didn't your mother teach you any manners?

it's snowing unmercifully outside, and since i'm not going to step foot into the outdoors until i absolutely have to, i thought that i would write a little piece on a particular subject that has been getting my goat lately. (getting my goat? is there a better phrase that i'm grasping at? i don't talk like that...i'm not an 80 year old appalachian woman.) anyhow, i've recently decided to be a little more confessional in this blog since i'm sure the only people who read it, if any, are my friends, so they will indulge me for putting this kind of junk out there in the ether, or wherever it is that electronic ideas end up.

so.

when i was young, i thought that adulthood was this slick and intricately choreographed dance that people would just naturally know how to participate in. once you passed a certain age threshold, you just KNEW WHAT TO DO. and somewhere in all of this intrinsic knowledge lay the ability to go out in public (say, to a restaurant) and be able to conduct yourself with civility and decorum. (sure, i wasn't using these words as a child in prospecting my adulthood, but i really think i had the basic gist of it.) as i mentioned in an earlier post, i've been serving for years now, and i've seen some bizarre, confusing, hilarious, and terribly offensive things. most of the time, i'm not the target of any of this lame behavior, but in this past week i've had two incidences that take the cake. i ask this question: when did it ever become ok for people to forcefully grab the arms of their server? what part of going out to eat at a nice restaurant makes anyone think that they are renting an indentured servant for the night? what happened to the dignified and gracious manners that our parents tried to instill in us? essentially, why are diners so freaking crazy?

i'm asking this because i have been grabbed by the arm on two separate occasions by women this week at work. the first incident was with an overly aggressive woman who wanted me to take a photo of her family. (aside note: your servers aren't party paparazzi...it's super-annoying when people want you take their picture, especially when it's busy. i don't really mind doing it when the group is respectful and gracious, but usually it's a drag.) this woman had already demonstrated herself as being demanding and a little unpredictable, and she seemed incapable of politely asking for anything she wanted. rather, she would just kind of whine like a child who was on the verge of a tantrum. i had more competent manners when i was in grade school! now, i'm not passing total judgement on these kind of people...i'm sure they are great in their own respects, and they love and have people who love them, but it's almost like they go into panic mode when they dine out and their distinct awkwardness forces things to come out of their mouths that maybe they never intended. i digress. so as she hands me her digital camera, she grabs my arm and starts pulling me to the side of the table. i mean, pulling...like a frustrated dog own pulling their resisting pit bull away from the tasty mound of trash that they are nosing through. i was instantly so stunned by her actions that i started leaning away from her and tried to pull my arm free, but her grip was ironclad. i had the flash of an instinct to rip my arm away from her, but thank god i didn't or we could have had a problem. more idiocy followed with some really ignorant and rude remarks she made regarding the fact that i told her i was actually a photographer and could handle this little chore, but i won't get into that. the real issue that frustrates me is that she felt like she could grab me... i don't know if it's motivated out of a false sense of entitlement, or if she thinks we are conspirators, or if she just thought i was a blithering idiot.

and as luck would have it, i waited on a table headed by a gregarious and gravel voiced matron who immediately launched into grilling me about a football score for a game that was happening that night. i don't know what people think that chefs and servers do back in the kitchen of a monumentally busy and classy restaurant, but i'll tell you it isn't watching tv or listening to the radio. i have pretty much zero time to do anything but run my ass off. when i told her i didn't know the score, she just exploded into chiding me about sports and ended her tirade by GRABBING MY ARM. hey grandma! i'm not your snot-nosed little niece who you can manhandle and fling about like a rag doll. i'm actually a 6 foot tall woman who is 2 feet away from a pile of polished steak knives!! all jokes about violence aside, the whole experience was so exaggerated that i started looking at the rest of the table in confusion with a silent plea in my eyes: is this for real? will someone please rescue me? i don't consider myself to be a diminutive person, and i'm trying to figure out why people have been groping me so freely. maybe they just don't know how to behave, and by treating me like i'm beneath them equalizes the stress of eating out. i don't know. i'm many things: teacher, server, artist, lame party paparazzi....but i'm no psychologist.

i'll be back in the saddle tonight, and who knows what kind of crazy interaction i might have with the patrons. as much as i and my fellow servers gripe about these kinds of issues, it's usually entertaining to watch people just make total goofs of themselves. but i'm still hoping for the day when people remember that their server isn't a moronic auto bot, but a cultured and nuanced person with an outside life who doesn't deserve to be grabbed like a misbehaving child.

fictional conversation, actual cocktail.

"...mmmmm....thish ish thuch a delithious daquiri. it isth thso chock full of sshtrawberries that i mutht drink it with my pinky out."


"yeth, yeth...itsth true. and not only thso fruity, but this bowling alley chaliceth isth thso heavy. isth it my turn to bowl?"

