Born This Way

One of the biggest factors in my decision not to pursue even higher education is the fact that my least favorite part of educating myself was doing the research. No amount of scintillating class discussions, speech and debate trophies as tall as I am, or waived tuition  can convince me that I want to spend any more time on doing research; which is, you know, 100% of what you have to do to create theses or dissertations. I can read the hell out of anything you give me, and even draw my own conclusions when reading articles and studies in conjunction with each other but the process of tracking down information is to me what picking socks up off the floor and making the bed is to an 8 year old. I don't wanna, and you can't make me.

I just finished watching the documentary "Fat Head", comic/author Tom Naughton's response to Morgan Spurlock's "SuperSize Me". The premise is that he found SuperSize Me to be over-the-top and laughable, and set out to possibly prove Spurlock wrong. Naughton's tone the entire time was one of ironic superiority, causing me to wonder if Spurlock gave Naughton a swirlie during an intermission at Sundance in the past, though I did find myself liking Naughton and the cut of his jib. I also recall enjoying SuperSize Me and liking Morgan Spurlock as well. Troubling. Now I (as well as most people, I would hope) approach media of all sorts, especially documentaries, with a healthy dose of skepticism. I'm not as stupid or gullible as advertisers and promoters wish we all were. Fat Head made a lot of questionable claims, but it's difficult to argue with Naughton's main conclusion: this is a free country and people are different. They make different choices, they have different values, and they have different preferences (though he does deliver this with a meaningful glance over his glasses after accusing I, the watcher, of choosing to sit on a couch eating Rice Crispy Treats instead of taking up volleyball).

All in all, I've drawn the shocking and controversial conclusion that Eating is Tricky and Bodies are Weird. Last year when I was doing my personal training and struggling with a high protein, low carb diet I lost around seven pounds (the goal was fifteen), lowered my body fat percentage, and was pleased with how flat my stomach looked. Unwilling to keep up all that hard work, I reverted back to my old habits with a vengeance and as predicted by statistics gained the weight back and watched my tummy flub return. Thanks to the fancy scale Seester got me for Christmas last year I am in possession of the knowledge that today, I am ten pounds lighter than I was two months ago and a full three pounds lighter than I was when I was doing with three months of intense (for me) diet and exercise last year.

I certainly didn't do it on purpose. Armed with the basic knowledge that in order to get less flabby I'd have to eat better and exercise more I settled instead for trying to love my body the way it was. My kitchen manager tried to fight me about the fact that I had lost weight when, after he admiringly asked if I had, I responded that I didn't know, I hadn't been trying. He insisted that I must have changed something (drinking less? stopped eating at night?), so I suggested it was because I stopped eating Friday's food since we weren't allowed to hang out at the bar anymore. He looked a bit wounded. He IS in charge of that food, after all. Alls I know is that I eat a lot of fried and carbohydrate'd crap, usually in one large sitting before I go to work, drink more beer than I probably should, and avoid anything that resembles exercise like it'll give me cancer on the spot. How I've lost weight is beyond me.

What bugs me, and what was highlighted after watching Fat Head, is that I will probably never know what it is that has caused my body to become slightly healthier. It clearly varies from person to person, and diet, exercise, and health are all extremely relative. This means that in order to figure out what my ideal mixture is I will have to do, you guessed it, research--all KINDS of research, since there is literally an opinion backed by a study or PhD or MD to support every single version of diet (or lack thereof), exercise (or lack thereof), and standard of health. I am way, way too lazy to bother with that nonsense.

Seid bereit, immer bereit

I often mention my uneasy relationship with emotions. As I continue to grow, experience, and change, I'm learning more about my relationship with my feelings and, um, my feelings about my feelings. I've learned that as a human being I deserve to experience the highs and the lows that come with life, and I'm learning to take ownership of whims both sad and joyful that can't be explained away by logic or circumstance

I read a blog entry fairly recently, and when describing her process of coming to terms with a life event the woman writing the post said "I wasn't ready, and then I was." I've had this tucked away in my head ever since I read it because it was at the same time succinct and profound, and it applies to anything that is scaring you (erm, me) about the future. It gave me permission to not be ready for some things, and it made me feel better about being 25 years old and not having achieved what I've internalized as a standard of success. I know that eventually, I will be ready. That moment just hasn't happened yet for some things.

