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2004-09-19 - 3:00 p.m.

My second entry for the day:

I walked down to the grocery store to buy some food. When I go there from my apartment, I usually walk, it is only a couple of blocks away.

When I shop there when I am walking, I only fill up a hand-carrying basket, not a shopping cart, because I have to carry everything home and the basket holds the right amount for that.

In line in front of me at the check-out was a typical denizen of this neighborhood--a skinny, young, selfish woman, the kind who thinks it is their due to become Hollywood movie stars (due to their bodies alone) and that type treats everyone as if they are already stars and everyone else is a despicable peon. Of course, they have it backwards, they aren't stars and most likely never will be, and my experience with true celebrities is that they are very nice and gracious, just the opposite of these snobbish would-bes, who come and go with the cycles of the moon.

They all look and act the same, I can pick them out in an instant. In fact, they look so much alike that it is almost hard for me to say with absolute certainty that they do come and go, except that the license plates on the cars in my apartment's parking lot change. They leave with no fanfare, sneaking out in the quiet of night with their one suitcase, and drive in an easterly direction across the desert with their head hanging down. I hate to tell them, but looking like a clone was no way to distinguish themselves in Hollywood, and their attitude made it worse.

Several years ago, I had a friend who was just like that, but who was, in fact, a very good actor. He would stand in front of his mirror for hours, studying his face, and he would cry to me with anguish, "I am the best-looking man in Hollywood, I just don't understand why I haven't made it yet."

I'd want to say back, "That might be part of it," but instead, I watched his life slowly fall apart as he left more and more bills unpaid, expecting at any moment the big Hollywood break that would make him into an instant millionaire, and ultimately, he was evicted, was thrown out into the street, had a nervous breakdown, and was never heard from again.

I could tell this woman at the grocery store was rude simply by the way she put her full basket on the checker's turnstile (too much menial labor to empty it, I guess, easier to simply stand there doing nothing and then make the checker do it when the basket revolved around) and then stood there in my way, too inconsiderate to move her own goods forward a little so that I could start to load the turnstile with my goods. Finally, my basket became noticeably heavy and I pushed my way in and she took the hint and moved forward, sneering down at me contemptuously.

After the checker had scanned all the woman's groceries, the woman handed her a couple of wrinkled up scraps of paper, cents-off coupons for some products that she had gotten. The checker unfolded the coupons and straightened them out, and then studied them with a quizzical expression on her face while the woman sighed and stamped her foot.

"They're coupons," the pre-actress said.

Well sure, the checker could tell that, but what were they for, had they expired, had the redemption instructions been properly followed...I realized that these various coupons that people throw at the grocery checkers are not common currency and thus they slow down progress in the check-out line in a way that is disproportionate to their worth.

The checker held up one tiny square and asked, "Where's the rest of it? There's supposed to be another piece."

"No," said the woman, "that's all, just scan it."

The checker studied it again with knit eyebrows.

"Just scan it, scan it, just scan it," demanded the woman, putting her "I am going to be a movie star and you are just an ignorant grocery store check-out clerk" pressure to bear.

Finally the checker shrugged and scanned them all and all of them registered fine. Minus $2.00 from the $13.42 total. Maybe the checker had been wrong and the would-be actress was vindicated. In that. But overall, in my mind, the battle had been lost before it had even begun--the checker had been the superior in the transaction and the nasty actress the inferior.

Then the woman swiped her debit card for the, what was now, $11.42 total.

"Do you want any cash back?" asked the checker.

"How much can I have?" demanded the skinny actress.

"Two hundred dollars daily limit," said the checker.

The actress typed in $100.00. Maybe she's going to be slinking back home from L.A. tonight.

While the checker was ringing up my groceries, I noticed a middle-aged man at the cash register next to me, smiling at everybody. He had on a back-pack and was turning in a full-size empty Sparketts water bottle. I noticed that he had only one and a half arms...his right one was cut off just a little below the elbow. This didn't seem to stop him, though.

After my groceries were bagged ("Fill up just one bag if you can, please, I am walking"), I stepped out into the parking lot. I walked to the sidewalk and then was making my way across the driveway of the parking lot's exit when the would-be actress sped out past me in her "pre-owned" BMW, seeing me but not caring in the slightest that I had the right of way and was, in fact, already one-third of the way across the driveway. She sped on past me and I shook my head in amusement, wondering where such people come from and why in modern society their presence is increasing.

Then I saw the middle-aged man with the one and a half arms, already half a block ahead of me. His backpack was full of groceries and with his one good arm, he was now holding a full Sparkletts water bottle across one of his shoulders. Very, very heavy, particularly for a multiple block walk!

