By now you all may have seen or heard about the obese Wisconsin news anchor who received a letter from a viewer admonishing her to lose weight lest she send out the wrong message to our nation's youth. Not willing to leave soul-crushing embarrassment alone, the broadcaster, Jennifer Livingston, eventually went on air in a four minute personal address to the letter writer after her own husband angrily posted the letter on the internet, turning it viral. The proverbial elephant in the room, I guess.
Personally, I learned about all this on Facebook, and then on Facebook some more, and then even more on Facebook after that. And I don't have very many Facebook friends. (People hate me.) Typically, the posting was accompanied by a rousing tagline of "You Go Girl!" or "Down With Bullying!" or some fawning ode to the beauty and courage of the victim in question.
Which is the part I fail to understand. Well, there's two parts. First, when did it become bullying to write a polite, signed letter to a public figure? Livingston readily admits that she is visibly overweight, even cops that over the years many other viewers have pointed out that same fact. And yet while the actual motive of the letter writer (purportedly offering help to lose weight) is questionable, he is bullying her no more than when a complete strange admonishes me for smoking a cigarette. Would my Facebook friends call me "beautiful and courageous" for telling the world to fuck off and that I am hurting no one but myself? (And don't even start with the "second hand smoke" bullshit. Car exhaust is far more harmful to one's health and no one says boo about our beloved automobiles.) If criticizing someone is bullying them, then is it "bullying" when the President is publicly excoriated on a minute-by-minute basis, in print, on the air, or sometimes even right to his face? No, it's simple discourse. Is it "bullying" when you get a negative performance review at work? Is it "bullying" when a police officer pulls you over for speeding? Will it soon be "bullying" for a teacher to issue a failing grade to a student? And why did Jennifer Livingston's husband publicize the letter in the first place? Who's the real bully here?
But beyond the specious bullying charges, can someone please explain to me who the "beautiful and courageous" woman is in this scenario? Because to me, it's not Jennifer Livingston. Oh, she is a pretty lady and she seems to have quite the personality. It's only a guess, though, because I don't know her at all. But I do know one thing and I can say it without knowing anything about Jennifer Livingston except for what I see: Obesity is plain, flat-out, categorically NOT beautiful and it should not be celebrated.
My father is a case in point. At his fattest he weighed a little over 325 pounds on his 6'1" frame, and he didn't get that way by accident. He got that way by eating at Wendy's or Rally's several times a week, by eating half a bag of potato chips every night after a large dinner, by eating several slices of pie every morning for breakfast. He loudly scoffed at anyone who questioned his eating habits and his prodigious weight gain and bragged many, many times about his Herculean "ticker." Bragged himself all the way to triple bypass, in fact.
Now he is almost completely dependent upon me and my mother for his daily care, and has been for almost eight years. He can barely walk, and struggles with the most basic of activities. But his grease-clogged arteries were only half the story. Most of his disability has come from complications from diabetes, a condition he largely ignored until it became inextricably intertwined with his prolonged and elusive recovery from open heart surgery. Weakened from multiple hospitalizations for congestive heart failure post-surgery, he had difficulty moving because of his weight, resulting in small bedsores that festered and turned into gruesome, golf-ball sized wounds that you could slip your entire thumb into. More than once he faced amputation, somehow dodging the bullet every time. His legs and feet are now engorged and shiny, the color of eggplant. A few months ago he bled out a pint of blood into his shoe before he even discovered it, from a cut on his foot that he didn't know he even had. The tops of his hands are oddly indented and mottled with black spots. He can barely see anymore. His medicines, about fourteen per day, have caused him to lose control of his bladder and he's in wet trousers most of the time. When he falls down, we must call the police as he fears that my mom and I will only drop him again. His hospital, doctor, and home health care bills, mostly covered by Medicare, are approaching one million dollars. Because I live with him, I don't feel like my life is entirely my own. I will be frank--he is a burden.
Like a lot of overweight people, my father did not eat comically boundless amounts of food. He just ate about twice as much as he really needed. It's not hard to do--food is delicious and abundant. He also wasn't very active. He never passed up an opportunity to ask someone to take his plate into the kitchen or to run something upstairs for him or to help him unload the car. He cheerfully mocked the untimely death of marathoner Jim Fixx, frequently intoning "Exercise kills!" He lived unaware. Even now he scorns the notion of food as medicine, as anything but calories. And he has said to me, more than a few times, that none of this is his fault and that I should mind my own business.
But blowing up a million dollar health care tab in the space of eight years, all because of overindulging, is my business. My father's surgeries, multiple hospitalizations, ambulance visits, convalescent care, home health care, doctors' appointments and medications are mostly funded by the government. The same government that helps to feed babies of poor single mothers. The same government that helps a struggling minority family heat their home. Freebies for so-called lazy, weak people that are squarely hated by the right wing. But let's face it--no matter how much "health care" my father continues to receive, he will not be getting better. Poor people get on their feet, they educate their children, they get better jobs, they buy homes. Not all the time, but often. My father is going to die.
