The Waitress...

AUTHOR’S NOTE:
It’s been so long since I’ve done any creative writing, and I was just itching to create a character in under a thousand words. Here they are…both of them.

She’s a pretty blonde in a vague way, with a compact body, small-built, a sweet, round face with tastefully chosen light-colored eye shadow and a light shade of pink lipstick. So many girls who waitress look the same – pretty blondes who aren’t gorgeous, and who don’t stand out in a crowd, but the customers think they’re cute, and not just the male customers. They have nice bodies in their form-fitting white blouses and tight black pants, but you can tell they’ll get fat as soon as they’ve had their second kid. This girl looked just like that.

She’s smart – she wants to go to Berkeley Law School when she’s finished with college – I heard her on the phone while she was getting a cigarette in. She attends a local college, and just got back from the beach where she had money to spend on a condo, groceries, and parties with older guys who are now doctors and lawyers. Dumped her boyfriend while she was at the beach – he had to stay home and work, and he accused her of being unfaithful while she was there. She couldn’t take the jealousy. He came to the restaurant and cried, so now everyone at work knows, and he went to her house and told her mom that the female friend she went to the beach with was a bad influence. Now she is on the phone to a guy she hasn’t seen in months, actively trying to make a lunch date between classes this week, because she needs a new boyfriend – she’s the type who can’t be without one. First, she tells him about getting promoted from hostess to server, and how much extra money this means for her, and then she says she hasn’t seen him in ages, and then informs him that she has just broken up with her boyfriend.

She talks about her job. She is making so much money now - $100 in tips for working a Friday lunch, $180 for working a Saturday lunch – she is the type that always gets hired for the well-paid jobs in the cliquey restaurants. She makes $3.25 an hour in wages, but it all just goes to taxes. She makes $450 a week just working weekends and one weekday, and she doesn’t even get the dinner shifts yet.

Just got back from the beach, but she is going to Pennsylvania next month, heading to New York with a girlfriend in October, and going back out to California in November. Waitressing pays for all of it – she certainly doesn’t have to pay her school tuition with her hard-earned money. And she’s on the five year plan, so there will be fewer classes to take each semester, with a more flexible schedule for waitressing. Once she gets the evening shifts, she’ll make more money each week than I make as a nurse.

It takes some work. The guy on the other end of the line keeps making excuses for why he can’t fit her into his class schedule. Then there is her class and work schedule to maneuver around. But by the end of the conversation she has got a tentative breakfast date on campus, and in another week or so, if all goes well, she’ll be able to say she has a new boyfriend.

She’s good at manipulating, but she’s still a team-player who is good with the customers – you can tell. These girls are all alike. Aggressive, ambitious, and hard-working – they get hired in the right restaurant by the time they’re 19 and they’ll be making $50,000 a year mostly under the table by the time they’re 21. They’ve got plenty of friends, plus a steady stream of boyfriends while they look for “The One”, a search that takes years. Most of them end up in law school; some of them get MBA’s.

I was never like her - neither as confident, superficial, or articulate. For me, love actually meant something special, and I couldn’t get it easily if I lost it – there was no way I could go from boyfriend to boyfriend at the drop of a hat. I was a waitress, too, but I couldn’t get hired at the cliquey restaurants because I didn’t have the right look.

Yet watching her, I felt amused instead of threatened. She’s cute, I thought, and fun to eavesdrop on. I am so much older than she is now that I no longer have to compete with her and her clones in any category that matters. So I guess I have reached my angle of repose, from which I can recline and watch the aggressive, smart-talkers who are destined to become so much more successful than I ever will be.

Thoughts On Cross-Stitch...

God, what an old-fashioned art this is. While knitting has kept up with the times, with new-fangled needles and super-pricey yarns, cross-stitch has really gone out of style among younger women. This is a problem, because older women who wear bifocals claim it is too difficult to do. They’re right – the holes in the fabric are tiny, the holes in embroidery needles are tiny, and the fanciest stitches (like the French Knot) are so delicate that you need a magnifier to see them properly. This means that the art has to be passed to women still young enough to master it. No wonder cross-stitch is dying out.

When I was a kid, I did a cross-stitch that was specially designed for kids. It had a pre-stamped fabric, and larger holes, so I could just follow along as if I was doing a paint-by-numbers, with a larger needle that a child could handle. These kits aren’t sold in the craft stores anymore – there is no market for them. They may be available online – I haven’t researched it.