I'm a pretty fast walker and I hurried ahead, hoping to catch up with him. I wanted to catch him at the stop light, reach out and shake his half arm (which was free) and say to him, "You are an unstoppable force of nature!", but due to his unstoppable nature, he was too fast for me and by the time I had reached the intersection, he was all the way across and half-way down the next block. I could only salute him mentally and hope that my sense of appreciation of him reached him in some other way.

Different kinds of people, I thought.

Last night, a good friend of mine called me and we talked. He's been unemployed now, for a year and a half (and made the crisis even worse by leaving relatively job-abundant L.A. to live in retiree-and-pleasure-resort Palm Springs with very few jobs), and it's becoming quite a serious crisis, because now that his unemployment insurance has long run out, the only way he is surviving is via his eighty-nine-year-old mother and his younger brother paying his rent and bills and buying him groceries, and so on. He claims to feel very guilty about this and says that his feeling of manhood and self-esteem are taking a real beating.

I said, "But you had that job for this weekend, didn't you, working for a convention, or something, wasn't that it? That's a good sign that things might be turning around for you."

"Oh, I left," he said.

"You left?" I repeated.

"Yeah, I got there at eight o'clock in the morning and then around three o'clock, I'd had it so I said to the other guys, 'I'm through, I'm leaving, now.'"

"How long were you supposed to work there?" I asked.

"Until five or six o'clock."

"Well, wouldn't you have earned some more money if you had stayed?" I asked, trying to hide my incredulity.

"Yeah, sure, but I had had it."

"Well, what was it exactly that you were supposed to be doing there?"

"It was a convention, a convention of Southern California Orthodontists. I was doing registration."

"Oh, you mean sitting at a table, crossiong names off of a reservation list, handing out nametags and stuff?"

"Yes, that's it, exactly."

"Well, that sounds kind of fun," I observed. "And weren't you supposed to go there tomorrow, too?"

"Yeah, the assignment was for two days, but I'm tired. So I'm not going there tomorrow, I need to rest."

"Were you working for the hotel, or for the orthodontists' association?" (I was wondering if this could have turned into a longer-term job.)

"I was working for the employment agency that I am working with."

"Well, I guess you better get another agency, then," I said, almost afraid to say it.

"What do mean?"

"Well, I think you are through with this agency, or, more accurately, this agency is through with you. They won't be sending you out on any more assignments."

"Why not?"

"Well, you didn't complete this one and jobs are very scarce out there in Palm Springs. They're going to only be giving assignments to their most reliable workers. I think you better start fresh with a new agency."

"Yeah, but they were only paying me $7.50 an hour, it wasn't worth my while...now, if it had been $25.00 an hour, then it would have been worth it to stay around."

"Well, how it works," I explained slowly, "is when you prove your reliability doing the $7.50 an hour jobs, then you can work your way up to the $25.00 an hour jobs, but so far, you are an unknown quantity to them, so they have to test you out with these more simple assignments."

"But they made me wear this ugly yellow polo shirt."

"Yellow polo shirt?"

"Yeah, something they gave me to wear, like a uniform for the staff of the convention."

"Can you keep it?" I asked (thinking that the company had made a little investment in his longevity, which is another consideration).

"Yes, sure, I guess so, not that I will ever wear it again."

"Did it say something on it, like 'Marriott Desert Resort,' or 'Southern California Orthodontists' Association'?"

"It had something on it, a logo, but I didn't look at it, I really don't know what it said. The minute I put it on, I folded the collar up, because I know how to dress, how to make an impression. I tried to improve it. The other guys, they just left the collar folded down, wearing it the regular way. But they should have let me stay the way I was already dressed."

"How was that?" I asked.

"Khaki pants and a black t-shirt, see, very sharp. I know how to dress."

Now this is a guy who has been making the huge mistake of going to job interviews and when they ask him what he would like to do, he answers, "Anything, I will do anything you've got, I have been unemployed for a year and a half." I don't think that's the best way to answer that question, and particularly not when you don't really mean it!

For a while I had felt guilty about this man, because in the course of the past year and a half, our school has had four or five different jobs come up that are similar to what this guy is job-hunting for (that is before he sank down to the "I'll do anything.") You'd think that if he is my friend and I am the Human Resources Manager at our school, I would have given him one of those jobs. But I used to work with him elsewhere and I thought that his work standards were terrible. The product of that company where we worked was written reports and his reports looked like crap (like the work of a person who doesn't care). His margins would be all screwed up, like half an inch on the left side and three inches on the right side (it looked like he didn't know how to reset the margins on the typewriter and couldn't be bothered to ask how) and he didn't care about spelling or where his typewritten lines ended--sometimes he would end a page after he was only two-thirds of the way down the paper. I never understood why the owner of the business kept him on...well, she didn't, ultimately, she fired him, which is why he is now unemployed.

