A place for everything and everything in its place. A pocket for easy access to ones phone, keys and wallet. Chapstick, gum, tissues, and lotion in another pocket so you have them if and when you need them. This is the basic function of a purse.

Finally decided to take a really good hard look at my purse situation last night and this morning. There were eleven purses hanging on a purse hanger on the door of the closet in my room. After going through them and discerning their usefulness and if they still spark joy in my life, finding others in my closet that I forgot even existed, I now have six on the door and eight are in a bag to go to Goodwill. Also mom bought me a new Spring purse that fits my life right now.

There in lies another question though. Why are purses built like bottomless pits anymore? I don’t know about other people but I just like to be able to reach in where I know something is and grab it. This purse among others I have looked at (while this was isn’t as bad) have one to three deep pockets where its just a catch all. Sanitizer, lotion and tissues all have their own pockets. The phone too. Keys live with a flashlight and a screwdriver set for personal easy access. Gift cards and membership cards have been dropped on the one side bottomless pit. Pens and a calendar/planner have been dropped on the other side. The middle is for the wallet next to the pocket that holds my phone and a twin pocket that have sunglasses and my name tag for work. So while I’m not a fan of the pits they technically have their purpose.

Tote bags a pits but they are like that for a reason. We have a lot of tote bags in the house, mostly used for when mom goes shopping but I have quite a few in my room that I put in a bigger tote for if and when I need them.

As I sit here at my desk thinking about all the bags I have in my room I am right next to all of the duct tape bags and wallets that I have created throughout the years that that was my hobby I thought one day I could make into a side hustle. What a waste! Now I have two baskets of tape mostly untouched, three tote bags, a messenger bag and a beach bag that might never be used by anyone including myself. I lost count as too how many wallets and phone cases I have made and still have here in a basket below me. Then there is the large tote that has my materials I used to measure and cut and line the bags.

Oy vey this is just getting me depressed all over again. Just want to crawl into my new bag with my book which I am realizing now I forgot to see how it fits in there and never come out.

It’s been a year now since the world seemingly stopped spinning. A global crisis, let alone a pandemic, which at this point has killed 2,720,329 to date worldwide. The vast majority of us were in lockdown for at least three months of the past year.

In the past year I have been through all the stages of everything that no one wants to go through. For the three and a half months that I was unemployed because my position was not considered an essential staff member at my job while they were temporarily closed and then open for takeout only. During this time I attempted to learn a language, Scottish Gaelic. During the entire course of the year I managed to read 19 books, which is a feet for me, and I binged, I lost count of how many movies and TV shows. My passion of duct tape crafts was reinvigorated. Creating larger bags and different styles of bags, a new design of wallet that is also a phone case while continuing with the original two designs of wallet I started with trying out all different kinds of color combinations.

Since January when The Minimalists second documentary came out I have felt like it is exactly what I needed at the exact right moment in my life. I watched Less Is Now and then found Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things. I have now watched both twice as of this blog posting. So now I have not only been slowly chipping away at my room with my new journey of minimizing but I have watched countless documentaries on Netflix and Hulu. Here I am laughing at myself thinking about how many I have watched just thing weekend let alone this year. A few weeks ago after going to theminimalists.com for the first time I started following them on social media and reading their blog posts. Now for two weeks I have been listening to their podcast on Spotify. It is a fascinating journey with many beautiful thoughts and points of view. They teach a lot about money and how they got out of debt and the difference between one’s needs and wants, essentials and nonessentials.

Yesterday was the first day of Spring and I decided that it was a nice day to take my Fall/Winter clothes out of my closet and put away my Spring/Summer clothes from my bins under my bed (I have a serious problem I have no idea how to tackle) into my closet. Plot of the story is that I know very well that I have entirely too many clothes. My issue is that I am not only stuck in my ways of only liking/rotating the same handful of ‘normal’ clothes. Also now that I took my weekends back from work (progress) I wear a grand total of seven black shirts and two black pants (there was a bleach incident with the other two I had) while working Monday through Friday. So I have said before that I still live in my childhood home with my mom who pushes all of my buttons even when she isn’t saying anything because I know exactly what she would say about most situations. When I started bitching about all my clothes and not wearing but half of them in almost four years let alone the last year when I know most people lived in PJs or sweat mom brought up the fact that I am “stubborn” and “need clothes for interviews”. Not exactly sure what universe she is pulling said interviews out of but whatever. Right now I am stuck in this job and at this point in my life I need to stay here until I can learn to help myself.

Some people think I am super detail oriented while other find that even if I do 99.99% of my work that .01% is the worst of all. All in all I am just overthinking everything and knowing that it might look like I got 99% of the job done for the day I have only done half of all I thought about getting done during the day. Unfortunately I have always known that I am a people pleaser, a yes woman, and while that makes for a very convincing hostess voice it makes me angry at myself for letting the world walk all over me. When I worked on Saturdays I had no time to slow down and make simple decisions about taking one thing at a time. It was always all or nothing with me. My one manager called me the hardest working person in the restaurant at a team meeting and while it was flattering it was also embarrassing (I could never take a compliment). I just have a constant fear of failure and being fired for doing something so stupid that I will never bounce back. Last but certainly not least I always over plan my day and when it doesn’t go the way I think it will in my head I tend to procrastinate doing the things that need to get done. Knowing that a table needs bussed and menus need wiped but instead constantly looking at various apps on my phone.

