It is What it Is

The New Age

When I was 10 or 11, I went through what can best be described as a "New Age" phase. Now, being a pre-teen from the suburbs with limited means as well as transportation, my "new age phase" probably pales grossly into comparison to anyone else who's ever truly embarked on a different spiritual path. (I never even got to burn incense.) But I did develop a rather unhealthy obsession with The Nature Gallery catalog (crystals and wrapped-dolphin rings) and dream interpretation. (At the time, all I dreamed about were tests that I had forgotten to study for, so it really wasn't worth the seven dream dictionaries, but I suppose bygones are bygones.)  

Also, and I say this with a little more shame, during this time I decided that I really needed to explore my past lives. (Side note: this is what happens to an impressionable young girl left alone with daytime television. Between guests of Phil Donahue and Sally Jesse Raphael and the musings of Shirley Maclaine, I had a lot of unanswered questions.)

Adventures in the Service Industry, Part Two

It was the end of day four, and I still hadn't made it past appetizers. Around 10:00 p.m., about the time I was dying to escape the restaurant training I had been in since 5:00 p.m., my manger, Lou, decided we were all in need of a pep talk.

"Now, I tell you, I don't know what's happened to this group," he said. "We started out 40 strong, and since then, you guys have been dropping like flies. People show up one day, don't come back the next. What is it? Is it an issue of commitment? Is it the tests?"

He then referenced the poster boards he kept to the right of his podium (because every restaurant manager requires a podium) where he kept multiple poster boards with our daily test scores written next to our names. (Want to know when I began cheating? The first day I saw that Joe, who spent his free time setting his jeans on fire with a lighter, had scored a 100 compared to my 97. No one -- not even pregnant smoker Jeannie -- scored less than a 95, and I figured cheating was the standard.) 

Adventures in the Service Industry

Having been a writer/grad student/member of the under-employed at various points in my life, I've also spent my fair share of time waiting tables.

One of the many lessons I've learned as a former waitress is that being trained to wait tables is always far worse than actually waiting tables. At best, you end up doing the grunt work for whatever server you're shadowing for the shift. ("Yeah, if you sweep out the back and roll the next batch of silver, we should be good to go." There's no "we" when one of us keeps all the tips, and the other finishes out each shift in rubber gloves, my friend.) At worst, you have to role play waiting tables for your manager so that he can see how you'll perform with "Bad Guest #1" before allowing you on the floor.

This is a story about the latter. 

As a Mule*

I have been known to be a bit stubborn.

I won't shop at stores if I learn that they don't have a bathroom for customers. (Not only is this one practical, but I firmly believe that if you're willing to take someone's money, you should be willing to let them use your toilet as well.) I think gift certificates should not have an expiration date, and have had chats with many a manager over this. (They still have all your money, right?) And I do not share desserts unless the terms of the dessert sharing were agreed upon before said dessert was ordered.   

While some people might see these habits as idiosyncrasies, or just kind of odd/difficult, I think it's my commitment to these rules that pushes me into the stubborn territory. No bathroom for customers? You really will never see me in your store again -- unless of course I hear a change in policy has occurred.

But, perhaps the best example of my stubborn streak is what happened in my computer class from the fifth through the seventh grade.

Once or twice a week, we had to go to something called computer class. (I've honestly tried to block this particular part of my elementary education out, so the details on time might be a bit off.) There wasn't much to the curriculum -- we did typing tutorials for 45 minutes. Each and every time. For three years.

We learned absolutely nothing else about computers, and the only incentive to complete the typing tutorials was that if you finished early, you could play computer games.

Now, it just so happened that computer class was taught by one of my least favorite teachers. I thought he was cocky, condescending and seemed far more interested in what the boys had to say than what the girls had to say. For this last reason alone, he was really at the bottom of my list.

Mace in Your Face

I have worked in plenty seemingly-less-than-safe areas: downtown parking garages, poorly-lit parking lots next to wooded areas, restaurants in neighborhoods that seemed abandoned by the time you finished closing up from the last shift.

I've even lived in the suspect cities of Washington, D.C., Chicago and Durham, North Carolina. (For those of you thinking Durham doesn't belong on that list, please keep in mind they were on the hunt for a serial rapist during my freshman orientation week at Duke.) Even Birmingham is no picnic with its high homicide rate and large incidence of robbery and break-ins. And need I remind you of the potential peril that was my apartment in Nashville?

But, for most of my time in these jobs and cities, I didn't worry too much about my safety. (By "worry too much," I actually mean "purchase a firearm." I always worry -- it's just a matter of degrees.) If I could find someone to walk me to my car, I would. If I couldn't, I'd go anyway, keep an eye out and have my largest key ready for stabbing if necessary.

