I had a fortune cookie yesterday. The fortune said: "Don't let unexpected situations "throw" you." NEVER BEFORE HAS A FORTUNE COOKIE BEEN SO ACCURATE. Because not only was most of my work that morning along those lines (though it could have been worse-- they were expecting a bomb drop on us Monday and that didn't happen yet), I came back from lunch to find out that oh, btw, my CC shift has been switched.

Let me rephrase that: I got an e-mail sending out the CC volunteer schedule for the summer, saying that I had been switched to Mondays. No explanation, no giving me a heads-up ahead of time why I got the boot and everyone else in my group did not, NOTHING. Even worse, that meant I was due to start shifts TONIGHT. With almost no notice. And for fuck's sake, if I'm supposed to bring food, NOTICE WOULD HAVE BEEN GOOD, THANKS. They said they wouldn't penalize the Monday volunteers if they missed the night--well, gee, I should hope so. I wrote them e-mail saying that I would be late, since now I had to go home, feed the fish I'm fish-sitting, scrounge for whatever portable food I can find around the house, and get the car so I can get myself home since I won't have Merry around to give me a ride. (Thank god for having a car. I love having the power to get my own ass home quickly.)

I know that at an organization that has about 70-80% turnover every year, shit happens during the transition period (which summer is--all the new managers start then). I think only one manager is continuing on and only some of the new ones were volunteers before this year. I know that the management standards have kind of devolved in how strict they used to be about certain aspects of volunteering. For example, they've gone from "Don't worry about food the first night, the manager will buy you all pizza and tell you the potluck schedule for the future then" to "Oh, btdubs, can you bring food?" e-mails sent later and later towards your volunteer night (going from giving you a few days' notice to sending them very last minute, like at 3 p.m. when you're supposed to be there at 5), to the current shitty "you're just supposed to know that you're supposed to bring some kind of food, we're not going to tell you, we're just going to arrive and then wonder what we're all going to eat." Which is kinda ridiculous. Either set an expectation or not, but give some damn notice, eh? I know it's all student managers and OMG STUDENT STUFF happens, but this is the start of the quarter (or summer school in this case), not finals week.

But seriously, if you're going to surprise move people's shifts around, MORE NOTICE THAN THAT WOULD BE NICE. The head managers weren't there by the time I finally got there--I really like those people, but I would have been saying something not terribly nice had they been there because this ain't cool. And that's not even factoring in my own personal annoyance because if Merry and I aren't on the same shift, we just flat out don't see each other due to her husband drama going on all the time. (Merry is also unhappy about this and pondering quitting for the summer at this point.) I'd like to know why the hell I got booted out when no one else did. Or just what the hell went on in general.

I did ask the manager training the new manager what happened and all she said was that another manager (who I like, but is TERRIBLE at scheduling--see last summer when I thought I was teaching class and then oops, wasn't--and then when I was teaching, confused everyone who signed up because they thought they were taking another class) fucked up. I'm wondering why it fell to him rather than the usual person...sigh.

I can see a few benefits to having to switch nights--well, mostly that I'm not going to have to worry about doing makeup time around the 4th of July after all like I would have had to otherwise. And technically I haven't booked anything on that night YET, though I've been considering booking the time for something else--which I guess now could be moved to Thursdays like the other party preferred, hah. It also won't interfere with my hanging out with L when she's coming into town midweek in August. So there's that.

My new shift is what I'd call a sausagefest, 'cause I'm the only girl on it. That doesn't happen all that frequently around here. I don't know the other dude super well or the new manager dude at all yet, but the third dude is one I've been fairly chatty with over the years, so I'm pleased to be on with him and vice versa. He's the guy who literally earned every stamp and took classes in every thing offered at the CC--so as a parting gift (he moves out of the country after this summer) they gave him his own stamp with his name on it. This amused me greatly, though he said that once he moved on the joke would pass and nobody would know who he was. Which is a sad thing.

Anyway, it'll probably be okay, other than my annoyance at missing out on Merry, and that I REALLY HATE having my schedule moved around on me by surprise (this is why I can't work food service or retail, I'd kill a manager), and that I will be totally screwed up on what my schedule is every dang week again. Maybe I'll just have to go hang out at the CC on Thursday nights instead of cuddling up with Mr. Television after going to the gym. Especially since my DVD player is being uncooperative at the moment.

In other news, I am pondering signing up for a "figure out what you want to do with your life" class/program thing running here. It's based off of EFT. It's kind of a mix of psychology and meditation and acupressure, I guess...oh, just read the link, it explains better than I do. Is it a huckster thing? Maybe. I did discuss it thoroughly with my (admittedly hippie) shrink and she said, "No, that's a really good technique, I've seen it work on people, I really should take a class in it myself for my continuing education requirement" and then proceeded to go look at a lot of stuff on this while we were on the phone. So perhaps it is not all that huckster-y.

I've slightly dabbled in it before in the past. I did a free phone consult with someone online about the technique and I did it for a few months and enjoyed it at the time, but then as usual, I petered out on sticking with it. This go-round, I went to a class on the topic at Whole Earth Festival and got on the chick's mailing list. I originally had the impression that it was some kind of weekly drop-in gathering that she was wanting to start, but either she's changed it up or I'm mistaken because now it is a whole Program. Which lasts 3 months long and is 8 hours of meeting time, most sessions lasting 1.5-2 hours long. And half of them are probably going to be Saturday afternoons because those are the group sessions and that's when the most people are free. Which yeah, I can see the point, but having Saturday afternoons booked that frequently is gonna be incredibly awkward for me to do, oh, ANYTHING ELSE AT BLOODY ALL THIS SUMMER. Almost everything is only open or running on Saturdays here! That's prime time I'm wasting that means I can't do anything else that day! Especially when those will probably overlap with the Saturday nights I am going to ye olde theater in Oakland for season tickets.

So the timing commitment alone gives me some extreme pause. I'm not even gonna talk about the money aspect of it other than that also gives me extreme pause. Though my shrink pointed out that if you do the math, the cost isn't that bad for the amount if time spent (cheaper than therapy, har). I don't know about this on top of therapy + with car payment stuff coming up in August, though.

So I whined about it to my shrink for most of an hour and in the end, I still don't really have a conclusion. My shrink was all, "Well, it depends, are you going to stick with it and throw yourself into it and buy in or not?" Because I tend to flake on shit REALLY quickly, like within a week most of the time. I don't really do Daily Routine stuff very well, and if things ain't working miracles fast, I tend to lose interest and bail. (And I pointed out that one of my objections to taking medication is that if it doesn't work for six weeks, my odds of sticking with that are pretty much nil.) She said something like, "Well, if you know you'll lose interest in a week, plan for that by only doing short things." Good point. I think my shrink leans toward me doing it, but she concurred that I tend to be ah, hard to crack and have a hard time believing that anything will work and that I will be PISSED if I spend that much money and time and come out the same as I usually am anyway. The actual quote was "It's not that you're a hard nut to crack, you don't want to be cracked!" She said something about what does my intuition say and I said that's been on the fritz for everything but driving for over a year, so that's no help. I can't trust it anyway when it was totally wrong--she said "things change and energy changes," nothing stays the same and energy isn't reliable. True enough, but sucks anyway. She also said that I think everything out too much and immediately jump to the "it's not going to work because of XYZ" point, which is also true. On the other hand, if it was likely to work to get rid of my fear issues, why wouldn't I try it? She also said, "We need to figure out a way to break through for you, kid."

Fuck if I know what to do on this.

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