cindy's world

Looking back at the entire day yesterday when we picked a jury for our auto accident trial, had to virtually immediately excuse one juror because he disclosed privately that he saw the plaintiff running out of the elevator but upon seeing the jurors, slow to a walk and start a limp, and heard the first expert witness on spinal disk hernia and surgery, the MOST interesting thing that happened all day was this:

[My judge and I in the back hallway waiting for the employee elevator at lunch recess. Elevator dings and doors open. The elevator is packed with judges already.]
My judge: [stepping in around the other judges]Holy cow!
Another judge: Who’re you calling a cow?!
Me: But he said “holy”, your honor.
Other judges: Haha!

What a sad day for entertainment.

I got some life updates about several people recently. They’re not where you’d expect them to be, not even where they themselves expected to be, and yet everyone’s working out and happy. But maybe we all fought it at one point just cuz it’s not what we’d imagined our futures to be like, or to be with.

I think sometimes when you try to force round pegs into square holes, you waste precious time overly focused/obsessed with this impossible task when really, the square pegs are RIGHT THERE if you’d just drop the round peg-leg gimp and look around.

Last nite’s class was fun. We did a lot of pouring at the bar, making tons of drinks on demand. My first drink set, the instructor told me to ice up 4 chimney glasses, and then he rattled off drinks which I made quickly with no problem. After I was done, however, I wondered aloud what garnishes to put in the drinks. I was gonna leave garnishes out until intructed otherwise, but Cop Groupie chick (standing across from me at the other side of the bar) said to put a lime in the first and a cherry in the middle 2 and a lemon twist in the last one. I don’t know WHAT I was thinking but I did as she said. The instructor came by and asked, “What are these garnishes? Did you just decide to put these cherries in?” I said, not wanting to be a rat, “Sort of.” He said, “No, you don’t do this unless the customer orders it that way. The middle two get limes.” And then he took out the cherries and twist and moved my lime over, added a 2nd lime. The lesson learned: NEVER listen to idiots over my own instincts. My bad. The rest of the drinks went extremely smoothly. I daresay I’m the fastest and most accurate drink maker in the class; the giggly guy (boyfriend of the girl who turned 21 the day before class started) rushes through everything trying to go for speed, but makes tons of mistakes. He puts the wrong liquors in, the wrong juices (like how did his Screwdriver end up red?), shorts the shots even with use of a jigger, knocks things over. A lot. But he’s a nice fun guy and knows a lot of drinks cuz he apparently frequents bars with his girlfriend, he just has to put some finesse into his work. I’m so glad I got the extra practice in over the weekend, that helped A LOT. I was the only one who knew offhand what went into Long Island and Long Beach Iced Teas.

Toward the end of class, the instructor gave me a Boston shaker (tin tumbler + tall glass), strainer, wooden muddler, upright supply tray for straws, swords, etc., and a full-sized compartmented garnishment tray. And the Flair Techniques DVD. All for editing what turned out to be just 21 pages of his Course Manual (the last 3/4 of the manual turned out to be copyrighted ServSafe material for classroom instruction on laws regarding beverage service, so that was already fine). Everyone was very jealous. He also did a big giveaway, and tossed out glass shotglasses (got one), plastic shotglasses on necklace strings (went to the giggle couple), little felt pouches for jiggers and shotglasses (got 2), and gave out his trusty Swiss army-style barknife/corkscrew/bottle opener, which he handed directly to me and said, “Why don’t you hang on to that for me?” I almost bought one over the weekend, too. I’m glad I didn’t. Cop Groupie chick nicely offered to help me carry my stuff to my car after class, but I took a paper grocery bag instead and it was fine.