I had a moment a couple days ago, though. It was a combination of things that had happened throughout the day which culminated in one quiet moment in my car where I actually exclaimed out loud "Oh my God, I think I'm ready." I immediately doubted myself because I'm not really a believer in Lightning Bolt From Heaven moments and this revelation would certainly qualify. Because I walk a careful line between psychosis and rationality I rigorously interrogated myself as I made my way to my destination, saying some things out loud to see how the words tasted in my mouth and how they felt coming back into my ears. I was skeptical of the fact that everything felt right and wonderful when verbalizing my revelation, so I've given myself a couple weeks to see if it sticks.

It's been a few days and neither nausea nor cold sweats have appeared but, other than this none-too-subtle blog entry (I often over-estimate my cleverness and under-estimate your, Blog Reader's, powers of inference), I'm sticking to my two-week gag order. I need time to construct lists and say things out loud a few more times to rationalize an unanticipated aligning of my internal clockwork. In the meantime, I'm stepping up my search for one-bedroom apartments back in my home 'hood and beginning a countdown to my first day back at The 'Brook TGIF.

It's sixteen miles to the Promised Land

I've come to view writing in my blog as an act of domesticity. Perhaps it's because the blogs I've been reading lately have been "lifestyle blogs" (ie: someone much craftier and more motivated to write than I blogs about their everyday life), or perhaps it's because I approach blogging with the same mentality I do, say, cleaning the bathroom. I don't actually mind doing the work itself, I looooove the end result and always feel like I should get a gold star on an accomplishment board, but finding the motivation to just suck it up and do it already is a project.

I've been sick the last few days which has given me time to reflect upon past illnesses, how I deal with being sick, what "being sick" means to me, and so on. This current plague seems to be a reoccurrence of the last time I fell ill a few months ago. Last time I mostly felt "vaguely sick-ish" but had a pronounced and horrible middle-backache. I kept asking everyone at work if I was dying of meningitis. Note that sentence implies that I kept going to work. This time I had the horrible backache again, but it was preceded by a sore throat and swollen glads and appeared simultaneously with a rapid-onset fever, chills, the weakness of a kitten with worms, and a less intense but still present all-over bodyache. The sore throat and swollen glands showed up when I woke up to go to work at 6:30am Sunday and the rest showed up in exponential increases as I went about my shift.

The restaurant industry at large is often criticized, and fairly so, for being suuuuuper shady when it comes to employee health and wellness (and therefore customer health and wellness). Shifts are scheduled to the bare minimum, so an employee really can't just "call in sick". I have to find a replacement, or else my coworkers will be overworked and the customers will be underserved. Therefore, even if I've lost a limb to a rare combination of gangrene and the bubonic plague if I can't find someone to come in for me, I HAVE TO come in and work.

Does this make business sense? For the most part, no. Customers can tell when their bartender is sick and it grosses them out to have a probably contagious person handling their food and drink. They might leave to go somewhere else where there aren't visibly dying employees. They might not stay for dessert because they just want to get away from the sniffling mess that's bringing the food out. They will very likely not recommend the establishment and will think twice about coming back. On the flip side, if you just let people call in sick, guests don't know that the reason their salad is taking twenty minutes to come out, or five minutes for the one lonely bartender to get around to greeting them is because the restaurant thought it would be better for everyone if Typhoid Mary stayed home. They just know that the service sucks, and the bad cycle is begun again.

Practicalities aside, hourly restaurant employees don't get sick days. If you don't work, you don't make money. If you call in sick anyway, you might get fired. Servers, bartenders, busses, and line cooks are a dime a dozen. We're expendable and we know it, so there are a lot of factors that go into the decision of going in for your shift anyway when you're vomiting every fifteen minutes.

That said--my manager Sunday morning handled my rapid onset debilitation in a professional, employee-minded, business centered way, and I'm almost ashamed to admit that I was shocked. It's not that I don't have faith in the humanity and compassion of my bosses, it's just that I know their decisions have to be made with "Overall Guest Satisfaction" in mind, and that's often at the expense of us. I'd asked him around 9am if it'd be possible to evaluate getting me out of there when the 3rd bartender showed up at noon, because I was just getting worse and worse. He asked if I could make it until 2pm when the 4th bartender showed up. I gave an uncertain "okay...". Around 11am, after the 2nd bartender was on the clock, and when my manager walked into the bar to me sitting on the floor by the mix cooler with my head in my hands, he pulled one of the servers off the floor to have them come help out in the bar and sent me home. All shifts were still covered, and I didn't have to be there.

