Amy Adoyzie Enjoys Life and Junk

In all my few years of retail experience, I have never had the capability of e-stalking a customer as I do now. I am only slightly embarrassed by this act because I'm sure I'm not alone.
There's this dude that comes into the record store on a regular basis and has cute eyeglass frames. Yesterday, he bought a Sonic Youth CD that I had been listening to the day before and it was like a Eureka moment! I didn't think of doing what I did until he handed me his debit card and I made sure to note his name. Then I MySpaced his ass!
Yee-haw! I heart the internet!
It turned out that Brandon is "In a Relationship," a student at PSU and a bit of a feminist. Sounds awesome, too bad he's taken.
Gus said that maybe I'm not the only stalker and that perhaps he's like majorly stalking me too! Maybe he doesn't even have a girl/boyfriend and he only says that he's "In a Relationship" because he's so deep in his stalkerdom that he thinks we're going out and that he has a mini-Amy shrine! HA! I should be so lucky as to have a stalker as adorable as this dude!
It's way possible.

Albert, my baby brother of almost 21 years of age, called me recently while I was at work.
"Are you busy right now?" he asked.
"Nah, just at work at the record store. Why? What's up?"
"Can you help me with some stuff with filling out applications?"
"For a job? Why're you getting a job?" I asked confused. Albert still lives at home, receives free financial aid from our government and mom still cooks all his meals. He might have one of the longest standing records for wearing pajamas.
What's he want to do with work?
"Dad says that you and Alan won't stop bothering him."
"Yeah, no shit! Isn't it time, already?"
"So, can you help me?"
"Sure."
He asked me about whether it's safe to divulge his Social Security number and filling in his availability.
"What should I put for 'Past Employment'?"
"Well, you're gonna have to lie."
"Really?"
"Yeah, cause you look like a slacker when you're 21 and haven't worked day in your life, dumbass."
"What should I write then?"
"Lie. Say you worked at mom's restaurant. She has a different last name. That should work."
"Okay... but it asks for jobs of the last seven years. I still have more spaces to fill in other jobs. Do I just leave them empty or put in 'N/A'?"
"Leave them empty. Or you can write 'Sleeping' or 'Playing Video Games' if you want."
"Man, you're so harsh."
"Man, you're so fucking lame you're just now trying to get a job! I've been working since I was 16 and you're just barely trying to get your first job! What the fuck?"
A short silence.
"So, I'll just leave that space empty," he said.

You're telling me you won't give this lazy bum a job?

It's a week before summer vacation where I tutor English in an after-school program. Today was my last day at that high school, and soon they won't have to waste anymore time at school and will find endless hours to do whatever sophisticated things it is that teenagers do nowadays with the internet and video games and other sedentary activities.
I was looking forward to seeing T- once more before he abandoned homework and worrying about catching up in school, perhaps leave him with some wise words about playing the bass or how to refine and hone his BS skills so to help him along in life. T- was that student, the one who makes you forget about all the other obnoxious kids who refuse to do work and force a blood pressure spike. When he began attending mandatory tutoring in math and english, he was failing most of his classes and completely uninterested in school. He didn't see the point in all these adults harassing him about some asinine assignments that had no immediate bearing on his adolescent life besides a few bad marks on his report card.
When I first met him, I just thought he was going to be another angst-ridden, brooding teenager who would find any way to avoid work. But he surprised me and read quietly during our first sessions together. He really liked my teaching style, which is very informal and kick back, and we were able to just shoot the shit and he told me about a lot of the issues that bothered him about school, teachers and being a freshman in high school. T- is a bright kid, with lots of energy and so much potential. He was funny and creative and just started learning to play the bass. I burnt him a slew of CDs including bass/drum duos like Lightning Bolt and The Ninja Academy, whom he really dug. He thought that The Locust was too fast, which surprised me because he's really into metal. Eventually, his grades picked up to B's and sometimes A's, he was passing all of his classes and completely caught up in school work.
When I saw him last week, he asked about music theory and playing scales on the bass. He was teaching himself from online tutorials because his mom doesn't want to pay for lessons. I told T- that he was probably smart enough to learn it on his own and he seemed encouraged. He also asked if I would write a character reference letter for him and I happily obliged.

