14@3.99 Annuals
4@8.99 Perennials
2more@3.99 Annuals
18@2.79 Annuals
4@1.49 Annuals
5@2.49 Garden Center
10@2.99 Herbs
2@1.99 Herbs
4more@1.49 Annuals
2 Annual Flats
2@29.99 Perennials
2@12.95 Pottery
1@135.00 Statuary
15more@3.99 Annuals
2@35.99 Trees and Shrubs
4more@2.79 Annuals
6@8.49 Annuals
1@13.99 Annuals
14@3.99 Acquaintances
3@33.99 Friends
5@120.00 Family
14@3.99 Jobs
4@8.49 Life Lessons
4@1.99 Life Lessons
2@2.79 Allergies
7@5.99 Parties
14@25.99 Dreams
3@5.99 Bagged Goods, See you in the parking lot

*

So, I've given myself permission to not post for awhile, as you can plainly see. I've been running around like a madgirl, trying to finish up school (which is now done until next semester, my final semester), and feeling sad that I have some good friends graduating and leaving the hood, and trying to get my life organized.

My life refuses to be organized.

*

I've come down with some mighty bad allergies for the first time in 8 years, and I'm of course wondering how much of it has to do with my new job around plants, which seems ridiculous to me, being that I'm always around plants when I can help it, but mostly I'm hoping it's something in the Chicago air, so I don't have to blame it on the flowers that are surrounding me. The problem is that whenever I get allergies, I don't just get the sniffles; I get fevers, rashes, sensitive skin, coughing, running nose, exhaustion, and if it's combined with alcohol, I even puke puke puke. I'm kinda a mess, certainly not sexy, and trying to get myself back on the mojo, so I can manage to do something other than go to work for hours and then come home and go to bed feeling crappy.

*

But that's not all of what's been going on, as mentioned before.

I've been attending parties, too many parties, and even had a little pizza-tasting (a la my roommate) and dance party (a la my own love). That went over well, although it took too long for the dancing to get into full groove, but then it was goodfun. I then went to a mother's day party, a graduate reading party, a post-classes party, a free-booze-for-awhile party hosted by the writing department, a farewell to a good teacher-poet party, a gin-rummy party, and I'm sure there's another few parties I'm forgetting. Well, I hope I'm not forgetting too much. But I do know for sure that I am all partied out. Enough for awhile but hopefully back to the dancing.

*

As for new news, it does look like I am going fishing. Just as soon as I had 'reconciled' myself to going back to WA for a month instead, and lining up some landscaping work around there, mostly with my mom, and then drifting down rivers with m'buddies instead of fishing, Donna called me and asked me to work... turns out she was just on vacation but really wanted to me to come. She fronted me my August rent already, and bought my ticket - which was really a nab, because she had enough extra miles to buy me a three-way ticket with a two-week stopover in WA to visit the folks before I go up to AK, which means some money will be saved on the visit-home ticket.

So, that's settled. I will be in Chicago until mid-July, hopefully still at this nursery job, if the allergies don't force me to quit, and then I will go up fishing for August and hopefully earn enough money that I don't have to work for my final semester - all except for a TA position that I think I might have landed [next day addendum: nope, not yet... still interviewing with the other folks, all of whom are also awesome, sigh].

*

In the meantime, this job. This job. I am going to have so much to say about it, Oh yes. It's actually really fucking crazy, nothing like you'd imagine working for a nursery to be; in fact, it's the most not-laidback job I've had, just barely barring fishing. I am on my toes all the time, running around, using the register, sweeping, carrying things, coughing, all the time. And when I say that, I mean that.

This place works kinda illegally in that it doesn't give you breaks. On the weekends- no breaks, not even lunch, which they weasal around by bringing in 'free' food for you to eat in between packing the boxes with flowers, so it takes two hours to ingest your food. And on the weekdays, I've never been told to 'take my break' and yet, I have been chewed out, usually collectively, for standing behind the cash register waiting for the next customer instead of busying myself with sweeping or box-folding or some such foofah. It's crazy, and on the weekends I get so tired I think of reporting the place for its business practice, but won't of course.

I'm trying to think of the perks. Really, just being around plants, I guess. A discount on them, which I've been using too much (spending what I earn) to fill my decks with flowers that I only get to look at until mid-July. Mmmm, lovely plants. And I do like most of the customers. Most of them.

I like the moms with kids, and the dykes and queerboys, and the Mexican men treating their women (pulling out huge wads and peeling off a few for the herbs).

Despite it all, I also like the very old immigrants who come in for odd herbs and cluck their tongues over the price of a 1.99 vegetable start.

Strangely enough, the landscapers who have 20%-or-more discounts are the worst assholes of the bunch; bitching and moaning, telling you how to do your job, pointing out any slight misstep at all, yelling at you for any changed policy (like we, the plebes, make them up), and so forth. What a bunch of pricks.

And the old ladies are a grabbag -- sometimes so cute and lovely and wanting to talk about plants and coo over the babies, and sometimes slowing everything down by changing their minds a thousand times, making you ring plants up in different orders, give refunds, taking plants off their cart, accusing you a of miscounting, adding two plants under your nose, and refusing to show ID for their credit cards, and so forth.

I'm not fond of the cranky Russian women who are riding buses and so want you to pack everything in the most bizarre contortions of box-bag-tape-rollerskates-undergarments (not because of the contraption you are packing into, but because they bitch you out if you do it 'wrong').

I quite like some of the other workers, a few people not so much but they're the managers and so I suppose that's the way it's supposed to be (I'm amazed at how they think of you as their slaves and if you've told them several times that you want two days off in a row, one of them on a weekend, and that's what they're hiring you at, they still manage to forget it and then yell at you for not being more flexible).

I'm okay with the owner even though he has a reputation for going off on people for not looking busy at all moments, and drinking coffee. He's nonetheless left me alone, and even nodded grimly at me and told me once he was glad I was there for closing.

I'm not fond of coughing while helping the customers.

I am fond of looking at all the plants, and will have to write something just for them.

Anyhow, I have to get up at the break of dawn tomorrow, and so must go, so will end on the fact that the one odd thing about this job is the way it's affected my dreams. At first, it invaded them in that I was endlessly punching numbers into the cash register in my sleep (see list above)... it went from flowers to categorizing the things in my life and punching them in, over and over, again and again, all night long. But now, it has gone on to make my dreams even more manic and high-paced than normal.

Last night, I dreamt I was on a train that had to be pushed by hanging your legs over the edge and kicking. This train was my house, where I lived with my family and friends, and it had slides leading from one car to the other, and different rooms and different levels, and my friend ww was exercising on a lower car, on a trampoline, and I introduced her to my mother as she bounced through the hole in the ceiling to the second floor where I was standing with my family. But our train stalled on the wrong tracks at one point, and we narrowly escaped a three-way trainhouse pile up by pushing the train back and forth through a switch-point (whatever they are called). Also, my mom told me a crush of mine had died, as we strolled down the street, and I knew she was just telling me to look into dating again.

And finally, I woke up with an image a woman who worked by typing up, on an old-fashioned typewriter, 'impugns' instead of 'eulogies.'