Job Loss + Tourism = Special

Not too long ago, I found myself texting a certain boy I know this message: “If you stop getting paid before I get fired, I’ll cook for you.” And that my friends, is what we call, a low point.
I lost my job, not ( so they say) because I suck, or because I did anything wrong (this I’m relatively certain of - even though I did steal the occasional avocado for my own cause) but because, basically, they wanted to save money. I can understand that, a pastry chef is a luxury (also their words) but I think a worthwhile one. I mean, everyone likes delicious things. I was upset at first, but now I’m on my way to becoming accustomed to the life of a stay at home mom with no kids. I’ve accepted that whatever treachery led to my untimely exit from my job is probably for the best. Especially because the other day I looked in the mirror and all I saw was… a rested version of myself. I used to wake up in the morning to the sound of my shrieking alarm and think, ‘Ugh…’. Recently I wake up and think “What should I do today?”. I think that’s a vast improvement. And then starting on Friday… I began waking up thinking ‘What the f**k is Aunt Polly doing?!”
Allow me to explain. When I told my mom that I was being fired, sort of kind of, but not really, she asked how she could help. Quick on my feet for once, I asked if she would come help me work on my house a little bit. At some point, she decided to bring her Aunt, my great Aunt, Polly. Polly has been cleaning houses, and cleaning…everything, as a profession, for longer than I’ve been alive. Polly is wonderful. She is as wonderful as she is bat-shit-crazy. When I woke up this past Friday, she was raking my front yard in her housecoat. This is awesome on several levels: 1) She was raking my yard at 8am; 2) The woman in question is 65 years old; 3) No one does that much yard work in my neighborhood - least of all at 8 am; 4) The fact that she not only owns a housecoat, but brought it on vacation with her. Today, I walked into the kitchen to find her on the counter vigorously cleaning the window panes of the glass front cabinets. She then blithely proceeded to dismantle the outside windows with a speed and grace that clearly meant years of practice at messing with other people’s houses.
There’s also the tourism. I’m a self proclaimed bad tourist. At some point in the tourist-ing day, I inevitably begin thinking: “Oh great, another freakin’ statue”. Aunt Polly is the precise opposite, which makes me feel…. Like laughing my ass off, and like I’m being a bitch, simultaneously. She began singing “The battle hymn of the Republic” as we went up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial last night. I snorted with laughter, and disguised it as a cough. All of this is made more difficult by the fact that my mom and I would have totally just painted my living room, and then blithely spent the rest of the week drinking delicious frozen alcoholic beverages, alternating with delicious iced coffee beverages, and getting spa treatments.
Right about now, I’m not sure what the moral of this story is - but I have a couple of ideas.
Option 1) If you lose your job, try and think of it as vacation on the cheap - on your sofa - while you wait for your life to shake out the next good thing.
Option 2) Not everyone is cut out for tourism in their home city, but showing your relatives around is the right thing to do - especially when they weed your yard, and compulsively clean your home for no reason.
Option 3) Everything is more fun when the right amount of alcohol is involved.

Back-log-blog....A loathe letter to Restaurant Week

Restaurant week, oh restaurant week, how I loathe thee.  Let me count the ways.

Allow me to explain - for those of you not in the hospitality industry, or perhaps not in the hospitality industry in a city that participates in restaurant week, restaurant week is a special time of year, that happens twice a year, that means a whole bunch of people descend upon restaurants of all kinds, and strike terror in the hearts of pastry chefs ( and chefs in general) everywhere.  At my particular establishment, we endured 2 weeks of this lovely extravaganza because numbers have been flagging since about mid-December.  So we prepared a small selection of appetizers, entrees and desserts ad nauseam for the entire time, for the bargain price of $20.11 at lunch and $30.11 at dinner.  

