The One Where I Start Blogging Again

So a lot of dust can settle on a blog when it’s left abandoned for nearly a year.  A lot can change as well.  For the whole five of you that will bother catching up with me, and the three new subscribers I’ll probably gain from this post, let me give you the Cliff Notes version of the last eight months…

• I’m back in New Orleans.
• I briefly and triumphantly returned to my former career, only to discover that in the six months of my absence the inmates had taken over the asylum… And possessed among them about as much knowledge of the restaurant business as actual asylum inmates.
• A dozen 50+ workweeks later I realized that any attempt at instituting (or expectation of) skill, knowledge, or basic capability was an exercise in frustration, so I bailed.
• Subsequently, Man and I got back together.  So far so good.  More than so-good.  Pretty-damned-good actually.
• I’m currently in the midst of trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up… Again.
• My thirty-fifth birthday is looming dangerously on the horizon.
• In totally unrelated-to-my-birthday news, I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat or screaming at least once a week.

There you have it.  I could probably go into more detail about these bullet-points, but having just lived through them I don’t really feel like it.  So let’s just move on from here.

Now that I’m not working, or recovering from working every given moment of every given day, I’ve got some time on my hands.  So I think I’ll start writing again.

In the meantime I’ve compiled a collection of my favorite entries in this blog that I’m sad to see collect the dust of abandonment.  A “greatest hits of my own narcissism” if you will.  Something to keep you busy while I’m constructing the next entry…

 

I Was Told There's ALWAYS a Barf Bag! (the one where I recount my very first flight.)

There Wasn't Even Room For J-E-L-L-O! (the one where I get myself impossibly and embarrassingly trapped inside a strappy dress.)

Who Is It?  Who's There? How Do I Say It Again? (the one where I experience the Saints’ first Super Bowl in the Quarter.)

La-Benneton-Roulette (Or Something) (the one where I learn the importance of making up holidays in New Orleans)

My First Mardi-Gras (the one where I don’t really say much.  I just look super-cute in the picture….)

Cinderella's Diamond Encrusted Pooper-Scooper (the one where I think I’d make a good relationship expert.)

Happy reading!

Neener! Neener!

Snowday!!!

I don’t think you ever get too old to wake up in the morning and run to the bedroom window in hopes enough of the white stuff has fallen that you don’t need to get out of your (pink) jammies (with teddy bears on them, thankyouverymuch!).  The only difference between childhood and adulthood snowdays is the amount of accumulation it takes to shut your life down for the next 24 hours (and the size of the jammies you’re wearing).  As a child all it took was a mere few inches and I was spending my afternoon with the neighbor boy and his red-racer sled.  As an adult, work doesn’t end until the snowfall resembles something Nostradamus predicted. 

Lucky for me…

The thing about living on an island is that should anything happen to compromise the bridges in and out of town, you’re stuck until further notice.  Needing to get to a shift at a restaurant that shouldn’t have bothered opening today anyway doesn’t constitute emergency use of the causeway.  So, it isn’t so much that my job isn’t open today.  It’s just that I can’t get there (Aw, shucks!). 

I did have to trudge out into the New Jersey tundra briefly for much-needed snowday supplies (frozen pizza, cookies, Pepsi).  It took me about half an hour to make a ten minute trip, but I’m all warm and comfy now (yes, back in my jammies.)  I’ve got a fresh pot of coffee and a stack of Vogues to catch up on.  So, to any of my inland coworkers who may be reading this….

I Make Pretty Today.

Once upon a time I was a decorator. 

It all started nearly a decade ago.  I was working in a little shop in Philly and I got bored, so I started redressing the windows.  I wish I had a picture of what I’d done because it’s to-date my favorite display I ever did (A floor to ceiling Christmas tree composed entirely of green monkeys, decorated with red monkeys and topped by a yellow monkey star).  Fairly proud of my work, but thinking nothing of it, I went back about my day.  What I didn’t know is that the woman who designed and decorated for the mall I worked in saw my display and snapped me up as her new assistant.  For the next few years I worked under her, decorating malls and storefronts and large parties.  The only reason I quit is because it’s piece-work.  Sporadic according to season or event.  Though the job made me totally happy, I had to leave it or starve to death trying to manage around it.

