Holidays for Servers

As a general rule I dislike the holidays. It’s not that I’m a scrooge, it’s just that on the days leading up to the festivities (and sometimes on the day itself) I am working. And it feels a little like I’m 17 again and the whole world is having fun without me.

Somewhere along the way it was decided that servers didn’t need to have Christmas eve off, as if we don’t have families (though in my case it’s nice to avoid an evening of sitting around a big table where my parents ask me yet again why I don’t do something else with my life). Or in the case of my working in Australia that we need to stick around to serve Christmas lunch. I’ve spent many an Easter Monday wondering why we’re open at all and playing a rousing game of presidents and assholes with the three patrons in the bar.

With Halloween upon us I can see it all happening again: middle aged men that are naked under their ghost costumes and really want you to believe them about this (I really should’ve gone into healthcare I’m so indifferent about genitals at this point), women who’ve lost a crucial part of their costumes and either haven’t noticed that they’re Janet Jacksoning a breast to the bar or they just don’t care, and teenagers who always seem drunk after two pints but always more so in Alberta Einstein costume.

I enjoy dressing up as much as the next person, probably more, but when I have to navigate time and again through small tables in a crinoline for an entire evening or explain to scores of drunk people that I’m a member of the SWAT team, as stated on my vest (seriously guys, this is Canada, not Atlantis, assuredly you’ve seen at least one American movie in your lives), I pretty much have no sense of humor about it by the end of the night.

Most jobs have insisted that I dress up for Halloween anywhere from one to four days in a row—and usually by the end of that I’m very tired of polyester and I’m out of ideas. The only year that I really had an easy time of it was when I lived with an exotic dancer who had a plethora of costumes at her disposal (some of which were actually okay to wear in public) and got to show up at work dressed as someone whose job I actually wanted (had it not been for the night that I’d walked home in the cop outfit, thinking it was fully warm enough to do so, and waking up with frostbite on my stomach the whole weekend would’ve gone off without a hitch).

But mostly I just dislike this holiday because it’s that much harder to track down someone who walked out on their tab while wearing a giant banana costume. And it’s not like they’re going to come in again wearing the same thing. 

Bratislava, Slovakia 2015

Waitressing Nightmares

I suspect with most jobs that when you’ve have a bad day you get to go home afterwards and, unless you’re a sadist, try your best to forget about it for the evening. Waitressing is not like this, you go home, suck down a glass of wine and then think about the entirety of your evening while you sleep.

I started having waitressing nightmares when I was eighteen with my first serving job. I had assumed they were something that I alone did, my subconscious being the equivalent of an over-active, self-flagellating priest. Until one of the other girls explained to me that she’d had a dream the night in which she couldn’t seem to stop answering the phone with, “Good evening, Mountain Peach,” instead of pizza.

Mine run more towards nightmarish, with me running around naked (yet still wearing shoes, as if my seriousness over having decent shoes for the job has bled into my dreams) in a room full of people whose demands I cannot seem to keep up with. We are always out of something that’s very necessary, say French fries or every sort of beer. And everyone is very, very pissed at me.

A few years ago I served a woman who told me that she’d quit being a server about ten years beforehand. “Do you still have the dreams about it,” I asked, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.

“Oh no,” she said, “You’re going to have those forever,” she said this too brightly, the way someone does when you ask them if your cancer is curable and they report sunnily that no, it’s terminal. “In my dreams we’re always out of condiments. And port for some reason.”

“Who drinks port anymore?”

“Right?!”

“Are you also naked in these dreams?” I wanted to know.

At this she’d wrinkled her eyebrows, “Why would you be naked at work?” as if the dreams always made sense, and I shrank away from her after that.

Sometimes I wake up upset that the dream has ended before I could fix things (as if there is a way to stop an angry, slightly-intoxicated-but-not-intoxicated-enough mob from lynching me in the dream world), and at other times it takes me a while to register that this wasn’t what happened last night (even if, the more I think about it, it looks like a pretty good facsimile). It’s a bit like going into work twice in a day and getting paid only once.

I picture myself in my eighties, leaping out of bed, thinking that I forgot a beer thirty years ago and that’s why the guy at table 4 seemed so unimpressed with me. After that I imagine I’ll run to wipe down the table, and realize that I’m still in my pajamas, and that I haven’t had to split a five down to the quarter in over a decade. It’s a weird take on the future, but I suppose, all things considered, it’s not really that bad.

Edmonton, Alberta 2016. 

Missing Out

The trouble with waitressing is that you don’t keep the same schedule as nearly everyone else on the planet (leading to the fine truth that nearly all of your friends are servers and the other few just put up with you for some unknown reason). If there’s a concert that you forgot to book off or a party that you wanted to go to, that’s just too bad because your day starts at six in the pm.

I’ve noticed that it’s my server friends that throw a party on a Monday afternoon at 3:30, while the rest of the world is at work we’re unconcerned with the fact that it’s five o’clock nowhere. And though I try to quash the feeling there’s just something a little off about swirling a Paralyzer in full on daylight.

I used to think, back when I was in college, that I had a decent social life; but I was wrong. I was at the bar all the time, but I was working. And while the two seemed very similar to me they weren’t the same. While everyone else was enjoying mulled wine and ugly sweater parties I was saying things like, “Nah, I don’t think we need to cut him off quite yet. He hasn’t thrown up inside the bar or exposed his genitals.” Though later I would find out from the parking lot cameras that the customer in question had been nice enough to urinate on my car.

In all honesty it didn’t used to bother me that much, but now that I’m older I no longer want to miss Dandy Warhols shows on a Tuesday night or have to not attend friend’s birthday parties because I’m working the hours when the rest of the world is relaxing. It’s like I’m on a Swiss time clock and everyone else is wondering why I’m sipping Jagger at seven in the morning (because I’m nearly thirty and haven’t been to bed yet). 

