Chapter 9: Chop Wood and Carry Water

ALICIA

There's an old Zen Buddhist expression about chopping wood and carrying water. Sometimes it's an expression about before enlightenment and after enlightenment, doing these things. Other times, it's a longer story about a young monk complaining to the abbot. The point is three things:

1. That although it appears nothing has changed outside, everything is different now on the inside. This was certainly true, even if I hadn't achieved enlightenment. I couldn't turn back these experiences or deny them.

2. To appreciate miracles in the ordinariness of life. Everything seemed normal, much like Fox seemed on the surface like any other girl, but this all was very strange. Yet the greatest blessing to me was peace and quiet.

3. That life goes on, regardless of enlightenment. Learning about Fox did help me learn some spiritual powers, but it didn't make me richer, happier, or better adjusted. If anything, life sometimes was harder because I now had experienced a world beyond the normal one.

And so, I moved back home. I got a job at the local library as a woman. And I kept myself busy, but I found that things were not normal there either because the way I perceived things wasn't the same anymore. I made up with my parents, agreeing to stay with them for room and board in exchange for help them out around the place. I rejoined my church as a different person. And although I tended to hang around the same friends, the way that I lived now was different. I had been changed by my life in the city.

Not just that. There's this theory that each language represents a way of looking at the world. That theory was in an awesome movie known as Arrival, which was actually more satisfying on the second water than the first, as I suddenly understood that the main movie was actually in the past, and the character was stuck in a sort of prophetic time loop, with the beginning and end in the future. This makes the film extra weird because it appears that she is depressed about a daughter, but that hasn't happened yet. So when I wrote about a language back in my days of inventing things, I created an open-ended pictographic language where words are symbols, and symbols can mean different things to different people based on their memories. The next page shows how this sort of thing works. There was also a syllabic method of using this language, but I don't think I want to bore people with all of that. The point is that the same symbol could mean "elm/maple/oak/tree/nature/forest" or any other related concept. Likewise, a symbol like could mean anything from darkness to mist to a single cloud or many clouds, or even used in science to represent gas when Greek symbols had been recycled so much that they were difficult tell whether you meant delta for change, Laplace, as a discriminant in polynomial, etc.

I also imagined this as some sort of benefit to cryptography, as people writing codes could decide between two people what individual letters meant, and assign syllables to these letters to make a cypher or something. But most important to me was the way this language taught you to think, as everything in the natural (and man-made) world as a symbol. For example, a girl named Sarah Fox wasn't just named Sarah Fox because Fox was a family name and they liked the name Sarah, but because she and all of her family were part of a fox clan, and the name Sarah meant "princess" so she was a princess of the fox clan. Or a random book or movie that I picked up from the library and gave to my friend Momo to check out for me might have some amazing symbolic meaning to her, while to me it was just a movie. Or vice versa. Some symbols are only of value to those who want them in the first place.

I had fun working at the library, but eventually the manager let me go. It all started when the first manager (though technically the term is librarian, as all of us workers are actually library assistants working at the circulation desk) decided to finally retire. After that, things got more intense...

Well, it all started when we had to work without a librarian for a few months or whatever. We had to make decisions on our own, and often had to figure out things ourself. Then the next manager came, and the first thing she said was that she wanted me to think of myself as though I was manager, and give any suggestions I thought were good. Liar. Had I been told otherwise, I would have been perfectly fine keeping my suggestions to myself. Instead, it seemed like the more ideas I had, the more my schedule seemed either too intense leaving me prone to mistakes. I actually felt like I was getting set up like Uriah in the Bible.

In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it with Uriah. In it he wrote, “Put Uriah out in front where the fighting is fiercest. Then withdraw from him so he will be struck down and die.” So while Joab had the city under siege, he put Uriah at a place where he knew the strongest defenders were. When the men of the city came out and fought against Joab, some of the men in David’s army fell; moreover, Uriah the Hittite died.

Whenever it was my shift, before with the first manager, there would typically be two people on duty. This was standard practice so that multiple tasks could be done, and that people weren't assigned things above their pay grade.

