Sticky Notes

I write a lot of crap down on sticky notes while I'm bored at work. I collect fees for entrance into a park all day. It's winter. At the beach. I don't have many takers.

Some sticky notes:

She looked like a fish, but, I must say, a lovely fish.

His cat was watching us fuck. The guy couldn't bear it, laughed uncontrollably. He was embarrassed, ashamed. We stopped. "Kitty"...what a stupid name for a cat, and not because of it's lack of imagination, but because that was the point.

It took me a while to realize that I, myself, am on the fringes too.

Do people faint from the site of blood because of some unconscious fear of death? Well if that's the explanation, then we should all faint when we see blood. I got queasy earlier when I pricked my finger by accident. I don't usually get queasy with the site of blood.


Would you consider me an eccentric?  And does the shape of my nose annoy you? It annoyed a girl who rode the same bus as me in middle school. She told a different Emily about it and then that Emily told me. Come to think of it, all of our names are Emily (assuming they are both still alive.)

Sometimes people physically near me feel so far away that I assume they have great depth of character.

It bothers me that my Dad thinks wind chimes are annoying. That's like saying you hate rainbows. I kind of think wind chimes are annoying. I also think poetry about the beauty of nature is annoying.

My little pet tree in my room is losing its leaves but I don't think it's dying. How the hell did that happen? It's an INDOOR tree.

I once saw some pictures on Facebook of a mentally handicapped guy I grew up with sitting on his parents' back porch (in NC) with Snooki from Jersey Shore. I still don't know the context behind this photo, and for the purposes of indulging in the absurd, I hope to never find out.

The signature line on credit card receipts no longer shows up for some reason, so I always have to ask visitors to just sign the bottom of the receipt. Even when I say it, it really throws people off when they look at it (plus it's not like they're listening to me). They sorta hover the tip of the pen  above the paper and make scribbling motions in the air, while quizzically trying to determine where to press it down and sign. We get so used to things appearing in certain ways even in varying settings, that we are totally thrown off when things don't match our much ingrained  preconceived expectations. I explained to one couple that the signature line 'just disappeared one day and never came back.' They both laughed hysterically about this. They looked like academics, or people who dress like academics. I wonder if they simply thought it was a clever witticism (which is wasn't, who am I kidding here?) or if they were just being generous, or if on some level they comprehended the desperation I feel in this existentially monotonous (or monotonously existential?) box I'm in, at least on some sociological/theoretical level." (yes I sometimes use more than one sticky note.)

My life is recorded on video camera for forty hours of the week by the federal government. (I doubt the camera views what it is recording as "Emily's life", it really sees "a sterile room where the movements of bodies rarely occur, (except for when a girl power paces madly from one side of the small space to the other) and where money could potentially be stolen, but probably won't, and I'm a video camera, so I'm objective anyway, and this is just a room.)This really doesn't help my battle with narcissism, nor my crippling paranoia, nor my hopeless exhibitionism.

I like the word implosion. It's very fitting a lot of the time.

Patrick Watson's "Fireweed"

Step 1 of Applying for Jobs. Step 2 will arrive shortly, if I get bored enough applying for jobs and feel driven to write it.

Applying for jobs is the worst. The vast majority of young Americans, and older Americans too for that matter, can agree with me on that.  There are steps to applying for a position. I don’t mean in the sense that I follow some bullshit list of guidelines that I picked up at my college’s career center, though I did do that after just one too many badgering phone calls from my mother...

“Alright, Alright, I’ll go to the goddamn career center.”

“Don’t say G.D., Emily, you know that upsets me.”

“Fine. I will go to the G.D. career center.”

Boy did that help. The lady basically told me, (not in so many words, and of course this is emotionally exaggerated due to my utter post-graduate despair) that I was useless to society and should just stay in school. Then she handed me some b.s. printed on colorful paper that I found crusty and wrinkled in the trunk of my car a year later and threw away without ever perusing.

Anyway, I have steps. Not some sort of standard procedure I wrote for myself on a series of sticky notes and then pasted on my fridge to irritate myself enough to apply for jobs. Nope, it’s just basically a pattern I follow each and every time. The first step consists of being totally consumed and hindered by the initial feelings of dred, helplessness, doubt, avoidance and the uninhibited act of procrastination which generally consists of refreshing Facebook every 30 to 90 seconds to see if I have any red shit at the top. Then I go to links of memes and youtube videos; laugh hysterically, sob violently, and have feelings of overwhelming fatalism due to the beliefs of the Republican party displayed in big text in front of unflattering photos of President Obama.

Then I think about how small and unimportant I am, which coincidentally reminds me that I’m supposed to be applying for a job, which chances are I won’t get. This is a bad attitude. I know it is.  And I think about my shitty attitude and feel even shittier, and nope, I don’t ever get to a place where I feel a renewed sense of personal strength and want to prove myself wrong.  Which would probably make my job applications way, way better.