So while conservatives angrily rail against food stamps and welfare and imaginary free cell phones for the poor, arguing that poverty is just a personal choice made by worthless "takers," there is a conspicuous, yet defeaning, silence when it comes to people like my father who throw their health away. Where's the outrage here? Is it obvious only to me that eating healthfully is much, much easier than increasing your income? Or raising children whose father doesn't pay child support? Or paying rent and utilities when you can't find a job? Is not eating processed food and junk from McDonald's really that much of a dealbreaker?
My thinking is that that Jennifer Livingston is headed down the same path as my father. It will start simply with a diagnosis of high blood pressure and elevated blood sugar levels, requiring a small, daily dose of a beta blocker or maybe just a diuretic, and then perhaps a glucose inhibitor or a sulfonylurea. Since she will still be relatively young, her health insurance will pay for most of it. Maybe her doctor will explain the benefits of a dietary overhaul, but one thing we as Americans do is WE DO NOT EAT ANYTHING WE DO NOT LIKE, so if she's like most people Jennifer will just opt for the drugs. In time, her cholesterol level will have to be addressed, and then her Vitamin D deficiency and then, as a precautionary measure, her doctor will put her on blood thinners. Thinking that she is addressing the problem by eating 100-calorie snack packs and fat-free frozen yogurt, Jennifer will continue to gain weight, putting even more pressure on her heart, and now on her joints. So bring on the arthritis medicine! Her first surgery, maybe just a knee replacement, or perhaps something way more serious, will then usher in a dizzying array of complications. And, of course, more medicine. And she will become my father.
Strangly, all of this will happen so slowly that no one will really even notice. The beautiful, talented and spirited wife, mother, and career woman who is doing just fine, THANK YOU, without the mean letters from total strangers will slowly morph into the weak and diseased morbidly obese woman who rides the motorized cart around Kroger. Oh, to be sure no one will approve of her physical appearance, even less less so than now. But no one will be thinking, "Wow, there's a few hundred thousand dollars of taxpayer money loading Wonder Bread and Beefaroni into her electric cart."
So let's stop robotically arguing that Medicare is sacred and untouchable simply owing to the inevitabilities of aging. Getting old, fat and sick is not foreordained. Good health is not just good luck. It's good choices.
Let's stop proudly counting off all the foods we hate, as if it physically hurts to eat some raw broccoli or drink a few glasses of water every day. Here's what hurts: infections and needles and scalpels and catheters and amputation. Being trapped in the house most of the time doesn't feel so good either.
But most of all, how about we all stop pretending that being fat is nothing more than an alternative life style. It's not. And it's not beautiful.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Hot Grease Flashback 2012
I thought I was over it. Really, my anger had pretty much leveled out over the years and usually when I thought about my previous job at A Toute Heure and my relationship with Andrea, it was with a degree of acceptance and even some self-loathing for not being a better person, as in a person who didn't cause a seemingly level-headed lady to irrationally scream in her face.
But then on New Year's Day I was standing over a pan of hot oil, frying wings for a little family get-together, and I had the following thought: "Oh, I hope this hot grease doesn't fly into my eye because I have no health insurance." And then I remembered. And I was ashamed.
Andrea asked me to come to work for her when we were still in cooking school. Although I was terribly out of place at this particular school, twice as old as most of my classmates, and completely oblivious to the hard-partying and fornication that was rampant not only at my school but also apparently right in my own apartment (another blog completely), I labored under the delusion that as long as I showed up for class every day I was destined for greatness. In spite of one of our instructors proclaiming us the worst class ever, I was unphased and so when Andrea pulled me aside one morning to ask me to be the sous chef in the restaurant she planned to open after graduation, I thought it was a halfway decent idea and certainly in keeping with my plan for world domination.
Arriving in New Jersey a year and a half later, having driven a 17-foot U-Haul truck halfway across the country in the dead of winter, expecting to begin a cooking job in a few days, you could say I was slightly less than thrilled to find NO RESTAURANT! Instead I found a gutted out building that looked substantially the same as when I had seen it about seven months prior on a reconnaissance mission to New Jersey. Now, I kid just a little. Although there were no sinks, no stoves, no counters, no work tables, and no dining room for the customers, there were also no floors or walls! This sad reality was the groundwork for my once-in-a-lifetime epiphany that because I was now stuck in New Jersey, having laid out a LOT of money to move and rent an apartment, I was now stuck in New Jersey. I needed to learn a trade, and fast.
And I did. In the space of three months I became, to paraphrase Andrea's father, an "expert caulker," as well as a fair-to-middling painter, and mediocre drywaller. I learned more than I ever cared to know about plumbing, HVAC systems and ceramic floor tiles and will probably strangle my own self if I have to tape and paint a French door (let alone six of them) ever again. For three months I made myself available to Andrea and her husband Jim in whatever capacity they desired, only drawing the line when Andrea thought it was in my scope of duties as her sous chef to help her and her husband move into their new apartment above the restaurant. Uh uh.
