Archive | May, 2012

Special Guest: Mavis Staples!

30 May

Just a warning, the following post will likely make very little sense.

So the dream theme continues but this time with a twist:  instead of water sports like in the last fun dream, this time I had a dream in which I was ice skating.  The premise of the dream was that I had to write a paper about something — I’m not sure what the topic was but if dream student Rebekah is anything like real student Rebekah then it probably had something to do with access to food, patenting seeds, maybe a little something about the construction of a pipeline and the resulting uptick in the spread of HIV along the trucking route — anyway, after the paper was written I then had to, with a partner, act out the topic and analysis of said topic on ice skates in front of the whole class which, as it turned out, was quite large.  I am not a good ice skater and, unlike my dream sailing prowess I have spoken of before, I am also not a good dream ice skater.  I spent the majority of my dream fretting over falling down and having my partner, equally as shitty in the skating department, slice my fingers off with his blade.  Rewind.

In the beginning of the dream I found myself sitting at a restaurant with a bunch of other people mere hours before the performance of the paper that I had yet to write.  I don’t know what kind of food we were eating, but I do know that I drank one of those mini old school bottles of Coke.  I know this because, upon asking for, and reviewing, the bill, I discovered that all the drinks were missing.  Trying to be a responsible dream patron, I went to the server and asked him about the pricing of the different sodas.  Were they all $1.50? I wondered.  Apparently not.  The server then launched into a whole diatribe about soda pricing, quoting for me the prices of all the other drinks in the drink fridge and omitting information about the relevant beverages which, in the end, turned out to all cost $1.50.  Sigh.  I threw money on the table and rushed off to class…I mean the skating competition…I mean class.  When I arrived, I busted out my computer, determined to finish the paper before I took to the ice.  Then, all of a sudden, I was at the sea shore!  With my computer!  What if sand gets into the keys??  People were swimming and having fun.  I was stressed out.  I decided to take a nap.  I walked inside and I was in a house that looked vaguely familiar to me.  I went in search of a bed.  I looked and looked.  Then, finally, I found a room with bed potential.  I opened the door.  There in the bed was some old dude who I don’t know but who seemed to upset dream me.  He awoke when I opened the door.  He was wearing ice skates and was trying, ungracefully, to ask me about the state of the paper I was working on.  I turned and fled back down the stairs to the sea shore which, oddly enough, was overlooked by a sink that was full of dishes.  I started doing the dishes and, in the process, found a bag of spicy mangoes.  I snuck some into my pocket.

Then…transformed back to class!  Class was cold, because of the skating rink, and I was sitting on a sofa, trying to work on my paper that, at this point, consisted only of an introductory paragraph.  Dream Rebekah thought that writing the paper in larger font would make it look longer and therefore closer to completion.  Real Rebekah would never do such a thing.  I was getting stressed.  Getting antsy.  Then, the lights dimmed.  Everyone looked around.  And who comes in?  Mavis Staples!  She performed a rousing rendition of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around” much to the pleasure of her brother Malcolm X (who is not her brother in real life, people!), also in attendance.  I woke up in the middle of the performance.  No encore for me but I did get out of performing that unfinished paper on ice.

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My Own Corner of Crazy

22 May

So a few weeks ago, a very nice man, Jon, came and cleaned my apartment.  All of us living here — and believe me, there are a lot of us — are pretty good about cleaning up after ourselves.  We do the dishes, wipe down the counter tops, take out the garbage, clean up spills, wash the tub.  But none of us do the serious cleaning, like cleaning behind the toilet (or, in my case, anywhere near the toilet), the insides of garbage cans, the tops of shelves that have accumulated layers of dust which eventually becomes sticky and is really alarming when you touch it in an effort to get something perched up high.  I was anticipating his visit for weeks.  The morning of his arrival I said to my mom on the phone,

“Mom, I want it to be 4 o’clock already so he can be done and I can see how clean the apartment is.”