When you live with someone that keeps regular hours you notice this more and more. They get up at ten on Saturday and want to go for breakfast and it’s still four am for you and you’ve somehow, in the throes of deep exhaustion, gone to bed with one boot on.

It has happened that I’ve headed home from the bar and ended up pulled over in a check stop explaining why I’m still out at four in the morning smelling like booze when I actually haven’t been drinking any. “Well you see officer, I spilt a tray of drinks on myself.”

“And you actually expect me to believe that?”

“To be honest sir I’m not so sure I even believe it myself.”

Woodland news anyone? Edmonton, 2016

English Literature 101

I am an elitist in spite of the fact that I’ve never been able to locate the salad fork. For some reason I think that reality television is somehow beneath me and on more than one occasion I’ve stopped calling men once I find out that they text with terrible grammar. Yet there is an exception to this rule: during the summer I like to read really terrible fiction.

It’s like I never got out of the habit of adhering to school reading lists and assuming that books were going to somehow enrich my mind, when really all I want to do is kick back with the sort of book that you expect to come with a half a pound of sand between its pages.

Beneath my copy of 100 Years of Solitude (which I’ve not yet managed to slog through) there is an entire chick lit series, and beneath that other miscellaneous books from other so-called must read lists. It is as if I think that sandwiching them between more worthy reads cancels them out. 

During the rest of the year my guilty pleasure reads are contemporary fiction, but once June rolls around I read books that declare the characters to be, “tall, dark and fangsome.” It’s a particular point of shame for me and one for which my mother judges me, saying when I send her a copy of whatever I’m reading, “I liked it, but did there have to be so much sex?” and I have to admit that after three months of filling my brain with this sort of things I hadn’t really noticed.

I have a few girlfriends that I trade these selections with, some of which have gone out of print for reasons that it’s probably easy to see—no one else believes that the blood of synthetic werewolves kills vampires—though we few are willing to entertain the possibilities.

I’ve often thought that I should be trying harder at the second language I’ve been working on learning so then I’d have an excuse for reading the things I do. Why do I have a copy of The High-Heeled Kitchen Caper? “Because it’s in German and I’m trying to learn a language here with whatever tools I can find,” I will explain. It’s not a hundred percent believable, but to me it’s better than just admitting that I’ve been reading the series since I was sixteen.

Why I care sort of baffles me. But here I am purchasing the hard covers of my favorite novels so I can put a different dust jacket over them and pretending that anybody might actually care that I’m reading the American Idol equivalent of literature. 

Under the Bridge. Bratislava, 2015 

The Definition of Fun

When I was a kid I always thought I’d get to a certain place where I didn’t have to do things that I didn’t want to anymore. Yet the older I get the more I realize that adulthood basically consists of vacuuming, sniffing leftovers to see if they’re still good so you don’t have to make dinner, and wondering when that last credit card bill became so violently overdue.  

I find it common too that I get guilted into supporting someone’s cause, say running for a rare cancer or degenerative spine disease. And because it’s insensitive to say, “Well, I didn’t give you the cancer in the first place,” I end up signing up.

In the lulls between final notices this past summer I ended up signing up for Mud Hero with a friend. Though, I ended up running/treading slowly through bog water trying to hang onto my shoes with a bunch of people who were strangers at the beginning and dear friends by days’ end—mostly because I’d thought it smart to wear shorts and had to scoop the mud out at odd intervals after going down the mud slides (why they couldn’t remove the tree roots from said slides I’ll never know).

By the end of it, when we were going through the car wash-like showers that had been set up outdoors, one of the other runners in our group was showing off her recently reconstructed breast. It struck me that this togetherness might be why people so enjoy being part of sports teams. I also knew that if I wasn’t careful all the comradery I was feeling might be enough to push me over the edge and sign up the next year.

The thing is I can’t decide if I even know what fun is anymore. Being late on my taxes is kind of thrilling at this point and book club is a pretty big highlight of the month. I enjoy things that I never thought I would: basketball, NPR, and concerts with musicians so old that the lead singer might not make it to the end of the night. I didn’t expect to spend my Saturdays picking mud from behind the hollows of my ankles, but I’ve got to say, maybe it’s not really that bad. 

Bratislava, Slovakia 2015 Petrzalka neighbourhood

You Have Them Then

My eggs are getting dusty, or so it must seem to everyone else. Never before has there been such a fire under my father’s ass to convince me that our children are our legacy—which is ironic really given that a lot of the time I’m pretty sure he thinks that I’m a real piece of work. I have insisted that if he wants grandkids so bad, he can have them himself.

In the days since his last visit I have found out how to tie my own tubes, thanks to Youtube, and have things all set up in the garage with some jumper cables, a pair of pliers and a bit of chicken wire—all things that I’ve found in the trunk of my car. My folks don’t think that I’ll do it, but I’ve been standing of this window ledge for a long time swearing that I’m going to jump. It would be cowardly to go back inside now.

I’ve always assumed that people want you to have children so that their lives can be as miserable as theirs. They’ll tell you it’s a great thing until you decide to take the same plunge and then, a few months into the pregnancy, they come out and admit that actually it’s pretty awful and they couldn’t stand to see you too happy. “But now we can have playdates,” they’ll say cheerfully. Which is why I suppose strollers are so large: to cart around all the booze you need to make it through the day. I go over to girlfriend’s places for coffee and the ones who have kids usually serve me cherry whiskey paralyzers instead. At eleven in the morning.

A close friend of mine, who has three adult children herself, recently told me that she’s impressed that I’ve decided not to have children (I took it to mean because it would’ve been like some sort of accomplishment in the life of someone who floats from one job to another, owns nothing but shoes and is more or less an adult child). “You know,” she said, “Everybody has children so that they can leave a mark on the world, so that they can be a legacy. But lots of the time your kids don’t turn out the way you want. Sometimes you don’t even like them.”

