Bah, awoke yesterday through a myoclonic twitch. Amateur. I'll attribute it to new-job stress and not to my dreaming brain becoming soft. It was a funny scene (not ha-ha), resonating fervently for several minutes after. In the scene, I was accompanying a band of police officers into the apartment of a man suspected of killing a small girl. (Case was not graphically shown, but it was shown making veteran detectives nauseated.) His apartment was vast and circular, so while the investigators were entering, and I was snooping around for interesting things to photograph, as you do during manhunts, I spotted the old man trying to exit. I called out to the officers and he saw me, coming at me over and around the furniture. I tried to kick him in the stomach, but he tackled me to the floor and while I tried really hysterically, desperately, to stall his attack until someone shoots him, I was fully aware he is either going to produce a knife and stab me or try to bite me, being infected with some shitty disease. He snarled: No jail time for me! and spat right into my eye. The moment saliva hit my eye I woke up. All in all, a shitty dream.

The one from today (slept really badly) was a lot better - I was a demon hunter in Diablo III and had to use my fists to punch through skeletons' skulls, but I was good at it. When time came to kill mini-boss, some putrid fatso monster, I suceeded.

So, the new job, as all lowest-paying menial jobs go, is depressing, tiring, demeaning, bad for health and soul-crushing - just how I like them. Thing is, I have better offers. But having a better job would mean I want to settle and I would rather wither and die than settle. People who come to shop and see me there, see me in those ugly white fluorescent lights, pale, bags under my eyes, hair thin and greasy, lips dry and pale, are not even surprised. I always pick the worst jobs. It is the exact opposite of a long vacation.

The General, if at all able, surprise-shows up to come to collect me, or makes me dinner or buys me food he knows I like (these days I love buckwheat and quinoa salad and soy stake, because it doesn't make me too drowsy if I eat for the lunch break), although the other day he made yummy bean stew, bless him, and that was not the best idea - it is not easy, holding in a fart for nine hours. 

I have two methods of coping with the negative bits of the job - making shopping lists for all the shit I want to buy to stock up my hiking and drawing supplies, and allowing my brain to fully appreciate the vacuum left behind by my deep disappointment with clients of the art world. As the job has me at the main cashier station most of the time - the station providing the worst humiliation and stress when I fuck up in money terms, the brain is required to keep completely and entirely dormant: I cannot reminisce about sex of the previous night, I cannot plan ahead, I cannot conjure concepts that might drag me out of poverty and back into arts and crafts business. It simply needs to keep its head bowed low and do the dirty little job. (It's a shop of mainly Made-in-China products, so the amount of dust, fiberglass and synthetic materials easily airborne. My hands are so dry and cracked they're starting to micro-bleed.)

There is one added bonus (more like a conscious choice) to this job (The hostess at McDonald's post would pay about 200 bucks more, but then we'd all die of cholesterol within a season. :D ) The shit we sell is so freaking cute. I cannot get enough of it. We keep getting new stuff and I keep making my list longer "The first few bucks I get, this is exactly what I'm buying!" ... :D

Good thing the General has a monopoly over our finances. We would die of exposure and starvation, surrounded by buttons and bows.