So there I am,
puttering around my surrogate bookstore, when the store's security guard comes over. She's not charging, exactly, but she's moving with more urgency than I've ever seen her exhibit. She motors over, looks up and me and says, "I have to talk to you in the back."
 We'd been listening to a jangling alarm from the second floor, and watching mall security block off the escalators, with a sort of amused, speculative, no-ever-tells-us-anything curiosity. I assumed that she'd finally gotten someone to give her a straight answer about what was actually going on. I somehow managed to miss the depth of anxiety apparent in her wide eyes and clenched teeth.
  Once she'd dragged me to the back room, she blurted it out. Someone had found a suspicious package, and the mall was being evacuated. She hadn't been able to get much more information, but the stores were closing, and we had to get all of our customers out.
  We proceeded to inform all of our customers that we'd been told to close. We were hot, man. A calm exit, no panic; we handled it like we'd been facing the possibility of being blown up daily for years. As we were getting our evacuation on, a mall guard on her way past the store shouted at us that we could stay in our closed store, once we'd gotten all of our customers to safety. I called my District Manager to tell her what was happening, and she and I agreed that we could close everything up, put all the money in the safe, and go home, foregoing the last hour of business in favor of not being trapped under three collapsed stories of retail rubble.
  To make a long story slightly less long, it turned out that it wasn't going to be that simple. As we were preparing to beat it, we were informed that the mall was planning to reopen in 20 minutes. I was relieved, since 20 minutes seemed like an awfully short evacuation if anyone was really concerned about the package in question. However, my relief was somewhat tempered by the fact that I was facing having to go through the trouble of getting my store running again to do business for another half an hour.
  So, I didn't die. Yay, and such. However, I was treated to an incompetent, lopsided response to a potentially serious problem,a disturbing lack of concern for the safety of myself and my co-workers and further proof that people are just not as highly regarded as the chance to make a few bucks. Sometimes, knowing what's going on is really depressing.

I don't really have that much to say.
  But, I'm trying to make a commitment to writing more often, so I'm going to share something with you. Here goes.

  As I'm sure you're tired of reading by now, I support my bastardly habits (and pay my half of the rent so Amy won't beat me) by working in a bookstore. We're a chain store, and when managers from other stores take vacations, we sometimes get to go fill in at their stores. Last week, I got to cross the beautiful, cinder-block-clear Delaware River, and fill in at a store in Philth-adelphia.
  I don't get into Philthy as often as I probably should. I'm never cool enough to know what bands are playing, and I do a radio show on Friday nights, so I never get to the First Friday events, where all the art galleries are free and such. So any chance to go to the city and get paid for it is always welcome. I drove my LB butt up to the Patco station and rode the train in, what amounts to triple the commute for basically the same job.
  The first night went pretty well. Counterintuitively, the customers that I interact with in the city tend to be more pleasant than my regular suburban Jerseyites. They're more thankful when you can help them, more gracious when you can't, and they're just tend to be nicer in general. I came to appreciate this all the more on my second night, when I had to ask them all to leave an hour before closing.

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Slack Ass Mo-Fos.

  I am of the opinion that the Summer Reading List is a fabulous idea. I'm sure that, when I was a student, I would have balked at the idea of squandering my three cherished months of freedom to read anything I wanted choking down some ancient tome. With a few years of perspective, I see the wisdom of trying to keep at least the vestige of critical thinking percolating in the minds of teenagers being bombarded by a summer's worth of MTV and Jerry Bruckheimer movies. When I was in high school back in the Cretaceous, we didn't have a Summer Reading List. I was lucky enough that my parents instilled an interest in reading in me from an early age, so my I.Q. only descended into the realm of advanced apes, rather than to the depths of gelatin. For those students who don't read for pleasure, however, it certainly can't hurt to have something that will coerce them into at least minimal cogitation.
  I maintain my endorsement of The List despite the fact that it provides an annual source of aggravation at my day job. As a bookseller, it's my job to provide the books that the schools assign to their students. Some of the schools will occassionally assign an obscure or out of print title, which is annoying, but not ultimately too traumatic. No, the real rabid badger in my oatmeal are the parents who come in to buy their kids' summer reading books the day before school starts.
  I encountered a lighthouse-glaring example of this problem today. (It will help to keep in mind that today is September 1st. The child in question has known about this assignment for almost three months.) A woman (who I will heretofor refer to as Mrs. "Your-Kid-Should-Fucking-Fail," or Mrs. YKSFF) came in with a crude, handwritten list of nine books which were her son's options for his summer reading. He was required to read two of the selected books, and write a report on each for the first day of school. Mrs. YKSFF wanted three (3) questions answered about each book. 1) Was it shorter than the other books on the list? 2) Was there a junior adaptation available, which would preserve the plot and characters, but would probably be easier to read and (in a sneaky reference to item one) be shorter? 3) Was there a movie based on the book that he could watch?
  By now, you're probably wondering why, if he didn't have his books at 3 o'clock in the afternoon on the day before school started, why he didn't come to the mall himself to get them. That's what you would have done, right? You might have started reading them in the car on the way home, in order to avoid wasting any more time. I was wondering the very same thing. In fact, I was close to leaping onto her back and whacking her on the head with the Junior Classics version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, while screaming "Why are you helping your lazy slacker spawn?" over and over. Luckily for me, she provided an explanation. Apparently, Junior YKSFF was still "at the shore."
  There are times when it takes a physical effort to squelch the bitter retort forming on my lips. When I have to clench my jaw and not tell Mrs. YKSFF to her face that she's a craven, callow cow (alliteration always awesome) who is too stupid to understand that her indulgence is just reinforcing her son's irresponsible behavior. It was a struggle, which I finally won by pointing out to myself that the odds were Mrs. YKSFF wouldn't even know what callow meant, and that if she did, I was just about guaranteed to lose my job. So I swallowed my caustic comment, and instead hooked her up with both the regular and apdapted 20,000 Leagues, and the novelization of the screenplay for West Side Story. I felt vaguely dirty helping Mrs. YKSFF, knowing that I was an accomplice in her son's slacktitude, but I was able to comfort myself with the knowledge that his report was destined to be a pile of rancid goat cheese, and he was likely about to pull an all-nighter, only to write two papers barely worth using to wipe the ass of his school's mascot. Of course, he'll probably go to college on an athletic scholarship...

Today was dancing kids day...
  I know, I missed the memo too. But it was happening too damn frequently to be a coincidence, so I can only assume that the Deptford Mall was holding some sort of event for dancing, 6-and-under epileptics. The only other explanation is that someone has invented a dog whistle which only young children can hear, that makes them shimmy rather than sit or heel.
  They were everywhere. This one's groovin' in the aisle, these two are shakin' it in the archway, this one is doing what can only be described as a sideways moonwalk. On my way to the Food Court for lunch, I saw a child who was attempting to swim the 100 meter freestyle standing up. He was bent at the waist, kicking his legs behind him and waving his arm (the one that his mother wasn't using to drag junior Mark Spitz down the hall) with a determined scooping motion. I was sort of hoping the kid would wriggle out of his mother's grip, just so I could find out whether he would actually lie down on the floor or just lean forward far enough that he'd fall and bust his nose wide open on the shiny white linoleum. Alas, his mother held fast, so I only got to see him kick hard enought to lose a shoe. And it didn't even hit anyone. *sigh*