In Memorium of My Waiting Job.

Yesterday was my last day waiting tables and, as such, I've decided to create the follow up to Ms. Mount Vernons guide to not pissing off your hostess. I present you

A Guide to Knowing if Your Waiter Hates You (A Lot)

1. omg hi i'm 17! me n my bff want to sit in ur section for 2 hours on a saturday night and chat about our bf probs. is it ok if we just nibble on the cheapest appetizer u have and drink water (WITH LEMON PLZ)? we'll tip 18% on our $8.99 bill we promise!
analysis: take your Forever 21 tunic shirt and get the fuck out of my section. if you're that self conscious about eating, why dont you just go buy some diet coke and laxatives and stay home. there is no need to cock block my income by crying over your house salad with dressing on the side for 50% of my shift. enjoy 7th grade.

2. hi me and my husband just decided to take our child, little Lucifer, out to a nice dinner! Little Lucifer has a bundle of excess energy-- you wouldn't mind if he just ran laps around the whole restaurant, right? Oh don't worry-- we taught him how to scream EXTRA loud so that we can always locate him!
analysis: i know this news is a little late, but you should have gotten an abortion. your child is a heinous devil and i want you to know i'm considering putting arsenic in his kids cheese ravioli.

3. gelici! hai en michrikov abrevmi gialonic barus. ni chai venov! velkomen amerkia! mikov harivk mi dinov hoy dimis tira ballen dikom. salut!
analysis: i did not just understand one fucking word you said. you know what i hope you understand? your foreign ass is going to get a 20% gratuity added to your check even if there are only 2 people. FREEDOM, BITCH.

4. this restaurant looks great! do you have XYZ item that i don't see on the menu? no? oh... well can i get this dish without this and without this too and can you change the sauce, add pepperoni, change the type of pasta and stir counterclockwise? is that too much trouble?
analysis: why would you come to a restaurant where you don't like/want ANYTHING on the menu? why don't you be a bigger pain in my ass and ask me to hand filter your water through imported hawaiian black sand? did you want to add boogers to your meal too? because i just assumed so. enjoy.

5. hi its our third date! i know this may be awkward, but if we sit on the same side of the booth its going to be a LOT easier for me to score an OPHJ (over pants hand job) in between appetizers and entrees. try not to interrupt our aggressive frenching when you bring our food out kthnx!
analysis: i know all you're paying attention to now is your strategy of getting her to let you touch her boob.... but lets see the forest through the trees. she wants EXTRA dressing on that salad? regular coke? once her metabolism gos you'll be accidentally f'ing her fat folds for the rest of your life. enjoy that boob touch chubby chaser.

6. hey we're really enjoying our dinner! i know there are 11 of us sitting here but would you mind if we all did separate checks? and can we all pay in cash and can we all get change? that's not too much trouble right? dont mind me, i'm going to only tip 14%... i'm SURE someone else will make up for it! i just am so short on those benjamins ^-^
analysis: congratulations! you just increased the chance that i will fuck up your bill/credit card by 200%. and please dont get pissy that its taking me more than 30 seconds to do. but seriously, i'm really glad you all wrote EXACTLY how much you each owe ($21.64) next to your credit card number. it makes it very easy. eat shit.



alright now beyond simple TYPES, here are some things never to do.
1. please take 5 minutes to consolidate your needs, create a prioritized list and then ask me to get you things. i do not enjoy when this job doubles as my work out so i will get pissed real fast if every person at the table is asking me to get them something different every time i come back to the table to give someone else whatever they just asked for.
2. if you cant afford to leave a decent tip, don't fucking go out to dinner. don't you understand ths is my income and i have a very aggressive partying lifestyle? please be sensitive to this fact whenever tipping under 20%.
3. seriously don't just hang out and eat at a rate of .0001 molecule per minute especially if your bill is low as shit. you're effectively preventing me from making any money. i understand you want to talk with your bff, but thats why places called "not my mother f'ing booth" exist. GO AWAY.
4. please don't make a hundred alterations to what you want to eat and then get pissed at me when its not perfect. stop being a diva and just fuckin eat up, if you want something that specific get your ass back to the kitchen and make it yourself (esp if you're a woman.. why arent you at home cooking anyway right?)

this is but a few..... i hope you are better educated and PEACE OUT waiting job... RIP motherfucker

Sad but true

We have literally grown up with Facebook.