I was giddy.  When he first got to the house, he wanted to assess what sorts of cleaning supplies we had so I could run out and get whatever was missing.  He went into my most anxiety-causing area of the house – the Cabinet Under the Sink.   I have always thought to myself that if I was a roach or something else equally as disgusting (does such a thing even exist??) I would for sure hide in the Cabinet Under the Sink.  It is dark, there are pipes in there which means moisture, there are little nooks and crannies in which to hide.  Roach heaven.  Anyway, as my heart pounded he pulled out the big blue plastic bin of bleach, drain-o, roach killer (ugh), latex gloves and dish soap.  Lots and lots of dish soap.  By the time he was done going through the dreaded Cabinet Under the Sink I had broken into a slight sweat, due to roach-fear, and a slight red glow, due to embarrassment.  Sitting on the counter in front of me was not one, not two, but 5 containers of dish soap with varying degrees of content remaining.  And that is not counting the full one I had just purchased the day before that was sitting unopened on the kitchen table.  I flashed forward to my life, 20 years down the line.  Me, sitting in an easy chair, my 50 cats wandering around the piles, and piles of Seventh Generation lemongrass scented dish washing fluid, the 1-800-GotJunk trucks parked outside with the camera crew and the mental health professional:  The Dish Soap Hoarder!  I shook the horrific image out of my head to respond to Jon’s repeated question:

“Do you want me to marry these?”

“I don’t think that’s legal in New York.  Oh.  You mean as in combining them? Oh, yea, I guess you’d better…”

Jon went along his merry way, the plethora of dish soap no more than a hiccup in the day’s activities.  Before he left, and after he had found the 5 packets of sponges, he said

“Yea, I think I have everything I need for next time.  Just don’t buy anymore sponges…or dish soap.”

I chuckled.  Of course I wouldn’t.  That would be crazy.  And then yesterday, after I finished a recovery run on the treadmill, I decided to do some light grocery shopping.  Up and down the aisles I went throwing things into my shopping basket.  I got to the check out counter and started unloading my goods:  head of lettuce, red bell pepper, zip lock bags, bananas, dish soap.  Dish soap?!  How’d that get in there??  I looked around me, inexplicably thinking someone might call me out on my crazy.  I picked up the dish soap — Seventh Generation, lemongrass scented — and handed it to the check-out girl and said with a serious tone,

“You’d better take this.”

She gave me a sideways glance that said “this bitch is crazy,” took the soap as if it was nothing and continued scanning my items.  I paid and walked out.  Sorry, A&E, you’ll have to find a new star.

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Only in Dreams

18 May

The past few weeks I have had the strangest dreams.  Or, should I say, I have remembered the strangest dreams.  I don’t know if it’s that I have been sleeping more fitfully, waking up at more regular intervals and thereby interrupting the process of my dream and making me remember, or just that my mind is trying to tell me something.  If it’s the latter, I think what it is trying to tell me is that there are some people I am angry at and I have a strange obsession with water sports of all kinds.

I have recently had two dreams in which I told off people who had wronged me, or perhaps people who I perceive to have wronged me.  The first one, the more detailed dream, made a lot of sense.  I have rehearsed in my head the very conversation that occurred in my dream.  Only, when I imagine the conversation I believe he will argue with me about how wrong I am, how I misperceived things, how I didn’t see what I know I saw.  In the dream though, he just sat there calmly while I told him what was what.  Didn’t defend himself, just sat there.  And this is because I’m right and he’s wrong and dream him realizes it.  Which is awesome.  Dream him is so much more agreeable than real him.  This closure that I have wanted to get for so long, that I know would only succeed in making me seem like a crazy person, was achieved in a dream state.  Hopefully that’s all that was needed.  Hopefully I won’t have another dream in which I push him down a flight of stairs because that is another thing I have fantasized about here and there.  Violence, whether in real life or dream life, is not good.  Or so I’m told.  The other dream, however, was sort of out of left field.  The person who I yelled at is someone who I am happy to not have in my life anymore, someone who was more of a detriment to my happiness than anything else.  I tend to operate by the theory that if you have a relationship with someone, any kind of relationship, and more often than not you leave an interaction feeling worse or less happy than you did when you entered it, it’s probably not a relationship you need to be in.  I was never happy after I saw this person.  Ever.  So why the dream closure?  Who knows but it was awesome.  And, the extra great thing about it was that, at least in this one dream, dream Rebekah was exactly the same as real Rebekah!  I told the girl off, and then I went around, in my dream, and told all my dream friends about what had happened.  I even embellished a little to make the story better!  It’s nice to know that in a dream state I exhibit remarkable consistency.

