Tip #8 on Being a Good Bar Customer

17 Jul

And the customer education mission continues!  Be sure to check out my other tips if you haven’t already.  Mostly they’re funny.  Tip#1, Tip #2, Tip #3, Tip #4, Tip #5, Tip #6 and Tip #7.  Enjoy.  Share.

So I work in a bar that has 15 taps, which these days isn’t really anything to write home about, and a lot of brown liquor.  A lot.  There are so many choices. So many fun and interesting things to try.  So many possibilities.  So I get it, it can be sort of hard to figure out what you might want to drink.  So please, take your time and consider your options but keep this in mind:  choosing what drink to purchase is not like buying a car, it is not like picking a college, it is not like deciding on a career.  Those things will impact your life well beyond the making of the decision whereas choosing a drink really only makes a difference during the drinking of the drink itself.  It might be unpleasant to drink a beer you don’t like but you know what?  I get it.  Sometimes things are yucky.  Be cool.  I will hear your complaint, pour the offending drink out, serve you a new one and you know what?  If you’re nice during the whole interaction and don’t act as if I purposely mixed some foul tasting substance in with your beer specifically to fuck with you I won’t even charge you for it.  Isn’t that great? You know what will not get you a new drink?  Acting like an asshole like this girl did this past Saturday.  Let me explain.

So this past Saturday around 4:30 PM, give or take, a couple walked in and sat at a hightop.  They made no move towards the bar so after a few minutes I politely informed them that there was no table service and that they would have to come place their order at the bar.  Upon hearing this they did what people often do when I give them this information: they gave me nasty looks and acted as if they already knew there was no table service which I knew to be a complete lie because from the second they walked in the door and took their seats they were looking at me expectantly.  Whatever.  Some people just can’t be wrong.  No matter.  About a minute later the female half of the couple came up to the bar and ordered the champagne cocktail I had specialed for the day (I’ve been trying to use up that damn cassis for like, 4 years) and a rum and coke.  I made the drinks, she paid me and took them back to their table and we all carried on happily with our day.  Or so I thought.

About 1/2 hour later the girl comes back up to the bar with a completely untouched rum and coke and says to me, in one of the snottier tones I remember hearing recently (and this after I complimented her on her sandals!),

“Um…what did you make this with?”
Me: “The rum and coke?  Well…with rum? And coke?”
Snotface: “No, what kind of rum?  He says he can’t drink it.”
Me, upon lifting up the bottle of Rico Bay rum: “The well rum.  In any bar you go to if you order a ‘rum and coke’ that is what you will get.”
Snotface, in her best ever imitation of a small, bratty child: “Not any bar.”

I took a moment to calm myself and think about what bars she might frequent that don’t use well rums in their rum and coke. I thought maybe he had a very discerning palate and perhaps he just didn’t like our delicious Rico Bay.  Then I thought that was unlikely because he ordered a rum and coke.  Then I thought maybe they usually go to fancy bars that use call liquor like Bacardi for their well. I mean, her sandals were really nice so it was possible.  I decided it didn’t matter.  So I asked her, trying to do my best imitation of someone who thinks the person she is talking to is a complete bitch,

“Well, what kind of rum would you like, then?”

She turns to her companion to see what he would like and you know what he said? Cuervo.  I looked around the bar to see if anyone else was hearing this because it was hilarious.  She then turned back to me and, in a completely serious tone, repeated,

“He wants Cuervo.”
Me: “Um…tequila?  He wants tequila and coke?”
Snotface: “No, he wants rum and coke.”
Me: “That’s great except that Jose Cuervo is a tequila so I don’t really know what you want me to do here.”

Her companion then started hysterically laughing.  I guess he wasn’t such a bad guy.  Wish he would have ordered the drinks in the first place.  She looked terribly upset that she was not in on the joke.  He then, through fits of giggles, said to me,

“I want Captain Morgan!”

So you guys.  Spiced rum and regular rum taste really different.  This is mostly because spiced rum has spices in it.  Spices like vanilla maybe and some cinnamon.  A spiced rum and coke probably is going to taste different than a rum and coke.  Also, I don’t know of a bar worth its weight in salt that uses spiced rum as their well because you know what would happen? Someone would order a rum and coke and end up with a spiced rum and coke and it would taste weird and they would send it back because that is not, in fact, what they ordered.  Anyway, since she was such a fucking snot I made her pay for her new drink.  So anyway, the moral is if you screw up your order, don’t blame it on the person who made it for you.  Blame it on yourself.  Because it was, in fact, your fault.

Oh and then sort of on the same topic.  Here are three other drink ordering related things that drive most bartenders up the wall. You know, jut for your own edification.

(1) The people who come in when the bar is packed, wave you down (HUGE no-no), and then when you arrive to take their order they turn around to ask their friends what they want.  If you are going to commit the faux pa of waving, snapping, or hollering at your bartender then at least have your order down.  Otherwise you will drop down to the end of the drink line.

(2)  The people who walk in and then stare at the beer board, or taps, or drink menu for fucking ever and when you walk over to see if they are ready they’re all, “um? I need a minute?” as if part of your job is reading minds.  So you make an effort to pass them by every minute or so, looking at them as you slow down to see if they are ready and they either ignore you while staring blankly at the beer boards, taps or drink menu or they give you nasty looks.  Then, all of a sudden, they are ready!  They know what they want!  And they are incredibly agitated if you are not standing right in front of them at that very second for their order.  They act as though the amount of time it took them to get a beer is your fault as opposed to the absolute inability they have in figuring out what they want to drink as if it is the hardest and most important decision they have made ever in their entire lives.

(3)  The people who walk into a non-cocktail bar and when you ask them what they want they say “you tell me.”*  No, I’m sorry, that is not how it works.  You actually tell me. I do not want a description that’s like “I want something pink with some berry notes and a finish of bandaid.”  I want you to tell me the beer you want or the vodka you want or ask me my advice on what sort of whiskey or bourbon might be fun to try.  I will then pour that into the appropriate glass and give it to you.  And then you will like it and give me money.  And then maybe we’ll make some jokes and I’ll listen to you talk about your job and everything will be right with the world.

