I Graduated! If By That I Mean I Got Kicked Out

Oh August, you surprising motherfucker. 

Today, on the day that the fired people stayed home, I promised to pivot away from sadness to acceptance. I made a point of eating my lunch away from my desk, so I could get used to who is missing. Then while I was in line to order my food I got an email suggesting politely that I move along from my Alzheimer's caregiver support group, since my mom is dead. True, I haven't been on-topic since mrguy got cancer. But I do talk about Alzheimer's, and I've been holding down the fort for 10 years. I am the OG. The suggestion was that I join a cancer support group. That this is not a social group.

Message received. 

I am not returning to say goodbye, although these *are* my people. It would just be too sad. I wrote to one of the group members, sharing my situation and thanking her for the years of support. Her person is also departed, so she got the same email. 

During another August, in 2010, we got kicked out of our ukulele band. Our bandleader referred to it as us graduating. Over the years we'd heard in whispers about people graduating. Where's Kaunaloa? Oh, she graduated. After a while you'd learn that the person committed some offense, and was asked to leave. I've shared this story, I know, but it still smarts. Our offense was creating a small group and practicing together so that we could play the open mic at the restaurant owned by our bandleader. At a band event where our bandleaders expected to entertain one another.

I want to repeat that in that situation our bandleader's son was so upset with the graduation that he didn't speak to his parents for a year. And they changed the band rules that they'd made up in order to fire us and asked us to rejoin the band. 

It's a different situation, but it still smarts and I did burst into tears. It is time to move on, but I will miss these people. I love them and want to hear about their struggles and their lives.

Oh well.

I'll try to pivot again tomorrow.

Salt Kelp Manager

During the last basho, clam brought over some new snacks, and I saved the wrapper because I love this guy:

When I told mrguy that this had contained shiso candy he said something to the effect of "When I see this guy that's definitely what I think is in the package", so I looked him up. When I asked Google AI for more information about Shio-Konbucho, this is what it told me:

"Shio-Konbucho (塩こん部長), which translates to "Salt Kelp Manager," is the highly successful, dramatic mascot for the Kurakon Foods Corporation. First introduced onto packaging by the marketing department in 2007, the character single-handedly reversed stagnant product sales and sparked consecutive years of double-digit growth.

Key Facts About the Character

The Dramatic Persona: He is illustrated in a classic, intense, thick-lined gekiga manga style. He wears a standard salaryman suit and tie, usually with his jacket slung over his shoulder or making an intensely passionate face while discovering a new food combination.

The Name Pun: His name is a deliberate Japanese wordplay (pun) combining Shio Kombu (salted kelp) and Bucho (department manager).His Corporate "Role": According to Kurakon, he is a highly talented General Manager whose entire job is coming up with creative recipe suggestions to show how versatile savory seaweed can be in everyday cooking.

Interactive Marketing: The character has an active social media presence in Japan where he "replies" to customer comments using a commanding corporate-boss tone while sharing recipes. He also regularly stars in live-action television commercials portrayed by actors.Collaborations: Beyond traditional kelp bags, his massive popularity has allowed him to branch out into collaborative snack items like the Daimaru Honpo Plum Candy shown in your image, as well as limited-edition corn snacks."

I will now attach him to my final work notebook.

Saturday Doin's

I was beyond excited for today. Boy kitten let me sleep in. I took out the garbage, green waste, recycling and stomped on some beer boxes to get them in the recycling, and scooped the cat boxes. Redid my dry-erase calendar in very tidy handwriting. September and October are now accounted for. I've written down the holidays for November and December.

It feels great. Then I cleaned up the aku room, tidied some plants that were trying to overtake the house, while listening to my current book, This Changes Everything, by Tyler Merritt. He has stopped yelling. I stopped listening to Andre Agassi because the guy's unredeemably angry, only to find that Tyler Merritt gets pretty wound up, too. 

I paused for a little plant shopping at Home Depot, some groceries for the best soup ever made, and now I'm here. I made the mistake of reading all the sad messages from departing employees on the Discord channel, and then I had to write out my sorrow. 

But I'm back, so to speak. I made a tuna sandwich, and now mrguy is eating tuna for the first time in a few months. His appetite has returned. His CEA, which had gone up to 3, stubbornly, has gone down to 2, where it lived since he first started responding to chemo. Yay! His CA 19-9, the important tumor marker which was way up there, is continuing its downward trend and although it is not in the normal, it's coming down by hundreds of points every week. We may be heading for better news. PET scan in two weeks.

Some photos of the wild succulents. They make babies that then fall off of the leaves and root on the ground. I made a large pot of cuttings, and am rooting some leaves, and they're kinda everywhere in the aku room now. I used to not like these plants, but then succumbed to my mantra "like plants that like you".

Let's do that.

PS Can NOOOOOTTTT wait to retire. For real. 

A Final Layoff Post?

This past few weeks has been really sad.

Yesterday was my 26th anniversary at the forklift factory, and it was also the last day that laid off employees had their keycards. People were doing things for the last or first time, like using their newhire free lunch coupon that they had never used, or buying things at the company store, or asking the commissary to make their favorite cookie or dropping things off on the free table or selling a million things that were in their office. On Thursday while I was eating lunch with some friends, there was a young woman openly weeping at the table next to us and being consoled by her tablemates. On Tuesday and Thursday we did oral histories with 5 people. Despite the advance notice that layoffs were coming, so many people were caught unawares. My teammates especially. We are still in a state of shock.

We took our affected teammates to a very fancy lunch on Wednesday, which felt good, when it didn't also feel shitty. We met at the rose garden, and then lunched, and then I went for a walk with my old boss and caught her up on everything. She knew some stuff that I didn't. Anyway, it was while walking with her that I realized that I've outlasted all of my bosses and all of my enemies. Except one.

As I said, yesterday was my 26th anniversary and also the saddest day I have felt at the factory. I've been through the deaths, all but one of the layoffs, metoo, Covid. People have left their goodbye messages on Slack. And because Slack is ASS and doesn't have an archiving function, and since all of our goodbye messages in the past were sent by email, I am cutting and pasting every single goodbye Slack into an individual email message which I send to myself, with the subject line "Employee Name Slack Goodbye" with date sent. Then I move it to my Terminations folder so we can archive all of the contact information, past and present, in the same place. This means that I read every single one of those goodbyes.

One person said that she'd be sitting on the lawn near the front gate playing the theme song from Top Gun until she was disconnected from the company wifi. I will miss her.

After work, clam and I went to a bar to sew. Her husband was part of the layoff and stayed home with the rest of the champagne bottle they were working on when I arrived to pick her up. We quickly had a distracting moment on our way to the bar when we saw a guy in cream colored shorts and a lemon yellow golf shirt, facing the busy street. He was holding his phone pizza box style and talking to someone while simultaneously battering a tree with the force of his tremendous stream of urine. We started pointing at him and yelling, while I flipped him off. I don't need to see that. My people just got laid off!! Clam and I later agreed that he must have been drinking 40 ouncers because of the volume and light color of his flow.

That really was an interesting way to change the subject from sadness to outrage and observation. Then we sewed and drank beer and caught up on several weeks of news.

Today is another day.