Teenage Ignorance is Entertaining

One of the things I enjoy most about going out to eat with my girlfriends is mocking the "special" teenagers who make up a large part of the wait staff. I'm not talking about nice restaurants or fancy establishments, these kids are working at fair-to-middling chain restaurants. I almost feel sorry for them because their service industry jobs expose them to the general public before their social skills are developed to a normal extent. On second thought, I don't feel sorry, they provide too much amusement.

Tonight I had a particularly awesome encounter with a teenage waiter. He was already struggling a little bit before we had even had time to interact with him in a serious way -- he tried to bring us the checks for a near-by table before we got our drinks and then totally forgot to bring us the bread basket.

The full extent of his specialness came out when we were ready to start boxing up left-overs. First of all, he couldn't take a single step in the process without running it by me first: Do you want a box? Do you want me to put it in the box for you? Should I put this in a bag? Do you want me to tie the bag? Yes, he asked if he could tie the top of the bag for me.

The best part, though, came when we were ready to pay. My wallet has the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster on the front of it. The waiter saw that and went into convulsions of joy. Apparently, I'm cool and I have his approval because of my awesome wallet choices (I can die happy now!). He then started to ask me about all the different permutations on the Keep Calm and *blank* On theme, letting me know that it all started with something or the other -- I couldn't understand him, he was mumbling. I looked at him for a minute, trying to process his indistinct mutterings, and then I told him that the original poster originated with British propaganda in WWII. He mumbled something else, I really wasn't interested enough to listen, and he went on his little way.

As we were leaving, my friend said that her favorite thing about going places with me is that I'm the type of person who will treat snot-nosed teenagers to a blank stare, and then inform them that they are mistaken, and this particular bit of pop culture actually originated in WWII, etc. etc. So, the moral of the story is that I'm a bit of an ass, but my friends like me this way, so it all works out.

Vegetarian Chickens & Meatless Monday

My brother got married about seven months ago. His new wife is pretty awesome -- we probably like her more than we like him. However, there is one thing about her that stands out in our steak-and-potatoes-type family: she is a vegetarian. However, while we do enjoy a good hunk of meat when we get together for family dinners, that's not the only thing we will eat, and we've had lots of fun trying new vegetable recipes with her and making old favorites with alternate ingredients.

The new sister-in-law had a birthday this week and my parents took my her and my brother out to dinner to celebrate. I tagged along because it's fun to push myself into situations like that. Plus, free dinner.

The birthday girl chose a local vegetarian, organic restaurant called the Sage Cafe, which was quite tasty and we all had a good time. My favorite part of the night came when the waiter took our orders. Several items on the menu included "vegetarian chicken." We asked the waiter what that was, and he explained that it was a chicken substitute that was seasoned to taste good, etc. Then, out of nowhere, my dad and the waiter launched into a discussion of how a chicken would be a vegetarian. Apparently eating bugs disqualifies chickens from being true vegetarians, but if they are corn/grain fed only, then that would be okay.

Meanwhile, I'm flashing to Portlandia. If you don't know already, it's an excellent sketch comedy show that gently mocks the mentality and culture in Portland. One of the skits involves a couple who grills a waiter about just HOW local the chicken on the menu is until they finally just get up and go to the farm to see for themselves. I'm sitting at the table, giggling to myself to the mental image of my dad at the chicken farm, interrogating the farmer about what is in the feed, and if it's really vegetarian and organic.I did manage to keep the snorting down to a minimum, so I didn't look like a crazy person. At least, not right then.

The cap to the night was when the waiter thanked us for helping participate in Meatless Mondays, an initiative they are trying to spread where for one day a week, people don't eat any meat. After he left, we got to talking and realized we'd all had at least one form of meat that day, expect for vegetarian sister-in-law of course. In spite of the strides we've been taking to try new dishes and enjoy vegetarian cuisine, I guess we just aren't yet cut out to be committed vegetarians, even if it is just one day a week.

November is Write a Blog a Day Month

In the spirit of National Novel Writing Month in November, I have decided to do some writing of my own. I'm not going to try to write a novel -- frankly I don't think I have a novel in me, and I'm fine with that. I am, however, going to write a blog a day. It's a creative exercise on a level that I'm better at working with, but it's still a creative exercise.

What that's you say? Today is already the fifth of November and I'm already five days behind? I do realize that, and I'm just going to start now and finish out the month. Depending on how many ideas I have, I may even do four or five extra days into December just to keep myself honest.

