Writing

Man, I’ve got to get better at remembering birthdays!

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I’ve written before about how I sometimes forget the right words to use – especially when I’m tired.  Well, I also am horrible about remembering some birthdays.  Today, I stepped out of the office for a few minutes in the afternoon to call my grandma and say “Happy birthday,” even though I knew I was a day late.  Weekdays are hard for me when it comes to calling home – they are all in Central time, I’m in Pacific time. If I have anything to do after work, they’re in bed by the time I get home, and that’s how yesterday was.  So, I ducked out today instead, knowing it wouldn’t be a huge surprise that I was calling a day late – most of my family expects me to be late with these things, or forget them altogether, which is odd, since I’m early or on time and completely organized for every other thing in my life.

I called and my grandpa answered.  “Hi,” I said.

Grandpa replied in his voice that has gotten soft and far away, “Oh, hi.”

“Are you busy?” I asked, more out of habit than because I actually thought he’d be busy.  He answered, perhaps one decibel above a whisper, which made it even harder for me to comprehend his answer.

“Actually, right now I am.”  Even he sounded surprised that he was busy.

I paused, then recovered and asked, “Is Grandma around?”  Again, an almost rhetorical question.  My grandparents don’t do much these days.  They’re approaching 80 and my grandpa in particular is quite frail.  Then I heard him say to whoever was with him, “My granddaughter…  from California…”  And there was a collective, “Ohhhh!!!” from the background, like I am some sort of celebrity or something.  I think it’s just that I live in California.  Long distance still matters to people that never understood the cell phone.  Grandpa hollered as best he could for Grandma who was upstairs, and said I was on the phone.

She picked up, and I pulled my cell phone away from my ear as she yelled into the receiver, “OK.  I got it!”

“Did I miss your birthday by a day?” I asked?  Grandma laughed a pretty big laugh and said, “Honey, it was a week ago!”

“What? You mean it was the 18th?!”

More laughing.  “No, it’s the 17th.”

“Dammit, I never get it right, do I?” I said, laughing back.

She said, “You know, I sent you the list.”  A few years ago, she hand-wrote all the important dates I should ever need to remember on a piece of paper and mailed it to me.  The  list has birthdays and anniversaries on it – for my aunt and uncles, my cousins, of course my grandparents – and my grandma even included my sister, my mother, and my sister’s kids on the list – birthdays I don’t generally have trouble remembering.  I know exactly where the list is.  It’s within arm’s reach of my desk, yet I never get it out in time.

“I know, I know,” I said.  “Well, did you do anything?”

“Your uncle came on Saturday and we went out for Chinese – you know we finally have a new Chinese restaurant in town.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes.  He had to travel the next day, so he came early.  Then on Sunday I fixed dinner for your sister and mother and everyone.”

“Shouldn’t they be fixing dinner for you?” I joked.

“Well, yes, now that you mention it.  I think we should do it that way from now on.  Grandpa cooked a turkey outside, and we had mashed potatoes and vegetables.  It’s too much work.  I just can’t do it anymore.”

I understood, but the thought of Grandpa’s turkey grilled on the Weber and Grandma’s mashed potatoes and gravy started my mouth watering and reminded me of how someone has to watch over the mashed potatoes around my uncle and I, or we’ll empty the bowl and no one else will get any.  Our conversation ended just a few seconds later.  It’s impossible to get my grandparents to talk on the phone for more than about three and a half minutes.  They think long distance is too expensive, even though I’m the one calling, and I try over and over to tell them it doesn’t cost me any more to call them than it does to call someone on my own street.  I think they don’t believe me.  Still, it was a nice break in my hectic work day.

The thing is I don’t forget all birthdays – just some of them, which somehow makes it all seem worse.  I never forget my grandpa’s birthday – perhaps because it is near my mom’s – but I have a feeling I have never remembered my grandma’s birthday on time.  Lucky for me, she doesn’t seem to hold it against me.

