So I’m a week and a half late for that post title. Waaah.

I quit The Restaurant! It looks like my promotion at The Hospital is going to require my hours to be a bit more flexible, so I won’t be able to make a schedule commitment to The Restaurant anymore.

At least, that’s what I told the owners.

I caught them both at the same time on the day I wanted to give my notice. LadyOwner isn’t too bad, but BossMan is a bit of a pill. I was really looking forward to his reaction.

Red: Hey guys!

Them: Hey Red.

Red: Do you have a second?

LadyOwner: Sure. (BossMan is silent)

Red: I just wanted to let you know that I have to put in my two weeks’ notice. (BossMan turns around and walks away) I got a promotion at The Hospital and my time won’t be as flexible, so I can’t commit to shifts here.

LadyOwner: Blah blah, congratulations on the propmotion, we’ll miss you, blah blah.

He just WALKED AWAY when I was talking! How dare he rob me of my moment of triumph?! I wanted him to cry! I’m actually the last waitress standing there right now. Meghan got fired, Natalie quit last week, and one of the bartenders also has her notice in as well. That leaves one bartender and one bartender/waitress to run the joint. E is pretty pleased that now BossMan and LadyOwner will finally have to do some actual work around The Restaurant instead of sitting at the bar all night “supervising” while they drink up what little profit we make.

This is why I REALLY quit:
In lieu of crappy tips, I am now raking in some bigger bucks tutoring high school English students. The pay is better, the hours are better (6-7 a week at $60 per!), and the kids are a trip. Look for more about them on here in the future; they do some pretty nuts things. I never really wanted to be a teacher – I was always afraid I’d end up on the news with a headline like “English Teacher beats student to death with comma splices” or something of that nature. Tutoring, I am noticing, is much more pleasant. I only have three students and they actually WANT to do well, so that’s a definite plus, along with the fact that it is awfully nice to feel smarter than someone once in awhile.

“Heart disease is the number one killer of women in America! Ladies, we’re going to change that!”

*cheers*

I punched the button to a new radio station. I do not like commercials.

Medical research is near and dear to my heart. Working in a high-powered research hospital gives you an eyeball into the crazy things that most Americans have no idea are being developed so they can carry on their little lives a bit longer and in finer form. It’s quite exciting.

Of course, research takes money. Lots of money. And unless the people dying of all these diseases are leaving the equivalent of a medium-sized country’s GDP to research in their wills, there will continue to be fundraisers and awareness campaigns and so on.

Back to the aforementioned radio commercial about heart disease. That heart disease is terribly prevalent in American women today I do not contest. Heart disease runs in my family. I understand that this is bad. But when I hear a chirpy spokeswoman for the American Heart Association shouting to the skies:

“Ladies, we’re going to change that!”

I have to wonder – change it to WHAT?

SOMETHING has to be the number one Grim Reaper. And if it isn’t heart disease, what would you rather it be? I personally would much rather have a massive heart attack at 55 and die straight away than acquire at 55 a cancer that will eat my body inside out for 5 years before I tell the “you can beat this!” people to beat themselves and leave me alone.

Auto accidents are pretty high on the Causes of Death list too. I don’t think I’d like to die in a car accident at any age, really. Or be murdered. Violence doesn’t do much for me, so I think I’d prefer the heart attack in those situations too. I’d also rather have a heart attack than burn up in a fire, fall off a cliff, choke on my breakfast, drown, or perish in a terrorist attack – just for the record.

When you think about it, heart disease is about as close as you can really come to death by “natural causes.” Now I’m not a doctor, but I think that “natural causes” is just a nicer way of saying “We have no idea what really happened to you and probably should have known while you were alive, but this will make your family feel better since it sounds so peaceful.” They said my great-grandma died of natural causes… she was ninety-six and just didn’t wake up in morning. When your heart stops beating and lungs stop breathing, I guess that’s natural. My great-aunt had a “natural” lung cancer. No one else put it there. The thing was entirely organic and grew on its own. So wasn’t hers also death by natural causes?

I vote to reclaim “Natural Causes” and apply it to all deaths of a pathological nature. If parts of your body stop working (and no one severed them or applied brute force) and it causes you to die, then that is death by Natural Causes. Some might argue that the things that cause many cancers (cigarette smoke, asbestos) and the things that cause heart disease (poor diet, lack of exercise) are in fact external factors that people can control and ought not be classified as natural. Bull balls, I say. Some people get lung cancer and have never smoked. Some never get it after 6 packs a day for 20 years. If a cause of death is always and only caused by something outside the body (say, another person or a fire) then it is not a Natural Cause.

And we should not fear Natural Causes, really. Of course we should always do what we can to keep ourselves healthy, and I would never say that it’s a bad thing to raise money for medical research. But come on people… if you cure Natural Causes, we’ll have to populate North Dakota because everyone will just keep on living, run out of money, and need to escape to Canada.

Oh HELL yeah!

http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=294827&gt1=7701

Robert Redford is taking on Bill Bryson’s “A Walk In the Woods” (one of the best books ever. EVER.) for an upcoming film project.

I have faith in Robert Redford as an actor and a director, and I have to say I’m quite pleased that it’s him of all people. Please Jesus let him do it justice. And Robert – have no mercy casting Stephen Katz.

The Restaurant is driving us crazy, my boyfriend and I. We’re both seriously on the verge of quitting and letting the alcoholics who own the joint fend for themselves when their underappreciated employees walk out. They promised a raise to one of E’s staff and when it didn’t show up on the paycheck… well, it went something like this:

E: Hey, BossMan, Evan’s raise didn’t show up on his paycheck this week.