For those of you out there who have followed my blog -- all two or one of you -- you know that I don't exactly update this thing all the time. I enjoy writing when I have ideas, but unfortunately, I'm not struck with ideas that sufficiently inspire me very often. The idea behind writing a blog a day for a month is to make myself write, even when inspiration hasn't necessarily hit. This is sort of an exercise in endurance. Not necessarily enduring the writing, that's the easy part, but forcing myself to write even when I don't have anything in particular that is trying to burst out of me. I suppose writer's block is not a new story, but this is what I'm doing to get over it.

All of that being said, I'm going to log out for the night. I do actually have a couple of ideas in embryo ready to be fleshed out, but I've got a month more of blogs coming, so I think I'll save them for later.

Tomatoes vs. Broccoli

I have recently entered a new and baffling world of pint-sized picky eaters. Well, to be fair, there is really only one pint-sized picky eater. I’ve been spending a lot of time with a ten-year-old who, I’m coming to realize, has the most Byzantine rules regarding what she will and won’t eat this side of Orthodox Judaism.

The most recent adventure involved lasagna. It wasn’t eggplant lasagna or anything unexpected like that. It was your basic sauce, noodles, cheese and meat lasagna. I even used boring hamburger instead of Italian sausage because I could foresee the spiced variety of meat causing drama. I’d seen the kid eating pizza before, and I figured that lasagna was basically the same thing. Apparently, I was mistaken. What I wasn’t aware of is that tomato sauce is a definite no. Her words were, I believe, that the tomato sauce “scared her”. She spent dinner picking out chunks of noodles and scraping any vestiges of sauce and cheese off of them before she held her nose and swallowed quickly.

I was more amused by the situation than anything else. From a conversation we had while I was cooking, I already had a heads up she wasn’t going to be partial to the lasagna, and my feelings aren’t going to be hurt by her not liking something I cooked. She already thinks my bean and cheese burritos are the food of the gods and is of the opinion that no one boils up a pot of buttered noodles like I do, so I know she wasn’t reacting to me but to the food.

What made me really decide to give up on understanding the rules of what is and is not acceptable was when I mentioned the broccoli I hadn’t cooked because I felt like the lasagna and garlic bread was enough. Her eyes lit up and she actually looked excited over the prospect of a green vegetable. Apparently, the kid who won’t eat lasagna because she’s worried about tomato sauce loves steamed broccoli. Not broccoli smothered in cheese sauce or dipped in lots of ranch either. Just plain, steamed, buttered broccoli.

I’m not going to try to make sense of it anymore. I’m just going to enjoy the ride.

Things I shouldn’t enjoy, but I do anyway

When I’m golfing and I line up the shot, make sure my stance and grip are all correct, swing carefully and precisely, and completely and totally miss the ball and instead get a huge chunk of air. I just have to laugh.

Late at night when I can’t sleep and I’m desperate for something on TV to distract my churning brain but there is nothing on TV except for Billy Mays infomercials. It seems OxiClean really is the answer to all my troubles, and I’m so glad Mr. Mays took the time to shout it to me. He is definitely missed.

Pulling an all-nighter to do homework because I have procrastinated the work and now it’s due in 5 hours, as soon as I get to class. Something about producing good work when I’m on a ridiculously tight deadline feels so much more satisfying than getting it done boringly ahead of time.

Being stressed for time at work and being pulled four different directions by eight different people as I’m working to meet looming deadlines. I’m sure it’ll get old eventually, but having a job where what I do makes a difference and people rely on me is refreshing after the dead-end gigs I pulled for several years.

Talking about other people’s misfortunes and drama is usually frowned on as something no polite person does, I know, but other people just make their misfortunes and drama so darn interesting that I have to gossip about it.

When my brothers and I are all hanging out and someone brings up a touchy or sensitive subject, I love pushing buttons and getting a sibling or two all red faced and worked up. Using my life-long knowledge of what makes them tick is just too much fun to pass up, and familial discord is always good for a laugh.

Crappy hostess doughnuts – the kind with powdered sugar on the outside and “raspberry” filling in the middle. I know they are horrible for me and chock-full of chemicals, but I love them. Tasty, tasty preservative goodness.

When I’ve got a captive audience of small children, usually relatives, I will tell them things that aren’t, in the strictest sense of the word, true. I wouldn’t make things up about anything important, just silly stories that take advantage of their gullibility. Is it so wrong to abuse the trust of the innocents in order to get some giggles? Well, when I put it that way I have to say yes, it is wrong, but it’s still fun.

When I’m done eating and I still have food on my plate, I will play with it until it becomes a big, smooshy mess. Then I’ll create art and fantastical sculptures with said smooshy mess. I know this is the kind of thing I should have outgrown about 20 years ago, but I’m not quite ready to give up the creative outlet.

