Ptaszynka goes downtown pt. 2

   I was reading an article addressing the fact that, lately, nobody has been reading much.
Adults, young adults, teenagers and kids - reading is at an all time low. According to the author, it could be partly due to the fact that writers tend to provide fewer intellectual stimuli than their colleagues from the past. So I remembered that I have a responsibility to keep my readers snappy and intellectual, and I came here to complete this chapter.

  In the previous post I told you how this woman with a dark family tree and whose facial traits had been clearly altered by means of injectables had managed to hook me up and keep her shop for around a couple days a week. Although I could tell from her overly mellifluous, enthusiastic introduction that it would end very quickly and bad, I let her approach me because, deep down, the experience of running a thrift store had always been little a dream of mine - plus I was in debt, still haven't spilled anything on that but that's definitely for later.

  First reason of resentment - the selection was lame and she didn't let us pick the new pieces. She would go instead, with around €50 in her pocket, to personally take the load once in a while; I can assure you, after seeing what she'd bring in, that you can really sell whatever you want, if you sell it in the right city area. She also put a laughable prize for when you'd sell over €400 in a day - which would logically never happen, since the store was only stuffed with leftovers, out of size fisher vests, stained swimming briefs that had once belonged to some malnourished kid from the 70s, and more bs. Or she would do this stellar thing where she got some fast fashion poor little thing for 50 cents, unmark it with a seam ripper or straight up scissors, and sell it as a rare vintage occasion for €80. At the end of the day, she managed to sell big part of these items, or the most decent ones - and that was the real puzzling matter to me.

  I spent most of my day alone, the most depressing aspect - along with the fact that it took me 1 hour and a half each time to get there, and who knows me also knows that I'd rather walk than move with public transport.
Customers came and went; I made friends with two lovely ladies from Hawaii - they told me they were singers and performers and touring with their vocal coach - and a few American students. Him+her couples were off the table, they ignored you to the point of looking dumb and not just rude, and tourists from Northern Europe would walk in, cause me several aneurysms by yelling and laughing on top of their lungs, try everything on, then leave without even buying a pin. The highlight came when I faced this Roma man (I can't say the word because it's 2025 and it's marked as offensive) who stank like donkey and cursed me to hell and back because I refused to give him any pair of jeans for free. He kept repeating he had worn the same pants for months, to which I doubled down by saying I had mine for over 10 years (not far from the truth) til he finally left. It could have gone worse.

  But the real moments of panic got me when a sweaty kid in soccer attire ran in and asked for a coin from the cash register because "he was thirsty". I was puzzled beyond words; he kept saying "my mom already knows, I told my mom, she always says yes" but I had no clue who his mom was, until G.E.E.Z. (cracks me up because I tried to turn her name into an anagram and it sums her up entirely) promptly phoned to warn me that her son was around and that she had given him the stupid habit of taking coins from the petty cash to buy his beverages on the go.

  I would also occasionally receive visits from another member of the G.E.E.Z. family: the husband. Apparently, her husband worked in parliament; not sure whether as a bag boy or as a politician, but that alone justified the fact that his wife could afford a 2k rent, plus the new (extremely expensive) shop she had freshly purchased, despite her business skills. Everything about him gave closeted homosexual in his 60s, but he was escorted by ladies every time without fail; his wife tried to conceal the whole situation by saying things such as "he has so many friends..." and we pretended to believe her not to be cruel. He showed up like Uncle Waldo with Abigal and Amelia Gabble, all giggles and laughs, showing off the shop as his wife's "side project", the good one being the other, exclusively attended by gauche caviars. His visits were blatantly surprise inspections, to check if we were staying on track, not stealing anything, doing everything right, etc.; they didn't even bother to sugarcoat the fact that we were being kept under surveillance, Uncle Waldo was unlikable and as condescending as only a moron can be.

  I was happy to be selling out summer shirts to Russian tourists, advising them about the fabrics (my years in tailoring school paid back) or styling ideas, I felt like an angel when I gave everybody a little discount (they didn’t know I would never pay that much for those pieces they were getting), I enjoyed styling the shop’s mannequin once in a while, but these violent delights have violent ends and we finally come to June.

  By the end of May, G.E.E.Z. texted me: "tell me what's your availability for June".
I said "every tuesday, then i’ll be out."
First Tuesday of June comes by and it’s probably the hottest day of the year: 40+ degrees. The bus I took had a broken a/c; some tourists from the Netherlands who were around my same age asked if that would be normal for a bus, then asked me where they could find a good cafe to have breakfast at. I said come with me it’s right next to where I’m headed.
The shop had a big cafe next door where I would get the keys before opening in the morning; I took those guys there, then went to collect the keys as usual. Since the barman spoke a broken Italian, I asked one more guy if what I had understood was correct: the keys had already been taken. Without saying my little new friends bye, I rushed into the shop and I found a minor, a schoolgirl, sitting behind the cash register dressed up full in beige like it was 2016, with a midi tube skirt and a knotted tee stained in the same brown foundation she had smeared all over her face, 5 tones darker than her neck. I must have looked deranged as I stormed in and barked "HI, WHO ARE YOU?".
The girl responded gently instead, she introduced herself and then showed me her chat with G.E.E.Z., letting me read that they had indeed planned for her to show up on the same days I said I would be available. Little detail I forgot to mention until now: G.E.E.Z. did hard drugs in her youth. The situation her mind was in, her grip on reality, were a clear indicator of that.
After clarifying the misunderstanding, I went out and sent her 5 voicemails telling her all sorts of things, trying to sound just piqued instead of pissed off and pointing out that with my low blood pressure I risked death that morning just to get there (I played an extra drama card there). Then I headed for the bus stop to go home. In response, she just said "Honey, there must be a mistake. Wait, there's no signal here. I'll call you back soon." Of course, she never called me back.