Eventually we opened, to fire alarms and blown circuits and crowds that, at first, we couldn't handle. Our kitchen staff included the Sasquatch-sized teenaged son of the chiropractor next door, a "foodie" named Adam who got fired after two days for undercooking the pompano, and a series of dishwashers beginning with Cliff who left early every Thursday to attend anger management classes while ironically angrily pacing about every night fuming that no one was helping him do the dishes, and ending with Emmanuel, a profoundly stuttering Haitian who was terrified of other Blacks.
We had some good employees, too, and although for the most part things were going very well for us, it wasn't without a price: I was working 65 hour weeks. Sometimes 70 hour weeks. It was all being logged in my appointment book although I knew better than to talk about it. That's because I was working for someone who once thought, even though it was for just a minute, that the Sous Chef should help her and her husband move because the Sous Chef was on the payroll.
So I am getting off point. Here I was, completely swallowed up by my new career choice but nonetheless trying to make the most of a very stressful situation, not least of which was learning how to cook as, up to that point, I was terrified of the grill and not so hot at much of anything else except desserts. (Oh, Andrea said I did the mussels well. Smiley face!) But a cookin' I was a doin' and one lovely summer night in July, 2007, just as I was dropping a beautiful pompano filet into a pan glossed with screaming hot oil, at the exact same moment Andrea was bending down in front of the stove. And then the fish met the pan.
"YOOUUUU BUUURRRRNNNEEDDD MMMEEEEEEE!!!!!!" Andrea suddenly screamed, jolting upright and covering her face with both her hands.
The rest of the story I'm not quite sure how to tell. As it all happened five years ago, I can't remember the exact sequence of events. I do know that, in my mind, which is secret, I immediately thought, "She actually got herself burned." I also thought, "Burns happen in restaurant kitchens all the time." And I'm pretty sure that I also thought, "Gosh, all this wailing and caterwauling is making me really, really uncomfortable." Because that's what Andrea was doing: carrying on as though, well, I don't even know. I guess like the playground bully who'd just been punched back. She was showing her true colors.
Fact #1: My numerous apologies went ignored. Well, no, they were met with scorn. Fact #2: She was angry. Boy, was she angry. You see, and please don't read any sarcasm into this, Andrea had the most beautiful porcelain skin I had ever seen. Having a greyish-green, acne-scarred complexion myself, I always envied her amazing skin. It was a pity that she was 50 pounds overweight and sported the most unflattering, butchy haircut for her face and body type EVER, but she had a lock on the good skin. And now I had torpedoed her modeling career.
"How am I supposed to go into the dining room with these marks on my face!" she angrily asked me when she returned after running out of the restaurant. "I am going to have to wear a baseball hat for the next three days!"
And now we arrive at the really good part. After calming down, applying salve, and lecturing me that instead of apologizing and actually taking care of her and nursing her back to health, I had instead "made jokes," and after explaining to me that to be the face of her restaurant she had to actually have a face (although I was pretty sure 99.5% of her face was still intact), her husband walked in the door.
From across the kitchen, an Olympian 24 feet long, he could immediately see that something was wrong. "Honey what happened to your face?" he asked in alarm.
"KAKI BURNED ME!" she shouted across the kitchen. Shouted.
Mind you, it had already been well-established to everyone working in the restaurant that night that I had intentionally burned Andrea. But that was not good enough for her because now she had to make sure that Jim also knew what a filthy rotten person I was.
I don't remember what, if anything, Jim said to me, although clearly he was being very supportive of his wife and always was, to the extent that a month or so later, while his wife "slept" in their apartment upstairs, he basically told me that I wasn't wanted there anymore although my construction and remodeling services had been greatly appreciated! But that is also another blog post for another time.
The bright red cherry on the gooey chocolate fudge sundae that night was when Andrea told me to snap out of it. I was beyond defeated and demoralized, having mentally retreated to that place I often go when I don't have the slightest understanding of what just happened, and while there is probably a good medicine for this particular malady, I don't take drugs, and frankly I just couldn't get out of my funk. But that was annoying Andrea too! LOL! Because although she failed to acknowledge that the reason I burned her was because I was cooking fish for one of her customers in her restaurant, now I needed to suck it up and cook fish for her customers in her restaurant. LOL times a thousand!
Andrea, Jim and I parted ways on September 1, 2007. Oh, we mended our fences insofar as me purposely throwing hot grease right into her moneymaker, but my hours were getting longer and longer and I was closing in on a nervous breakdown. No joke. Well, this also annoyed Andrea, as did it when I went to the chiropractor right next door for 20 minutes every Friday at five p.m. Because my arms and legs were inexplicably going numb.
Although it's been five years, I have recurring dreams about A Toute Heure, mostly that I have snuck inside the restaurant and am hiding from Andrea. To this day I am afraid of her.
And, my friends, that is the story behind the Hot Grease Flashback of 2012.
