Kat Sadler

So here’s a quick update on my first week working full time.

I am tired. I am really, really tired. I have friends in the real world who talk about how tired they are but I sort of only half believed them, thinking that a full time job can only be so draining. Is a 9-5 job really that tiring?

YES.

I get up at about 6am because I’m too tired to work out how the trains function to get to work. I just don’t know which one I need to take. Time is really hard to tell. My brain is to time as what Dali is to clocks; all melty and fucked up. Often, when I think about time, I feel like I’m still in year six as little ten year old me, equipped buckteeth like grapple hooks, desperately fumbling around for a remote foothold of comprehension. A frustrated tutor looming over me whilst a little bit of pee runs down my leg as I gaze blankly at the page, a melty mushy mess of numbers slowly rotating, mocking. Even time’s embarrassed about being time, coyly covering its face with its hands BE BRAVE TIME SHOW US WHO YOU ARE.

Anyway, so I end up several hours early for work. Obviously I don’t go in early like a fucking nark (I’m not a keen pleb, get a grip) so I’m in Starbucks, every morning, when it opens, ordering a full fat latte.

Also, things have gone downhill with Jennifer and Vince. They moved in together a few months ago when things were getting pretty serious. They were still quite cautious about the prospect, tentatively rubbing along together. But now they’ve begun to suffocate each other, and they’re desperately trying to push the other one out. There’s a part of me that feels trapped in the middle, that can’t breathe. Jennifer’s even thinking about moving back in with her parents, to get a healthy distance. Is there such thing as couples counselling for thighs?

No, I’m only kidding, my body has never looked better, spackled with reptile-like scales and white confetti cellulite, like an internal piñata exploded inside me, in celebration of the stress carnival I have every morning. My jeans barely aid in constricting even the suggestion of a leg-like shape, like little conjoined overstuffed cocktail sausages. My legs look like two desperate snakes, eating parallel swollen cacti, slowly dragging their engorged carcasses into work.

I’m thinking about linking this blog to my Tinder profile.

I think that if I were to die right now, they would be able to tell how much weight I’ve gained through the curvature of my belly button piercing; slowly bending under the pressure of my stomach, being forced out of my body and over my jeans. If that doesn’t make sense, its because I don’t know how belly button piercings work- I just know its infected.

My skin is really great at the moment too, kindly adopting the texture of all the muffins I’m eating.

(Sugar packets for scale)

It’s shit. Everything is absolute shit. I’m not even funny anymore, really, I’m just annoying. Annoying with a big stupid face and a silly voice and a tubby tummy and a unibrow because I cant even afford the £5 to get them threaded by a woman in Nike Airmax.

HOW CAN SHE AFFORD AIRMAX SHE PLUCKS HUMAN HAIRS FROM A FACE FOR A LIVING

Anyway, if I’ve gained anything aside from weight this week, it’s an immense respect for people who work in retail. The general human population has a profound absence of this. I get people come up to me and ask stuff like:

“Hi can you help me find a book? I don’t know the author. Or the name of the book. But I just know its got like a bunny that fights crime maybe or is it a goat I’m really not sure”

And I have to be like yeah, of course, let me just flip through the internal rolodex inside my brain to the section on small mammals, then to the employed civil service sector, and then combine the two to find the subsection about vigilante rabbits and maybe look in the kids section for twenty minutes before you suggest that it might have actually been Claude the Movie Star Dog.

I had one very small little girl come up to my till with her father to buy a miniature pony figurine (£5.96). She didn’t say ‘please’ when she handed it to me, and to be honest I wasn’t too fussed on the matter, but her father was furious and made me put the horse back. The little girl then threw the biggest tantrum I have ever seen in the store, at ME, screaming. I can’t describe it without getting a bit shaky but it was almost exactly like that moment in American Beauty when the mother tries to sell the house and then screams because she doesn’t like the blinds or something. But this little girl was filled with a real, crushing, trauma-fuelled suburban existential hysteria, because of me.

I would have fucking bought that pony right there if I could have done to make her stop; other employees are looking at me like I’ve just kicked a six year old girl in the vagina. But that pony is the same price as a pair of well-shaped eyebrows. Her father drags her out, and then returns to the shop ten minutes later with the little girl, in his arms, snot and tears streaming down her face. Holds her up so she’s face to face with me and she squeaks out a sorry. I tried to smile at her, but it was very difficult to, considering I had just spent the last ten minutes in the employee toilets, hysterically crying that I had ruined a little girl’s life and I am probably going to be a terrible mother and it’s probably because I’m stupid and fat and I can’t tell the time and I lied earlier and it was more like year nine.

In a job interview I had last week I actually used the phrase “I’m used to rejection” and I think it’s really working out well for me so far.