So, there's not a lot of jobs being offered this month. No idea why, but it's been a few days since there was even a hopeful entry position that then demanded degrees, experience and a solemn promise to help in the breeding of a superior race of low-level administrative drones.
Okay, maybe not the last one, but even McDondald's won't have me, on account that I don't have the German certification of not being a serial killer or a herpes-riddled prostitute. All other employers either demand experience or a degree, all homocidal maniacs and diseased streetwalkers welcome.
I've even been refused for a learning position because, I shit you not, my secondary school diploma wasn't German. Where did I apply? The city. I'm assuming they were ho-humming about bloody foreigners not wanting to learn when my application pinged into their inbox, followed by a flustered 'What does it mean, 'secondary education'? No, no, wait, it's not a German school, can't have that. Make it go away, quickly!'
J., as mentioned before (I think, slightly sleep-deprived from too much Pokémon), will hire me as studio slave next month, but I figured out today that there's only so much you can do in the studio.
Take today, for example. I was bored. Rather than chat endlessly with customers until I was politely asked to shut my piehole, I decided I'd be good. I'd be helpful. I'd do useful stuff.
Like re-arranging all the gels so the colors matched, rather than having to pick out pink from between the brown and purple and orange and missing the pot that was inbetween the blue. Then I lined up the TLC gels by color of box. The black boxes with their risky but pretty gels next to the silver ones with their relatively safe pretty gels. Then I checked all the gels of all the brands for foil left behind. It's not a total bother, it's just enormously messy if it's big chunks of metal keeping you out of the thing. Then I stuck tips on the pots without tips and colored them in. It turns out, we had half as much 'anthracite' gel as we thought: the second pot wasn't in the 'nail polish' variety, but the 'glimmer gel' one. Whoops.
I also cleaned S.'s sponges. She has two and had managed to cover them entirely in several colors of gel.
And the little lint-free rectangles used to wipe down nails with were running suspiciously low. S. was out, J. was out, Sis was fast running out, I hadn't had any since last week. The strange thing was, there had been four rolls of it lying around the studio when I checked the week before. There's at least 500 squares on a roll. They don't just disappear.
Turns out, they didn't.
In case you hadn't noticed, everyone in the studio has a mild case of kleptomania. Sis steals gels from her mom when she's running low, everyone envies S. her pink stamping polish, since it's the only pink that works, I. has bright yellow and neon colors in her own, personal, self-paid arsenal of gels that occasionally get borrowed without asking and no one takes it seriously when Sis puts her stamping plates under her desk. You just nab them at will.
The problem is, we're all aware of that. Sis and J. share the costs of buying gels, S. stamps in pink more than anyone else, I. has colors customers seldom ask for, but which look nice in contrast to others and the stamping plates always get returned to Sis, even if it's when I come in and put them back. It's a give-and-take situation where no one really minds.
Except for one colleague I've never met. I know she's supposedly nice and polite. She works evenings, sometimes alone. What I also know is that she is known to leave sinkfuls of dirty glasses to congeal over the weekend, does not bother to dust or sweep up the studio even if the dirt is lying finger-thick and uses gels from everyone who has them. Not just a little dab of gel here and there, mind you. Both J. and Sis frequently come into work asking each other if they've used their gels, since it's nearly empty again. S. has more than once had to retrieve either her or J.'s gels from this woman's shelves. I'm pretty sure the only reason I.'s and my gels are safe is because we use leftovers and finds from in storage. They rarely if ever get used on customers, so she has no use for our stuff.
Everyone seems annoyed, and I'm wondering why she's still employed.
Today, we spent two hours wondering how we were going to fill the wipe-shortage, until I vocalised this worry to Sis. Weren't there any left in the shelves? Nope, not even in the boxes near the reception desk. Well, no worries, Ms. Nightworker still had two packages in her shelf. Two packages. With two rolls of 500 rectangles in each. While she still had half a roll left, mind you. I'm starting to wonder if she's just spiteful. I liberated a package and made sure S. and J. had wipes. You know, since they, unlike others, did not have a week-long holiday this week and needed them to earn a living and other such whimsical things.
J. showed me how to clean up the pedicure room for her, which took up another whopping fifteen minutes of my time.
Then I released my inner kleptomaniac and nabbed the leftover twenty squares from S. and got cracking on making me some nails. I worked with some stamps, tried a triangular french tip with a hair-thin gold lining, all went well. What I really wanted to do, and did, was practices with the swirl tool and hair-thin brush, trying to get both thin and delicate, intricate details onto the nails.
Big loops are easiest with the brush. A swirl tool is a wonderful piece of equipment, but it's not suitable to draw smooth lines with. It's not like a pen that refills itself. You have to keep feeding it gel, drop by agonising drop, and lines that flow only work if they're thick. So, brush.
But if you want something like a tight spiral, the brush very much works against you.
I spent the better part of half an hour trying to figure this out. I couldn't use the brush without making a mess, I couldn't use the swirl tool to draw a flowing line.
What I could do, however, was break down the spiral into components, like I'd done to create Mario's face. First put out points where lines either cross or bend. Then connect those using a scallop pattern with a little swoosh at the end for flair. Finally, ad loops by going one way, then the next. If you run out of gel, add it to the very first points, nowhere else, or it'll smudge.
I hardened, I sealed, I hardened again... And noticed that I'd wiped off to the top each time, giving the top two-thirds of the nail a greyish film, irrepairably trapped with my hard work. The only way to make my greytone confection look presentable, was adding a bottom of green grass where the white was still white.
Then I made a carrot in the corner of a white nail. It looked lonely, so I threw together a quick rabbit on the opposite side's opposite corner, drawing a dotted line with unnecessary loops inbetween.
Then I decided to be silly and drew eyes on the tip of a nail, including eyebrows.
After which it was time to go home.
I have nothing to do tomorrow. If there's a job, I'll apply for it. If not... I want to do laundry. And bake stuff. I want to try making dulce de leche, and American baked cheesecake, and micro cupcakes baked in thimbles. I want to make bacon muffins and pizza pockets. I want to make soup, so we've got some vegetables in our lives. And I still want a treadmill, so I have no excuse to not move anymore.
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