What makes me wonder is what happens when Facebook and us approach our golden years, will applications like "Online Shuffleboard" or "The race to see who takes the most pills a day" will dominate our landscape. Will we write on our walls, "Hey Margaret, it was great playing checkers with you in the Golden Years Home this morning LOLROFL you are so good at them. P.S. come by my room lata Ben, the 90 year-old from next door just got High School Musical 45 on DVD"?

Ahh those will be the days. Off to Puerto Rico in ohhhh....3 hours, so I should probably go to bed.

The Many Failings of a July Birthday.

Today marks my 22nd birthday. Of the 22 birthdays I've had, five stand out in my mind as particularly... disasterous, and it is those five which I'd like to expound upon now.

Tenth Birthday, 1996: Once, in my youth, a friends mother made a birthday cake that is responsible for 2/5 of my problem birthdays. It was a pool-- chocolate mini donuts as inning tubes, frosting people, etc, etc. On my tenth birthday my mother and I decided to recreate it. This, of course, meant we brought it to the Giant Foodstore bakery staff to recreate. Instead of receiving the cake of my dreams, blue jello and icing people and chocolate diving boards and all, we were-- two hours before my party was set to begin-- given a cake with a buxom, bikini clad beauty bathing in a pool upon a pink swim float in a fairly seductive position. My mother was flabbergasted, saying "THIS IS FOR A TEN YEAR OLD" in an exasperated manner to the bakery staff. Because my party was so soon, the bathing beauty was scraped off and "happy birthday sara" was scrawled across the cake in icing.

Eleventh Birthday, 1997. Due to the failures of my swimming pool cake the previous year, my mother and I decided that we would be better suited to hire a cake maker who could respond to our individual needs. Mother looked in the phone book and found a cake maker who lived a few streets down. We gave her a call, got in the car and headed over to her home.
The woman seemed very nice, a portly, wily haired woman in her 40s. We explained to her what we wanted and she said us on her couch while she made my mother coffee and gave us her portfolio to leaf through.
Red Flag #1. When you open up a portfolio and immediately see breasts. Cake breasts, to be specific. Turn the page.
Red Flag #2. Penis. Cake.... penis.
Oh thank God, we turned the page and there was a non controversial cake raccoon. Lets look at that for a while. Turn the page.
An entire nude woman, her naughty parts exposed, crafted out of cake. Turn the page. A CAKE NUDE MAN, pointing to the ceiling with his cake staff.
At this point, mother calmly closes the portfolio and places it on the table. She tells me that we will not be getting a cake from this lady. We get up and slip into the day, before the wily haired woman ever comes out of the kitchen with her coffee.

Fourteenth Birthday, 200o. Hiking the 100 Mile Wilderness of the AT. We were close to the end of our day and stopped to have lunch by a lake. Lunch was pizza!!! AKA macaroni and cheese cheese on top of a pita. Disgusting. Only one obstacle remained before we got to our campsite-- Potawadjo Ridge, a small little hill. After having just hiked high, craggy mountains for days, Potawadjo Ridge received nothing but our ridicule. "Oh noooo I don't think I can hike over it, its hugeeee!" Well. Potawadjo Ridge has a sense of humor.
Just as we arrived at the summit of Potawadjo Ridge, disaster struck in the from of a freak lightning storm. And not a lightning storm a couple miles away-- a lightning storm within 500 feet of us. As in, we were made aware of it when we saw a tree up ahead get struck, spark a bit and fall over. We immediately assumed "lightning position". Lightning position is designed for close proximity to electric storms so that, in the event you are struck by lightning, the energy will go through your feet and ass, not through your heart and kill you. HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
We stayed like that for two hours. It hailed golf balls. It poured rain. The temperature dropped 15 degrees. I was in a friggen cotton t shirt. It kept lightning over and over-- there was no pause between the flash of the lightning and the rumble of thunder. I genuinely thought I was going to die.
After two hours, the storm subsided and I got up. I was shivering so badly that I couldn't walk, all of us had pretty bad hypothermia from sitting in hail and rain for that long. Trip leader got some emergency chocolate bars out of his backpack to get our blood sugar up. I vividly remember him handing me mine but my hands were shivering so bad it shattered and fell all over the ground. We had six tenths of a mile until our lean to and we RAN the entire way, I have no recollection of it at all. Just little snippets of memory running through trees, half tripping on roots. We arrived, made hot chocolate and sang happy birthday.