There’s no real way to validate your life to others, and except for in front of my parents I’ve all but stopped trying (meaning that I hide my bank statements when they’re around). No one else is going to understand the decisions you make, especially the big ones. And you shouldn’t have to explain that to anyone except maybe your partner.

So I have a quiet, child-less, selfish life, something that I’ve wanted with another person for a long time. Maybe it’s not for everyone, and maybe I’ll be lonely in my old age. But I wouldn’t give the right now up for anything, and I think that’s kind of the point.

Paris 2015

Social Panic

Somehow I’m still convinced that in a first impression situation, if I make enough inappropriate jokes the other person will like me. It is a real shame that I never seem to be able to read my audience then and have a flourish for leaving people’s mouths wide open as I begin the mad search for where I left my coat, knowing that this was once again not the audience for jokes about rubber sheets.

I’m only now finally convinced that alcohol isn’t for people like me. In the event of a nervous situation I can be found gulping champagne instead of oxygen. Introduce me to your parents for the first time and you’ll find that I’ve suddenly reverted to drinking wine through a Twizzler, much the way I consumed Boone's back in High School. It’s all very nuanced and classy, or I imagine it is until I spill down the front of my top. 

I’d gone to a friend’s party recently, and while I did have a good time it was also kind of a daunting set up. I’d found myself in the middle of conversations and nodding at impossibly blonde strangers and wondering what social etiquette was for noticing that someone’s hair extension was hanging by a thread. Was I meant to point it out to them? Or was it too early in our relationship and, like the shirt that’s buttoned wrong on a near stranger, was I just meant to pretend I hadn’t noticed? By the end of the night there was so much hair on the floor that I felt like I was standing in a nest.

I have a hard time having fun at these types of things, mainly because I’m chewing my tongue by the end of the evening wondering how badly I’ve trounced all over the social etiquette. I am the bridesmaid pulling her slip off in the middle of the vows and tossing it behind the floral arch, realizing only later that that maybe wasn’t the way to go about cooling myself off.  

It goes without saying now that I have more than a few acquaintances who avoid me at parties, such as the friend’s husband who lives in a country where it’s customary to greet each other with a kiss on the cheek. I’ve now gotten him in the ear four times, but really who’s counting? I’d catch his eye at a social gathering and then suddenly he’d be walking, well running really, in other direction. If anything I’m grateful to him for this, because it means I don’t have to spend that odd moment hovering near him and wondering if I shouldn’t try again.

I’ve noticed lately too that when I’m embarrassing myself I have a habit of making odd little noises at the same time. It’s like a way of letting go of the stress for me at this point and can’t really be helped. Invite me to a social event and I’ll be the one gasping for air in the corner, the other guests giving me a wide ring of personal space despite the small venue. Some sort of exotic animal that can only really do well on the moon.

Under the Bridge. Bratislava, Slovakia 2015

You Call This a Holiday?

I recently went camping in the sort of weather that assures you that sleeping outside under a bit of nylon is never a good idea. The four of us had driven up to Waterton (a town that I was later told was known for being windy. Next time I figure I will advocate for setting up on a nuclear test site) and persisted even though it was miserable, eventually setting up in the front of friend’s tent with our chairs and giving up on the fire because it was too wet.

That first night the wind was crazed. I woke up several times to see the tent being battered around and I continually thought that it was going to blow over or tear (in the morning we came into town and found that several trees had gone over, it was that wild). At one point I was certain I heard a pole snap and I waited for the whole thing to come down upon us.

Meanwhile my boyfriend slept heavily, his elbow jutting into the small of my back as we slept nearly on top of each other. The air-mattress we were on wasn’t fully inflated so we continually rolled together until we gave up and went with it. It was less than romantic.

Though I’m told some people find sleeping in the bush to be wildly idyllic. My father once took it upon himself to tell me which national park I was conceived in and this knowledge has never left me. I have since decided that if I ever have inquisitive children I will assure them that their conception occurred on the moon.

The next morning in Waterton, we discovered that it was our friends’ tent that had snapped in half and flipped over. They spent the remainder of the weekend sleeping in the truck.   Though on our final morning we woke to find a beautiful sunny day for the long drive home.

Now I sort think of camping as a string of days that after which I’m really going to enjoy a shower and will never again take my immediate access to a toilet so for granted. It’s a weird thing to call a vacation, I see that now. It’s like a vacation from anything you might like to do.

I spoke to a girlfriend before I left and realized that I’d never heard her talk about camping. “I don’t camp,” she said decisively, as if it would never be up for discussion. She then recounted a story in which she and a bunch of her co-workers had drunk a bunch of gin and slept outside, though there had been no initial plan to do so. “I recall some sort of outdoor structure and falling asleep under it, so… camping.”

“I don’t know if that’s camping so much as falling asleep under a bridge.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, I think there has to be planning and intent,” I explained.

“I intended to get drunk and didn’t care where I fell asleep,” she told me. And I couldn’t just then tease out the difference in these things or if there really was one.

My partner keeps going on about how next time we should buy some sort of rig and sleep in the bush in style. I however, have decided that next time I’ll just build a fort in the living room and tack some glow in the dark stars to the ceiling. It was good enough for me as a kid, so why not now?  

Tube sock coffee anyone? We forgot filters. 

The Restructuring

With every new relationship I find there is a period where the both of you sort of have to realize where you fit and the things that need to change for it to work, and for me the biggest part of that is food.

If left to my own devices I will eat all of my meals standing over the kitchen sink, one hip dug into the counter as I ponder why the rest of the world doesn’t also think that lentils are a fine stand-in for all of the food groups. But when living with someone who actually eats meals and is not content to eat a handful of pickles and call that lunch I have to rethink my entire approach to eating.

