I vacillate between extreme smuggery and epic self hatred, so it’s hard to tell what’s actually happening in general, on the macro level. On the micro level, Calvin has some work so is very boisterous on his meetings. My work is okay, except for the part where the overlords debate as to whether the media property I work on makes any sense. What is the point of this? is a sentence I hear too, too often in meetings.

So I’m rooting for the Tyranny of Sunk Costs to tyrannize my employment life and keep it steady for a bit. It’s a fun job. I kind of love it. I get to edit long form articles about cancer. I’ll never get to do that again, not in my weird field. And I enjoy my team and want to keep working with them. I make a ton of mistakes and my new boss does not laugh at my jokes, so yeah, I’m a little nervous. I spend a fair amount of time plotting jokes that will make her laugh, but she doesn’t give a lot away.

Wyatt is fine. I worry I don’t worry enough about him. He doesn’t like to talk to us much but he is happy and healthy and helps around the house when asked. Daisy is also good, away at college. Calvin hassles her about internships. We took the cats to the Vets (aka, the hard upsellers) so the feline ladies could have their eyes checked. I loathe the vet and they told us nothing but upsold us on some crap, some of which we went for. I need to brush the cats’ teeth, I guess, so I don’t have to pay a thousand dollars for senior cat tooth cleaning.

What to look forward to? The PTA bake sale!

The PTA is rollicking hard. It’s a source of good-natured gossip and a lot of constructive work, and a ton of great rewards. I wonder if others experience it differently. I mean, I get endless delight from complaining about things and feeling oppressed by my To Do list. Do others also find this enjoyable? I think so. I get dozens of texts a day about PTA business, and have lots of meetings, and more and more parents come to each meeting. Yeah, it’s good. I’m not going to worry.

The Bake Sale is coming up. Bake sales fulfill something in me, this need to hector people and tell them what to do. My best job as a very young adult was a hectoring job, a bossy job, and somehow I didn’t take its lesson to heart when I actually picked a profession. The idea of connecting the fact that I loved to boss people around to a possible career path was an idea that I just did not have. I was always such an idiot about the most obvious things.

The summer of 1990 I worked as a cashier in a scummy T-shirt store on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California. When I got the job, I was horrified, but it paid me to do real work. I’d found a job folding T-shirts at a tiny store that sold only cotton clothing and was the most boring place in the world. Also they only needed me 6 hours a week. I had an internship at a publishing house in San Francisco, a very classy place that published poetry, new translations of Dostoevsky novels, and books by Evan S. Connell.

My roommate (in Oakland) was someone I knew from Columbia, and she had arrived a week earlier and been hired at a sushi restaurant. Lucky. I was not so lucky. All the legit cool places had hired summer help, and Berkeley Beach was my last try before I applied at the horribly greasy pizza place.

I was hired by a pale, pale woman with jet black shiny hair named Carla as a cashier at Berkeley Beach, which sold t-shirts that said Hitler World Tour on the front and the list of the invaded European countries on the back. The selection of racist, misogynist, hateful merchandise took your breath away.

I had one other acquaintance from college in Berkeley that summer, a guy who was studying for the LSATs as it was the summer before our senior year. At that time, I secretly thought it was tacky that he was taking a test-prep course and that was all he was doing all summer. I had an internship and a job on Telegraph Avenue, which was the tackiest, smelliest, stupidest place I had seen in a while. It was even tackier than that block on 8th street with all the guys selling tube socks and incense.

But this guy, I now see, had his eye on the ball (and more money than I did–why let go of bitterness now?). He understood that he had to choose a career. I pretended that was true but I was not paying any attention to how I would earn money.

Back to Berkeley Beach. Between studying for the LSAT, this guy would show up at the store, select one heinous object, and then stand in the line to pay (me) for it.

He brought up the Hitler World Tour T-shirt a few times. He could not get over that one and as the years roll by, I have gotten over that T-shirt and then reversed course and become freaked out that I sold many of them that summer. He also brought a postcard up that showed the torso of a woman in a bikini with a dead fish stuck in her bathing-suit bottom waistband. The copy said: Catch of the Day. I rarely looked at the merchandise after my first day, and never bought or even stole anything from the place.

Aside from the foul wares of Berkeley Beach, the place was a blast. Ruddy teenagers from middle America spilled out of Teen Tour buses all day, every day, and into the store. These young adults had cash to spend on offensive wares and no parents to say NO YOU CANNOT WEAR A T-SHIRT SHOWING A TOILET WITH A KNIFE STICKING OUT OF IT.

My job was to take their money and yell at them in service of policing the line. Literally hours went by where I just yelled at people and then rang them up. I yelled at them to check their bags and where to get in line and that we were closing and they needed to move it ALONG. Oh, it was bliss.

At the end of the day the crabby manager, a guy with many tattoos and piercings (not that common in 1990) would play terrible music at a crazy volume so people would flee. I would continue yelling as the bad music blasted, just to make sure they all left in a timely manner.

I was at peace that summer in a way I’ve never been since

Bake sales bring those Berkeley Beach days back, but this time, with a maternal sense of something noble? No, that’s what I would like to tell myself, that I yell at the teens because I am trying to help them. Yes, of course I do. It breaks my heart when I see a kid on Wyatt’s sports team beat themselves up after a bad play or a team member get blamey and prickly when a game goes wrong. I want to hold them by their shoulders and say to them: Just have a good time and remember you and everyone else are doing their best. It’s all okay. Have a good time as you do your best and it will be so much more fun.

I’m looking for a way to deliver this message to all hardworking teenagers, en masse. Ping me with your ideas. I haven’t figured it out yet.

But at the bake sale, yes, I feel a glimmer of the need to message my life-enjoyment advice but mostly I just want to have a fun chat. Teenagers tend to be so self conscious and cool that they don’t chat, and so the only way in is yelling. I’ll try to slip in some wisdom but mostly I am in it for the chats. And the yells.

All day long at the Bake Sale you just hassle the kids and take their money. You boss them around. You try to mind control them into taking your unwanted life tips. You radiate influence at them and try to make them enjoy it. You’re not their parent. You’re just the aggressively friendly person hectoring them to try to enjoy their lives, even while young.

Good times.