The important part to remember however is who eats at restaurants during restaurant week.  They run the gamut from the best (the simply inexperienced diner), to the tight budgeted ( the poor student who doesn't usually eat out otherwise), to the worst ( people who are just truly cheapskates and then expect amazing feats of service and cuisine).  Pretty much all restaurant week diners fall into one or more of these categories.  They oftentimes mispronounce things, like the names of wine, ( a past favorite is pinot noir pronounced "peanut noor".  It was then consumed through a straw.) or the varieties of fish ( salmon pronounced saal-mun, and of course ordered extra well done).

I've had all sorts of strategies in the past for restaurant week.  Viewing it as a challenge helps, timing yourself to see how long it takes you to pipe 100 meringues can be interesting, a couple of times, some sort of hard liquor comsumption is generally helpful... but then generally it comes down to one thing for me - the certainty that unless I get a new job in the next 6 months, I will be doing this again, in 6 months time.  At least it's predictable I guess.

The Valentines

Valentine's day used to bother me a lot more than it currently does.  But it still rankles a bit from time to time.  I am quite good at being single, have been known to show up to all kinds of things alone, and in general ascribe to the methodology that it's far better to be single than with a less than ideal mate.

But...

If there's one day to make you feel as though you've gotten the romantic short end of the stick, it's valentine's day.  It's not necessarily easier if you have a date either - because unless the couple in question are really on the same wavelength, valentine's day can ( and often does) lead to hurt feelings, mis-communication, and plenty of other things that are apt to kill off all those happy feel good endorphins you should be feeling. 

 

So this year, my tactic is to blithely ignore the niggling thought that I will be sleeping alone on Monday night, remember that I'm not really that romantic of a girl, and attempt to ignore all the chocolate covered strawberries I have to make.  I mean, it's really the valentine's day cheese factor that bothers me anyway.  All of those " Every Kiss begins with Kay"  commercials and hopelessly happy people giving each other jewlery and stuff just doesn't seem that realistic.  I mean, can't we get a romance paradigm shift here people?

To illustrate my point - the commercial with the guy who doesn't know what to write on flowers and chooses:

"Dear Kim,  your rack is unreal."  Fantastic.  I wouldn't mind getting that card attached to flowers actually. I mean, you'd certainly get the feeling that the guy was honest.  Not to mention, any girl who tells you she doesn't want to hear that she's got a great rack is lying, or a crazy femi-nazi...  I also think people should try different ways of showing their undying love.  Anyone can take you out to a fantastically coreagraphed 5 course tasting menu at the hot spot in town, but personally, I feel that nothing says I love you better than pulled pork sandwiches.  I mean, if you can blissfully stuff your face with someone without worrying about how you will appear, or whether they will still think you're hot afterwards ( or perhaps a long time afterwards... depending on how much you eat) then that's love.  I mean, the only way you can pile on more love after that is, obviously, ice cream. 

Anyhow, those are my somewhat scattered thoughts on Valentine's day.  For me, love = calories.  Preferably calories high in saturated fat.  Happy love day.

Inexplicable

There are many many inexplicable things in life.  Why, for instance, certain people feel like it's ok to play guitar hero in the middle of the night when their roomates are sleeping, or whether or not it's called something besides jaywalking if you run across the street while not in the crosswalk, or who, if anyone, buys those wierd comemorative coins that they advertise on late night tv.  However, in this instance, I speak of why that guy that found you so charming for those first one, two, three, even up to say, five or six dates, will just not call you back.

So just recently this particular inexplicablility, if you will, happened to yours truly.  Now ladies, and I suppose this can go for guys as well, I am one of those girls who knows all too well that girls can be crazy.  So I try not to be.  In the early days of dating, rare is the time I will call more than once in a row without a response.  Or even text for that matter.  Because everyone knows that reciprocity is key at this point.  So when all of that goes well for a while, and you sit on your hands, and you stare at your phone, and you wait for them to call you and when they do, repeatedly, get back to you, you start to think,  Hah!  Not an asshole!! Sweet!  I am totally going out with this guy again.  Then it happens, they say something, or they do something, or they think something, or perhaps you do something, in my case this is generally without knowing it, or sometimes not even being able to figure it out after the fact and for whatever reason... poof.  They're into the ether. 

