Earlier I was really hating life. Work was bad. Bad, bad, BAD. Stupid customers, stupid corporate people who don’t know what’s going on in the retail stores, stupid marketing people who failed to notify us that one of the most prominent LDS musicians was coming to our store to sign (luckily a customer asked us about it this morning so we were able to make the necessary preparations. It would have been incredibly embarrassing to have him walk in and have us scrambling to get books and cds for him to sign), stupid managers who haven’t set foot in our store in 4 weeks and so don’t realize that we’re severely understaffed, and therefore expect us to be miracle workers, stupid employees at other stores who keep you on hold for 10 minutes at a time while you’re trying to make sure they have an item. I came home extremely irritated and intensely happy that I have the day off tomorrow and don’t have to deal with it all. I usually love my job, but sometimes the stupid things my company does really irritate me, and the fact that they’re doing them in the middle of the busy Christmas season drives me crazy.
But a little rest, Orange Creme Stephen’s Gourmet Hot Cocoa and some Heyer works miracles.
I even recovered enough to do a bit of studying for the GRE. I am profoundly grateful for Jane Austen, J.K. Rowling, and Bill Watterson. They are extremely helpful when studying vocabulary. Thanks to Jane I know the meaning of words like taciturn, dissemble, and precipitate; JKR helped me guess that to occlude means to prevent or stop something and let me recognize torpor; and Bill Watterson showed me that transmogrify indicated a change of state. 
Being well-read can be extremely helpful. Now if only I could get that darn math. *sigh* At least I won’t have trouble with the Fibonacci sequence. “One, one, two, three, five. Eureka!”
3 responses so far ↓
1 Leslie // Dec 11, 2003 at 1:17 pm
I’ve been out of the retail world for over 7 years and it still haunts my Christmas mood. I find video games helps with the stress. Good luck.
2 dave // Dec 11, 2003 at 2:01 pm
pusillanimous \pyoo-suh-LAN-uh-muhs\, adjective:
Lacking in courage and resolution; contemptibly fearful; cowardly.
Evil, unspeakable evil, rose in our midst, and we as a people were too weak, too indecisive, too pusillanimous to deal with it.
–Kevin Myers, “An Irishman’s Diary,” Irish Times, October 20, 1999
Under the hypnosis of war hysteria, with a pusillanimous Congress rubber-stamping every whim of the White House, we passed the withholding tax.
–Vivien Kellems, Toil, Taxes and Trouble
You are now anxious to form excuses to yourself for a conduct so pusillanimous.
–Ann Radcliffe, The Italian
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Pusillanimous comes from Late Latin pusillanimis, from Latin pusillus, “very small, tiny, puny” + animus, “soul, mind.”
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And of course my own contribution to Emily’s GRE preparation:
Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. (Wizard of Oz)
3 Marion Barrett // Dec 28, 2004 at 6:21 am
General Ulysses S. Grant used this term regarding politicians of his time during the American Civil War. He stated that they acted with pussilanimity.
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