But then on New Year's Day I was standing over a pan of hot oil, frying wings for a little family get-together, and I had the following thought: "Oh, I hope this hot grease doesn't fly into my eye because I have no health insurance." And then I remembered. And I was ashamed.
Andrea asked me to come to work for her when we were still in cooking school. Although I was terribly out of place at this particular school, twice as old as most of my classmates, and completely oblivious to the hard-partying and fornication that was rampant not only at my school but also apparently right in my own apartment (another blog completely), I labored under the delusion that as long as I showed up for class every day I was destined for greatness. In spite of one of our instructors proclaiming us the worst class ever, I was unphased and so when Andrea pulled me aside one morning to ask me to be the sous chef in the restaurant she planned to open after graduation, I thought it was a halfway decent idea and certainly in keeping with my plan for world domination.
Arriving in New Jersey a year and a half later, having driven a 17-foot U-Haul truck halfway across the country in the dead of winter, expecting to begin a cooking job in a few days, you could say I was slightly less than thrilled to find NO RESTAURANT! Instead I found a gutted out building that looked substantially the same as when I had seen it about seven months prior on a reconnaissance mission to New Jersey. Now, I kid just a little. Although there were no sinks, no stoves, no counters, no work tables, and no dining room for the customers, there were also no floors or walls! This sad reality was the groundwork for my once-in-a-lifetime epiphany that because I was now stuck in New Jersey, having laid out a LOT of money to move and rent an apartment, I was now stuck in New Jersey. I needed to learn a trade, and fast.
And I did. In the space of three months I became, to paraphrase Andrea's father, an "expert caulker," as well as a fair-to-middling painter, and mediocre drywaller. I learned more than I ever cared to know about plumbing, HVAC systems and ceramic floor tiles and will probably strangle my own self if I have to tape and paint a French door (let alone six of them) ever again. For three months I made myself available to Andrea and her husband Jim in whatever capacity they desired, only drawing the line when Andrea thought it was in my scope of duties as her sous chef to help her and her husband move into their new apartment above the restaurant. Uh uh.
Eventually we opened, to fire alarms and blown circuits and crowds that, at first, we couldn't handle. Our kitchen staff included the Sasquatch-sized teenaged son of the chiropractor next door, a "foodie" named Adam who got fired after two days for undercooking the pompano, and a series of dishwashers beginning with Cliff who left early every Thursday to attend anger management classes while ironically angrily pacing about every night fuming that no one was helping him do the dishes, and ending with Emmanuel, a profoundly stuttering Haitian who was terrified of other Blacks.
We had some good employees, too, and although for the most part things were going very well for us, it wasn't without a price: I was working 65 hour weeks. Sometimes 70 hour weeks. It was all being logged in my appointment book although I knew better than to talk about it. That's because I was working for someone who once thought, even though it was for just a minute, that the Sous Chef should help her and her husband move because the Sous Chef was on the payroll.
So I am getting off point. Here I was, completely swallowed up by my new career choice but nonetheless trying to make the most of a very stressful situation, not least of which was learning how to cook as, up to that point, I was terrified of the grill and not so hot at much of anything else except desserts. (Oh, Andrea said I did the mussels well. Smiley face!) But a cookin' I was a doin' and one lovely summer night in July, 2007, just as I was dropping a beautiful pompano filet into a pan glossed with screaming hot oil, at the exact same moment Andrea was bending down in front of the stove. And then the fish met the pan.
"YOOUUUU BUUURRRRNNNEEDDD MMMEEEEEEE!!!!!!" Andrea suddenly screamed, jolting upright and covering her face with both her hands.
The rest of the story I'm not quite sure how to tell. As it all happened five years ago, I can't remember the exact sequence of events. I do know that, in my mind, which is secret, I immediately thought, "She actually got herself burned." I also thought, "Burns happen in restaurant kitchens all the time." And I'm pretty sure that I also thought, "Gosh, all this wailing and caterwauling is making me really, really uncomfortable." Because that's what Andrea was doing: carrying on as though, well, I don't even know. I guess like the playground bully who'd just been punched back. She was showing her true colors.
Fact #1: My numerous apologies went ignored. Well, no, they were met with scorn. Fact #2: She was angry. Boy, was she angry. You see, and please don't read any sarcasm into this, Andrea had the most beautiful porcelain skin I had ever seen. Having a greyish-green, acne-scarred complexion myself, I always envied her amazing skin. It was a pity that she was 50 pounds overweight and sported the most unflattering, butchy haircut for her face and body type EVER, but she had a lock on the good skin. And now I had torpedoed her modeling career.
"How am I supposed to go into the dining room with these marks on my face!" she angrily asked me when she returned after running out of the restaurant. "I am going to have to wear a baseball hat for the next three days!"
And now we arrive at the really good part. After calming down, applying salve, and lecturing me that instead of apologizing and actually taking care of her and nursing her back to health, I had instead "made jokes," and after explaining to me that to be the face of her restaurant she had to actually have a face (although I was pretty sure 99.5% of her face was still intact), her husband walked in the door.
