Robin's CRAAZY TUMBLR

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.

I’d been interning with her as an artist/executive assistant for some time. To put a long story short she’d developed a tremor that kept her from doing a certain amount of studio work, so in between sending emails and invoices for her I’d chip in and help with line art or drafting on longer projects. A lot of it was the two of us sitting in her basement studio, doing our own thing, waiting for the phone to ring. We got to talking a lot. I’d just moved across the country and was still finding my footing.

There was a handyman she had over occasionally — he was a personal friend who enjoyed her company more than she enjoyed his. She didn’t dislike him by any means, but he definitely had feelings for her that she didn’t reciprocate. One day, after he’d come over to repair something-or-other and left, she and I started talking about relationships.

She asked if I had a boyfriend. I told her I wasn’t interested in being in a relationship with anyone and that I’d never had a desire to be in a relationship. Admittedly, I was bracing for the “You’ll meet the right person someday” response. I knew it generally came from a place of care, but it never changed how much I dreaded to hear it. I really respected my mentor and I was prepared to nod along to whatever response she gave me. Instead of anything I expected her to say, she just kind of nodded and said, “Me neither. I think I’m — what’s the term — asexual?”

I was ecstatic. I told her I was asexual, too. I saw her sigh in relief, the same way I did. I couldn’t believe it.

We didn’t get much work done that day, we just started talking about our experiences. She’d been married once when she was younger and even during that period of her life her disinterest in a sexual relationship didn’t change. She had a roommate after graduating college who confessed to having feelings for her and she had to tell her “It’s not that I don’t like girls, it’s that I don’t like anybody.” The roommate harbored enough bitterness over this that they had to split ways. Her mother told her that she would quote “rather have a gay daughter than a daughter who didn’t fancy anyone at all” unquote.

I didn’t have nearly as many experiences as she did, but I was able to share my own for the first time. I shared how it was easier to say I was taking time to work on myself than to say I had no interest in being in a relationship. We talked about the words “You’ll meet the right person someday” and “You’ll know when you’re in love” and “Don’t worry, one day you’ll meet some guy that changes everything.” As if something was broken.

“I’ve been alive for sixty five years,” my mentor told me, “and I’ve never felt like I was missing something, even if everybody told me I was.”

Currently, my mentor lives with her parrot, her cats, and her backyard-wildlife pals in a house that she owns. She makes art and hosts community art groups and volunteers at care homes and is the most self-fulfilled woman I’ve ever met. And she loves her life. She loves the people she knows and they love her, too. If I could be half as cool as she is when I grow up, I think that’d be pretty amazing.