This is almost as bad as a recent experience I had with a friend’s birthday.  I tend to associate birthdays together when I can, because it helps me come a little closer to remembering them, and I have a friend whose birthday I had associated with one of my sister’s kids.  In September, my niece’s birthday was coming up (which I remembered to call for, but I still haven’t sent her birthday present to her).  This triggered my associated memory of my friend’s birthday.  I had an odd nagging feeling in my mind that I might not be right about the exact date in relation to my niece’s birthday, and even though I hated to admit it (this friend never forgets my birthday), I broke down and sent an apologetic email saying, “I know your birthday is soon, but I can’t be positive it is today – so I apologize for that, but I wanted to say Happy Birthday even if I have the date wrong.  I hope you’re doing well.  We should get together soon.”

Later that day, I got an email back.

“Hi!  You are very thoughtful; your birthday is super easy because [it is the day after a holiday], but my day is a lot harder to remember.  My birthday is actually in April, but your email has put me in a totally celebratory birthday frame of mind, which I was not at all in, for my actual birthday. I think I am going to go to Cost Plus World Market this weekend and buy myself presents, and I am going to buy a whole box of Whole Foods vegan donuts (instead of a cake, because donuts really are even better than cake).”

Christ, it’s my nephew’s birthday that my friend’s birthday is next to, not my niece’s!  I explained.

“You know, after I hit send, I thought – wait, maybe it’s in April.  The issue is, I’ve associated your birthday with my nephew’s before, because his is in April – and yesterday was my niece’s birthday, and somehow the association got switched in my mind between the two of them – man, I’m not even 40 and already my mind is completely going!  I’m glad that you are now in a celebratory mood, though – that makes my huge mistake somewhat more tolerable.”

I guess worse things could come of forgetting someone’s birthday.

My sixth grade teacher and The Jackson Four

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In sixth grade I had a teacher that I think may have been senile – or, on her way, anyway.  I have no idea how old she really was, but to an eleven-year old, she looked ancient.  I remember brown hair, so maybe she wasn’t so old as I thought, but she always seemed to be missing something – focus, or sharpness, alertness.  She was off in outer space all the time.  She wore glasses with really large frames, had a short haircut that was obviously permed – no way curls would look so tight and fuzzy on the top of someone’s head, yet the hair at the nape of the neck so straight.  She had a hunch in her shoulders which may be part of the reason I remember her as old – she was a tall woman, though, so maybe she just carried herself that way to look less imposing.

She was a fan of Carly Simon – she used to hum or sing You’re so Vain under her breath all the time.  Then she would laugh at how clever she thought the song was, and try to explain it to us in detail.  None of us knew the song, and although we could understand the concept of the term “vain,” it wasn’t really a vocabulary term that we heard used in real life.  We just thought she was crazy, but to this day, I cannot hear that song without thinking of my sixth grade teacher.  I can’t for the life of me remember her name, but I can hear her voice…  “You’re so vain.  You probably think this song is about you. You’re so vain.  I bet you think this song is about you… don’t you… don’t you…”

She read to us after lunch every day, and though that reading time was meant to be fairly short – maybe 15 or 20 minutes, she often got so engrossed in the book that she’d kill an hour or even more.  No one ever stopped her.  The only book I remember her reading was The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende, and that may be because I had read it already and begged her to read it to the class.  If you’ve only seen the movie, you’ll think it was a cheesy story, but the book is actually quite good – especially for kids in late grade school.

Our crazy teacher didn’t make us sit with our desks in straight rows facing the front of the room.  We got to split off into groups of four and arrange our desks in little pods in random places throughout the classroom.  I’m not sure it was the best idea to let us all sit in groups like this – we did spend tons more time whispering to each other and ignoring what the teacher was saying.  In fact, many of my memories of that year don’t even feature her.  It’s as though she wasn’t even in the room.

Of course, we got to choose a name for our group and hang a sign from the ceiling above our little cluster of desks.  Not surprisingly, most of our group names were tied to whatever music we were into at the time.  I remember a Motley Crew group, and my group was The Jackson Four.  Thriller had been out almost two years, but we were still fanatical about that album.  I only wish MJ had made a dozen more albums like Off the Wall and Thriller.