I made the mistake once of telling this story at work.  Now the owner’s wife fancies me their personal decorator.  I knew it was coming, so I wasn’t surprised at all when I walked in this afternoon and found she’d dragged dozens of wreaths, two Christmas trees and enough garland to wrap around the place twice.  Ornaments, glue-gun, ribbons and mistletoe all awaited my arrival.  Happy to have a reason to be anti-social (I was in a bad mood today) I set to work making the place pretty.  I have to say, with every shiny orb I hung on the tree my mood lightened until I eventually forgot what was bothering me in the first place.  It’s not done, but I’m pretty proud of what I did so far.

 

I have to admit, I’d forgotten how much I enjoy doing it and by the end of the night I’d heard “Why don’t you do this for a living?” so many times, I started wondering if maybe I could….

As soon as I get used to the feeling of hot-glue spilling on my fingers again… Owie!

The Curious Case of The Odd-Smelling Flowers

Everyone at work is already buzzing about the upcoming Christmas party.  It’s not that I work for jerks, it’s just that they aren’t very sociable when it comes to their staff.  However, once a year they throw procedure to the wind and show that they really know how to host a shin-dig.  I’d like to tell you the story of the girl that got way too drunk at the last party I attended, but shamefully that girl was me.  No one realizes they’re the “drunk one” until they break a heel on an Atlantic City street and find themselves face down in front of an oncoming cab… I mean, that’s happened to you, right? 

That night I learned that no matter how many tequila shots mixed with vodka chasers (Ugh! Was I serious?) you’ve consumed, you develop the reflexes of a cat when your face is about to become hamburger meat in a yellow-cab’s wheel well.

Not to mention the fifty dollar bill I suspect accidentally stuck in the juke-box instead of a five, as well as the fact that I couldn’t get out of bed until sometime around sunset the next day.  But that’s not what this blog is about.

Pollyanna aka the “Secret Santa” game. 

As though the holiday season isn’t stressful enough, we faithfully add every year the obligation to guess what someone you barely know, who you never really gave a second thought to until you were forced to pull their name out of a fishbowl would like as a Christmas gift… For ten bucks or less.  I’ve been given cheap perfume (really cheap), cop-out gift cards to stores I don’t shop in, and misshapen plastic ornaments that still smell of the factory in a country that doesn’t even have Christmas.  I’ve decided that the true object of this game is to purchase something for your unsuspecting recipient that they at least won’t throw away until after the party.

It seems that no matter how hard you pray while you’re sticking your hand in that fishbowl you never get the person at work you know best.  No, you get someone you either hate or have to ask “Who is this?"  This year I got one of the kitchen guys. I could have done worse, at least he’s nice to me.  Back in October when he caught wind that it was my birthday he ran outside and picked me a small bouquet of flowers from the pots he keeps out back.  He presented them to me in a milkshake glass and I kept them on my kitchen table for about a week before they died.  Sweet gesture, right?  Unfortunately he didn’t know the truth about his flowers.

About a week ago I showed up for work to find the flower pots had been moved indoors.  They looked pretty sitting there, but in the confines of the corridor I noticed a very peculiar, very un-flowery smell coming from them. 

“What’s up with the flowers?” I asked when I got inside.

“It smells like that because so-and-so has a bad habit of getting drunk at night and pissing in the outside flower pots!”  Then he got up and took them all out to the dumpsters.

But…

Wait.

Those are…

My birthday flowers!!

So I know what I’m getting this guy for Christmas this year. 

Chia-Pets.  Keep them in your window and hope so-an-so doesn’t finish a six-pack and find them.

I threw away the milkshake glass.

When Housemaids Scrub the Floors, They Get the Spaces In-Between.

Though I tried to avoid it at all costs, I found myself sucked into Bravo’s collection of useless Real Housewives series.  My favorite is New York (Team Bethenny!) followed by New Jersey and then Atlanta.  I can’t help myself.  These overtly decadent and decorative women pretending to nurture careers and families when we all know they’ve never put in more effort than it takes to hold themselves upright in a manicurist’s chair in their lives makes me giggle.

