looking at the stars

Mystical Woodland Animal Art Prints by RivuletPaperShop

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

chemists: don't think they know enough to be an authority in other fields

biologists: aren't even sure they know enough to be an authority in their own firld

i saw somebody say “what if you’re gone and i haven’t become anything yet” and basically that broke me on a random thursday evening

i'll take something incredibly "simple" as my example — an anime called Laid-Back Camp. it shows us cute girls that go camping and they're very laid back about it. we feel laid back while watching it and begin yearning to go camping, even if we've never done any camping before. you get it — camp-back laid, back-laid camp, etc. the conflicts are short-lived and absolutely no larger than life. it's cozy. it's cute. fans put it on in the background to rewatch it a million times without actually paying attention to it. it's as simple as simple gets, and possibly, at this point, has been loved all the way down to the state of a very dead horse.

but it's not... about camping. and it's definitely not about living a conflict-free laid back life.

what it might be about is: friendship, community, growth, adventure, meaning, balance, or even a whole life philosophy. perhaps it's even about the medium and stands proudly as a case of "the medium is the message," its every scene one beautifully painted frame after another.

it didn't become popular bc it was simple and cozy. it became popular bc it contained meaningful ideas and touched something intimate in the experiences of its audience.

using the reference anecdotes as guiding stars doesn't mean a book or movie needs more bells and whistles. it doesn't mean a poem about a sister's death has to be reworked to also be about... idk, weather, capitalism, and dating. but there's gotta be something under the shock and grief of that passing that feels even more honest than grief to create an experience that speaks louder to its audience than a diary entry. maybe it's finally admitting to relief, jealousy, self-loathing. or even the opposite — grief is the more honest element that underlies another story or idea about the sister or the author, a truth which would not have been confessed if not for the act of writing the poem.