So yea, ordering.  It is one of the easiest things to do and yet people, regularly, get it oh so wrong.

*And, actually, in my experience cocktail bartenders don’t really like this either.  Generally they like you to at least give them a liquor and a general idea of sweet or savoryness.

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What Did I Ever do to You, Ears?

13 Jul

My ears and I have never had the best of relationships.  This isn’t a superficial thing.  I have no problem, visually, with the way my ears look.  They are neither particularly big nor particularly small.  They neither stick out too much nor hug my head too closely.  I do sometimes think that they are a little bit high because wearing a hat can be somewhat problematic at times.  I either have to tuck my ears into the hat, thereby looking foolish, or let them stick out, thereby looking foolish.  My solution?  I don’t often wear hats and I’m okay with that.  The poor relationship that I have with my ears, and particularly my left one, is predicated on the fact that for my entire life they have caused me quite a bit of pain.

For the first 5 or so years of my life I had near-constant ear infections, or at least that’s how I remember it.  I think it was more a seasonal thing in reality but I have always been one for exaggerating so let’s go with it.  I think it had something to do with the development of my ear canals and so my ears didn’t drain themselves properly, or something.  Regardless of the reason they occurred there was no denying the fact that I was a walking ear infection.  It was so constant that my pediatrician, most awesome lady ever, considered draining my ears out to stop all the build-up of whatever it was that was building-up.  She told my mom that if the following ear-infection season (read: all the fucking seasons) I got another infection, then she would drain them but she was reluctant to do so because she said there was a risk of me losing my hearing.  My ears, upon hearing this news of having tubes painfully stuck into them, decided to stop infecting themselves.  For then…dun dun DUUUUUN!

Fast-forward to the winter of 2004, west coast of India.

There I was with some of my friends from my study abroad program on the beach at night.  We decided to go swimming despite the relatively large waves crashing down on the shore.  I was doing that thing that I love doing where I turn my back until a big wave comes and then I jump and ride the wave all the way onto the beach, only sometimes bloodying my knees.  For some reason right when a monster wave was approaching I looked over my left shoulder and CRASH!  The wave hit me right in the side of the head, absolutely pummeling my left ear.  My ear became clogged with water and remained that way for the following 2 months.  The annoying aspect of that was completely offset by the fact that I got to say to people, in my best Jewish Grandma voice, “Eh? Talk into my good ear, sweetie, I got some schmutz in the left.”

Ever since that incident over 9 years ago, my ears, and particularly my left one, have consistently acted up.  It’s sort of like, when my doctor threatened to stick tubes in them they ran scared but they were really just biding their time.  Maybe they even forgot.  But then one day my mom told me my old pediatrician had retired and seeing as how they get the information before the rest of my body a spark of an idea was born and they were all “we’ll show you, thinking you can control us.  You got nothing on us, bitch.”  So now every time I swim and every time I wash my hair they suck water into themselves and hold onto it for dear life.  For days everyone else’s voices are muffled while mine is in stereo.  Then comes the headaches on the sides of my forehead just up and out from my eye sockets.  The occasional searing pain and the embarrassing realization that I am probably the only adult in the entire world who still gets ear infections.  But that’s not the worst of it.  The worst thing ever is flying.

I have never loved flying, per se.  I enjoy the idea of going somewhere new, of boarding a plane somewhere I know and ending up somewhere completely different.  But the flying itself, boring.  I can’t sleep on planes because I can’t sleep sitting up.  Also, my butt falls asleep and it is always so damn cold on those planes and I, without fail, forget to bring a blanket.  I always end up sitting dangerously close to the bathroom, children, or both.  Or someone who smells.  But the worst of it is the excruciating pain that shoots through my head.  It literally feels like my ear drums are about to explode or my head is just going to split in half.  I sit there, doubled over with my head on my knees, stupid ass earplugs sticking out of my ears that are supposed to help relieve the pain but really just make me look like an asshole, chewing like 12 pieces of gum in order to try to salivate enough so that I can continuously swallow thereby popping my ears (which, by the way, hurts like a motherfucker) and crying.  Crying.  Almost every god damn time.  I routinely bring scarves or just take off my sweatshirt so when the moment comes when tears are pouring down my face I can at least cover up.  Sometimes I take Sudafed but then I often lose it between journeys and have to buy another box, again landing myself on the national “is this person a meth head” registry.  And it only helps like half of the time.  And you know what else?  The flight attendants never stop to see if I am okay.  I am doubled over in pain and only one time did someone stop and she told me to chew gum.  Bitch!  I have like a whole pack in my mouth right now!  The only people that ever seem mildly concerned are my seat neighbors and mostly they just look at me like I’m nuts and/or click sympathetically. This last flight my neighbor goes to his wife,

“Oh her ears must be clogged.  Quite a production.”

It’s like, I can hear you!  It sounds like you’re about 10 miles away but I can ever so slightly hear you and if my eardrums explode I hope you get eardrum gore all over your stupid golf shirt.

So yea, my ears like totally suck.  Especially the left one.  I went swimming on Tuesday afternoon and you know what? Still clogged!  Still can’t hear shit except my own stupid self!  So, yea, that’s what’s up with my ears and why if you see me any time in the next few weeks I might ask you to repeat yourself 12 times.  I think I am going to make a doctors appointment but don’t tell my ears, especially the left one, because who knows what torture they’ll have in store for me next.