Fifteenth Birthday, 2001. Seven week whitewater canoeing trip in Northern Quebec down the Mistassibi river. Unfortunately, there is not a direct road or even any direct way to GET to the Mistassibi so three of our seven weeks consisted of getting to the river itself-- pond hopping, canoeing rivers upstream, walking our canoes down untraversable rapids while in the frigid water up to our shoulders down rapids and, my personal favorite, PORTAGING. Portaging is when you physically carry your canoes, your backpacks, tents, food, everything over land to the next waterway.
My birthday, July 14, 2001, we were scheduled for eight portages. Eight. Getting out of our canoes, unloading, carrying everything any distance from a tenth of a mile to two miles, reloading and canoeing to the next one. My favorite was the two miler, it was such a joy. There's nothing quite like getting lost in the Canadian woods while carrying a 95 pound piece of wood on your shoulders. We completed all 8 and got to our campsite.
Two things I remember besides doing eight god awful portages: first, that the boys were mad the girls took the good tent site so they cut down a bush and put it under our tent. So I slept on a bush. Assholes. Second, that we made a Jell-O No bake cheesecake for the occasion and it SET. The cheesecake set. For the record, they usually only set while IN THE REFRIGERATOR. It was that cold.

Eighteenth Birthday, 2004. This summer I am working at Darrow Wilderness Camp's base camp so I figure I'm safe. There are no showers on the island, so we have to bathe in the lake. I decide that I'm going to treat myself and wash my hair, take a nice long lake bath. I go into the supplies room and grab a plastic container of what looked like Dr. Brauners all purpose shampoo/soap/car degreaser/all purpose liquid. I go to the lake and take my time, wash my hair, just have a wonderful time making sure I'm nice and clean.
Fast forward ten hours: why is my hair so gross? I guess it was because that plastic container had VEGETABLE OIL in it, not shampoo. I washed my hair with vegetable oil.

Happy. Fucking. Birthday. Lets hope this one is better!

Trail of Beers

If you were driving down Wisconsin Avenue yesterday around 6 pm you would have been witness to a glorious spectacle, 4 of us, Rio leading the way with a keg, R with 2 30-racks on his shoulders, Flash with a cart full of mixers and myself holding another 30-rack and a backpack full of booze. Thus the Trail of Beers as I call it, commenced another successful "gathering" at OHD house.

Once again our party patrons did not disappoint as no alcohol remained this morning, minus that bottle of 12 dollar bourbon...okay perhaps not the most popular purchase.

Flash of course almost got her ass beat. Actually, not true at all, she has a killer right hook. However someone was added to the Do Not Invite list and I think we all know who that was...a sad reminder that even if you do go to a state school, in the end you are just an alcoholic.

Just a reminder the Rayger is next weekend as we celebrate Flash's next 3 birthdays. All we can do is pray our neighbors are once again gone for the weekend.

this WOULD happen to us.

It has come to our attention that there are nine dead bodies buried in the alley way of our house. While I am obviously not pleased about this news, I am at least comforted that the dead people are no longer in our basement where they were originally found.

Katie informed Rio and myself of this fact as we were peacefully watching Joel become potty trained on John and Kate Plus 8. Our reaction was typical: "dont tell us! dont tell us! DONT TELL US! ...tell us everything." To make a long story short, someone was digging around in our basement and lo and behold they found nine dead people. A basement is no place for corpses, so the person removed the bodies and REBURIED them in our alleyway, affectionately called Diagon Alley.

It goes without saying that there are some concerns that come along with finding out that your home is burial ground. Firstly, how in the hell did 9 people die in our basement? Second, what room do our dead people prefer to haunt? Third, is it possible that a ghost is watching me while I shower? Fourth, do ghosts enjoy eating mini fruit roll ups and diet coke? If so, how do I ensure they don't eat my mini fruit roll ups and diet coke?

So anyway, please be aware of waking the dead while you are partying at the OHD house this July 5th.