My question then is what the f**k happened?!  You were pursuing me goddamnit!  You were wanting to take me places, wanting to fix things at my house, asking if I'd meet you at the bar with 10 of your closest friends, and telling me it was hot that I was independent and then poof.  Did you suddenly remember that in fact, you do not like tall brunettes? Did you wake up one morning and decide to devote your life to the priesthood?  Were we moving too fast and you suddenly realized you'd left your cojones behind somewhere along the way? Did it freak you out that I was simply honest with you, and told you I liked you, and that I truly like dive bars, enjoy watching football, can tolerate documentaries, and wouldn't mind cooking for you occasionally? Did the fact that I curse and have friends who are boys make you feel threatened? Or were you simply not as interested as you appeared? Did you suddenly just get lazy and think - nah, too much work to try and keep dating this girl?  Is there some other weird thing that has very little to do with either of us going on here?   Are you actually, this very moment, stuck in a snowbank somewhere?  Well, I will most likely never know the answer to those, or the other inexplicable questions.  But I'll live.  It's happened before, and not to sound defeatist, but it may in all likelihood happen again.

But for you, Mr. Noncall,  here is what I fear for you.  I fear that someday, perhaps a long time from now, perhaps only a month or so, you'll look either at the empty sofa next to you, or your less attractive, less awesome than me girlfriend, or your bed/car/boat/life that could have been better, or at least more fun with me in it, and think....shit.  Shoulda maybe called her back.

Santa and Scores

Christmas comes but once a year... which seemed sad when you were a little kid, and now, if you're anything like me, you're irrationally grateful that it's only once a year.  What occurs each year, for the past few years anyway, is I begin the christmas season lambasted by requests of all kinds for pastry items.  This is par for the course, as I am in fact, a pastry chef, and therefore entrusted with all sorts of irritating holiday traditions both in the workplace, and at home.  At home is one thing, because they're your relatives, and like it or not, you love them, or know you're supposed to act like you love them, and so you do what you must.  At work, it's pure irritation, and little reward.  Although this year I managed to finagle a mug with the company logo on it.  I am now considering it my christmas bonus.  This year however, I have one truly lovely tale to tell you about my at home Christmas experience.

I arrived in the Indiana to find that my mom had a new SUV that was apparently designed to look like a space ship, my dad still had lots of choir appearances, and my brother is still a good ol' boy in training, and seemingly happy about it.   It looked like nothing had really changed.  Relieved, I settled in to the bizarre situation that is Christmas in your hometown, when you haven't lived there for years. After we ate, and took my suitcase home, I then set out with my brother to meet his friends at a local bar.   I cheerfully beat his friend Cullen at pool, and was quite satisfied with the evening.  The next night, we were supposed to go out again, and I was at home after lovingly/resignedly getting  ready for Christmas eve dinner the next day.  I had been told that Brian would "holler when he knew what was going on."  Apparently this meant that I was cool enough to hang out with him and his friends for the second night in a row.

At around 11:30 I get a call from the younger brother:
"Joe's coming to pick you up,"  a statement, not a question.
"I'll put on some shoes...?"  I said.
"K," he responds.

Joe duly picks me up and informs me, while smoking, and driving around my neighborhood so as not to be on actual city streets while smoking up, that we are going to Brickyard, the bar attached to a new titty bar downtown which is called Scores.  The hilarity of this doesn't sink in, however, until we arrive, and there are cops outside, and there are off duty strippers everywhere, and I am getting doggedly hit on by a really tall, drunk, bald man while my brother and friends laugh at me.  One of the bartenders was in my high school graduating class, name long forgotten, and I resolve to look it up when I get home.  (It was Roxanne Martin - I think we had World History together.)  Of course you all know where this is heading.  Of course we end up in said titty bar.  I can't stop laughing - I wasn't ever, at any point, very drunk, but the absurdity just kept me laughing.  After we'd been hanging out, and laughing at each other's disgust that my brother's ex-girlfriend's cousin is one of the strippers for an hour and a half or so, in walks my old friend Chase.

