Shut Up Already

You Don't Say

"Since nicotine itself has antidepressant effects... many smokers unknowingly smoke to self-medicate depression."

I'm feeling much better today.  Yesterday was my third patch-free day, and I felt like shit.  I thought I was getting the flu, but it turned out to be something called "quitter's flu", which s a form of nicotine withdrawal.  I'm angry that I ever started smoking, because quitting has been really hard so far.  I envy people that never have to go through it.

I'm hoping to get into the city this weekend and catch up with some friends.  Here's hoping.

Send Help

So, it snows a lot in New England.  So, FYI, if you had planned a relaxing retreat in coastal Connecticut--combining writing and job-seeeking with a few hours of infant care--there's a lot that could go wrong.

The baby could get the flu, for instance.  Toxic poo might dribble from him constantly, punctuated by periods of retching (and I mean frat boy retching, not baby spit-up.)  Then, maybe the two of you would get snowed in for the weekend, alone.   Maybe you would wake up on Sunday, reeking of sour formula, and realize that you hadn't worn a bra for a few days. 

Say the internet is down, and none of your friends call you any more.

Perhaps you're trying to quit smoking, and the whole wrold is the color of a box of Marlboro Lights.

Maybe you start to consider the baby's pacifier as a means of controlling your cravings.

Maybe you're bored with this speculative narrative voice.

I am.

I have 4 restaurant reviews and an artile of theaters to write today.  I spent yesterday driving all over New Haven looking for an internet cafe, and when I finally found one it was a  disaster.  They had some security settings that prevented me from checking Gmail and Hotmail, none of you people had left me one single comment, and my blog post got erased because mac uses different keyboard short cuts than  PCs.  Who knew?

I know this makes me uncool, but I hate Macs.

It's lonely in Connecticut, and I have writer's block. 

There's no diet Coke here.

Or chocolate.

I want a cigarette.

Wah.

Slightly Blue

I'm supposed to be working on an article on DC theaters.  And washing bottles.  And a shower might be good.

(remember how you started reading this blog for the blistering political commentary and the tales of crazy drunken nights?  And now I'm writing about washing baby bottles, and you never even got to read about me falling in love and having sex and getting married and getting pregnant, etc?  It's been a crazy year!)

Tomorrow, E. works her 30 hour on-call shift, A. is out of town, and a blizzard is scheduled to descend.  I wish I knew someone around here who would at least come over for lunch.  ON my own, I could easily settle in for a day of movies and reading some of the enormous books I brought, but the baby is the enemy of literacy.  I'm sure he'll appreciate the American novel at some point, as he comes from good reading stock, but at the moment is attention span is highly under-developed.  Like, two paragraphs, max.

I'm invited to a party in Brooklyn tomorrow, complete with a ride back to New Haven, but with the snow storm scheduled I just don't think E. is going to approve the trip.  I'm not sure I would if I were in her position.  Baby P is probably safest right here in his footie pajamas.  Auntie Cara, however, is getting a little restless.  I like it here, but I wish I had somewhere to go and something to do outside of this condo. 

I wish to almighty God that cigarettes were good for me and smelled like roses.  I could cheerfully eat a pack of Marlboro Lights right now.  I'm going to be one of those people who still dreams of herself as a smoker when she's eighty.  But at least I won't be dreaming while I'm hooked up to an oxygen tank.  Or dead.

(more...)

Minutiae

Tomorrow, it will be one week since I've had a cigarette.

Yay.

It's like saying goodbye to an old friend.  Or being abandoned by your best friend.  Or something.

On the way home from lunch the other day, I allowed the eensiest but of self pity to come out and said aloud for the first time, I really want a cigarette.  I teared up just a little.  My cousins were politely solicitous; they don't have any unseemly addictions.  But in general I'm OK.  Except when I talk about it or think about it, like right now.  I haven't ventured out of the house yet on my own because I'm afraid I'll pass a gas station and fall on the cigarette display like a pack of ravening wolves.  That's OK, because I shouldn't be wandering around places where money could be spent either.

Kids, don't start smoking.

It's a powerful addiction.  I hear.

In other news.. goo.  Goo goo ga ga.  Good boy!  What a handsome guy!  Show mommy how you can lift your head aaaalll by yourself!

Versus

So here I am in CT with my cousin E., her husband A., baby boy Patrick and Lily, a very nice half-Siamese cat who just might have to come home with me.

E. and I are six months apart in age.  I beat her out of the womb, and it was the last victory of its kind.  In retrospect, I should have gloated some.  While I was in bars with my parents, begging for quarters for the jukebox and slurping down Shirley Temples, E. was busy playing multiple sports and becoming valedictorian and then getting a full ride to college and an excellent med school.  She has a great husband and an adorable kid, and I've always been insanely jealous, to the point that I might not like her if she weren't also kind and fun and cool.

Greetings from Winter

I, nonsmoker and nanny, send you greetings from wintry New Haven, CT.

Things are going well here; the baby is adorable and I haven't had too much trouble resisting cigarettes.  I think it's a combo of factors: the patch, and being around my cousins, the doctors, that are making it easy.  More anon.

Smote

I think yesterday was the worst shift I ever worked.  And believe me, in eight years of sporadic employment, I've worked some pretty hellacious days and nights.  This time, I had my least favorite section, in which six tables sat down at once (no ones fault, it just goes like that sometimes) and then, as soon as I had taken all of their orders, the printer in the kitchen ran out of paper and no one noticed for 20 minutes. 

Which means no food came out to my tables, who were the last to order because they were the last to sit, for well over an hour.  There comes a point as a waitress when you just can't face your tables any more and bear the shame of their judgment, and so you hide in the server station and cajole your colleagues to drop checks, fill water glasses, etc. 