I discussed his case with some of my friends at work and they said, "You can't bring him here, he'd wreck your job and your reputation of good judgment, you know the standards here are the very best! You don't have to feel guilty about not offering him the jobs (or even telling him that they were available), he's not qualified for them."

Yeah I knew they were right, their thinking matched my thinking...still, I felt I ought to have been able to do something.

The thing is, he's actually VERY GOOD at some stuff (which is why he is a friend of mine), but he's just not good at the kind of job he is looking for. And I realized that this is a common problem...it's even a problem with ME. People get stuck doing a kind of work that is commonly offered in the world because that is what "work" looks like to them, whereas the things that they do well do not translate into a job, career, or business idea in their mind--it just seems like a hobby, or something that couldn't possibly earn any money with.

On the other hand, I am constantly amazed at the immense level of success that some other people have, and that I, too, (think I) should have, because they actually turned what they do best into a viable career. And their thinking is one of "absolutely no limits." Like the guy who wrote a diet and exercise book that I just bought this past weekend, The Business Plan for the Body, by Jim Karas. His no-nonsense, nuts and bolts, "bottom line business plan" approach to dieting and perfecting the body appealed to me. And apparently it appealed to a lot of other people, too, because this man earns $10,000 a week helping people solve their weight problems (in an already extremely crowded field!). Ten thousand dollars a week? Yikes! What am I doing wrong? (Everything!)

I found a site on the Internet a couple of nights ago that outlined the nation's top ten largest private land-owners. Now, you have to understand that in this great land of ours, I do not own one square foot of land. I do not even own one square INCH of land. I rent a crappy apartment and it's driving me crazy.

So who do you think is the number one largest land owner in the United States, and how much land do you think he owns?

Ted Turner. One and a half million acres. Yep. Just let that statistic roll through your head.

Now that's pretty inspiring to me, to tell you the truth. The "no limits" aspect of it.

Interestingly, as an aside, we all know that he was once married to Jane Fonda. (Apparently he no longer is, but I don't keep up with that kind of stuff.) A few years ago (and maybe it's even still true today), Jane Fonda was the biggest money-making female in all of Hollywood. (The biggest money-making male was Bill Cosby, in case you wanted to know.) Now someone might protest, "But she hasn't even been in any movies lately," but she was not making all that money from her movies (not ALL that money)...she was making it from her exercise videos. And the importance of that fact is that while she loved movies, her PASSION and her ENTREPRENEURIAL CREATION were those exercise videos. So let that be a lesson to all of us.

And I wonder if what drew Ted Turner and Jane Fonda together was not some level of sexual attraction (well, not that altogether), but was some similarity in their no-limits level of thinking? The nation's biggest land-owner and the entertainment industry's biggest money-making female just might find something in common with each other.

Different kinds of people.

So this entry is in celebration of those people who are unstoppable forces of nature, and not those people who care just about "show". Nasty treatment of the world because you think you are a movie star, or walking away from the only money you have earned in the past year and a half because you had to wear something and do something that you thought was beneath your dignity--is NOT the way to go, or not the way to go very far.

I do remember, and will always remember, that when the bottom dropped out of the aerospace industry and my father, who had four different professional engineering licenses (Industrial, Mechanical, Nuclear, and Structural) and had been successful in the aerospace industry, lost his job when he had a wife and four children to support, and after many, many months of fruitless job-hunting and until he was able to find something better, he went to work in a San Francisco bread factory pouring flour into a hopper. A man who had once designed the entire Dole pineapple processing plant in Hawaii was now a simple functionary in a factory assembly line.

He sold his car in order to help pay the mortgage that was due...he could take the train to San Francisco, even when that meant walking several miles every day at the end of the line into the city.

At the end of the day, my mother would go pick him up at the train station in our town (that now has the highest per capita income of any city in the United States), and while friends and neighbors got off that train wearing three-piece business suits because they were CEOs or stock brokers or lawyers or business owners, my father would get off wearing overalls with flour in his hair and on his face. Did he ever feel embarrassed, or ashamed?

"Nope," my mother says. "He was utterly unaware of the show of status of those who surrounded him. He was only aware of one thing...he had a paycheck in his pocket. He had a big smile on his face, because he knew that even doing this, he was continuing to support his family, which is what a true man cares about, not what he is wearing or whether currently he is receiving what he thinks he should."

Different kinds of people. I know which kind I'm glad I had as an example, growing up.

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