Night of the Zoos

I have been exhausted lately, so I tried to take a power nap.  I didn't really fall asleep, but I did feel slightly better.  Then I took a shower.  I was super annoyed with myself because my complexion has been great all holiday break, and today I woke up with a pimple forming (not quite) on my forehead.  It looks super stupid, but I scrubbed it as hard and as long as I could and then put four different medications on it and then makeup. 
I had agreed to go out to dinner with Lisa and Tori (and maybe Ashley?  Ashley's so hard to pin down these days so I didn't know if she was coming.)  I was scheduling things back to back so maybe I wouldn't have time to go home to fix myself up, so I was doing the fixing before hand, before I went out with the girls. 
I'm not good at timing.  I had an extra half hour before Tori and Lisa wanted to meet, so I sat down at my laptop and tried to take care of some extra things.  I made sure my MP3 player was recharging, I caught up on some reading, I worked on some paperwork.
I noticed that it was ten minutes past when they were meant to show up.  Ashley has a tendency to be late to things, so I thought maybe they were waiting on her.  If so, Tori would already be annoyed, so I decided to wait it out.  I worked on a short piece I'm writing, trying to edit it down so it's shorter. 
Around twenty after, I got a text from Lisa.  "Where are you?"  Uh-oh. 
I texted her back that no one had said where we were going.  Last week, Tori just swung by my house and picked me up.  I had no idea where we were going until we got there, and I frankly was too busy talking to ask.  I had assumed, since no one had said anything about where it was, just had given me a time, that we were having dinner then. 
I finally got there, almost an hour late.  The place was packed.  There were tons of children around, and it vaguely reminded me of what people say when they say something is a zoo. 
I finally found both of them in the back.  They had politely waited, ordering an appetizer but not food.  They apologized. 
Tori was telling me about how she had gotten an email by a professor over how angry Tori was with this guy.  He had mispronounced her name for months, or something.  (It was hard to hear over the zoo animals.)  She had replied back that she was going to torture him in this class. 
"What are you going to do?" Lisa asked. 
"I'm going to sit in front and talk to him the entire time."
"You're going to get tired," I said.  I can't imagine talking like that in class.  When I'm in a lecture, it's all I can do to get all the information down in my notebook. 
Lisa showed me pictures of her new apartment, which is possibly the nicest looking college apartment I've ever seen.  The bed spread matches the shower curtain that matches the couch that matches the lights in the dining room.  Tori teased her for having so many stuffed animals on her bed. 
"They come off when we sleep there," she said.  I honestly don't think six stuffed animals are that many, and anyway, they're all smaller.
We headed over to the grocery store.  Tori had seen this thing about chocolate beer.  I told her how I had chocolate wine once, and it was seriously disgusting.  It took us a while, just because Lisa got herself lost and then ran into someone and then called Tori and I asking where we were. 
"We told you, we're in the booze aisle," Tori said. 
"Tell her it's the large aisle." 
We looked around for this chocolate beer, but couldn't find it.  We looked through lots of other things, and I was struck by how much I wanted to try certain things.
No luck.  After combing the area we gave up.  Tori and Lisa decided to keep looking.  Tori thought that maybe the grocery store was the wrong idea; we needed to look at an actual "booze-booze store." 
"Booze-booze?" I asked, in reference to her choice of words. 
As we were driving, I got a text from Philip, asking me to meet him.  I had agreed to meet him yesterday, before this whole dinner with Lisa and Tori thing, before the alcohol hunt began. 
"I'll drop you off," Tori said. 
When I got out of the car, I thanked her, calling her Mom.  I went inside. 
Again: a zoo.  I'd never been here and it not be a zoo, so okay. 
"Are you looking for someone?" a waitress asked. 
"Yeah, he..." I trailed off.  I was about to say his name but I was stumbling for how to describe him. 
"Is he tall, dark and handsome?"
"He...he's handsome."  I guess.  He's not that much taller than me and he's got darkness inside, but it's something he doesn't show people willingly.  He barely likes showing me. 
She pointed, and he looked up and saw me.  Okay, looking at him again, I thought, he was handsome.  He has a nice haircut, the kind I tried Chris to get for years. 
He hugged me and I sat down.  Another waitress approached us and we ordered. 
Philip told me all about what he's been up to lately.  He's working on his master's.  He is trying to find a job, and although he's interviewed for some, there haven't been any offers yet.  He said he had just broken up with a girl about a month before. 
"I'm sorry to hear that," I said. 
"Don't worry; it wasn't meant to be." 
What does that even mean?  It wasn't meant to be implies that there is a certain amount of fate involved in relationships, and I'm wary of fate as a philosophical concept.  It strikes me as intellectually lazy, like not believing in evolution or saying that someone is overanalyzing a piece of literature. 

Meltdowns and Mistakes

Ashley and I have been working a lot together the last week (which is part of why I haven't been posting as much lately.  Sorry, guys.  Will try to do better in the future.)  Mostly, work's been fine.
We do have the occasional child meltdown, which I always feel bad about.  A woman with three kids, two older boys and the youngest, a girl, came in. The girl was told she could choose only one thing, and she immediately began to cry.  (It was later in the day, so that might have been part of it.)  Watching her face crumble made me so bad for anyone. 
Another woman asked me for help finding something, so I walked with her to another part of the store to find her something.  She had thankfully asked for something I knew exactly where it was. 
"Do you get criers a lot?" she asked. 
"Just today."
"Oh, you're a saint!" 
Just hearing that (especially from a woman who looked like a Mom) made me feel a lot better. 
The next day, an older woman was looking for a certain thing, and I led her to that area of the store.  I noticed that some, though not every one of them, were marked 75% off.  When ever anything is marked like that, it goes on certain shelves, and this was not one of them.  I couldn't tell the woman that she wouldn't get her discount, but I took the others off the shelf and asked her to excuse me.
I went into the back and gave them to one of the other people working there, explaining things.  Then I called the boss and took directions from her about it.  ("Leave them in back, I'll fix it.")  And then I went back out on the floor and rung her stuff up for her. 
She told me as I was doing that she had worked as a head hunter for a large corporation for twenty some years, and that I had handled myself like a professional.  She said she was really impressed and she would totally hire me, if she could. 
And then this nice old lady just walked out. 
This is one of the things that I've been (happily) surprised with: people can be so nice!  (People have also been rude and difficult at this job, but I expected that.)  The nice people make me feel so good. 
So, nice people: keep shopping.  It makes our days better.