From across the kitchen, an Olympian 24 feet long, he could immediately see that something was wrong. "Honey what happened to your face?" he asked in alarm.
"KAKI BURNED ME!" she shouted across the kitchen. Shouted.
Mind you, it had already been well-established to everyone working in the restaurant that night that I had intentionally burned Andrea. But that was not good enough for her because now she had to make sure that Jim also knew what a filthy rotten person I was.
I don't remember what, if anything, Jim said to me, although clearly he was being very supportive of his wife and always was, to the extent that a month or so later, while his wife "slept" in their apartment upstairs, he basically told me that I wasn't wanted there anymore although my construction and remodeling services had been greatly appreciated! But that is also another blog post for another time.
The bright red cherry on the gooey chocolate fudge sundae that night was when Andrea told me to snap out of it. I was beyond defeated and demoralized, having mentally retreated to that place I often go when I don't have the slightest understanding of what just happened, and while there is probably a good medicine for this particular malady, I don't take drugs, and frankly I just couldn't get out of my funk. But that was annoying Andrea too! LOL! Because although she failed to acknowledge that the reason I burned her was because I was cooking fish for one of her customers in her restaurant, now I needed to suck it up and cook fish for her customers in her restaurant. LOL times a thousand!
Andrea, Jim and I parted ways on September 1, 2007. Oh, we mended our fences insofar as me purposely throwing hot grease right into her moneymaker, but my hours were getting longer and longer and I was closing in on a nervous breakdown. No joke. Well, this also annoyed Andrea, as did it when I went to the chiropractor right next door for 20 minutes every Friday at five p.m. Because my arms and legs were inexplicably going numb.
Although it's been five years, I have recurring dreams about A Toute Heure, mostly that I have snuck inside the restaurant and am hiding from Andrea. To this day I am afraid of her.
And, my friends, that is the story behind the Hot Grease Flashback of 2012.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
The Real Deal
The following is the unedited version of the essay I submitted to the Columbus Dispatch, printed in its much shorter and far less interesting form on January 28, 2012. All the grammatical and tensive errors have not yet been corrected by the wise journalism staff at The Dispatch.
I have done the unthinkable. I have resigned from my job although I don’t have another job lined up. Now I am facing some serious soul-searching, massive self-doubt, and a gut-wrenching longing for what I gave up. Oh, I am not talking about a steady paycheck, or lost benefits, or even the free food and coffee drinks available at my job that I always bragged about to my friends and family. I did love those things. But the intense pressure of my constantly changing environment, the maddening lack of staff, and the demanding overnight and weekend hours were just too much. When I began to notice my knees regularly buckling as I walked from the parking garage to my unit, that’s when I knew it was time to get out. I already knew my blood pressure was through the roof.
No, what I am going to miss so dearly is my employees, the students of OSU who worked so hard to feed other OSU students. Now, there are many, many jobs for students at OSU. Some work in the library, or they find a job in their dorm, or they do jobs that involve walking backwards all over campus talking to prospective high school students and their parents. And then there is the behemoth of Campus Dining, where I worked. It is the mother lode of student jobs because at OSU feeding students is nearly as important as educating them and it is nothing less than a gargantuan machine that pushes out food for close to 24 hours a day. And we relied on student labor to do most of the pushing.
The funny thing about students, though, is that most of them haven’t built up much of a resume in their 19 or 20 years. They come to us having worked for a summer at Dairy Queen or the local feed store or their aunt’s restaurant in China. Or they never worked a day in their life. They come to us with a checkerboard class schedule that leaves us pulling out our hair figuring out how to schedule them without making them work every single Friday and Saturday night. They come to us so cash-strapped that the Goodwill store on High Street is probably their only option for their required work uniform, a pair of black chino-style pants and black non-skid shoes.
And of course they come to us not understanding a thing about the restaurant business. Unlike all the other units that feed students on the meal plan at OSU, I managed an actual full-service, sit-down restaurant that provided a unique dining experience for students and the public at large. And by unique, I mean very hard to learn in just a few days. But that is all we could spare for training before pushing our new employees out on the floor to wait on other students. Having started in the restaurant business myself back in the 1990s, I remember only too well how strange and intimidating everything was, and being not comforted, but actually frightened, by all the people purposefully charging around inside of it. As a manager, I had to make it as unscary to these young people as possible.
Unfortunately, that is the inherent conflict in the restaurant business: it is nearly impossible to run a restaurant efficiently without being kind of scary. Well, firm and direct and unwilling to listen to arguments or entertain excuses. And in spite of being the scariest, meanest manager they had ever seen, this is how my deep respect and honest affection for my student workers was born because at the end of the day (literally) they always came through for me.
First there was Cory, a quiet sophomore who was with us when we first opened in March of 2010. Had Cory not needed to work 30 hours per week (the maximum allowed), I may never have noticed him at all except that he was always there, helping me close the restaurant at five o’clock in the morning. (Yes, I said five a.m.) He did dishes. He ran trash. He cleaned drains. He mopped floors. And he was one of the only students I trusted implicitly to clean “the coffee shop,” a confectionary area directly inside my restaurant that was a mini-restaurant in itself. Over the course of his one year with us, Cory met every single one of my requests with an even-toned “Okay,” never delivered with eye rolls or tongue clucks or an exasperated exhale of breath. At least not in front of me, which is all I asked of my student workers.