Chase and I were best buddies in the neighborhood back before boys had cooties, and we purportedly planned our wedding at my mother's kitchen table sometime in the late eighties.  He actually brought this up, at the strip club, while we were discussing old times.  He's still cute, and didn't really seem to mind how I look these days either.

I don't know if we'll ever get married, but we've been texting ever since.

There's more to this Christmas story of mine, I certainly have material for a few more posts, but I decided to put my best post forward, and I'll keep you informed about Chase...

Equal parts drill sargeant, Evangelical Preacher and Crackhead

Today I will tackle that ever so American phenomenon, the exercise class.  I have been "Workin on my fitness" lately, to quote Fergie, and in so doing, have been taking an exercise class named, weirdly enough, "Body Pump".

Now, body pump, for the uninitiated, is basically weight lifting set to really loud, oftentimes a tad obnoxious music, with someone yelling at you to go slower/faster/harder/longer which makes the weight lifting itself harder/more annoying/less thought provoking.  Some days I like it more than others.  The instructors vary, and this, my friends is where it gets interesting. I am a people watcher, and they are really the only ones to watch while you're a captive audience  sweating away the delicious pastrami you ate for lunch. There are quite a few varieties when it comes to exercise instructors.  There is the Former Cheerleader ( think "Ready, OK!  More SQUATS!!"), the Real Weightlifter ("Make sure you use your heaviest weight for this set now..."), the I'm Really a Kindergarten Teacher but I Needed a Job, ("OK guys!  Today we're going to really do our BEST!"), the I'm Too Old For This But Have No Other Skill Set ( OK.  Now we're moving on to lunges... sigh..."), the I Love Fitness and You Should TOO! ( "Don't you just love CRUNCHES!!??') and... you get the picture.  However, it was not until yesterday that I encountered the ever so entertaining Complete Whack job variety.

Equal Parts Drill Sergeant , Evangelical Preacher, and Crackhead,  this woman was quite a specimen.  Relatively muscular, and slightly androgynous, she was a middle aged black lady with a somewhat fanatical gleam in her eye.  I originally thought she was the aforementioned I Love Fitness and You Should TOO! variety, but no.  I was in for a treat.  As we began our dead lifts to slightly slowed down CASCADA, I began to notice some things.  First, I noticed that she wasn't so much speaking into the microphone (duh, they have a microphone so they can be heard over the rhythmic beats of the fantastic tunes) as she was screaming at it.  Screaming in such a way as to make her words less clear instead of more clear.  Oh well I thought, maybe she's new.  Right about then is when I began to notice the facial expressions, and the head bobbing and the strangely improper weightlifting form.  Like some sort of bobble head turtle person, our lovely lady lead us through all of the regular stuff all the while shouting unintelligible things at us through her headset.  She had a lot of head and shoulder movement going on all the time. Like, sort of a shrug, head bob, head bob, shrug combo.  Like she was exaggerating her movements for teaching purposes, but forgot what she was trying to convey. I caught more than one fellow class attendee uneasily sliding their eyes left and right to see if they were the only ones thinking this lady was completely cracked.  I didn't completely lose it, however, until the bicep curls. It was one of those moments where the laughter bubbling up from within my sarcastic inappropriate soul was completely, well, inappropriate.  She was getting louder and louder, and she was bobbing, and curling, and shrugging and bobbing,  and any minute I expected her to say either "Hallelujah!!" or " Drop and Give me 20!" or even to perhaps coo like the pigeon she was apparently imitating.   After said curls, I actually left the room to collect myself.   There is sometimes only one cure for inappropriate laughter - and that is to go laugh manically in the ladies locker room.  After that, we did our requisite stretching and she did some more bobbing and I hastened away to consider why I attend this class, and how I am going to make all of that pie for Thanksgiving...