In sixth grade, I was a bored student.  There wasn’t anything about school that challenged me.  I talked to my teacher about it once, but she had few ideas about how to challenge me, and my small rural school didn’t have the funds for any kind of advanced kids.  In the end, she told me I could work ahead of the class in math if I wanted to – at my own pace.  That seemed cool.  I finished the entire year’s worth of assignments in about a month.  The rest of the year, when other kids were doing math, I got to read.  So, while in some ways, I didn’t get challenged in terms of the difficulty of the work I was doing, I did get hours and hours of additional reading time in, which I’m grateful for.

I remember that we had salamanders as pets in the classroom.  We kept two or three of them in a glass aquarium and fed them crickets, kept their water fresh in a shallow dish, and cleaned the cage regularly.  Until they disappeared.  Seems someone left the lid off of the cage and they found their way out – or maybe someone took them out to let them walk around and they got lost – either way, we were stuck with an empty cage for the rest of the year.  At the very end of the year, we all chipped in to help clean up the classroom – organizing bookshelves, taking down our super cool signs hanging from the ceiling, sweeping up in hard to reach corners.  That’s when we found the salamanders – very dead, very dried up.  They had found their way behind a bookshelf and that was that.

 

 

More great reading

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There was no way I could pick a single post from this blog, though I will share the link that got me to read it.  Seriously, though – do not stop there!  It is full of hilarious posts about “The Problem with Young People Today.”  The writing itself is very funny, but I couldn’t help but laugh even more at the people that feel the need to argue their case with this admirable man.

Wrapping things in bacon is always a good thing.

After reading this post, I am really glad I don’t qualify as a clutz to this degree.  But, if you do, you may be grateful for the advice shared by this poor clumsy person.

This story of a moment of writer’s crisis from a woman whose life looks so different than anyone I know is a great read.  I’m hooked.

And, finally, this piece simply left me speechless.

Jobs from my youth – Younkers, 1992 & 1993

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I recently wrote about one job I had in 1993, waiting tables at a restaurant/night club.  I had many other jobs that year, though.  I started the year working at Younkers, a department store in downtown Sheboygan.  Socially, it was a pretty fun job.  My best friend and roommate at the time worked there with me, and we made a handful of new friends there, too.  I have never been a very fashionable person, but J was.  He had that gay man’s touch when it came to clothes and hair.  He could make rags seem trendy, and I became fully reliant on him to maintain a “look” after we became roommates, though I had never had a “look” before.  When I had to start my shift earlier than his, or work when he had a day off, I woke him up in the morning so he could do my hair.  He was such a good sport about it.

I still can’t do anything with my hair – every time I get my haircut, I walk out looking how I want to look, and every time, I go home and take a shower because I hate having itchy hair around my collar, and I am hopelessly unable to recreate whatever my hairstylist has done with just a few waves of her fingers through my short hair a half an hour earlier.  The accompanying picture gives you an idea of what J used to do – remember that it was the early 90s, and we liked to think of ourselves as “alternative.”  Not goth, not punk, nothing so specific – just alternative and definitely NOT mainstream.  That was the thing to avoid.  I am fairly confident there is little chance anyone would recognize this photo as me.  As I said, the only time I had a “look” was when I had someone to put it together for me.

Younkers had an old-fashioned lunch counter.  When I worked there,  I could order a chicken sandwich pretty cheaply with my discount.  I ordered a chicken sandwich with cheese every time I ate there – with mashed potatoes and gravy, of course.  Even today, I have this puzzling tendency to eat the exact same thing day after day for lunch, but when dinner time rolls around, I’m rarely content with the options available to me in the kitchen.  My current lunch streak consists of a turkey sandwich with a slice of swiss cheese on potato bread.  I bring potato chips so I can put them inside the sandwich just before I eat it.  I get an unusual amount of satisfaction from the crunch of potato chips inside the sandwich.  I also bring a pear or a nectarine or some other kind of fruit.  I bet you are picking up on the potato trend in my life.  I blame it on my great-grandfather, who is rumored to have reached America as a stowaway on a ship carrying potatoes, which were all he had to eat on the way from Romania.