I admit that I like cooking, I just won’t do it if it’s only for me. Last summer I spent a couple of months in Central Europe and my diet basically consisted of vegetable soup, salad and gummy bears. I assume this is how models do it: they live alone so that there is no one around to tell them that their spine looks more like a weapon than the integral column of bones that is holding the rest of them up. I felt fantastic, but I looked like I was about to start haunting the apartment floor that I was living on.

Now that I live with someone I’m back to normal meals, or as normal as someone can be after spending ten days in France: an entire country of people who start off with a cheese course at eight and eat dinner at ten pm. So we’ve met in the middle and tend to eat at around seven.

After we sorted the issue of meals, the other issues seemed insignificant, such as: what a top sheet was meant for, that unless it’s a cactus I will inevitably kill whatever type of fauna you bring into the house, that I am not one properly-marinated-steak away from eating beef again, and that girls do not actually eat toilet paper but it does somehow disappear at a rapid rate when we live in your house

So we’ve been navigating: trying to figure out how best to share a meal even though the things we’re consuming are sometimes vastly different. I can no longer count the individual vertebrae of my spine and he understands that wrapping food in bacon renders them inedible to me. It’s going well I think, even though there is still the occasion bump in the road. And though I know it seems insane part of me is still sure I may just kill him if he untucks the top sheet one more time.

Paris, France 2015

Learning German

I’ve recently been trying to learn German and have found that learning a language is not really something that allows for shyness. It’s one of those things that you have to bumble through at first, butchering the grammar and coming to learn that you accidentally/on purpose called someone boring—because I cannot both translate and have an inner monologue I guess.

Germans like to smash words together, so you get combinations like Freundschaftsbezeigungen, a word meaning a demonstration of friendship. When I look at these words on the page I can’t help but feel overwhelmed or überwältigt. Words also have their own gender. The table is masculine while the girl is neutral but the duck is somehow feminine, all of this reminding me why I always thought French was too difficult to learn.

I’d first signed up for a class on Saturday mornings, and because no one wanted to actually show up at 9:30 on a Saturday myself and two others had the teacher all to ourselves. What followed was eight weeks of conjugating verbs and learning sentences that I doubted I’d actually be able to slip into casual conversation: “Those aren’t my ducks,” or “the rabbit ate my shoes.” It was not the sort of talk that I imagined actually using unless I turned out to be the sort of person who slept on the banks of the Rhine. After class I would imagine getting on the wrong transcontinental flight and—because you are unable to explain what happened unless questions like, “Is this your knife?” are somehow going to help you out—ending up in a foreign psyche ward.

Now that the class is finished I’ve taken to using an online course of sorts that I’ve been pretty regular to use every day. I’ve discovered that if you speak louder into it, it doesn’t always notice that you’ve botched your pronunciation, and I often find myself yelling at my computer (which is not such a new development, now it’s just in another language) with all of the windows in the house opened, which often makes me wonder what the neighbours think.

My fellow classmates are resilient though and we still try to meet up and go over the material. The other girl in the class is very pregnant and each time we meet it’s like the timeframe we’ve been given is drawing to a close. She is eight and a half months along now and we sit in a living room where there will soon be an inflated pool where she intends to have the child. I find myself tucking my feet under me during study group, as if the birth could take place at a moment’s notice and I will be in the way.

I am so excited for her, that she has gestated a baby. Sie ist sehr Schwanger, or very pregnant. Yet I cannot even express in German, the language of her partner, how excited I am for the upcoming birth of their child.

Outside the Terror Museum. Budapest 2015

It’s My Party and I’ll Sleep Through it if I Want to

I am officially 28 years old, another birthday having aggressively gone by. And I feel like I am really noticing Canada’s aging population at the moment. The waitress that I told it was my birthday (while we were in the process of paying so it was too late for her to grab me a shot) said she was looking forward to going for high tea on her birthday. If that’s not an indication that the Canada Pension Plan is going to be long gone by the time I’m 65 I don’t know what is.

The thing is I really didn’t want to do anything for this birthday, nothing in the traditional bar scene anyway. I suspect I’ve seen one too many people vomit on their birthday—there is after all, nothing like reaching into a glass to fish out a napkin and realizing that someone has vomited into it first and used said napkin to cover the evidence. Evidence that is now all over your hand.  

I have been in attendance for a thousand parties, been asked to call a hundred cabs (why is it that in the throes of drunkenness nobody seems to have a cellphone?), and had to instruct many an individual that I wasn’t joking, I really can’t serve them anymore booze now that they’ve less than deftly vomited into their own handbag.

Don’t get me wrong, I like pubs and meeting friends for a drink or two. But if it is the focus of the night I will inevitably get antsy and begin asking when we can head home to build a fort and watch terrible nineties movies. Everyone on your Instagram sees that we left the house, so why can’t we go to my place and watch Buffy? Next year I’m dispensing with the charade and throwing a pyjama party.

On my own birthday I prefer to hide under the covers, maybe watch a movie or hit up a museum and let the day pass like a bout of traveller’s revenge. My partner doesn’t understand this notion, and feels that I’m still at an age that I should want to make a big deal out of my birthday. I think this difference in our outlooks puts undeserved pressure on him because I can’t seem to haul my ass to a bar and celebrate properly with a few muff dives (I remember the days when I used to feed these to people: newsflash they are not all the same. If you got a Rocky Mountain Bear-Fucker shot in yours and there was strawberry syrup drizzled over it then the server did not care for you. I know because this is what I often did). Now I can only assume that karma dictates that I will find a Cement Mixer shot nestled in the middle of all of that whip cream and strawberry syrup.