The thread is cheap. It frays frequently. It is hard to separate without knotting it up. And I’m still very much a beginner. I spend more time putting a knot in the base of a new thread, threading the tiny needle, and doing ten trial-by-error stabs through the fabric as I just try to pinpoint the correct tiny hole than I actually do sewing.

Still, there is something incredibly meditative about cross-stitch. It can be the yoga of needlecraft. It’s a great way to waste hours at a time, and you can throw away a week on a small 5x7 picture without even thinking about it. The tale of Ichabod Crane comes to mind. Cross-stitch is a rabbit hole straight into Sleepy Hollow if there ever was one.

The wonderful thing about cross-stitch, though, is that it can be personalized in a way that few other crafts can be, once you get the hang of the lettering. Some one I know has a simple one hanging by her front door that depicts a woman with a broom and reads, “You think this place looks bad now? You should have seen it BEFORE I cleaned it up!” Who wouldn’t want a unique, framed piece like that? Framed cross-stitch pieces from kits end up in yard sales all the time, particularly in the Midwest, but I have noticed that these highly personalized pieces almost never get tossed at a public sale.

A lot of old-fashioned things are coming back in this recession era, from DIY gardens to hand-cut pasta, but cross-stitch conflicts with a need for daily exercise. It is an invitation to sit for hours at a time and get fat, and we already have computers for that. So I’m not predicting a renaissance…I’m just a stubborn hold-out who wonders if I can train a little pair of hands before she gets old enough to dump me and the needlework for a treadmill and a future smart phone that texts when you think at it.

UPDATE: THURSDAY, AUGUST 26, 2010
Cross-stitch was not as meditative as I hoped it would be. The end result is still beautiful, don't get me wrong. But I got so tired of the thread knotting up or fraying for no reason - the thread that comes with the kits is very cheap. The thread is constantly dropping out of the needle so that the needle needs to be re-threaded, which is a challenge when the needle has a tiny eye. And then, I swear, the needle seems to want to stab my finger without warning or reason.

After working on this project for a week, I switched back to knitting and was amazed at how much easier and less stressful it is to knit.

Beads and Quilts For The Bored, Cross-Stitch For the Poor

This is the signature piece of one of my favorite “quilt” artists, Judy Wickersham Schauerman






GOD, WHAT A LONG SLOW SUMMER...
It’s amazing what a broken foot won’t do (yeah, there’s a pun). It ruins a summer. I keep trying to think of different, more positive ways to look at it. Mixed feelings about how well that is working.

WHAT'S THE HARDEST THING ABOUT THIS SUMMER?
Between the sprained knee this past winter, and the broken foot this summer, I have put on so much weight...

Here I am at Wonder Books in Frederick, MD, where I have just spent $3.29 for a copy of Gods and Myths of Northern Europe by H.R. Ellis Davidson, originally published in 1964.

I never even realized the author was a woman – that name is deliberately deceptive. And given the fact that the quote on the header photo of this blog is from one of the Scandinavian sagas, you would think I would have read this classic in the field before now, but somehow I never got around to it. It was wonderful, BTW. I ate this book up.


WHAT SHOULD HAVE I BEEN DOING?
I should have been studying chemistry…so that I’ll know it if I get a chance to teach it. Well, I have done a little of that.

WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING TOO MUCH OF?
Sitting on my butt. More than halfway through a summer afghan that I really didn't need to finish for another couple of summers.

LOOKED INTO QUILTING…


I went to the library and Borders and looked at quilt books. In a book called, “Once Upon a Quilt: A Scrapbook of Quilting Past and Present”, I found a Japanese lantern quilt made in Pennsylvania around 1920, 25 cotton blocks, (sorry, no photo available). Simple white background, rich blue calico diamonds bordered b y solid red stripes for the lantern, red embroidery thread (I’m guessing) for the lantern handle, and the blocks are all set in a grid of solid lavender pieces, with a thin red border around the outside of the quilt. Perfect quilt for a beginner with some sewing knowledge…

But it will be years before I tackle something like this. Quilting classes are pricey, and necessary for a beginner, unless your female relatives still remember how to do it and can help you. Buying enough quilting fabric for a large quilt is ridiculously expensive now…you don’t save any money making a first quilt – in fact, an experienced quilter with access to wholesale fabric can probably make it for half of what it costs the beginning hobbyist. Quilt kits are popular for a reason…but then you can’t innovate as you go. And then there’s the time factor – no craft genre is more time-consuming than quilting. It’s a dream of mine to hang one beautiful display quilt at home someday, and be able to say that I made it. The fact remains that I will need to pay myself a six-month sabbatical to be able to do it.