Ten minutes before tutoring began today, a friend of Tyler's came to ask me about his character reference letter. She said that Tyler had been suspended and had asked her to pick it up for him. My heart fell.
"What happened?" I asked, confused and concerned.
"He's not allowed to come back to school," was all she said.
I handed her the letter, filled with words about how much Tyler had improved, and couldn't think of anything else to say. I wanted to say so much to her, to have her relay to him, but I couldn't think of a thing. How do you ask someone to convey a feeling for you? How could I have asked her to tell T- that he's a great fucking kid and that he shouldn't let this color the rest of high school for him. That even though high school is a daily metaphor for robotic hell sometimes, it's still worth it. That I just think he rules and I can see him being a really awesome person someday. How do I ask a 15-year-old to relay my optimism?
So, I didn't say anything.

My only hope is that he remains caught up in the last week of school and won't have to repeat any courses next year. I later learned that he was suspended for setting a small ball of paper on fire during school hours on campus. He knows better, and that's what shocks me. It's just heart-breaking to see that he worked so hard this year and now it might be in limbo.

I'll confess. Adoyzie was not the last name given to me at birth.
I was 16-years-old and had no real concerns in my life except for being the average angry teenage girl who obsessed over the Lookout! Records catalogue. My life was filled Joey Ramones, Ben Weasels and Joe Queers, all names with self-declared last names. Punk names.
Before I renounced punk rock for all its hypocrisy, white dudes and inevitable mirror of the mainstream society that it proclaims to challenge (hello Punk Rock Confidential! A tabloid magazine with the tagline, "It's not about the music" for Chrissakes!); before all of that I was a naive young thing who actually believed that a scene of kids with wildly colored hair and tattered Chuck Taylors could change the world.
My memory is very clear, I was sitting on my bedroom floor with my beige phone securely cinched between my ear and shoulder talking to Gus.
"I need a punk name," I declared. "Amy something."
Gus muttered something that I couldn't quite make out.
"Did you say 'Adoyzie'?" I asked.
"What?! No. What the hell is that?" I recall Gus saying.
"I dunno, but I like it. Amy Adoyzie."
I'm a sucker for alliterations and gibberish. Adoyzie meant nothing, and at a time in my young life where nihilism made lots of sense, it worked.
I've been writing, designing and prancing around with Adoyzie as my pseudonym for almost ten years now and today I finally semi-officially acknowledged it as an AKA.

Late last summer I did an interview with one-man-band extraordinaire Almighty Do Me a Favor for Punk Planet. It was nothing huge, 800 words max. They were gonna pay me $30 for it and I wasn't going to argue. I finally received the check last month and smirked as I read that the check was made out to Amy Adoyzie, which made me realize something profoundly lame: I've never been paid to write.
There I was, a proper paid writer and junk, and with no bank account to deposit the greenery into.
I braced against the funked-up Portland weather today (shifting between pleasant spring sunshine to sheets of rain with pellet sized hail), and rode to the bank to figure out how I can get my ass paid. Cuz I gotsa get paid! Armed with the Punk Planet issue that had the interview, a Razorcake issue with my column that featured a goofy photo of me aside my pseudonym and picture ID.
An eager Vice President/Manager greeted me as soon as I stepped into the bank. I told him of my predicament and with all my evidence in hand, he believed that I wasn't trying to rip off someone else's check.
"Do you think you'll be getting more checks with this name?"
"Uh..." I thought for a moment. "I doubt it. I don't get paid to write very often."
But you see, this Vice President/Manager, who greets his valuable banking public at the door, believed in me, in my success as someone who may one day receive yet another check for making use of the English language. He added a note to my account "Profile," to state that I do officially have an alias, wherein it recognized my existence as a person who writes things and every now and then someone may send her a piece of paper that can be redeemed for cash.
Now that's customer service.

