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.

Two Thousand and Eleven, Common Era

Here's some advice I wish I got when I was your age: Live every week like a Shark Week

It's officially five days into the new year and I still can't reallybring myself to want to write my 2010 recap. The latter half of the year has, overall, bummed me out and I'm mostly just trying to close my eyes, plug my ears, and yell "lalalalala" until July when my lease is up and I can make a change again.

Things I Hope Come to Pass in '10

-Get out to Oregon to visit SB
Success! The Pacific northwest coast is interesting, gorgeous, and I'm raring to go back.
-Move to Chicago with Seester
Success? I did it. We're here. It's okay I guess.
-Get a Real Job (I'd love NPR or Q101, but I'm not picky) Caveat: acceptable alternative--go to grad school
Nope. But I've made up my mind with what I want to do with myself.
-Stick with The Boy
I'm giving this a 50% success rate.
-Keep up the healthy habits
Failure, I suppose. I have managed to moderate my eating habits.
-Grow my hair all long(er) and sexy-like
Success!
-Go to at least one wedding. Everyone keeps getting married and no one ever invites me!
Success! Three weddings! Ah ah ah.
-Write more
This is another 50% success rate. I wrote more. Just not in here.

It's always quite difficult to sum up my feelings about a year once it's over. A year is still a very long time for my young little brain and last January seems very, very far away. Judging from the handful of entries I composed this past year, 2010 went something like this: Trying to improve my life by exercising and eating right, thinking that was crap and too hard, trying to salvage my relationship as I felt it slipping away, being crushingly sad about being broken up, hating working in the city, being nervously ecstatic that The Boy wanted to work it out, still hating working in the city. The end.

It's been a learning year, overall. I learned about my limits when it comes to will power and work ethic. I learned a good deal about love and relationships. I've learned a lot about my personality and what I'm capable of dealing with, and a lot about city folk and human nature. Overall 2010 has ended on a lower note than it began. I miss my friends in the suburbs. I miss my regulars. I miss work being laid-back. I'm still scared that things with The Boy are too good to be true. I miss my parents. I miss helping the speech team. I want my old life back, essentially. It's been fun Chicago, but I think our relationship has an expiration date.

Also I turned a quarter-century old and spent the last week of the year hobbling around like an old person because I inexplicably hurt my back. Awesome.

Things I Hope Come to Pass in '11

-Move back to the suburbs
-Go to New York and meet the long lost fams
-Not lose The Boy again
-Get on the management track
-Chop off my long(er), sexy-like hair
-Help plan a wedding
-Seester goes to grad school!

Get ready for the campaigns for 2012 to start, and for my Sarah Palin costume to get a good workout.

Changes, please,
Thrine

Bright Lights, Big City

Tell the Devil I say "hey" when you get back to where you're from

There's been points in my life where I've wondered if I'm somehow broken; things that were big emotional deals for my friends somehow avoided my radar, or more often than not Poncho will marvel at my apathy toward something she would have started busting skulls over. The more people I encounter at my Big City restaurant, the more apparent it's becoming that it is truly not I who is broken: as my bar manager would say, "homies is crazy here, yo."

Back at Suburban restaurant I had my fair share of amusing, frustrating, and infuriating customers, though I am now realizing that those people fell within a normal range of behavior. The guy who told me I wasn't getting a tip because "you don't get [anAmEx Black Card] by giving away money to servants" was exhibiting a familiar, albeit appalling, arrogance. The lady who expressed confusion as to why she had to pay her server because she "has a ponytail" was a perplexing yet recognizable imbalanced person. People who got upset about one thing or another all fell within the standard derivations of frustration and passive-aggression.

Perhaps it is simply the fact that being located in a town with a population of three million just within the city limits means there is a greater chance of encountering people who push the limits of my sanity. I'm more inclined to think that something about the water sanitation or the air pollution in Chicago makes the people here Really Fucking Crazy. At least once a week I'm witness to yet another act that makes me think "surely, this is the most insane thing I will ever see. People can't possibly be more ridiculous than this."