And now on to water sports.  As some of you who know me might know, I love love love the Olympics.  Specifically the summer Olympics.  I have even assembled my ideal women’s gymnastics team.  (I have also discovered that when you tell people you have assembled your ideal women’s gymnastics team they think you are a little bit of a freak so it is best to just keep it to yourself.)  Anyway, a few weeks ago I had a dream that I was in an Olympic sailboat race.  Not only was I in the race, but I won.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you are reading the blog of a dream-Olympics gold medal sailor.  And I did it on a Sunfish, no less.  You might ask why, of all the Olympic sports, and considering my obvious obsession with gymnastics, I would have a dream in which I sailed.  I do not have an answer to that question.  I don’t think I have set foot on a sailboat, Sunfish or otherwise, since summer camp in the early 90s.  But let me tell you one thing I know for sure:  winning Olympic gold is awesome.  What’s even more awesome is that when I woke up there was like a 5 second period during which I actually thought I had won Olympic gold in real life.  Those 5 seconds were totally great.  And when I realized I had neither attended the Olympics nor won the event, I wasn’t even let down!  I was just super impressed by my own imagination.  I went from congratulating myself for winning to congratulating myself for being a really good dreamer.  Gold medal caliber, even.

Then, two nights ago I had yet another dream.  In this dream, a friend of mine was pregnant.  Very pregnant.  The weird part of the dream was that in her rather large state she insisted on swimming a 100-lap race.  In open water.  Without goggles.  (And no, it was not part of the Olympics…it was just your regular, every day, run-of-the-mill 100-lap open water race.  For fun.)  I don’t know why she wasn’t wearing goggles.  I don’t know why she was in the race – she isn’t a swimmer in real life.  I also don’t know whether or not she won because a 100-lap race takes a really long time to finish, in a dream or otherwise.  What I do know is that she was doing a damn good job last I saw.  Maybe the dream-baby added to her buoyancy.

Anyway, that’s it for this first and, likely not last, installation of my dream journal.  Going forward I hope for more water sports and less anger.

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Solamente en ingles

9 May

First and foremost, please forgive my inappropriately accented Spanish.  I have no idea how to make an accent mark in WordPress but, for those of you who care to know, there should be an accent over the “e” in “ingles.”  And now, on to the real purpose of this post.

Last night before bed I was perusing the New York Times on my phone when I came across this article about the mysterious death of a groom at Churchill Downs.  In the interest of full disclosure, I would just like to say that when I initially read the title and, in fact, the reason that I continued on to read the article at all was because I thought it referred to a bridegroom, not someone hired to care for horses.  Like most people, I am always interested in something tragic.  Not to say that the death of this man isn’t a tragedy, but there is something especially upsetting about the death of someone right before or right after marriage, or some other important life event.  It’s like, you have made a decision to do something big and important with the future in mind, and then bam.  Dead.  Anyway, as I was reading the article (I had committed to it, after all) I came across the following few paragraphs:

Officials said Mr. Pérez, a Guatemalan immigrant, was living in the stables at Churchill Downs at the time of his death. His son, Wilson Pérez, 19, identified his body. He had been licensed by the racing commission as a groom in 2008, Mr. Brown said.

Police officers worked to establish the facts of the case on Monday, hobbled in part by the fact that Mr. Pérez’s son does not speak English.

“It is sort of a barrier that you can’t get the information firsthand,” said Lt. Barry Wilkerson of the Louisville Metro Police Department, who spoke at a news conference on Monday.

Okay, people, we are talking about Spanish, here, right?  Not like, Malayalam or Welsh.  According to the US Census, as of 2010 16.3% of the overall population, and 3.1% of the population of Kentucky, identified themselves as being of “Hispanic or Latino origin.”  I know that not everyone who identifies as being of Hispanic or Latino origin speaks Spanish, but I also know there are plenty of people of other backgrounds that do speak Spanish.  Also, weren’t there all kinds of people there for the Kentucky Derby?  Maybe one of them speaks Spanish.   I don’t know, maybe having lived in New York for all these years has blinded me to the fact that there are some more linguistically homogenous areas of the country, but I can’t imagine how trying to get information out of a Spanish speaker would be especially “hobbling” to a murder investigation.  We’ve got plenty of Spanish-speaking police officers up here in NYC, maybe one of them would be willing to help.  It’d be a nice vacation from the rain.