Let me grow lovely,
growing old
So many fine things to do;
Knitting lace, darning holes, and forging gold.

LOOKED INTO BEADING…
This was interesting. Looked at all the books, got a feel for designs that I like, looked at the magazines, noticed ads for the bead shows and the big Bead Fest in Philadelphia in August. There’s a small shop in Frederick that has a necklace on display that I just loved – the designer who taught a class on how to make it is “on travel” all summer, so I may try to catch her in the fall.

MY “FIRST” IMPRESSION OF BEADING
There’s an awful lot of ugly jewelry out there, and you really have to sift the slush-pile for classic designs. Once you find what you like, the reasonably priced classes are out in the sticks (in Maryland -Frederick and beyond). There are a lot of techniques to learn – it takes a lot longer to become proficient in jewelry making than it does in say, knitting or crocheting.

You buy a lot of tools in the beginning. You take classes on things that you can learn for free at a knitting circle or from a friendly knit shop owner – beading is A LOT MORE of a business. Every stay-at-home mommy and their mother is doing jewelry shows out of their house, it seems. People who are attracted to beading want an opportunity to MAKE SOME CASH ON THE SIDE.

This is a big contrast to knitting, where the community has a long-standing tradition of knitting things and just giving them away. With knitting, there is constant pressure to be knitting something for somebody else. Nobody EVER asks a beader, “So, who are you beading that for?”

The other thing I've noticed is that the beading crowd has more than its fair share of folks with more money to spend than taste. I'm not sure if this is because a lot of techniques need to be learned before you can make something pretty (meaning that beginners get "stuck" making ugly jewelry in order to learn to the ropes). But I don't think that's it. I've seen some very simple jewelry look elegant, and it looks like "beginner jewelry" to me.

LOOKED INTO CROSS-STITCH EMBROIDERY KITS…
I kid you not. This is how bored I am. I haven’t done one of these since I was a very young child, and I had my mom and grandma helping me back then.
This is one of the cheapest crafts you can get started on – I found this little kit in the half-price bin at Michael’s for $4.25.

You need an embroidery hoop, and a couple of extra embroidery needles, and you probably need more thread than the kit is going to give you. But the whole project costs $25.00 tops, excluding the cost of framing it when you’re done.

This is important to me, because I'll be lucky if I pull in $1000.00 this month.

Let me be honest and say that I’m not sure when I’m actually going to start this project – I have all the pieces for a lace blouse and a retro black dress cut out and sitting in the trunk of my car – it’s been there over a year now. Plus, this is a grown-up embroidery kit – the pattern isn’t stamped directly on the fabric – and that’s the only kind I did as a kid. So this is going to be more of a challenge.

But I just love the theme “It’s All About The Journey”, and it’s 5 X 7 inches, so it’s totally portable. Portability is a big factor for me on crafts - this is why so many of my projects end up in my car. I knit at lunch. I crochet at teachers’ meetings when I can get away with it. If I can’t take it with me, I think twice about investing money on it.

WILL I MAKE IT THROUGH ANOTHER MONTH OF THIS?
I ask myself this all the time now. I'm off to half-price happy hour to get my mind off it.

Long Summer Days

Derain, Andre Arbres-a-Collioure 1905

This painting is what summer means to me.

I was in a lot of pain the first three weeks after I fell and broke my foot – chronic, low-grade pain that never went away except when I slept. About a week ago, that pain finally dried up, and I immediately gave up the crutches the moment I could. Now I am limping everywhere, with my foot in a surgical shoe, but no ace bandage (God, is that thing hot in one hundred degree heat). I’m keeping my fingers crossed for August 20 (the six week mark) but I’m mentally trying to prepare for Sept 6 (I’m a slow healer.)

A month after I fell and broke my foot, I’m still trying to decide whether I was better off having this happen. There’s a lot of confusion in my mind over whether this was a blessing in disguise, or a total pain-in-the-ass misfortune - the real meaning of Jupiter/Chiron/Neptune on my MC in this year’s Solar Return, I suppose.