Library school is fun!

When I got my bachelor's degree, I decided for some reason that studying English history and Latin, with a bit of English lit thrown in for good measure, sounded like a good idea. I did have fun studying those things, and I learned a lot, too. And some of the things I learned, like the writing skills developed over three years of producing papers for demanding professors, have even proved helpful to me in my post-college existence. What it hasn't been helpful with, though, has been getting a job. For some strange reason, there's just not much call for conjugating irregular Latin verbs in the workforce, and prospective employers seem unimpressed with a degree that focused mainly on things that happened a thousand years ago or more. Weird, right???

Well, after a few uninspiring and less than satisfying jobs (including a delightful bout of unemployment), I finally got myself enrolled in a masters program in library science this past January. It's something I'd been meaning to do for a while, and I was looking forward to having some education on my resume that would help me get a job that I want. What I wasn't looking forward to, however, was the actual going to school part. In college, I loved listening to lectures and learning and forming friendships with my fellow students, but I (like every other student in the world, I'm sure) hated doing my homework. As I looked forward to two years of a distance, mostly-online masters program, it seemed to me it would be a big on work, and short on the fun parts of school. And I wasn't even taking interesting classes like history or English lit to make up for it.

Imagine my excitement, then, this last weekend when I realized that I was actually having a blast with all my classes. Yes, they are a lot of work, and yes, I still tend to procrastinate enough that I have to pull the occasional all-nighter, but despite all that, I'm having lots of fun. The courses are actually interesting, my fellow students are the smartest group of people I've been around in a long time, and my professors are (there's no other way to put this) awesome.

It all started to fall into place when I was finishing up a paper the night before class. I realized that the things I was writing about actually had some bearing on reality, and that all those theories and abstract concepts I'd been forcing myself to read translated into real-world, practical usefulness. The epiphanies continued throughout the class weekend, and by the end of the day, I was actually feeling excited to finish up my assignments for the semester, because the material was so interesting. And only some of the giddiness was due to sleep deprivation!

This state of excitement was admittedly a bit short lived -- it lasted right up until I started working on the pile of things I have left to do this week -- but it was great while it lasted. And the best part of all of it is that I'm not looking at the next two years as a joyless slog anymore. Maybe I'm not giddy and excited for everything that's coming, but I know it will be interesting at the very least, and I'm more motivated to get what I can out of it than I was a few weeks ago. That's progress, and I'll take it.

E-Readers & Libraries

Full disclosure: this is an assigned topic. I'm in a master's program to get a degree in library science -- there really is more to it than just alphabetizing books -- and one of my assignments is to create a blog and post an entry with my thoughts on how e-readers will affect libraries. I was already half way there because I just happened to have created this blog about a month ago, and it was so kind of my professor to gift wrap the topic for me because being assigned doesn't mean it's boring. And so, on to libraries and e-readers.

Libraries are always expanding and chronically short on space for their collections. Take the public library I used growing up, for example. It had started in an old, pioneer era building that had been added on to and haphazardly modernized over the last fifty or so years. It was stuffed to the gills with towering, nearly full bookshelves, and there were hardly any reading areas and no room for expansion. When the city finally built a new, larger library, the thing that struck me most was all the empty shelf space. Having been filled to capacity for years, the librarians made sure that they had plenty of room for the collection to grow when they moved to the new space, and a huge portion of the available shelves sat empty, patiently waiting future need. This is the cycle you see in any type of library, and it is a cycle that e-readers have the potential to completely change or even do away with. Obviously, electronic media don't need vast amounts of shelf space (for example the automated retrieval barns found in many academic libraries) and this could open up huge opportunities for libraries that have always been constrained by the physical space available to store their collections.

On the other hand, e-readers and electronic sources of information have the potential to completely bypass the library on the book/information's path from source to consumer. If a person can purchase and download any book instantly from an online source, why would the library need to be in the picture at all? The opportunity I see for libraries is that they can become the the source to which the consumer goes to download that e-book. Just like with paper copies of the books, people will want to borrow, not permanently buy, many of the books they read, and that is where your friendly public library will step in. By providing access to huge electronic collections, they can reinstate themselves in the information loop. I know there are problems with the current method of delivery for e-books. The licensing of the materials and the ways that they can be used by libraries are limited, but progress is being made in making it easier for libraries to purchase multiple licenses and share the media with multiple patrons, and once that is all ironed out, huge possibilities open up.

And, as a final note, one definite plus about e-books rather than paper ones is that you can be sure another person hasn't read it in the bathroom. It's a silly thing I know, but one that might add to a lot of people's peace of mind when patronizing the public library.