When I was in college and I started working in the bar I thought it was a cool job, that I got to be social every weekend and that I was lucky. Now I realize that the experience, though fun for quite a few years, has basically turned me into a terrible curmudgeon. I like kitchen parties and book club meet-ups and long afternoons spent around a pool with a decent amount of margarita mix—but drag me into a dark bar and feed me shots for hours on end and I will assume that I have wronged you. Or that it’s your birthday and I somehow forgot.

Along the Seine. Paris, France 2015

The Bearded Lady

I do a decent amount to keep myself from looking like I’ve slept under a bridge, though being of Slavic descent brings it’s own set of difficulties. Along with my grandmother’s love for wild roses I have also inherited her moustache. Her moustache was a thing that even in the twilight years of her dementia she never forgot to shave. She had no idea who I was and her own identity was becoming foggy, yet even in her anonymity she was determined not to be the defined as the woman who died with a full beard. 

For years I was ashamed of my inheritance and kept very seriously on top of it. But I’ve gotten older and laxer, and while it still embarrasses me I often find myself out and about, the fine hairs on my upper lip showing plainly in my reflection in a shop window, I am much less likely to run home and do anything about it.

I can only assume that that the hair will soon fill in with the sort of ferocity that, if I’m not careful, will have me known behind my back as the girl with the moustache (which sounds like a terrible Stieg Larsson spin off)—if this has not happened already. It’s karma I think, for those afternoons that I took such glee in my mother’s own attempts to wax off her stubborn upper lip fuzz, as I sat in one corner of the salon nearly clapping. It was a “better you than me” mentality and one that has since come to bite me in the ass.

Some months ago a friend and esthetician leaned across the table that we’d eaten dinner together on just moments before, and stared at the general fuzz on my face. After a long moment of silence, she said suddenly, “I never noticed that you have a moustache.”

She had gone then to fetch something called a Q-stick, an implement of torture that is basically an oversized spring that you run across your face. It then rips the hairs out one by one, as if a tiny hand is slapping you repeatedly. Even now she sends me ads for deals on the things, as if I’d want not one but two of them.

We’d sat on her living room couch as she pulled hairs out of my face, barely containing a look of glee as I began to tear up. “This is my favorite thing about being an aesthetician,” she exclaimed, “I’m doing you a service, but you’re in so much pain right now that I can feel how much you want to hit me.” I had pondered then on how odd the relationships of women are sometimes.

Now when I visit my mother I count the things that we have in common: the olive skin tone, the fact that we cry all the time at nothing, and of course our respective moustaches. We both claim things like, “It doesn’t really come in the way it used to,” but on the beaches in the glinting sunlight it’s easy to see that this is untrue. In the harsh light of day, I have a 5 o’clock shadow and it’s only noon.

Now I just try and keep up with it, and I find it’s one of those things that the people around you will let you know about, like having your fly down in public. As if to hammer his point home, my partner leans in for a kiss and says, “moustache, moustache, moustache,” so quickly that the words all run together. And I begin to think that this may be the way that people around me tell me that they love me.

Outside a bakery. Love, glory and botox. Paris, France 2015

Why is Siri Always Yelling at Me?

I’m afraid of technology. I long for the days of typewriters, for the days when you didn’t have to update your computer every ten minutes. When something is wrong with my laptop I don’t know where to start. Some days I pretend I’m Jewish and bury it in a houseplant like an un-kosher fork.  

I think often about moving to the bush, of washing my clothes exclusively in my salad spinner and giving on technology entirely.  Every time I go into the laundry room the washer beeps at me for seemingly no reason and I find myself running from the room. I have been an adult for nearly a decade and I am still afraid of appliances.

I am at that age where I can still remember getting my first cellphone (part of me now thinks that it’s safer to hand one’s children fireworks rather than smart phones). When I was first introduced to the technology and had no use for this blue flip-phone that my mother insisted would be excellent for me to have in case of an emergency. The design, at the time, had struck me as overly sleek. I think I would’ve taken more kindly to the over-sized brick of a phone that my mother used for years, a boxy thing that if thrown could double as a weapon.

Perhaps I don’t want you to get a hold of me, and certainly not in a timely manner. If you want to talk to me why not just stop by? Whatever happened to interacting in person? Now when I see friends it’s like eons of time have passed before they’ve managed to fit me in for a Thursday evening drink, only to order a glass of juice because they’re suddenly five months pregnant. And I’m just learning now that it’s their second child.

I do still have a cellphone, but there are days when I think to flush the damn thing. Yet I know that I can’t because once I have figured out the basics of a phone I will use it until I find myself balancing it atop skipping ropes to charge it and yelling into the speakerphone during calls (mostly to my father, who is rather deaf to be fair). I will pretend that it’s not so bad that it clicks loudly into car mode several times a night and begins speaking to me. I will ignore the overall stickiness of it after I spill an entire Chi Chi on it and shrug it off when it drops every second call. To acclimatize to something new scares me.

This is probably why my printer is nearly the same age I am. It is a tank, has lived through being packed off into storage several times and has been dropped multiple times (because that is how I deal with technical problems). There is a printer with WiFi in my house, but after the 17th set of updates I gave up on it.

I fantasize most days about Office-Spacing the new printer with a bat out in the yard but I feel that this will officially establish me as a crazy person to the neighbours. I imagine them leaning out their windows as I stand in the grass with computer parts strewn about the yard, loudly lamenting the end of the days of the abacus.  

The Timewheel. Budapest, Hungary 2015  

Photo Evidence

I miss the days before Facebook and before everyone had a cellphone camera. I feel now as if every aspect of my life has the possibility of being documented. Gone are the days of being able to do stupid things and get away with them. I feel it should be a right to throw up into my own handbag and answer to no one but the three friends that have accompanied me on this particular evening.

