Here’s one from the good old days!In the last few months, I have achieved a healthy balance in my working environments. In the morning I have an office job, and in the evenings I work at an Italian restaurant. While I am in the office, blearily watching the minutes tick by, I long for the hectic world of foodservice, and while I am at the restaurant, balancing awkward, heavy trays and splashing ice water everywhere, I long for the sweet, merciful release of death. So far, it has been a good system.
I wouldn’t mind the restaurant job as much if I weren’t in constant fear of being screamed at and/or fired. Mine is not a forgiving restaurant owner. There is a high turnover rate here—none of the other employees have worked for longer than a few months; all of us are fairly new. It is not difficult to see why; in this city there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bodies willing to bear steaming hot plates of gnocchi and salads buried in pine nuts across a polished wood floor, until the day they either die or drop something.
There is something almost exhilarating about knowing that your job hangs in the balance every time you cross the room. “Could this be it?” you think at every turn. Did I just make my last cup of coffee? Will this steak betray me? Might this soup be my undoing?
I am not good at selling things to people. I should probably not make a career of it, as it would not be a wildly successful career. I’m simply unable to make anything sound appealing that I don’t find personally appealing, which is a large part of selling things…possibly the whole part. I didn’t fully realize this until I began working with people who ARE able to sell things.
“The Tiramisu? Oh, uh, it’s ok. You might like it. I mean, I’ve never had it, but it’s…I mean, it looks pretty good.”
This is not the way to sell a dessert. My boss at the restaurant, the gay French boss, the one who could not be either more French or more gay or he would risk exploding in a blinding flash of gay French light, the one who spanks me when I mess up orders and who made me call his old restaurant on April Fools Day and make a reservation for Joan Rivers; now HE knows how to sell things. He could sell a can of ravioli on a doily on a plate for $23. Oh, you need a can opener? Excellent choice. Of course, there is an additional $7 charge for that.
In his case, the key to selling things appears to lie in mispronouncing words to make them sound more exotic and less intelligible. Somehow, when he says “Beef Onion soup,” it sounds like a magical, tasty elixir. When I say it, I sound like a grouchy, world-weary cafeteria lady.
Actually, my favorite thing to do is to warn people away from certain dishes. If my boss were aware of this, I would doubtless get more than a spanking. But I can’t help myself sometimes. “Don’t bother with the Lemon Delicious cake,” I’ll murmur, leaning in closer as the table falls silent and round-eyed, hanging on my every word. “It’s not that good. People don’t usually finish it.” If I know a certain dish is good (usually only because I’ve slunk behind the ice machine and scarfed up untouched portions when the boss wasn’t looking), I recommend it, but people are never as impressed by my assurances of deliciousness as they are by my candid admissions of mediocrity. Perhaps my real calling lies more in the area of food criticism.
Sorry for the absence everyone! (i.e., both of my lovely readers.) I spent the week in Portland, OR with some friends. We visited Naked Aging Hippie Hot Springs and sampled some delightful beverages (Pear Cider! Fat Tire! and Down Easters– which is a blend of dark rum and Moxie. We brought the Moxie as a gift from Boston because it is apparently regional. And by ‘regional’ I mean ‘gag-inducing’).
We also sang karaoke to Nine Inch Nails. The memory of growling “I wanna f*ck you like an animaaaal” into a microphone at a seedy bar in front of a mildly alarmed, toothless elderly couple will remain with me for far too long. I now know that it is possible to experience the highest and lowest points of your life simultaneously.
However, at last I have returned once more back East, to the coast of my birth. Three or four good nights of sleep, and my brain will work again. At least, I can hope.
I baked a chocolate cake last night, and it’s Jordan’s Furniture’s fault. I had neither the time nor the energy to bake that chocolate cake. I needed to pack for a weekend wedding trip, and before I packed, I needed to figure out what dress I was going to wear to the wedding, and what outfit I was going to wear to the Friday night dance party before the wedding, and before I picked out my outfits and packed them, I needed to shower.
But before I knew what was happening, right in the middle of Two and a Half Men (come on, it’s a pretty funny show, don’t judge me), a Jordan’s Furniture commercial came on, and that white-bearded and bespeckled Jordan’s Furniture guy was standing in front of a bunch of beds, holding a giant piece of chocolate cake. I didn’t hear a word he said. “I want chocolate cake!” I blurted. Brian looked at me. “So do I,” he said, in wonder. Brian doesn’t really care for dessert. Chocolate usually leaves him cold. But damned if we didn’t both burn for chocolate cake with a passion that could not be ignored.
I cracked open ‘Joy of Cooking’, flipped to page 645 (Chocolate Cake Cockaigne– Joy of Cooking delightfully adds the word ‘Cockaigne’ to the title of every recipe they think is especially delicious) and got to work. I melted down 3 oz of bittersweet chocolate, creamed butter and sugar, separated eggs. I picked out an icing and measured out butter and cream for it. The house filled with the scent of Jordan’s Furniture-inspired cakelust.
Two hours later, while watching the dubious “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” (did they write that movie in one sitting and shoot it without a single re-read? What a waste of Uma Thurman) we sat down to piping-hot slices of Chocolate Cake Cockaigne. I hadn’t packed, showered, decided on outfits. But I guess sometimes you have to prioritize. Sometimes the siren-call of chocolate cake must be heeded.