There was a visitor in class — a long-haired lady who graduated from his course a few years ago. She’s apparently having trouble getting hired. She said she went to places she wanted to work at, nothing happened, then she applied at places she didn’t want to work at just to get SOMETHING, that was also fruitless, and now she doesn’t know what to do. The instructor talked to us about the economy these days saying new employment may be a tad slow, and then he reviewed her resume and said it looked fine. Then he thought maybe she wasn’t interviewing right, but she said she only got 1 interview out of all her efforts. Okay, now that’s scary; I’d always assumed I’d just zip right in and get the job I wanted. =P

One of the female radio personalities on the talk radio station I listen to every morning is getting married, so the topic was on bachelorette/bachelor parties. “When I see a group of women together and one of them is wearing a white veil and all of them are sucking on straws shaped like penises, I think that’s DISGUSTING.” Haha. Agreed. Her male cohost and special guest Tom Arnold thought it’d be brilliant to scare her and tell her what REALLY goes on in the bachelor’s parties.

1) Bachelor’s parties out, like in a club, strip club, or Vegas, include strippers and hence multiple lap dances. Since it’s the bachelor’s friends who *really* want the party cuz they want to break free from their mundane married lives for a night, they’re going to INSIST on strippers, pay for lap dances, and heckle the bachelor and shun him forever if he is not amenable to the debauchery. (To this I roll my eyes and think, “Great friends. Who’s the night really about, anyway?” Good thing Mr. W’s best man is his 18 yr old son who’s not old enough to get into a strip joint even if the boy WERE crazy enough to want to see nekkid women gyrating on his DAD. Ew.) Occasionally the guys find a place seedy enough for a higher level of cheating to occur in the back room given enough money exchanging hands, but this is less common than…

2) Bachelor parties in. Strippers hired to come to the house and do their thing in a private residence are WAY worse than in a club where there are laws and regulations that most strip clubs follow. It is apparently not uncommon for strippers to start off in the living room and end up in the bedroom. Tom Arnold said the bachelor usually ends up naked duct-taped to a chair with whipped cream all over him. Sexy…not.

3) The level of stripper. Apparently there are different “rankings” or levels of strippers. Like prostitutes, you have the upscale $10K “escort” managed by a madame who’ll travel with you and cost you your government office *nudge*, and you have the call-girls for $200 that you phone an agency to arrange to arrive at your house for an hour, and you have the street walker who stands at a corner and will give you a quickie in your car for $15. In strippers, the pretty ones are the ones with standards about what they’re willing to do and typically don’t do anything overly risque, and the ugly ones you see at the strip club — the ones you look at and think, “WTF is SHE doing here?!” — are the ones who secretly make bank for their complete and total availability and willingness to do whatever you want. Cuz they have to compete with the pretty high-demand ones somehow. Tom Arnold goes on to say, “The stripper’s got head issues anyway, and you take an unattractive one who all she has is this job, and you’re about to embark on a beautiful lifelong journey with someone…if the groom’s remotely good-looking, she’s gonna be all over him doing whatever it takes.” Women and their competitive catty naked egos. *sigh*

I’m glad I’m marrying Mr. W. None of this garbage is going to be an issue. At least, that was something he’d used to woo me, saying I need to be with a man like him who’s not interested in doing all that immature guy stuff like bachelor parties and strippers and club/bar-hopping. *crossing fingers*

I received a book recommendation via email this morning. Law Clerk buddy Adam thought that I ought to read mystery novel “Mandarin Plaid” by S.J. Rozan, saying that the heroine detective is “a short cute modern ethnically burdened tae kwan do throwing brilliant clueless hot tempered Cantonese chick who thinks she looks like a peasant. It didn’t make me think of you, I swear.” I wrote back asking for his literary opinion on the book and author, and in his response he wrote “It’s entertaining sometimes to watch a cute young hot-tempered fast-talking overanalyzing Asian female fly off the handle.”

Talk about mastering back-handed compliments. But I’m sure he was just referring to the heroine character of the book. =P

I bought a little container of planted Venus fly traps over the weekend that I’ve brought to work. There’s been gnats irritating the crap out of me in the past week. I think they’re coming from the avocado trees’ soil. Hopefully this’ll resolve the problem, altho it doesn’t look like it’s caught anything yet. All the little pink teethy mouths are still open and hungry looking.