I had planned to work this summer, put some money in savings, upgrade my museum-piece cell phone, replace the digital camera that has been broken now for nine months, and pay off some bills. That didn’t happen. The economy is such a disaster here that it is impossible to find a job just for the summer that will accommodate the disability – I decided I would be better off reviewing chemistry, so that I can get ready to apply to public school teaching fellowships in the fall as a chemistry teacher. Still, there is a part of me that would really like a job, a part-time job, just to help me stay focused. But it’s a full time job to find a part-time job, so…maybe after I’ve gotten some other things done.

There’s been oodles of time on my hands this summer. Time to read – Maile Meloy’s short story collection, “Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It”, which was wonderful. Time to read “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert - she’s a good writer, and it was an interesting book. She is also an annoying, one-hit-wonder kind of writer. She trashed Bali for everyone who has to go there after she did – Lonely Planet Bali even did a boxed inset titled, “That Damn Book”, in their section on Ubud.

She appears to have done the same thing with “Committed”, the book she published after her blockbuster. “Committed” is 250+ pages of her trashing marriage after she just got remarried herself. (Let me be the one to admit that I only skimmed it briefly, and didn’t want to devote the time to read it.) But at least I had the time to read whatever “struck me fancy” while hanging out at the Border Books in Frederick, MD (where I have spent an inordinate amount of time since breaking my foot). Like that would have happened if I had been working this summer.

There’s been time to daydream. I liked the section on Italy in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book a lot. If I can get the job I want in the Emirates a couple of years from now, and if the dollar stays reasonably strong against the Euro,I could totally see myself spending a month or more in Italy during my first free summer. I’ll have the money to do it – it’s a short, convenient flight from the Emirates. I started reading guidebooks, and planning a grown-up vacation (in fact, my first real grown-up vacation someplace outside the U.S.), instead of the backpacker kind I did the last time I was in Italy as a college student twenty years ago, (and I was only there for a week, nowhere near enough time for Italy).

Of course, July and August are high season in Italy, and the place would be overrun with tourists. I’d have to reserve everything far in advance. I’d have to put up with a lot of aggravation. And while I would hop flights from northern to southern Italy to save time (something I could not afford when I was younger), I would still be using trains to get around, because I don’t want to have to drive there – it’s the parking nightmare that boils my blood pressure, and not the steep, twisty roads.

I’ve always dreamed of going to Sicily – my grandmother’s parents were from there. The guidebooks inform me that Sicily will be a tourist madhouse in July or August, and the heat could be about as bad as it is in the Emirates.So maybe I could swing it, and maybe I couldn’t. But at least I could get as far south as Naples, with its amazing pizza and gelato, and not have to worry about my weight at all – I can eat whatever I want with a net loss when I ditch the car for a month or so. And maybe I could just relax on some of those little islands off the coast of Naples if I didn’t have the energy to make it all the way to Sicily.

When I was in Rome twenty years ago, I arrived on New Year’s Eve, and had everything stolen on the platform as soon as I got off the train (Rome was awful on crime twenty years ago – I understand things have really changed). My money was in a money belt underneath my padded plaid jacket, but I had nothing else left. I made my way to the American embassy, only to find out that it would be closed for several days over New Year’s. Outside the embassy, I remember standing there and crying, and this priest who spoke good English came along and felt sorry for me. He let me stay for free in his monastery some place near the church with the statue of St. Teresa of Avila for the long weekend – twenty years later, the only thing I remember is that he took me to see St. Teresa of Avila, and I stood there, like, forever - absolutely bowled over by it. [Just googled it, it is the Bernini statue and the church is Santa Maria della Vittoria - wish I could remember the monastery, it was right nearby].

But I digress…ah yes, Italy is on the brain. I’ve been multi-tasking as I write this blog, and checking out the agricultural B&B’s online at the same time. This is the one I really like,Casa del Grivio . It is in Friuli, that forgotten northeast corner of Italy on the border of Austria and Slovenia. The owners have a sweet, non-native way of expressing themselves in English that is charming (or else I’m a sucker for it). They seem like really nice people. I’m going to remember this one, particularly since tourists don't bother much with Friuli.

I came to Border’s to do chemistry today. But I haven’t spoken with the mother of my god-daughter in awhile, so maybe today would be a good day to call her. I still have to learn that short rows technique for the sweater I am trying to finish, which means I should call Christy and find a convenient time to go hang out in her shop a little while. Man, I love summer, and I love having it to myself without having to work an extra job. There’s no way I would be a teacher if I didn’t get my two months of summer vacation – I’ve got no problem admitting it either.