Every morning I get up and make coffee. Holly and I sit in the living room, browsing the internet, and every now and again my gaze shifts from my monitor to the window next to my desk. Somehow, every day I manage to time my aimless staring outside to the same dog taking a dump on our driveway. It’s like a morning ritual. Make coffee, check email, watch a dog pooping. The dog doesn’t seem particularly apologetic about it, often looking up at me at the window while its back leg twitches. I often nod my approval to its owner after he cleans up after the mutt. Then I put on some clothes.
Today, my view is dominated by the snow that’s falling at quite a rapid rate. Snow is something I’ve only recently started getting used to. Last winter was pretty mild, and the snow levels stayed quite remarkably low. The four years prior to that were spent in Scotland - where there is usually no snow to speak of. Of course, as soon as I left, Scotland (and the UK in general) have experienced two of their harshest winters ever.
Anyway. Every time there is a heavy snowfall, I have very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it’s beautiful. We live on a tree-lined street, and there are lots of pretty houses getting covered in snow. On the other hand, every time it snows I need to shovel the sidewalk again.
Imagine if you had to sit and watch as your carpet got covered in cat hair. Imagine that somehow time was sped up so you could watch it accumulate in the space of an hour and a half. Now imagine that the government made it mandatory that you had to hoover your carpet within an hour of the cat hair messing up your carpet or they would fine you. This is what I feel like when it snows.
Don’t get me wrong - I don’t mind shoveling that much, it’s just disheartening to know that as soon as you clear it, it’ll just build up again. I also worry that I’m somehow doing it wrong. I haven’t very much experience with this sort of thing, so I’m kind of improvising as soon as I go out there. I have three main tools at my disposal; a large shovel, a broom and a metal scraper thing on the end of a stick. I’m pretty sure that I’m using them in the correct fashion, but the task is so simple that I don’t want to ask anyone to be sure. All the people walking by always smile at me as they walk past, but it’s difficult to tell if they’re being friendly or find my efforts to clear the ice to be hilarious.
If the Canadian government suddenly decide to follow their American counterparts and introduce a citizenship test for new immigrants, I’m willing to be that they won’t be asking them about previous Prime Ministers, they’ll be handing them snow shovels and getting them to order coffee at Tim Hortons. I’d say that’s what being Canadian is all about.
There are things in life that are fun. Crosswords are fun. Watching movies can be fun. Playing football is fun. Drinking with friends is fun. There are other things in life that should be fun, but aren’t. Shopping for underwear with my wife should be fun. Society tells me that it should be an enjoyable experience. It’s not.
It’s probably my fault, as most of these things are. I am missing the part of my brain that allows me to access my imagination while the process is going on, meaning that I just get bored really quickly. Unless Holly’s actually going to model the underwear, everything starts to look the same after a while. She tells me that this particular pair of panties are nice. I can’t help but think that they look much like the same pair that she was holding three minutes ago. Sure, I can see that a certain bra is going to look good as she’s holding it near her chest, but eventually my brain tells me that she’s just picking up different coloured pieces of fabric and putting them down again. My input moves from the normal husbandy platitudes (“Yeah, they look great, darling”) to just barely remaining conscious of where I am and what I’m doing (“Wha? Yeah, sure, they go better with your eyes.).
It’s supposed to be a sexy thing, you know? Helping the wife pick out some new underwear? No. Without wanting to horrify anyone that’s reading this by revealing too many details, my wife is beautiful. She’s sexy. Her underwear? Meh. I think she looks awesome in anything. Granted, some things more than others, but I’m not that interested in getting involved in the process of buying them. As I’ve said many times before, no woman has ever taken her clothes off and had a guy turn her down because her underwear was unattractive. We like to focus on the bigger picture. And the bigger picture usually doesn’t involve underwear, ifYouKnowWhatI’mSayingandIThinkYouDo.
The reason I mention this is that I made the mistake of accompanying her when she went shopping for some nylon tights today. In Holly’s defence, we only went to one store and we spent what must’ve been a maximum of 8 minutes in the store. The only way the eight minutes could’ve felt longer would’ve been if I had been forced to have a rectal exam while waiting at the checkout.
I understand that there’s a very specific type of nylon tights that’s she was looking for. They had to be sheen, and black and of a certain length and size (my wife is very tall). They had to be within a price range. This is good. Knowing what you need/want before you enter the store is good. It saves time because you don’t have to work out what you want while you’re there.
The problem is that all nylons are identical. They all look exactly the same. Yes, Holly might walk around feeling the fabric of each, AS IF THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE, but we all know that the quality of these things are exactly the same (or at the very least, impossible to discern from touching it with your thumb and forefinger). They’re the same colour. The pattern on them changes, but she doesn’t want patterns on her tights. We determined that right at the beginning (when I was still paying attention). She has no brand loyalty. We’re effectively comparing glorified identical socks.
She wasn’t shopping based on what she needed, she was shopping based on how each item made her feel. And that’s where I’m lost, because nylons don’t make me feel anything other than bored.