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The Time I Slept on a Marble Slab in the Aiport and Lived to tell the Tale

10 Jul

So you guys.  The other day I had one of the most epic travel journeys of my entire traveling life.  Those of you who know me (which, at this point, is most of you because you are the only people who would happily put up with my sort of unfocused rambling) know that I do a fair bit of traveling. I have been a number of places.  I love leaving the country.  I love seeing how other people live their lives and having a context for all the international things I like to read about.  I also really like eating fruit so I tend to go to fruit-heavy places.  I am one of those people who does not think that papayas taste like vomit.  Anyway, one of the things about traveling is that you have to actually get to and from the places you are going which can be the most trying part of it all especially when you book flights ass-early in the morning.  Clearly, I always book my flights at the most inconvenient times possible because it makes them cheaper but it also means that I get sort of stressed out and occasionally have to sleep in airports.  Sleeping in airports is pretty much as shitty as it sounds.  So, here’s the story.

A little over a week ago I traveled to Merida, Mexico to visit a good friend of mine from graduate school.  My flight there left at 7am from JFK.  No problem, I had my favorite driving friend pick me up from my house at 4:30am and take me to the airport.  I took the direct flight and then waited in the airport for like two hours reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and then I got on a bus for 4 hours and voila!  There was my friend and her friend, who is also now my friend (yay!), waiting in the bus station when I got there!  The way back was not nearly as neat and clean.

We had decided to travel a little bit the last weekend I was in town and ended up at this cute little town on the water called Mahahual.  It was fun and nice only the cash machines all had no money in them and a lot of the places didn’t accept credit cards.  It was slightly problematic but we made due.  We left super early on Sunday morning, the day before the flight, in order to drive up to Cancun and spend the day at Isla Mujeres which is slightly less touristy and bro-infested.  As a side note, we stopped at a gas station and although the original guy we asked said they accepted cards it turned out, once the gas had been pumped, that they actually did not.  Clearly, we had no cash other than American currency which they also didn’t accept.  In the end one of the dudes ended up climbing on top of an adjacent building to try and get service to run the card.  It worked and it was hilarious.  Made my day.

So, we drove up to Cancun, parked in a lot, and took a ferry across to Isla.  Keep in mind that at this point it was like, 1:30 and we had been traveling since like 7:30 am.  My flight was the next morning at 6:10am.  Obviously.  I figured I would take the last ferry off Isla at midnight, take a bus to the airport, get there around 1:30 and just wait till my flight.  Just to be sure I looked online.  At 8pm I discovered that there were no buses that left from the Centro to the airport after 10pm and a taxi from the ferry to the airport was going to cost me $70.  It was decided that I would take the previous ferry, at 9pm, grab a cab to the Centro, take a bus to the airport and then wait. I got to the airport at 10:30.  I wanted to die.  After eating some toast (nothing on the menu at the only open restaurant in the airport was meat-free) I found a nice little slab of marble to attempt to nap on.  At around 12:30 I put my bag on the floor, extracted a sweatshirt to pad my hip, and laid down, using my luggage as a pillow and hugging my purse like a teddy bear.  It was the coldest, hardest, florescent-lightiest piece of marble in the world.  I’m serious.  I set my alarm for 4:45am because there was NO WAY I was going to oversleep my flight but it was unnecessary, I didn’t sleep.  At 3:45 I grew tired of pretending to sleep, checked into my flight and went through security.  It was then that I discovered that the Cancun airport is infested with the biggest, grossest cockroaches I have ever seen outside of the Benares train station in India.  Those fuckers were the size of rats.  I thanked my lucky stars that I had not discovered them the previous night because then my bed of marble would have been entirely out of the question.  Finally I boarded my flight.  But that’s not all!

My first flight went from Cancun to Mexico City.  Then I transfered to another plane there and flew from Mexico City to Hermosillo.  The international wing of the Hermosillo Airport was the same as the domestic wing of the Hermosillo Airport and probably if I threw a rock as hard as I could I could make it land clear on the other side.  Of the entire airport.  A rock.  Me.  I do not have a good throwing arm.  Also, there was a Subway there and the entire teeny tiny airport smelled like Subway sandwiches which is really gross.  I ate Pretzel M&Ms for lunch.  I then boarded a new plane with the same flight number at Hermosillo to fly to my 4th and final airport of the day.  It was so small.  So bumpy.  Not my favorite ever plane by far.  Finally, 17 hours after leaving Isla Mujeres I had arrived in the Phoenix Airport.  But that wasn’t the end!  I still had to get to Tucson!  My friend was outside waiting to pick me up only the Phoenix Airport is roughly the size of my hometown and I got lost like 12 times.  But I persevered!  I made it outside and we headed back to her house.  But first….

We stopped at an Ostrich Farm where we fed ostriches and deer and donkeys! It turns out ostriches are scary.

The end.

Oh, wait, one more thing.  Tomorrow morning I have a flight out of Phoenix at, you guessed it, 6am.  Have a shuttle picking me up at 2:50am.  Stay tuned.

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Why Do People Cut Their Nails in Public?

28 Jun

So today I was reminded of one of my biggest pet peeves:  people cutting their nails in public places, most notably on the subway.  This afternoon I dragged my exhausted self into the city for an appointment with an extra large, extra caffeinated iced coffee in hand, while reading an article on Alzheimer’s research (for those of you wondering, any sort of progress towards a cure seems sort of hopeless at the moment).  I was really excited that the R train came right away and that, even though the N had passed on the express track while I was two stops away from Atlantic Avenue, when I arrived I found it waiting there with open doors, inviting me to enter. I hustled across the platform next to an equally excited woman who was eating pork rinds.  I settled into my seat, drinking my coffee, reading my magazine, generally feeling happy about my insane train luck and then I heard it.  Click, click, click.  I have this like, really keen sense of hearing when it comes to people clipping their nails.  I started looking around the car to find the culprit and there he was, a young man, probably in his 20s.  He was sitting next to his girlfriend, hunched over, shedding his nails all over the train floor.  Yuck.