It was actually sort of an odd family affair to work at Younkers.  My mom worked there part-time behind the jewelry counter for a while.  My great-uncle also worked there.  He was an interior decorator and spent some of his time selling expensive furniture to the handful of wealthy families in the area.  He is also the only other gay person in my family that I know of, and the first time I ran into him at the local gay bar in Sheboygan, he was so thrilled he bought my friends and me drinks all night long.  Even my great-grandmother worked at the store years earlier, before it was called Younkers.  She sold fancy hats and china.

Younkers used to be called Prange’s back then.  It was a well-loved local store because it was part of a regional chain that began in Sheboygan in the late 1800’s.  The local store remained intact for just over 100 years before it was bought by Younkers.  I remember going to Prange’s as a kid to visit Bruce the Spruce – a talking Christmas tree alternative to visiting Santa Claus at the mall.  I was probably as scared of Bruce the Spruce as I would have been frightened by a strange Santa Claus, but as I re-imagine the past, I think Bruce was more welcoming.

There were plenty of negatives about working in retail, though, such as aching feet at the end of a day, utter boredom from wandering around the department and refolding every piece of clothing a customer picked up then tossed like a wet towel onto a table, and constantly reordering all the hanging clothes by size.  I did leave the industry with fairly particular ways of folding clothes, though.  My partner often marvels at my ability to quickly fold a shirt with the arms tucked in back and the front perfectly displayed, all without the use of a table or other surface.  Such important things I learned in the jobs of my younger years.

Cat’s Cradle

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Since I’ve been ruminating on the time in my life when I was still not burdened with much responsibility and mostly got away with wandering from one job to the next, or one state to the next, or one book to the next, I thought I’d pull out a few of my Vonnegut books, because I worshiped them back then.  I was like a religious fanatic that lived and breathed whatever nonsense was contained in the tome of truth for that religion.  In that sense, reading Cat’s Cradle (over and over, as you can see in the accompanying pictures of my a couple Vonnegut books off my shelf) gave me my first vin-dit towards Vonnegut worship.  These books were a sort of life blood for me, validating my strongly held beliefs that the world was full of a bunch of idiot-robots without souls that were so preoccupied with their own existence that the rest of the world could just fall away and they wouldn’t really notice.  Let me say, I no longer view the whole of society that way, but I still sometimes miss the days when I did.  A chapter from Cat’s Cradle:

Bicycles for Afghanistan

   There was a small saloon in the rear of the plane and I repaired there for a drink.  It was there that I met another fellow American, H. Lowe Crosby, of Evanston, Illinois, and his wife, Hazel.
They were heavy people, in their fifties.  They spoke twanglingly.  Crosby told me that he owned a bicycle factory in Chicago, that he had had nothing but ingratitude from his employees.  He was going to move his business to grateful San Lorenzo.
“You know San Lorenzo well?” I asked.
“This’ll be the first time I’ve ever seen it, but everything I’ve heard about it, I like,” said H. Lowe Crosby.  “They’ve got discipline.  They’ve got something you can count on from one year to the next.  They don’t have the government encouraging everybody to be some kind of original pissant nobody ever heard of before.”
“Sir?”
“Christ, back in Chicago, we don’t make bicycles anymore.  The eggheads sit around trying to figure out new ways for everybody to be happy.  Nobody can get fired, no matter what; and if somebody does accidentally make a bicycle, the union accuses us of cruel and inhuman practices and the government confiscates the bicycle for back taxes and gives it to a blind man in Afghanistan.”
“And you think things will be better in San Lorenzo?”
“I know damn well they will be.  The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!”
Crosby asked me what my name was and what my business was.  I told him, and his wife Hazel recognized my name as an Indiana name.  She was from Indiana, too.
“My God,” she said, “are you a Hoosier?”
I admitted I was.
“I’m a Hoosier, too,” she crowed.  “Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier.”
“I’m not,” I said.  “I never knew anybody who was.”
“Hoosiers do all right.  Lowe and I have been around the world twice, and everywhere we went we found Hoosiers in charge of everything.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“You know that manager of that new hotel in Istanbul?”
“No.”
“He’s a Hoosier.  And the military-whatever-he-is in Tokyo…”
“Attache,” said her husband.
“He’s a Hoosier,” said Hazel.  “And the new Ambassador to Yugoslavia…”
“A Hoosier?” I asked.
“Not only him but the Hollywood Editor of Life magazine, too.  And that man in Chile…”
“A Hoosier, too?”
“You can’t go anywhere a Hoosier hasn’t made his mark,” she said.
“The man who wrote Ben Hur was a Hoosier.”
“And James Whitcomb Riley.”
“Are you from Indiana, too?” I asked her husband.
“Nope. I’m a Prarie Stater.  ‘Land of Lincoln,’ as they say.”
“As far as that goes,” said Hazel triumphantly, “Lincoln was a Hoosier, too.  He grew up in Spencer County.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I don’t know what it is about Hoosiers,” said Hazel, “but they’ve sure got something.  If somebody was to make a list, they’d be amazed.”
“That’s true,” I said.
She grasped me firmly by the arm.  “We Hoosiers got to stick together.”
“Right.”
“You call me ‘Mom.'”
“What?”
“Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, ‘You call me Mom.'”
“Uh huh.”
“Let me hear you say it,” she urged.
“Mom?”
She smiled and let go of my arm.  Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle.  My calling Hazel “Mom” had shut it of, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along.
Hazel’s obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon.  Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows – and any nation, anytime, anywhere.
As Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:

