The Path of the Bookseller

Christmas is over. And, as predictably as the taking down of Christmas lights and the half-off sales on the foot-tall black, gold, and fuchsia plastic trees, it’s time for the retail workers to get sick. I’m no exception.

I felt fine, though tired, when I left work after 11 PM last night. I had a twinge of a sniffle by the time that I got off the BART, was sneezing regularly when I did my rounds at the church, and had a full-blown head cold by about 2 AM. I debated whether to call in sick, but by 4 AM, I had little doubt that I should. I emailed one of my managers to tell her that I was doing so; at 4:30 AM (she being as much a morning person as I am a night person), she emailed me back to say that it was OK.

As it was, we had five people out on Monday, a significant chunk of the forty or so scheduled to work that day. Working within the standard capitalist directives to squeeze the most work out of the fewest workers possible, we have close to no redundancy in the ranks–we even had to close the café early because we had no one left to staff it effectively.

I slept until about 2:30 this afternoon, and have been vegging at the computer since then. My housemates cooked dinner tonight (a wonderful soup made from, among other ingredients, the leftovers of the cooking that I did on Thursday), and have me drinking copious amounts of ku ding cha. Aspirin is also helping, and I’ve been wolfing down oranges.

I’ve been trying to relax, but, not doing so easily, I’ve catalogued some DVDs, working on reconstituting the archive for a mailing list that I run, been following the news from Macworld (I may go tomorrow, if I’m up to it, this being the first year that I’ve actually had a Mac), and done some upgrades to my desktop Linux server. I’ll do my rounds at the church at about midnight, as usual, and see what else I can keep myself from doing.

By the way, having gotten the Bluetooth connection working predictably, I’ve set up a Flickr page for my photos. By default, anyone can look at them, and they’re released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. I’m having some thoughts about how differently things look to the naked eye, to the viewfinder, and on the PC screen. But those will have to wait until I can think more linearly.