Waiters, waitresses, idiots and injustice.

This is not a "screw with me" sign.

I have never waited tables. Let me qualify that. I served as a celebrity (their term, not mine) waiter at a Special Olympics fundraiser three or four times. That gave me enough experience to realize how physically demanding it is to do that kind of work. It didn’t expose me to the kind of crap they have to put up with.

Last night I had dinner with my family at one of those Japanese hibachi grill places. Cooking in front of you, chopped up bits of food, knives, fire, you know the drill. The kind of place you never actually see a Japanese person in.

We ended up sharing a table with a family with an infant son. As it turns out, the baby was the only one who treated the waiter and cook in a halfway decent manner. In fact, the baby was really likable, as babies are.

 

I am so deep, yet it appears effortless.

This week, as I do four times a year, I was involved in putting on a forty hour

A class. Not my class.

class on mental health issues. The audience was made up of folks from my field who have a lot of contact with, but not a lot of training in dealing with, people in a mental health related crisis.

These weeks are some of my favorites. I work with friends I enjoy spending time with, on a topic that I see as important.  Together, we do a great job of it, if I do say so myself…and apparently I do.

 

Hey, Cornucopia

Well, there you are again.

Hey, Cornucopia. You’re back. This is your time of year to show up. The thing is, I don’t know anyone who gets you at all.

No one knows where you are the rest of the year. No one knows how you start showing up around Thanksgiving. Yet there you are, spilling a bunch of fruit and vegetables out.

I remember the first time I saw you. You were on a bulletin board in my first grade classroom. Even at that young age I wondered why anyone would make a useless basket such as you – a basket destined to spill its contents. I still have no good answer to that question.

 

It is just a pickle…or is it?

Put it in the bag, or don't. I don't want to talk about it.

Periodically, I grab a sandwich for lunch at a place near where I work. It isn’t too near where I work. I think we’ve established that I work in an odd and unpleasant area of town.

When I order, the routine is pretty typical. I ask for what I’d like, they make it. As they wrap my sandwich, they always ask me the same question – “would you like a complimentary pickle?” The sentence may vary slightly, but the element of “complimentary pickle” always remains the same, no matter the employee. It is so weird.

 

The Seat of Destiny. Why me?

I love going to concerts. I love being in the crowd, I love the volume. I love the creative versions of songs that play out daily in the expected way each time they come up on my i Pod.

Mrs. Omawarisan

Unlike me, Mrs. Omawarisan could do without concerts. There are probably a lot of reasons for this. We’ve talked about it and accept it as one of our differences. Of the reasons she does not like concerts, there is one reason I have witnessed and empathize with her on.

 

Karma, My Cubs Cap, Daytime TV and the Flu. Thoughts of a NyQuil addled mind

I went on vacation and took the day after I got back to town off from work. That was probably a good idea on my part, not because I got my laundry done, but because that’s the day the flu hit me.

Since this happened after I got back from vacation, I am going to go with the idea that my Karma is very good at this point. I was apparently destined to suffer through this bout of the flu, but life was lined up such that I could enjoy my vacation, then get sick after I get home. You can’t ask for more than that, can you?

I try to learn as much as I can from whatever I go through in life. Here is what I learned from this bout with the flu, which was largely spent staring at the television while wrapped in  a blanket on my couch.