At the suggestion of Lee Jamilkowski I’m going to try and write a little more about me and who I am, and perhaps a little less about pop culture and my thoughts on it. Writing about happenings in the pop culture world comes naturally to me. Writing about myself does not.
In any event, tomorrow I begin my new job as store manager of the EB Games in Cary, North Carolina.
As many of you may be aware, I’ve worked for three and a half years for Electronics Boutique, the world’s leading retailer of video and computer games, and most of that time was spent in a management capacity in Exton, Pennsylvania. This past summer I decided I needed some new vistas in my life, an opportunity arose at Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I decided to pack up and move onward.
The new job involves taking over a store that had management problems in the past, hiring a new staff six weeks out from Christmas, and dealing with the organizational problems the store has had. Sounds like a challenge. I need a challenge. I thrive on challenges.
To quote Captain Kirk, “Sounds like fun.”
I had never been to Cary until this afternoon when I went searching for my new store, just to be sure I knew how to find it. What I found–
1) The largest Barnes & Noble I have ever seen. Immense does not do the store justice. It’s the size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter. A person could wander around lost in there for days.
2) I visited Cary Towne Center, the shopping mall in Cary. It’s only November 2nd, and already they had Christmas decorations up.
3) I’m not one prone to getting lost. I usually tell people I navigate holistically, and I arrive as if my magic and without forethought whereever I wished to go. My holistic navigation failed me today, however, as I couldn’t find my way home, got lost on an interstate, then lost in the campus of North Carolina State, and then just plain lost. Once I found the right interstate, getting back home presented no difficulty, but getting in the right direction took more time than it should have.
I’ve been reading Mel Odom’s The Rover, a fantasy about a dweller (basically, a halfling) named Wick Lamplighter who gets dragged aboard a dwarven pirate ship and must learn to be something more than a bookish coward. I don’t normally read fantasy, but the cover art by the Brothers Hildebrandt called out to me from Waldenbooks’ shelf. The writing is oddly flat in places and excessively wordy in others, but there are some interesting characters and an intriguing depiction of ship-board life.
The cover, by the way, depicts a scene that may have nothing to do with future plot developments. In actuality, the cover depicts the meeting of Faramir, Frodo Baggins, and Samwise Gamgee in The Two Towers. Why it was chosen for an unrelated book I couldn’t begin to guess.
