Y'all.

Well. Working in the Dallas area over my winter break sure has been interesting, especially doing 12-hour days at two different stores with bronchitis, the voice of a 7th-grade-boy, and sore feet. To any retail employees reading this: DON'T WEAR CONS TO WORK. You might as well be wearing tissue boxes with the amount of support they give you. Some of the highlights from this week include...--A middle-aged woman seeing the instrumental Cirque De Soleil Beatles album and asking if "that was their new one." Um, no. I'm pretty sure they stopped making music thirty years ago. Kinda hard to produce an album when half your band is dead.--50 people getting mad at me for saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." At least, I think that's why they were yelling at me. I couldn't really hear over the sound of their bibles thumping.--One of my managers giving me a mug filled to the brim with his mother's homemade peppermint bark for Christmas. Holy crap.--One of my coworkers making me a raspberry, blackberry, blueberrry, and strawberry gingerbread torte. Why are these people trying to fatten me up?!--Overhearing one of the shifts admit to being a self-declared member of the Nazi partyPLEASEDONTHURTME.--Being thanked profusely for finding someone's wallet that I actually didn't find but going along with it.--Working during a rush with one working espresso machine and one working steam wand...on two different machines.My parents think I'm working too much. I also think I'm working too much. If I were working this many hours back in Massachusetts, it wouldn't be so bad because my love of my store can battle any frustration I might have with shitty customers or the pain in my calves. But time in Texas is glacial. No wonder we're an hour behind. It's kind of like those mornings when your alarm goes off at 6:00 and you go back to sleep and then you wake up and panic because you think it must be 7:30 by now and you look over at your clock and it's only 6:03. Except when I look at the clock and help 15 customers and look at the clock again and see that only three minutes have passed, relief is hardly the word for what I feel.Fuck making money. Fuck being around coffee all day. Fuck my shitfaced personal life. I just want to sleep until this pathetic, lonely, miserable excuse of a winter break is over.