I worry that one day there will be a mutiny of my former roommates and all of the unsavory photos of me brewing kitchen wine in my underwear (it stains and I prefer to be half in the bag when I do such things anyway) will be seen by the entirety of my friends and family.

At a girlfriend’s birthday a little while ago many drinks were had, photos were taken (I can be seen in a few ducking behind friends and making unimpressed faces) which were then dispatched to my parents, via the birthday girl. I had thought we were friends, but now I am suspicious.

My mother had then called me to ask how I was doing; though I suspect she already knew. I was already laying on the bathroom floor, I really didn’t feel like discussing the nature of cause and effect with my mother. As I tried to get off the phone before I really did something to let onto the state I was in, she scrolled through photos in Hawaii, asking me if I’d managed to keep down breakfast (I hadn’t even tried).

What I mean to say is how can anyone get away with anything anymore, and why are we so okay with so much of our lives being publicized? I’m glad that I managed to get through the bulk of my teen years before social media became such a thing as it is today (mum and dad never needed to find out about my habits of spray painting farm animals or shooting fireworks at my friends, though I imagine that somewhere out there, there is a polaroid waiting to surface). For those people who post about their progress of doing laundry on a Friday night, their current mental state and their cheating exes I have to wonder why they have no stake in their own privacy.

It’s too easy to find strangers too. I’m still trying to shake off guys that I dated a long time ago. One found me on an app I’d been using to call long distance while I was in Sweden. I had been in the middle of asking the bartender about her tattoo—a Kurt-Russel-Escape-From-New-York inspired snake that curled around her midsection—when his name flashed up. As unwelcome as a rash.

I feel almost like my life has become a deposition, that I now have to admit to my parents about everything, lest they come across that photo of me riding an ostrich or sneaking into cordoned off areas in France. It is now almost impossible to ask permission for all of the things you are about to do, which is why I spend so much time begging forgiveness.

I suspect that so one from our generation will ever be able to become a politician. One photo of you cupping the two-dimensional breast on a Hilary Clinton cut-out is all it takes for you to be out on your ass as a speech-writer. So what of a body-painted shot at a full moon party? Though I suppose if Trump gets in all bets are off on that.  

I wonder about the possibility about any sort of private life and whether that’s going to be possible. It makes me kind of upset that I can’t just go out with friends and have a good time, that I need to worry about other people seeing what I’m up to, and for that I curb my enthusiasm, ducking behind a shoulder in the photo, worrying about what my mother might think.

Under the bridge. Bratislava, Slovakia 2015

I Feel Bad About my Neck

My elbows are starting to look odd. I thought I would notice other things first, say an age spot here and there, or that the sarcastic line along one eyebrow was finally deep enough to insert a coin. But it is the elbows that I’ve begun to notice, with their extra little flap, as if with age a purse is no longer enough and now I require storage intermittently along my body. 

A girlfriend told me some years ago that aging had snuck up on her, something that I doubted very much as I had been there during the uncomfortable afternoon that her children had to explain to her what the acronym “MILF” meant because a young friend had used it in reference to her. “It’s true,” she’d said, “I was waving the other day and after I stopped the skin on my arm just kept going.” And it was then that I flashed back to a church dinner that she’d been encouraged to speak at and, not wanting to be cliché and write about her husband, she’d gone with an ode to finding her first nipple hair. I doubt that even in another fifty years I will be that cool.

For my last birthday, my 27th, my mother had called to wish me an almost thirtieth. At the time I’d laughed it off, but after I hung up I’d been sad for days. And then I sent her a copy of Norah Ephron’s I Feel Bad About my Neck for her birthday. I don’t know if I’d call this a victory, but neither of us spoke about it for a long time afterwards.

I find that with a lot of Ukrainian women our necks are the first thing to go, the skin at our throats suddenly swaddling us in old age like an ever present scarf. I’ll be standing in front of the mirror in the evenings noting a line that bisects my neck that wasn’t there a couple of years ago and wonder if within the decade I’ll be using it to store an extra set of car keys. I’d defer to my mother and my genetics on this one for a peek into the future, but a thin line marks my mother’s neck where her thyroid was removed and you notice nothing else. She is almost gleeful about the scar, shrugging it off and saying that it’s a great conversation starter. “I like to tell people I got into a knife fight.”

I’d like to be comfortable with myself, regardless of my age, and I think often of one friend’s mother who I’d very much like to be at fifty. There had been no pub near her little town and she’d thought to open her own watering hole. “Aren’t you a bit too old for something like that,” one of her girlfriends had asked when she’d brought up the idea.

“Why? At this point I could attach rags to my breasts and clean tables as I go.” She’d looked over at me then, sizing me up. “You’ve got a long way to go before you can multi-task like that,” she said. It was, and still is, the oddest and greatest compliment I’ve ever received.  

Hockey Fever

At my last bar job on game nights it was inevitable to watch the customer’s joy lessen as the night went on. At the end of it everyone would leave in a rush (these were usually the moments that the debit machine chose to go down) when the team lost, leaving no doubt to go home and finish their drinking alone with a bottle of something stronger and a little bit sad, say a plastic bottle of Russian Prince vodka.

I paid little attention to the games, to the point that when customers came in and asked me the score I was often caught off guard, having not noticed that there was in fact a game on. Though when I worked behind the bar I knew enough to dip out of the way of the TV, joking that day I would make someone the perfect wife.

Now as I attend games with my partner, a season ticket holder with more jerseys than I have shoes, I find myself having to try to feign interest about the game. Though it is truly embarrassing to ask if those are the Denver Broncos on the ice, only to have my partner tell me, his face in his hands that that’s an NFL team. I’ve never really felt dumb about anything before, and here I am realizing that reading Chuck Klosterman is not an answer to all things sports-related.

