Thank you Grandpa, for everything

Grandpa’s dead now… Well, since Christmas Eve he’s been dead for two years and I'm just now beginning to accept it. I hope I go out like he did - in my sleep. I know, boring as hell, but if it’s on Christmas Day at least I can haunt my descendants a little (the ones who remember me) on what is supposed to be a happy holiday. Christmas Day, Eve - what’s the difference? He couldn’t have planned it any better than that. In fact, without even knowing it he may have been trying to steal the baby Jesus’ thunder. And how can you knock a guy for inadvertently trying? Of course that’s speculation but it’s true he wasn’t a big fan of the manger, or to be more specific, anything religious or even slightly Catholic-y.

Yes, dying in my sleep in my seventies on Christmas Day is exactly how I want to go. Once you hit 80, how can life be any good? A typical day for me at that age would probably consist of coughing up blood, writing a few crappy lines about the “good ole days” right after swallowing a bunch of pills, cursing out the neighbor kids, inspecting my poop and then sleeping for 16 hours. Whoopee!

Grandpa went out right. It was the right time and the right way. He was getting too old to keep driving, let alone keep kayaking the rapids. All he did was worry me the last six years of his life anyway. When thinking about my own children and grandchildren I think six years of stress would be sufficient.

But really, as great as it seems I wouldn’t have to die on Christmas Day. I’d settle for any holiday just as long as I have a few grandkids around to make my own children feel guilty for not spending enough time with me when I was an old maid. Just because they’ll have their own lives is no excuse for the inevitable neglect. Someone has to call them out, even if it’s in advance. Guilt is what makes a family go round. And if anyone should feel guilty, how is that my fault? We all have our share to carry. Some of us just choose to ignore it.

So as I was saying four paragraphs ago, Grandpa’s dead now, but in an attempt to find some kind of wisdom to pass on to my sons (who are turning 17, 16 and 15 this year) I’ve been looking back at his life. I think it’s my own way of dealing with the fact that I can’t call him up and ask, “So what the heck do I tell these hormonal punks?”

As it turns out, the life he lived is a gold mine of valuable information. Here is a tidbit of what I’ve told my sons: Be careful who you help out. Rescue a dog and you’ll have a faithful friend. Rescue a hooker and she’ll stab you in the back. The beautiful ones you always seem to lose.

Okay, that last line is actually from a Prince song but that doesn’t make it any less true. And this has nothing to do with Grandpa (or Prince) but I’ve also warned, “You’ll need a f**king army or a crazy bitch to stop one. Don’t call me!”

I guess in a few years they’ll already have learned this stuff on their own. Who ever listens to their parents, anyway? Oh... No… They’d better not call me!

Finally, I don’t want to get mushy or anything and you probably can’t read this but I’ll always love and miss you Grandpa. Thanks for everything.

People are strange, and my celebrity twin

About a week ago I learned something in a crowded room full of (mostly) strangers. People tended to be drawn to those who looked or seemed most like themselves. The few blondes in the room always sat together. The guys in plaid with baseball caps stopped talking whenever a man wearing a tie sat near them, or a female. Leather jacket people (unfortunately not the biker kind) had their own little group, and so on. I mostly sat next to Pat since I knew him, and there wasn’t time for idle chatter so it worked out. Talking to Pat is like talking to a rock.


He just can't do it.

When we took breaks the strange behavior continued as people congregated in the hallway, lounge and outside. For the most part people were polite. No one I spoke to ever snubbed me, except for one of the blondes. It was like I was invisible. In that moment I felt… so… black. Damn cracker.

Now here is the list of brave people who initiated conversation with me:

· The only Native American woman there, who sat next to me and sought me out on breaks. I was the only one she talked to and her bff that week. I’ll just say I know more about her family than I ever will about Pat’s. I don’t think he even has one.

· A red headed woman who thought I was funny, but then again, it could’ve been gas. You never know.

· When I was a few minutes late one morning a really spiffy and happy man said, “Hi! There’s an empty seat right here. Sit.”

Damn, I didn’t get his name or number.

· Pat said, “How about Perkins?” and “Let’s go to KFC,” and so on. He was definitely the bravest.

I’m a tough one to figure out thanks to my dark hair and peachy/pasty skin. Whenever someone meets me for the first time and tries to label me or guess my ethnicity they are usually wrong. The upside is being able to blend in just about anywhere. The downside is… Well, there really is no downside. When they are wrong I find it amusing. One time I’ll never forget was back when I was married and living in my husband’s home town. I’d just started making chicken-fried steak (which is the only thing I can cook well) and we were almost out of cooking oil so my husband went to the store. He returned with an old friend he had seen walking along the road carrying a 12 pack. I hadn’t even met this guy yet but here he was, at our dining room table waiting for dinner and drowning himself in his beer. They called me out of the kitchen. Right after we were introduced he blurted out, “You look like a Jew!”