All of them, that is, except for the Beverly Hills ladies.  They don’t make me laugh.  They don’t make me smile.  They make me very sad and a little sick to my stomach the way I felt that first time someone showed me the Faces of Death web site.  I find myself grotesquely fascinated and a bit horrified that people like this exist in the world.  And that there are other people willing to broadcast such things for the rest of us to see.

They’re all dead-eyed and vacant; sporting plaster-of-paris mannequin faces.  Sad and bored in ways that only an obscene amount of money can buy.  Lonely from rattling around in their silly mansions all alone while their husbands do whatever someone does to afford such a life, they cling to eachother like a support group.  They don’t seem to like eachother much at all—especially the sisters—but who else understands the pangs of despair when you realize you’re nothing more than a bullet-point on some man’s list of net worth and assets?

This show proves without a doubt two things:

1.  Money can’t buy you happiness.  It can buy you enough plastic surgery to form your mouth into something resembling a smile, but it won’t be actual happiness.

(This lady freaks me out the most.)

2.  Weezer got it all wrong. 

(I still like the song, though.)

All the Fun of a Hangover Without the Tequila Aftertaste.

I left work early yesterday because I was feeling a bit out of sorts.  Run down, couldn’t concentrate, generally just blegh.

By midnight I was sitting on my bathroom floor for the second time, staring into the dark abyss of the toilet’s u-bend and wondering if I had some form of food poisoning or the flu. (Thank Gawd I’d cleaned the bathroom Sunday afternoon!)  By the third trip to pay my respects to the porcelain god I just didn’t care anymore.  I felt like I was being turned inside out and I wanted it to end. 

Then my face caught fire while the rest of me shivered like a hairless cat in the snow.  Then every inch of my skin began to crawl with aches and pains.

Great.  Flu it is then.

I crawled into bed with the heat cranked as high as it would go, and cocooned into four blankets where I stayed until about two this afternoon.  I was at work by three, on my way home again by four-thirty.  I guess there was something about the waitress standing off in the corner looking all green and shaky that might put people off eating in our establishment, so they sent me home.  Or it could have been that when someone tried to hug me my body ached so bad I actually started to cry.  I’m such a baby when I’m sick.  Sequestering myself at home is more for the benefit of no one needing to hear me whine than it is about being contagious.

So here I sit, wrapped in my favorite furry blanket waiting for a delivery of Won-Ton soup and fried rice in the hopes that it will fare better inside of me than that ill-fated grilled cheese from earlier.

My kingdom for another bottle of flat ginger ale…

 

(I finally start blogging again and I dedicate an entire post to being sick…  Such is Emma.)

Perhaps Whoop-Ass Comes in a Pop-Top?

Tapioca pudding.

Where has it been all my life?

I’m not quite sure what it’s made of, and I don’t know what those little orbs of yummy floating around inside it are, but I’m hooked.  I can’t keep my face out of the stuff and that is a problem.  I was briefly relieved of my addiction this week when we ran out of it at work, but a couple days later one of the cooks turned up with a vat of it so big I could have sat inside and eaten my way out.  I hadn’t been so happy since that surprise sale at the Steve Madden outlet.

Anyway, I’m afraid that this new tapioca addiction of mine is going to hinder all the weight-loss progress I made.  I was discussing my little dilemma with a friend over coffee (There may have been pie.  I admit nothing!) when they suggested that I take up some form of martial art. Um… Have we met?

I probably should start actually working out, though.  Especially since this tapioca thing is clearly going to destroy me.

The truth is, I get bored at gyms.  It’s repetitious and boring and I stopped wasting my money on memberships years ago.  The last time I tried, I dropped a ridiculous amount of cash to join one of those fancy-pants casino spas, then spent more time in the hot tubs and steam rooms than anything else.  To be completely honest, I only remember passing the actual gym part of the spa on my way to the sauna.  What I need is something more structured and disciplined that will actually hold my interest.

I took a kickboxing class for a while when I was like 22, but that was a long time ago.  I think these days I may need an actual can opener to get that can of whoop-ass open (Electric, please).