A couple of weeks ago I’d run into someone I knew from my bar days who was in the middle of being drug into a bathroom stall in the ladies’ room at the stadium by a woman I didn’t know. I’d joked about it weeks later when I’d seen him again, saying I didn’t recognize him when he wasn’t being drug into a bathroom stall and had raised my eyebrows suggestively.

“Oh, she’s a friend,” he’d told me, “We weren’t going in there to do that… actually yes, yes we were.” And it made me think that perhaps the whole stadium was on something, thousands of people drinking the Kool Aide while I loafed silently alongside them. And their energy to keep up cheering for a team that was constantly losing made sense all of a sudden.

Now I see someone on the street in a certain sweater or the ugly orange and blue scarf, and I find myself wondering if they will be my generation’s artefacts, if a couple of hundred years from now Gretzky’s fossilized jockstrap will stand in a museum next St. Stephen’s mummified hand and Andy Warhol’s wig collection.

As I watch the city work itself up into a fervor I feel like it’s high school all over again and I’m never going to fit among my peers. There are suddenly bets and middle-aged men in suits tussling in the streets. I think that I wish I understood, there’s something about that sort of faith in a sport that makes me a bit jealous. It’s like one long tailgate party that I feel I shouldn’t attend. Yet as I learn about cherry picking and hat tricks and who the most watched new player is I find myself trying to understand. I want to learn, even if it’s to come out looking better than the girl beside me wondering loudly when the other team got another goal.

Over-Packing

After years of bumming around the world, moving from apartment to apartment and thanking friends profusely for the use of their garages to store my things it still baffles me that I am completely incompetent at packing a bag. Certainly I’ve made advances over the years (thank god for e-books) but often when I return home I find that I’ve used pretty much nothing that I brought along.

There’s no reason to take along your full make-up kit. When it’s forty-some degrees in Thailand every day all you’re going to accomplish is sweating everything off into your cleavage by noon. The same goes for curling irons, in that sort of humidity you’ll be more concerned about blacking out in the back of a Song Tao with strangers than you will with the state of your hair. It’s usually by the end of the trip that I end up looking like something that belongs in the jungle anyway, cleanliness falls by the wayside and I’ll realize there’s a thin dreadlock snaking down the back of my neck. It’s not a good look, but it doesn’t take any time at all.

Now, when I think back to bags that I’ve hauled, walking across the border into Vietnam in the dawn and pulling out of busses as they jostled buckets that were literally filled with live squawking ducks, I wonder just who I’d been trying to impress in the first place. I think to motorcycle rides I took, trying to hold my bag steady as I whipped through the streets of Hoi Anne with a stranger, wondering about why I’d thought it so important to hang onto that clearly badly photocopied edition of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

While I was in Laos I’d met a guy who’d lost everything. His bag had been loaded up with everyone else’s on the bus but the luggage compartment had opened somewhere on the journey and he’d been left with the clothes on his back. By the time I’d met him he’d been carting along a rice bag that someone had given him and in it was a single change of clothes and his toothbrush. It was, if nothing else, an argument for minimalism. Something that seemed to go right over my head.

Now when I travel the one luxury I’m thinking of doing away with is a single somewhat fancy dress. I’ll take it out at every lengthy stop, smoothing it out and letting it hang somewhere in the room. But now it just kind of makes me sad to have such things with me, as if the dress is the date that no one is going to take anywhere, as I slip past it without even a glance, smoothing my dirty hair back from my bare face, pulling on the same pair of jeans, readying for another night in a place that I don’t yet know.

I Like to Cook

I like to cook. I think it’s a necessity, and a selling point. I love a man who can cook and who I don’t have to worry about getting scurvy—my own brother concerned me on this front for years, and it’s only now that he’s married[1] that I worry a little bit less.

Now that I’m getting older and trying to make healthy choices,[2] I find that it’s kind of complicated to be learning these sorts of things, especially on the nights that I fail horribly.

Not too long ago I’d made some edamame pasta with a cream pesto sauce that I thought sounded pretty good. The sauce was in fact rather tasty, but the pasta itself was much like consuming a bowl of elderly shoelaces.[3]

I was glad at least that I only fed the pasta to one other person and not an entire dinner party, because it seemed to me then that said pasta was the sort of thing that you feed to people that you hate and assuredly would have left them all wondering.[4]

That’s the other thing too—so many of us have all of these unfathomable allergies now that how can you not know how to cook?[5] Sure we’re becoming wiser about feeding people with allergies and sensitivities, but wouldn’t you rather learn how to feed yourself well and that you prepared that food to a standard that you’re certain won’t make you sick?

I like that I can feed my friends and my visiting family and that I know how to turn a meal into a gluten or animal product free variation.[6]  

Sure, I’m no master at what I do. I burn things. I take forever to do the prep-work for a meal. I adlib where I shouldn’t and end up with a cornbread that’s more like masonry than baking. Yet I’m still proud of myself in the kitchen, of the things that I’ve learned to do over the years from the friends that were kind enough to teach me. It’s a skill, and one that, regardless of my sex, I am proud to possess.  

 [1] Not because she’s a woman and can cook for him—I get the sense that he does a bit of that now too—but because that means someone will be there should he collapse inside his basement suite and require medical attention.

[2] Which back in college meant vegan hotdogs and a pack of menthols, the latter doubled as mouthwash in my world.

[3] A girlfriend had recommended it too me, yet when I thought back to her exact words I recalled that she’d liked it because it had laxative-like qualities and at the time she’d been working to look model-thin in her wedding dress, something that she succeeded at no doubt because this pasta did exactly as she had stated and it tasted awful too.

[4] In fact, my boyfriend had suggested we buy a bunch, give it to my parents, tell them it was fabulous, and spend the trip home from their place laughing at the prank we’d pulled—though knowing my father’s allergies and the limited number of things he can actually consume they might have thought it was great.

