December 28, 2007
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The Discovery of Avalon
I am mentally and emotionally exhausted. Every year it seems that the holiday season gets harder and harder. Of course, you all know I work in bookstore. It’s my feeling that everyone should be required to work retail or in a service industry immediately after graduating from highschool. It should be mandatory so that everyone, no matter what their station in life, is aware of “how the other half lives.” Honestly, they say that more people kill themselves every year at the holidays than any other time, and I have to wonder, how many of those people work in retail? I bet the ratio’s pretty high. So I’ve actually been sick a couple times this holiday- once before my holiday series of posts, on Christmas, and today I am sick again. I am getting very tired of being sick.
Of course, it’s the stress. Stress wears you down and affects your immune system. I don’t know how it is in other countries, but Americans are just plain rude. My mother raised me to be courteous and compassionate. I say please and thank-you. I hold doors for people. I smile at people and stop to pick up things that others have dropped if it falls closer to me. I pick up things that I have knocked off shelves or tables with my coat or whatever. I put things back where I got them if I decide not to buy them. I do not make work for other people. There is enough to do without adding things, especially this time of year. A person who lives consciously and conscientiously tries to live cooperatively with society. We may all be individuals, but we are also parts of the whole. We can’t act like we only have ourselves to live for. As living creatures, we cannot shirk our responsibilities to our fellow beings.
The holiday is just the worst time of year. Even people who were raised properly forget their manners. Everyone is trying to be ten steps ahead of everyone else. I am just so tired of trying to help three people at once or with my arms full of books that were abandoned somewhere because people have forgotten what patience is. There’s nothing that makes me feel more misanthropic than rude people at the holiday. It never ceases to amaze me how people, who would not be caught dead in a bookstore at any other time of year, will be the rudest and most demanding customers during the holiday. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what book was on your favorite trashy talkshow even if the cover is green. (A side note: the cover is seldom if ever green or whatever other color the customer insists it was.)
This will probably be my only post until after the New Year because I just don’t have the energy to post more often. I’m still hoping more people will jump on the round robin game. Wunderkind, if you would like to post an entry…? Come the New Year, I’m going to start posting from a Pagan Calendar I started collected way back in college. Just about every day has a Pagan holiday or historical event, and I’ll be posting them whether I actually blog or not.
Thought I’d post this today though…. The Welsh Isle of Bardsey is considered by some to be Avalon, which translates to Isle of Apples. It seems fitting then that one of the world’s rarest apple trees should be discovered there. Not many people are aware that the story of Arthur was originally the Welsh Mabinogion before it was rewritten by Sir Thomas Mallory as Morte d’Arthur.
Welsh gardeners keen to bite into one of the world’s rarest apples
So, in lieu of reading my posts, enjoy the news article if you have a sweet tooth for apples and read the linked Mabinogion at Sacred-texts.com if you’d like to read the original Arthur.
Comments (9)
ryc: very good point you made. And of course the body is constantly replacing itself as well. Cells die off, Cells replace. That’s in addition to what you’re talking about to.
I think people do not know how to be free inside themselves, subsequently this turns into a frenzied, self absorbed attempt to fulfill not only their own expectations but what they feel is the expectations of others. The holiday becomes the culmination of a life already lived by these expectations and chaos ensues under the banner of holiday giving. I have worked in both retail and hospitality in my time. It is true that one sees the best and most frequently the worst in people. I have drawn the conclusion that too many people are simply unconscious, plain and simple, which makes either industry a pain to work in some days. The problem with unleashed consumerism, is that it blinds the spirit’s eye and breeds an infantalization in the mind.
All one can do is breathe very deeply and strive for a higher spiritual plane.
I hope you feel better soon. Stress is truly immunity’s bane. I enjoyed your entries on Seasonal traditions.
Blessings~
I’ve always thought that too, every kid should work in customer service, take care of a baby for a week and travel to an impoverished country. That’ll teach them some real lessons.
i really think there are some people that hide in their houses until christmas and then come out to wreck havok on all retail workers. i never see half the people that come into walmart until christmas and then they all converge everyday at once. it’s ridiculous.
Yep, I felt it when it got closer and closer to Christmas. People were more impatient, more rude, more hurried. Kind of sad considering what the season is purported to be about. I worked in fast food restaurants but generally things went well. I do see it though in retail stores just how some people get and often think, the poor store worker and all they have to endure.
Lessee… I was owner/manager of an upscale gift store for more than a decade, does that count? Even these years later, this time of the year is mostly bah-humbug to me; swirling memories of 80-hour weeks and rude people blaming those behind the counter for their own bad planning… this time of the year does bring out the ugly underbelly of humanity.
Dear Candace,
As an ex-retail manager, in charge of both tree lots and toy departments during the holidays, (I almost forget that I managed the electronics department too!) I feel your pain. Someday I want to write a series of reminscences based on my retail career, “Don’t Ask Me, I Just Work Here”. From the tenor of your post, it hasn’t changed much. Thank you for the insight into what it’s like to be in a bookstore during Christmas. (A small boutique store like Meg Ryan’s, or a big chain like Tom Hank’s? (cf: “You Got Mail”)
Sorry about the lack of participation in your blogring. Sounds quite familiar to me. I’m shutting my own blogring down this year, I’m pretty sure.
I love the historical and mythical stories of Arthur. I’m not partial to Mallory. I love T.H. White’s 1958 novel “The Once and Future King”. (And, to be truthful, Disney’s “Sword and the Stone.”) Most if not all of our current myths and religious stories are grounded in earlier tales. Most of the book of Genesis had roots in ancient Sumerian myths.
I will look forward to your Pagan Calendar posts. Take a rest, relieve the stress, and take it easy. And Have a Happy New Year.
Michael F. Nyiri, poet, philosopher, fool
i must admit – being a foreigner, Americans are rather rude and they cuss far too much. Back home, the most anyone will call you is a Bitch and even at that…you gotta work damn hard for that name. I don’t like that about this country. There’s no respect – not for your elders, not for the authority, not for teachers. What ever happened to the good ol’ forty-niners?
Hmm…sixty nine, was a VERY good year.
i’ve found the meanings to most of my dreams are internal instead of from a book or what other people tell me. although i have had a lot of change this past year. mostly it has felt like it’s tearing me apart.