Thoughts from the Ass End of the Saturday

This is the insomnia post. Nothing herein should be considered heavily or consumed without a grain of salt. I've got all these little thought shittles running around in my head, and if I get a couple of them out on paper, maybe it'll help me get to sleep.

I had a job for the longest time where I'd come to dread Saturdays. A lot of retail is like this. What I did wasn't exactly retail, but it was close enough for government work. I worked for a charitable organization that made its money off of donated goods. And it was my job to supervise the folks taking in the donated goods.

Saturday was the busiest day. By far. Not only would you get three or four times the workload of any other day of the week, Saturday being the day everybody has yardsales and the HoneyDo lists come out, you would also unfortunately get two or three times the number of assholes who carry with them an exaggerated sense of entitlement and a bad case of self-righteous indignation to boot: people who think that just because they dug the three moldy, wet, worm-ridden mattresses out of the backyard where the dogs have been sleeping and pissing on them, that a charity should gladly accept them, and should likewise pay to have them carted off if they can't use them.

(That last sentence, a horrible run-on the likes of which my third grade teacher would have smited me over, contains something like 112 words.)

Folks, as an aside, if you're donating hard goods to charity, call ahead to get a guideline of what the charity can use, and then don't get indignant when they can't use something....it can be a surprising amount of work and a suprising amount of hassle for everybody if you've brought something that can't be used. For example, in Tennessee it is illegal to sell a used mattress unless it has been sanitized (one guideline says only de-loused). Which takes time, money and space that some organizations don't have.

But I digress....

You know as a kid when you wake up, and you have to take a moment to think about what day it is? Hoping, perhaps, that it's Saturday....remember that moment of elation you'd get when you realized that Yes it was indeed Saturday?

Well, at that job, I had the opposite. I woke up, and if I realized that it was Saturday, I'd usually curse the day.

And as supervisor, I never got Saturdays off. Once in a blue moon, I'd get a Saturday off. I was what you called a "sucker," because I was the rare manager who actually put his staff's whims above his own. I'm a retard, sometimes.

For some reason, I remember that in 2002, I got literally three Saturdays off that whole year, and only one weekend with both Saturday and Sunday.

You'd think I was paid and/or treated well at that job.

Looking back, it's really no wonder I burned out with absolutely one of the most spectacular cases of burnout in all of history at that job.

I'll say this: It puts a crimp on one's social life. Any time my friends were doing something on a Friday night, I'd have to watch the time, because I generally had to be at work the next morning.

And if something was on Saturday....I was, a lot of the time, too worn out to really enjoy myself if anything was going on.

Well, now I'm at a different job. It's third shift, but I actually enjoy what I'm doing. I'm a lot less stressed and it leaves me with the great majority of my Saturdays free (there is occasional Saturday work, but there is someone I work with who prefers to work Saturday nights, muchly because he doesn't much care to spend time with his family--sad, but true).

Of course, I've only taken advantage of the free Saturday once or twice to actually do anything. Mostly because I'm a dork with the social life of your average housecat, but it's the principle of the thing. I no longer dread Saturdays. They're mine again. We're taking baby steps. Right now, when I wake up and realize that it's Saturday, I'll sometimes recoil in reflexive horror, but it'll subside quickly, and I'll sigh it away.

Usually, I'll go back to sleep. Because that's what being a single childless adult is, I think. Being awake a lot, and then sleeping a lot.

You heard it here first. Being an adult is being awake a lot followed by sleeping a lot.

Profound.

And I got me a social life. It's just very tiny right now. And I'm watering it. (And by watering it, I mean I've started taking daily showers. With Soap!)