How to Glare at Young Couples

Young couples occasionally screw up, so let's not encourage commitment. Instead, all young couples shall be cast into the wilderness, so that if they screw up, they won't get any of their failure on us.  

It's also a good idea to glare at anyone youngish if they hold hands in a public place. Premature sex could hurt them, so make sure they feel the full opprobrium of our society for this act if they so much as smile at each other. Ugh. How disgusting to smile at a best friend you want to spend your life with, am I right?

Glaring if they smile will DEFINITELY help them know the correct boundaries and avoid hurting themselves. Keep glaring. I bet you're really, really helping them.

In case they don't properly commit and they break up, discourage them, so when they break up, YOU'RE not responsible. At the same time, if they mention marriage, remind them that they should wait till they're financially sound.

Remember, only 30-year-old people have the right to make life commitments. You have to be rich to have a family. Poor young people have no business reproducing.

People who want a romantic partner and don't yet have one can be made sad by seeing people in healthy relationships. This can be solved by taking anyone who does find a romantic partner and casting them out of society ASAP.

Teaching them to be sensitive and love on their single friends will not work. I tell you, happy couples are poison to single people and we just need to get rid of them.

What if your children see a happy young couple and consider them role models? They might become a couple and want a family and then we'd have to glare at them.

I mean, if they were young. Wait till they're ancient and have put off commitment for ages, THEN bug them to go make a family.

(If they have wrinkles, we'll even let them hold hands after the correct 18 month waiting period.)

By shoving all young or young-looking couples into a wilderness of glaring and isolation, we can best encourage commitment, create strong friendships, and support the strong marriages and myriad grandchildren that we want, even if those grandchildren had to be defrosted from test tubes because we taught people to wait until their eggs had all dried up.

If we just wait to support anyone till we're SURE they're not going to fail, we'll all get everything we wanted and puppies will rain from the sky and yes, this is satire and I am attacking this because, God have mercy on me, until 2 years ago I WAS these people.

Guys. Let's nurture. I thought I'd wait till I was old, but I can't.

And my hair is like, turning white already, so.

The Rental Car

The insurance agency was kind enough to rent me a car of the same make as the one that crumpled into a paper ball on hitting mine.

I climbed in, cried, drove a little- for pity's sake, none of the pedals worked like mine- pulled over, cried more. I shouted, "I hate this, but it doesn't matter. If it mattered, they wouldn't have hit me with a car." I drove home through a 30 mph zone, screaming in horror most of the way. Crap, my brain is broken.

When I got home, I said, "I hate you, but we're going to be friends." I learned all her buttons and dials, and then I saw the odometer on the dashboard, and she only had 30,000 miles on her. I don't think I'd ever seen a car with that little. My voice broke. "Oh. You're only a wee baby. You're just a little baby."

I sat there. "...it's okay. We'll be friends. We'll be friends."

Junkyard Adventure

Need therapy?

Walk past the high junk-yard fence. She's staring at you, still gray and sleek, still friendly. Still looking just like home. You don't notice that the backseat isn't straight, don't see the way she's bent and jammed. From the front she still looks pretty. Tell her so. Say, "Darlin', you still look pretty." It's okay for your voice to crack. Who cares if the paramedic told you not to cry? If you were to do it again, you would cry as much as you wanted.

Talk to the tiny, goblin-like man who hides behind the grate. He'll tell you as the owner of the car, THE car, your only car, you're the only one who can go into the junkyard. You look small. Your mother and the burly man with you say they'll be on the other side of the high fence, the one topped with three strands of barbed wire. The gate is wide open. Anyone could have come in and touched her pretty, silver paint, stolen the hard candies that, in the darkness after the crash, you left under the seats. Your team laugh and smile like it's a joke. You're not alone. You've got back-up. They hand you the screwdrivers, and walk off. Give the little man your papers through the barred window of the fortified hut. Wait while he photocopies them, alone.

Perhaps it's better that you do this alone.

The charred and crumpled shells of cars are so close together, you can hardly open the door of yours. So many of the cars are blackened and blistered. Your crash wasn't so bad. She's still silver. You feel a little surge of pride because, compared to everything else in this lot, in this cemetary of wheels and dreams, she is still a tank. That's why you're still here.

Her license plate- YOUR license plate- is curled under from where the girl hit you so hard that even your tank curled its tail underneath. There are scratches on her spare tire cover. You get down on the ground, examine the one screw holding on your plate, fumble with the screwdrivers too big for your hands. You lean on the ground to leverage yourself down, and pain bites. There's blood; scratches and slices over your palm. Blue-green glass litters the ground, like a snowfall of sapphires. You kneel, hoping your knees and feet won't follow your hands. You wore sandals here. That's what a noob you are.