I'm on my way to being recovered. I had yesterday off, I found someone to cover my shift tonight, and I just noticed I have tomorrow off also. My awful back and bodyaches have gone away, as has my fever, but I'm left with a lingering sore throat, swollen glands, and my dry cough has turned into a wet, hacking one, which I think means I'm almost done being sick.

On a completely different note, Seester accepted her acceptance to the English PhD program at Boston College for the fall. I'm simultaneously elated and sad. I think the program is her dream come true and will help her become an Allstar of Academia, but, I mean, Boston's really far away :(

There's a blaze of light in every word

Back when work was fun

Happy Pi Day Everyone!

It seems like my coworkers and guests have all been conspiring to force me to take a good, hard look at my life and my "career" choices recently. The weather here in the Chi is beginning to warm up which means the busy season is rapidly going to be upon us, which means my daily contemplations of taking advantage of the city's unenforceable handgun ban to shoot myself in the face is nigh.

It's not that I mind being busy, it's just that I mind the proportionate increase in people who are difficult, mean for no reason, unreasonably demanding, and lacking in basic human decency and compassion. A discussion with one bartender about how hard it would break into the corporate branch of our company, a guest wondering why I didn't go work somewhere fancier with better tippers, and a conversation with a different bartender about whether this location was giving me ideas on how not to run a restaurant have all reminded me that I intend to move up in this company. The Boy has begun rather frequently wondering out loud why I don't just quit and go work somewhere that has less stress and a bigger payoff and to be honest, some days I very seriously consider it. I'm 99% sure that when I move back to the suburbs my old location will welcome me back with open arms, whether or not I stayed with the company here in the city.

I then remind myself of a few things. One, getting a new job is not a guarantee. Two, I'm not a quitter. Three, I get my health insurance through work. Four, if I really do intend to move up to the corporate level quitting would reflect poorly upon me. Five, it's only five more months. They made me a "training coach" pretty much as soon as they let me into the bar here at the downtown TGIF, and a recent coach meeting actually managed to have an impact on me. This particular bartending job with this particular company requires an acceptance of what is often referred to as "corporate bullshit". If you're not willing to do what seems like ridiculous, disingenuous protocol then this company is not for you and you can feel free to leave peacefully to go work someplace where there isn't an expectation that you ask every guest if they're a member of our rewards program and invite them back, regardless of whether they're tourists from Bangkok who could barely communicate with you. In essence, be willing to be a corporate robot.

I can do this. This, I think, will help me cope with the imminent increase in business (and therefore evilness). Being able to tell myself that, while at work, I'm not Cathi, I'm TGICathi and what happens here is not a reflection of my true self and no matter what people say they're not commenting on my actual worth will make the days go by more easily. I can look at my remaining five months as an opportunity to study, to watch and learn. This place is just so different from Bolingbrook that I'm telling myself it's an invaluable learning experience to know what it's like to do six million dollars in sales a year, to experience different managerial styles, and to see what it takes to operate with a huge staff of diverse people.

With all that said, I'm going to take a deep, calming breath and get ready for work tonight. I will smile, I will suggestively sell, and I will card each and every person who appears to be under 40 years old (and I will only accept valid, current, government issued IDs--I'm looking at you, Guy From Apple Yesterday With The 3-Year Expired ID Who Left In A Huff When I Refused To Get Him A Blue Moon).

The Marrying Kind

I think this entry is going to end up being a lot of things.

Wedding planning is daunting, and I say this as a mere Wedding Recruit (aka Maid of Honor) for the Poncho Wedding Extravaganza. Daunting can be both good and bad, it just means there's a lot of choices, a lot of information, and a TON of distractions. Fortunately for me, I can immerse myself into this project and allow myself to be distracted by the shiny things, the pretty things, and the hilarious antics of anonymous brides without having to worry about money, deadlines, or letting anyone down.

It has raised a lot of questions in my own mind regarding my own relationship. I've tried very hard over the last five years not to compare my relationship to Poncho's but I'm willing to admit that it's difficult not to. We started dating our dudes more or less within a week of each other back in 2006 and being the same age and going through the same timeline with undergrad and all, well, I don't think you can fault me too much for occasionally making mental Venn Diagrams. I always knew it was a bad idea to do this, if only because comparing your life to others' is never an advised activity. Poncho and I go about things very differently; relationships beings the crowning jewel of our differences. We expect different things from our partners, our communications skills are on opposite ends of the spectrum, and as time went on our academic and professional life paths diverged. Trying to compare my relationship with hers is like trying to compare cats and dogs. Everyone has their preferences and opinions, but at the end of the day they're entirely different animals.