Before I get a little more into this, let me just say that if my boyfriend were to start cutting his nails in public I would break up with him then and there.  That, to me, is a sign of a complete inability to discern that which is disgusting from that which is not disgusting and I do not want to date someone who thinks that doing something disgusting in public is normal.  To me, nails should only be cut when you are alone, in the bathroom, with your hand or foot dangling over the garbage can to try and catch as many errant nails as possible.  It is then important to sweep.  There is nothing worse than walking around the house, feeling a prick on the bottom of your foot and then discovering that someone elses nail is stuck into your skin.  A guy I used to date used to cut his nails on the coffee table while he watched TV, collect them into a neat pile and then deposit them into the ashtray.  I had to leave the room.

Anyway, sometimes I think that people who cut their nails in public literally follow me around.  I encounter one such person in the subway at least once a month.  When I was on my way to New Orleans in late February, the woman in front of me on the plane was cutting her nails.  One time I saw a cab driver cutting his toe nails (thankfully I was not in the cab at the time).  I have seen them on the bus, on the train platform, I have seen nail clippers dangling from key chains.  These people are everywhere.  They are everywhere and they are always cutting their nails.  Do their nails grow faster than other people’s?  Are there just thousands of people who find cutting their nails in public appropriate?  What is the thought process behind this?  Do these people simply not notice that their nails are long when they are in the privacy of their own homes?  Are their lives that busy that they have no choice but to cut in public?  And why in the world do they have nail clippers with them on the go anyway?  Of all the things I might think to throw in my bag, nail clippers are nowhere on the list.  And then you have to wonder, do public nail clippers do other yucky things in public as well? Do they floss out in the open?  Do they pick gunk out of their belly buttons while sitting at a red light? Do they pop zits at the dinner table?  These are all things that I wonder whenever I encounter a nail clipper out in the wild.  These are all the questions I silently asked myself as I suffered through the click, click, click of a public nail clipping event just this afternoon.

Seriously, one of these days when I am on the train and this happens, I am going to politely approach the offending individual and ask him or her why.  Either that or I am going to siddle up next to the person, snatch the clippers out of his or hand, and throw them violently across the train, taking care to not hit anyone in the head with them because that would hurt.  I will let you know how this goes.

As a final point, I would like to quote from my friend Mandy’s response to my Facebook posting about this very incident:

“The cutting of one’s nails in a public place should be condemned openly and publicly. It is revolting and I don’t understand why people don’t know this.”

Mandy, I could not agree more.

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We’re All on About Paula Deen, But What About the Blackhawks?

25 Jun

This whole thing with Paula Deen is a total mess.  Previously, the most outwardly offensive thing about Deen was her overuse of butter and heavy cream.  In fact, one of my favorite games to play back in the day was “predict when Paula Deen is going to add more butter/heavy cream.”  Turns out no matter when you said “butter!” or “heavy cream!” you were right more often than not.  It got old fast but it sure was funny the first few times.  So anyway, Deen has been all over the news and rightfully so.  However, there are many people who have rushed to her defense.  One of those people was a commenter on the New York Times website by the name of Sandy who said,

“I am Paula’s age and live in the South. Whom among us hasn’t laughed at a joke or said something about another race and yet not been racist. (Um, Sandy, you are obviously racist.) I for one believe Paula is like me. We grew up in the 1960’s and definitely know about civil rights and honor them. To fire her for some off hand remarks is a knee jerk reaction by the Food Network who has made a lot of money off of her show. She was sued for the money and now dropped by the Food Network for fear it’s watchers would revolt against her and the Network. Shame on you!”

This attitude was repeated by Deen herself as well as her sons, Jamie and Bobby, who both spoke to Chris Cuomo of CNN in defense of their mother.  I would love to pull the whole interview apart, but I fear I could not do even close to the job done by Alyssa Rosenburg of Think Progress so I encourage you to read her piece entitled “What Paula Deen and her Sons Tell us About the Four Ways Racists Defend Themselves.”  It’s super well written and gets at some of the things a lot of us have been trying to articulate over the past few days but have struggled with.  Anyway, all of this is actually not the point of this blog post because, honestly, I have not been reading up on this Deen-bacle enough to really be able to express my feelings about it in a way that I could get behind.  Perhaps that will come sometime in the future.  The point of this blog, instead, is to point out something that has sort of been boggling my mind over the past few days which is the fact that while we are all talking about Paula Deen, and while people are criticizing her and defending her with equal fervor, we watched with fascination and excitement an incredible Stanley Cup final.  One of the two teams in the final wears a jersey featuring the face of a Native American (worn, may I point out, by a team made up overwhelming of white men). Why aren’t we outraged about this?

As pointed out in an article in The Native Press from 2003, there have been lawsuits brought against many professional sports teams, most notably the Washington Redskins, for their use of racist and derogatory names and imagery.  The term “redskins,” according to Suzan Shown Harjo, president of the non-profit Morning Star Institute and an advocate for American Indian rights, “is the most derogatory term for Native Peoples in the English language.”  And yet in 2013, the Washington Redskins still retain their name.  And then of course there is the Atlanta Braves and their infamous tomahawk chop, which is shared b the Florida State Seminoles, a team that also features offensive imagery on its jerseys.  As pointed out in a recent article on Policymic.com by Sarah Dropek, the Blackhawks were criticized most recently in 2010 for the “the racist nature of the name, emblem, and mascot of the team.”  To the people who claim that “political correctness” has no place in hockey, Dropek declares that

“the problem with decrying political correctness as a reason to throwout a legitimate discussion of racism is that it claims the racism is frivolous, that it is not worth upsetting the fandom or the team dynamic. The suggestion that the racism is not worth arguing against is a claim that it has no real negative impact in our world, that it is not worth bothering about in light of other issues.”

