All Or Nothing

The Season Of The Witch

I love Christmas, I really do.  I like all the decorations, adore the music, definitely get into the gift-giving spirit - so that's not really my issue.

I'm just in one of those seasons where the store, and all it entails, is really starting to wear on me. 

I honestly believe that EVERYONE, regardless of their job or position in life, goes through these types of seasons, where everything they're doing and all the activities of every day add up to one seemingly pointless total.  And we all look at someone else's life; someone else's job, and think "oh, if ONLY I could be doing that.  That would be SO MUCH BETTER."  And then that person, the one doing THAT, they are looking at you and thinking the same exact thing.

What I'm saying is that I know this is normal (at least it better be), and so I'm not like, rushing out to fire-sale the store or anything.  I am just going through one of those times where every little thing I have to do regarding the store seems like a big, annoying task - and there are a LOT of "big annoying tasks" for the store this time of year.  Even when I have a day off, it never feels like one at all.  I'm either filling out some form (for the store), going to some event (for the store), spending hours trying to book a cheap plane ticket to market (for the store), updating mailing lists and working on a direct mailer (for the store), etc.  You get my drift.  And even when I push all that aside, telling myself it can wait 'til tomorrow, nothing will fall apart overnight (a stress-management technique I had to employ after I spent nearly every waking hour of my first year of ownership AT the store), I have to deal with the phone calls from vendors, telling me that I owe them money.

Yeah, because that's the new and exciting thing that's been happening ever since our economy took a nosedive.  Companies who are hurting just as badly as I am are going through invoices from YEARS back, literally, and calling on them.  Aggressively calling on them.  And the lady who owned the store before I did, when it was a whole different entity, basically - well, apparently she didn't pay some bills.  And now the companies are after their cash, and while I can't blame them, really - I mean I am as desperate as anyone these days - they really don't seem to get the concept of "SHE DOESN'T OWN THIS STORE ANYMORE, AND WE HAVE NEVER HEARD OF YOU".

Not to say that I don't owe anyone money.  Because I do.  Oh, I do.  I am constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul, and sometimes when I get called on an overdue invoice, or something from three years ago that everyone, including me, forgot about until just now - I have to tell them "sorry, I don't got it".  And Internet, let me tell you - I'm not a "sorry, I don't got it" kind of girl.  Well, I WASN'T, anyway.  But it's the truth, and at this point, on a lot of things, the truth is the best I can do. 

Two of the stores in my center went out of business in the past two months.  Things are not getting much better.  And the RIDICULOUSLY SHORT-SIGHTED MEDIA keeps on and on with their doom-and-gloom, predicting that 2009 will be the "weakest economic year in recent history", whatever THAT means (how recent? how weak? what's your definition of weak? oh, to answer all of that wouldn't be NEARLY as sensationalist, would it?).  And the general population, your average Joe who just watches the evening news over dinner, hears the media blathering endlessly about how the economy is falling apart, and he decides that he better pull the purse strings a little tighter.  No more frivolous purchasing!  He's putting his wife on a budget!  And with that, there goes my $200 per month interaction with average Joe's wife.  And if enough average Joe's make that identical decision, well, $200 x 1500 adds up REAL fast.

So when I see a mom pulling her stroller out of the trunk in the middle of the day to kill some time out of the house, I miss the dark circles under her eyes and the look of desperation on her face.  I only see the immense appeal of focusing on ONE task instead of ten million.  Raise your child, keep your house decent.  If you don't have a house-cleaner to do that second one for you, that is.  If your kid has a bad day, no one's gonna lose their job.  You aren't going to file bankruptcy if you can't get potty training down in three months.  And I know - of course that's an unfair comparison - I not only have no idea what all goes into being a stay-at-home mom, I honestly don't even WANT to do it right now - I know it's a super hard job, and when (if) I ever do it, I'm sure I will look back on my store-owner days and think OH MY GOSH, WHAT WAS I COMPLAINING ABOUT?

But maybe I won't. 

And the former scoffing I've done at 9-5 desk jobs, with all their boring monotony and personality-killing sameness - that now looks like blissful regularity, beautiful certainty.  I would go home at 5pm, maybe stop at the grocery store for dinner supplies, and NOT THINK ABOUT MY JOB ANYMORE UNTIL THE NEXT DAY.  Oh, and I'd also be getting a paycheck, which would be awesome.  And I know, I know - I get to have a super flexible schedule and fly to LA all the time, and I'm on like, the MOST INCREDIBLE concert-seeing streak ever - so again, if I was, say, working in a bank or accounting office somewhere, I might be wringing my hands over what I gave up.

But maybe I wouldn't.

The best thing to do when I'm feeling this way seems to be to remember that the store is NOT my life.  So if things at the store aren't going well, I don't need to extrapolate that over my entire life and have this all-consuming cloud of guilt and failure hovering over my every moment.  The store is NOT my life; the store is one aspect of my life, and if I am doing my best at the store, and doing everything I know how to do, then whatever happens, happens.  I have to be okay with that.  And most of the time, truthfully, I am.

