everyonebutsix.com

Ah, so I cannot stay away. It’s the calming green of the background, you see…I crave it in these crazy New Year times.

I’ve decided to embark on a little project spurred on by some internet wanderings. A few months back I was up late, fueled by insomnia and thoughts of the recent closure of Geocities and with it, many animated-gif laden pages of the teenage angst of my peers. I got to thinking about old writing of mine that might be floating around in the ether and whether it might be worth rescuing and archiving.

( a few years ago, during a tour of the National Library, one of the librarians impressed upon me the need to archive online materials. I flatter myself greatly in thinking future generations would be at all interested, but I’ve been a bit more careful in labeling and archiving emails and writings since.)

I found an old LiveJournal started a few years back, when I was working at a very quiet bookstore  and had a great deal of time on my hands. It only contained half a dozen entries, but there were stories from my time in California, when the memories were a lot fresher. Rather than let them go to waste, I’m going to start putting them in a new section on the blog, for written pieces from other projects.

Until that happens, here is a short description of my bookstore job, from the winter of 2006. Good times:

It’s kind of like getting paid to be in my living room all day, as it’s warm, I sit around a lot drinking tea and reading books, occasionally I answer the phone and sometimes I leave to get food, collect mail and put stuff in the bin. A few times during the week, my friends come to visit and we sit around outside in patches of sun. Also, if I don’t keep it relatively tidy someone will probably bitch at me.
On the other hand, lots of strangers can see in, so I can’t sit around in my underwear if I feel like it. Since I work by myself, I can’t leave that much either. There’s also the matter of having a cash register and the occasional customer.

So really, it’s more like I’m getting to paid to spend time in the living room of someone who is quite fussy and likes to enforce a dress code. They’ve got a much nicer living room than I do too, with better stuff in it. So much so, that sometimes other people come and look in it, take away things they like, and pay me a small penalty for doing so.

It turns out that I enjoy this arrangement.

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bookstore, old stuff