...but my feet sure do hurt.
Yesterday marked my week anniversary of starting my new job at a shoe store in the mall. This is my first time working retail, and let me tell you, it is a different experience.
I was really lucky to get this job, seeing as how I have no experience in retail at all. I am even luckier because my manager is a really great guy who genuinely cares about what he's doing, loves his job, and is concerned about his employees. Plus he has really cute kids and his wife is adorable. They're from Thailand, actually, though he's Chinese and they've all been in the States for awhile now. I'm also lucky because I actually enjoy doing what I do -- helping people find shoes that fit their needs -- most of the time. It's just when I've been there for five hours, listening to the same CD of Brittany Spears, Shakira,*Nsync, and the Backstreet Boys (which is better than the alternatives, believe me) for the fifth time, standing up the whole time, and no one's come in the store in at least an hour that I start wishing I had a little more interesting job. Or when I hobble home on aching feet and finally collapse on my bed and wonder if $8.50/hour can possibly be worth it.
But, as I said, there are worse ways to put yourself through college. I try not to think about the job I had freshman year, before I left for the mission -- student circulation aide at the Naval Academy's library. It was easy, it was 15 hours a week, and it paid $3.50/hour more. Not to mention it was within walking distance and I didn't have to stress out over the unreliability of the public transportation. And I never had Brittany Spears stuck in my head.
Then again, maybe the Lord doesn't want me to take the easy road. I'm certainly learning things I wouldn't have learned at the library, and I can't help but think of Calvin's dad (in the comic strip Calvin & Hobbs) saying, a little superciliously, "It builds character." In this case I think it is. And who knows, maybe three years down the road I'll look back and see clearly that this was better for me and served some greater purpose in helping me develop into who I need to be.
But my feet really do hurt.
Here are a few shots of one of my latest pots from my class. My efforts at pot-throwing (and by this I mean the creative kind of throwing, not the destructive kind of throwing; the difference being that your mom is less angry about you doing the first kind in the house than the second) are improving, I think. This bowl is about the tenth thing I've thrown on the wheel, and I can already see my progress in getting the clay centered better, as well as forming a more centered hole. Centering is the process by which you move the clay from where you slapped it down on the wheel, uneven and lumpy, to the exact center of the wheel. The object of centering is to achieve uniformity in the clay, thus producing a uniformly round pot. It looks so easy when someone experienced does it, but this is the fourth week of my class and there are some who still struggle with it.
Similarly, opening the hole in the exact center of the clay is important, too. If you haven't, you will still have an off-center pot, despite the careful centering of the clay you did just previously. 