20% or more, or shame on you!

i don't understand people. i am saying this from the perspective of someone who has worked in the restaurant business for a long time, and who comes into the weirdest, most awkward contact with tons of people. last night i had two particular instances which just left me shaking my head, and incidentally enough, they both happened within an hour of each other.

the first: i was hoping to use the restroom quickly in the middle of my shift. i went to the restroom hall, and knocked on the open door of a room, just to be safe. when nobody answered, i figured it was safe to go in. ( i mean, the door WAS open an all.) nope. of course not. naturally there was a guy pulling up his pants, in front of an unflushed toilet, ON THE PHONE!! who talks on the phone while they are using a public bathroom?! i mean, trying to pull up their pants! and then this bozo is sitting in my section. the rest of my interaction with him was decidedly bizarre, but i am pretty sure that he had no idea that i had just seen him indisposed. WHAT THE HELL?

and then: i have a table of four people (2 couples) who have brought a magnum of wine for their table. the cork just disintegrates as i open it, which is embarrassing enough. but they were nice enough, if a little pretentious. people sometimes have extreme difficulty controlling the bull that comes out of their mouths when they are in a dining situation. some people think it's funny to make jokes about skipping out on the bill, or leaving a bad tip, or taking shots at the server's intelligence . this table had one man in particular who seemed to be enjoying his food, but still felt like he had to tell me they might be sending something back to the kitchen. those kind of jokes are NOT funny to servers about 99.99999% of the time. after dessert, they shared two glasses of port, which i had described as a tawny (which is what it says on the menu, and hell, i don't know about ports. whenever i think of the word port, i think of the Swedish chef from the Muppets saying "port port port!" with his rad accent.) sooo, they get all worked up because they don't think it's a tawny port, and they try to engage me in some kind of "is it? isn't it?" debate (because they are IN THE BIZ...as one guy put it.) finally, they ask to see the actual bottle, to which i obliged them. usually, i'm able to grin an bear that kind of hoop-jumping, but i did get a little sassy with them. i guess it paid off because i was tipped $60 on a bill of $180. people are rarely that generous, and it seems that when you bend over backwards for them they tip you less than you deserve. but not this time, i guess.

port port port!!

my heart is exploding onto yours

http://emichrysalis.co.uk/sigurros/heima/film/heima_trailer.html

a movie about sigur ros?! why wasn't i born in iceland?! i went to see them with my father last year, and it was one of the few shows i have ever cried at. and now a feature length film...am i going to be the sappy chick sniffling in the back row of the theater?

fairly

i love to be scared and freaked out sometimes. that's partly why i go to the fair. observe:





i don't know...that was a little creepy on my visit to the fair, but at least i had a reserved seat. but then i saw this little gem...




i don't know if all that information is accurate. i'm pretty sure i don't enjoy dodging poop at any given time.

then i ran into this guy...and he tried to sell me a pewter and crystal unicorn statue.





then i found the american apparel photo shoot...




and then i adopted a bunny that wears more eye makeup than i do...

thoughts on the small and mighty

although i am not a native, i grew up in the sticky swamps of southern and central florida. admission of the land of my youth is always met with surprise and a detectable note of revulsion. considering that i live in minneapolis, i guess i can understand why people are so shocked that i moved from florida (orlando to be precise, which is a double whammy.) over the years that i have resided here, i've found that minnesotans LOVE to camp, and they really have good reason to, especially regarding the northern borders. this is one activity that i haven't been able to relate to, since my family was decidedly not wilderness-bound while in florida. who in their right mind would want to throw their sleeping bag down in a sandy, red ant infested, flat, mosquito ridden forest; a landscape with no promise of glittering lakes or charming wildlife or rocky cliffs? i do remember taking some lovely canoe trips as a child, but it seemed kinder to just sleep in the boat rather than try to camp. alligators, anyone?

anyhow, this weekend, i think i passed my final induction as a certified minnesotan of sorts (after all, my parents are from here!) rob and i drove up to lutsen to camp with his sister and her best friend. rob's family is the sort that camp regularly every year, are NOT intimidated by yellowstone (nor do they confuse it for jellystone...) and are perfectly capable of cooking amazing meals on an tiny propane grill in the middle of the dark. this goes against everything i knew growing up. really, my parents and i even went out to eat on christmas eve. it's kind of sad in a way, because i never cultivated that humble sense of hearth and home. i think we ate out so much because we had no other family in florida, and my parents didn't socialize much, so to go out for meals was one way we integrated ourselves with the rest of the world. i think that rob was really excited to bring me into his environment, to show me the tents, lanterns, the rituals.