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Don’t Be An Asshole

3 May

Last Thursday night I was, as I am every Thursday night, behind the stick of the bar in which I work.  It had been one of those days.  Specifically, it had been the day that I was harassed by someone in, and on my way home from, The Home Depot near where I live.  I was not in the mood.  But, in an effort at being professional, I tried to put my day’s anger out of my mind.  After all, it wasn’t the fault of my customers that some asshat in an SUV had stalked me through a hardware store and then tried to give me a ride home.  The night went along more or less without a hitch…until about 3:15.  We have this customer who comes in after his restaurant closes most nights of the week. I find him incredibly annoying.  Also, weird.  Annoying and weird.  But as long as I ask him how his night went, give him the 5 tastes of beer he wants and then the actual pint he decides upon, everything is more or less okay.  I try not to talk to him much but to be pleasant when do.  Generally he only stays for one or two, generally he is gone by 12:30 or so.  This past week was different.

He, I’ll call him Daniel, came in at the usual time with a few of his coworkers.  They were celebrating the return of one of the other employees of the restaurant who had been injured the week before.  We were all happy he was back at work and smiling.  Daniel had his customary two beers and then the third.  After the third beer, about 2 1/2 hours after he originally showed up, he decided to go home.  I was happy.  Then, 15 minutes later, he was back.  That is never a good sign.  Generally I find that people who come in late night looking for that one last drink are the most problematic of them all.  Sometimes you don’t know how much they have had and that last one puts them over the edge.  Sometimes you know how much they’ve had but, since they have been there for awhile and you know them, you feel a little bad cutting them off even though you know you should.  You don’t cut them off and you always, every single time, regret it and swear next time that happens you’ll do it.  But then it happens again and you don’t.  Vicious cycle.  Anyway, I have no idea of what this guy’s tolerance is whatsoever.  I only ever see him have one or two.  But I knew when he walked back in the door that this was the drink that was going to do it.  He ordered a Guinness.  With a 4.2% ABV, I figured this was a safe and smart order.  He started asking my coworker a question.  She said she didn’t want to talk about it.  Then he did the thing which I find that men often do:  he asked her again.  Again and again and again.  He phrased it differently.  Tried to guess the answer.  Over and over and over.  Finally she, and I, had had enough.  It was my bar – she was barbacking – so I decided to step in and ask him to drop it.  As I see it, as a bartender, it is my job to make sure that my clients and coworkers feel comfortable and safe and not annoyed.  He argued with me, told me he wasn’t talking to me, that I interrupted.  She fled to the bathroom, I walked away to the other side of our very long bar, leaving him alone.  A few moments later a song came on that sounded more appropriate at a funeral than in a bar, so I walked down the other end, past Daniel, to skip to the next one.  He started up with me again.  I ignored him.  And then, again.  Clearly this is a man who doesn’t take no, or drop it for that matter, for an answer. Finally, after another pointless back-and-forth, I got so annoyed by his condescension and accusatory tone that I asked him to finish his beer and go.  He said he could go somewhere else.  So I said fine, and I took his beer and pulled it in front of me, a sign that it was no longer his to drink.  He looked at me and said,

“Are you drunk?”

“No,” I responded, “but I’m fairly certain you are.  I’m working.  This is me doing my job.”

And then he said it, “go fuck yourself,” and he stormed off.

Now I have been a person far longer than I have been a bartender, but 95% of the times I have been told off in one way or another have been when I have been behind the bar.  And 95% of those times have been by men.  It’s something that I never get used to and something I completely don’t understand.  Being called a bitch.  Told I am “disrespectful.”  Informed that if a girl at my bar has a tattoo on her lower back that is exposed it is someone’s “right to take a photo of it,” that if she didn’t want it looked at she wouldn’t have gotten a tattoo there.  Being instructed to “smile, it’s not so bad.”  Having dollar bills hurled at me over a bar as if I were a piece of trash.  I am told by friends not to let it bother me, and it’s not as if it diminishes my feelings of self-worth or anything, but it still doesn’t feel good.  All I am doing is trying to create an environment that is safe and enjoyable to the majority of people in it.  If you are the one that is standing in the way of the obtainment of that environment, then I am going to ask you to stop and, if you don’t, to leave.  And your meager tips aren’t going to stand in the way of me holding you accountable.  I don’t need the money that badly and I don’t need you to come back.  I find that the people I stand up for, the people I step in for, make much more loyal customers than the drunken idiot I tolerate.  That’s the way it is.  That is my job. Don’t blame me for the fact that you misbehaved, blame yourself.  Go home and think about it.  Figure out why it is that you are not able to act like a normal person in the world. Alcohol is not an excuse and it’s not a license to do, and say, whatever you want, even though a lot of people think it is.  All you have to do is abide by one simple rule:  don’t be an asshole.  Now is that so hard?

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