Power and Control (and Tiffani)

I’m dredging inspiration from the bottom of an…an I don’t know what. It would take some inspiration to come up with a good simile and since I don’t have any I’m assed out! First two weeks of fourth quarter were just fine. No better, no worse. Well, a little worse considering I have to share my station with a second quarter student. It’s a real pain in the tuchas. I think I mentioned that they’re starting a new class every quarter now. So within Id say, one more quarter the school will be completely maxed out and totally out of control. For now we are just starting to feel the effects. There are only two back classrooms, and about thirty stations and you know all the teachers, two of which are teaching theory at all times, so you can imagine the hubbub of unsupervised mishigas. It’s a nightmare. I have to fit all my shit into one drawer and the other girl gets the cupboard. I’m trying not to think about what might happen if were both on the floor at the same time. I wont last. I’m paying for this for god’s sake. As it was these last two weeks Ms V is out of the country, saving the world starting with Ethiopia (we all started there, so why shouldn’t she?), Ms Kendra is totally occupied teaching the new 1st quarter students in the back room and Ms Michelle is in Vietnam so Ms Bellehas to man the front desk, which leaves us with Ms Carole and Ms Dolores on the floor. Ms Dolores is fucking crazy, as you know, and has a terrible control problem. She tries to follow each and every inane rule of the school to the letter even though none of the other teachers do. This makes her seem terribly inconsistent and like a total power tripper. She ended the day Friday yelling at me and Milan, a second quarter student, for my doing her hair on the floor when it wasn’t a student service day. The girl had paid for the haircut, was already dismissed from class and had made the appointment at the front desk with Ms Belle, and I had already done my consult with Ms Carole. All were in the know, and no sneakiness was employed. Fatal flaw though, Ms Dolores was technically her instructor that day, and even though she had let the class go for the day, Milan should have known that she had to FIRST ask Ms Dolores before asking me if I was free and before proceeding to the front desk (go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.) Ms Dolores made it plain (in many, many words) that she didn’t object to Milan getting the service, mind you, just that we were doing it on the floor and not in the back classroom on a non-student service day. By the time she was done with her beaurocratic diatribe I didn’t have enough time to do Milan’s haircut anyway, so we trudged to the back classroom like the preschoolers she obviously thinks of us as and finished flat ironing it so she at least wouldn’t look crazy at work. Ms Carole could really give a rat’s ass about the rules. She used to teach hair at the state women’s prison in Walla Walla so to her, what ever is going down at SVI is pretty much no problem. She just wants to get home on time, and she takes the bus to Tacoma, so as long as we are cleaning up by four thirty its all gravy. She just chats it up and visits with us and with the clients, trading recipes and talking about her kids and how she should be avoiding carbs, then gives you a four (the highest score) even if you’re sending people out of there looking like DeNiro in Taxi Driver, and gets on the PA at four talking ‘bout “ I needs to be on that bus at five o one so if you not wit’ a client you would want to be cleaning up so we can get out of here on time.” She is pretty cool and knows a lot about relaxers which is good for someone like me who doesn’t. One of my fave students from Checkpoint is in the first quarter class. That’s weird, and makes me feel old and like an underachiever. Actually I didn’t really feel that way at all but it crossed my mind that maybe I should. She is pregnant again and her first baby is going to turn one next month. She is 17 and a darling, truly youthful girl. I love seeing her every day and I feel very protective of her. There is an older guy in their class who buys her lunch and makes sure she has bus money and I love him for it. He and his wife own a successful salon in the rainier valley and he wants to learn hair so he can be more involved in his business and his community. So cool.
I haven’t really done that much hair in school the last couple weeks, nothing to speak of. I gave Ariel a haircut that was all right. Kind of like mine, even in its bad parts. I did have some problem areas that needed to be handled perhaps a little more delicately than they were (hint: it’s a little shorter on one side, sort of a la great clips) but the main objective was to get the burnt up orange color grow-out off as much as possible. It did look cute, but she is really in a long hair phase and just wont be happy until she’s back to hair farmer status. I gave her friend and local piano celeb a fabulous new short do for her trip to NYC. She is ADORABLE and has a round cherub face and a foxy bod. I made it longer in the front and piece-y so it framed her face, and cut the back all messy and short and punky. She said she had been trying to get someone to cut into her hair for a long time and she kept getting glorified trims so she was happy. Stylists, a lot of them anyway, are really afraid to cut off long hair. I say chop it, if its not doing anything for you lose it. Especially if someone is asking you to!
