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Wednesday

You say you want long, but no one is commenting. I will now give you short:

Wednesday Most of you probably don’t know that the day before Thanksgiving is the biggest day for grocery stores in this country. I didn’t know it before I worked in one, even after the numerous times on Crowded Wednesday that I went to the store to pick up a few things. I always assumed I just had bad timing.

I have no individual memories from that day. Customers move too quickly and are too focussed to be anecdotal. All I know is that it was our busiest day ever and that we had over 4000 transactions. That’s over 300/hour. And that my wrist fucking hurt by the end of the day.

Thursday

Thursday jactitation was sick. After calling the video stores and having no answer, I called nodoilies and she kindly lent Jacco a few videos and a DVD that I went to pick up so Jacco wouldn’t have to watch the Macy’s parade and "feel-good" movies all day. As I left Nodoilies’s apartment, I realized that I had just called too early and almost every store, including two of the three video stores within three blocks of my apartment, were open. I got Jacco a lamb schwerma from the Middle Eastern place for sustenance and left for my parent’s house.

Thanksgiving, because of certain child custody issues, has become the only Must-Attend holiday at my family’s. It’s fairly small, just my parents, my brother and his wife, my sister, her husband and their three kids. I brought no witnesses. It tends toward the dull side especially now that the dog is dead and people can’t project their weight issues into concern for its health. One of my biggest family regrets is that I didn’t keep a journal of passive aggressive dog/weight comments over the years that were really directed at other people or just instructive of people’s own personal insecurities.

Highlights? My 15-year-old rebellious niece* wearing headphones and singing along, too loudly in the way headphone wearers do, to Tupac "Changes". I was, of course, the only one who recognized it. "What are you laughing at Gordon?" Mom asks.

"Oh nothing."

Besides that, my other niece had recorded a CD of show tunes ("Little Mermaid", "Annie" etc.) as an audition thing for some famous-if-you-live-in-LA music teacher. My brother-in-law, a semi well-known (if-you-live-in-LA) defense attorney and frustrated musician, played the music and sang the duets with her. Aren’t father-daughter duets the creepiest thing imaginable? Especially with that creepy-anyways "Annie" theme song? ("Together at last / together forever / tying a knot they never can sever")


*Who, for the record, is just as white as me.

Friday

Friday I always forget until Thanksgiving night that I have to work at 8 AM the next morning. One of these years, I’m going to sub that shift, I swear. When I arrived at work there was a block long line waiting to get into Office Max of all places. Crazy consumers.

Saturday

Saturday After work I went to the Lusty Lady benefit party South of Market with a friend and co-worker, Hot Historian. Of course, she had the time to go home, change, and look good while I came straight from the cheese mines and was stained and stinky. Oh well. The main part of the party was just like any small club show with people standing around watching bands, though the bands were probably wearing less clothing than usual.

I should have realized something was up when we had to finish our drinks before going into the next room but we were too busy discussing where the kids area and the karaoke machine should be during our worker party which, coincidentally, we’re having in the same space. We were wandering around planning and suddenly all these women wearing lingerie were being extra nice to us. Hot Historian was talking to one of them who turned out to be a scantily-clad friend from school when I realized we had stumbled into the lap dance area. Uh clueless? Yah.

HH* eventually got a lap dance from another dancer and came back hot, bothered and unable to form complete sentences. After watching a couple of rounds of lube wrestling, everyone got kicked out of the area because the "Fire Marshall" declared it too full. I decided to go home, satisfied that I’d done my duty supporting another cooperative. My only regret was that I missed The Space Whores because I didn’t want to lose our front row wrestling seats, on nice comfy couches.



*Um, for any co-workers reading this, it is not our co-worker who’s initials are actually HH, though he is somewhat of a historian. Otherwise, he’s about the polar opposite of the person I’m talking about.

Sunday

Sunday Jactitation made a wonderful brunch for our house and Nodoilies and Southbay came over to help eat it. We talked books and grad school for hours. The grad school conversations in my house just never end. Thankfully I didn’t have to work because co-workers told me that after being cooped up with families for the weekend, people had lots of aggro to get out of their systems and were looking for retail workers to unload upon.

I watched the Niners get absolutely destroyed by the Ravens and then headed East with anarqueso and a couple of other friends for a potluck at felicks’s house. Felicks lives with an old political friend of mine and when I said I hadn’t been there for 13 years, the East Bay people thought I was saying I hadn’t been to Berkeley for 13 years. Sensitive much? Geez.

amarama co-hosted, and many LJers were there, including some I met for the first time. I think it would aggravate my RSI to name them all. I brought a vegan "tuna"-noodle casserole. I had a lovely time despite the hosts’ insistence on playing party games. My favorite moment was when we were in a small group arguing about astrology. Contrary to cliché, the group was evenly divided with all the people who actually grew up Californians disbelieving.