March 2006 Archives

One could say that the still absent Ribcage story is a sign of my mind being turned to soup over at Wolfgang Puck's, (Squash soup!) but don't feel neglected, I nearly forgot to pay my power bill today.

The good thing is that I actually do like my job. It's good people and it's immediate gratification, with the servers handing you cash at the end of the night and all. The only thing I don't like is all of the exhaustion after the fact.

This is the scary thing about working. The brain soup on my days off that could very well kill my writing.

Today, I was supposed to write a Ribcage story, answer questions for Lulu's PR department, write an email back to Lulu's event co-ordinator and start on a book proposal for The After Fat. Instead, I slept a very long time, went to the grocery store to spend ALL of the money that I made in the last three days on toiletries and enough food to get us through the next few work days, then watched The Amazing Race with Adam and Vanessa, then I drank a beer. All in all, it felt fantastic. Felt better than running all over hell, but didn't feel as good as doing something productive would. Something productive, that is going to happen tomorrow, hopefully.

Elise serves the managers tomorrow to hopefully get the heck off of training. She's put in something like 70 hours of training now, you know. Can you believe that? She worked the floor Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, taking all of her own tables on her own. It was working, just without keeping the tips at the end of the night. It was kind of terrible for them to do that to a trainee three nights running. On three WEEKDAY shifts, she made close to six hundred dollars, but she didn't see a dime of it.

I guess that's why they torture you like that, because when it's all over, you're making a butt-load of money. I've worked three days off of training and I've yet to break $70, but I still average about $13 an hour with my hourly, so I can't complain. Except that I don't have a year of serving experience to be a server and make that $200 a night. Or the patience to put in those 70 hours at minimum wage, giving all of my tips to somebody else.

Ribcage will be updated on Thursday this week.

Hooray for working!

Tomorrow, Ribcage night is my sixth workday straight. The good news is that I've been off of training and making money. Came off of training two shifts early because I am that awesome. I'm pretty awesome at cleaning tables, you should see it.

At least I don't have to worry about going to the gym anymore.

They didn't have a single polo shirt of any size in stock at the work uniform company OR anywhere in the restaurant. They offered me a different, button up shirt, just for tonight... the only shirt they had anywhere and it was an XL.

Needless to say, when I tucked it into my pants, it tucked down halfway past the breast pocket! I had a pocket coming out of my belt, a baggy hump on my back and sleeves that hung down a foot from my arms.

I suggested that they didn't want me on the floor like that and that they reschedule my shifts for tonight and tomorrow morning so I can go and hopefully pick up the shirts the uniform woman ordered for me tomorrow.

When I got home, I got some good writing news about Ribcage: Volume 1 and some possible publicity and then my father telling me to write a book proposal for The After Fat. That he wants to get that to St. Martin's Press for me.

That would be two book proposals I'm working on now, the other being a secret, as well as writing The After Fat and Ribcage and compiling Ribcage: Volume 2.

It's a good time to start cleaning tables!

I never open the mail in my spam folder, but I should! It's hilarious what they'll write to trick you into opening an email selling fake Rolex watches. Real spam to follow...

The side of her head took on a ripply, hydrocephalic bulge.

When he was dead she put him on the stairs and hoped it would work.

When it struck them their faces went white and the lines on the machines monitoring their precarious lives went flat.

The result was an awful bolt of pain, and he groaned.

That part of his head had quietly gone out to get a pastrami on rye, or something.

The Smokey reached the driveway. "Jesus," he whispered.

Martians, he thought. Men Taxes DIRT.

Update: I figured out that these are all lines from Stephen King's book Misery. Even the pastrami on rye line! Apparently these Rolex spam emails are electronically plucking random lines from Misery. But what are the chances they'd pluck the weirdest lines like that?

Our training schedule began on Monday and so... don't expect to see us for a while. 10 days straight without a day off together and the full schedule for next week hasn't even come out yet. I think we're racking up something like five or six hundred dollars in bare minimum training pay, which is crazy. Needless to say, the training is extensive.

Mon - pick up E's uniform deep in Orlando in morning, E night shift
Tue - C orientation, E night shift
Wed - E morning shift
Thur - pick up C's uniform in Orlando in morning, E + C night shifts
Fri - C double, E night shift
Sat - C night shift
Sun - C night shift
Mon - E + C training videos in morning, E night shift
Tue - E double
Wed - E night shift

I have half a feeling they're just going to fire me over my tattoo. My boss told me that I can't wear a long sleeve t-shirt under my polo, but then offered no solution to my tattoo. So I'll be going in tomorrow in a long sleeve t-shirt anyway because there is no other choice.