I was well past that point when I received word that the surly assholes at table 19 wanted more water.  Of course, their food and the food of their neighbors was still stuck in a kitchen labyrinth somewhere, and it had been a good fifteen minutes since I'd assured them all that their food would be out in five.  Also, my shoulder had started to hurt pretty badly when things went to hell in the kitchen, and by this time my stomach was hurting too because I'd taken 1800 mg of ibuprofen, and it was not yet quite one p.m.  Things were going badly, and  could see my potential tips dwindling by the second.

And it was then, as I prepared to face my angry section and quell the riot brewing there, with the prospect of carrying a tray of water glasses in the wrong hand through the throng, with no food imminent, that I dropped a glass and shattered it.  This seemed like a little more than I should be expected to bear on my second day back after an absence of over a year, and so I did the only thing I could do: I set everything down, stepped delicately over the shards of broken glass, and locked myself in the bathroom stall for a little cry.  It had to be a little cry, because taking the deep breaths necessary for sobbing caused my shoulder to hurt like I was being stabbed.

After a few minutes, I got myself together and went to each of my tables and explained that there had been a fire in the kitchen and that it wasn't my fault their food was so late.  Most restaurants would have probably bought them a drink or something, but we pride ourselves on being a little surly at M's.  I mean, why would waiters want to keep their customers happy?  What's in it for us? (It's actually the management who's not so interested in keeping the customers happy.  Or the staff, for that matter.  Though we did get McDonald's for lunch.  I hate McDonald's.)

Anyway, universe: I'm sorry I said I had a good day Monday.  I'm extra double sorry that I said I'm a good waitress.  I understand now that I was arrogant and presumptuous, but I think I've been punished enough at this point.  Let's start with a clean slate tonight, 'kay?  I'll be humble and industrious, and you see to it that some people who tip 20% sit in my section.

Whack for the Daddy-O

Ten hours of waiting tables done, innumerable to go.  I served my first Guinness at M's nearly eight years ago now.  Though it had been well over a year since I last reported for duty, it all came back immediately.  The memory of how to get through a big rush has apparently just been living in my muscles all this time, and today it just tumbled out.  In short, I rocked.

Until my back started hurting at about hour 6, I felt like I was 22 again.  Just smarter and not so hungover.  Right now I'm thinking that if I could just get a few more  freelabce copyediting and writing jobs, I could work a few shifts a week at M's for the cash and have a pretty good life, with the right mix of work I like and contact with humanity.  I can just see myself slipping back into that kind of life.

We'll see how I feel after I drag my tired old ass through the rush tomorrow.

Pop Quiz: Why did I miss Delurking Day?

Well, I've been very busy, in a non-remunerative kind of way.  I'm gearing up to do some copyediting for a technical website, and it's MUCH harder than I'd imagined.  I'm just not used to reading such incomprehensible chunks of text.  I have to read some sentences five times each just to determine if it has all of the proper parts of speech.  There were two whole paragraphs in the last article about logarithms.  LOGARITHMS.

Pop Quiz: What would Cara rather do than read/think/know about logarithms?

a) Drill a hole in her own head
b) Slide naked down a razor blade slide into a pool of rubbing alcohol
c) Starve to death in the gutter, with dreadlocks obscuring her vision
d) a and b

I'm also writing restaurant reviews for a nascent magazine.  No pay, but they reimburse you for the meal.  Thank God I don't have to give up restaurants; that would be one of the crueler effects of unemployment  So far, I've been concentrating on the eating as opposed to the writing. 

And, in a giant leap backwards in time, I'm picking up shifts at my old bar, M's.  I love M's, and I'm lucky to have it as an option, but donning ye olde green apron again is a hugely depressing sign o' the times.  My sister reminds me that dreading my shifts is much worse than actually working them, and I'm trying to believe her.  It's been over a year since I slung a Guinness at a fat, drunk tourist, and I had fervently hoped that a million more years would pass before I did so again.  Alas.

Pop Quiz: What's the worst thing about slinging Guinness at a faux Irish pub?

(more after the jump)

A Day In the Life of A Shut In

Yesterday, I didn't shower or remove my pajamas.  That might not be so bad, except that I also didn't shower on Sunday.  By the time I went to bed last night I had small but distinct dreadlocks.  While I'm sure that somewhere out there is a Midwestern-raised white yuppie chick who can pull off dreads, it ain't me.

I'm clean now.  I swear.

Last night, after we played a game of Scrabble on the front porch (it's freakishly warm here, which I did not find out until 4, when I stepped outside for the first time) I was standing there reading and finishing my cigarette when my neighbor came out.  We were chatting about their upcoming move, and about how he doesn't want to move to a neighborhood that's too white because he's afraid he'll be harassed as a young, unemployed black man with dreads...who stands outside smoking blunts all day (that last bit was more implicit.)  We reminisced about the time a few months ago when he was unjustly arrested in a neighborhood-wide sweep (it really was unjust, and  I had to tell his mother he'd been arrested when she got home.)

Anyway, he asked me what I was reading and I unthinkingly flipped the book up to show him the cover.  We'd been talking for about ten minutes and I'd kind of forgotten about it.  It's a collection of funny-ish essays in a striving-to-be-Sedaris style, written by NPR contributor Hollis Gillespie.  I bought it because I liked the cover and I'm an NPR geek.  What it's called has little to do with what it's really about, though the title is one of the things that made it noticeable at the bookstore.  It sounded wholly different when my neighbor read it out loud, on the heels of our open, rather personal conversation.  It's called Bleachy Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood.

Yeah.   So many interssting things happen when all of one'e time isn't filled with work.