``Best job I ever had -- working my way up, meeting people, listening to stories...''
-- Dignan (Owen Wilson), musing on his job with the Lawn Rangers, in ``Bottle Rocket''

Part of vacationing with my family every year is the incessant trips to the grocery store. It's close by but not within walking distance. Close enough that no one cares enough to doublecheck they got everything the first time. Someone goes every day and this time around, that person always seemed to be me. To the point that one day I refused to go back a third time, lest I risk having the store manager call the police.

I was especially sensitive about being conspicuous because the town was empty post-Hurricane Dennis, thrpwing the ratio of grocery store employees to consumers out of whack. When I went to the deli, I had three people working on my order, which constituted some turkey and some cheese.

The sight of cashiers standing patiently out in the open, coaxing people into their lanes, took me back to my days as a cashier during one summer in high school, when I donned the apron at Randall's in Houston.

The closest one to my house was dubbed Randall's Flagship, so named because it featured slightly higher-end items and a decor (higher grade linoleum floors?) than your run of the mill Randall's found in other neighborhoods. The only noticeable difference it made to me was that the uniform, instead of being the typical green apron and khakis, was black pants, long-sleeved white shirt and bow tie and a pin-striped apron. Yep, pin stripes.

I'd desperately wanted to be a bagger, mainly, OK, solely because you got tips as a bagger. This was before most grocery stores banned the practice, hanging giant signs that said ``Helping you with your bags is OUR PLEASURE AND OUR STAFF AREN'T ALLOWED TO ACCEPT GRATUITIES.'' I feel bad when I read those signs for the poor baggers enduring the summer heat. Is it really their pleasure?

I was crestfallen when the store manager told me there were no bagging openings but he'd be willing to hire me as a cashier. With little desire to go to another store or look for another job, I accepted. I went through the requisite training at a store miles from my house, doing my best to memorize produce codes and learning how the cash register worked.

The work itself was just this side of soul-crushing, but at least it was air conditioned (though I still coveted the baggers' jobs, their aprons brimming over with singles; sure they made less than me in base salary, but that didn't matter. The idea of real money in your pocket, the instant gratification every 10 minutes or so was incredibly attractive to a 16-year-old). I bought a pair of ugly, comfortable shoes and got used to being on my feet and smiling for 8 to 10 hours at a time.

Your first real job is designed to scare the shit out of you and make you respect a different kind of authority that doesn't have any sort of vested interest in you. Unlike your parents, who are legally obligated to feed, clothe and protect you, and your teachers, who are paid to watch you and keep you in line, your employer is bound only to not mistreat you and can dismiss you when you screw up. And even if that's unlikely, it's there, and at least for me, that fact was motivating.

The three months of work there, plus my failed attempt to work a few weekends once school started in order to maintain my ``seniority'' for the following summer, was largely uneventful and what remains are a handful of fleeting memories. I remember wanting to get on the same shifts as the couple of pretty girls who were working for the summer, too. I remember being reprimanded because my scan rate wasn't fast enough after a month.

And I remember turning a deep shade of crimson when I'd hear my mother's voice as she stood in line waiting for me to ring her up.

It's a truism that any sort of service job embeds an empathy for others in such a position that hopefully never sinks too far from the surface. So while it's not really the best job I ever had (in fact, it's probably barely top 5, and only because I haven't had many more than that), it may have been the best for me.

I know I'm getting in shape when I start feeling like I'm going to throw up. This is a life-long problem, or at least dates back to my teen-age years, when I began running cross country and left the contents of my stomach along many a race course across Texas. I was reminded of the tendency this morning near the end of a harder-than-normal run when a wave of nausea hit me during the last mile.

It is, perhaps, karma. I quit freshman football after two weeks in high school, after suffering through two-a-days, earning the scorn of my classmates who called me nasty things to my face, and I'm sure worse things behind my back in the wake of the fateful Houston afternoon that I trudged off the field and turned in my pads. I'd been assigned to play offensive line and flat-out hated it. I wasn't cut out for either the size requirement or the mentality it takes to focus solely on running into someone and pushing one way or another depending on the play. It wasn't for me. I knew it. The coaches probably knew it. I hated it. I quit.

That weekend, I went out and got some running shoes, a cheap pair of Reeboks, since my parents knew I had an expensive pair of football cleats sitting in the back of my closet and refused to pony up the bucks for a nice pair of Nikes or Asics.

I showed up the following Monday for cross country practice, having cleared the way with the coach, a priest who served as a freshman theology teacher and drama club moderator as well. He liked to jog, so they gave him this gig as well. The vow of obedience at work.
Fr. Wahl was a scrawny aging hippie priest who addressed us in a singsong voice and for me, was the perfect antidote to the hard-ass football coaches in their sport shorts and whistles who relished in galvanizing the testosterone surging erratically through our 14-year-old bodies, provoking skirmishes among the team in the name of making us ``fooball'' players. This was, after all, Texas High School Football -- even the parochial schools weren't immune.

Cross-country on the other hand was cerebral to the point of geeky, attracting an awkward band of us that I soon fell easily into. Father Wahl would post a schedule for the week and largely leave us alone, sending us out on training runs as a group, occasionally overseeing a track workout. The few pounds I managed to put on for football melted away during the first several weeks and I fell into the rhythm of the training. I found I could anything and everything as running enhanced my already swift teen-age metabolism.

There was one problem: I have a notoriously weak stomach. Distance running is taxing on the body -- despite what my former football teammates would tell you -- and demanded that we push ourselves well beyond normal exertion. For some people, that means their legs or sides cramp painfully. For me, it meant barfing.

