A Post with Substance

Here's the situation, folks. I'm sitting in a hotel room in Jamestown, NY, with two guys who are watching the game/Southpark and giggling like a couple of 12 year olds, and I'm trying to listen to Eva Cassidy on my headphones, but Southpark is louder, and if I turn up the headphones anymore, my eardrums will explode. It's not a bad situation, really, but I'd rather be home. (Oh, and I'm the only girl on this trip except the manager, so I'm rooming with a boy. Oy.)

Today, we hit 71 at 7am, pulled in around 11, and were finished setting up by 2. That means I got my regular daily pay for about 3 hours of work. That's a good thing. The bad thing is I get paid the same regardless of how much I work, and a lot of days, it's 9am to 12am. Sometimes only 10 to 10. I knew what I was getting into, don't get me wrong, but 27 is a lot older than 18 and I sure don't have the energy I did back then.

So this is set up: we put up a tent which is about 10x15, then add 20' worth of overhead signs and 2 six foot wings. We unload the box truck--4 gallon boxes of BBQ sauce, boxes of baked beans that weigh about 20 pounds each, etc. Last week, we had to load the freezer trailer first, which involved taking 80 cases of ribs out of one freezer and putting them into another. What I'm trying to get at here is that this is not the desk jobs I'm used to. I'm whipped. And my legs are covered in bruises. Today I walked into the trailer hitch and have a knot about the size of a softball just above my knee. Tomorrow, it's supposed to be almost 90, and if the humidity today was any indication, I'll probably be melting around 3 p.m. Yay.

So, sometimes a girl just needs to whine, right? I guess I do a lot of that. I'm a little frustrated because everything is happening so quickly and I don't have time to process or deal with most of it. There are little bits of sanity, too, though. Like making dinner last night on the grill and sitting on the porch after. Like finding time while I'm on the road to work on my chapbook and take some notes for reordering the full length ms. Reading a Stephen King novel when I don't want to think. And the people I work with, although not anything like the people in the other parts of my life, are good people. Kind, hardworking people who like to have a good time. I'm trying hard to appreciate what I'm going through--as my mother likes to tell me, it's all about attitude--but I do miss the kind of summer I've gotten used to since starting grad school: three or four hours of reading every morning, afternoons writing, evenings going to class or hanging out with friends. I suppose, in a sense, I'm paying for that now, since the loan money is gone. (Which reminds me, I need to do my FAFSA for the fall!) At any rate, I'm in this thing until labor day weekend, so I guess I better buck up and get used to it.