With your bleeding hands, you unscrew your scratched, bent, shredded license plate, and as you stare at it, there is this little piece of victory, the first piece since the crash seemed to take everything you had. They can take your beautiful car. They can slam into you and make everything hurt. They can force you to stay on the empty road for three hours and speak to bored cop after foul-mouthed cop and tell you not to cry, but this piece of shredding metal? This is yours, because you took this back. It will go on your next space ship, on your next, glorious vehicle that you will keep running against the odds, and they can't take it from you. It's readable.

You use your key- you rescued this, that night, remember? You were a little bit a hero- you fished it from the fabric surrounding your spare tire- you use your key and pry her open. You manage not to dent the green car beside you. That is someone else's baby car. Someone else loves her, and will come for her corpse.

It's okay to tell her she's been a good girl. You know cars don't have souls, that she isn't alive, but your heart doesn't believe it.

Pull every piece of your life from her wreckage.

Rob the peppermints from where they were rocketed under the seats, pull out each trivia card from beneath the carpeting, from where the wreck shoved them into the window-rims. Scavenge your rainy-day ketchup packets from the glove box, and rip up the seats so you can stick that one dime in your pocket. Pull out the radio- it feels like you're cutting out her heart- pull out the radio, and figure out (you've never seen this before) how to disconnect the wires. The last one, you have to break. You're strong enough. When you have every dime and peppermint, every ketchup packet, that crummy blue pen and the one, forgotten silver fork, when there isn't a scrap of homework left and the radio, trailing it's limp heart-strings, is stuffed in your bag with your scavenged license plate, climb over the rocked and crooked seats, and pick up the jack.

Lift it over the fence, and hand it through the barbed wire.

As you walk away, carrying your wiring and your ketchup packets and even the cigarette lighter, because hey, why not keep your cigarette lighter, for a little while you don't feel like a victim trapped on a highway, like a person whose back still aches from the impact of a single thoughtless act that crushed a world and whose key-chain has lost the best key. You feel like a sci-fi heroine who can walk into a junkyard and rip out her own ship's heart.

Everything might still suck, but hey. You're not totally helpless.

You have a license plate.

Foot-Watching

Sometimes when I dance, I stare at my feet. And I'm so worried I'll miss a step, I miss everything.

Yesterday, Passover service, a big circle dancing around the chairs, an old lady holding my hand to drag me through, I looked up. And there were all these people, and they were making mistakes, and they were laughing, and they were trying again. They were okay.

And I'm like, this is my life. I'm so busy staring at my feet, staring at my to-do's and to-don'ts, watching my mistakes and hounding my success, that I don't see I'm dancing with this big, beautiful group. We laugh and we love and we goof up, and it's okay. I feel alone so much. But we're doing this together.

Next time you're watching your feet, look up. You're not dancing with your feet. You're dancing with people.

Saving the Dinosaurs

"Do you want a plastic bag for this?"
"No."
"Okay! Thank you for saving the dinosaurs. ^-^"
"Wait, what? o__o"

Plastic bags come from oil. Oil comes from fossils. Fossils come from dinosaurs. I AM WRAPPING YOUR GROCERIES IN DINOSAURS.

You're welcome.

Two Anniversary Cards

A little lady came through my line buying two identical anniversary cards. I asked her if she knew.

"Oh, yes. My husband's eyes aren't as good as they used to be, so I buy a card for me and a card for him.

"I tell people it's all thanks to my hairdresser. I get my hair in a new color every two months, and he has a new wife. ^-^

"...fifty nine years."

"Any tips?"

She stared into my eyes like she was grabbing me by the lapels and wanted to pin her message to my heart. "Stay close with God."

I nodded, vigorously. "Yes, ma'am."

Her face snapped up like a rubber band. "And," she chirped. "Once he's senile you can always change your hair."

The Man with a Dog in the Car

Me: *ringing up fancy dog-food* You must have a really happy dog. :D

Man: No, not really. He's in the car.

Me: Oh. ._.

Man: He has really bad separation anxiety. My wife left, a month ago, and took the other dog. Now he gets scared if I leave, and there'll be a puddle when I get back if he stays home. So you see, I can't leave him anymore.

God bless the man who takes his dog everywhere, so he won't be scared of someone leaving him again.

Confessions of Cheerful Cashier: No One

[This was written half on February 4th, 2015, and half today.]

I had a straight-up traumatic night at the grocery store last night, and I'm still raw and aching.

No One.

No one stuck up for me.

A front end of coworkers, and every one of them siding with the fruitcake and telling me to break the rules, acting like I'm the one who's wrong and the psycho alternately screaming and crooning is the one who's right.

The manager would have thrown her out, but there was no manager. The manager would have told them, like he told them, that I was on target with every regulation I cited, but there was no manager. He was late.

And this woman with her demon-eyes kept saying between screaming that she understood "where I was coming from" and "my job was everything" and telling everyone that I was fine, "Hillary" was fine, I just didn't know what I was doing.

My name is Joy. My name is Joy. I almost quit my job. I almost quit the job that I love and walked out of the store, right then, because I wasn't sure I could be enough.