[5] It’s my celiac girlfriend that I would say is the best cook I know. There’s nothing like having someone rock up to the bar at two in the morning, when you’re closing down and it’s just you and the bartender, to scare the shit out of you and drop off some gluten-free macaroons.

[6]I suspect that this learning curve is the only reason that I ended up dating a vegan for a very short time. We met at the grocery store and it turned out that he really did just want someone to cook for him. He was an ass, but without him I probably would’ve never learned how pillowy and delicious gnocchi can be in soup.

Actual Waitressing Resume

Name: Lets be honest here. You don’t care.

Sex: Not interested in having it with as a means of getting out of weekend shifts.

Age: Under 30

Regularly rated a solid 7 out of 10.

Excellent at dealing with difficult personalities and volatile situations. Is not afraid to clean up blood or to lie to customers about the volatility of a situation. Has an excellent memory for gang tattoos.

Will work for pretty much no money and understands the astronomical tip out rate. Will also be okay with the fact that the owner has no idea of my name.

Is not averse to working with the smell of raw sewage, mould or having a constant cold due to working conditions. Will not think it odd that her nickname is patient zero. Will not discuss conditions of the establishment with customers, as it would make them think twice about the sandwich they are about to consume.

Understands the need to give up all manner of a social life for this position. Will not complain about working every Friday, Saturday and Sunday and understands that, except in the event of giving birth to one’s own child, all days off must be booked far in advance and that sick days are for people with regular jobs.

Is opened to all manner of ridiculous work outfits. Is no stranger to wearing kilts and adhering to ridiculous dress codes (for example being sent home if one’s make-up isn’t heavy enough or their skirt isn’t short enough). Has worked in a Canadian winter in a place that had faulty and sometimes non-existent heating in a nylon mini dress.

Is no stranger to sexual harassment from customers, fellow staff, and managers. Will refrain from becoming upset when a manager suggests things like getting breast implants or losing five pounds. Does not cry in public.

Is accustomed to working for hours on end with no breaks. Understands that imaginary/unicorn breaks will be docked from paycheck.

Is able to keep secrets of a sensitive nature, such as that one of the cooks is drinking kitchen wine or that one of them has a habit of smoking crack before work. Will also turn a blind eye to the manager’s coke problem and that the manager seems to be buying it in the parking lot on shift. Possesses a moral compass but is quite capable of keeping said convictions to oneself.

Swallowing one’s pride and self-respect is negotiable.

References provided on request.

The Panty Raffle

I was thinking back the other day to one of my first nights at the bar. I had just started to think I was getting the hang of things when, about halfway through the evening the bouncer had wandered into the men’s washroom to find a deer leg, hoof-up, protruding from the toilet bowl. I hadn’t really believed him when he’d told me and, because I hadn’t wanted to cause a stir in the men’s, I’d had to take his word for it until closing time. By the time two am rolled around I forgot that we’d acquired a bit of taxidermy and went home without checking it out.

In the morning I’d come to the bar to open up, and found that the leg was very much real. Someone had removed it from the toilet and placed it on a palate out back, rather than tossing it in the dumpster, as if to keep it as some sort of furry memento of the night before. I’d left it there, thinking it would add some novelty to the patio attached to the back of the building (something it very much needed as it looked out onto a gravel parking lot).

Later though the kitchen staff and I received a talking to—while the manager had been in the office taking care of the day’s bank deposits, someone had taken the leg and shoved it into the grill of her car. At the time she’d been having some trouble with her steering and so I suggested she go the old fashioned route and use the leg like a rudder (I’d always had a hard time seeing her as an authority figure, which I think she knew from the one year I came dressed as her for Halloween. Though at first she’d thought I was Snookie). She was less than amused. But when we all went outside to help her remove the leg, it was gone.

At the time I’d thought it was sort of like an omen of things to come, and I wasn’t wrong. Though aside from a few arguments with people over whether they should have to clean up their own puke (bachelor parties are the worst for this), things continued as normal. Until around Christmas time when we’d had a guy come in and claim that he was an auctioneer.

We’d had ads up around the bar saying that we were collecting money for a children’s charity and so it made sense that he wanted to help us out—trouble was that he intended to do it by raffling off the underwear belonging to the female staff members present. He had then lapsed into a tirade about how after that he was going to sleep with all of us—as if a bit of fabric was the only thing getting in his way—and had been thrown out a short while later.

After that it seemed like the weirdness ball had sort of been set in motion. We promptly had an infestation of tiny mice, which were adorably drunk when you swept them out of the puddles of beer on the floor, and the coffee maker became overrun with a pack of flying ants.

Though the most disturbing of it all was the smell that started to come from the washrooms, a rather serious sewage issue that they were always in the process of fixing but never actually did. At one point the city had dug a massive hole in the front lawn to try and rectify the situation and I’d spent the days afterward peering out the front windows, watching drunks goose step around the open excavation as I waited for them to fail the sobriety test of not falling in.

Full moons though were the worst, and I soon found a direct correlation between them and the nights we were likely to have fights. I’d stand agog as a sixty-something woman flashed a table of strangers and wondered how fast I could get her to clear her tab. My eyebrows didn’t even go up anymore when patrons said things like, “Honey, I’ve got grey pubic hair older than you.”

In the summer the same entertainer who’d been in the night of the auctioneer came to play a weekend gig. We’d stood around afterwards as he sipped his beer had tried to jog my memory about that night, “You know, the guy who’d tried to raffle off your underwear.”

“Oh, that guy. I’d totally forgotten about that.”

“How could you just forget something like that?” he’d asked me. And I found it hard to admit even to myself that all of the weirdness had just sort of started to run together.