his previous strikes have involved:

• barging into the workplace on his day off (while drunk) and getting nasty and yelly and would speak only to the lead supervisor (his issue? he needed to know his schedule for tomorrow)
• coming in late, clocking in, then spending a significant amount of time on the phone in the break room, not getting off the phone and going in when told to by a supervisor, getting mouthy with the supervisor, and getting mouthy with another supervisor when she told him that the first supervisor was right
• (I wasn't present for this one) getting in the face of a supervisor over a bad monitor report

Now, he's managed to alienate one of the few people who could stand him, a fellow phone goon -- he called in and claimed it was an emergency, and gave a different name. She won't accept calls from him anymore.

Other than that, work has been relatively calm today. It is a day where I might want to be home with a good fic and a nice cup of Irish chocolate milk, but not a bad day.

I still need to color in the gas can on the "No one here is smoking ... ... yet" cartoon.

I fixed the clock settings at work that had been bothering me. Mainland Alaska is not two hours behind California time.