I smiled and said nothing.

He turned to my husband. “She’s not Jewish?”

My husband just smiled and shook his head. Then his friend turned back to me, “You really look like you’re from Israel or sumthin’!”

To this day I’m still not sure if he was racist, ignorant or just thought I looked like Anne Frank.


Anne


Me

She's definitely my celebrity twin. Now if anyone needs me I’ll be hiding out in a house full of white kids.

The Shit List: Downtown Chain Restaurants

I wanted to reserve this list for groups of people I really dislike, but bad management IS people and the root of the problem. And I’ve heard it’s not good to “stuff” your feelings. I never have a good bottle of booze handy anyway. I spent last week attending lectures so by Friday I was numb enough as it was. And all that sitting! I hate it when my butt cheeks fall asleep. It really wasn’t the place to stand up and shake it. The first day I was surprised to see some one I knew. Pat is extremely boring one-on-one and I was in physical pain trying to have a conversation with him, but he is a nice guy and no one likes to dine in public alone. Well, we don’t. We didn’t want to risk getting back late so after factoring in everything (traffic, parking, wait time, etc.) we had to have lunch downtown. Our places of choice were scattered around the outer edges of the city and we were stuck in the center. Math is never fun and was working against us.



When I’m in the largest city in the state I normally try to avoid downtown. Traffic stinks and the only place to catch a bite without messing with a meter is a chain restaurant, which you can find elsewhere. But now I have even more reasons. Pat didn’t know what to expect either so I can’t pin any of this on him. Hence the shit list. We went to a different place each day and they all sucked. These were the two worst.



We started off the week at Perkins. When our waitress came over I immediately recognized her. I used to work with her somewhere else and she looked exactly the same as she did ten years ago, from her hairstyle right down to her pregnant belly. Talk about deja vu. But wait, there’s more. She still has this cold and pissed off look like she will either pull out a gun or start balling if you ask how her day’s going. Don’t think this just comes with being a waitress and packing a fetus. She’s always had a way of making people uncomfortable, prego or not. Well, everyone has their skills. She also hates conversation unless it involves her complaining, so I was glad she stuck to her job. I was hungry so I ordered the ‘Everything Omelet’, which was a ten dollar omelet. Ten dollars! Everything Omelet! So I’m thinking I’ll be in omelet heaven. Was I wrong to assume that? Umm… After getting my omelet I couldn’t help but wonder where the rest of it was. Seriously, it looked like something a model would not only inhale but actually leave in her stomach. I was already put off, then I noticed the cheese on top wasn’t melted. The last time I got my food like that (A&W summer 2006) the entire thing was cold. Well, it was actually much worse. My chili dog was partially frozen. So was I wrong to assume my omelet would be a little coldish? Since it didn’t look frozen I dove right into it. I burned my tongue.


I had it coming. And I’m always this scary.

As you can see I’m wrong a lot of the majority of the time. And when I’m wrong I’m very, very wrong. And as if all that weren’t bad enough, while I was pretending not to be in pain I noticed another tight-lipped, snobby snot waitress who worked with me that same year. It wasn’t weird enough to see just one of these old sour puss co-workers, so here were two of them in the same damn place. And yet, after thinking it over I left a nice tip for the walking time bomb. Some day some one might get hurt.

The next day Pat was craving some kind of KFC bowl that had mashed potatoes, gravy, chicken and cheese all mixed together. I still don’t know what it’s called. For one, they didn’t have it up on the board. Two, he couldn’t remember the name. We stood there for a while as he looked for it, until an anorexic looking young woman with greasy hair and a depressed demeanor slowly came out of the darkness (maybe some bulbs had burned out). And the place was dark too. To be more specific, this girl looked like an emo 8th grader but was Addams Family creepy. The bad lighting didn’t help any. No, scratch that. If the lighting was any good we would’ve seen more creepy.


They always start with dolls

Pat described what he wanted and she rang it up. Although it sounded grotesque, like what a one-year-old does with his food right before he throws it on the floor, I knew Pat had some taste so I told the Addams girl I’d try it. Then she said we’d have to wait while they made the chicken. It was lunchtime at KFChicken and they weren’t ready for 2 measly orders? Great. It got worse though. We sauntered off to find a table and there were plenty of them. There were only 3 other people in the place which I thought was odd, at first. Then we went from table to table. We couldn’t find one that was clean. Not one! Every single table was dirty. Magnificent. Pat went from disgusted to determined to make it better somehow. He chose a small table with only a few crumbs and used a napkin to wipe it off. He was really hell bent on this chicken potpourri so I thought it had to be good. When it was ready we had to go back to the counter. Perkins prices but no waitresses in sight? Yes, I was pissed the bowl thing cost ten bucks. I know it’s all about location, but we weren’t in a frigging mall. Okay, I’ll admit the chicken/potato gumbowl was very tasty, but it shouldn’t take a Taser to get your employees to wipe tables or show some courtesy. And they should at least look like they might not be carving out the hearts of live chickens by candlelight in a back room. Oddly enough the rest room was clean, so if I’m ever in the neighborhood and need to pee or drop something off...