There was Will, a junior with a glorious teased-out Afro, who started as a bartender but quickly morphed into my go-to person for almost every job in the restaurant. Since we didn’t sell a lot of alcohol, Will first became my coffee shop pro, then my dish tank fall-back guy, and then we trained him as a server, a job he detested. We quickly came to an understanding that I would save him from serving as often as I could as long as he stood ready to carry out my every order which ran the gamut from finding me a case of Half ‘n’ Half somewhere in the building to manning the expo line for two hours. When a co-worker brought his Pokemon card collection to the restaurant for a few days, generating lots of whispers and snide comments, an exasperated Will finally exclaimed to me, “They need to just leave him alone! Everyone’s a freak.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Speaking of which, there was Tatiana, the kookiest 18 year-old goofball that ever came down the pike. From Day One Tatiana latched on to me in a bizarre Eddie Haskel-ish fashion, trailing me around the restaurant, meeting my every order or request with an enthusiastic, “ I’ll do it Kaki!” sometimes even fighting other students to handle a task I had assigned. Only I knew that Tatiana wasn’t brown-nosing. She was just a frustrated actress with a goofy persona who knew I didn’t take her antics very seriously. For some reason, she simply wanted just to please me. Or amuse me, which she did time after time.
A total surprise was Patrick, a sophomore who was sassy way beyond acceptability, yet so dependable that he nearly reached his one year anniversary without so much as being late for a single shift. Nearly. I caught Patrick leaning and loitering and texting while on duty more times than I care to remember and yet his spirited excuses were the catalyst for my sanity-saving epiphany that while I could try to micromanage every physical aspect of the restaurant, I could not micromanage my students’ personalities. I had to let them be themselves, or they would be miserable. And I could not have that.
In time, having some semblance of fun became the most important item on the agenda every night, however I could fit it in. As much as I deflated every time I learned that my scheduled dishwasher did not show up (which happened a lot), I always smile remembering the night that Karah and I went on dish duty and simply made a party out of it. We sang loudly and composed ridiculous dish-themed chants simply to send the message that working the dish tank was hands down the best job in the place. I was damned if I was going to have anyone think that any job in my restaurant was beneath me or intolerable.
And then there was Josh, a scrappy little guy from central Ohio who worked as a student cook, a challenging job under even the best conditions. From Day One Josh seemed out of his league alongside his peers, someone I would have pegged to fail simply because of his small build and unfailingly agreeable attitude, a flat-out rarity in a commercial kitchen. But somehow Josh outlasted them all, becoming indispensable to his chef supervisors, and to me. I can’t recall a single student who did as many dirty jobs as he did, or who refused to speak ill of his co-workers although plenty of times he had good reason to. Josh was killed in a car accident only two weeks ago.
In time, most of my student workers figured out that all I asked was that everyone just do their job, or at least try. If the restaurant was clean and well-stocked and the customers had full drinks and no empty plates in front of them, then I was okay with a little relaxing. At some point I had seen each and every one of them racing around the restaurant carrying large trays of steaming plates or a bus tub full of dirty dishes. I had seen them all lugging huge buckets of ice to refill the ice bins and dragging overflowing dumpsters of trash and linen to the loading dock. I had seen them all sweeping and mopping the floors at five o’clock in the morning, bleary-eyed and ready to cry because they had a class at ten a.m. Although most of them didn’t start out that way, they all ended up caring, in some small way, about their job, the restaurant, and the customers they served. I was proud to work with all of them.
And when I resigned, they cared, and that was the biggest surprise of all. So, thank you Cory, Tatiana, Patrick and Karah. Thank you Molly and Shelly and Sarah and Courtney and Crystal and Jake. Thank you to all my Joeys, Wills, Megans, Katies, Alexes, Brittanys and Sams . Thank you all from the bottom of my heart. And thank you Josh Elzey, may you rest in peace.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Happiness
Just about every morning I wake up earlier than I want to. I rarely sleep well and instead of "hitting the snooze button" on my alarm clock, I always just get up when the alarm goes off. I don't even know what a snooze button is, quite frankly. It is completely foreign to me, like getting money from my parents or having a mentor.
And so when I wake up, I head downstairs to the kitchen and start the morning ritual: empty the dishwasher, cut up the fruit, make my tea, check on the dog, and figure out what I am going to make my disabled father for breakfast. You see, I live with my parents. My dad is 80 and my mom is 77, and I am 49. We are all living together in the house I grew up in, a 3000 square foot mess of a shithole where no cleaning is done, no trash is taken out, no spills wiped up, and no shrubs trimmed or leaves raked unless it is done by me. And that ain't even the start of it.