Friday the 13th has blessed me with a rather annoying day thus far. Missed busses, missed appointments and my fly was open until only an hour ago. My heart rate increased as my blood pressure rose. I was getting frustrated. In order to soothe my frazzled self, I'm writing about one of the volunteer thingies that I'm doing that makes me smile like a wild chimpanzee.

Every Monday morning, I get up early for a 10-minute walk to a local elementary school where I spend an hour reading to two kids. I'm a volunteer reader for SMART (Start Making A Reader Today), a Portland non-profit organization whose goal is to encourage literacy and the love of reading. Incredible!

During the first half-hour I read to a kindergartner named Aimee. She has a 6-month old brother, Malakai, and last Monday she spelled his name for me as "A-L-N." Adorable! Aimee likes to read about bunnies and babies and likes to wipe her nose with her sleeve.

Bich Tram is the third grader who I see during the second half-hour. One of the first things I learned about her was that she "loves sausages." It's her all-time favorite food and I almost shed a tear when she told me because she held her little hand to her chest and emoted so beautifully her adoration for all types of tubed meat substances! She's a jittery kid, squirming and squishing all over the place, and she reads that way too.

I wonder about whether they'll remember me when they're my age. If they'll enjoy reading as an adult, maybe this might even encourage them to start writing. When I was a kid I loved checking out the Peanuts and Garfield cartoons from my elementary school library. Eventually, I started reading books that didn't have pictures on every page, mostly Beverly Cleary classics about that mischievous Ramona, who fell in line with childhood heroes like Pippi Longstocking and Punky Brewster. In junior high, I was obsessed with Christopher Pike's cheesily-lurid mysteries. My mom couldn't understand why I read for fun, she preferred that I had my face slammed into a textbook instead.

And to think that my youngest brother doesn't read books. What makes some of us addicted to muskiness of yellowed pages? Why do our hearts stop when our eyes run across a piece of lyrical prose? How can we make everyone else near-sighted and card-carrying library member?

Maybe reading about The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a start.

What is the deal with me? I quit a career in Los Angeles, with wild-eyed ideas of the earliest retirement of non-trust-fund-kid history only to move to Portland and enlist myself to work THREE jobs?

Well, rest assured, my dear friends, it ain't as tough as it sounds.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm only working about two and a half days a week!

Jobby #1: eBay Power Seller Monkey
I help a woman sell vintage purses on eBay. It's a sweet gig, under the table and I actually like my boss! I'm here two and half days a week, gossip with Maria (who is the most generous and understanding boss I've ever encountered), write about purses and junk, and she doesn't care what I blast from my iPod (she especially enjoys Johnny Cash). No complaints there.

Jobby #2: High School English Tutor
I show up once-a-week and school dems chilluns! My prized student, Lynn, comes in for help with her Humanities class. We're both simultaneously learning about early civilizations, but don't tell her because she thinks I'm an encyclopedia of worldy knowledge when in fact I totally advocate Engrish and didn't even know how to pronounce Sumer.

Jobby #3: Record Store Chum
I asked Ken if he needed help at his record store, one of the best places to score the most retardedly underrated independent music. I volunteered one night and a couple hours later I was hired to work a shift on Fridays! That's the secret to scoring ridiculously awesome jobs: don't even ask if they're hiring! Ha!

So here's the dilly-yo-mang. I don't count Jobbies #2 and #3 as actual job-jobs, because I would do it without pay (but don't tell Ken, because he's supporting my Greg Cartwright addiction)!

Imagine that. Isn't that what we're taught, as children, to aspire for? To climb and reach for our "dream" jobs, work that we would do for the pure satisfaction of the work itself? Instead, those jobs are just fading dreams, receding further in our collective psychi, as we mindlessly shuffle and settle.