First off, I ain’t no Jean Val Jean. I walked out of the grocery store with a bag of rolls clutched in my left hand, along with my wallet, and the stuff I bought and paid for in my right. I got to my car, put everything down and thought, “Fuck, why are these rolls in my left hand?”

Walked back in the store and paid for them. The check out chick was all chipper with a “Forget something?” My retort was something to the effect of nope, I stole these and she said I could make a run for it. All kind of dumbly amusing.

The sad part was when I was in my car trying to decide whether to walk back in or not. I had to remind myself that since I wasn’t literally starving for a loaf of bread the non-douche, positive karma thang would be paying. Wonder what Jesus would have done over some $1.79 Kaisers?

Secondly, sometimes when I’m driving I’m most overcome by having left the familiar behind by 3,000 miles or so. Yesterday, I was driving before sunset and there were pink-toned mountains filling the background through my windshield with the whole soundtrack laden “Sunk sinking in the west” reflections and light and cinematic cliche all over the fucking place. Then, I have to remind myself it’s real.

I grew up at sea level with no mountain vistas, and the opposite scenery always kinds of jams my senses and causes me to take a breath.

Lastly, in the same vein, sort of, I keep meaning to talk about the animals. Since driving cross country, I’ve seen black and red squirrels in addition to the gray ones I know from New England. The squirrels here seem to come out of holes in the ground, which I never saw back home. Somewhere there’s a truly fucking lame, uninspired, timeworn observational comedy reference about diversity that I could haul on stage and try out. “You know, dude, the black squirrels are all like badass and the red ones just go ‘How.'”

I also want to write about the single coolest wildlife moment of my life, when M. and I were driving at dusk up in the country outside of Yosemite. We had just switched to my driving, because his eyes were tired and having a hard time with the dusky shadows. As we turned off the main road, there was a huge blur of tawny brown rising from the high grass in the ditch, swooping across the car, close enough that I really thought we would collide. As it rose up in front of the glass of the windshield, catching some of the light from the headlights, both M. and I gasped as we saw clearly a big owl weighted down with some fresh killed rodent in its talons.

On that same day, we had much earlier stopped for a wild turkey or two standing in the road.

The nature girl in me is also in overdrive when I see lizards scampering from sun to cool shadow. I’m living in a place that has lizards.

(Actually, on the day I went on my job interview, I was early and wasted time watching two lizards playing on a log. I thought at the time that it would be cool to work at a place where you could watch rustic lizard play right in the scenic parking lot. Today, I went walking around the grounds and figured out where the community garden area is and where some of the walking paths go and saw a lizard.)

Finally, this job just feels different, but that just makes me crazy after all of the negative reinforcement, horrible conditioning of the last one. Like the president and vice president came by my desk today, together, and were clowning around. Since my boss was out of town, the president declared he was taking over our group and giving us all new names.

At my former place of employ, the whole exchange would have been designed to strike fear into me, the unwitting pawn, and as they goofed around, thousands of sycophantic fingers would have been typing emails to try to uncover what game was afoot and where their advantage would lie.

I, a babe in this new western land, am at a complete loss as to how to behave with these folk.

Even today, someone basically took me aside to let me know that it was OK to be annoyed with the annoying person.

Whatever rules govern these office politics, my old book doesn’t seem to apply. (Which, I guess, is good for me, because I quite sucked at the old game.)