July 2006 ArchivesI had one of those “Time’s moving forward and I’m standing still.” moments today while on my lunch break. There’s a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis called Peter’s Grill that’s been there since the mid 1910’s. It has an old fashioned neon sign hanging outside with a 50’s like depiction of the dining experience. I used to go there a lot because even though the food wasn’t exactly moderately priced ($8+ for a burger), it was one of the few places downtown that you could actually smoke in. Me and my ex friend Melanie used to go there for lunch because it was right across the street from where we worked and we didn’t have to burn 15 to 20 minutes standing outside smoking.
They closed on July 3rd of this year. It was very unceremonious, very quiet, very eerie. There was no goodbye, no “Hey! We’re closing! Come taste our really good food at half price!” fanfare. Just a note on the door saying they would be closed for the 4th, reopening on the 5th.
Only they never reopened. All the tables are set, glasses turned upside down waiting to have water poured in them. Salt and pepper shakers placed to one side ready to be used, silverware set carefully on paper napkins ready to assist diners in consuming a ham and cheese omelet or a fried chicken dinner. There’s even little silk flowers set into vases behind the salt and pepper shakers. It’s like the airport in Stephen King’s “The Langoliers”, like some sort of stage that’s been set awaiting a scene to start.
I walked past it on my way to get my lunch and looked in the windows as I went by and was struck by the sadness of the entire scene. It was like the entire restaurant was looking out at passersby saying, “Hey...what did I do? Don’t you want to come in and have a bite to eat? I’m ready. My forks are clean and if this one napkin isn’t enough, I can get you more.”
I’m willing to bet that it was the smoking ban that passed last March, outlawing smoking in the entire county’s public places (some bars excluded if their liquor sales made up a majority portion of their profits) that put the last nail in the coffin. You used to have to wait 10 to 15 minutes for a table and with the plethora of choices available downtown to your average lunch rush customer, that is saying something. But since the smoking ban, busy tables were fewer and farther between.
Time marches on, and sometimes it leaves a stamp on a place and sometimes it leaves that stamp on your heart.
Goodbye Peter’s. I wanted to have just one more chicken sandwich but I guess I’ll have to settle for the memories.
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I was watching tv (shocking I know) and noticed something that's been dancing around the peripheries of my consciousness for quite some time. When they have commercials on for male sexual enhancement, be it a product for erectile dysfunction or just male arousal enhancement, they all have pretty much the same selling points. The guy is doing very guy things, watching football, playing golf, something with power tools, etc. And there’s always a woman making doe eyes at him, be it his wife, or just some hot little hoochie. But they are always pretty much the same. The guy needs some woman to be all over him, or be very overt about the fact that she wants to have sex with him, and he drops everything to pop a pill.
There was one on today for female sexual enhancement. The entire commercial consisted of the woman shopping. That’s it. Just shopping. No guy fawning over her, or acting like she’s the end all be all of sexuality. She’s just shopping. I think at the end they showed her hugging some guy but it was presented as if she’d been out all day and they ran into each other, a sort of ‘oh hello! I haven’t seen you all day!’ sort of moment.
It seems to me to speak volumes to not only what the differences are in what men and women feel sexy about, but also what it takes to make them happy. It also shows the differences in the stereotypes of how men and women are viewed in society. A man needs to feel that a woman desires him in order to be sexually aroused while a woman can have an orgasm by finding the perfect pair of shoes, multiple if they’re on sale.
How far we’ve come.
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Mommy it's too fucking hot!!!!!!!
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What does one say on a blog with no readers? Pretty much anything that one wants to. That's the beauty and the curse of anonymity...nobody's reading so fuck if I'm actually going to offend anyone.
Yesterday after work I inadvertently chased some old woman across the street. See...I'm what I like to think of as a "Considerate Smoker". We're a rare breed. We're the ones who get mad when other smokers drop their cigarette butts on the ground when they are 5 feet from an ashtray. We're the ones who will stand away from a crowd of people in an effort to avoid blowing possibly (probably) unwanted smoke in someone else's face. We're the ones who have no problem whatsoever not smoking in the house or car of a non-smoker. And we're the ones who will sit in the non-smoking section of a restaurant if we are with non-smokers.
So I get out of work and light my cigarette on the way to the corner to cross the street and wait for the bus home. As per usual, I stand well away from the crowd of street crossers gathered at the curb waiting for the light to change. I look to my left (cigarette in my right hand and held away from me) and see this old woman pushing her way through the crowd to be at the front when the light changes. She takes one look at me, scowls and shoves the end of the really fucking ugly scarf she has around her neck into her face and holds it there like she's just stepped into an air-tight room with all the dying cast members of "Outbreak". The light changes and she starts run/walking across the street, turning back to glare at me with literally every step she takes.
Being the incredibly obnoxious person that I am, I start to walk faster. She drops the scarf from her face but about half way across the street, she sees that I'm gaining on her, and throws the scarf back over her nose and mouth and her entire upper body bolts forward while her 384 year old legs try to catch up. She looks back at me so often and with so much force that I half expected her head to come off its swivel and go bouncing down the street and into oncoming traffic.
She was walking away from me, and into the wind. I realize that some people are sensitive to smoke but come on now. It isn't as though there was a gang of us surrounding her and letting the smoke hang around her head like some sort of evil halo or something.
