D-Day

As server there are several days a year that are known as D-Days.  These are the days where there will be more people than the restaurant can handle, everyone will be stressed and screaming... the weak will cry.

Working in this job it is inevitable that you will have to serve your time on one of these D-Days.  They include:

1.  Christmas Eve

2. Thanksgiving (If your establishment is open)

3.  Easter

4. Father's Day

5.  Mother's Day (by far the most horrible of them all)

and

6.  New Year's Eve.

The optimistic will dream up ways of how to escape work on these days including diarrhea, constipation, vomiting, flat tires or all-out car accident that involves the jaws of life.  The realists, the veterans, will accept their fate calmly, knowing that by tomorrow it will be over, and hopefully they will still have their sanity and their jobs.

The owner will be there, causing unnecessary stress and micro-managing the smallest, most unimportant details.  We will run out of menu items, but no one will be told resulting in a huge backup on tickets.  Plates, spoons, knives, glasses will all miraculously disappear leading into large stampedes looking all over the restaurant.  People will linger at the door because there is no one to seat them, since the hostesses have been commanded to run food.  Servers will steal each other's food in order to complete their tickets first, there will be squabbles and fights.  I have seen one waiter grab another by the throat for taking a salad that wasn't his.

It's a cutthroat business, and it's every man for himself.

I'm sitting in a restaurant right now, and I can smell the impatience of the people at the door.  The busser is getting nervous and dropping water glasses.  In one hour his hell will be over whereas in two, mine will be starting.

Happy New Year everybody.  My only resolution is to never work another New Year's Eve D-Day again.

The Christmas Season

I hope that you all had wonderful holidays with lots of fireplaces, hot cocoa and surprises.

I consider this to be my first adult Christmas.  It's the first year I've had money to blow on presents for other people and also the first year that I've had to pick presents out for four little girls.  The little girls in question are Ernesto's nieces ages 10,8,5 and 2.  Ernesto and I spent all of the twenty-third picking out stuff for everyone, including my notoriously impossible to shop for mother.

At the end of the day we had everything and since we'd made the deal that he'd clean the house and I'd wrap the presents I sat down with a glass of wine and a cigarette, confident that I could tackle the mountain that lay before me.  I laid out the paper, scissors and ribbon as if I was on a battle station.  I started to wrap one gift.

See, I had started out with a feeling of self-confidence that soon proved to be false.  In high school we used to wrap presents at Borders for donation money for the orchestra.  By the end of the day I would be flying through each gift, corners perfectly folded and bows immaculately accenting the paper.  I guess I kinda figured it was like riding a bike.

I was dead wrong.

The first present seemed to be turning out alright, a little iffy but I figured it would be fine, that is, until I turned it over and found that a whole quarter of the package didn't have a stitch of paper on it.  Goddamn it.  I cut out a little square quietly and taped it on.  I thought I was so slick until the muffled laughter behind me grew uncontrollable.  Tarik and Ernesto apparently couldn't contain themselves after all of my arrogant bragging.  As they hooted and hollered I tried my best to ignore them and wrapped another one.  I'd gone off the deep end, paper-wise, and now was stuck with gigantic ends on either side which I tried to fold tightly against the package.

Essentially I had made a Christmas gift with love handles.  Squeezing in the sides of ribbon, I cursed my inability to get away from love handles.

I was comforted as I watched Ernesto's nieces tear into their presents, no ten year old gives a shit about how their present is wrapped, the paper is just going to end up on the floor in a thousand pieces anyway.

I bought Ernesto a guitar for Christmas, a lovely Dean model that has a tuner built into the motherfucker.  If only I could find a violin with the same attribute.

Christmas List:

1.  A bulldog

2.  An electric violin

3.  A sapphire ring

4.  Apples to Apples

Ha!  The only thing I got was #4, twice!  Except my mom wouldn't let me exchange the one that I got from my aunt and uncle and forced me to give it to her.  What a beast.

Not that I really expected anything on the list, but it would have been totally sweet.

Apparently there's a beauty contest at the Riot Room that someone wants me to enter.

Uh, I wish. 

By the way, this sort of gave me hope for the future.  Apparently the CIA wins friends in Afghanistan by offering Viagra to aged tribe leaders who can no longer keep up with their four wives.  In return, Afghani tribe leaders offer information on the Taliban and their whereabouts.  See guys?  Viagra isn't just for your limp weenies!  It could save the world!  Hef has it right with those towering easter baskets of Viagra.

Mama said there'd be days like this...

So here I embark on my foray into the blogging world.  Really I'm just doing this so that I don't have to scribble madly in a paper journal, blotting the pages with food scraps and minor paper-cut blood residue.  There's snow on the ground clinging furiously to each piece of grass, refusing to leave only getting harder and more compacted.  

The kids are leaving school now and there's a rush of slamming car doors, stomping feet and children calling.  They get to go home to a bit of freedom, cheeks tinged pink from frosty air and the rush of a sled whispering down a steep hill.

I, however, have a fashionable scarf wrapped around my head with three working pens and a wine key in my back pocket and a black pinstriped blazer situated a little tightly around my ribcage.

There's an itch on my back that I just can't scratch.

We went sledding last night on Suicide Hill, the most brutal hill that one can find in this pancake of a territory.  A man showed up wearing a kilt and a clinging infant.  He had two dogs, one of which looked like a wolf who delighted in chasing me down the hill trying to lick my face.

The sheer velocity of the sled, barreling down hills that literally make you fly in the air, this, this is the intensity I crave in my everyday life.

Tarik and I have decided to treat life like it is, an absolute fucking joke.  Go to work, make the money and then do the prescribed fun things to forget that your life has absolutely no meaning.  We will do things differently.  He is like the male version of myself only with more energy.  I told him we should be rock stars and just save all the money and then flush it into a poverty-stricken country by building schools, hospitals and homes.  The world is here for us to conquer.