Three months of stuff between
now and
then, a million changes and a hundred unchanges. I’m fifteen to twenty pounds lighter now that school has ended and still decreasing in size, hopefully only until I reach my long-standing
middle school weight.
With the summer mostly over, I have been to the beach
once, on the forth of July. I was sunburned so badly that I was forced to hide my horrid self under many layers for three weeks, through the worst heat of the summer while working in a 200 degree oven of a factory constructing elaborate machines from plastic and seventy six different screws.
My little brother turned into a stranger on us all, becoming an ex-convict and getting a new car after a Chinese gang stole his old one, all seemingly overnight. Now he is simply a rebellious pre-adult with a police record to follow him into old age with a probation officer in tow, scrawny and supposedly straight in his “post”-addiction days despite his constant use of Oxy Contin, and he sits in the driveway in his new Audi (although he has no license until his eighteenth birthday thanks to his illegal activities) and shakes the house with a system containing subwoofers that weigh more than he does. One of his skeezy pseudo-best friend’s mother (and one of my parents’ favorite allies in their famous, sporadic emergences from denial when they try to crack down on the rules at the house, kicking out the junkies and 15 year old sophomore hoes, confiscating what they can find, confronting the boys about their obvious yet conveniently ignored habits, which lasts for a day or two and then things are back to the norm) trades him 300 pills of OC, taken from her current and severely pain-wrought-due-to-an-incredible-car-smash-up husband for some unmentionable quantity of bud, all of which is a huge secret that I only discovered tonight while watching American Pie 2 with Adam’s ex-girlfriend-current-fuck buddy, Sheena since she was so busy puking in a trash can due to some sort of mysterious overdose to realize what words her vocal chords were forming.
In short, I can’t wait to get the hell outta here and back to Ann Arbor and the relatively sane world of four hours of sleep per night and severe hangovers.
In all actuality, apart from the tremendous fiasco with my young sibling, the summer has been pretty average. I have worked two jobs for an average of about sixty hours a week for more than two months after the most stressful of desperate searches for employment I have ever experienced. I finally had to break down and settle for a common factory job, which would not have been bad except for the fact that I don’t speak Spanish. Doomed to work in an isolated bubble, I spent many weeks listening to the gossipy gibberish of large Mexican women wearing their yellow-gold gaudy baubles with such arrogance that one would have surely believed they were discussing politics in the air conditioned comfort of a sunlit yacht cabin. There was one woman who spared enough breath to tell me I was fatter than she, using an incredible number of double negatives, while I simply glanced at the rolls of arm flab hanging over her wrists, did my best to ignore her grammar and insanity, and continued to work. Not content with my lack of agreement, she continued to call me an over-educated spoiled brat, a typical anorexic – despite the earlier coment about our oh-so-similar weights - gringa who didn’t live in the real world because I was handed everything in life and could never accept my deserved place in society (which I assumed she thought should be right there, sitting at the table next to her, scraping black epoxy off of car side mirrors with razor blades). Keep in mind the fact that I had never once divulged any sort of personal information to her or anyone else beyond the fact that I was a college student working there for the summer. I complained to the manager, but nothing was done. She decided to speak English to me for several days in a row, until finally I started correcting her grammar, which made her turn purple with rage. Then I left for a different job that paid twice as much.
I had called the temp agency a million times over the course of my abuse experienced at the hands of one thirty two year old, 160 pound, 5’2” Mexican woman with bad grammar, and finally got the response I had been waiting for – an opening for me at a different place. I went from wishing I knew Spanish to longing to understand Laotian and Cambodian. But at least everyone at the new place attempted to speak English to me.
I leaned how to use power tools! The highlight of my entire summer.
After making floor cleaning machines on line number fourteen, with three of the nicest older asian men I have met, for a month and a week, I left. They made me a card. One bought me a Sprite. I baked cookies for them. Then some other people from the company took me out to dinner at eleven at night after we got off work. I was able to forget I was one of ten women and one of six white people on the entire production floor. I am so happy for having the experience of working there.
My girls and I went out this morning, as our beloved Jessica who works at the GAP gave us all thirty percent off coupons good for one day. I bought two pairs of these new style jeans there, called Long and Lean. I was surprised to find that a size four hung from my bottom as if I was missing something. I bought them anyway; baggy is better than skanky, as I always say. I also found four shirts, and got the whole pile of clothes for a mere seventy-three bucks. Then we went to Perkins for lunch, surrounded by old people, and received balloons from an employee for being so relatively young. I tied mine to a spoon, which I accidentally brought home with me. Meanwhile, my loving mother took my brother to the Banana Republic and Abercrombie, spending almost six hundred dollars on clothes for his senior pictures. I chose to ignore that.
Now I am in the process of packing my dad’s huge dark purple Jeep Grand Cherokee with a plethora of odds and ends to take to my new apartment tomorrow. Not sure when I can move in exactly, but my future roommate says anytime is fine. Stay tuned.