I went up to the front desk to ask about getting the lock cut off. I know they do this with locks left on lockers over night, so I had no doubt they had the tools and skills necessary to free my gym bag.

“Hi,” I said. “My padlock quit working. Could I get someone to cut it off of the locker?”

The young fellow behind the counter looked at me blankly. “Uh, yeah, sure.”

He walked to a side room and came back with a large bolt cutter. “Can you do it yourself?” he asked as he handed it to me across the counter.

That seemed weird.

I sure wish I’d known this was how the evening was going to end, I thought. I’d have skipped all the weights and focused my evening exercise on first locking the locker, and then cutting through the padlock.

“Um….” I really didn’t think I’d have the biceps to pull it off, and I was a bit surprised that the scenario was playing out as it was. “…OK.”

I took the bolt cutter, and started to walk toward the stairs to the lower level locker rooms. I heard another young fellow who had been at the far end of the front desk tell the guy he should do the cutting.

“I can’t!” the first guy said. “It’s the women’s locker room. I can’t go in there!”

“She can clear it out, you know,” said the other guy as he came around the counter towards where I was disappearing down the stairs.

“Ma’am!” he called out. I turned around. “I can do that for you. I can’t have you do it. If you got hurt I’d get in trouble for letting you do it.”

I went ahead of him, made sure the room was clear, and with some struggle (“man, that’s a tough one!”), he managed to cut the lock free.

Funny how both employees approached the solution of this problem very differently. It’s true that the moment the doorway of the women’s locker room senses a Y chromosome passing the threshold, lasers will shoot forth and kill the intruder.

Because who would ever think of just having me clear the women’s locker room?

The problem with Grape Nuts cereal is not that name (though that is extremely confusing), nor is it the taste (that’s the joy of Grape Nuts!) — it’s the look.

I don’t personally find the look or texture unappealing. It looks like roughage, and it is. As I eat it, I imagine all sorts of fiber and various healthful compounds doing my body good. The look is a problem only when considering camouflage, combined with the fact that I’m trying to clean out my cupboards and eat cereal that’s almost two years old.

[I ate some rancid mixed nuts last week. Please heed my warning and do not follow suit.]

Grape Nuts cereal has a peculiar visual texture that serves insects well.

I already knew this could be an issue. It’s happened before, and my years of accumulated Grape Nuts Consumption Training has taught me to never really look at the bowl. It doesn’t cause the collateral damage to the roof of your mouth like Cap’n Crunch, but it is a bowl of questionably identifiable foodstuffs formed into what might possibly be fractal shapes. Just fill the spoon, and eat it. Don’t contemplate. Don’t dwell on the edge of the milk in the bowl. Don’t consider what you can’t see, what might not be discernible due to texture and coloring. Just eat the cereal.

The edge of the milk in a bowl of Grape Nuts cereal is much like an old map of uncharted territory — here be dragons. That’s where the floaters drift out and can be seen.

So I looked at the edge of the milk.

Critters, though not living, be there.

I really can’t blame them. It was opportune housing, and they had had more than enough time to fulfill a year lease.

I took a few more bites. I figured the protein wouldn’t hurt, though my chewing began slowing as I started to do the math regarding the dragons I could see and the likely amount of those buried in the caverns and caves towards the much-larger center of the Grape Nuts.

I put the spoon down.

Frugality has its place, as do vaccinations and quarantine.

I may be broke, but I’m probably going to hold off on eating bugs for as long as I can.

Well, whatever.

I’ve gotten fairly exhausted filling out applications for advertised jobs, writing and submitting cover letters and resumes for those jobs, and getting rejected (most of the time without being notified). Last week, on a whim, I decided to take all the usual resume and cover letter rules and tips and all the self-help “find the perfect job with these five tips” and throw them out the window.

Enter the Non-Cover Letter and the Non-Resume for the Non-Advertised Job.

Accepting and instigating entrance into the world of multiple negatives is born out of pure exasperation, frustration, and desperation. All of the -ation’s.

My non-resume, in size 75 red lowercase Myriad Pro, said one main thing in the middle: i make art. Below it, in small gray writing, I noted that “you may need some sometime. contact me.” In my non cover letter, I ever so briefly explained, in size 23 lowercase right-justified Arial font, that I “wasn’t applying for a job you didn’t advertise, not listing what I’ve done, do, or use (software), instead, i’m merely saying ‘hi’, if your company ever needs an artist, perhaps i’ll come to mind.” I included a few samples of work that were all over the board, in a folder that had a “Hello my name is” sticker announcing my name was Freelance Artist.