The Shit List: Undecided Voters

On occasion I make a mental note of certain groups of people I hold a good amount of contempt for. But why keep it bottled up inside? So I’ve decided to share my feelings. It isn’t hatred - I just really dislike these people. I’m calling it ‘The shit list’ for lack of a better title. ‘People I really dislike’ sounds too lame, and ‘People who should disappear off the face of the earth’ or ‘People I hold a good amount of contempt for’ are too long, and that last one just plain sucks.

Watching the presidential race has been so weird this year. I can’t remember a race ever being this dramatic. It’s like a soap opera except it’s real life, which is pretty awful when I think about it that way. I hate soaps, but I do enjoy vanilla scented body wash. I also hate polls for many reasons but mainly because it’s always really close, and you’ve got those undecided voters who could swing it either way, yet they insist on remaining undecided right up until the very end just to keep the rest of us guessing. Thanks, guys! So we don’t really know how it will end, but I’m ready for it to end now.

Here’s my advice for undecided voters. The first time in my life I had a tough decision to make I went to my dad. Maybe it was something like deciding whether or not to wear those hideous leg warmers to school because they were considered hip, but whatever and whenever it was, it was a tough decision at the time. So I asked my dad how he decided what to do when he was confused about something. He said, “You’ve got to weigh it out.”

He held out his hands, palms up, like he was a human scale and literally showed me how it worked. “You put all the good on this side, put all the bad on the other side. If the bad outweighs the good, it’s the wrong choice. If the good outweighs the bad, that’s probably the right choice. Run with it.”

The leg warmers helped to keep my legs warm that winter.

So there you go. You think about everything you already know, and find out everything you don’t yet know but want to know. Then you weigh it out. It’s not fool-proof, but it’s a formula and better than just sitting on your haunches. So please, and I’m probably speaking for most political junkies here, don’t remain undecided another day.

We’ve still got over two weeks left before the standard national voting day, but that doesn’t mean the undecideds should keep telling the pollsters they have no clue who they are voting for. Everyone’s identity I assume is kept confidential, so what’s keeping them from spitting it out? Are they really still confused or are they just paranoid? Are they on drugs? Alcoholics? Is there a Nazi in the room when they get the call? I give up.

Yeah, I know. Polls are usually wrong anyway. I should just turn off the TV and go to church.

Magic beans, and what not...

I have this crazy sleep schedule. After a hard day’s work I lie on the sofa to watch some TV and end up passing out for a few hours. Then I catch a few more hours of sleep in the early morning until the phone rings at around nineish. It’s always a computer guy named Jim or gal named Jill who wants me to upgrade my cable to satellite or extend my imaginary warranty, or even consolidate my imaginary credit card debt. Point is, I could sleep through a tornado or monkey slapping my face. But for some reason I always jump out of bed and a deep sleep whenever the phone rings. So that works for me much better than an alarm clock. I’m pretty much awake the rest of the day. At least, until I get home from work. That’s how it’s been for the last few years or so. And now I need to change all of that. In fact, I just took a sleeping pill so I need to finish this as quick as a Vegas wedding so I don’t pass out and drool all over the keyboard. But that’s not a real scenario. Pills only seem to work when someone wants to get high. Well, I just need to hurry.

So my old boss called me about a week ago. I was his office manager for six months in ‘03-‘04 before he realized he could no longer afford to pay me. And regarding the business, he said, “Please! Just take it!”

Since then he’s started and apparently shut down another business that he ran without any outside help, and again started up an entirely new one. Now back to the phone call. I didn’t think much of it since he calls occasionally to see how things are going with me and/or needs a favor. One time I ended up selling sno-cones around town with one of his daughters from a golf cart because he got busy and needed me to take his place. And, he said I would pick up some extra cash. That only lasted about a month. After expenses and splitting the profit with his daughter, I raked in ten dollars a week.

Here’s how the convo went…

“Hey Alicia, sorry to call so early but I need to run something by you. Got a minute?”

“Uh… yeah. What time is it?”

“Ha ha. Hey, I’ve had this new business now for close to a year and it’s doing really well.”

“Tons of dough, huh?” Yawn.

“Like I said, it’s doing well. I have a new office in town, and it would be great if you would come work for me.”

“I’ll have to think about it. Can I keep my current job? ‘Cause I don’t really want to quit it.”

Translation: “I’m scared to death to quit a secure job when any time I’ve ever worked for you it’s only been temporary.”