This, I think, is exactly the point. And Dopek does not stop there.  She then says,

“The objectification, commodification, and logo-ization of a group of people (a very real, live, and living people) is cause enough for change. The continuation of racist stereotypes of Native Americans based on these logos is reason enough for change. The majority of sports team logos and names center around animals, much like the Boston Bruins (bears). When you slap a stereotypical image of a Native American on a jersey you are equating them to these nameless, carbon-copy animals that populate other team’s locker rooms. They are no longer a people with agency, history, and future like anyone else, they are a thing to be harnessed however the individual in charge decides. “

For those who then point out that teams such as the Blackhawks compensate tribes for the use of their images as a way to let themselves off the hook for blatantly racist and dehumanizing actions, I say you are missing the point.  No amount of money can undo the damage of commodifying an entire group of people.  If there was a professional, or collegiate, sports team called “The Kikes” that pictured a shifty-looking guy with a big nose on the jerseys I think we would have a lot to say about that.  So why is it that in a country willing and able to have a conversation about Paula Deen’s blatant racism, we are so incapable of being critical of the even more obvious racism presently featured in the sports world?  Are Native Americans so invisible to us that we don’t even notice anymore? Or are we just so attached to these names and chants that we simply can’t bear to change them.

 

 

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And Then I Saw Turtles

24 Jun

I think this is going to be one of the more pointless blog posts to date.  It’s contending for the ultimate prize of Most Needless Blog Post Ever against the one about the time I sneezed really loudly and it was embarrassing.

So today I decided to go for a run.  It is, I would say, probably one of the first days this year when it really feels like summer so the smart thing for me to have done would have been to get up earlier and get out for a run before it got too, too hot.  Like, maybe get out the door by 8:30 am.  Well, I woke up at 8:30am so that was pretty much out of the question.  Also, I had a stomachache.  Waking up with a stomachache is really pretty normal for me.  I have always had a pretty bad belly (thanks, Dad!). I specifically remember it really getting bad when I was in high school and one day after track practice I decided to make myself some Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.  This, mind you, was well before the time when I decided that the Kraft company is evil and I would no longer purchase their food but if someone else happened to buy some, say, Ritz crackers I would make no bones about eating them.*  As an aside I would also like to note that ever since Kraft bought Nabisco they have had a serious corner on the cracker market.  Have I talked about this before?  It can be exceedingly difficult to find “good” crackers without Kraft konnections.  Anyway, back to the belly.  So I made myself Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and holy stomachache.  The rest of the afternoon was pretty much a blur of me running in and out of the bathroom… sorry for the over share.  That was the beginning of the end of carefree living for me.  After years of near-constant stomachaches, searing pains running all through my lower abdomen, and trips to the doctor where they did ultrasounds and concluded there was nothing wrong with me at all, I went to this magical chiropractor who did these crazy things with magnets and I discovered that I have an intolerance to basically everything.  I have sensitivities to dairy, wheat, sugar, everything fermented, over ripe fruit, and caffeine.  Not to mention I don’t eat meat.  So I tried to eliminate all of those things from my diet. As a result I felt a lot better but I was fucking hungry all of the time.  So, recently, I have basically just cut out processed things and also dairy, for the most part.  Also, I try and steer clear of fried foods because a lot of times restaurants don’t clean their grease traps and the results are not at all pretty.  So now rather than waking up with a stomachache 100% of the mornings, I wake up with a stomachache like 50% of the mornings.  So I feel pretty good about that.  This morning, unfortunately, was one of the bad 50%.  Hence I didn’t get out the door to run until like 11am when it was already something like 90 degrees.

I decided, in an effort to keep myself cooler, that I would go running in a sports bra and shorts.  It has been quite a long process for me to feel comfortable doing this because I never do any ab work (I know that as a runner this is incredibly stupid) so things move around a little.  This year I decided that I don’t give a fuck about that and if people don’t like it then they can just stop looking at me.  So off I went up to the park, feeling equal parts confident and awkward, running far too fast for the heat because I figured if I felt hardcore enough to run in just a sports bra and shorts I better go pretty fast so I at least look the part.  By the time I got up there I sort of wanted to vomit.  No matter, I went running along anyway.  When I arrived near the exit at Ocean Parkway I decided I needed to give myself a second and, lo and behold, there was a little pathway leading to the lake!  Perfect!  So I walked down the pathway and there, on the benches, was a group of old ladies.  I felt really weird being near the old ladies without my shirt on and I guess they felt weird too because about a minute after I got there they, ever so slowly, left.  I felt bad for disrupting their stay on the benches but happy to have a little outside space all to myself.  So rare!  I started gazing at the water and noticed this strange commotion.  I figured maybe it was fish.  And then I looked a little further and there, about 100 feet or so into the lake, was a floating log that was literally covered in sunbathing turtles all doing that super cute thing that turtles do when they sunbathe where they turn their cute little wrinkly faces up towards the sun and bask.  I. Love. Turtles.  Like, so much.  Anyway, soon thereafter I realized that the commotion in the water that I initially had concluded was fish was actually a bunch of turtles swimming around looking for snacks!!!!  They were everywhere!  It was so great!  I wanted to stand there forever but I was like, drowning in my own sweat and also felt a little bit like a wuss standing in the shade looking like a hardcore runner but not running at all and instead staring at turtles with a cheese-eating grin on my face so I went back out and finished my run which was totally awful.

When I was finally done with the loop of the park I sat in the shade and had the sad realization that I am officially too old to run during the hottest part of the day.  Also, now I have a really bad sports bra tan.  But turtles!  So really, everything is good.

*Note to friends, Ritz crackers are a surefire way to my heart.  And not the whole wheat ones, those are some bullshit.  I want the white flour, super buttery, extra deliciously processed kind only, thankyouverymuch.

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Tip #7 on Being a Good Bar Customer

18 Jun

And here it is, Tip #7.  You know what that means:  if there is a #7, then there must also exist #s 1-6 and guess what?  You’re in luck!  And you can read them all by following these links!  It’s like magic (or hyperlinks…).  Tip #1, tip #2, tip #3, tip #4, tip #5 and, finally, tip#6.

