For a couple weeks I worked 4 pm to 4 am, split between two factories. I got to know my coworkers, the routine, and some Spanish. It was amazing. My sleep cycle was completely screwed up, but I was making over a thousand dollars a week, so I didn't care. However, as the work at those warehouses wound down, I maintained my sleep cycle so I could continue to work night shifts, as I believed I'd be doing.
That means going to bed at about 6:30 a.m. and waking up at 2 or 3. Jump to yesterday, Saturday. My dad was leaving for a flight to Boston at 6:30 or something, and I went with him to the airport. So I went to bed at 7:30. At 8:37, my phone rang. I assumed it was my alarm to wake me up (at 2:00 in the afternoon or something)... when I saw the sky outside and the phone, I thought it had to be a mistake. But no. It was a regional supervisor saying someone had called in sick, and could I come to Zillah and fill in?
Of course, I couldn't say no--I needed the money, so I went to work, working a 13-hour shift on an hour of sleep. To summarize, it was long and boring and tiring and kinda sucked, for two reasons. First, is that this warehouse had the inspectors do the California crush samples, which essentially involves crushing a hundred and fifty pounds of cherries or so at each lot change... sounds easy, I'm sure, but each hour and a half or so I had to crawl around people, taking buckets, replacing them, then grinding the cherries, covering them with brown sugar syrup, then straining them to save the syrup, and disposing of the cherries. It took about an hour per lot, and really stained my hands (dark purple).
The second reason was this lot from hell--a lot of Oregon cherries with over 50% skin breaks. We had to keep dumping the boxes back in to be re-sorted and it took about an hour and a half to get the lot passable. So--take the worst part of our job--telling packing bosses that their fruit isn't good enough to ship, and that they have to dump it--then imagine doing that constantly for a couple hours. [shudder]. It would have been comical, if it weren't, you know, $30000 in cherries.
It made me think a lot about what truth is, and who's out there upholding it. Ultimately, I guess, we're the last stand. But...if we weren't? I mean, we go to class for three days then we start inspecting. But if we lie, if we make up every single sample and pass everything, no one will notice. If some inspector at the sale point notices that the cherries suck, they're simply not going to pass the cherries. Then the distributor will get pissed, but... I mean, how would they know if the damage was in transit? A cherry inspector can always just say that they reported the truth, and that damage surely must have occurred in transit. Bang. And truth goes out the window, and no one's the wiser.
Of course, this is specific, but applies everywhere. Who is out there, standing up for truth? I've always been a stickler for what's true, as people who know me know, but ... where are the safeguards? Is truth purely a matter of trust? that depends on what you're looking at. We trust our friends to tell us if something looks good or if we stink or something, but our friends are free to tell us something else. But I think a lot of people apparently haven't thought about how important truth is, and how fragile it is, and how we, individually, are the only people who can protect it. It might not seem to mean much if we lie to someone about how their clothing looks or how they acted on such and such night, but it's every bit as important as what a military advisor says to the president. I'm sorry, but truth is truth, and truth is not something which should have to be extracted from what people say or write. Write the truth, live the truth, speak the truth. How else is there to live? How can people live with themselves for lying? I mean, it just doesn't make sense to me. I'm sorry. The truth is not some article of clothing, not a piece of fabric to be dyed, styled, and worn. The truth is what our words should intend to convey. If they don't... what are we saying? In lying to anyone, we deny the very makeup of our universe. We are denying our reality to lie.
That might not make much sense. I'll elaborate. Ultimately, we have no control or say in truth. We are reporting something which is already present. If we are making judgments, we make them, and report them. Kindness and tact have nothing to do with it. If someone looks good, tell them. If they don't, tell them exactly how they look. Vague words are useless. Tell the truth. Report reality. That's all. Nothing will ever be above the truth or more important than acknowledging the world we live in, except perhaps a human life. But the majority of us will never have to deal with that, so just tell people the truth. Fuck pretense--who gives a shit if you telling your friend they don't look good hurts their feelings? They should know the truth. think about it. I mean, if you tell them they look good, who is benefiting? Are they? Are you? Are the people whose company they shall share? No one is! Seriously. I've had it with lying. If they don't like the truth, it's their problem. It's not like their friendship with you is contingent upon you not hurting their feelings, and if it is, you've got some shitty and shallow friends, and their problems are far larger than simply having friends--they're in denial of reality.
Hurgh.
Trumpet ... eh. Practicing daily isn't always best. I need to take a day off to let my embouchure recover again. Today I filtered my iTunes to only display Final Fantasy songs, then I just put it on shuffle, paused playback, and went song by song, and played the song on the trumpet without listening to it. It was good interval, sequencing, and trumpet practice.
I also played oboe at Mass today. It seemed to impress most people, which I was a little taken aback by, since I haven't played for a long time. Whatever. My oboe embouchure has no endurance, but most people won't notice that. I would like to redevelop it when I get a chance.
That's mostly it. There's more on my mind, but I think I'll write about it later... it's the whole thing about self-reliance and leaving Duke and possibly going somewhere cheap and leaving the dependence of my parents, but we'll get there after seeing how Duke's music is.
Night. (aaagh! my trumpet gets here on Tuesday!)
