Here's a blog post for you!

Boy howdy, it's been a while! I'm putting the finishing touches on my statement of purpose for my PhD application (*cough* writing the first draft *cough*) and it occurred to me that I'm now Bad at Writing. I'm pretty sure I'm still going to be accepted (although, as Dr. K said, they might get a whole bunch of more qualified applicants than me!), but I still figure it couldn't hurt to do a little extracurricular writing, so here I am. Since the last time I wrote, I turned 27, we all entered 2016, I freaked out a little over Sherlock, stopped freaking out so much about One Direction, and started freaking out pretty hard about The Future (but what else is new?). I'm really excited about starting the PhD, actually, especially since Jessica and I started discussing a dissertation topic that I can't wait to start investigating, and I've started looking into doing work with the research center connected to our department that's being rebooted this year. I know I'm being a little secretive about this, but I'm also really excited about some of the things I'm working on with Samantha, which feeds back into being excited about emergency management as a field all over again.

At the same time, I've been feeling a little more ambivalent recently, because in spite of the fact that cashiering and being on my feet eight hours a day are not my favorite, I'm going to miss working at B&N so much. It's nice to feel competent and to get to talk about books with people all day, but the best part of my job is obviously my coworkers. One of my favorite things about working with a lot of people who are quite a bit younger than I am is that I can finally act like the mom I am in my soul. Do you need someone to bring you dinner? You got it. Do you need someone to tell you that high school sucks and you'll like college better? Guess what, high school sucks and you'll like college better. Please don't dye your bangs green. Aren't you cold without a sweater on? Do you want me to get you an ibuprofen? I love it. I'm hitting my stride.

They're also great people when I'm not nagging them. Since leaving the FTC I'd kind of forgotten what it's like to be friends with the people you work with, but it's coming back to me now in a big way now. I don't have anything deep or insightful to say about them, I just really like my coworkers, and I'm going to miss working with them a lot.

Now here's a story because I feel like I haven't really delivered on this post and it's been such a long time since I've written. Ok, so it's a fact that the weirdest Barnes & Noble customers' preferred section of the store is the music department. That's not to say that people on the book floor don't also interact with some characters, but the music department people are definitely stranger, in per capita terms. I don't work in music too much, but I was in there a couple of months ago, just chatting with Matt or Alex right after the store opened, when a woman came in and yelled the name of a band at me. Ok, fair enough, my job is to help you find things, not to talk to my coworkers. Could she have been a little more polite? Sure! But it's an occupational hazard. So, I found whatever CD she was looking for, and she proceeds to just yell another band at me. This goes on for a little while, until she asks me to find a CD with the first recording of 'Paper Moon' on it. When I told her that sounded like an interesting CD, she looked at me and said, disappointedly, "It's not interesting; it's amazing." Ok.

Well, I looked for the CD but we didn't have it in our system. She didn't seem too upset about it, but somehow to topic of "Paper Moon" got her thinking about learning how to play trumpet. She told me she learned how to play trumpet from two great teachers, and she wanted her daughter to learn, but it was hard because the first teacher was "dead from cancer," and the second teacher was also dead. Apparently these were the only two capable trumpet instructors she would ever have access to. From music, she started talking about visual arts. This is where things started to get interesting for me. She told me she was studying biochemistry, but she was also doing graphic design work. "Of course," she said, "you wouldn't understand anything about that because you're a square." I'm not sure how she expected me to respond to that, but I was like, ok sure. So she adds, "I bet you don't even have any original art in your house." At that I took a little offense, because, well, I do have original art in my house. When I told her that she retorted, "Well I bet it's bad." Now I'm a little confused and a bit miffed, because it's not bad, and also she literally knows nothing about me at this point. So I responded that the art I have is actually very nice, and in fact a lot of it was done by my mother and sister.

That comment was, in retrospect, probably a mistake, because it must have extended the conversation for at least 20 minutes. She was delighted to hear that my mother was an artist, "I bet she's crazy, all artists are crazy, my mom is an artist and she's nuts!" Ok now pay attention because this is about where things started going off the rails: "You should have heard her on the phone when she was yelling at this hotel staff -- I had been having a terrible day! The hotel overcharged me, and on top of that I had just murdered someone with my car..." At that point I kind of blacked out for a while, and I didn't get any further details about the murder, which somehow managed not to be the point of that story. At the end of our interaction, she told me she wanted to buy something but didn't know what, and could she just give me $20?

I didn't see her for a few weeks, until she came back with some things to say about psychology majors, for some reason (that interaction was mercifully short, and I'm not sure if she remembered me). Then a couple of weeks ago she was back in the store, looking around kind of frantically. She asked me if someone could look for someone in the men's room (no). She was looking for a guy who comes in a lot because she wanted to tell him she's pregnant. I congratulated her (because that's what you do, right?) and she just said, "No." So that's good.