It was really only a good race if I threw up since I knew that I then, quite literally, left it all on the course. I often threw up on the verge of the final sprint, as I dug deep for that last bit of energy and came up with whatever was left in my stomach from the night before. I vividly remember puking on myself gliding down to the finish of a race, glancing over to see a crush from a nearby girl's school. Her cheers turned quickly to disgust. What could I do?

During the Peachtree Road Race in 1991, I ran my fastest time ever, and that included and extra 45 seconds or so to step off the course at the top of the biggest hill and barf in an oversized planter.

So when I approached my house the other morning, glistening with sweat, the sun was just coming up and my stomach churned ever so slightly. It was a marvelous feeling.

It's not nice to laugh at your children. I know that. Yet I do. Often. After all, isn't this part of the reason we have them? Haven't entire cottage industries been created on their poor little backs as we chuckle at their ``Don't they say the darndest things?'' ways?
My middle son, W, is the current leading provider of unintentional comedy in our house. He is an extremely smart young man at the ripe old age of 2, speaking in complete sentences and expressing himself eloquently. There's only one problem: His `L's'.
He's more or less unable to use the `L' sound and substitutes a `Y' sound. This is, frankly, really funny, owing largely to his aforementioned command of the language. `I want to sit on your lap' becomes `I want to sit on you yap.' I'm sorry. That's funny.
The other day he was singing a song he learned in chapel at his (obviously Christian) preschool/day care. ``Happy happy happy are people whose God is the Yurd.'' That would be `Lord,' not a new Eastern-sounding pagan god they're teaching him about.
But the instance that sends us into adjoining rooms to laugh quietly out of earshot is when he decides it's time to relieve himself, or `go No. 2' in the parlance of his five-year-old brother. W, usually grabbing onto a chair leg or table top to steady himself, his face going slightly crimson with the effort, catches your eye, and scolds: `DON'T. YOOK. AT. ME.'
It's easy, and necessary, to look away.

There is a certain pleasure, and a little horror, in succumbing, which is just what I did yesterday when I swiped my credit card for my own iPod Mini. I'd resisted mightily -- as much as one can while surreptitiously searching eBay for good deals on used models -- clingingly pathetically to my two-year old iRiver MP3 player that had devolved into playing 13 songs. The same 13 songs, with no hope of ever changing them out.
I opted out of the easy, antiseptic online purchase and drove to the Apple Store at the mall. It was everything I expected -- an orgy of minimalism with black t-shirted hipters with headsets buzzing about, stroking their just-scraggly-enough facial hair and requisite one piercing. The customers at noon on a Thursday proved Apple is hitting a chord, as older folks mingled with professionals, teen-agers and soccer moms, jostling for a chance to play with iMacs and iPods.
I'd researched what I wanted online and gone so far as to personalize my mini before realizing I could get the same thing, sans laser-engraving, by going to the store. And I wouldn't have to wait five days.
Finding what I wanted was easy and I picked up the armband I wanted and stood in line. Of the four ``registers'' (souped-up Macs, natch), one was occupied by a hipster cashier who was helping a customer who apparently needed extensive documentation to complete the purchase. I was alone in line, at the end of an airport security-like maze to keep the peace when the store was more crowded.
Black t-shirts milled about, sometimes helping a customer, but mostly congregating in small groups with one another. Occasionally one would glance my way, I would force eye contact and they would look away and pretend to be busy. Could they tell I was reluctantly joining their cult? Could they sense the PC at home on our desk?
Finally, someone ambled over to the far register/Mac and waved me over. After I put up no fight over buying another accessory, a wall charger, I was done. And I owned a Mac for the first time in my adult life. I am forever changed. NEXT: Wherein our hero shamelessly embraces the iPod and makes crazy statements about joining the cult.

Yeah, nothing like letting a few months pass between posts. I've spent too much time reading other folks' blogs and not enough actually writing. The whole job thing gets in the way. Bummer. In the coming days, I'm hoping to throw up - phrasing intended - some thoughts about recent books I've read. I recently finished `Blindness' by Jose Saramago and am in the middle of `The Human Stain' by Philip Roth.

For the unitiated, a sinecure is a job that pays a great deal while demanding very little. I first learned of the term - WARNING: obnoxious anecdote coming - while strolling through Paris with my friends B and K. We'd devised a silly game whereby we tried to work in obscure words and phrases into our conversation, a harmless way to pass the time as we worked our way through Paris and its outskirts. 'Sinecure' was one of the words (for the record, 'Peruvian students' was another one, an homage to our seedy hotel's management. The hotel, notably, had been forced to white one of its two stars out at some point before our arrival.

Sinecure then became the title for our working dream publication, which we imagined would be, as every wannabe magazine editor/publisher does, 'a magazine for people like us.' Who we were at the time was slightly different than who we are now (this was 1998). At the time, B and I were in the midst of working for nascent dot-coms, imagining that our stock options would make us comfortable, if not wealthy (though we held out hope for the latter). Flush with the youthful egotism - OK, arrogance - of the time, we imagined a world that our ilk ruled, and that vision came to pass shortly after that, if only for a little while.

Our idea for Sinecure then was as an online publication that would showcase movie reviews, book reviews, some travel writing, all geared toward our demographic. or what we imagined it to be: an upwardly mobile, youthful and adventurous group that had stumbled into an appreciation of the good life well before our time.

That era has given way to a more realistic time. Gone are our jobs at thriving, sky's-the-limit high-tech companies. As several friends have noted, many in our loosely defined generation are waiting it out, biding our time in less fulfilling gigs and clinging to the hope that work can again be close to as fun and inspiring as it was for that one shining moment (with apologies to the NCAA basketball tournament).

Today's Sinecure, then, strives to be a repository for observations that may represent the clinging and the biding. Or whatever. We'll see where it takes us.

This is a test of the Sinecure blog...