maybe it is because i have such limited experience in the wilderness, but there is something about being in the fresh air and surrounded only be trees and stars that rekindles a little bit of the fanciful dreamer that i was as a girl. i was the type of child who would stare into forests looking for telltale signs of unicorns and who would interpret unfamiliar markings in the backyard as evidence of a cavalcade or fantastic creatures. i did have two small experiences during my trip that satisfied my more romantic self. one was on the first day, when we were horseback riding in the hills. i saw a buck leaping into the grove of bushes just as i rode past. i know it doesn't sound that wonderful, but for a split second the willowy legs and white tufty tail of the deer looked like something more special. the second instance happened as we were packing up our site. i was scanning the ground for litter, and i saw what i first thought was a broken branch, but later turned out to be an antler. it hadn't been there the day before, so either something dragged it into our site, or a deer just pulled up to shed the horns and vanished. even though you aren't supposed to take anything from the campgrounds, i did bring it home since i didn't remove it from the animal myself. i have no idea what this object will be used for, and i really hope this doesn't signal a weird prediliction in me for tons of animal relic house decorations. yeah, if you come over, and you notice that i have a chandelier made out of horns or something, please pull me aside discreetly and punch me in the face.

“Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O sea! And I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me”

when i was 18 or 19, i remember randomly purchasing a copy of blind spot magazine, the fine art photo resource. i'm not sure if i had set my heart on the pursuit of photography in school yet (i did attend art school, but with the initial desire to be a graphic designer. it seems to me that the world has a comfortable supply of both designers and photographers, but i have to fit in somewhere!) anyhow, the cover of the particular issue that i got resonated with me in a way that i don't believe any image had up to that moment.



this image, or rather, this style of imagery, this mode of working...doesn't really look that contemporary anymore, but at the time of my first viewing, i couldn't get the awkward shape of the boys legs in contrast with the remote beauty of the seascape out of my mind. i think it was the first time that i had ever been able to readily acknowledge the poetry in a work of art, or at least in photography. people freely throw around words like "poetry", "lyricism", "beauty" and "history" when talking about any art in particular, but so often i feel that those words ring hollow, or function as blanket qualifiers for work that really isn't anything remarkable. it's no longer of such crucial importance that art embody the traditional ideas of poetry, beauty, etc. especially since really contemporary artists have taken work to a position where ideas trump objects. but i will admit that i like beautiful things, and if they can communicate something more emotionally stirring, then i think the artist has achieved something rare.



i know that people curate favorite things in their lives, and that those cherished items/idols wax and wane with age and experience. for example, when i was a child i adored bubble gum ice cream, unicorns and new kids on the block. now i can't imagine why i would want to take bite after bite of ice cream studded with chicklets, unicorns are still a vice and nkotb induces nausea. however, i feel that i can say that this image of the girl in the green swimsuit will remain a fundamental part of my love for the photographic image. I love the way that she is mirroring the birth of venus by botticelli, the way the the bottom of her swinsuit is still wet from the ocean, as if she has just walked out of the water, the way that the seascape looks like a painting itself. this is the kind of beauty that you don't grow out of.

3 cups of unicorn puree

so, i was baking massive amounts of delicious treats last night and the power went out. well, everything on my block went down to about 10% power, and my regular old oven was reduced to E-Z Bake status. i was expecting a friend to come over and hang out while i worked, so i lit a ton of candles so she wouldn't think i had left. i think she thought i was trying to set "the mood" for her...because, you know, nothing says romance like a hot, muggy kitchen and tons of cupcakes in the dark. i abandoned the food and we went to get a drink. lucia's is close by, and we had a glass of wine, but i think we offended our server by not ordering food because he told us to "stay hungry" as we were walking out of the door. i work in the service industry and i've never heard that epithet as a standard for dining hospitality. but, you learn something new everyday i guess.

i see what i cannot see

beginning to blog feels like trying to condense yourself into your most interesting and charming form to impress a first date.

despite the discomfort, i am going to give this a fair shake.

i don't have a particular agenda, although i'm especially interested in the arts: photography and music being my particular loves. do i think that having a blog is a vehicle through which to share information? maybe. do i think it's a forum for me to communicate with abstract forms? sure. is it an opportunity to shred binary solos? definitely.

i recently returned from a trip to the east coast: chicago, then on to nyc and philadelphia respectively. rob, cameron and i went to coney island one afternoon to see the wretched paradise for ourselves before it becomes condos, or and industrial park or a starbucks or whatever it is that developers are doing these days. we saw the midway, the concession stands, the skee-ball arcade...basically every element that seems to make this place repulsive and magnetic. it's difficult to imagine the glamour of it's history...i wouldn't be caught dead teetering around in heels and garters in that terrain. i felt like my shoes were constantly being pulled from my feet by wads of gum strewn on the boardwalk like seashells.

we eventually made our way to the beach, right up to the water's edge, and i made some photographs of bathers. rob took a photograph of me in the middle of my reverie. it's unusual for me to have an image of myself, since i'm regularly the maker and not the subject, but this image reminds me of my reverence for my camera, for the multitudes, for reineke dijkstra's "bather" series. i'm grateful to have this reminder of the grittiness and the loveliness of that day.