  Long story short, it must have been all the evil eye we conjured against her (and there was a whole group of people who had been done dirty, not just me) but one evening, a few months later, we were told by her former associate that the shop had now become the cafe's storage room. It still reads as open on google, a sunny postcard waving from the past.

Ptaszynka goes downtown pt. 1

  The Botox Lady had a very singular surname: if you googled her, you’d only meet some slightly unsettling results. Money laundering, blackmailing, getaways at night, fake passports, you name it. All in her lineage.
Was I blackmailed myself into associating with these darkness operators? Actually, that was part of my atonement trip. I was in debt with myself for a substantial amount.

  I had a friend who worked for this woman. My friend has 2 names, one starts with a G so I’ll call her G.; she deserves her own chapter but right now I’ll just say that she changed a lot of jobs in a relatively short time, which led her to meet Botox Lady and her associate twice on her path, and the second time she offered her a job. These two baddies, aged 40-50 (uncertain) ran a vintage store in one of the chicest historical neighborhoods in Rome, plus B.L. was on her way to open a second one, a concept store, in another equally insufferable overpriced gentrified neighborhood not far from there.
Given the nature of my trade, temporary in itself, I was currently jobless and waiting for another project to start in September; in April, G. said that she mentioned my name to maybe serve as a runner for a day or two, because Botox Lady needed someone to carry her junk around and up to her soon-to-be-opened store. I love driving so I agreed, but I was reluctant to be called again...

  I got up early in the morning and off I went, the day wasn’t exactly a breeze but definitely an interesting experience. I got to sneak into a lot of labs and little craft shops you cannot simply visit or wouldn’t regularly notice with the unaided eye, all these young people busy creating horrible artifacts sold as “naïve” and baby Jesus knows how else they get called; I remember picking up a horrible black and white cylindrical glass beads necklace (they looked like rigatoni pasta) to be tied together with a gros grain ribbon that this lovely girl was renting a whole studio to make, I remember a sort of capsule collection including two "reworked" (read "stained with vinyl dye in random colors") suit pants, some slip dress with poor little fabric scraps sewn on, a fast fashion y2k little purple purse covered in a drizzle of metallic paint which resembled my cheap nail polish from when I was a little girl that these two gay fashion students were proudly selling in their little studio-lab, I remember collecting a lot of cardboard boxes that this guy kept saying were "empty" (but to be fair he seemed freshly burnt out, like he had just broken up with his girl), turns out they contained the ugliest ceramics you could ever imagine and, last but not the least, I collected plastic ampoules. Boxes and boxes of plastic ampoules from this shop in a remote industrial area, literally named "PLASTIC".
It was unclear whether these objects would be put on display as rentals or they’d go on sale and, as I came to know, not only it wasn’t unclear to me, but also to the artisans themselves. Everything was very blurry and uncertain. That’s how rich people with a little hobby organize their business by the way: they don’t.
At the end of the day, the Botox Lady was sooooo enthusiastic with my job, so she immediately started showering me in compliments, love bombing, you know the drill. But I wasn't buying into that: I’m not a spring chicken. I have a narcissistic dad, I know all the tricks in the book, they don’t work with me. They only work if I make them work, that is, I need something in return. Which was the case: I looked at my bank account and it needed a major fix.

(To be continued)

Are we reading allat?

  For almost a decade, it felt as though as blogging was on the edge of dying.
Maybe it died, maybe not, I choose not to care; but we can all agree that it's not the favorite medium at this time.
Reading a text longer than a 3 lines caption feels like a quest, the time to sit and process your thoughts is a luxury good. I see fearmongering tiktoks about "European people sending 6 hours voice messages instead of typing" (I'm European and I do all of the above, I regret NOTHING), not to mention the staple "NOT READING ALLAT", the supreme move.
Which is true: most of the times, we ain't reading allat.

   Too many words are being said, too many messages are being spread, too many alarms beeping, too many small happenings trying to catch our attention: we're at once fed up, intoxicated and numb to informations.
There's a fire that moves me, though, the core of it all - that’s the reason why I learn new languages and own social media accounts, watch vlogs and interviews, retrieve some nieche biographies and, in fact, enjoy blogs: to mind other people’s business. My insatiable compulsion is to look into the others' lives and the motive is not even that deep: reality is more sapid than fiction. Maybe, just for the mere fact that it's real. And what about the opportunity to turn your own thoughts into a novel, only truer than truth? So seductive.

  As I type today, I'm sitting at my desk. I'm on the clock, there's clearly nothing much to do lately but I'm pretending to be painstakingly filling in a wire transfer request anyway (how much does it take to fix just 3 vendors?) ... see how many things have changed in 10 years? Got a job, got the money, my dream to work in an office wearing vintage Prada sandals and midi skirts slowly came to life; what also came to life, is a white strand of hair. I tried plucking it, she's 6 or 7 years old now, still there, still white and looking like nylon fishing line.
Full disclosure, my current job and the white strand are not directly connected; they have a common denominator, though, which you'll maybe find out one day reading these pages...
Keep minding my business!

- Ptaszynka 

"Evil doesn't die: it reinvents itself"

  Opening a blog was in my new year's resolutions.
In doing so, I stumbled into a real time capsule: all the blogs I've owned in the past - or, more precisely, the ones that have survived the various blogging platforms going out of business. I was sure that I had lost my credentials forever; truth was, they were simply connected to the email accounts I use to this day... which made me feel like a buzzard, a little bit.

  What changed? Everything that could change over 10 years, and maybe even more.
But I'm not, by any means, new here...
("Evil doesn't die: it reinvents itself")