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But after this, the other workers would be sent to do projects, while I had to watch the desk alone. I would get hit with long stretches of customers, and sometimes checking items in or out, the scanner would malfunction. I was constantly second-guessing myself, because a failed check-out meant items could be removed from the library and got lost, while a failed check-in meant customers complained of fines. Worse, sometimes we had internet down. I dutifully recorded check-ins and check-outs, but for all I knew, someone after me simply chucked the sheet in the trash, not understanding what to make of it. Stupid volunteers.

And I was indeed given things that I have never dealt with myself. When I asked about it, she was verbally abusive, "It's two years and you don't know how to do this?" No, I don't. Another worker, we'll call her Melissa, normally handles this. Or Sylvia. Or Whatever. But if you want to teach me how, I'm okay learning. Instead she used it as an excuse to further cut my hours, even though I was trying my hardest to get these back.

The final straw was two things. We had a computer that was hooked to display announcements on a TV. We were supposed to turn it on every day, yet it demanded a powerpoint presentation loop (very distracting) and didn't even bother to display the time. So while I was working with a library accountant who seemed bad at her job, I decided to try to get this system to work better. I tried to animate the lock screen (better idea) but spent much of the five or so hours at work to no avail. Finally, I managed to figure out how to make the background change. "Hey, that's cool! You should hide the tiles too," she suggested. As they say, "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." She didn't bother to tell her superiors that she hadn't bothered to talk me out of this brilliant idea of mine, and that she had given me the bright idea to try to hide the icons. As a result, they couldn't find anything, even though I did get the background to animate. They called the computer tech up because they didn't know where the powerpoint was, and didn't bother to read my directions that said that the system now ran via timed background changes. You could maybe call me up, and ask me? But the very last thing was from the manager herself. She told me that there was a rule that library memos must be typed (there was no such rule, I checked the other memos, they were everything from typed to handwritten). So she had be go over and retype this note, while she abused me about my "unintelligible handwriting." Once I did, she sends an email to everyone, taking credit for my work. That's fine, but what isn't fine is that on top of that my hours had been cut. I complained to anyone who would listen, which was basically the inverse of "You can't fire me, I quit!" You can't make me quit, but I will make you fire me. And so she did.

MOMO

I met Alicia at the library while I was working there. She was sweet and oddly interesting, I guess. She'd definitely traveled and seen more of the world than I have, plus she seemed good with computers, also liked anime/manga, and was also a storyteller and wrote all sorts of things. It was also nice to talk to another person in the LGBT spectrum at a time when I was struggling with being bisexual and/or aromantic. Though, she wanting me to go out on a date with her, she wasn't really relationship material and I wasn't all that interested in that kinda romance. I did want to be her friend though, I guess.

I suppose I had met her when she went by Emett at one time, but she was kinda introverted when she identified as a guy. Mostly he just stuck to shelving books and didn't really talk to anyone. It was only after Emett became Alicia that she seemed to come out of her shell a bit.

I dressed casually to work, but she always tried to look fancy, as though it was a point of pride to look like a woman. I could tell she cared about this, as she put on light makeup and stayed away from the drag look, while at the same time being meticulous to not let even one stray bit of facial hair be visible through her make up. She was usually wearing clothing straight from a department store while other library workers like me were perfectly fine in tee shirts or simple blouses. Alicia would wear a patterned dress, leggings, and heels or a blouse with skirt combination. She just always seemed put together, I guess.

Over time, though, I noticed a change. While we usually worked together and I dropped her off at her house (she lived in the opposite direction, but both of us lived in town) after chatting at work and helping customers, we stopped being scheduled for the same shift, and so we wouldn't talk with each other as much. When I did see her, her hair seemed more frizzy and she looked tired. What was going on? Was everything okay with her?

ALICIA

But now, I'm actually thankful for this. I was able to set up my own schedule when I was self-employed. I worked as a computer tutor, until finally the whole COVID hysteria came. One week, one lady was leaving for Florida, and I was really pushing myself even though I had a bad cold. The other one let me reschedule, but then rescheduled herself at about 2am. I could only get there at Saturday, when I'd come over on Friday, come back, and found that she wasn't there. It was a mess, and after that one last job, I didn't hear from either of them. I was glad I was freelance though. I really really wouldn't have wanted to work at the library during COVID, and put up with forced masking. I dunno how anyone there put up with this, to be honest. As it was, it became hard to advertise my business so I got frustrated with the whole thing.

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