"Joy, do you want to go to the bathroom for a minute?" Missie, little, rabbit-faced Missy who always, always gave in. My face was hot and swollen and tears were tracking down because I couldn't care enough to stop them. I left the register to her, left, banished and humiliated, and went to wretch in the empty bathroom, chanting, over and over, "I can't throw up. Food costs money."

When I got back, no calmer but pretty confident that I would not be ripping my arms open in front of the customers, everyone told me I was right. The CSL, the other CSL, the manager. Not the cashier who'd begun the fruitcake's rampage by not backing me up when it wasn't her job on the line. She asked if I was okay.

I wanted to say, "Back me up next time, or stay out of it, please." But I didn't trust my voice. I didn't want to hurt her. So I forced a smile- I would be doing this for hours- and said, "Give me a few days, Shanaya."

...I had more to say. The evening was an unending journey in being wounded. But I had to get back to work, and I had to go back to my line, and. And.

My voice shook as I asked people if they brought their happy-shopping cards.

My hands shook as I circled savings on receipts with pens I kept dropping.

A man asked, "How are you?"

"Terrible." I half-laughed, half sobbed.

His eyes shifted to the side, and he acted as if he hadn't heard me. They all acted like they hadn't heard me.

That's when I realized that no one cared. They didn't want an answer to their question. It was unwarranted to give it to them. I wasn't a person to them. I was just a cash register. I had always been a cash register, and I would always be a cash register. They wanted a machine. They wanted me to be fake.

So I was. For hours and hours, as my soul bled out on the counter and I wanted every minute to walk out, but Phil- the manager, Phil- no one would cover if I left- for hours as I struggled like I was drowning, no one noticed I was there.

"Hi! Did you bring your Happy Shopping Card?"

"You must get told you sound like a kid all the time."

I looked up from the groceries. Dear God, no one had talked to me like a person in so long. "Actually, there was this one time that-"

"Plastic, please." She stared back, hostile, flat and empty eyes. I thought I saw hate. She was angry with me. I'd forgotten I was a cash register.

I started asking God, as I put cans into bags, "God, do you see me? Do I matter?

"...do You see me?"

And finally, I had to stop. In my stupid, aching, grieving pity-party for the person I'd been three hours ago, I stopped and asked myself, why do I think I have the right not to be invisible?

I'm sorry, God. I'm sorry in my pain I decided I was so important. I'm sorry I got to feeling entitled, started to act like You owed me something different.

I show up to work to love people, and if that means being poured out like a blood offering over their bags of lemons, I am Your servant. You take care of me, whatever that looks like. I take care of them.

I was nearing the end of the shift, telling myself all the reasons I need this job, telling myself the same, stupid reason not to quit. This old man came up. I rung up his groceries, and then he asked me my name.

For the love of cashiers, the question shouldn't be so hard.

I stammered. I vacilated. My parents call me Joy, but corporate sent me this name tag, so the store says my name is Hill-

"What do you call yourself?" He was smiling. He was still standing there, like he wasn't miffed, and I'd talked like, seven seconds.

"My name is Joy."

"Nice seeing you, Joy." He tipped his hat and smiled, and strolled out. He'd treated me like a person. It took all night, but someone treated me like a person.

I wish I could say that the one man made everything better. He didn't. But he helped.

I got home that night and wrote in this document, "I am going to love the people while being disappointed and hurt and wounded and not knowing if I will ever be able to enjoy my job again."

I went back. It felt like too many times.

My job wasn't fun anymore.

I couldn't pretend the best of people anymore.

All of the ugliness was right there, in my face. I couldn't pretend.

I knew I could be like them. I could be cold, and treat them like machines, like they treated me.

I knew I could quit. No one would blame me. I've stayed for way longer than the people I started the job with. No one expects a cashier to stay for long.

But I didn't quit. I didn't give up. I stuffed my pockets with peppermints, and I showed up to love people. Again and again and again.

Sometimes it's hard.

But I'm the lucky one. When people snap, when they're cruel or they're creepy or they're cold, I get to show them, over and over, that they're more important than anything they can do to me. I get to go that extra inch, treasure their bread, wrap up their candles, hold out their receipt, and show them, whether they see it or not, that they matter.

Sometimes I watch love change them. Sometimes I whisper prayers for people I'll never see again. But God sees them.

No one.

No one will walk through my line and be able to feel unseen.

Dear Two Old Veterans In My Line

Dear two older men who came through my line today,

Please do not respond to news that the cashier's boyfriend is joining the Army with a step-by-step run down of how the military will identify his body if he is dismembered, complete with kicking his jaw shut on his dog tags.

I get it. You're cool, and you're old veterans, and you like showing off that you're okay with gruesome stuff. But here's the thing:

You get to leave. I am stuck here. I am stuck talking to tons and tons of people when I need to be alone with the pain you have poured on my heart, and I must be cheerful for another four hours until I reach my car. I am not allowed to cry.

Please, for the love of cashiers, for the love of one little cashier, shut up.

Sincerely,

Me