I really don't think that many people are all too familiar with the origins of the marathon. Sure, most people know that it's some race that crazy people subject themselves to, but I would wager that few people know any of the details beyond the event, either technically or historically. For those of you who don't know, the marathon is a twenty-six mile race that stems from a famous path run in between Marathon and Athens in Greece in the Ancient Olympiad. Somehow the idea of running for twenty-six miles for fun caught on and people have been doing in and out of the Olympic games for years and years. Although my blog post for today is entitled "My Marathon", it really has nothing to do with running a race per se. It does have to do with being a little bit crazy and subjected yourself to massive exhaustion though. What I'm talking about is the marathon that I've been running at work over the past three days. With the summer months here and students in our relatively small college town not around, business has been pretty slow at my place of employment. It seems that hours have been cut in nearly every department in the store. My hours, luckily, haven't been cut all too much, but the hours of overtime that I have been enjoying over the past month has slowly dwindled away. As a result, if an opportunity to gain some extra hours or maybe even overtime arises, I've been doing my best to jump at the chance. I've been lucky enough to pick up one extra shift both last week and this week outside of my own department, but as my luck would have it, I know longer have the luxury of just saying what nights I would like to work. I have to take what is given to me and just be happy and grateful for the extra hours, which obviously equals extra pay when the checks come around each week. I usually open in the mornings and have a six hour shift in my department. The times that I pick up other shifts outside of my department though require that I end up closing. Sometimes this means working for six hours in the morning, going home for a little bit, maybe catching a quick nap, and then getting the uniform back on to go back to the store and take a five hour closing shift. That's a big eleven hour day at the store. As it happened this week, my one crazy eleven hour day per week over the change in work weeks ended up being back to back. Not a big deal since it's definitely something that I've done before. I had planned on resting up the night before my two-day stint so that I would be ready and rested for the mini-marathon. In the midst of my starting my relaxing evening the night before however, I received a phone call at a quarter to five with a message that someone had called in sick and they were in desperate need of someone to come in and cover a closing shift. However much I didn't want to go in, I knew that I didn't want to turn down the extra money, so I got myself ready and headed up to work without thinking what I was really doing to myself. I hadn't had a day off in about four days and now I was going up to start a three-day long marathon of opening and closing eleven hour days. It's now the end of my third day of this, and I am one tired pup. I've worked more hours in the last three days that most of my coworkers are even scheduled for the entire week. Thirty-three is my magic marathon number, not just twenty-six. Three eleven hour days, and I'm still not done, since I have to work the next two days on opening shifts. Luckily I have the afternoons off on both of the next two days before my day off the following day. I've warned people at the store to not even both calling me if something comes up, because I need to catch up on my life and everything that I've been meaning to do over the last three days that I've practically lived at the store. It's scary to think that my sleep total over the past three days has been about fifteen hours, which you can all calculate is less than fifty percent of the time that I've spent at the store. The thing that makes me laugh about this now, and has made me laugh in the past, is that I really don't necessarily need the money. It's just that I like to make money, because in the long run I like to save money, or pay off my credit card, or be able to buy my brother and sister-in-law an extra nice wedding gift next month. I like to know that I worked the hardest that I could and made the most effort to make the most possible money while I can. There is no sense in wasting away my summer sitting around playing on the internet all summer. Graduate students need to make good money any way that they can, and a lot of it!