First Things First

"I wouldn't have the balls to cross him," the old man was saying to me.

"Why's that?" I asked.

"The Red family...has different methods of collection than the federal government," he said.

I'm glad I have the name backing me, but I'm glad I'm not that kind of Red. Really the only kind of red I am right now is the sunburned kind. Even the backs of my hands are scorched.

I'm finding that the rule of thumb for construction work is that anything painful that can or will happen to you will involve your dominant hand. First day, burned, second day, palm is sliced open, third day, impact gash on the burn from a saw cord, fourth day I notice the random cuts and bleeding bits I didn't even notice getting.

It's kind of nice.

The skin on my fingertips has been tearing and breaking as it gets used to all the friction and rough surfaces. It's one of those things that goes both ways. When you shake a man's hand, if yours are smooth you kind of feel like a pansy; on the other hand when you run your thumb back a girl's cheek, you sure as hell don't want it to feel like sandpaper.

Vatev, though. It's a job and I'm glad to have one again, I just wish I knew more of what I was doing so I could be more useful. The boss man wants me to know what I'm doing to make things go faster, but he wants things to go faster so he doesn't take the time to teach me what the hell I'm doing.

I'm all for self learning, but it's kind of a different scenario having someone hand you a book and telling you to read, and someone handing you an electric saw you've never touched before and saying, "Cut those even," and walking away.

The hardest part is just sucking it up and not being a wuss about stuff. My momdroid falls off a ladder and breaks her spine, no big deal, I have to just climb up and not think about it. I've seen my dadbot come home missing a fingernail he had that morning so many times I can't count them all. Suck it up. I just plain don't trust nail guns, but too bad.

It probably wouldn't be so bad if my parents hadn't been total mindfuckers when I was a kid. There's a pit of rocks around the foundation of the house that's filled later on, but before that it can be a drop of several feet between dirt and cement with metal bits sticking out of it. The drop is called an overdig. My point being when I was little rather than my father saying, "Hey, keep your distance from that pit because you could fall and get hurt really really bad," he'd say shit like, "Don't fall in there because if you do there's no way to get you out and we'd just have to bury you."

His way was probably more effective in keeping me the hell away from the overdig, but it's not exactly reinforcing when I actually do need to lean into it or jump over it and something in the back of my mind is telling me I'm doing something very, very wrong.

Eh. Suck it up.

I feel like I've done a whole lot of nothing so far, and that's pretty accurate. So far I've just cut stuff, nailed stuff, moved stuff, and cleaned up stuff.

Which at a glance seems to encompass construction as a whole. Really the things I'm doing they can do faster without me, which they do now and then, leaving me standing there looking about as useless as I feel.

I know that as I go on and learn more I'll become faster, more efficient, more universally useful. Even knowing what they're talking about will help (it took me quite a while to figure out that what they call a 'sawzall' is what I've always known to be a 'jigsaw').

It doesn't help that with the progress you're doing something almost totally different every day, but at least I can be glad for the bits and pieces that are actually repetitious.

Someone asked why I wasn't in school, and my uncle said, "He fucked up and didn't pay his tuition on time or something." I took that over, "My PO has to see about letting me off early for good behaviour before I can clear the embassy."

I really need my life in order.

First things first, though, it's time to get my first and last night of good sleep in a long time.