But this is the life I have chosen. Thankfully, I like my parents. My dad is a total pain in the ass quitter who would eat cookies 24 hours a day if we would let him, but my mom is an industrious planner/thinker-type who keeps busy all day long and rarely asks me for anything unless she just cannot do it. Like fix her TV when she pushes some wonky buttons on the remote control and gets a blue screen for an hour and then finally asks for my expertise, which is zero. But I always manage to restore her cable, always followed by a stern admonition that she'd better not do it again! And I say it real mean-like because that's how I roll.
Needless to say, I often feel that my life is not my own. On the very rare occasion when I have the chance to spend an entire weekend with my boyfriend, I still leave for a few hours to go back home for no other reason than to make sure no one's lying in a pool of blood or urine, or just counsel my mother not to carry pans of scalding grease across the kitchen (code meaning: drip it all over the floor and onto her bare feet which has already happened). I count it among my many blessings that I was actually home when the pipe burst on the back sink when my mother was out of town, or that I hadn't yet left for work when I discovered the old back door that we haven't used for almost two decades had somehow rotted it's sneaky self open and would not stay shut.
I think a lot about having no demands on my time. You could even call it a dream, like I dream of having an enormous hot air blower in my bathroom or a vacuum that straps onto my back. It would be nice to only do self-indulgent things all the time, which is not a terrible thing being that we all have to hand over our souls to The Man for 40 hours a week. But when I hear someone say that we are supposed to pursue happiness in life, that above all we must do what makes us happy, I shake my head in amazement because I just don't see it.
Where does it say that we must make ourselves happy? How does one arrive at the conclusion that personal fulfillment is the objective of life? Conversely, how can one not think that doing for others is the sole purpose of life? I guess I view my life as my child: I can't not change it's diapers or take it to school or go to it's room when it's crying in the midde of the night. (Yes, my child is an It.) These things have to be done, no questions asked. Although I am a pretty piss poor housekeeper, and would probably benefit immensely from devoting myself to a major cleaning/organizing expedition, not to mention that I have been staring at a hair tumbleweed at the top of the steps for, oh, about a month now, I wouldn't think of saying anything but "Yes," to my sister if she needed me to watch her son, or my other sister if she wanted me to attend her child's recital, or my brother if he wanted me to dog sit for the weekend. I will leave the house at 9:00 p.m. to get my dad a lottery ticket or buy him some more pee pads. I will take down the umbrellas on the patio furniture and stack the chairs and put away the pool toys even though it's not my damn house! I will learn how to operate a chain saw and then spend days cutting down a giant Thing in the backyard that once was a tree but we cut it down and then it morphed into an uncontrolled bush until another dead tree fell on it and it became A Thing That Broke The Fence. All to keep the city beautification committee from coming after my parents.
But I don't really want to do these things. Just like I don't really want to drag myself out of bed every morning to cut up my dad's fruit. And I don't do these things because I am a good person. I am cynical and a bit of a grouch. I scream at the cable company every single time I call them. Only a few days ago I yelled at a homeless man because he wanted ten dollars instead of my loose change. I am categorically not a good person.
But I certainly have no doubts about why I'm here on earth.
And so when I wake up, I head downstairs to the kitchen and start the morning ritual: empty the dishwasher, cut up the fruit, make my tea, check on the dog, and figure out what I am going to make my disabled father for breakfast. You see, I live with my parents. My dad is 80 and my mom is 77, and I am 49. We are all living together in the house I grew up in, a 3000 square foot mess of a shithole where no cleaning is done, no trash is taken out, no spills wiped up, and no shrubs trimmed or leaves raked unless it is done by me. And that ain't even the start of it.
But this is the life I have chosen. Thankfully, I like my parents. My dad is a total pain in the ass quitter who would eat cookies 24 hours a day if we would let him, but my mom is an industrious planner/thinker-type who keeps busy all day long and rarely asks me for anything unless she just cannot do it. Like fix her TV when she pushes some wonky buttons on the remote control and gets a blue screen for an hour and then finally asks for my expertise, which is zero. But I always manage to restore her cable, always followed by a stern admonition that she'd better not do it again! And I say it real mean-like because that's how I roll.
Needless to say, I often feel that my life is not my own. On the very rare occasion when I have the chance to spend an entire weekend with my boyfriend, I still leave for a few hours to go back home for no other reason than to make sure no one's lying in a pool of blood or urine, or just counsel my mother not to carry pans of scalding grease across the kitchen (code meaning: drip it all over the floor and onto her bare feet which has already happened). I count it among my many blessings that I was actually home when the pipe burst on the back sink when my mother was out of town, or that I hadn't yet left for work when I discovered the old back door that we haven't used for almost two decades had somehow rotted it's sneaky self open and would not stay shut.
I think a lot about having no demands on my time. You could even call it a dream, like I dream of having an enormous hot air blower in my bathroom or a vacuum that straps onto my back. It would be nice to only do self-indulgent things all the time, which is not a terrible thing being that we all have to hand over our souls to The Man for 40 hours a week. But when I hear someone say that we are supposed to pursue happiness in life, that above all we must do what makes us happy, I shake my head in amazement because I just don't see it.
