TastyTrixie.com

Archive for the ‘class’ Category

I almost did something crazy just now . . . I started filling out an application to work in a grocery store.

Oh my god! Is money REALLY that tight for Trixie? Or is she quitting webwhoring? Errr . . . what the fuck?

It’s nothing like that. It’s actually more embarrassing than that; I don’t NEED another job, I just really like cashiering. Sometimes when I go to the store I am jealous, and I just think it would be fun to pick up a Saturday or holiday shift or a busy dinner rush now and again. Sometimes I just want to get out of the house and do something regular, normal . . . something with a rhythm and set of rules. Something with clearly defined boundaries. Something where I pick things up, move them only a couple feet, then set them down in a bag. Something that doesn’t require a lot of complex thought. Something that doesn’t involve planning for the future. Someplace where I’m never asked to make big decisions.

Sometimes I’m just tired of being in our house, and I don’t want to socialize exactly, but I want to interact (in very predictable, regimented ways) with people. I guess normal people would go out and have a drink with friends in my situation, but that is SO INTENSELY BORING AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO ME. The thought of sitting in a bar drinking to relax just bores me STIFF. But the thought of having a mundane, repetitive job sounds relaxing and wonderful to me. I like counting money and typing on little keypads and scanning things. I would be standing up and lifting things! I would feel so efficient and pleasantly robotic.

I know I have a college education and I don’t *have* to get a job like “that”, but how can I explain how much I want one sometimes? Sometimes I just want things to be simple, rote. Cashiering is like a video game job.

I can’t really afford to take time off from our sites to have a smiling robot job, though. Part of me seductively whispers that maybe it would REFRESH me for my real job here in internet porn. If I knew I wouldn’t be pressured to work when I couldn’t and I knew I wouldn’t have to wash toilets or face product or, god forbid, MOP anything, and I could just work at a checkstand, like, once a week or something . . . I would totally do it.

I feel like I shouldn’t be admitting this.

I feel embarrassed about this desire, but today isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way. Lately I have been fantasizing about getting a temporary job doing data entry (there’s nothing like that available in our town so it really is just a fantasy). I enjoy the world of what-other-people-consider to-be menial labor. I enjoy the structure of it. And I really like typing. Do you know that? I REALLY LIKE TYPING. I like the sound of it, the feeling of it. I like the cadence of data entry. I like escaping into work that only requires lower-level thinking. I have told myself that I could pretend in my head that I’m only getting a job like that as research for a book, but that would be a lie. I just like learning the little subcultures of wage-earners.

People who’ve never had normal jobs like this, I’ll bet they don’t know how fascinating they can be and how interesting the people you work with are. There are the people who are surprisingly interesting, and there are the people who are predictably dull. And I usually like them all. I would never want to feel stuck in a job like that, but those kinds of jobs can be extremely SATISFYING. They’re mechanical, manageable, and fun to master.

My job(s) right now? I will never “master” any of them. Sometimes that’s really cool and exciting and sometimes it just makes me feel tired and want to cry.

Sometimes I just want to have a stack of work and see it visibly reduced as I complete each piece, one at a time. Sometimes I just want to know when my shift is over. Sometimes I just want to be faster than someone else. Sometimes I just want things to be simple, and to go home and spend the whole night reading a book or watching tv without feeling guilty about it because I should be doing something creative and productive and special. Sometimes I don’t feel like I can be productively creative and sometimes I don’t want to be special. Sometimes I just want to be a worker bee and enjoy being a well-oiled piece in a bigger machine. Sometimes I want to be able to blame corporate or upper management or just some dickwad above me for my problems and limited range of motion. Sometimes I am just so tired of not having anyone to blame but myself.

Sometimes I just want to know exactly what the people in charge of my paycheck want from me, and to be able to ask them that point blank if I don’t. What do you want from me? Sometimes I just want to know who those people are, and have there only be one or two of them. With my job(s) right now, it really is cool and almost divine to be able to make so many people happy in so many different ways, but it makes repeated success complicated and unpredictable. Everyone wants something different and everyone is so many people in so many different time zones. Who are they? What do they want from me NOW? This is not easy, and the only way to make it easy is to only care about yourself in a way that requires turning inward too far.

Sometimes I want to know that I can quit, but the problem is that I can’t. I can never and will never quit this job I have now. This is my work and it’s what I’m supposed to do with most of my life. Sometimes it’s boring to have found your life’s work and know that you’re never actually going to be GREAT at it. It (in all of the different forms it does and will take) will be special, but it won’t be GREAT. The best I can hope for and work towards is that someday it will be more profitable, but money is not as great a motivator as greatness, so these days I move forward very slowly.

Sometimes I’m depressed, and that sometime is now (especially without the wonderful, magical, mood-stabilizing happiness that is hormonal birth control). Sometimes I feel like a failure for being a regular person, and sometimes I feel like I’m about to really EMBRACE being average and become crazily happy with that. Sometimes I am.

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL

Last night we watched Cruel and Unusual, a documentary profiling transgender women in American prisons.

If you want to see a movie about real people performing heroic acts, see it.

I usually feel like we’re lucky enough to live in a time and place where a single person cannot lead a major rebellion or do something even remotely revolutionary. In my lifetime and country the only things described as “revolutionary” have been new tech products like the personal computer; that type of revolution is meaningless to the lower class in terms of positive change since it mostly serves to widen the gap between the haves and the majority of have-nots.

What a couple of these women did while they were incarcerated was to shed actual BLOOD to effect personal change and governmental/institutional/legal change benefiting other trans women, and, I think, genetic women too. When the prisons refused to CONTINUE hormone therapy when they jailed these people who’d already been on hormones and refused to even acknowledge there were adverse *medical* implications to their obstinance, what did these prisoners do? THEY CUT OFF THEIR DICKS AND/OR BALLS.

And laws changed.

AMEN.

I’d love to wax appreciative and thoughtful on these issues longer, but I’m going to leave it at that for now.

I think I burned through a ton of personal energy yesterday because today I feel like I could sleep for twenty-four hours. This morning I had some crazy hot sex dreams, but couldn’t really sleep soundly for worrying about finances and repeatedly waking up to immediately begin thinking of ways to ease the current situation.

I know I should probably make it sound like spending ten thousand dollars is no big deal for us, but . . . it is. Tucker took a giant jar of change to the coinstar machine so we’ll have money for food and so I could try to avoid incurring an overlimit charge on one of my credit cards. He did it early this morning since we woke up at six accidentally and of course the first thing out of my mouth was, “we need to take that change in TODAY and get it to my bank before it closes at noon”.

I’m thinking of pawning my old wedding/engagement ring; the only thing delaying this act is that there’s no pawn shop in town. I like my ring a lot, but I never wear it and it’s really not that important to me. I’ve never pawned anything before, either, so I’m kind of curious about the process and like the idea of being part of an old white trash tradition. I like the idea of sacrificing something tangible and precious, of doing something ritualistic to commemorate this event and burn it even deeper into my brain. I don’t think I’ve ever even been INSIDE a pawn shop, to tell you the truth.

I should confess that the only reason I’m in this current precarious situation is a lack of planning; I could have cammed my ass off for a month prior and paid for Trixie.com with no problem. But I didn’t. I honestly didn’t even consider making a goal of raising or saving a certain amount, partly because there was no way of guessing how much it would sell for and partly out of sheer optimism and faith that everything would turn out for the best. And it did. It does. It will. I trust “it”. I trust myself.