“Hey, that’s no problem. We can work around your other job. Just think it over, and if you decide you want to do it give me the earliest and latest times you can work.”

Translation: “This I know. I will be your boss again. Muahahahahaha.”

“Sure, I’ll think it over and get back to you.”

Translation: “Oh shit! You really are serious, aren’t you?”

So I called him back on Friday, and he says this will eventually turn into full time with benefits.

Okay. Whatever!

I start first thing Monday morning. Wish me luck.

"Just Say No" to your boss

It’s not easy for me to just say nay when my boss is in a tough spot. If I’m needed I can usually be counted on to nearly run myself into the ground for the company. But yesterday when I was asked if I wanted to work the substitute day off I was given for working through the weekend to cover for another employee, my aching body told me I needed a day to recover. So I turned it down. It was a tough split-second decision but I’m happy with my choice.

So today I was home with a sore back considering why I have such a hard time just saying NO. After some reflection and nearly shattering the mirror in the process, this is what I learned about myself.

I like the extra money… I like bigger paychecks. Sure, the extra money gets spent on things I wouldn’t need to buy if I weren’t working so much. Things like frozen and fast foods, and toys for the kids to ease my guilt.

But still, it looks good on paper and seems wiser (in theory).


I like to prove my loyalty. I don’t know why this is an issue with me. Why do I need to prove I am loyal? Isn’t the fact that I show up on my scheduled work days proof enough?

A boss has never actually said anything like this to me, “I don’t think you are loyal enough. Why don’t you prove it by working your days off this week. If you don’t, we’ll know you are nothing but a loose cannon.”

This is reality… My boss simply asks me if I can work and I say yes. Seriously, I need to grow a pair.


Most of my jobs have had room for growth. And I like moving up the ladder and getting the few more ounces of respect and pay that come with it, only to eventually quit because I have to move, or give birth and nurse a child for a year. Okay, that was a lie. I’ve never breastfed a child. I've tried but things didn't operate like they should have, and I still feel like less of a woman.

But this job is different - it’s a small business. There isn’t any promotion available that I’d actually want or need. I don’t want to take over while my boss is on vacation. She works from 8 am until 10 pm, seven days a week! What kind of life is that? I can’t see any real benefits from becoming boss number two, even if it is just for a few days. The hours I put in are enough as it is, thanks.

So now that I’ve realized promotion isn’t a factor here, I need to learn to implement “just saying no” more often.


I’m a nice person. I need to work on this before it kills me.


I have a fear of losing my job. I’ll start with the story of the last time I lost a job because it’s slightly relevant. Okay, it’s not really relevant at all. The true reason I fear losing my job is the fact that any work is hard to come by in a small town and I can't really afford to commute 100 miles per work day, but I really want to share this story anyway.

I used to work in an office for a guy who started up a small business, and it went very well in the beginning as far as sales go. But it wasn’t enough to support his family and cover the expenses so his credit card became his best friend. He ended up starting another business in a more profitable field and in the meantime ruined some important client relationships with the first one - not delivering the finished products on time. Running two businesses was too much for him as he couldn’t be in two places at once. It would take too long to train a new employee to do this specialized work, which was a difficult and dirty job.



I was only good at the secretarial stuff and (still) had no manly muscles, so I wasn’t a good candidate. The one guy he had spent months training became a party animal so you can just imagine what that was like. After losing clients he finally threw in the towel and gave up production. Since we had become good friends while I worked for him he asked me if I wanted the business in its new form. At this point he had already informed me he was shutting down the office, so I’d be losing $300 per week. I knew I had to find another job. But if I took over the business and ran it from my home, on the side I could make an easy $50-$100 on every sale (at least), so I thought I’d be a fool to say no. He signed it over to me for nothing and I became a dealer. Now that production was no longer an option, he sold the equipment and got a little money out of the deal.

So, the company that supplied the product to me for resale would now handle the production. This raised the final prices, and made it more difficult to entice customers. The market is an extremely small and competitive one in my area as it is. And rising fuel prices haven’t helped any as costs in the industry have gone up dramatically (rather than slightly) every year since 2004, which just happened to be the year I was handed this so-called business opportunity.

There have been some good times, though. I secured a client on my own for a couple of years and it helped pay some bills. But he was having too much difficulty turning a profit and it didn’t make financial sense for him to stay in it. Funny, I wasn’t making a killing either so I couldn’t lower the prices for him. It was fun while it lasted.

So instead of being a proud profiting business owner, I work another job and bend over on a regular basis for fear of losing that job and having to rely solely on my flailing business. What’s so wrong with kissing the ass of someone who is turning a decent profit and can afford to keep you fed?

Forget I said that. It could really be misinterpreted.


Has it ever been tough for you to just say no to your boss?