Well now it is Sunday night and I have work in the morning. Mondays can be hit and miss these days. Plan for the best and expect the worst or vise versa. Whichever is your cup of tea. Stress relief tea sounds like plan right about now after getting all of this out on the World Wide Web.

Good night blog world.

Remember…”you can’t CHANGE the people around you, but you can change the people AROUND you.” – JFM

Recently I discovered my latest passion. Over the years I have had plenty that I thought would go somewhere but never really took me anywhere. They sparked joy in me for a short time and then they fizzled out. As I sit here at my desk three of those things come to mind off hand because they are write in front of me. Just seeing them makes me sad but this is where my computer lives in my house, my parents house (get to that part of my anxieties/depression later), and I am not sure if it would be suited anywhere else in the house or in general.

Earlier this year I was just scrolling through Netflix once again on lock down. This time it had actually only been for two weeks like the first one was supposed to be and ended up being three and a half months. Everyone in the world should know what I am talking about at this point unless you have been living under a rock for over a year now. Well I wasn’t in the mood to start a new binge so I went to documentaries. A huge THANK YOU goes out to The Minimalists for their documentary Less Is Now. I have not watched it twice since it came out and I have been devouring their podcast for the last two weeks. If anything this podcast has taught me to concentrate on the here and now more than I have my entire adult life. While listening to each podcast I am usually either driving to or from work or sitting in my room. Today while listening to the episode entitled Mentalclutter, I know right, I was sitting my room pulling out containers from spots all over my room going through them and organizing them. Do I really need all these lip glosses? I haven’t warn lip gloss in I have no idea when, so no. I have so many stickers in my top drawer of my nightstand that I have no idea what to do with knowing at one point I had them there right next to me ‘just in case’. Looking around me now at this desk there are dozens of pens and pencils that I have no idea if they function so that might be a task I can put upon myself while I am listening to the podcast as well.

My mom and I watch a lot of HGTV and so I have been fascinated with other people’s living situations for a very long time. Tiny homes have been on my mind for a while. The Sims game has been one of my passions on and off for 20 years. I took a drafting and design class in high school and it just fueled my passion for home design and decor further. The Sims games came out with a tiny homes expansion and that peaked my interest for a fleeting moment as well. Once again I mention that my attention span is almost at a zero except when it comes to listening to books or podcasts. Even reading unfortunately leads me to pick up my phone and scroll Facebook or play a game until I run out of lives/energy in said game. This is where my anxiety kicks in most though. I am not sure what to do with myself because I have so much to do and don’t know where to begin.

I know I can be a horrible person to be around. I don’t even like myself most days. I come across as lazy to some people and I yet I am just trying to do too much all at once barely getting anything I want to done at all. I know my some of my coworkers think poorly of me because I can’t get all the menus cleaned before they get there. I’m sorry that no one during the lunch hours want to use the QR code. On Friday 130 guests came through before my replacements got there. That’s an average of 35 tables in just over 4 hours between when people started coming in and I left. I’m sorry I wasn’t just chilling up at the host stand wiping menus that whole time instead of you know busing tables. And yes by the way I did clean both bathrooms so that was another 15min I was not up at the host stand wiping the fucking menus.

Two weeks ago, so starting yesterday, I took my Saturdays away from my work availability. This was to alleviate the anxieties I felt working most Saturdays and I used to feel on Sundays with the amount of traffic that came through the restaurant on those days. My anxieties became too much for me to handle that I had other coworkers yelling at for doing everything within the scope of my job that wasn’t what they thought I should be doing. People half my age and twice my age telling me I am not doing my job the way they think I should be doing it only because I have been doing it my way for four years and three months up to this point and they have been doing their position for three months and 14 years respectively. I am the only ‘expert’ qualified trainer in my position but my brain cannot do what it needs to to teach others when I have a million people around me yelling about when they will be sat (both guests and servers alike).

Truthfully I hope that eventually I will be able to figure out a way to wrap my brain around minimizing the things in my life so I can learn to prioritize me and the people around me. For now I take my anxiety and depressive state once moment at a time, one task at a time.

“Love people and use things because the opposite never works.” – Joshua Fields Millburn

Waking up twenty minutes before the alarm is nothing new. It happens a lot around here these days since I had to start setting an alarm again. Three weeks ago Applebee’s opened its doors once again to the public for dine-in. Being back has been different because I not only have been Host but I have been placed in a new position that I was really enjoying until this past Saturday.

For the last full week I have been the Sanitation Specialist. At this position I deep clean and sanitize all of the active tables throughout the building after each guest. While similar to the Host job description before it is different in the time it takes between tables. Each of the sprays I use has to sit on the table and chairs for a minute before they are to be wiped off for maximum effectiveness. That is three minutes a table. With there being twenty-four active tables and on the average Saturday doing each of them at least three times that is seventy-two tables adding up to 216 minute of work (3hours and 36minutes). That is not including the bathrooms which both also have to be deep cleaned and sanitized which takes me by myself about a half hour.  So in total I did four hours and six minutes of non-stop work on Saturday. That’s not a lot for you 9-5ers and I get that. This is manual labor though so by the end of the average day I am in so much pain I am numb.