Not that this hasn't stopped me from watching her get engaged and begin wedding planning with a tinge of envy and wondering to myself "why isn't this me?" The Boy and I have been together for five years now, we're happier together than we've ever been, we've occasionally discussed our wedding (ranging from the less-serious "let's bake brownies instead of a cake and have people vote whose they like best" to the much more serious "you know I refuse to convert to Catholicism, right?") and we quite often speculate about a life together. So, why aren't we a mirror image of my best friend and her boyfriend? Well, a hundred reasons, but none more important that "Because. That's why."

I mean let's be honest, I'm not ready to be a wife. Not yet. This doesn't mean that we're not in love, or that our relationship sucks or that I'm experiencing doubts or some need to go sow my wild oats (or whatever it is single people say when celebrating their singleness). It just means I have some personal goals I need to accomplish before I can even realistically entertain the thought. This is something that I've had to remind myself what feels like a thousand times in the last month, and something I will have to continue to remind myself as the excitement for Poncho Wedding Extravaganza ramps up. I'm happy with The Boy. I'm happy with where we are, and who we are together. We're right where we should be, doing what we need to be.

Life is not a competition. Other things are, like bartending, debate, or which sister is prettier and more successful. But not life.

Found myself today singing out your name

One thing that was often lacking in Blog.1 (This being Blog.2, you see) was, in a word, transparency. I tended to wait to write entries until I felt I had something more significant than "some fat lady was all up in my grill on the bus and I was wigging out about it, so I tried to imagine that her stupid butt that was bumping into my shoulder was just a pillow, a nice, soft pillow, which worked great until she finally moved and I realized I'd been crop dusted." After telling this story and being rewarded with uproarious laughter (instead of the polite chuckles I usually get after botching a story) I've decided that maybe my everyday life might be worth sharing.

Another stumbling block when it comes to my ruminating about the thoughts tumbling around my head is the fact that I am blessed with many relationships and therefore my daily ruminations often center around the people in my life. Since the dawn of my blogging years, yes, even back in the self-centered days of my freshmen year in high school I was intimately aware of the fact that the words I was producing were going out into a public realm far more vast than I could possibly anticipate. Strangers might deduce my location and kidnap me after school! People who wished to do me social ill in the hallways might read this! I was giving the link to all of my friends, so they'd definitely read all the salacious details about them that I'd penned. MY MOM MIGHT READ THIS. As I've matured a bit, the concern that my employers could access this has occasionally crossed my mind.

So despite being an angst-ridden teenager, I still knew that I had a responsibility to protect not only myself, but also the people in my life from the ills of the Internet. This transformed from the fear driven into me by Oprah and the Naperville Police Department from "being abducted by creepy men in trenchcoats" to "I really shouldn't talk about my friends' and family's lives without their permission". This manifested itself most keenly when it came to the relationship I've been in for the last five years. A large part of it was my fear that if I spewed sappy/wobbly word-vomit out into the universe that if/when he decided he wanted out of the relationship everyone would know what a fool I'd been, but part of it was also wanting to respect his emotional privacy by keeping things like "he threatened to kill half a dozen people today when we were stuck in traffic, and I nearly believed him" to myself. I've held firm to the belief that by protecting and censoring my own thoughts, opinions, and ruminations about the actions of people I love, or my feelings about the state of things that I was protecting them. Really, I was just shielding myself from disappointment.


Those days are over, my friends. Not that I'm going to begin revealing secrets my loved ones have trusted to me, but the simple fact is my life IS the people around me. Without my family, The Boy, Poncho and Boy-Poncho, and the less-frequent though equally important friends who bless me with their presence I would have very little to talk about.


Unless you care to hear about my frustrations with LOST, in which case I have lots to talk about.

New Beginnings

Greetings blogging world at large!

After years of seeing my blogging and writing in general fall into a steep decline, largely due to the lack of things to procrastinate on, I came to the decision that my old blogging site was not aesthetically motivating. By that I mean that in this age where everything is personalized to the nth degree and made easy with the advent of Rich Text Format, diaryland.com just wasn't cutting it for me anymore.

I intend to transfer all of my Diaryland posts to this thing, though the impulse to tamper with less desireable posts from years ago might prove to be too strong. We shall see. Once that endeavor is complete (or abandoned), I think I'll be able to post again.

Aufwiedersehen, lieblings.