The Cake of Wonder

For my second momentous posting, I will rely on an incident at my job.  Perhaps incident is the wrong word, perhaps incidence of idiocy is more apt.

First, some background. I work at a restaurant, and we do private parties frequently.  Sometime in June or July, there was a woman, lets call her DeAndra, who wanted to have a private party in our private dining room in October, for her baby shower.  ( This was to be the first odd thing about the situation - shouldn't your friends be doing this for you?)  She also wanted to order a cake, from yours truly, the cake lady.  She did not want just any cake however, she wanted a very special cake.  The word special can be defined here as - I'm a whacko, and I have no idea what I want, so I am going to micro-manage every aspect of this freakin' cake as though my life depended on it.  I did not however, know this going into the situation.  I received an email from her, and was mildly annoyed because she wanted to do a cake tasting, which I do not usually do.  The cake needs of my restaurant are relatively simple and can usually be met by regular, well decorated, yet not super customized cakes.  The people choose a cake flavor, an icing flavor, and a filling flavor, and what they want it to say on the top, and ta daaa - a cake is born.
                 DeAndra however, would  not be thus satisfied.  So, we plan a cake tasting.  She seems to place a lot of undue importance on this, going back and forth between flavors, asking her husband (who she had dragged along to an 8 am cake tasting) what he thought, saying how moist this was, or did he think this one was too sweet.  At this point, I am all ready thinking... this is why I work with pastry, not with the people.    So, I made it through this tasting without throttling her, and I think, ok, we're good - by the end of the week or so, she'll email me a picture, and a flavor and we're done.  She decides upon a cake that looks like building blocks, will take me forever to make, and balks at the quoted price.  And yet, I still think that this ordeal is pretty much over with until I make said cake.
            Oh how wrong was I?  Oh I was very wrong indeed ladies and gents.  She then proceeded to email me not once, not twice, but somewhere in the neighborhood of whatever two times the number of weeks between July and October is.  I, of course, become progressively more annoyed, and do my best not to write emails ending in "F**k off Lady!".  Somewhere around the first of September, she wants another tasting.  At which point she changes the flavor she previously wanted from something I offered, to something she made up, and basically continues to imply that this cake is not going to be decorated to her liking.  So, while I do not want to lose my job at this point I desperately need to vent, and therefore penned the following, never to be sent email, in response to her "you didn't respond to my last email" email:

 

Dear DeAndra,

 

Kindly get over yourself and your freakin cake please.  If you don't trust me to make this thing, good luck finding someone else, somewhere else to mollycoddle you long enough to get out of you what the heck you actually want, because it has now taken me approximately 4 1/2 months.  It should not take half of the gestation period of your unborn child to figure out what you want the cake, to celebrate his/her impending birth, to look like.  You know why?  Because it really not that freakin important that's why.  I'm sorry your wedding cake did not meet your exacting standards.  And this cake won't either, because you're impossible.  I feel sorry for your husband and your fetus, because they are going to be the most henpecked individuals ever.  And good luck with all those birthday parties for that kid.  Good freakin luck with that - because if you're this concerned about what the cake looks like and this child is as yet unborn - i can't imagine how nuts you'll be by the time the 1st birthday rolls around.  I didn't email you back because there is absolutely nothing left to discuss.  Nothing.  And from my dealings with you, I am 100% certain that you will insure that this child will basically be wrapped in cotton batting from the moment it pops out.  He/she will never play contact sports, or learn to drive, or do anything really except perhaps take piano lessons, and eat organic foods.  And turn in perfect homework assignments.  Meticulous. 

 

Have a nice life, and please don't plan any more parties with cake here.  Please.

 

Sincerely,

The Jingo

The best/worst part of all of this is - this crazy be-yotch actually loved the damn cake!  She even sent me a hand written thank you note.  In which she stated she wishes I could make all of her future cakes.  I desperately hope she moves across the country sometime soon.   Because the next time I may have to kill her, and don't really want that on my conscience.