I was really ticked off. It was one thing after another, and none of it the fault of any bass ackward customers, though there were a few who really needed a time out. No, once again it was my micromanaging manager, and she wasn't even in yesterday.

She insists upon checking in the new signs when we receive them, but of course, this week she did not. So while I was running around trying to find a sign for a sale on bags and wondering where she'd hid it this time (just as last time she whipped it out of thin air a day later), it was still sitting in the box it came in. I even left her a note that I needed the stupid sign since I left before she came in, and the note disappeared without a sign surfacing. So when I got in last night, I caught grief from everyone because 1) no one knew where the display was, though I told one of the managers exactly where it was the previous day and told him I needed a sign, and 2) it was a sale that started yesterday morning, and so there were a few customers who were antsy about it before I arrived. Then the same manager who I had told about the bag display, decided to take down a sign on another sale display because the sale was not ringing up at the register, despite the fact that the sale was not supposed to end until the end of the day. Of course, he did not replace it with anything, and all displays are supposed to have a sign. So I was running around looking for the sign he removed and finally gave up. Wouldn't you know it, I found it as soon as I replaced it with something else.

Now I have a problem with electrical devices. When I get upset, they stop working right. It must have something to do with my unusually strong energy field. I can't wear any metals because they give me a rash, but when I was a kid, I would wear those cheap plastic watches and the batteries never ran down. I remember I had a watch for about seven years and I never once had to change the battery. I only threw it out after the band broke. I worked at a bank for three years, and in the last and worst year of working there, I killed two computers, two printers, a phone, and the entire intercom system in the drivethru. The drivethru was down for three months.... pantomime is fun. heh

So last night, after about an hour of frustration, I apparently broke our connection with home office. We could still search our own inventory, but that was it. The customers couldn't search the Borderstore system at all, we couldn't get onto the booksinprint site, and we couldn't even get our emails. One of my coworkers didn't believe it was me until I showed him my walkietalkie which was flashing through the channels like it was possessed. I could still hear requests for assistance, but the channel indicator was completely spastic.

It would have been funny if it wasn't so annoying. All of it was annoying. I wish my GM would do something about my idiot supervisor. Everyone knows she's having an affair with one of our coworkers, and she never completes anything. She starts something and then just leaves clean up for everyone else. I wish she would just get a hint from the way everyone acts around her and go somewhere else. She's such an arrogant, officious little pissant. The woman needs a reality check. She acts like the sun won't shine unless she tells it to.

The past is a crutch,
too often blamed
for the misdeeds of the day,
the misbegotten child
of current regrets -
a stigmata revealed,
reveled in,
glorified and bemoaned.
I am more than the sum
of my broken parts,
a being of infinite jest and suggestion,
swaddled and tangled in traps of the past,
deformed and diseased with childhood memes,
using the limitations set upon me
to dream, to grow, to overcome.
No longer bound to the mold,
but free.

And it lies there...
broken...
instead.

There are so many ways my family has influenced my life. I told a coworker something of my childhood the other day and his response was something like, "Wow, I used to think you were just insane, but now I realize you're pretty well adjusted."

So many people use their past as an excuse to act like monsters. When someone becomes a serial killer for instance, the first thing society does is look at their childhood with a feeling of, ah Ha! If nothing immediate jumps out as a cause for their actions, society feels there must be some hidden horror that has yet to come to light. No... don't do that. The past is an excuse, not a cause. We all have it within ourselves to overcome our past. I could be so much worse than I am. But I know who I am, and I accept who I am. I know I have bad habits, but I also know that I am a better person than someone else might have been in the same situations.

The first two and a half years of my life, my father often beat my mother... once breaking her nose while she was pregnant with my sister by repeatedly hitting her in the face while he was driving. He didn't even show up for my birth (or to take my mother to the hospital) because he was celebrating his birthday in a bar. He was a selfish man and the center of his own universe. Nothing anyone ever did for him was enough to satisfy him. When he was a baby, his mother ran off with a door to door salesman and his father, a bouncer and a truck driver, died when he was very young. His grandmother raised him. He never had a good thing to say about her or "Uncle" Freddie, her boyfriend, though they both doted on him and bent over backwards to provide for him. They gave him everything and it was never enough. Was it the loss of his parents at such a young age that made my father a monster? Or was it that my Nana and uncle Freddie gave him so much that he never learned to provide for his own happiness.