Especially when there is supposed to be a second person helping you do said positions work load on a day like Saturday. The first guy that was there to be my second I heard take a phone call in the restroom first thing in the morning and proceed to tell our supervisor that he didn’t feel well and needed to go home. He left and they proceeded to replace him with an extra waitress they had on hand. She was present for the first hour and I am pretty sure I saw he bus one table which I proceeded to clean and sanitize. Then she comes up to me and says she will be going on break and having lunch with her family who came in to see her. Being that she was supposed to be the evening Sanitation Specialist I was fine because how much could my life fall the fuck apart in one hour…make it two. She sat down for lunch just after one o’clock that afternoon and by the time I saw her next it was after three. I told her I was fine but I clearly wasn’t. I told her I was upset about how another server was treating me and while that was more the truth it was a depressing combination of both. Not sure where she went after that conversation but I continued to clean the four tables in the section that I was in.

All this and the Hostess is nowhere to be seen so I go to sit two tables in which the one server informs me that he was double sat so lack of communication right there should tell you something about where this is going. I go back to my tables that need finished and I talk to the supervisor about the server that had been treating like shit all day. I tell her I would rather quit right then and there than ever work with her again. As soon as I finish with the section I was on I grabbed my things and stormed out the carside door with barely a word to anyone on the way out.

I clocked out at 4:08pm on Saturday. I clocked in at 10:52am. That is five hours and sixteen minutes that I was clocked into work for the day. So barely an hour and ten minutes of that was I doing nothing as that server suggested. Most of that time was the 11 o’clock hour after we first opened when I was just waiting for a table to clean. So 4:08 to 4:18 I am sitting in my car fuming. I am not only physically numb I am also emotionally numb. I have forgotten how to breath at this point. Ten minutes sitting in my hot car before I remember to turn it on and pull out of my spot. I don’t even remember driving there but I end up at my local Starbucks where I stop for coffee almost daily. I tell my friends who work there about my day and how I am shocked I wasn’t in an accident on the way there. I take my coffee and thank them for enduring my tirade about my day. I drive home and tell my mom in short about my day because she is one to not hear me when I am like that. She makes out to be being overly sensitive. My dad always just says, “don’t sweat the small shit, and its all small shit.” Both sentiments are useless to me when I am upset about anything big or small. Then I went up to my room to get out of my work clothes and proceeded to cry for the better part of twenty minutes. Then we had dinner as a family, mom and I watched a movie together and then I drank the rest of the night away until I woke up at 11:15 on Sunday which is my off day anyway.

Last night before I went to bed I checked out the site where the schedule is posted and saw that the server who thinks that, I don’t do anything in the job I have and don’t know how to do anything right and “don’t know what its like to be a server” (I walked past a conversation between her and another server and she deliberately said this louder and looked my way as I am passing through the dining room), is going to be working on Tuesday so I made the informed decision to drop my shift for that morning. Now as far as I know unless she switched with someone she is not supposed to be on today. I don’t really want to quit, especially since my mom pointed out I should have another job before I quite this one.

Sitting her at my desk looking down at my pile of duct tape works beside me I wish that I could just give up on the outside world and just run with my upstart but that’s a pipe dream I fear may never come true. Last week I added phone case wallet to my collection. I gave the first one to my boss because she just had all her credit cards in the pile the back of her phone case so obviously neither the phone or the cards was fitting properly.I have made three totes and two purses since quarantine started back in March and now I have made five phone cases.

Now seeing it is 9:30 I guess I should go get ready for work though.

Do you listen to audio books? As I said in my last post I have been listening to them pretty regularly lately. Well last night I had a thought as I had to get out of bed and go over to where my phone is plugged in to pause my book before I fell asleep which still took me another to hours to do (another story). Why isn’t there a feature that can tell when you fall asleep and pause your music, book or whatever for you. There are millions of wearable devices out there now that track your every move and your sleep. I had a FitBit for years and then last year I got a Galaxy Watch for Christmas. Both devices tracked my sleep patterns to the best of their ability. Still I have to manually pause my book on my phone, also a Samsung Galaxy, before I officially get settled in my bed at night. I have scoured the manual and the settings for my watch and my phone and there has yet to be a feature invented to do this one seemingly simple task. I went to bed at midnight but fell asleep according to my health app on my watch at 2 am. Now I could have got a good hour or so more of my book done if I wanted to but I was not risking getting up again walking over to my phone and getting distracted by the apps on my phone just to have the opportunity to go to my library app and turn the book back on. With technology getting smarter every single second of every single day especially since most of us have nothing better to do but be on our phones you would think that this would be a thing now that someone has thought up. If there is something out there already I haven’t  found it yet. If anyone knows of something similar and could pay it forward that would be amazing. Anyway thank you all that pop in for indulging my 1 am thoughts.