If you wish to study a granfalloon,
Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

Revisiting the 80s: Video Games

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I grew up LOVING video games.  I still love them.  It’s my uncle’s fault.  One of the best birthday presents I ever got was $20 worth of video game tokens and an afternoon at the arcade with him.  My favorite arcade sized game is Galaga, and luckily, it was the favorite of enough people that you can occasionally still find it in an arcade.

I was reminded of my 80s video game craze tonight when I was doing some random web surfing.  I came across this site, retrojunk.com, which I believe could entertain me for hours.  It is not the most aesthetically pleasing site, but who cares when the content is this good?  Paging through old commercials for video games reminded me of Intellivision.  Unbelievable to look at that game console now and imagine the hours of entertainment it provided.  Do you remember the little plastic overlays that slid over the button pad on the controller?  They always ended up with permanent indentations from pushing so hard on the buttons with my thumbs.  I vaguely remember being scolded about that, but I would’ve been so zoned in on the game, it probably barely registered.

I loved Pitfall, but who knew Jack Black was in one of their early 80’s commercials?  As I watched this commercial, I could feel myself leaning heavily to the right, as my body willed Harry to make it across the pond full of alligators, my muscles tense like rubber bands until I dropped him safely on the other side.

And what about Burger Time?  I could play that game for hours.  Listening now, I’m not sure how I could handle the music for so long, but check this out – even if you only listen for a few seconds, I promise, it will take you back.

I eventually got a Nintendo when I was in high school, and mastered games like Super Mario Bros., and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out (which you can still play as a retro game on Wii, but now it’s just called Punch-Out since the game’s namesake bit off someone’s ear).  I spent way too many school nights up into the early morning hours hooked on this one.  I can’t imagine how many hours it took me to get through the whole game and beat Mike Tyson.

As I said, I still love video games, and I now play the kind that take months to get through (especially since I’m no longer in high school with hours and hours to spare), but there’s something to be said for the magic and simplicity of games from the 80s.  Despite the now simplistic graphics capabilities, the concept of home video games was still so new, you felt like maybe Star Trek would become a reality someday.  What were your favorites?  Were you an Intellivision nut, an Atari kid or did  you have a Sega or ColecoVision?