Then, I took a new job a couple of years ago, and I really started to worry. It wasn't that the locale was that different from anywhere I'd worked before, it was the comments I heard around the building that got to me, like "the security guard had to draw his gun on the guy" or "someone chased me up the stairs in the parking garage." (Plus, it was a genuine, bona fide runner who had been chased in the stairwell. She stood a shot. I, with my hobbies of wine and Lost, did not.)

Like a lot of my thoughts, none of it really went anywhere for quite awhile. I worried. Sometimes I worried more, sometimes I worried less. But it was still just worry.

Birth Order

For most of my life, I took incredible pride in being the oldest sister. (I have two sisters, one three years younger, and the other five and a half years behind me. Yes, my mother had three kids in less than six years. She and my father both worked full-time, too, so she does admit that most of our collective childhoods are "something of a blur.")

For many, many years, I equated "oldest" with "wisest," "most powerful," and "most entitled." (My middle sister is currently thinking that last sentence shouldn't be in the past tense.)

When we moved into a new house, who should have the biggest bedroom? Me, of course. And why? Because I was the oldest. Last piece of cake? Oldest. Right to check the mail, swim in the deep end of the pool and first shot at all gifts simply labeled "for the girls"? Oldest. Oldest. Oldest.

What No One Tells You

I always thought that being able to work from home would be my perfect job. I think that's true for most Americans. After all, you can be in the comfort of your own home, work in jammies and avoid all of the office politics. There's no pretending to care about Peggy's photos from her trip to Phoenix, pressure to buy $10 gift wrap because Paul's kid has a school fund raiser or having to remember to swing by Winn Dixie at 7:30 a.m. because you're the one in charge of pimento cheese for the company pot luck.

Work from home, live the dream, right?

I once even accepted a piddly salary (that I later found out put me about $8,000 behind all of my male counterparts) because I was told there would be the possibility of working from home on some days. (Said possibility never materialized.) And every time I've been part of a large office and overheard someone talking about spreadsheets or how to shake the toner cartridge in the copier to get more life out of it, I've stared off into space and dreamed of doing my daily tasks from home. 

Let's just say that after a year of working from home, yet another of my dreams is dead. Here's the stuff they don't tell you about that domestic office:

A Birthday and the Unexpected

When I was about five, my family moved into a new house on Crestside Road in Mountain Brook near the water tower and the local public high school. It took me quite awhile to recover from the indignity of the move. (How could they tear me away from my childhood home just like that? And it wasn't just any home -- there was an elementary school across the street complete with the largest playground I had ever seen. To take a child  away from her very own across-the-street playground? The cruelty astounds me to this day.)

Eventually, I recovered from the trauma and came to enjoy our much bigger backyard and the decadence of living in a three story house. (It was actually just a split level.) There were also a lot more children our age around, and it was fun to ride bikes, organize kickball games and dig around looking for arrowheads.

There were two new girls, in particular, that I decided I needed to immediately befriend. Both were my age, and while one lived across the street, the other lived a block and a half down or so. They seemed to do everything together, and I had to be a part of it.

It was after a few days of playing house (and trying to get them to like me even though they knew all the same people from school while I was the odd private-school-kid out) that I learned even more about them, "Oh, we're not just friends," Sally said, "we're cousins, too."

I was in awe. For my five-year-old self, being friends was one thing. Being best friends was a whole other sacred and longed-for entity, but being best friends and cousins was cooler and by far better than anything I could ever think of. You chose each other, and you were real-life -- not-just-blood-brothers -- related? I couldn't think of anything better.

Southern Hospitality

This past weekend, I attended a series of readings for pms (a literary journal produced by U.A.B. that is an acronym for poem memoir story). Dr. Alison Chapman was one of the readers, and she read from a piece about her work teaching in Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Alabama. While the entire essay was of great interest, the point of interest that lead to a discussion between another colleague and myself was this: Are Southern women ,in particular, torn between honest expression and the need to placate, please or be polite to others?

In short, are we more likely to keep our mouths shut? Do you tell your friend she looks huge in a particular dress when she asks, or do you say, "No, of course not, you're always beautiful"? While no friend, colleague or stranger likes these kinds of confrontations, it seems that Southerner women, especially, have trouble with the concept of expressing what they're really thinking.

This is also a conversation I've had many times before, especially with Northern transplants to the South. "Is everyone always this polite?" "Will someone stare if I want to talk about something other than tea sandwiches at the luncheon?" "Does anyone ever say anything negative about anyone?" "And what is this 'bless her heart'' stuff?"

And here's how I explain it: While Southern women may have been raised with a lot of decorum and a lot manners, we're also raised with a fair amount of sass, and we're not idiots.