Today marks the first day I’ve gone to the gym in 9-10 days. There were plenty of little excuses — lunchtime work meetings, evening HOA meetings, bartending class, my trainee being unavailable due to her own lunchtime meetings and errands. I’ve even leaned heavily on the fact that I’d injured my left wrist months ago by benching with an easy bar (yeah, don’t do that; use a straight bar or skip it if the straight bar for your weight isn’t free), and now it hurts to support any weight whatsover so my constant heavy weightlifting through the pain has lengthened or maybe even worsened the problem. But the real reason for my lack of appearance at the gym is that I haven’t felt like going. Today, because gym trainee and I both hadn’t gone in over a week, we decided to make this a cardio-only week to give my wrist an extra week to heal and to warm us back up into working out. 10 minutes elliptical on hills, 10 minutes run on a treadmill, 10 minutes stairs, and we were sweating bullets. Serves us right for being so lazy the past week.

Saturday, Mr. W and I had dinner with my parents, my aunt, and her sort-of significant other. She refers to the guy as her “best friend” and “soulmate” but she’s still married to my uncle. Anyway, the guy is a definite fan of the gym and is wider than he is tall (all muscle), and all evening long, in between his pill-popping of various supplements, digestive aids, and fat burners, he insisted that Mr. W adopt his workout and supplementation regimen, with a GIANT push for creatine. Mr. W pushed it on me and said I won’t let him take creatine, but I just didn’t want to get into that stuff with a fanatic. It got awkward as they were leaving, tho, cuz he hugged us goodbye (really friendly guy, been in my aunt’s life for over 10 years now) and then said to Mr. W and me that he’ll see us soon, if not then he’ll see us at the wedding. After they left, my mom said that my aunt had told her that he can’t go to our wedding because her husband will have a fistfight with him. I guess I’m only addressing the envelope to Mr. and Mrs., then. I don’t want two grown men fistfighting at my wedding!

On Sunday in the middle of watching “Angel,” I felt my first twinge of stress since planning the wedding. A couple of people had asked me last week how the wedding plans were coming along, and I’d answered honestly that I haven’t done a thing toward that end in months. It used to be because I was so ridiculously far ahead in wedding planning that I haven’t thought about doing more, but now that it’s been months since I did anything except order that cute little cake topper that came today, I started to feel like I’ve let myself fall off-track and waste weekends doing nothing but hanging with Mr. W idly playing Wii or watching “Angel.” So I ran off into the other room, typed out an email to MOH Vicky and my mom to schedule measurement day for our dresses, scribbled out a to-do list for the 2 weeks of vacation I have coming up in May (which I will fill with wedding and home repair stuff), and felt better.

Sunday night, Mr. W invited his neighbor over to my makeshift bar in Mr. W’s kitchen. I wanted to get drink mixing practice in, but I don’t really drink and there’s not enough adults to drink my stuff ordinarily. Sunday night, I gave the guys a menu based on the liquor we had on-hand, and I made Mr. W a Long Beach Iced Tea (gin, rum, vodka, Triple Sec, tequila, sweet & sour, splash of cranberry juice), his neighbor a Sour Apple Martini (vodka, Sour Apple Pucker, splash of sweet & sour) and a Washington Apple Martini (Crown Royal, Sour Apple Pucker, splash of cranberry) which his neighbor has now decided are his all-time favorite alcholic beverages ever, and I made myself a makeshift Red-Headed Slut (Jaegermeister, peach schnapps, cranberry juice; I didn’t have peach schnapps so I substituted it for a shot of Triple Sec and it came out tasting nearly identical). I forgot — on Saturday I also made Mr. W a dirty extra-dry blended gin and vodka martini, and made myself a Bacardi Cocktail (Bacardi Premium [dark] rum, sweet and sour, Grenadine). 2 drinks in a weekend is bad for me, especially when I haven’t been at the gym.

