Back to the Burger Mines

Today was a long day.

We weren't busy.
It was the first day of work after a long holiday, and so I should appreciate being able to ease back into the routine, but sometimes being slow is worse than being busy
because I have so much time to contemplate the time I am wasting.

I can only make so many phone calls (to the pediatrician, to the bank, to the power company...) during lunch, I can only have so many ideas when I'm explaining to the 50+ year old admin how choosing "small, medium or large" will affect the size and price of her fries and drink but not the size of the sandwich
(I wish I was making that up)
or how, believe it or not, I am not responsible for our advertising
(again, admin, and again, I did not make that up)
or the fact that we do not have any of the new fries with the stupid name right now.


I can only make so many grease pencil-on-register tape lists.

The holidays were never enough.
The promise of a second free summer is no longer enough.
Being financially and emotionally poor all the time...
is too much.

So pray for me. Send me some good waves or positive energy or whatever it is you've got.
I need it.

A word, though.
I appreciate the power of a positive attitude.
I appreciate that putting on a happy face can sometimes lift your spirits, and that a happy spirit attracts good things, and so forth and so on,
but unless you know me,
unless you know the score,
unless you've watched my kids while I go for a last-minute 7:30 pm job interview,
hearing this from you does not help.
I feel about that the way a lot of my religiously unaffiliated friends feel about people who tell them that God has all the answers.

I do not subscribe to the theory that it's all in how you look at it.
I always get this advice from someone in a very comfortable place.
Someone with money, someone with not so many firm tethers, with a sugar daddy, with a sugar mama, some adorable nineteen-year-old hippie chick with a job at the co-op,
someone who's secure in their real, grown-up job...
So forth, and so on...

I do not live by the arbitrarily applied social law that because someone has it worse
(and someone always, inevitably, has it worse)
you have no right to complain,
because that's
A cop out. 
It's a ride on your high horse with the comfortable broken-in saddle.
It's the polite way to excuse yourself from an emotional investment. From an action.
It shows a lack of understanding. It tells me you don't hear how I feel, or that my feelings are irrelevant.

If you are planning to say that? Don't say anything at all.
I know the hard truth better than you think.
I wear polyester and a baseball cap to work.

So.
Help, listen, or stfu and leave me alone.
It's better that way.