And yet. And yet. My first week at the restaurant I witnessed a dozen dine-and-dash attempts where teenagers would literally go dashing across the dining floor. My first week in the bar I had a lady ask for a bag to puke in so she didn't have to go to the restroom, and some lady leapt the railing on the patio to chase a homeless guy with one of our steak knives. More people than I can count have decided that out and out yelling is a good way to solve their problems. A couple weeks ago two men tried to physically fight their server when they thought they'd been overcharged. Last weekend an angry "guest" accused my afore-quoted bar manager of being "too Jewish" to give him a discount, and an angry family emptied the ketchup and mustard bottles on a table because their server "insulted" them by returning the 10-cent tip they gave him.

This is not normal behavior. The reactions these people have to their food being overcooked or finding themselves without a refill is mind-blowingly disproportionate. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, in my life and experiences would ever have encouraged me to think that acting like some of these people do is okay. Some of the things are just baffling (like thinking it's somehow less public to barf in a bag at your table than inside a stall in a bathroom) while others have outright shocked me. I don't think these nutters are actually nutty in a conventional sense. I do think they are, at some level, psychopaths, because nothing else explains how someone can go from "my hot wings look a bit dry" to calling their server a "dumbass chink bimbo" while demanding new wings for free and threatening to just leave if their dinners aren't perfect.

As my infuriatingly passive-aggressive manager suggested to me, my skin is pretty thin when it comes to some things. I used to be able to shrug off problem customers because I could always see some semblance of logic in their behavior. They would make me angry, but it at least resembled human behavior. This complete lack of rationality or control behind the customers I encounter now gets to me. I don't like the unpredictable. I don't like not knowing if an apology and a free dessert will diffuse the situation or result in a security guard flying across the bar to come to my defense.

The good news is, should I go back to my home base, I'll be prepared for anything.

Strawberry Lemonade,
Cathi

The Make Up

Just you, me, and the stars

Years ago on a whim I drove Alex and myself westward on a state route until it was finally dark enough to see the stars. We parked next to a cornfield, lay down on the hood of my car, and were quiet for a while. It's one of those things that, beforehand I thought it sounded cute and romantic, and looking back it sounds cute and romantic, but at the time it was just kind of weird. It took us a really long time to drive to a place that was adequately filled with stars, I'm not sure Alex was entirely sold on the idea in the first place, the stars really weren't all that bright or plentiful, and once we got there it was simultaneously humid and a little chilly, so we didn't hang out there for long.

I know that I am not alone when it comes to the golden haze of memory and storytelling. While I can't (lovingly, with blurry but rosy edges) recall the psychological term, I do know there exists a proven type of nostalgia where we tend to white-wash our pasts. People yearn for the heyday of the 1950's when men wore hats, women baked cakes, there was always ice cream in the fridge, and children respected their elders instead of trembling with the remembered fear of the communist witch hunts, Jim Crow and lynchings, and the threat of Soviet invasion. It's not necessarily a bad thing on a personal level. I don't fault anyone for wanting to think they had a happier life than they really did.

I'm currently engaged in a struggle against the tangible threat of the cloying mist that is nostalgia and re-writing and misremembering my personal history. If you hit the "back" button just once, you will see evidence of a terrible, consuming heartbreak that honestly threatened my sanity a bit. Yet, in the short span of a five-hour reconciliation last night, my heart and mind are so willing and ready to forget the mess that was the state of my relationship in order to be truly happy that somehow, Alex came to his senses.

Last night has the makings of a cute, romantic story. Phrases like "I realized that, honestly, life sucks without you" and declarations of things like "I'm all in" were uttered, framed against the backdrop of a deserted Lake Michigan beach, the twinkle of the skyline all around us. There were brief moments of intense happiness, perhaps even giddiness, more often muted by serious discussion, hard questions, and apologies.

I think I'm happy. I think getting back into a relationship with him was the right decision, and I'm sure that once the proof of time has passed I will look back upon last night with a quiet sigh and a smile. In the meantime, you'll forgive me if I let my heart that was hardened over the last couple months be quietly cautious, viewing this wonderful thing that has happened with a measure of circumspection. I want to be happy. I want this to be as wonderful as I think it is. I want to believe that everything that was said was meant, and will be followed through. I want nothing more than for my life to feel both normal and great again. I just don't want to be hurt so badly ever again.

Looking up,
Cathi