Remembering Kathy

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Fifteen years ago today, someone very important to me died.  I was 23, and so was she.  We had an intense history – sometimes good intense, and sometimes bad intense.  She fought a hard battle with cancer, and though the hand she was dealt was unfair, she lived each day she had with positive energy.  For that, I will always admire her.  I’ve spent a lot of years of my life regretting that I couldn’t or didn’t do more for her, but today, I try to just remember her.  I see her goofy smile, and her overgrown dark brown hair.  I laugh at her crazy passion for dancing, even though she wasn’t all that good at it.  I think fondly of the times she dragged me out to find some new lesbian hang-out in the city we had just moved to, even when I’d rather have stayed at home.  I remember how she was able to find a way to decorate our tiny studio apartment, even though we had no money to buy things.  I think of the huge pots of spaghetti she made for whatever transient visitors were staying with us while they found their own apartment in San Francisco.  I think of how she insisted on having our pictures taken with our cats, the poor things forced to wear tiny Santa hats.  She printed these with a cheesy holiday message for us to mail to our friends and family.  I remember the strength she would muster after intensive rounds of chemotherapy, refusing to let it keep her down for long.  I hear the loud conversations she had in Greek with her superstitious mother, trying to convince her mom she would be OK.  I remember how everyone around her wanted to be her best friend.  I remember our trips to the East Bay so she could visit holistic treatment centers, trying acupuncture and many blends of Chinese herbs to see if they might be successful where modern medicine couldn’t be.  I remember the courage she had to embark on a lengthy international trip alone in the last months before she died, unwilling to leave the world without having seen some of it.  I wanted to smack her when she congratulated me for making it to age 23.  Now and then I read the few letters I have to remember her by, and I’m glad our paths crossed for a while, even though it ended way too soon.  So, today is a day for remembering, because she really deserves to be remembered.

Random articles

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In the style of my “great reads” links to other blog posts, I thought I would periodically share random articles that catch my attention.  Round 1 begins now:

An exciting new ailment: Text Neck – Not only is this article a great example of the endless creation of new ailments, with a brilliant name for an ailment, I love that the author thinks the new ailment of which he writes is exciting.   This is my kind of facetious!

I have to say, I am not generally a fan of perfume or cologne – especially anything that smells very flowery.  But, I couldn’t resist sharing a link to information about this fabulous new invention – bacon cologne.

I think someone needs to find this guy’s kryptonite.

This last one, I’m including for my devoted reader, Bassa.  I am dying to hear what you think of this commercial.

More blog spam

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Some more gems…  I just can’t help it…

From hairremovalforall
“I love this site, countless occasions I go to web sites and they’re only stuffed with spam. Though, the website here is actual good quality”

Don’t you mean, countless occasions you go to web sites and stuff them with spam?

From Corliss Ontiveros
“Im impressed, I ought to say. Extremely rarely do I come across a weblog thats both informative and entertaining, and let me let you know, youve hit the nail on the head. Your blog is significant; the issue is some thing that not enough people are talking intelligently about. Im definitely happy that I stumbled across this in my search for one thing relating to this problem.”

I seriously want to know what issue?!?  What problem?!?  And, why would you search for just one thing relating to your problem?!?

From Miss Shively
“Im impressed, I ought to say. Quite rarely do I come across a blog thats each informative and entertaining, and let me let you know, youve hit the nail on the head. Your weblog is vital; the issue is one thing that not sufficient men and women are talking intelligently about. Im definitely happy that I stumbled across this in my search for one thing relating to this problem.”

I think Corliss Ontiveros and Miss Shively might be conspiring together…

From slot games
“Best Suggestion Of your Week: When going by means of airport customs and you happen to be asked “do you have any firearms with you?” don’t reply “what do you will need?””

Oh, man.  This one had so much potential.  I was really hooked as soon as I saw airport customs and firearms – why couldn’t you come up with a better reply?

From body acne treatment
“Aw, this was a very nice post. In concept I would like to put in writing like this moreover – taking time and actual effort to make a very good article… however what can I say… I procrastinate alot and by no means appear to get one thing done.”

Well, you don’t seem to have trouble posting spam on people’s blogs.

From adult acne treatment
“An interesting discussion is value comment. I believe that it’s best to write extra on this matter, it won’t be a taboo topic however usually individuals are not enough to talk on such topics. To the next. Cheers”

I don’t even know what to say to this one..

From Dennis Dutt
“Can I simply say what a relief to find somebody who really is aware of what theyre talking about on the internet. You positively know methods to bring an issue to mild and make it important. More people need to read this and perceive this side of the story. I cant consider youre no more well-liked because you undoubtedly have the gift.”