So in this blog I am going to tackle a topic that seems to be slightly divisive: kids in bars.  This divisiveness can be easily proven by referring to a comment I made on my Facebook page a few weeks back that simply read “No, I do not have milk for your child.”  The responses were diverse, to say the least, ranging from “bar life is slowly being destroyed in NYC by entitled parents” to “You’re right, people with kids should just stop trying to enjoy themselves.”  I am not here trying to start an all out war, but I have some opinions.  So, here goes.

I am not going to put myself strictly on one side of the argument or the other, but I think those who know me, and those who have gotten to know me through my writing here, can probably guess which way I tend to lean.  That being said, there are people who come in with their kids who I actually like having in there.  One couple specifically comes to mind.  They have been my once-a-month customers for years now and recently, about 2 months or so ago, they adopted two little girls who I lovingly call “the ladies.”  The ladies are very cute.  They are also very well behaved, always snoring away in their little baby bjorns, one on the front of one daddy, one on the front of the other.  The second one of them starts fussing, one of the parents takes her outside and bounces her around until she quiets down and goes back to sleep.  If that doesn’t work, they close the tab and head home.

I have noticed over the years that people who were customers of the bar before they reproduced or adopted were the best customers if they chose to bring their children in, although many of them do not.  Many of them will pop in with the baby every now and again to say hi and then be on their way.  But if they do decide to stay, they are incredibly attuned to their child, or children.  They respect the bar, they respect the other customers, and they respect me and understand that a crying baby will drive customers away, thereby lowering my income and making me angry.  And they don’t want to make me angry.  I am told I can be scary.

It’s the people that weren’t customers before that are the problem.  So a few weeks ago there I was at work when this guy came in.  He ordered a beer, drank about half of it, and then said he would be back in a few minutes.  Like a good bartender, I placed a napkin over his beer so no dust or little flying friends would go in it (also so I wouldn’t forget he was coming back and dump it out) and went about my business.  About ten minutes later he walked in…with his 6-year-old daughter.  Apparently she was at a birthday party across the street at the Little Gym.  He took his seat back up at the bar and she sat down next to him.  Just as an aside, I hate it when people let their little kids sit at the bar (to the person who follows my blog who brings his kids in, you are an exception because your kids are awesome and also they write stories about me and also neither of them is 6).  I actually think it is illegal and normally I would have said something about it but I wasn’t feeling up to the conversation and also he had been there before and I felt weird about it.  So, whatever, I just ignored it.  The dad was super distracted watching a monster truck rally on TV and was not paying any attention to his daughter at all.  When they got up to leave about 10 minutes later I noticed that she had scribbled all over the bar!  There was marker everywhere!  Why did he give her a marker?  Also, being in a bar is not an excuse to stop watching your kid.  I am a bartender, not a babysitter, I will not pick up the slack unless you pay me at least $30 an hour and even then I would probably tell you to go fuck yourself, I serve booze.

And here’s another example.  Just this past weekend these 3 adults came in with 2 toddlers.  That means there were 6 eyeballs to watch 2 little dudes running around.  They went out to the back, which immediately prompted all my backyard customers to move back into the bar.  About 1/2 hour later, I hear the mother screaming “Marky! Marky! No! Put that down!!”  And she runs over to where her son was standing with a rat trap in his hands.  He had dumped poison all over himself.  She didn’t realize what it was at first and said something along the lines of “ew, I don’t know what that was.”  I happened to be standing by the back door and, putting it all together, leaned my head out and said, “yea, that was a rat trap.  You might want to take him into the bathroom and wash his hands, arms, legs, and shoes with soapy water before he puts something in his mouth.”  The parents were actually cool about it, blaming their lack of attention for the oversight rather than the fact that we had a poisonous rodent trap on the ground.

Here’s the thing.  It actually doesn’t even matter what I personally think about you having kids in the bar because the reality of the situation is that bars, and my bar more specifically, tend to not be child friendly.  This does not mean I will cast you dark glances and spit in your drinks if you come in toting a toddler, it means that there are accessible outlets, furniture with sharp edges, there might be broken glass on the floor, and, as Marky found out the hard way, occasionally there is poison.  So I might talk a good game about how they cry and it gives me a headache or people change the diapers in the bathroom and then the whole bar smells like poo (this has totally happened before!) but really, I worry enough about my adult customers maiming themselves without adding two-foot-tall curiosity machines into the mix.

So, in summation, in the words of my brother (about something completely unrelated but whatever), “just because you can does not mean you should.”  And in the words of me, if you do anyway then watch your damn kid.  Going out to a bar to blow off some steam is only a vacation from parenting when you leave your kids at home.  Don’t make me parent for you because, guess what? I won’t.

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You Live Here, Why Not Travel There: The Case for Sustained Female Tourism to India

12 Jun

I traveled to India for the first time in December of 2003 with 21 other students and a few professors.  We spent about 8 weeks learning about sustainability, the economy, tourism, ecology, agriculture.  We spent a good amount of time in the homes of different families who welcomed us with open arms  (well, for the most part).  I returned just after I graduated college in the fall of 2005 with a good friend of mine, Abby, and spent about 4 months traversing the sub-continent.  It was an amazing trip, cut short mostly by the fact that I had run my travel fund dry.  I spent my entire trip in the company of others and the only close-call of a sexual nature came at the hands of a fellow traveler.  I went back for a third time in the summer of 2011 with two of my girlfriends from graduate school, one of whom is fluent in Hindi.  This led to some surprised faces and a pretty awesome night in which the operators of a government bus hand delivered us to our hotel so we wouldn’t have to face tracking down an auto rickshaw after midnight on our own.  I would go back in a heartbeat if I could find a companion and if time and finances allowed.