She got across the street, almost tripped and fell stepping up on the curb because she was too busy looking to see where I was, made some sort of grunting noise that I'm sure if I had my secret decoder ring would have translated loosely into something like "YOU GO TO HELL! YOU GO TO HELL AND YOU DIE!", and dashed into the church on the corner.
I hope that there is a little black cancer-like cell forming in the corner of your heart you withered old bitch because there are worse things in the world than having to walk into the wind in front of one person smoking for 5 seconds.
Being thin(ner) and riding a bus sucks. Since I'm no longer afraid of people sitting next to me, I no longer walk to the back to sit in an attempt to avoid having someone sit next to me. I sit right up in front, in the first sideways facing seat next to the door so I can get off quickly once the bus arrives at my destination. The drawback to this is that the seat is grouped together with 2 others that in no way, shape, or form can accommodate 3 grown adults.
Today after work, I got on and took my seat. An older lady got on after me and took the seat at the other end of the three seat section, putting her 2 bags on the seat between us. Well, since the bus I usually take either didn't show up or was very late, the bus was packed to standing room only. A few stops down the road and this guy got on and without missing a beat says to the lady, "Excuse me, ma'am." and without even giving her time to respond starts moving her bags off the seat so he can sit down. He proceeds to sit on me. Literally on my thigh. I moved sideways a bit and yanked my skirt out from under him and made a production of trying to get settled again which went totally unnoticed by the douche bag who decided to share our buscouch. The only time the fucking prick wasn't sitting on me is when we started moving again after coming to a stop because the force of the bus moving forward would temporarily make him lean to the side.
The kicker is that people got off the bus and there were plenty of seats available he could have gone to but he didn't move. He obviously knew that the three of us were not comfortably seated there but I guess someone who is rude enough to move an old woman's bags without giving her a chance to move them herself is unconcerned with whether or not he's cutting off the circulation in the leg of the person next to him because, much like his head, his ass apparently has no sense.
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"...Nothing can prepare you for the carnage you are about to witness...In this building it's kill or be killed..."
Select parts of Dan Aykroyd's speech on the way in to the stock exchange as he and Eddie Murphy walk through the plaza in front of the World Trade Center Towers in 'Trading Places'.
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My transformation to The Dark Side is almost complete.
This weekend, I was faced with a moral, ethical, political and pseudo-patriotic dilemma. On Friday night, around 11pm, I was sitting at the computer, wasting the night away playing some game or other, and I happened to look over at the window. On the top trim of the building right next to us, I could see the telltale strobe lights of some sort of emergency vehicle.
My Cops watching eyes lit up, “There’s an emergency vehicle of some sort outside!” and like the father in ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas, Away to the window I flew like a flash, Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash. (Ok, so we don’t have shutters and there was no sash throwing.)
I could see that the source of the light was originating from the back parking lot and I exclaimed with glee, “We have windows in the back! We have windows in the back!” and I ran into the bedroom, around the bed and looked out the window. Almost directly below our bedroom window, a cop car had a truck blocked in. At first I couldn’t tell which car it was that the spot light was focused on, but Gary came in and said something about the passengers still being inside. We opened the window to see if we could hear anything, but there was nothing to hear as the cop was still in the car and the passengers were still sitting in the truck. After about 2 minutes or so, the cop finally emerged and walked over to the driver’s side of the truck, pad in hand.
She said something to the driver and then said, “No, you can’t go get it, but your friend there can go get it.” and she gestured to the guy in the passenger side of the truck. Through further exchanges, we determined that it was the driver’s ID that was in need of getting and soon the passenger got out of the truck and started heading toward the building next to ours. He was gone for quite awhile and during that time, the cop and the ‘suspect’ chatted about this and that.
During part of the conversation, I heard the cop ask the driver “You’re illegal right?” He said something and she repeated the question, “You’re here in this country illegally right?” He responded and she said, “Well, see if you were here legally, you would get paid more. $8 an hour just isn’t very much but they can pay you that because you’re here illegally.”
Now, I would just like to interject here that I know plenty of people who were born here and don’t have the luxury of making $8 an hour before taxes, let alone $8 an hour under the table in cash tax free, which since he’s here illegally, is I’m sure how it’s working out for him. After quite a long time, the passenger came out with someone who spoke no English but who had been gracious enough to bring his own ID instead of the driver’s. The driver jabbered on in Spanish to the guy, presumably telling him that he didn’t bring the right thing (and possibly to hide the marijuana plants they were growing in the spare room’s closet, maybe to move them under the bed of the 8 other illegals that are surely living in the apartment with them) and the non-English speaking resident went back toward the building next to ours in search of the right item.
The cop continued talking to the driver for a few more minutes but got tired of waiting and simply let the guy go.
This morning, after much self debate over the last day and a half, I called the property manager and asked her what the property owner’s policy was on renting to illegal aliens. She was not happy and is looking into it.
The liberal side of the thinky parts of my brain was telling me “Oh, just let it go. He isn’t hurting me, I’m not really being affected by this guy and his illegality.” And the nasty, closed minded, Republican side of the thinky parts of my brain were saying “Oh hell no! This guy has the balls to move into MY country illegally, get paid illegally, live HERE illegally, not pay any taxes AND he gets let go by the cops when she KNOWS he’s not a legal citizen. WHAT.THE.FUCK?!”
Thoughts? Opinions? What would you have done in this situation?
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