No one is allowed to say "poker" in comments ever again. Seriously. Just try and say the word "poker" and see how fast your comment is denied.

Poker was such a source of my blog's spam problem that I outlawed the damn word.

Tomorrow, I fill out all those jolly tax forms and what not for a bussing job at Wolfgang Pucks. In the end they gave me the option of food running or bussing and I took bussing. This is because of my fear of uneaten food, probably. Or is it change? All I know is that I'm going to get accustomed to the place before I dive into a whole new thing.

Now my book can begin AND end with me bussing tables! You know, with all of that weight loss and television appearances and fan mail and book deals and inspiring thousands of other people to lose weight and not being able to walk through a single Wal-Mart without seeing myself make a slushee on the TV sets above the cracker aisle in the middle.

Prologue: I clean people's tables.
Parts 1-5: I taste fame. Love.
Epilogue: I clean people's tables again.

Seriously though, it just feels right. Even with working four days a week, I'll probably end up writing more than I do today. I kind of need my time to feel more precious.

I've been starting chapters with blog posts. How much do you want to bet this post makes it into the end of the book? Even this part about the post making it into the book will make it, you watch.

So if this is in the book, I should say... Enjoy the epilogue! I hope it's a doozy! Because, at the time of this post, I've yet lived it.

You may turn the page now.

You know, I've been working on my non-fiction book for something like a year and a half and I'm consistently unhappy with it, always trying to make it better, but now I have to question myself.

You see Macaulay Culkin just released this book called Junior, at least I think it's called Junior because even the cover is such a mess that it's hard to tell.

Maybe if my family made it onto Oprah or something, I could just vomit all over paper and call it a book?

This book looks like something they'd publish posthumously. Like if Macaulay Culkin died and they found all of these psychotic journal entries and things written all over his walls and decided that they'd pretend it was coherent. Like that Kurt Cobain book that came out except forced and completely uncool and pretending to actually be a NOVEL!

Kirkus said...

Culkin isn’t particularly concerned with narrative and takes no legitimate stabs at structure. He sticks instead with a rag-tag rambling style, tossing out his offerings like scraps on a trash heap—poems piled atop lists piled atop letters, none of it really compelling, and none of it really going anywhere. All the usual typographical tricks—font-size changes, phrases crossed out, blank pages helpfully labeled “blank”—are brought out in a rather unsuccessful attempt to disguise the basic pointlessness of the exercise.

He told Barbara Walters that he isn't a writer and I wanted to scream, "Then don't write a fucking book!" His reason for releasing it? Because some of his friends thought it was cool.

Let's not forget that Culkin did walk away with most of the millions he made as a kid. Of course your friends thought it was cool! They also think that you should start a band, open a restaurant, direct a movie, run for office, do anything you want because you're a millionaire.

So apparently Blockbuster recently started throttling or at least started admitting it, so now what the hell?

Now they both suck. I went into Blockbuster to use the free coupons they gave me and our Blockbuster only rents out like 2 movies these days, because mostly they're the pre-owned DVD black market now. In the company's defense, this is the smallest Blockbuster I've ever been in.

It's on Central Florida Parkway, just a quarter mile down from the Ritz Carlton that I just saw on Primetime because they dissect human corpses in the ballrooms. No shit.

From Primetime's Web story...

Registered nurse Marion Ulloa observed the conditions inside a seminar in Florida, where four dead bodies were being used as teaching tools for doctors, in the public ballroom of a popular hotel.

"I don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting to see the whole entire cadaver laying there as if it were in a morgue. Pull out a slab, just like that," Ulloa said.

And she said infection control seemed a bit primitive.

"We had gloves, but we didn't have a sink in the room, we didn't have soap in the room or hand cleansers and that would have made me feel more comfortable," Ulloa said.

In fact, Ulloa says one of the bodies was leaking onto the plastic underneath its gurney.

"There was a puddle on the floor next to it and … it was dripping from the hand of the person," she said. "I don't know, that kind of didn't give me a good feeling. I just wish they were done in the proper venue — possibly in a morgue, or an autopsy table."

Olson said that dissecting cadavers in a public hotel ballroom shouldn't be happening. There could be a risk, he said, of transmitting blood-borne pathogens.

