The Real World

“Think about it this way.” He pulled a server’s pad toward him and began to draw the inevitable clock: an eight-top table with numbered seats and their corresponding orders. “So just bring the plates and work your way straight around like the hands on a clock!” 

Duh. It sounds easy. It should be easy. But I want to tell him that I was twelve before I could read a face-clock. I want to tell him that I can’t just move around the table dropping plates in order if the kitchen sends them out hap-hazardly. I want to say that I drew that very same diagram and lined up all the seats with all the dishes numbering each one as I went: that’s why my ticket reached the kitchen last. But it doesn’t matter. I still screwed up the dishes and there isn’t any such thing as a 504 plan in the real world. 

It seemed silly when the psychologist diagnosed me with a “visual-spacial learning disability.” I mean, what the hell is that and why on earth does it matter? Apparently it does. It might explain for hitting the garage three times with my car, for performing choreography backwards when I had to move it onto a stage, for not being able to copy math problems down from the white-board. And now, for not being able to match the numbers on my waitress pad with the number of seats at the table.

Still, it doesn’t matter. My problems are my own business and if I struggle to lay a table, then I struggle. That doesn’t excuse me from performing my job as quickly and efficiently as anyone else. My manager says that he will do anything he can so that the tickets make more sense to me, but he doesn’t know what else to do. So he draws the same diagram and I nod and promise to fill out my ticket just so for the next event. 

Maybe it is good that I leave for school in three weeks.

Life With Children

~Some people aren’t supposed to have children. I know this because I deal with these children, the ones the parent’s don’t want to deal with themselves. The difference is that I get paid and am able to send the little hellions home at the end of the day.

~Some things in life are inescapable. Children, lovers, family, memories. We have to deal with them, whether we want to or not, and the the manner of our “dealing” is the only recompense we can hope for. A situation may lack all logic or justice, but we must take whatever we get from Life’s grab-bag.

~I always hoped that my parents were wrong: that children can be ruled by kind fairness, by gaining their trust and compromising on both the child’s and the adult’s end. That isn’t always the case. I never wanted to admit that one does what one can and prays to God that He will compensate for one’s insufficiency.

~If you need humility, spend time with a child.

Keeping my Head Above Water

This is to let you know that I am still alive, yet very busy juggling two jobs at the moment. I work as assistant camp director for Tanglewood Youth Theatre by day and as a banquet server at Biltmore Forest Country Club by night. Camp ends Friday so hopefully I shall soon regain the privilege of unnecessary activities such as blogging….

‘Tis a shame. Eighty-something drama queens and kings all packed in together for eight hours a day makes for some fabulous stories. But I have a feeling that exposing the antics of hyper-active, overly emotional children is somewhat below the standard of “professionalism.”

The Scent of Money

Have you ever wondered how rich people spend the Fourth of July? It’s not that different, really. Just bigger and more expensive with 100% pure Angus beef instead of ground chuck. Oh, and it comes with pretty cool inflatable toys to keep the kids busy while the parents get happy at the bar. Maybe that “happiness” explains the inordinate lack of child supervision. I wait tables, get drinks, clear plates. I don’t baby-sit. If your five-year-old wants to enter a sugar-induced coma by gorging on Klondike bars, that is your affair. And I am sure that you signed something to that effect when you joined the country club. If not, I am sure that our lawyers can fit that clause in somewhere.

Still, I am glad that you had such a good time. The blue-grass band played the correct American classics, the barbeque exceeded expectation, and the snow-cone machine was a family-friendly hit. This is your privilege of moneyed happiness. All you want and more. 

That is my job: to create the impossible. Whether you want a dish the chefs have never heard of, or need a Beefeater Gin and Tonic in a large glass, extra lime, extra Tonic, and NO straw, then that is what you get. The smile is extra. 

It struck me as odd tonight when a couple at the table “welcomed me” to the country club. Though I acted as their hostess, for all practical purposes I suppose they were right: It is their club. One might as well say that I am their guest. And they pay for that privilege too. Money may not necessarily buy happiness, but it buys a Hell of a lot of other stuff.

The Demise of the Sacred Box and other Such Tragedies

The more I see of the world the more I am convinced that anything can happen and that nothing is sacred. Basically, that is the only rule of life. And this rule came to mind rather poignantly yesterday afternoon while window shopping in down-town with Ben Torres’ girlfriend. For me to be close friends with a fellow English major who appreciates chocolate, tea, cute shoes, P&P, and bargain shopping is only logical. But it is always difficult for me to forge my own relationship with someone whom I know only in reference to someone else. So when I first met Mariana and placed her on my mental “exceeds expectations” list ten minutes after Ben introduced me to her last April, I still wasn’t sure how things would work out between us. After all, she was “Ben’s Girlfriend” and I was “Ben’s Friend from Church.” Luckily, not everyone is as narrow-minded as myself, and boxes can be done away with in some circumstances. This possibility proved itself yesterday as we curled up on cushions at Jerusalem Garden restaurant, eating Moroccan food with our hands, and pondering how to juggle doctorate degrees with children.

I would think that I would have the intelligence to do away such boxes. Mariana is only one of the more recent escapees from my mental warehouse. People lie there, packaged and labeled, until they unceremoniously break through the cellophane tape and force me to take them on their own terms in place of my mental creations of their supposed selves.

Rosi is another example of my extreme presumption. Within the first honors meeting in Dr. Thuot’s tower classroom I sized her as bored, beautiful, perfect eye-liner, a down-right weird taste in music, and a cavalier attitude toward grades altogether inappropriate for an honors student. By December she was my closest friend at school. 

