Name your baby Internetta.

I just sold a mug. That is all the action I've had all morning. On five cash registers, we have so far had 7 transactions and not made more than $50. I am telling you all this to illustrate how mind-numbingly slow work here can be.

I'm currently involved in, as far as my mind is concerned, a war. A chess game. Something. I feel like the wily little guy who hasn't got any power yet but is determined to prevail. I've got my Charmander and I'm gonna do something with it! Damn it! They are taking our internet away. Without reason, without any real announcement, just months of murmurs and whispers and paranoia whenever an IT guy rears his ugly head. They sit up in their IT chambers, wearing robes and creating crumbs and making intricate tangles of wires. They are lazy by nature. They think that "on call" means you have your cell phone with you on your weekend away in Tennessee. Never there when you need them, always there when you don't.

Yesterday we were open for three hours before anyone bought anything. There isn't anything to do. At Great Wolf, they said, "If its slow clean the windows. If you've already cleaned them, do it again. I don't care if you clean the windows 20 times." I would fold shirts obsessively there. I would crank up Radio Disney and fold and refold and refold and rehang and rehang and rehang. I made more money there. Here, I make nothing. Without disclosing my pitiful wage, I will tell you that, after two years of employment (4 years not counting a 4 month absence), I make only 50 cents more than when I started.

I work hard when there is work to be done. But for this much money, I ain't cleaning the windows no 20 times and that's a fact. A girl that worked here used to have a saying... "Minimum wage, minimum work."

And so, as our CEO parks in his new special-est birthday boy parking spot and sits in his office Tweeting, I get my internet taken away and am left with nothing to do but pick my nose and read 20,000 issues of Woman's World. Yes, I'm whining. Yes, its not THAT big of a deal and I know I will find things to do without the Internet. But nothing quite passes the day like having a good 5 hours to read news articles. And I have never been so well-informed as now. Not to mention that with so much time for these things, I feel compelled to waste no part of my off days on the time-obliterating Internet. Its the perfect balance--workdays are lightspeed with Internet fodder, offdays are long and productive and lazy all at once.

I feel that I am being treated like a child, and my natural inclination is to respond like a child and stamp my feet and whiiiiine. But I am determined to try to win this war. I will demand accountability from the IT lizards and their evil wires. They WILL clean up the disgusting wire tangles they have left beneath our computers. They WILL give me a reason that they are doing this. I know I can outsmart them. To me, its a game. And I'm going to win.

do what now?

It seems the more time I have on my hands, the less time I find to blog. Peculiar.

I still don't have time to blog at the moment. Works almost through and I'll be damned if I waste a single minute getting out of here as quickly as possible. It makes me nostalgic for high school. I also just had a dramatified conversation with my grandmother on the phone. I don't know if you know this, but I am an awful person. Because I am not a victim and lack sympathy for other victims, I am the scum of the earth. This is, I should add, as far as my grandmother is concerned. Where I once was a treasured favorite, now that I am no longer a helpless child, I am all tarnished and icky and no one knows if they should touch me or not. No, I have not been to visit my sick aunt thus I am the worst person ever. Nevermind anything I had to do. Nevermind the last time I did. No, it is black and white, friends. You visit her and you're good; you do not visit her so you're terrible. Bonus points if you make Grandma cry when you tell her that you didn't have time.

Thank goodness I have my mother or I may never have avoided the tears that threatened to rear their ugly heads in the worst possible venue. They're just her crazy in-laws. Family can be just as terrible as it is wonderful. And for the same reason, no less. They'll always be there for you no matter what. But what about all the times you have to be there for them? And the lovely way that the people who get what they want are the people that are the worst. "We want to go on vacation, but the vacation that you took all the time to carefully plan and are paying for SUCKS! No, I don't want to plan it myself. I want you to plan and purchase a vacation that specifically I will enjoy and forget about everyone else!" That situation is happening on my mother's side of the family right now and its going to cost us going on a vacation at all because the Cleveland-ers have decided that the cruise my fake grandmother planned out with her travel agent and is eating the cost of (she's not even related to us!!) is not something they are interested in. So do we say, "Ok, have a good summer, we'll send you a postcard"? No, apparently we say, "Alright, where do you want to go?"

Families have got to be the most complex, messy, awful, terrible things in the world. A bunch of people who don't necessarily have the same values or beliefs or feelings all stuck together for life. Don't get me wrong, I love my family. But I have had a very rude awakening over the past few years. I learned that not everyone is there for you when you really need it. More importantly, I've learned that my mother, absolutely, 100%, without fail, is.

Sometimes a person isn't there for you when you need it and you can't seem to find the time to visit them when they're sick.

Sometimes explaining all that to Grandma would be telling her a year's worth of things that she doesn't want to hear.

Sometimes not being a doormat makes you the bad guy.

Sometimes you're much worse off because of your family.

Sometimes you have to watch people you love do horrible, awful things but you aren't allowed to stop loving them.

Well, this is one of those specials blogs that's rendered me unable to think of any sort of conclusion that isn't the most depressing thing you've ever heard. I'll just leave it at that. Coming soon---Eclipse book review, Twilight movie review (find out where I laughed inappropriately!) and my experience with salvia.