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.

Today marks the 37th year of the passing of trans pioneer and celebrity Christine Jorgensen. Jorgensen was famous in the 1950s due to her public transition, including her successful sex reassignment surgery in Denmark. For many, she was their first nod to the possibility of changing your sex/gender. She was also able to advocate for the better treatment of transgender people in America. Notably, Jorgensen considered herself to be transgender, not transsexual.

The brick on the building is an old sandmold standard-size flashed burgundy brick and a plain buff mortar in a flush joint. If I were to match these, I would use Belden Brick's Belcrest 740 bricks. Those aren't available in standard size, but the modular size they're made in will work because it's the same height. (Matching size exactly doesn't really matter for columns or other projects where the brick isn't going to be laid directly into the existing brick wythes (in fact, the bricks on the columns are a bit longer and a bit less tall than the bricks on the house)). I'd match the mortar with Heidelberg's Old Colonial, the go-to for matching older structures, from their Flamingo colored mortar series. Heidelberg's premixed Old Colonial could also work.

The brick on the columns is just over 8 inches long and just under 2 1/4 inches tall, so it's a weird size. They may have been "seconds", meaning the factory screwed up and had to sell them at a discount. That would explain the mismatch -- mighta been a 1970s Landlord Special. Nonetheless, they're beautiful bricks. A rusty brown color with ironspot texture ("ironspot" is somewhat literal: the clay and/or shale is mixed with actual flecks of metal, usually manganese these days I think, that melts in the kiln and makes a sort of glaze of freckles on the surface of the brick!), laid with an almost-matching red mortar.