They say that those experiences which break some people will empower others. My sister has always felt the lack of a father. My mother left our father when my sister was still a baby. When she was born, she got pneumonia and almost died. My father was again in a bar when my sister went into convulsions. My mother later abandoned us with our grandmothers while she went on a soul searching mission across America. In the meantime, our father came for us, but he didn't want us. We were left to social services. My sister was too young to remember, and I have no memories of that time either, but I was told that I was abused... that the family taking care of us tried to make me go to Church and pulled out a hunk of my hair when I resisted. This may partially explain why I am so sensitive about who touches me, especially my hair.

When my sister got pregnant, she chose to stay with the father of her baby solely because he was the father. She did this because of her own yearnings for a father figure and did not want to neglect the needs of her child as she felt she had been neglected. If only fathering a child was enough to make a man a father. He was no more worthy of being a father than our own father had been. But we couldn't tell my sister that, she had to discover it on her own. Thankfully she is no longer with him, though she tolerates him for the sake of support payments and the supposed needs of her child. I think it is really only for the sake of the money that she tolerates him at all any more.

What affect has my childhood had on me...? I am emotionally stronger, but psychologically more brittle, than many people I meet. I am broken and still pasting the pieces back together as I find them. I cannot regret my past because it has shaped who I am (and despite many problems, I like who I am), but I cannot say whether I would be a better person if my childhood had been different. There is so much that happened to me when I was a child, my family cannot be blamed for it all. But I have become the family observer. I watch them, and people in general, because my past has made me watchful and suspicious. I do not trust that people who say they love me are telling the truth, and even when I am sure they love me, I still cannot trust that they will not see to their own wants before my needs. I am an emotional invalid, subsisting on a diet of sublimated yearnings. I don't reach out to people, and I don't reveal my needs for fear that they will be turned against me.

No one knows me. I am not the person you think I am, or that my family thinks I am, or that my coworkers think I am. To everyone I am a different person, reflecting what they expect. I deserve an Oscar. Because I am never myself with anyone, at any point, I may become disgusted with current friends or family and shut them out completely when they take too much advantage, when they sit and complain for days, months, or years about their lives, but never once ask how I am. I shut out my father when I was twenty-three, and he forgot my birthday yet again (our birthdays were less than a week apart. In my entire life, I think he remembered my birthday twice.) People may take what I offer for months or years and and never stop to think about my needs, never offer anything, until one day I just snap and cut them out completely. This may also be why I do not stay very long at most jobs. (I have been at my current job almost four years, which is about as long as I usually last.) I could never tell anyone what it is they are denying me without breaking down completely into a bawling mess. And let me tell you, that does not happen often. The last time would have been almost a decade ago. I do not like to let the mask crack. It's too much effort to repair it once it does.

This is the legacy my family has left me. I am so afraid of being abandoned entirely if I ask for anything for myself, that I end up denying myself everything everyone else takes for granted, until one day it just becomes too stressful, and I break ties at a moment's notice with people who often don't know what they've done. Childhood friends who never realized they took me for granted years ago before we moved away make overtures now when we chance to meet again after decades apart, and I pretend again that I believe they are sincere, take their numbers, and never call. If perchance, I ever moved away from my family, it would be the same. Slowly, communications would taper off and eventually, it would be months between contact. I would be that stereotypical single woman who's mother would complain that I never write or call. My sister calls and has contact with my mother nearly every day, but it is always because she needs something... money, a babysitter, time.... I could never be so needy, and so I would just stop. I wouldn't ask, and I wouldn't take.... and if something was offered, it would be very difficult for me to accept. But I doubt anything would be offered... my sister's wants and needs were always more important than mine. She almost died after all. My sister is every bit our father's daughter. I try to tell my mother how my sister really is, but she just ignores me.

The boundaries of neglect bequeathed to me by my family have become reinforced by my own fear of rejection and abuse. What once was neglect has become isolation. I am truly alone in the world, but loneliness holds more security for me than companionship.

"How has your family influenced your life" was a featured question at Xanga where I do most of my blogging. Figured I'd post it here too...