“Is that your handwriting?”

Hello world. I am reporting from the desk at (insert name of climbing company here) in lovely ol’ East Nastville. What a beautiful day it is out today! The sun is shining. The birds are singing. The people are working communally. What a dream, what an absolute dream.

We’ve had an exciting day here so far. I am the only staff member at this small local gym, until my reinforcements show up at 2pm. I opened the gym up at 10am, and got to crackin’. A deluge of folks came in right at the turn of the clock, that is, exactly at 10am, they were ready to go. Coaches, youth team, gang of young lads, veteran local climbers, and a couple on a first date. This was a lot for me to handle on this sleepy Saturday morning, I must confess, due to my lack of being properly caffeinated. This failure on my part to ensure proper caffeine levels in mine bloodstream was because I had planned to drink some expired energy milk drink this morning. There is a chocolate milk energy drink by the brand Hatchers, that is sold in these gyms, called Jumpin’ Jimmy. Jumpin’ Jimmy is a 16 oz. beverage that offers everything that anyone could ever want in a single drink, all for an affordable price and packaged in a container that will likely end up in the ocean and starve a whale to death. One Jumpin’ Jimmy contains 42 grams of sugar, 160mg of caffeine, and 32 grams of blessed protein, and of course wonderful fats, calcium, etc., the normal offerings of milk.

I had scored some Jumpin’ Jimmy yesterday… long story short, I forgot the Jumpin’ Jimmy today, and I was planning to finally drink one for test purposes, to see what would happen, because we do sell them after all, I should know about the product, but I have been avoiding them because I have a great fear that it will make me feel terrible and horrible. Well, I purposefully drank only a small amount of coffee this morning, so as not to overload myself on Jumpin’ Jimmy juice, but then I forgot it. I was then blasted with a good amount of action right out of the gate, at the gym, and when it cooled down, I was doing my general activities, and having cravings for more coffee. I took a can of cold brew out of the fridge three separate times, deliberating whether I should buy one or not, as they were $4.21 post-discount, which was still too expensive for me, and I thought long and hard about this purchase. Did I need this coffee? 250mg of cold brew? For $4.21? When I make $15.50 an hour and should be scrounging every penny possible?

This was such a difficult decision that it took me 45 minutes to decide to pull the trigger. I wrote about it in my journal, to help me through the quandry. I went for it, in the end, it was a small joy, and the timing was right. And here we are three hours later, I am 2/3 of the way through the can, and we can say it was the right decision. That caffeine is turning this Saturday around and got me goin’ right quick.

Immediately after I decided to purchase this can of cold brew, my home boy and veteran climbing staff member guru Luke shows up for some Saturday climbing, and the first thing he does is ring up a cold brew, same one that I bought. And he didn’t think about that for a single second. There was no deliberation there, no hesitation, unless he worked it all out in the car. That is a great place for deliberating, we all know it. I commented on this. (He did end up spilling some of his can, his precious coffee life-blood, lost about 70mg worth of cold brew.) When he rang it up, I noticed that it was cheaper for him, and he said there was an issue with some staff members getting regular member discount rates (10%) and not the staff discount rate (30%). I was getting a member discount rate! I could have saved $1.00 on that coffee! And 45 minutes worth of deliberation! I messaged the Director of Operations immediately and brought this issue to his attention.

The cave lights were not on today. One of the coaches asked me to turn them on, and I couldn’t figure it out, and then I had other business to attend to, and I forgot about it for a while. Then I remembered that that was something that needed to be done, and I asked all the brains in the building, how do we get these cave lights on, because nobody told me and I’ve twisted every visible knob and none of them have turned the lights on. I was walking back into the lobby to contemplate this issue further and see if anyone had answered my plea for help on our communication channels, when I spied Carlin, the herpatologist (who also works at these gyms), and I said, “Carlin, do you know how to turn the cave lights on?” (I should have that there is an overhung section of the gym, where you climb at 60 degree angle or so, maybe just 45, and that is referred to as “the cave”). Carlin investigated, attempted to turn some knobs, and then began to engage her brain further. We discussed the possible resolutions to the problem, and we then had the hypothesis that these cave lights should be also controlled by the master light switch, which toggles every light on that side of the building. Had someone then manually switched off the cave lights by accident, when they should be controlled by the master switch? I was stumped, when Carlin suggested that I just try toggling the master switch again. Okay, why not — I did so, and would you know it? That worked. Now all the lights were on plus the cave lights. Carlin was genius. We made many jokes about this, that our technical issue was actually resolved by the classic “Did you try turning it off and on again???”

I wanted to write about my handwriting, and I will, when I then remembered that another comment was made today about my mannerisms (if that’s what we can call them – my quirks.) Two comments were made today about things that are classically commented on, for me. The first is that I was asked by the 16 year old climb coach why there was a loaf of bread in the office. Many of you may know that I am a bread enjoyer and have no problem with eating an entire loaf of bread. This has gotten much attention in basically every workplace I’ve ever been it. I replied to this young climber coach, “It may be that someone is going to be eating a loaf of bread today.” Something like that. It was obvious to us all that it was my bread. The other girl said that she hoped that whoever would be eating the bread wasn’t just eating bread, and I said, “There may also be some peanuts around,” (that was true). She then called my diet “medieval”. It’s the first time it’s been called medieval, but I think that is actually a pretty great description for my diet, if you don’t want to call it “sparse” or “simple”. I generally use the word “simple”.

Some time after this, I was checking in a couple here on their first date, and the guy said to me, noticing my open notebook on the counter, “Is that your handwriting?” This is another thing that is commonly commented on. I confirmed that it was in fact my handwriting. It has already been outed here at this workplace that I have wild and unreadable scribble and script, as I have left several informative notes at the counter that no one has been able to decipher, even though I used my best handwriting. I came in to Starbucks a few days after my last shift, where I had written a short fictional letter of a man who had been stranded on an island with dinosaurs, and it was an object of interest for the staff, most of whom just looked at it and joked about it, but one friend, Chris K., one of my true homies, he went further, and spent hours, so he said, attempting to read my scribble. He had gotten quite far, through pure perseverance and will, and when I showed up for my next shift, he immediately came to me with the notepad and had me read the story to him. He said several times, “So that’s what it said!”

I was shocked then a couple weeks ago, when one of the climb staff members was able to read my handwriting almost flawlessly, with very little difficulty. I told him, you are an anamoly. The other team members couldn’t read it and were lambasting it, but he said, “I can read it,” and then he read every single word that I had scribbled on a sticky note. It was amazing. I wrote another message and had him read it, and he read that one too with perfect accuracy.

I was also shocked to see, once upon a time, a bartender who had nearly the exact same handwriting as me. She had almost all of the same patterns and quirks in her handwriting. I like to say that it is a “highly evolved script”, as it has become the way it is to be fast and efficient. Many things meld together and evolve/devolve (depending on how you want to look at it), but are readable to me or in context. It’s not an accident that the handwriting looks this way, and this bartender, her script was exactly the same. I had her write on a piece of paper for me, because we were having a conversation about my handwriting, again as I had a notebook open, and I wanted to see hers. I was amazed to see her writing, to see a kindred handwriting spirit. Right there on the paper, I performed a small analysis of the similarities of our writing.

The man at the gym, he said, “Is that your handwriting?” and he was amazed to see it. He said that his writing was “bad, like a 5th graders”. I asked him what he thought about my handwriting, and he said it looked like a doctor’s writing. It does look like a doctor’s scribble.