I think the guilt over not fixing up my house (removing bathroom wallpaper, repairing the ceiling damage caused by the roof leaks) is permeating my subconscious. This morning I was trapped in a nightmare about there being a landslide and my house being half submerged underwater. In my dream I thought for some reason that I could just leave it underwater cuz the inside’s dry, but then suddenly the walls got moist and the ceiling started leaking in the upstairs hallway, and Dodo was getting concerned. I also dreamt that I kept trying to go to work, but 3 attempts all landed me at Disneyland. So in my dream I seriously considered calling in sick from my physical inability to be anywhere but Disneyland. Oh, and some staff member at Disneyland was trying to peddle some nutrition meal substitute on me.

MOH Vicky and I came across this small store that sells Japanese stuff. Cute stuff, like cartoon videos and colorful Japanese snacks and trinkets. I was musing at the video/DVD section and the older saleslady (whom I assumed was the owner) said that if I liked those, I should check THESE out. Then she went in the back and returned with some anime porn, and they were all on a special with a large discount. So I was all excited to see anime porn, especially really cute anime, and I left the store with a bag of anime porn DVDs and a few snacks for $29.09! What a deal! As we were walking away, MOH Vicky and I shared a bag of multi-colored puffy snacks, like Pops! cereal (man, I haven’t had those for awhile!) that looks like those long Cheetos Puffs, and she laughed at me and said I shouldn’t be buying porn cuz I’m about to be married. Why?! Am I not allowed to have porn if I’m married? Then it makes even more sense to stock up now while I’m in my last months of singledom, right? But she couldn’t bring down my mood, as we walked and chatted, I was looking extremely forward to getting home and seeing what these anime porn videos are all about. I had high hopes for them.

But I never made it home. I woke up instead. Bummer.

~ Cindy and Gym Trainee’s Top Picks for Stupidest Bartending Moment This Week ~

There’s always many staggering examples of stupidity to report in each session of bartending that we’ve attended so far, but if I were to list them all, this post would be ridiculously long. So here’s my #1 pick for the week:

At the start of each class, the instructor passes around a sheet of neon-colored self-adhesive address labels. We’re to write our name on a label and stick it on our shirt as a nametag so the instructor knows who he’s looking at. This week, it was bright hot pink.
Toward the middle of class I returned to my desk after doing some pour drills in the bar area, and saw the half-used sheet of neon address labels near my desk. On a white rectangle where a pink label has already been removed, is written “Melissa.” *blink blink* The idiocy hit me fully and dully. “Melissa” had written her name on a white space that no longer contains a hot pink label, and tried to peel it off to stick on herself. I wish so badly that I had a photo of that sheet to post here, because seeing the thing and realizing suddenly what had happened is so much more impactful than my describing it to you!
“Melissa,” by the way, is one of the two unemployed blondie girls who were an hour late to the 1st class, who didn’t buy a day parking pass to put in their cars so the whole class had to wait another half hour for them to get that done so they don’t get towed, and were 20 minutes late returning from break that 1st day. The two girls missed the 2nd week completely, and were again an hour late to this 3rd class.

Gym Trainee’s #1 Pick of the Week:
Our instructor has a rule that if we miss our session that we’re enrolled in (Tuesday evenings), we can make it up by attending the Thursday evening session that week. If we can’t make that, either, we can pop into the Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon session. He teaches the same material in each session each week.
Toward the end of class while he was finishing up his lecture, the instructor said, “I know you’re not obligated to attend more than one session a week to be certified, but the Thursday evening class is only half full. The Thursday class is at the same time as this class, so if you’re not doing anything, you can slide into the Thursday class too, to get some extra practice in for your pouring and mixing. I’m not charging you extra, and it’s to your advantage to come to the Thursday class as well. So who thinks you may want to come in on a Thursday class?”
As a few hands went up, the cop groupie chick asked, “What day’s the class?”
Uh…the Thursday sessions that he teaches on Wednesdays. What did she THINK?!
The cop groupie girl is the same person who did the dumb stuff I mentioned last week, too.

I don’t understand how these people have managed to stay alive this long to be in their 20s. How is it that they didn’t trip one day while walking and chewing gum at the same time, and fall face-first against a moving vehicle?
Gym trainee said to me during break, “I’m glad I’m a girl. So I don’t accidentally date one of them.”