So I must say I am more than a little saddened by the recent reports that, due to highly publicized sexual assaults in India, tourism has dropped, and especially amongst females.  A June 10th article on the New York Times blog, India Ink entitled “India Scrambles to Reassure Tourists Shaken by Recent Attacks on Women,” discusses the issue.  The article, by Neha Thirani Bagri and Heather Timmons, explains that in the first three months of this year visits by females to India fell by 35%.  Thisfall-off has been linked by many to the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old student in Delhi this past December.  There have also been assaults and rapes reported by tourists over the last few months, including a 30-year-old woman who was gang-raped in a resort town in the north and a 39-year-old Swiss tourist who was raped by four men in Madhya Pradesh.  Listen, I get it, the prospect of being raped or sexually assaulted in a foreign country where you’re not familiar with the language, the customs, or the legal system and where you are far from home and your friends and family is terrifying.  But the thing is that, as a female, I live in almost constant, albeit dull, fear of being sexually assaulted and I think, when pressed, many women would agree.  In fact, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a woman in your life who has been neither threatened with sexual violence nor had sexual violence committed against her.  For my part I have been groped and spit on in the street, been the victim of an attempted rape in my own home, and ran screaming from the house of someone I considered a friend, although not a close one, when my strong and loud repetition of the word “no” went unheard.  My stories are not unique.  And every single one of them happened here, in the United States.

That’s not even the point.  I am not here arguing that there are more rapes in the United States than elsewhere.  I don’t know that we could ever accurately know that given the poor reporting rates at the global level, a fact I have discussed elsewhere in this blog.  Clearly, I have spent more of my life here and so it would follow that most of the bad things that have happened to me also would have happened here.  What I am saying is that the articles covering the decrease in tourism have not done much to reverse this trend by encouraging a more nuanced discussion.  So, here’s my attempt.

As a commenter on an article I read said, India is a very big country, 1,269,219 square miles, with a lot of people living in it, over 1.2 billion according to the 2011 census.  There are places that are more safe and places that are less safe, much like here.  There are people who are likely to rape and people who are unlikely to rape, much like here.  In the Times article, the authors quoted a 24-year-old from San Francisco, Corinne Aparis, as saying “It scares me to think that there’s that type of deep hatred toward women — that just being a woman is enough of a target and reason for some men to inflict such violence on me.”  The thing is, she could be talking about anywhere.  This quote is taken as something specific to the Indian context but that could not be further from the truth.  For evidence of that fact just watch the movie Compliance, read about the Cleveland, Texas gang rape of an 11-year-old, talk to some of your female friends.

You know what is different about India?  The response.  I doubt we would have learned nearly as much about the horrific December Delhi rape if it weren’t for the response of Indians.  According to the Times article once again, “The public outrage over the December attack led to the passage of a new sexual offense law in March that imposes stronger penalties for violence against women and criminalizes actions like stalking and voyeurism.”  I personally do not remember a time in the United States when protesters lined the streets for a day, let alone weeks, in response to a rape and the subsequent handling of the case by authorities.  I do not remember a time in the United States when the national dialogue wasn’t seemingly dominated by the endless repetition of “boys will be boys,” “why was she out at that time wearing that outfit,” and “where was her mother?”  Let’s just think back to the recent events in Steubenville.  Just this past Thursday, on June 6th, Mother Jones printed an article that reported that where the two rapists in the Steubenville case got a 1-and-2-year prison sentence, one of the hackers who broke the case open is facing up to 10-years in jail for hacking-related crimes.  To me, that says a lot about this country’s priorities.

Listen, I am not saying that people’s feelings regarding safety when traveling are unjustified.  If you feel unsafe for any reason, that is your prerogative.  What I am saying is that let’s put this into a larger context.  This is not an India problem, this is an everywhere problem.  But I would go so far as to say that the Indian population at large, at least recently, has a much more proactive attitude towards securing safety from sexual violence for women and men, and towards ensuring the proper handling of sexual assault cases.  We should be so vociferous.  Rather than write India off as unsafe for women, we should follow in the population’s footsteps.  We should stand in support of sexual assault victims, try to get our justice system to do right by them, by us, and change our rape culture.

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It Turns Out I’m Boring

10 Jun

I have always kind of figured that interesting people have interesting dreams.  If you’re interesting it seemed  likely to me that the things that went on within the confines of your skull reflected that.  You would imagine things in your sleep that would make fantastic trips to a psychic or great conversations at parties.  When I had interesting dreams this idea made me feel really happy about my prospects as an “interesting person” but recently my dreams have taken a terrible turn and I have come to the realization that either my lifelong theory is wrong or else I am actually really boring.

A few months ago I had a dream that I was waiting for the bus.  There I was, outside the stop near the bar in which I work, patiently waiting for the bus I take home after my day shifts.  The bus wasn’t coming but I continued to wait.  And wait.  And wait.  And then I saw my bus approaching in the distance and I became really excited.  Finally, Dream Rebekah could make her way home.  But then my bus, as it sat waiting for the light to change, morphed from the bus I needed into the bus I didn’t need!  Then, as the bus passed by me the driver leaned out the window and screamed “SUCKER!”  I shook my fist at him and kept right on waiting.  Then I woke up.  The sad thing about this is that I had this dream not once but twice and the second time there was no morphing bus, it was just me waiting.  The whole dream, just standing there at the stop all by myself…waiting.

In another recent dream I got a dog.  He was a brown dog and I named him Sir Todd Allen.  I introduced Sir Todd Allen to my mom on a walk around my hometown and when my mom asked me why I had named him that I told her it was because I thought the name was very “stately.”  Then Sir Todd Allen told me to fold my laundry.  Leave it to me to have a dream in which my new dog talks and he tells me to do something so incredibly dull that it takes all the magic out of it.

Anyway, I would write about more of the boring dreams I have been having but I am afraid it would put all of you readers to sleep.  So instead I will just sit here at my desk, trying to work through my new found anxiety that I am one of the most boring people alive.  I think this is going to be a very fun day.

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Jezebel: Stick with Women, Stay Away from GMOs

5 Jun

I’m sorry.  This is really long.