I’ve been really struggling with my jobby job at the Dark University Village of Evil. The other receptionist there has serious personal issues that are overflowing, as personal issues almost always do, into her work life and subsequently on to me. This has been going on for quite some time in the form of amazingly mean-spirited passive aggressive note leaving. Things like making lists of my priorities that weekend in order from selling gift certificates to entering parking registrations, all of which I do every weekend and have for over a year, telling me every week to clean up the desk area and then when she couldn’t say the same thing again cause she knew the desk couldn’t get any neater she cautioned me not to forget to Clorox wipe it down. She specifies which things to enter and goes over my work, even the projects she has nothing to do with, and looks for things I should be doing differently and leaves notes to that effect. Even down to going through the HUGE box of gift cert receipts which no one ever need look at again and seeing that some are upside down and leaving me a note to make sure to file them all right side up. INANE. Asinine and inane. The weirdest part is we get along well in person; in fact she calls me to complain about other work things and to seek reassurance from me about her competence. She has even been known to take my advice on things now and again. I don’t like to go over people’s heads, if something is going wrong I always try to address it with that person. She is so conflict averse it’s mind-boggling. The last time I tried to talk to her about it, since we never work together at the same time, Sabrina our supervisor suggested the U Village buy us dinner and we could have a meeting about whatever the issues were. Great idea, except ol’ girl brought a friend so we really couldn’t talk about anything. No accident there. I still broached the topic and she continued to insist that she really has no problem with me personally or with my work, its just that she’s busy at the end of the day and cant be bothered to worry about the tone of her notes. I told her it would be worth her time to worry about them, and that I would try to be more detail oriented as I could “sense” that was something that was bothering her. That was before thanksgiving. This last weekend the note broke the camel’s back. I had called her and asked her if I could eat some of her Trader Joe’s sesame sticks that she had in the drawer. She said yes. I ate some, not all, just some. I came in this weekend to this paragraph starting the note:

Please refrain from eating my food that is in the drawer. I have created (CREATED??) a space for you in the drawer under the GC computer and you can feel free to go to QFC and by your own food and keep it there secure in the knowledge that I will not consume your food.

That pretty much did it. I don’t care if I ate every last one of her stupid crackers, you CANT talk to me like that. I of course left her a new bag (to the tune of $1.29) and told Sabrina that she needed to read every single one of Tiffani’s notes to me because I wouldn’t last through one more like that. We compiled a bunch of the heaviest hitters and took them into Holly’s (the general Manager of the Dark Village…Crate and Barrel is such a menacing structure….it looks like a penitentiary) office. It was clear to me that I am not the only one having these sorts of territorial control struggles with Tiffani. Holly said everyone breathes a sigh of relief on Mondays when I’m at the front desk instead of Tiffani. It saddens me because Tiffani cares so much more about the job and is SO much better at it. In fact a couple o weeks ago she said to me "I stayed up all night thinking of how I could make the new marketing event more successful. I couldn"t sleep a wink. " Unthinkable. But what she doesn’t understand is that who you know and how much they like you is FAR more important to your success at almost anything than how well you do what you’re paid to be there for. In any case, Holly will be informing homegirl once again, that she’ll either be shaping up in how she talks to me, and her office attitude in general, or shell be shipping out. I honestly hope she shapes up cause either way ill be shipping out in the pretty near future and Id hate for them to lose both of us at once. I’m sure you’ll hear of them again after the all office holiday party on the 21st where the all female management office teams up with the all male development staff and everyone’s husband and wife flirts with everyone else’s husband and wife and Ariel and I sit around and get wasted on drinks we could never otherwise afford. God bless a corporate party.
