Shewbox.org

Feeling like listening to some Múm this morning

If there is one thing I really cannot stand about waiting tables, it is not having any control over who walks in the door when.  Or to narrow that statement down further, I hate it when it has been a slow shift and, after I have prepared everything to get ready to go home, people walk in right before we close.  On the one hand, I understand where my money comes from (and I do make decent money here).  But on the other hand, if it has been slower and I am in a mindset to go home, someone coming in at the last minute throws everything off balance.  Instead of going home in the next 15 minutes or so, now you have to stay for another hour.  Just for one table.  Just for a few more bucks.  Having completed all of my side work I can only sit brooding while my table talks and laughs and enjoys themselves oblivious to the inconvenience they have just caused for their waiter, the kitchen staff, and the manager.

Last night was one of those nights.  Actually, it was really slow all day long (probably due to the nasty weather), and I had just one table left about 30 minutes before closing time.  At this point I have made around 50 bucks in 8 hours, which is terrible compared to my average.  I am tired of being in the place and aching to go home, grab a beer, crash on the couch and turn off my brain.  Days like these, you want to be walking out of the place by 9pm.  Of course, right as I am thinking that we surely won’t have anyone else come in, I see the door opening and four college students are coming in.  I act without thinking.  I rush to the front of the restaurant and before these people can even open their mouths I tell them that, sorry, we closed early because it was so slow.  Their mouths open, disappointment on their faces.  Before they can formulate some sort of argument on why I should serve them even after I told them we were closed (and believe me, this has happened before, as if I would really change my mind and gladly serve you after I told you to go away), I turn around and walk to the back.  They stand there looking pathetic and stupid (or looking like that to me since I’m upset and want them to go away so I can go home) for a moment more before turning around and leaving.  I feel triumphant but nervous at the same time;  the manager does NOT want us doing that.  But because they didn’t come in the kitchen staff was even able to finish early and everyone left 15 minutes after nine.  4 people left a little disappointed, but 6 of us left very happy, eager to be going back to our families just a little bit ahead of schedule.

At a school, but not seeming to be a student.  The school is VERY large, also seeming to house all grades.  I don’t remember much of the dream except two key parts.  First, I remember a huge cavernous room on the side of the school that is in ruins.  It is almost completely dark, and I am in there with someone else although I don’t know who it is now.  There were several dark creatures in this room, and one in particular kept flying at me as I tried to move about the room.  It was a very large winged creature with a nasty looking beak, but I never got a good look at it because it stayed in the shadows as it tried to attack me.  Scared, I managed to escape from the room into a different room with a few teachers, or maybe they were administrators.  I told them about the terrible creature in the cavernous room, but they didn’t seem to care at all.  I tried to get them to go in there ,to see the terrible beasts so they would do something about them, but they gave no sign of concern.  I decided to take matters into my own hands then.  But instead of trying to do something to rid the huge, wrecked room of its terrors, I thought it would be best if I just burned down the whole school.  Suddenly, I’m walking around the outside of the school (which is one gigantic building).  It is dark outside, and I am walking around the back of the building with my friend Michael.  There is debris everywhere and it looks as though no one has bothered to clean up in ages.  We take some gasoline and throw it over some of the debris in several different places and light it up.  It isn’t long before all the debris behind the school is ablaze and soon after that the entire school begins to burn to the ground.  This is when my dream (or my memory of my dream) skips to the next part.

The second half of the dream seemed to take place after the first, but in this part I am in an auditorium (also very large) filled with people.  I got the impression that this auditorium was in a school, but seeing as that I burned down the last school I don’t know if this is in the same school I was dreaming of earlier.  Andrew Buck comes out on stage and does a singing and dancing routine to the delight of the packed auditorium.  I watch for most of the program, but before the last number I walk down to the left of the stage.  Andrew is getting a prop ready for the last number, which is to put together a bed for some reason.  But he is having trouble putting it together (why it isn’t already assembled I have no clue). I try to help him figure it out, but i am having no luck either.  Then suddenly Andrew says that he actually doesn’t need the bed together on stage, but that he just needs the parts strewn about on stage.  Several other people at this point come up to try to help, but he explains to all of them that the bed is just fine like it is.  And the rest is too vague to recall.

This is the difference between living in Miami and now living in Bloomington again:

Ah, the joys of comment spam.  In an effort to prevent me having to keep marking comments as spam, I’m trying out a simple captcha plugin for wordpress:  Did you Pass Math?

I do find it amusing how I have practically no human visitors to my site but spam bots manage to find me just fine, wanting to link to all sorts of “fantastic opportunities”.   So if you are a real human, why not try to post a comment?  You have to correctly answer a very basic math question, and then I have to approve your comment.   But hopefully I won’t get so much spam even in the moderation stage.  Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.