BossMan: What raise? Did we talk about this?

E: Yeah, after Justin was fired and you and I agreed Evan would come on full-time here and get a raise.

BossMan: When did we decide this?

E: Two weeks ago, at the beginning of this pay period.

BossMan: Was I drinking?

E: Um, yeah, you’d had a couple beers I guess…

BossMan: Well then how do you expect me to remember THAT?

And so on.

It wouldn’t be too hard for me to walk away… I work full-time at The Hospital and actually just got a bit of a promotion at The Hospital, so I’m in decent shape, dollar-wise. For E, on the other hand, The Restaurant is his bread and butter, as it were. He comes home every night frustrated and angry, torn between the fact that he hates his job and the fact that he’s good at it and doesn’t want to let The Restaurant fail. If he walks, that place will fall apart at the seams and we all know it.

We spent a few evenings working on his resume. Managerial experience, sales experience, budget work, etc… he’s got the degree and qualifications to get out of this business that he hates, but to where? Qualifications can only get you so far when you have even one major limitation.

E is dyslexic. This is a completely foreign concept to me. I could read before kindergarten and was into chapter books in first grade, Greek and Roman mythology in second, and full-fledged novels when I was about 9. I was a pretty precocious child in that regard, nose in a book all day, under the covers with a flashlight after bedtime. Books were a world for me, an escape into which I could indulge my vivid imagination and create stories of my own. I wrote poems, songs, short stories, and still harbor the aspiration of completing the novel I’ve started about four times now.

I’ve wondered all my life how people could not like to read. I thought they were just reading the wrong things – schoolbooks only, being forced to deconstruct and write papers on things they weren’t interested in, curriculum-required reading, etc. But I just knew that if these anti-readers could find the right kind of books for their interests, they would understand.

I thought these things until I met E and watched him struggle to do what comes so easily to me, narrowing his eyes and concentrating on putting letters into words, words into sentences, turning sentences into meaning. He’s smart, he really is so smart and well-spoken, and it’s hard for me to comprehend the disconnect. And it’s harder still to know that he watches me read and understand so quickly, his self-esteem sinks a little bit because he can’t do what I can do. Not in an emasculating sense, mind you, just the same things he’s felt his whole life.

The skills and experience he has are highly marketable in various industries. I’ll say this, the man’s got people skills. He has a strong work ethic, cares about employees and customers and always puts his heart into his work – even now, when he hates the job he does and the people he works for. But the transition is scary… any business he goes into outside of The Restaurant is going to require him to write, to keep databases and send emails and so on. And he’ll struggle and fight for it, and it won’t be like the rest of us struggling to adjust or find a path in a new job. It will be ongoing, and I’m scared for him. You never like to see a person you love hurting, and his dyslexia hurts him.

I want to be there for him, to help him show off the skills he has to a prospective employer and get a job he’ll like and excel at. But I don’t want him to think he’s not good on his own. So where is the fine line between encouragement and nagging?

I have a tendency to take over, I know that. It’s kind of my job as a team leader and project coordinator, I’m supposed to direct people and keep things on track, in scope, and on schedule. But I’m going to try, for his sake, to clock out at the end of the day at The Hospital and come home to just be the girlfriend and rub his shoulders while he sits at the computer.

My best friend has up and joined the Police Academy. I was really just kidding when I bought her that “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” t-shirt at the Houston Rodeo last year. I’m so very happy for her (really) because while various life events have kept her from applying until recently, I know this has been a dream of hers for a long time.

The big bummer is the fact that homegirl will no longer be working with me at The Hospital. No more project buddy, no more lunch buddy, no more person to bug on Instant Messenger when she’s busy and I’m not. This is what I get for having only one friend.

Ah, such nostalgia – the unit secretary and resource assistant days we shared, the mutual upward move to Perioperative Services and subsequent cluelessness about our new environment. We sat through Lean Sigma Yellow Belt training and pulled off a major presentation in 2 1/2 days. We pick each other’s brains for ideas, work on project teams, and have developed a reputation as the Wonder Twin Powers. (Well, we call ourselves that. Everyone else just thinks we’re good to put on a project together, but we like to pretend we’re superheroes because we always pull it off with aplomb.)

These days are coming to an end. Of course, I still live just down the street from her, and I suspect that the corner of her couch where I always crash will develop a much more prominent dent in the shape of my butt over the months to come. Sure, we’ll still have pizza and beer nights when we do nothing but amuse ourselves with her baby’s ever-changing antics while her husband is plugged into World of Warcraft. She’ll still be my sounding board and I’ll still be hers, but it’s a sad, sad day when The Hospital loses a stellar employee and I lose my best homegirl at work.

I thought about titling this post “Apocalypse Now,” but I thought that might be a teesy bit overdramatic. After all, I contributed to this. I filled out the character reference for the Metropolitan Police Department and said all sorts of glowing and warm fuzzy things about her work ethic, determination, committment, mighty omnipotence, etc. I conveniently chose to leave out those instances of public drunkenness and expulsion from hoosier dive bars, because I know how important this is to her. (Plus, I only heard about that bounced-from-the-bar night secondhand, so I couldn’t honestly say that I KNOW that happened. Public drunkenness and a deep appreciation for PBR and Stag, this I can attest to.)

And so, in memory of a great working relationship and in honor of a continuing friendship, I have written a haiku. Mel – this is for you.

Trade blue scrubs for blue
polyester, new holster
on her Yellow Belt.