Everything about it, according to tradition and accepted practice, was non, not, no, and never. Since I am the mayor of all four of those even when trying to follow and play by the accepted rules, it seemed appropriate.

I look at it as, at worst, a sum zero effort. No job was advertised, no position or work available, so by not applying for that  job, I’m bound to be not disappointed. Not hearing back would be expected, and desired, since there is nothing to hear back about not now.

No harm done. The non-purveyors of the job can do with it as they wish.

Warning: If you don’t post a job, I may apply.

There are the Christmas letters I’ve been steadily receiving. Facebook is like a year-long Christmas letter, always prompting me to remember how boring and unexciting my life is, how little I’ve achieved, how I’m not married and have no perfectly adorable kids doing adorable things, nor as thin or in shape as someone else, nor traveling to exotic locales or experiencing job promotions. I am solidly reminded of my place in life and how I used to love Christmas.

I used to practically do a cartwheel at the thought of Christmas. I was the Christmas kid. Ask my parents. Now, however, I have come to loathe everything about it.

I loathe what people become during Christmas, how they treat others, what their priorities are, what kids become, the focus, the distraction, the horrid music, the stressful requirements.

The radio station we play at work plays the same 30 songs all day long, and the cycle seems to be first telling me it is the most wonderful time of the year (no – and if you worked food service or retail, you know the truth), then it sings about an animated snowman, a creepy fat elf who watches you and knows your every move, some dumb deer with a red nose, some generic snow-themed nonsense, then a token jab at religion with O Holy Night, and then either John Lennon or a group or wealthy pop singers reminding us there are some who aren’t having a good Christmas and how dare we have one. And then it starts all over again. What kind of schizophrenic message is that, anyway?

There’s the man who comes in to the shop and demands a fussy order for Christmas and turns into a queen right at the counter when I say we cannot do it this late in the game but could provide cookies instead, proceeding to tell me off in a huff, going back to his place of work, and calling the bakery to try to place the same order with the hope, I guess, of getting another worker who would kowtow to his “needs” forgetting there were only two of us and that’s why we couldn’t take the order in the first place. Christmas goodies are anything but good; I now associate them with demanding price-complaining people who want everything now and feel that a lack of planning on their part constitutes and emergency on my part.

Church, which should be a place where the never-ending nails-on-chalkboard noise slips away, becomes its own monster. Pressure to be festive and solemn and then festive and then introspective at church services, as jerked about by worship leaders and sermons and well-meaning folks leaves me nothing but angry. This last Sunday, the sermon was wonderful and just as I began to mull it over in the difficult place in life I find myself, it was wiped from usefulness by a rendition of the Chipmunks Christmas song and wanting hula hoops because I guess Christmas is about the kids and we can’t possibly leave the service without choking down something upbeat.

By the end of the day, I just want Christmas to go away. Besides that, I don’t want anything. What I need no person can give me, anyway, if I knew what it was in the first place.

Oh, for December 26th, when the ridiculousness pauses.

Ten years ago, on September 10th, 2001, I boarded a train and headed west and things in the country were fine. On September 11th, 2001, I was still on the train, and, wrapped in the confusion of tragedy, the trajectory of the country changed. Somewhere on that four-day trip to Denver, I called my parents to let them know that I was OK, that the trains were packed with frantic people but still running, and that a train derailment that had happened between Sacramento and Salt Lake City was the train headed west, not east. They were relieved to get that phone call.

The tenth was good.

The tenth is always good. It is the day before. The day before someone you loved died. The day before you lost your job. The day before the accident. The day before the assault. The day before you get the diagnoses. The day before the bad news, the truth revealed, the hopes crushed. The day before your entire life collapses.

The tenth was good, but I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know the eleventh was coming, so I wasted the value of the tenth. The tenth is worth more than all the gold in the world once you find yourself in the eleventh.

The eleventh is always coming.

How you handle the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth…do you hit your knees or raise a fist in anger?

I think of Good Friday, and am reminded that even though Thursday might have seemed better, Resurrection Sunday was on the way.

We can’t live our lives on the tenth. The eleventh goes along with it, unforeseen and unstoppable. When it does, though it seems impossible, Resurrection Sunday comes, too. It might be three days or a tenth anniversary, but it comes.