Now I’m having horrible flashes of these girls googling information on bartending or the class, and incidentally landing on my blog and reading this mean-spirited post. The cop groupie chick might sic some of her cop party attendees on me.

This past weekend, while I was reading the bartending course manual, I kept seeing all these typos and errors. I tried hard to ignore them and move on, but I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I’m sorry, but I don’t think a course manual for bartending, that hundreds of students view monthly, should spell brand names of alcohol wrong. It’s Absolut Vodka, not Absolute Vodka! Apple Pucker, not Apple Puckers! And when you make a point that 1 drink = 5 oz. wine = 12 oz. beer = 1.25 oz. hard liquor, and you want to say that it takes a person’s liver 1 hour to work through each of the above, you shouldn’t say “Alcohol is metabolized in the body at a rate of about 1 ounce per hour for the average person.” It should be 1 drink per hour. (I pointed this last one out to the instructor the 2nd week and asked for clarification, and he was at first confused but realized the error and said I was the only one who’d ever caught that.) If you know me you’ll know what an editor at heart I am. Dwaine just lovingly refers to that trait of mine as “neurotic.”

So this weekend, after pages and pages of errors, I lost self-control. I emailed my instructor.
Hi Dan!
This is Cindy from your Tuesday evening bartending class. But enough about me. (ha.) I was reading over the course manual and saw some minor errors and inconsistencies that can easily be corrected. I was an editor and copywriter some years ago, so things like typos, misspellings and syntax problems jump out and wave at me. Your website, by the way, is error-free and very impressive that way; it’s rare to see perfect language usage these days, especially online. Anyway, I was wondering if you’d like me to mark up a copy of the manual with editing corrections so your next print/publication of the manual would be cleaner. I’m not soliciting and I’m not charging you anything, I just like to see clean professional copy and thought I could offer you a skill and help you out. I hope I’m not offending you; I’m not passing judgment on the contents at all. Just a tiny bit on the presentation. Haha.
Cindy

Soon, I received a reply.
Hi Cindy,
Thanks for the suggestion. I would like to review these issues with you next time we meet. Thanks for your support.
Best, Dan

Okay, so I think he wasn’t offended. I approached him after class on Tuesday. “Oh, you’re the one!” he said. “I wanna sit down with you and talk about the changes.” After a brief discussion, I realized he’s pretty computer illiterate and I decided it’d be faster for me to mark up a copy of the manual with the suggested corrections, give it to him for approval, and then he’ll give me the computer text files of the manual and I’ll make the changes myself. He was very receptive and excited. And here’s the best part. “I’ll make it worth your while,” he insisted. “I’ll give you a whole bar set. With the tray for the garnish swords and straws and stuff. How’s that?” I loved that! Since gym trainee was standing next to me, he said to her, “I’ll give you a complete set, too. That way you won’t be all mad and jealous that she [nodding toward me] got one.”
Gym trainee said, “I won’t be jealous!”
I was like, “Shhh, he’s giving out free stuff!”
And then he offered to throw in free DVDs for Flair bartending techniques! Throwing bottles and fancy tricks! I knew my neuroticism would pay off one day!

I’m sorry, I have to vent again.

Maybe I’m more into self-preservation than you or the next person. I’m definitely more into self-preservation than Mr. W is. I have that trait because that’s just what my past experience has taught me. I look out for myself, because ultimately I’m responsible for myself and my own happiness, and I am the only factor that I can control. Other people tend to be unreliable at best.

And it drives me CRAZY that I’m trying to plan my own future, making some big, major, permanent, expensive decisions here, and there are tons of large x-factors floating out there that aren’t even MY x-factors, that would significantly change the landscape of whatever future and decisions I would make and/or be locked into. I’m not even allowed to have feedback on these x-factors because they’re not within my control and any feedback just pisses off the one who DOES have control. So I can’t plan. I wish I could just grab a hammer and nails, or better, some nail guns, and nail down these x-factors NOW so I know where the issues are and work with or around them.

And it’s crap that I have to feel guilty about feeling like this. Utter crap.