🌦️

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.

@clarencechampagne people claim otherwise because it's nice to imagine there's an inviolable inner sanctum of what you truly believe and who you truly are, and the notion that the core of your self can be changed not even from inside but by a bump on the head shakes people who emotionally rely on the notion of mental states being essential and transcendant, even when they're nominally a materialist. we like to think mind is safe from matter.

also coming from the political perspective people get very uncomfortable (understandably so) around the notion of people whose politics and conduct are cruel and harmful being that way because of a brain injury, stroke, illness, etc. some harm to them that they did not will. it breaks the notion of worldview and politics being powered by will and agency, which a lot of people, again, rely on for their moral political frameworks, even when they say they're materialist marxists.

To this view, If someone has harmful politics it means that they're a bad person. And if someone is a bad person, then they will that under their own agency. They chose to be a bad person and they could choose otherwise. The moral causation, under this view, arises solely from within the mind, rather than anything material. The notion that someone could become a harmful presence due to material situations outside of their control is deeply threatening to this sense of self, which is often taken for granted as common sense. The notion that we have ultimate and final control over ourselves, and the notion that we can keep our inner selves safe from the world by enforcing a determination on our own worldview, like, committing ideologically to a stance as protection from the world, is something that a lot of people, especially leftists, rely on, and the notion that you could get very badly hurt and come out of that with a brain that engages in harmful politics, engages in a harmful worldview, due to an injury, due to a disability, is morally threatening to a lot of people.

And I think that's understandable, but I don't think it's correct. I think there's a lot of compassion that's called for, regarding people who push back against the notion that, essentially, an injury, a disability, could make you what they see as a bad person. It's understandable why that would deeply freak you out and it's understandable why you wouldn't want to hear it. But I think the issue here is a deeper one of how people conceptualize ontology and ethics and morality and politics in general.

Behold my Hercules beetle! I took a huge chunk of time away from piecing and sewing in general due to work insanity, but I finally got around to finishing this boy.

The fabric is all second hand: the background fabric came from a local craft thrift store, and the green/orange and brown/gold speckled fabrics are twice reused kimono silks. The kimono fabric was gifted to me by the wonderful Madame Button, who used the original garments to make these gorgeous corsets.

She got the kimono because they were either new dead stock, or in such bad condition that they couldn't be worn. She can't use the fabric once it's cut up smaller than a corset panel, so she's been chucking the scraps at me for a while, and I've finally gotten over my fear of cutting up such beautiful silks. Go check out The Bad Button on Instagram and Facebook and drool over her other gorgeous pieces.

I decided to forgo sandwiching and quilting this because I wanted the piecing lines to be the highlight. For now it's tacked to a plain cotton bed sheet until I can find a nicer frame for it.

Obvious disclaimer that you shouldn't have wild animals as pets.

But like, cheetahs are the only large cats that keepers will do free contact with. Hell, even most small cats don't get free contact. (Because small cats can be VICIOUS. They'll have a baby pallas cat wearing thicker gloves than when handling an owl. Because small cats can just be vicious.)

Like I think the only other cat at our zoo where I've seen free contact with was servals? Because I know they've used servals in shows to demonstrate their natural jumping ability. But I know servals can sometimes have a mean temper as well. Meanwhile they'll do the cheetah run and afterwards put the mic by the cheetahs and it's just like an engine with them purring. It's fascinating to watch when the message in every other large animal is "no free contact because it's dangerous even when they're born in captivity".