Well, yesterday was probably the best Valentine's day I've had in a while (last year I was on tour in Ottawa, and went to meet a bunch of friends at a bar but they'd moved on without letting me know. Not stoked). As much as I tried not to celebrate it, I do work at a sex toy/porno shop so it was kind of hard to avoid it.
It was the best shift I've had at X-Citement so far, and I'm definitely getting a lot more comfortable helping customers. It's not that I have any problems talking about sex toys with total strangers, I just have no idea what we have in stock yet or whether any of it is any good. The fact that I've been so interested and have studied up on sex and bodies and toys just out of plain curiosity over the years is definitely paying off ("No, sir, I don't believe anyone offers a pill that will give you a bigger 'load' when you ejaculate, I think you're just gonna have to save up for a little bit").
One think I'm pretty stoked about is that almost every customer I have is a lot older than I would typically expect to see browsing a sex shop. I realize there's this popular idea of the "dirty old man", and while it's true that almost every person through our door is a grey-haired, mustached, truck-driving man in some sort of hunting apparel, they're really not what I expected. The customers we got at Video Difference were usually socially awkward, constantly sweating, and completely avoided eye-contact with the female-bodied clerks. At X-citement, there's no shame (from what I can tell), and the dudes that one would expect to get the most vapid, oppressive, misogynist porn, wind up being the ones who buy hot pink vibrating nipple clamps, and talk about how embarrassing it is trying to explain the hook for their sex swing to their visiting adult children.
I mean, of course not everyone is perfect. I had a guy the other day making extremely tasteless jokes with my manager, but she was eating it right up. Obviously I'm never going to find a job that's in a completely PC environment, and if I did it would probably make me sheltered and naiive and completely ill-equipped to deal with real life.
No work today, for both Steve and myself, so we're at the cafe/hostel down the street, trying to make albums happen for Mistake Makers, Stagnant Stars, and the Rumble Strips. Busy busy busy! Winter is almost over!