Doot doot

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.

….?

the following events ensued:

1. predictable lively discussion on the preparation of Wienerschnitzel, in which natives and wurstaboos are pro-puff and everybody else is like *confused dog head tilt* why wouldn’t you want the crust to stay ~attached to the thing you put it on? as with other fried foods?

2. thirty “Bad Schnitzel is my band name” jokes

3. thirty “Bad Schnitzel is my stripper name” jokes

4. one “ah yes, Bad Schnitzel! a lovely spa town” joke

5. this absolute masterpiece:

I wanted to last year but I 'never got round to it'. I kill a lot of plants (not on purpose. ADHD and constant watering is hard, and sometimes it's just me confused as fuck about why I suddenly have x thing happening to my leaves) and kind of felt it was hopeless anyway.

Then I was reading your posts, and how you were seeing biodiversity in even small little hopeful changes. And I was like. Hey. Even if I do kill the plants. They will feed insects for a little, while they survive, and after, I can put them in my compost pile and they will feed more insects, and the flowers (if I get any) will feed bees (which are my special children) and so, even if it doesn't give me food, and even if they die, it might be worth it to try.

I never ate the cilantro. Turns out my flatmate has the soap gene. But it flowered like CRAZY and there were SO many happy pollinators.

I ate so many green onion shoots. The bulbs I still haven't pulled because they just keep giving me shoots to eat.

The mint is going HAM and also the insects loved the flowers.

The cucumber plants went absolutely APESHIT and produced flowers ALL SUMMER, and they were BEAUTIFUL, and I couldn't walk outside without a bee or, occasionally, a butterfly dropping by. It's STILL FLOWERING in NOVEMBER in PHILLY and now I have ladybugs and fireflies. FIREFLIES! I didn't see a single one last year and now they love my balcony and I love them so much. I only got two cucumbers but I don't even care.

I had a bunch of nonedibles in a little greenhouse thing, and they flowered too, and I'd find random bugs (a grasshopper. Huge. Massive) in there hanging out. They died when the greenhouse got blown over but they lasted longer than I ever expected to keep a plant alive.

The birds came by my balcony despite the cat avidly watching them by the window. More types of birds, too. And my little compost box is constantly happy with fruit flies and regular flies and things I don't recognize. I never did get around to buying worms, but I haven't had to because the insects are having a blast in there and every time I think "oh, it'll be full" it is, once again, not full because it has been broken down further.

There is a tiny ecosystem on my 6th floor apartment balcony because you get excited about plants, and it was inspiring enough to get me off my ass. Because even if I didn't eat my plants, you reminded me SOMETHING ELSE WOULD.

First these were obviously gay teens, the choppy dyed hair, the piercings, the giggling and demeanors, the all-of-it being shepherded by the most Canadian looking dad ever. A true fan too, Harris clocked the older Centaur logo on the older man’s cap. 

Second was the “jerseys”. They were not jerseys so much as white t-shirts scribbled on with sharpies and creatively cut and pinned with buttons. Each had one of the starting line-up of the Centaurs written on their back with their number, but also some very artistic interpretations of the Centaur’s logo. Also so many hearts and stars and hand-drawn hockey sticks. They were so cute he could die. 

He pushed through the crowd and reached them, only a bit out of breath in his rush.

“Excuse me” he said to the dad, holding out his hand “My name is Harris Drover, I’m with the Centaurs social media” 

“Hello Mr. Drover, oh goodness, please don’t be too hard on the kids, they’re so excited about their shirts, it’s all just for fun.” the man responded, shaking it immediately. 

“No no no, I’m not here about copyright, I just wanted to talk to you, maybe an interview for the team’s channels?”

“Holy crap, dad! We have too! This is so cool!” a petite teen with scraggly goatee and eyes that matched his father exclaimed.

“Well, I don’t know if your mother would be ok with it or any of your parents” he said looking at his son then the group. In a whisper, he leaned towards them and continued, “And I know it hasn’t been too easy for you kids online, with all those real jerks”

Jesus Christ, Harris’s heart just broke on the spot as the teens looked at each other in dismay. These kids were so brave and beautiful he almost forgot to think of the cruel world outside. He should know better, he lived it and now monitored the comments of the Centaurs TikTok, Insta, Facebook and ect. 

“Wait a minute coach, maybe you could talk with Mr. Drover?” a girl with a grown-out pink bob and wearing her shirt Billie Eilish big piped up.

“Yeah dad, you’ve been a fan forever”

“Well yes swe-Aspen, my whole life as proper Ottawan should.”

Now that was an idea. The man, Jimmy McDunnigan, bashfully agreed after some very spirited encouragement from his son and his friends. Harris pulled the group to a quieter corner of the stadium with good lighting he knew about. He got photos of all the jerseys from the back and one great shot of the teens all posing and flexing faced away with Jimmy facing him with a double-thumbs up. He switched his work phone to video and turned it to the man of the hour.

“Now Coach McDunnigan, why don’t you tell me a little about yourself?”

“Well first up, I should mention, I’m not a coach, my ….  son and his friends just started calling me that after I taught them the ropes of hockey before this game” he responded with an awkward pause of a man trying to remember a new word. He could see Jimmy take a quick glance at Aspen standing just out of shot and Aspen’s reassuring and proud smile back. “It’s also the same night the kids made their jerseys”

“The jerseys are beyond adorable, tell me more about them.”

“Oh gosh, is it ok if I start from the beginning?” Harris nods vigorously while making sure not to jiggle his hands. 

Jimmy takes a deep breath in and says, “I’m just so proud of my son. I’m a season-ticket holder and have been for years, it’s the only reason I was able to get these tickets and I was so happy when Shane Hollander, good gosh, THE Shane Hollander joined our teams, though I know it wasn’t the best of circumstances. Rozanov is good, great even, but Hollander? Holy cow. Aspen here was really excited about hockey for the first time too and I was so happy we could share this. I promised him a Hollander jersey, if we could find one. Hollander has been such an inspiration for my son. He’s always been such a responsible young man and just one of the best players and now he’s gay too? It’s wonderful. Aspen has been showing me all of his old clips and I get to laugh and say, yeah I remember that one when it happened!”

God, Harris could just cry, it was all just so sweet.

“Well then Aspen went to school the next day and came home and said ‘hey dad, can we talk?’. I was worried but it was good news. He asked if instead of tracking down a Hollander Centaur’s jersey, the prices have just been getting so high, I could get another ticket for a friend of his from the Queer Agenda” Jimmy pauses. “That’s the LGBT and plus club at their school” he adds as an aside. 

“The club and his friends there have gotten him through some tough times and he really wanted to pay it forward and at least have one other member come, they’ve all been so excited about Hollander playing for THEIR team”Jimmy chuckles at his own joke here, but continues 

“And I thought, I can do better than that! So I asked some of my friends, other long-suffering fans with transferable seats, and the parents of these fine young kids and we scrounged up enough tickets for every member of the club! Now these kids know everything about music, the internet, politics and just everything except hockey” The teens outside the frame grin at this assessment.

“So Aspen and I plan a sleepover and I put together some slides. We learned the rules, the history and the kids all know Hollander and Rozanov, but the Centaurs have other really good players too! So I show them our starting line. I was half-way through when Jake pulled up Wyatt Hayes’s instagram and says ‘this is so me!’. Oh man I really felt like a teacher, all the kids pulled out their phones and started googling the players and deciding who was each one. And well, a six-pack of Hanes t-shirts and a raid of the Mrs’s crafts closet later, that is how we got the jerseys.”