"can we move to that table by the window? the woman at the table behind us looks like the kind of woman who will be speaking too much." - an actual man, talking to me about an actual woman
what is worse than cold french fries?
cold poop.
a glass of winter rosé
quick! everyone learn how to help yourself!
"to play"
do you ever care for the emotional experiences of inanimate objects?
this afternoon at the restaurant, i was stocking ramikins with sugar packets at the end of a busy lunch shift. yellows packets full of splenda, pinks of sweet-and-low, browns of turbinado, and whites full of refined granulated sugar--all to be tucked in equal proportion in individual ramikins before being placed on clean tables the next morning to accompany the coffees of the breakfast rush. i am standing behind a chest-high counter in the back of the restaurant. i am compiling each neopolitan rainbow by methodical rote, pulling handfuls of like-colored packets from a wicker basket holding an orgy of yellow-pink-brown-whites in dissaray.
three quarters of the way through, the line of precisely filled ramikins extends almost across the whole length of the counter; the bottom of the wicker basket becomes visible in patches beneath the thinning pool of disorganized sugar.
someone in the kitchen calls my name. i turn my body and knock the wicker basket off the counter. i pick up the basket and several sugar packets remain on the kitchen floor--two pinks, a white, and a yellow.
i kneel to rescue the fallen packets. i return to standing with the two pinks, white, and yellow in my left hand. i am unsure who witnessed the incident. assuming it did not go entirely unnoticed, i stand holding the sugar packets, contemplating how best to move forward. my manager is a man who once told me that my tendency of very occasionally scratching my cheek when it itched "said a lot about my character." he is a man who values cleanliness above humanness. everything inside of me knows that his gaze would demand i discard the soiled packets. yet, to deprive these few sugars of their opportunity to fulfill their destiny--to eliminate any hope of them sleeping gently in line with their like-colored brothers and sisters before being awoken one by one to sweeten a virgin cup of coffee on a fresh breakfast table--seems villanous. particularly so because these sugars have been marked as unuseable by no fault of their own.
standing there at the back of the restaurant, holding the now unuseable sugar packets, i am the elementary-schooler who was picked last for kickball. i am the middle-schooler without a date to the dance. i am the high school senior who still rides the bus and the college freshman who has never gotten drunk by his second semester. i am the young adult who was left by his first love via a phone call at one o'clock in the morning on valentine's days. i am still the young adult who was left by his first love via a phone call at one o'clock in the morning on valentine's day, so i organize the disabled sugars in line with their untouched peers and place them in a ramikin to await their journey the following morning.
it is audadious for any person to say with absolute certantity that there is or is not a higher power. but still, the thought of something larger concerned about the happiness of things smaller, and commited to providing every chance for those smaller things to fulfill their desitnies, is comforting. "we don't get to choose what or whom we love. we just don't get to choose."
--
i have this cut in the middle of my right palm. it looks sort of like a small stigmata, which can only mean one thing...
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