After the eight minutes of looking at disembodied legs, Holly chose the mid-priced pair that look suspiciously like the other fifteen million pairs that weren’t quite up to her standards. She’ll wear them five times, they’ll get laddered and the cycle will repeat again, and we’ll go shopping for some more. Probably at a different store. Hopefully somewhere that sells beer.
I recently got married. This holiday season was the first time I’ve had the opportunity to experience a Christmas with the new in-laws. I’m well liked by Holly’s family (mostly because of my awesomeness) so I wasn’t really nervous. That said, it was certainly very different from my usual Christmas, and that brings a certain degree of apprehensiveness.
Last year I sat in my house with my friend Danny and got drunk. Just the two of us. We watched Elf and Home Alone and Dan fell asleep at 3pm. When you’re in a foreign country over the holidays, Christmas day just turns into a day off work where you can start drinking early and eat more chocolate than usual.
The year before was in Scotland. Christmas day with my parents is spent on the couch. It’s the one day of the year that my dad cooks for my mum, and the day is run with a kind of military precision. My father doesn’t really see the point of cooking without a clearly laid out plan and a very specific recipe and timing for each part of the meal, so we’re able to have a timetable as to how the day is going to go - we can usually work it around the television schedule. Most of the time we don’t really move unless we absolutely have to. I end up doing the dishes. It’s a day for just the three of us.
When Christmas rolled around this year and I faced the prospect of hanging out with so many of Holly’s family all at once, I just wanted the evening to pass by without much in the way of incident. I decided not to drink too much, I would eat, I would make jokes every now and again, and I would provide Christmas hugs when prompted. I would entertain the kids when they weren’t entertaining each other, and the festivities would be wrapped up by 10.30. Easy.
All of this went as planned, apart from the part where I electrocuted myself.
Now, believe me when I say this - there isn’t much you can do when you electrocute yourself in front of your new wife and all of her extended family (four generations worth of people, folks). I made the mistake of touching the metal outer part of a coffee urn which wasn’t grounded. My brother-in-law, Jeremy, had asked me to check if the coffee was hot. It wasn’t. I was half-sitting on a couch when it happened, and I rather quickly found myself in a more lying-down-ish position. After the initial shock, there was a wave of concern from Holly’s Aunts (there was a few nurses in attendance), but once it was clear that I was okay, the jokes began.
“Dude, when I said that we should get buzzed tonight, that wasn’t quite what I meant.”
“Jon, I know that spending time with our family can be pretty shocking, but you’re taking it to the extreme!”
The kids started picking up random objects and shuddering before falling to the floor in convulsive laughter. As electrocutions go, it was still relatively minor - there was no scarring or burning and the main side effect was a headache that hung around for a couple of hours - but I’m going to forever be known as the guy who got electrocuted at Christmas that one time. The story will follow me around. I’ll be fifty and Jeremy will be telling my kids about the time I got a shock from a broken coffee urn. Then I’ll tell his kids that it was ALL THEIR DAD’S FAULT. I guess this is how families work.
Here’s a supposedly interesting thing I’m sure you don’t really want to know: I slept until 1pm today. I’ve been awake for 90 minutes. It’s Monday.
Working in the service industry for so long, I’ve met many young grasshoppers in my time and tried to give them the benefit of my experience. I started out 10 years ago (sigh) and I’ve made pretty much every mistake it’s possible to make while working in bars and restaurants in two different continents. I’m still only 29, but I’m in a position where I’m able to take a 19 year old kid aside and give them an idea of a way to work in ‘the industry’ without losing their minds. The problem is when I break my own rules and start repeating my mistakes.
Rule one of working late nights: DON’T SLEEP PAST MIDDAY. All other rules are irrelevant. If you don’t follow rule 1 you’ll burn out within 6 months. You just can’t do it. I’ve tried every kind of sleep schedule, and talked to hundreds of people that work late nights, and I gotta tell you - you can’t sleep until the afternoon, no matter what time you got home last night. There have been nights where I’ve finished at 6am and I’ve dragged my ass out of bed at 11.30am, because once you go past that midday mark it sparks a chain reaction that screws you up for DAYS. Seriously.
I’m working again today at 4pm. That means I’ve had three hours of conciousness before I go back to work. That sucks because you can’t really get in a non-work headspace. One thing that keeps you sane while working in a restaurant: feeling like you have a life outside of the building. Even if it’s just for a few hours every day. I’ve seen a lack of outside time destroy servers and chefs, managers and bussers. We all need to feel like we got something else going on. No matter how much you love being at work. The most unhappy I’ve ever been at work is when I went days where I’d work late, sleep later and then come straight back into work. We all need some time out. That means getting up earlier. If I’d been following my own rules I’d have gotten up by 10.30am.
Today I had breakfast at 1.30pm and I won’t have anything more to eat before I start my shift. At 5pm I’ll be STARVING. I’ll eat dinner around 9pm. I’ll finish work at 1am, and I won’t be tired, but I’ll be hungry. I won’t eat anything to try and get to sleep. The human body generally gets sleepy again 14 hours after it wakes up. By that reckoning, I’ll get tired around 5am. Then I’ll be tempted to sleep late, and the cycle will repeat itself again.
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