Any Book Club in which we spend the last 20 minutes casting the film version of the book, is the right Book Club for me.
Yesterday I opened an envelope from a school and found an invoice with a dime taped to it. My company had sent an invoice for $0.10 to a school, and this was their response. It seemed fair to me.
Later I got a letter from a customer with a $0.41 cent stamp on it, and a penny taped next to the stamp, in lieu of postage. Apparently you can do that, and it works. Or maybe the postal inspector was feeling generous.
Apparently, Thursday, May 15th was Tape a Coin to a Document Day. No one told me!…With words.
Lately I have found myself saying ‘What?’ a lot when people are talking to me, because I didn’t understand something they said. I mean, I say it a LOT. The scary thing is, I only say it around half the number of times that I WANT to say it– meaning that the other half, I do my best to interpret, through context and tone, the general idea of what is being said to me, and I respond accordingly (and vaguely). This tends to work pretty well– I don’t find myself responding in a totally inappropriate way very often, because conversations don’t tend to switch gears suddenly. By which I mean, if I am talking to someone about how lame our respective commutes are, and the person says something I can’t quite make out while making a wry face and I respond with, “Right, totally, that sucks”, chances are they will nod and continue, because they probably said something about how the T smells. However, in one case out of ten, they might have actually said something like, “But at least I can drive sometimes, and I really love my car,” so that when I respond with “Man is that lame!” it throws things off a bit.
The problem (well, one of the problems) is that constantly saying, “What?” to the person you’re talking to also puts a damper on a conversation. So, it’s a tough call for me either way. Maybe I need to get my hearing checked. Maybe my ears are lazy—or maybe the part of my brain that interprets sounds is lazy. I feel that laziness is the root cause of this, and not hearing trouble. But you never know. I used to listen to the Mighty Mighty Bosstones pretty loud in highschool. Not their new stuff—the oldschool screaming Skacore stuff they did in the beginning. That’s right! I was cool.
When Brian and I are feeling movie watchey lately, we try to find a very random free movie to watch (thank you, cable plan that offers free movies and is affordable when split between 4 people). We have done this twice and have thus far not been disappointed. The first movie we watched in this fashion was called “They Live”. Directed by John Carpenter and starring Roddy Peeper (damn straight), it was thoughtful and engaging while still managing to be timefully 80s. The premise of the movie: Earth is gradually being taken over by skeletor-looking aliens who mask themselves as wealthy and powerful humans. You can only tell the alien from the human by looking at them through special (and hilariously dated) sunglasses. Looking through the sunglasses also reveals that every billboard, poster, newspaper and magazine in actuality has no content save the same few simple, subversive messages—“CONSUME”, “MARRY AND PROCREATE”, “STAY ASLEEP”. During the middle third of the movie, the ‘hero’ and his reluctant sidekick engage in a no-holds-barred alleyway brawl while the hero tries to get the sidekick to don the sunglasses. They beat each other brutally for over five full minutes, which felt like an hour. Every time one of them gets up and helps the other up and they start to laugh and you think they are going to stop fighting, one then sucker-punches the other. This kept happening until it was funny, and then stopped being funny, and then was funny again, and so on. Good free movie!
There is never a dull moment when I open the mail at work.
Well, all right. That’s not true. There are mostly dull moments. But I am guaranteed that at least one or two pieces of mail a week will make me laugh. This is partly due to my low amusement threshold, and mostly due to the fact that weird stuff comes in the mail.
Monday we got a flyer from a company that sells urine and saliva drug testing equipment. They had little cups laid out on an attractive background and spoke glowingly of fast and reliable results. Mm!
Today I received a mailing from American Express offering us a business credit card. The mailing was addressed to “Menopause Society” at our company’s street address.
For those of you who are not aware, I do NOT work for the Menopause Society, as disappointing as that might be. In fact, the name of my company could not ever remotely be mistaken for the Menopause Society, which, Google tells me, is actually located in Ohio and is called the North American Menopause Society, or NAMS.
Heehee. NAMS.
I made bran muffins this weekend. I was really excited to do so. I even invited friends to come over and have bran muffins with me, which is borderline insane. They passed on the offer. At the grocery store checkout I looked at the items in front of me on the conveyer belt and felt shame. Bran, Honey-flavored Wheat Germ, raisins, applesauce. The excitement!
Then when I made the muffins, I forgot to add baking soda to make them rise. I took them out of the oven looking more or less the same way they’d looked going in.
“At least I didn’t waste any tasty ingredients,” I said to Brian over the phone. “I’m not going, ‘oh no! My expensive chocolate chips and my dried cranberries!’ I’m going, ‘oh, darn. My bran.’ ”
Although their consistency more closely resembles a giant rubber bathtub drain stopper than anything else, all things considered they’re kind of tasty. To me. I will eat them. All I wanted was something to eat in the mornings that would keep me from being hungry for hours, and that’s just what they do.
Yesterday I got a press release “Introducing the Wireless Moose Fence”.
It will instantly train Moose to stay out of my yard and garden.
Each box contains 3 posts and one year scent supply.
I Heard Tell 