Where does it say that we must make ourselves happy? How does one arrive at the conclusion that personal fulfillment is the objective of life? Conversely, how can one not think that doing for others is the sole purpose of life? I guess I view my life as my child: I can't not change it's diapers or take it to school or go to it's room when it's crying in the midde of the night. (Yes, my child is an It.) These things have to be done, no questions asked. Although I am a pretty piss poor housekeeper, and would probably benefit immensely from devoting myself to a major cleaning/organizing expedition, not to mention that I have been staring at a hair tumbleweed at the top of the steps for, oh, about a month now, I wouldn't think of saying anything but "Yes," to my sister if she needed me to watch her son, or my other sister if she wanted me to attend her child's recital, or my brother if he wanted me to dog sit for the weekend. I will leave the house at 9:00 p.m. to get my dad a lottery ticket or buy him some more pee pads. I will take down the umbrellas on the patio furniture and stack the chairs and put away the pool toys even though it's not my damn house! I will learn how to operate a chain saw and then spend days cutting down a giant Thing in the backyard that once was a tree but we cut it down and then it morphed into an uncontrolled bush until another dead tree fell on it and it became A Thing That Broke The Fence. All to keep the city beautification committee from coming after my parents.
But I don't really want to do these things. Just like I don't really want to drag myself out of bed every morning to cut up my dad's fruit. And I don't do these things because I am a good person. I am cynical and a bit of a grouch. I scream at the cable company every single time I call them. Only a few days ago I yelled at a homeless man because he wanted ten dollars instead of my loose change. I am categorically not a good person.
But I certainly have no doubts about why I'm here on earth.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Christmas Nineteen Eighty Something
This is a true, for realsies, rebuttal of my sister's Cats with Knives blog regarding the great Christmas tree caper of 1980-something.
It was Christmas Eve 1980 something. I was home for the holidays, visiting from the east coast where I lived. We were all sitting there minding our own business, which meant everyone else's business. My mom and dad had gone to bed. I don't remember anyone crying about not having a Christmas tree. Christmas trees cost money and dammit I didn't have any to spare--I had an expensive Hoboken apartment, seven brothers and sisters, two parents, and a Limited habit to feed. Money was tight at Christmas.
Suddenly I was in the car with my brother Ed, Billy Bope (his friend from college), and I think my sister Liz, on a mad hunt for a Christmas tree, guns blazing, all fired up about making Christmas right. And that's how I rolled: so easily manipulated and forever gullible about other people's sentimental bullshit. (Truth be told I LOVE Christmas trees but I also don't typically put them up in other peoples' houses without their permission. Generally.)
We found a lot not far down the main drag and found a tree. Maybe we hopped a fence, don't really remember. It was dark. When it was time to depart I distinctly remember knocking on the door of the trailer at the lot, getting no answer, and then leaving. Pretty quickly. Then we bought beer with all the money we had shaken down from our siblings to purchase the tree. I seriously don't remember actually extorting any money from my pubsecent siblings, but it sounds vaguely familiar and I distinctly remember buying the beer. Huh.
When we got home we put up the tree in the hallway, drank some beer and went to bed. I remember nothing else except that my mom was happy when she saw the tree in the morning. I'm sure we ruined the day for her at some point later on, though. The poor woman put up with a lot of shit from us. And still does.
Merry Christmas.
It was Christmas Eve 1980 something. I was home for the holidays, visiting from the east coast where I lived. We were all sitting there minding our own business, which meant everyone else's business. My mom and dad had gone to bed. I don't remember anyone crying about not having a Christmas tree. Christmas trees cost money and dammit I didn't have any to spare--I had an expensive Hoboken apartment, seven brothers and sisters, two parents, and a Limited habit to feed. Money was tight at Christmas.
Suddenly I was in the car with my brother Ed, Billy Bope (his friend from college), and I think my sister Liz, on a mad hunt for a Christmas tree, guns blazing, all fired up about making Christmas right. And that's how I rolled: so easily manipulated and forever gullible about other people's sentimental bullshit. (Truth be told I LOVE Christmas trees but I also don't typically put them up in other peoples' houses without their permission. Generally.)
We found a lot not far down the main drag and found a tree. Maybe we hopped a fence, don't really remember. It was dark. When it was time to depart I distinctly remember knocking on the door of the trailer at the lot, getting no answer, and then leaving. Pretty quickly. Then we bought beer with all the money we had shaken down from our siblings to purchase the tree. I seriously don't remember actually extorting any money from my pubsecent siblings, but it sounds vaguely familiar and I distinctly remember buying the beer. Huh.
When we got home we put up the tree in the hallway, drank some beer and went to bed. I remember nothing else except that my mom was happy when she saw the tree in the morning. I'm sure we ruined the day for her at some point later on, though. The poor woman put up with a lot of shit from us. And still does.
Merry Christmas.
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