Okay, so, there was a time when in the mornings, after checking the headlines on the New York Times, I would head over to Jezebel and see what was happening in the world of women, as represented by feminists (some of them not so much) on Gawker’s payroll.  It was a pretty good way to keep up on all the happenings surrounding that Susan G. Komen debacle, gave me a link to an amazing speech by Sandra Fluke, and strengthened my extreme dislike for Donald Trump (I previously hadn’t thought that particular strain of dislike could be strengthened but there you have it).  In the last few months, however, I have found myself, for reasons I could not quite pinpoint, abandoning my daily visits to Jezebel.  Maybe it was because of those damn “thighlights” that I found both hypocritical and gender-normative, maybe it was the Jezebel staff-writer who had a few drinks at my bar and was a total asshole, or maybe it was the fact that the site was straying from it’s gender-focus and moving more in the body-snarking, celebrity-obsessing, semi-women related fluff direction.  Whatever the reason I didn’t have a particular aversion to Jezebel, more a feeling that we had just grown apart.  Until, that is, I read an article titled “Everyone Just Shut Up About GMOs.”

I don’t know if all you readers actually know me but here’s a little background.  I stopped eating meat when I was 11-years old because the texture grossed me out (still does!).  As I grew older I started having moral objections to the way we in the United States raise and slaughter our animals for consumption.  I don’t like the way we grow feed, the damage that concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) do to our environment, the lack of oversight of CAFOs and slaughterhouses at the state and federal level, the power the meat lobby has in Washington, the immunity that packaging plants seem to have to any regulation whatsoever, etc.  I could go on for days, literally.  This is not to say that you should stop eating meat or that I think any less of you if you do.  Educate yourself, if you want to (I know some good places to start), or don’t.  Your choice.  My interest in food and agriculture just sort of spread out from there and, during my junior year in college, I became incredibly interested in genetically modified organisms.  Over the last ten years or so, I have done quite a bit of reading on this topic so to come across an article on a relatively high-traffic site that was as poorly researched as this one was really infuriating.  I am actually sort of convinced that the author was being paid.  Let’s just look at some of Meagan Hatcher-Mays more…um…simple-minded points.

1. “A lot of people are wary of GMOs because of long-term public safety and health concerns. These fears are misplaced—not only are genetically modified foods regulated by the same rules as ‘regular’ food, but there is also a broad consensus in the scientific community that genetically modified food is safe to eat”

If GMOs are regulated by the same rules as regular food, we are fucked seeing as how regular food is hardly regulated.  Or, more specifically, that regular food is regulated in such a way that protects industry over consumers.  Ever heard of “veggie libel laws?”  Or the story of Stephanie Smith, a children’s dance instructor, who ate an ecoli-tainted burger in 2007 that rendered her paralyzed, with cognitive problems and with severe kidney damage?  Her case was settled in 2010 largely because she was profiled by the New York Times in 2009, lending her experience the added boost of national interest.  Also, there is no scientific consensus that genetically modified food is safe. Short-term studies seem to reveal it is fine, but GMOs have not been on the market long enough for anyone to decisively say they do not cause long-term harm.

2. “Monsanto… has genetically modified its seeds to make crops resistant to pests, herbicides, and disease. But the crops’ ability to repel these dangers reduces the need for pesticide use, which is actually good for the environment.”

Actually, no!  The result of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds have resulted in the creation of super weeds, against which Monsanto’s seeds are not resistant.  This is because of evolution!  As it turns out, weeds and insects also want to survive and will evolve over time to be able to tolerate the use of Roundup.  The result is that farmers all over the United States are forced to use greater amounts of more hazardous pesticides in order to deal with this new generation of pests.  This was discovered by Charles Benbrook, who is a research professor at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University.  He found that herbicide use has increased by 527 million pounds from 1996 to 2011, and although insecticide use had initially decreased by 123 million pounds,  it is now on the rise.

3. “GMOs can provide much-needed vitamin supplements for populations that are deficient. Two ounces of golden rice can provide almost 60% of the recommended daily intake of vitamin A.”

Here, Hatcher-Mays completely disregarded the scandal revolving around the tests of “golden rice.”  This rice was tested on children in China without the proper research approvals and without informing the parents of the children that the rice was genetically modified.  As someone who enjoys occasional forays into academia, this fact is incredibly problematic and also reinforces the feeling that many consumers have that they are not being provided proper information regarding their food by the agricultural industry.  Hatcher-Mays insistence that people against GMOs are therefore against poor people shows her inability to do even the smallest amount of research into the topic: I found a wealth of information in a 5 second Google search. Treating the poor as guinea pigs is not exactly a good thing.

Also, “golden rice” is not as new as Monsanto and other GMO supporters might have you believe.  I learned about it when I was in India in 2004 and Marion Nestle, a professor of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU published a letter to the editor about it in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in 2001. In her article she does not completely dismiss the usefulness of biotechnology in reducing diseases caused by vitamin deficiency, but she does state that simply adding vitamin-B to rice neglects to address the other biological (necessary enzymes and dietary fat) and political forces that are needed to truly deal with this deficiency.

Listen, maybe golden rice will be helpful in the future.  More tests need to be carried out to that effect and probably the scientists should inform their subjects of their role in the study and also the contents of the food they are eating.  Also, internet writers in the United States should shut up about their desire to feed “poor, nonwhite, non-American, non-British human beings” if they haven’t done even a modicum of research into the surrounding debate.  Repeating mistakes made at Tuskegee is probably not the best approach.  Also, to trick ourselves into thinking that big-Ag is doing anything positive without thinking primarily about PR campaigns and its own ever-deepening pocket is simply naive.  These companies are far-more concerned with making money than with solving world hunger.  The state of agriculture in the United States is horrific and to think that big-Ag has any intentions other than expanding into growing markets is ridiculous.  Whether or not GMOs are dangerous to human health when consumed has still not been proven, but the fact that they are incredibly dangerous to the environment at large (water usage, increased herbicide and pesticide use, monocropping, etc) has been proven time and again.  So, probably people shouldn’t be self-righteously telling those who know more than them to shut up about GMOs.

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