After doing some fruitless haggling on the phone with the general manager of the Crunch 38th street location gym, I decided to change locations and go to the location closer to work for the next year. It’s always sad when loyalty isn’t rewarded, and all they do is tell you that you are getting a great deal even when they’ve been raising your rates consistently over the last three years.

How many people do you think actually pay an entire year’s worth of gym membership up front? If I’m going to pay a higher rate and also pay up front, it better be the most glamorous gym I’ve ever stepped foot into. In this city, gym memberships are typically $90-200/month, excluding any ridiculous enrollment fees they make you pay. To get better deals, you can pay up front, but that also means bigger commissions up front to the sales person.

I can’t stand slimy sales people. While I could have sent him a nasty email to his follow up message letting him know he doesn’t know a single thing about sales, I simply let him know I would not be renewing at his location. Take that, loser.

This week has been dismal for multiple reasons for me. This week ends in the third anniversary of my brother’s passing. This week contained my first experience firing someone. And, it is the week of the Republican National Convention, where I heard so much fear and hatred among the Republican speakers and audience, with the exception of Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump’s speeches, that it honestly made me fear for the future.

I’ve never seen a series of speeches that tried to instill fear in the American public. Usually when I think of Republican or Democratic national conventions, I tend to think of them as a time to instill hope for the future, but these speeches were all about how we should fear for our lives and fear our neighbors and potential immigrant neighbors, load our guns, and defend and preserve what is America. I don’t know what America is if it’s a place that is hostile to neighbors, or thinks that it’s actually an easy feat to immigrate here. The “facts” that were discussed during this convention did not appear to me to be facts, but more lies that try to make people hate Hillary Clinton, who really doesn’t deserve that much hate and is frankly getting a lot of this hate because she’s a powerful woman, and make us hate each other more. It felt hurtful to me to watch these speeches, and it pained me to think of the future ahead of us with a potential leader who has no true game plan at all.

Bill Maher and Michael Moore are right. We’re a nation of people who are idiots who will likely be led by Trump because of our laziness to see the truth and cut through all of the Trump campaign’s bullshit.

What is really amazing is all the crap that the Trump presidential campaign has been able to get away with simply because it is Donald Trump running for president. Every time something stupid has been said or done by this campaign, I always wonder: what would America have said if Mitt Romney said that Mexicans were rapists? How would people have responded if Obama had said he wanted to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico? And if Michelle Obama had plagiarized Laura Bush’s speech from a major convention, the right would never have forgiven Michelle.

The plagiarism of the speech speaks to several things: Obviously, Melania Trump likes Michelle Obama; she admired this speech so much that she read it to her speech writers for her inspiration, leading to this plagiarism (gasp, looking to the other side for inspiration!). Melania can’t write, even though the Trump campaign insists she wrote the speech herself. And, this issue also raises the issue that I know will be raised by the further left in the media and by black people (and really, anyone of color who thinks deeply about this, including me): white people stealing the work of black people and claiming it as their own — an ongoing battle since forever.

Oh, dear. This is the world we are a part of.

No one wants to get fired. It’s not easy to get fired, and it’s also not easy to fire someone. Seven years ago, I was laid off due to the big recession. Sometimes, people don’t differentiate getting downsized due to recessions/overall company layoffs or actually getting let go because of performance, but I think that either way, it’s a pretty miserable experience. I’ll never forget how terrible I felt the morning it happened. It’s funny because I actually had anticipated it for weeks and had even cleaned up my desk and taken home all my belongings two weeks before. I had already started applying for new jobs. But on the day, I still cried and felt unloved, unneeded, and like no one cared about me. I felt like a complete failure. My friends and family called to comfort me. My roommate held me when I got home. But I still felt useless and unneeded.

So, I thought about this throughout today as I prepared to let someone on my team know her employment would be terminated, effective today. It had been a long time coming; she’d dictated to everyone else what days she’d choose to take the liberty to work remotely, was argumentative when I asked her to come into the office during normal office hours during work days, and consistently tried to tell her teammates that she knew better than they did because she’d been at the company longer. She refused feedback constantly and perceived everything as an attack. But despite all this, I felt terrible because I knew how she would feel. She would feel betrayed, like I had pretended to help her since her performance improvement plan but had never really intended to at all. She’d feel like we never appreciated her hours and devotion to the company. She’d feel worthless the way I felt seven years ago when I got laid off. Regardless of whether it’s true or not, she’d feel like she did not deserve this and that she’d done nothing wrong.

It’s cliche, but I’ve learned a lot since that day I got laid off. I learned that my loyalty to a company should never be that deep because frankly, loyalty is dead today. People don’t get pensions anymore; time devoted to a company is now meaningless. I learned that I can’t fully trust anyone I work with while we are still at the same company or in our current partnership, that there would always be things I wouldn’t know that would have the potential to harm me (two minutes before she came downstairs for our final meeting, she went into my manager’s manager’s office and asked him, “If you knew I was getting fired, you’d tell me, right?” He said, of course!). You can be friends with your colleagues; no one is arguing against that. But you should also be very careful what you say, especially when it has to do with the company or others who work there.

I also learned exactly how important perception is; just because you think you work hard doesn’t necessarily mean anyone else thinks you work hard; you need to make that shit obvious. Also, working hard doesn’t mean working longer hours; it means working smarter and more efficiently. Oftentimes in this brainwashed American society we live in, we confuse working hard with working long hours, which is so flawed and simply stupid.

I feel bad for her, and I know she cried on her way out. But I do hope she saw this as a learning experience as cliched as it is, and that she does try to improve herself in her next role. I don’t wish ill will on anyone. Although I still deal with my own trust issues, I really do wish the best for everyone I know, even if I absolutely cannot stand them. Some people I know will never improve (mostly my family, sadly), but it doesn’t mean I don’t still hope for positive change.