But sometimes I'm not.

Thank goodness I'm only 27.

The Seven Year Itch

I get email on my phone now, and maybe that's the problem.  The easy access, the siren call of the flashing red light, the immediate notification - I was drawn in to the cycle without even realizing it.  I don't even have to get online anymore to check Facebook, that amazing time-suck of a social media site.  Yeah, that's right....my phone lets me know of any relevant changes or postings on there as well.  This burgundy piece of equipment is singlehandedly destroying my relationship with the World Wide Web.

Or is that just an excuse?  Is it easier for me to blame the demise of my long-term love affair with all things Internet on this sexy little newcomer in my life?  Or does it run deeper than that?  Perhaps it was inevitable - all good things must come to an end, or so they say.  I don't know if it's similar to the New Car Phenomenon, where you decide you MIGHT be in the market for a new vehicle and then suddenly you seem surrounded, INUNDATED, by new car ads, specials, promotions, enticements...but the few times I have gotten online lately and clicked through to some of my favorite blogs, I have been met with goodbye messages.  So it's not just me, I tell myself.  See, other people are having this issue as well. 

What is it with blogging lately?  I'm just not satisfied anymore.  I don't need you like I used to, blogging.  It's not you, it's me.  Or is it?

Maybe it's that many of the top bloggers out there, the ones I read all those years ago and made this whole endeavor seem so appealing, have turned "corporate" - they write for the money, whether that be product placement posts or merely for the increase in traffic that fuels their ad revenue.  And something about that just hits me as SO disingenuous.  Not that I am against the free market or capitalism or making money with your talents - because I'm all about it.  But mainly because what drew me into blogging in the first place was the rawness of the expression, the naked openness of saying "this is my story, and I want you to know it".  And that theme gets lost rather quickly in all the recipe contests and giveaways and corporate sponsorship of 3-year old birthday parties that I feel like I read about more than anything these days.  As such, I haven't even OPENED my feed reader in probably three weeks.  If I am online with an itch to read blogs, I click through my page to about 4 or 5 different sites, and (imagine this) NONE of them are sponsored by anyone or anything.  In fact, most of then net less than 10 comments per post and seem to be genuinely unconcerned by that fact.  It's refreshing.

So what to do?  I don't really want to stop writing.  I like writing; like the stringing of words together to create coherent thoughts and occasionally funny anecdotes that I would otherwise probably forget.  I enjoy the catharsis of putting swirling emotions in order and organizing them in written form on a page, and then hitting publish and feeling like the whole situation has been solved.  I'm not giving that up.  But what I AM giving up is the pressure to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak.  I'm not going to host recipe contests, or jump around seventeen different social media sites and seventeen HUNDRED blogs just trying to up my traffic or stats.  If I don't post for a week or a month, I'm not going to concern myself with what my readership is doing, or if they're going elsewhere for their fix.  Let's be honest, I obviously haven't concerned myself with that last issue much in the first place, since my last Project Runway recap has been up for over a month at this point.

And you know what?  It's not because I don't love having people who read my blog, and even less because I don't love the individual people who read my blog, because guess what?  I DO love you guys.  I know many of you in real life already, and I have gotten the chance to meet a couple of you that I otherwise knew exclusively online, and there are many of you who (and you know this) I am DYING to meet.  Much like my store, which gives me no end of grief on a regular basis, my favorite part of blogging has got to be the friends I have made through doing it.  And so there's another reason to continue, because I'll never believe that I've met all the amazing people there are to meet in this world. 

So what's my point, you ask?  Well, maybe there isn't one.  Maybe this is one of those cathartic posts, and now that I've expressed to blogging how I'm falling out of love with it, we can get back on track.  Or maybe blogging has changed, and we do need to break up.  But since I'm still writing, and you're still reading, it looks like we're still on.  Maybe all I wanted to say is that 2008 has been one of the weirdest years of my life; in some ways one of the best and in some ways one of the very worst.  And yet, even though this year has been absolutely packed full of experiences and changes, my blog reflects almost none of that.  I am tired of not getting to tell the stories I want to tell on here because I am constantly afraid of who I'll inadvertently offend with MY story, with MY life.  And maybe I'm not going to be afraid of that so much anymore. 

So maybe this isn't a breakup, blogging.  But I gotta tell you - things have got to change a bit for this to work out for us.  You have to be a little less commercialized and popularity-contesty, and I am going to be a little less scared of offending those few people out there with something I say that has nothing to do with them.  I mean let's be honest, they were going to be offended by SOMETHING, anyway.  Might as well be me :)

Also, Lydah wanted to say hello.  She says that if she doesn't care about laying in a dirty fire pit, then everyone can just get over...well, just about everything.  She also wants to add that her ears are just perfect, aren't they?  And also that she would very much like to go camping again, and if any of you can make that happen, please drop her a line at [email protected].  Yeah, she really is THAT conceited.