Hooting a Few Hoots

First, I hope everyone had a nice Easter weekend. I wish I had a sense of tradition for holidays. Not that my family doesn’t do holidays — we do. But I still don’t mind not having a celebration to attend or having family around. I’d much rather have my family around on a random Tuesday… we’d have dinner and talk late into the night about nothing in particular. I miss that.

“The man who doesn’t relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.”
–Elbert Hubbard

I have a headache. I’ve had it for about a week now. It is worse when I am at work or thinking about work. When I am at home, not thinking about it, I hardly notice it. I am extremely frustrated with the direction of my job and can’t seem to find a solution at the moment. Maybe there is no solution, but I am certainly not happy. It all feels so petty when I have to analyze it. Somehow, the concerns that drive me to tears while I am at the store seem so trivial when I am not there.

These are my complaints:
•Those hierarchically above me feeling entitled to whatever they want.
•Those same people complaining about having to work certain shifts, knowing that I write the schedules.
•All questions and concerns about the way the schedule is written requiring an impromptu meeting.
•Full-time employees planning work around their social lives instead of the other way around.
•Having more work to do than I can finish and receiving no help when I need it, even after requesting it.
•Bending the rules because certain employees are more “valuable” than others.
•Not having an outlet for venting frustrations.
•The things I do affecting people’s lives and others not understanding that.
•Having a supervisor who gives orders rather than working with me to get everything done.

I love my job. I really do. I like being entrusted with responsibility and am honored to be the person who makes so many decisions about the store. I feel perfect for the job, as I tend to have more patience than most and I am trustworthy. I know that my job will never be done; not only do I have to complete the same tasks every two weeks, but I also want to learn new things all the time and challenge myself to grow as a part of the company. That is difficult at the moment though. I feel like I can barely catch up enough to just get by.

I wanted to be a writer. I still do. But I feel like that is slipping further and further away, as I am in a line of work that requires a lot of work all day. Much of what I do is mental work, but that is just as taxing and I end up exhausted and disinterested by the time I get home. To calm down and resume the love of things I forget to enjoy requires me to spend a few hours with David or Heather just so I can collect my thoughts. Is my job getting in the way of my goals? I don’t want to believe that it is, but I am obviously not doing what I love to do as a result of what I need to do to pay the bills. And it barely does that.

Where am I going with this? I don’t really know. I don’t have a solution, as I have said. I don’t know if relieving some of the stress will fix the problem or not. I need the money I earn from working, but I need my dreams to be realized. How can I have both?

[Did I take a break from this blog? Not exactly. I have been so stressed out that I have been unable to focus on anything. I have done a lot of sleeping. I have done a little crying. I have been at David’s and at Heather’s. I have been escaping from my life through events rather than through the computer. It may be a loophole, but I am still using it Travis. Plus, I’ve been updating & adding poetry pages.]

Images: Paul Klee – Die Zwitscher-Maschine (Twittering Machine) (1922); photo by Eugene Chystiakov (via Unsplash)

Featured Image Art: photo by John (via Unsplash)