Wild Things

One of the things I enjoyed the most about this trip to California was seeing the variety of wildflowers on the roadside in Oregon reaching down into the ditches of northern California. It's one of my mental games to recognize and name plants everywhere but few things please me as much as wildflowers. Many of them are considered to be weeds but they have such a scrappy charm the way they dot otherwise bleak banks of dried grass.

This trip there were pink and white sweet peas all the way down the section of I-5 we traveled. In some spots it was like thick pink foam floating on top of the yellow dry grasses. There were small daisies growing in happy drifts. There was some chicory here and there- remarkable for its blue petals. I saw false dandelions in profusions so impressive I couldn't help but feel happy seeing the floods of yellow dots on the landscape.

I haven't identified the yellow flowers pictured here yet. They look similar in form to chicory but I haven't known a chicory to be yellow. There were other flowers that I wasn't sure of. Possibly some wallflowers, definitely some California poppies (looked pinched and small from the dry heat), and I might have seen some salvias as well. I wanted Philip to stop the car so many times so that I could photograph the riches of wild plants and pick some as well but I restrained myself until we stopped at a Denny's by the freeway a little north of Eugene and I spied some easily accessible flowers. Moments like these make the tough moments in life bearable. Sometimes I feel like the whole world goes silent when I pick flowers.

Of course, I thought it might be entirely possible that it's against the law to pick roadside plants. I could get arrested. I could get fined. Such a simple pleasure is often not legal in our very cramped and restricted society. It would be a pity if it were true.

I came back home and started working at Safeway. I had my first real shift yesterday. You know how sometimes you start a job and you know, right away, that the worst aspects of it are going to become a fixture of your life forever and you can see immediately that you would rather stab yourself with a pen in the temple than try to scan in a thousand ratty coupons every single day? I had that dreadful feeling that I would die inside if I had to go back ever again. Within the first hour I was already worrying about having to start all over again the next day.

Part of it was not getting enough training with someone else on a real register doing real transactions. My whole training consisted of computer time doing simulated transactions. They throw you to the wolves there. Seriously. TO THE WOLVES. Who are the wolves? You and me, my friends.

It just so happens that I am a very fortunate lady and the owner of the local toy store hired me yesterday on a part time basis. I started today. Oh holy hell...what a difference in atmosphere the toy store is compared to the grocery store. It's colorful and light and quiet and although it has all its own rules and procedures, there aren't so many coupons and sad people and impatient people. People are happier in toy stores than they are in grocery stores. Plus the people who already work at the toy store are so helpful and the lady who was training me today was so helpful and easy to work with.

Everyone has been asking me over the last week if I'm excited to start work at Safeway and I kept wanting to ask "Are you drunk off your ass, or what?! Of course I'm not excited. People don't get excited about working in grocery stores." Which is quite rude and every time I was tempted to answer in such a rude way I was stricken because the human resources lady who hired me to work at Safeway was so awesome and I really liked her personally. Plus, she gave me a job and I've come to realize that that's a pretty big deal these days. I felt a lot of gratitude for her generosity but I just couldn't honestly be excited to work as a checker.

So, if anyone cares to ask me if I'm excited to work at the toy store I can honestly (and thankfully) say: HELL YES! And also: THANK YOU LINDA!!! I go back for more training tomorrow and I don't dread it in the least. The relief I feel is palpable. It's thick in the air. I'm sluffing off dread in bucketfuls. I need full time work still (unless I keep getting more and more Etsy orders, and I'm so thankful for the ones I've been getting!). Another librarian job has come up. Two actually, but one of them so specifically isn't interested in my undereducated self it almost feels as though the ad for it is saying "...so don't bother applying ANGELINA." The other one is a part time circulation desk job and there are no psychic notes on the listing that tell me not to bother. In fact, I feel a slight shimmer of invitation.

So check it out: maybe life could iron itself out here. I think I'd be great at the circulation desk and since it's part time I could work at the toy store and the library both. This is a working life I can get on board with. My kid is not happy to have me working but if I need to be out there earning actual money (as opposed to the vast amounts of pretend money I make every day) I can't think of a better situation.

I'm not even going to say things like "I probably won't get the circulation librarian job" because I know I would be great at it, I would enjoy doing it so much, and there's no reason on earth why they wouldn't hire me for this position unless they have already picked someone from inside. I've decided that I'm going to work hard on my positive visualization skills. I've never been able to decide if I think positive visualization actually gets results or if it's just that people like you better when you're busy visualizing happy outcomes and so you have better experiences?

If I don't get the librarian job then that really means that something else is waiting to happen out there. Thank you, sister, for reminding me of that the whole time you visited. You have reminded me of so many things I need to be reminded of.

I am like a scrappy wild flower trying to carve out a life out of a hard dry landscape. Many of us are. I absolutely love cultivated flowers but there really is something intrinsically charming to me about those flowers that rise up out of the dust into a cloud of color and I have to wonder where they got the nutrients to shine as brightly as hothouse orchids.