But somehow, I don’t seem to learn. In a way this failing is delightful, since it amazes me to share nerdy pleasures with Rosi, like reading The Magician’s Nephew in the attic of Stowe Hall, or to re-discover how similar I am to Mariana while we admire restored Javanese furniture at Terra Nostra Home Decor down-town. Also, my mistaken ideas of people force me to practice humility. It is people like Mariana and Rosi who force me to accept the idea that life goes where it will. “If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.” God delights in raining on our parades, wrecking our preconceptions, and reducing boxes to piles of gluey brown sludge.  

Certainly, presumptions and narrow-mindedness constitute some of my greatest failings. But if God chooses to cure me of this failing through people like Mariana and Rosi, I welcome a rain which closes my parade in exchange for tea and friendship. It is a generous exchange even for all the fanfare and glitz of a Bourbon Street Mardi Gras.   

Sketch of a Mountain Home

I never really notice my house till I clean it. You know, all the furniture, the colors, how dirty it actually is, etc. And then, above it all, I notice the mountains rising up behind the windows and suddenly all the mismatched colors, the eccentric arrangement of chairs and tables strugglig to give definition to the rambling living room, seem strangely congruent with the view. With a bank of dormer windows stretching out to meet the blunted blue peaks, their domes become as much a fixture of the house as the stone fire-place. They, more than anything else, seem to allow for the irony of grandma’s hand-crocheted afghans clashing loudly with the new couch. And maybe, in their benevolent presence, it is a little more reasonable for me to listen to Pandora radio piping from my shiny white macbook while I scrub a wind-up victrola.

 Mountains smile at incongruity. They invented the word to excuse their broken ridges and the weird mixture of hippies and Evangelicals squashed together in their shadow. I don’t want to live in the pages of Southern Living with gracious plantation porches. I want to enjoy all the weird tradition of antique meat saws hanging in the kitchen, old moonshine bottles above the mantel rubbing shoulders with the chinese tea-pot. These are the mountains. They are too old to care for convention. 

Romanticism 101

Life as a romantic is difficult. “Duh,” you might say, “a quick glance at a Norton Anthology could tell you that!” But no, my complaint is not that of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, that only the barren elements can comprehend the vital passion of the romantic hero, thus rendering him an outcast from humanity. No offense to Byron, but such self-flattery does little to recommend the romantic movement. 

What I really mean is that life is just more difficult when every great adventure glows valiantly in one’s mind until the awful moment of hanging from a rock face with aching fingers and bloody knuckles wondering how one got into such a predicament in the first place. I suppose one could call it “The Baggins Effect” when the Tookishness has worn to shreds but Smog’s lair still remains to be plundered. Damn.

I have been pondering this effect since I finished Maiden Voyage, Tania Aebi’s account of her circumnavigation at age eighteen. It is a wonderful story, (one which I highly recommend for summer reading), but it certainly popped my nautical bubble, so to speak. For a few years now I have considered sailing around a few seas; the Mediterranean to follow Aeneas’ voyage, and the Caribbean simply because it is beautiful and exotic and suggests rum-soaked sunshine. Wrapped in my respectively Mythological and Jonny Depp-ish day dreams Tania’s story of battling lice, bleeding calluses, faulty fuel-pumps, and learning engine repairs, actually surprised me, much to my chagrin. After all, isn’t Tania supposed to achieve Byron’s goal of emotional enlightenment through unity with the ocean after rejecting society? No, not really. Not anymore than I was ever able reach a higher level of existence through bruised toe-nails and dirt-tarnished pink satin slippers.

No, adventures promise the same reality of farts, belches, pimples and cases of morning breath as Prince Charming. But one still has to take them, adventures and princes, for what they are. The only difficult part, about being a romantic, is that one often forgets all about the blemishes until they rudely interrupt the most delightful phantasies. Perhaps practically minded people have an easier time thinking “Yes, I shall go rock climbing. Yes, the sharp rocks, by virtue of the fact that they are rocks, shall most probably bruise and otherwise lacerate my hands. Yes, I am out of shape and have never enjoyed great strength in my upper-body, beside the obvious fact that I am female and am therefore at a physiological disadvantage. But I shall deal with these difficulties and shall go rock climbing anyway.” I, on the other hand, experience that wonderful surge of “I shall climb a mountain with my bare hands, struggling valiantly to the top where I shall survey the world at my feet and know that I am one with the earth and the God who created us both.” And inevitably, such ideals suffer a swift death in that quintessential moment of “Damn.”

But the Tookishness lives on, stubbornly as ever, and I begin to resign myself to the idea that always and forever when an idea strikes me as particularly brilliant and poetic, I must denude it of all fantastic glory and examine the facts on a purely practical level. I hate this process, as it is exceedingly difficult to re-clothe an inspiration in shimmering vitality, but it is a skill well worth learning. After all, it is romantics who possess the singularly intense emotions necessary for such a task, and emotional coal-mines are a fair exchange for the heights of Mont Blanc.       

To say something good….

Mom always warned that if I couldn’t say anything good I shouldn’t say anything at all.  It is a good rule, and quite practical for reducing fights between young children.

I have learned to live by this rule when dealing with my family and it has done enough good in that sector that the time has come to direct the phrase toward my writing. To say nothing that is not good…. A tall order, but then the best things in life are never easy. And so we shall see what, if anything, of good I come up with, and you shall decide if it is worth the reading. After all, literature is purely a matter of taste and you may prefer more solid fare to my whimsical and exotic ramblings.