I went on an emergency hair house call last night to my friend Javon’s house. He is black and has long, natural and super beautiful hair that was in some very real need of a washing and braiding. I had done some really quick straight backs about a month or more ago that were still in and looking very fuzzy. He wants to cut it all off but said that if I promise to fit him in every two weeks he’ll leave it at least for a while. I washed his hair in the sink; he has a cool sprayer faucet that is really just like a shampoo bowl. He told me some stories while I was twisting him up that seem to fit in with this week’s theme. The short one is that he went to a beauty school in Kirkland and asked them to wash and braid his hair. They looked at him like he had snakes growing out of his head and told him “we can’t do that kind of hair.” Not even the instructors. They don’t teach black hair at all. Like it isn’t even hair, but some other alien substance that cant be understood by the uninitiated. Sigh. Then he went to fricking fantastic sams or some such place because he saw a mixed girl doing hair in there and asked her if she could do his hair. She copped some kind of crazy attitude and said something to the effect of “you think just because I’m black I'm gonna know how to do black hair?!?” I think that pretty much speaks for itself. The other story really is our theme and there really isn’t anything funny about it. . His hair turned out beautifully, a nice design. Got to remember to balance the ends of the braids as well as the beginnings so they’re not all thicker on one side and thinner on the other. I had dinner with Sophie’s friend the other night who in the face of those stories decided that it was Javon's fault because no black person in their right mind, least of all him would ever let a Caucasian touch their hair anyway, they were doomed to fuck it up. I guess with that attitude there really is no reason for any of us to learn black hair, or even to stretch out comfort level outside of a bleach and tone and a good cut. The second and most certainly not funny story is that Javon got arrested and detained in the Lynnwood Fred Meyer for “stealing” a rice cooker. Here’s how it went down: He went to the housewares section. He picked up the rice cooker. He carried it to the personal appliances section where he contemplated buying a new shaver and then decided not to. Then he walked to the customer service desk because he was paying with a gift card. He purchased the item and went to leave the store. At that point two agents, who accused him of stealing the rice cooker, surrounded him. He said “the receipt is in my pocket, you can see it right now.” They said that they would take care of everything in the back. “Why do we have to go to the back? I didn’t take anything and you can look at the receipt which is in my pocket right now.” Please come with us, and we’ll discuss this in the back, they said cuffing him. He told me he just kept saying the receipt is in my pocket over and over, just look at it. They get to the back and ask him “Is there anything in your pockets?” “The receipt!” “ Like a needle or weapon or anything that could injure us if we reached in to it?” “No!” They kept telling him to calm down even though he was completely calm, and just wanted to know why since they were looking at the receipt for his item why they still had him in handcuffs. One of the guards started yelling at him, telling him he knew that he stole it and that the receipt was bullshit. At this point he started getting a little scared and asked another man who had slipped in the room and was standing there according to his description like one of the British royal guards if he knew why he was still cuffed and why they even thought he took something. The guy ignored him completely. About ten minutes later the other guard came back in the room, uncuffed him, gave him the managers card, said that the manager wasn’t in today but that he was free to go. Javon said he wasn’t sure if he was going to leave or just go ballistic. He left then came back in and left his number for the manager to call ASAP. Then he went to the police station and asked them what they thought he should do. They didn’t really have anything to say except that they are allowed to detain you if they believe you’ve taken something. He talked to the manager the next day who said some outrageous lie that had to do with the frequency that people pick up items from housewares and take them to the customer service desk and just return them. That security had called the woman working at the desk and she confused him with someone else and said he was making a return. Javon was the only black person in the store, but the manager said that they don’t use any “profiling” i.e. descriptions to identify possible suspects. Its bullshit, that call never happened, if they thought he was doing return fraud why did they accuse him of stealing and why would he be leaving with the item in question? AND THE RECIEPT. He actually said, well I was wearing a big coat and hat. Its 30 degrees, of course he was, I’m sure everyone was. If I was, no one would think I was shoplifting. It’s a terrible thing that being a black man and going shopping in the winter is cause for suspicion; bless him for trying to give them an excuse.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday. He would be devastated at the current state of affairs at almost every level. I went to the celebration at Mt Zion Baptist yesterday. It was good; I was very impressed by King County Executive Ron Sims talk about ceasing all talk and all celebrations in favor of action and movement. The keynote speaker was an amazing preacher from Tennessee who also heads up the Casey family programs. Casey programs work with the Foster care system, which is totally overburdened and rife with moral transgressions. It was a great speech, very inspirational. He called on us to look at how 13 years of Dr King’s life changed the world. He was a man like all of us are men and are women. How have the last 13 years of MY and YOUR lives changed the world? And the next 13? I remember one of Dr Kings phrases that Paul Raymond, one of the founders of the Northwest School and my 12th grade humanities teacher always stressed: Speak Truth to Power. Dr King also said that power without love is anemic. There is so much anemic power in our society, so many small minds who feel that control is power. We have to vanquish the fear of being wholly truthful in the face of power, real or perceived. At fucking Fred Meyer, in my stupid doldremic office, or to my unexamined teachers. I think now we aren’t so scared of dying for speaking up but of the very real possibility of nothing changing. The fear is now to speak and act up and see the same things play themselves out anyway. At least for me that’s where the fear of speaking truth to power comes from. I have to try and find the strength to do it anyway, because the last few years of being a social dropout are making me feel like a real asshole. Ill keep you posted. Anyway: happy birthday Dr King. I’m glad you’re not here to see what a mess we’re making of your dream.