Hmm… “methods to bring an issue to mild”…  “I cant consider youre no more well-liked”…  Because there’s a double negative there, does that mean I’m well-liked?

Jobs from my youth – The Downtown Club, 1993

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A few weeks ago, I posted about a writing exercise in Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories.  It had to do with creating a timeline for some period of your life, to help jar your memory about details and spawn some story ideas.  One of the things I did when I started my timeline was go through old tax records, which reminded me of various jobs I had when I was much younger.  There was a period between 1993 and 1995 where I reported income in two states for each of those tax years.  I moved a lot back then.  I was trying to find a way out of Wisconsin, and it took me a while to make that work.

In 1993, I reported income from five employers in Wisconsin, and one in Illinois.  All those jobs, and my income only came to $5436.18.  I wasn’t great at holding jobs back then.  Nothing made me happy, and I hadn’t developed the will power it takes to stick with something you don’t like.  In one job, I waited tables at what was a new restaurant/dance club in Sheboygan.  During the day, we opened for lunch, then closed for a couple hours to get ready for dinner.  At 9 0’clock, the dinner tables went away and the place turned into a night club.  I learned some interesting lessons at that job.  The Downtown Club billed itself as a fine dining restaurant, and back then, there weren’t many to be found in the area.  However, that also meant that those of us that worked there didn’t really know what fine dining was – not the food, not the service, certainly not different wines.

I did my best, but I remember a wealthy couple in for lunch one day.  I served their sandwiches or salads, or whatever it was the ordered, and they were drinking coffee.  As I made my rounds to see if anyone wanted refills, the wealthy woman nodded that she did.  I picked up her coffee cup, and topped it off.  She told me condescendingly this was not the way to refill someone’s coffee cup.  I should lift the cup on the saucer, so as not to touch the cup itself.  I clenched my teeth and bit my tongue instead of apologizing and walked away quickly, hoping they would soon leave and I would still get a half-way decent tip.  I felt a certain shame that I didn’t know those fine details about how things are done for wealthy people.  All my coffee-pouring skills were learned from the overworked waitresses at IHOP who poured my coffee only occasionally after they left the “Bottomless pot” on my table.  Even then, I was lucky if they didn’t pour the coffee in my lap as they leaned across the table to reach my mug.  I’ve never completely gotten over the bitterness I felt at people who had money, coming from a mostly lower-middle class background myself.  I still carry a chip on my shoulder, even when I choose to go to fancy restaurants now, and money is no longer a big issue in my life.

Another lesson from my job at the Downtown Club was how to tend bar, Wisconsin-style.  I’ve learned since then that the way people make drinks in Wisconsin doesn’t really match the way they make them anywhere else.  For instance, the Old Fashioned is a very popular Wisconsin drink.  Age doesn’t matter – everyone drinks them.  You can order an Old Fashioned with either whiskey or brandy, and order it either sweet or sour.  This is a departure from the traditional Old Fashioned, which calls for no soda whatsoever.  In Wisconsin, though, sweet means put 7-up in the drink, and top it off with a cherry wrapped in half an orange slice, impaled on a plastic sword.  Sour means put sour soda in the drink.  I have yet to find any other place where “sour” means sour soda.  When I first came to California, I’d order a sour drink – Amaretto Sour, Whiskey sour, whatever – and the bartenders put that horrible sweet and sour mix in the drink – the kind you’d find in a margarita.  The first time I took a sip, I almost sprayed it all over the people standing in front of me.  

50/50 was a popular sour soda used as a drink mixer.  It was a grapefruit & lime soda, and all bars had it.  It’s soda, but not as sweet as 7-up.  I have no idea why this soda seemed to be such a regional drink.  The closest thing I’ve been able to find in California is called Collins Mix, and it’s not available in bars.  I eventually switched to ginger ale when I wanted whiskey with something less sweet in it here.  Bourbon and ginger ale was my standard drink for a few years.  Lately, I drink fruity drinks, which I get a lot of crap for from all my friends, because I am not supposed to like girly, fruity drinks.  Maybe I’d drink Old Fashioned’s again if “sour” meant what it does in Wisconsin.