Now in the Ritz Carlton's defense, Primetime wouldn't reveal which Florida Hotel their footage was from but I found the website advertising the event that matched the one they showed on the show and it was there at the Ritz Carlton. Either way, if it wasn't, they're still dissecting corpses, just different corpses than the ones we saw, there.

Seriously, they showed these corpses without a care in the world too, it was horrifying. They even blur that shit out on The First 48, but not Primetime.

Elise went to a Sweet 16 party in one of those ballrooms!

I just hand deleted 818 spam comments that were made in the last 24 hours. Actually, technically, I hand saved every comment that's been made that isn't spam, because that way I only had to check 250 little checkboxes instead of the other 818.

No one wants to play poker on your website.
No one wants your mp3s.
No one wants your diet pills.
No one wants your cheap any kind of pills.
No one gives a rat's tit about spam except for those that have to delete it.

I think you'd get more business from a message in a bottle than 818 robots on my blog.

If the site explodes today, it's because I was probably trying to install some kind of spam-blocker on the server. Last time I got fed up with the bullshit comments, I went for the newest version of Movable Type and it's built in spam blockers, but lost my entire site's layout and template while trying to transfer over. In the end, I never got the new Movable Type working AND the ONLY reason the site wasn't lost forever was because Internet Explorer had cached the stylesheet the last time I'd been on it.

Until I can get some system in place, comments will require my approval. I check my stuff often, so no big deal.

Got my hair chopped off into a fohawk and it's nice, didn't get the Lulu nomination and well, in true and bitter fashion--don't give a rat--for reasons I'll keep to myself.

Oh and Elise and I have probably got jobs at Wolfgang Puck. They want to give her full-time with benefits and sure that could ruin our lives, but it's a good job. They want to make me a food runner, even if I am afraid of holding people's heavy plates of food in my hands.

This picture of Elise freaks me out because she's making a Natalie Sanders face.

Last year I finished two books and today I could be nominated for awards for both.

Today, the finalists are announced for both the Lulu Blooker Prize of which Ribcage: Volume 1 is in the running, and the IACP Cookbook Awards of which Eating Stella Style is in the running.

Strange how these fell on the same day.

The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to "blooks": books based on blogs or websites.

The IACP Cookbook Awards annually celebrate the year’s most outstanding food and beverage publications. The awards are the culinary industry’s most coveted acknowledgement of excellence in cookbook writing and publishing. You are cordially invited to attend a reception for the food media to learn which books have been selected as finalists.

Also, we have a Job interview over at Wolfgang Puck's, then I'm cutting all of my hair off, then I'm going to the bar to mourn the loss of my hair and either celebrate today's announcements or drown them out.

I'll keep you posted.

Well that whole Netflix bullshit worked out more than for the best.

Not only did I get a free month at Blockbuster Online, saving $18 this month for switching... But I now know that Blockbuster, no matter how much I thought I hated them as a company, is a far better service.

Not only do they NOT throttle their customers whatsoever (as far as I've read online) they actually have barcodes on the envelopes that the post office scans in, reporting to Blockbuster that they've collected the disc and that it's on its way back to them.

What this means is that they're shipping out my next discs, even before they get the last ones back! Right now I actually have five discs reported as "shipped" and in my posession.

So they're actually FASTER than Netflix, even when Netflix ISN'T throttling your ass.

Some of their popular movies are on waits though, but the four free store rental coupons a month will get me something like Walk the Line from my local Blockbuster for sure.

It's pretty funny when I can't even get a really shitty job. A bussing job.

Elise and I applied at Lone Star Steakhouse, which is basically a dumpier version of Outback and Elise got a call that day for orientation. Not even an interview, orientation. But after seeing the inside of the place, she didn't go.

Bahama Breeze doesn't even have bussers, I found. The girl said, "Do you want to try for server, though?" Okay. "Do you have one year's serving experience?"

Then she suggested a dishwashing job.

Wolfgang Puck's restaurant said they were hiring bussers but they weren't sure on servers, yet they only called Elise back today.

I only have Dave Manuchia, one of the founders of The Olive Garden down as a reference, you'd think I'd be a pretty safe bet to wipe down a dirty table.

If you'll excuse me, I have to get back to making a living as a writer. Have to get back to this little proposal thing for a little book that you may soon hear about.

There was a new Ribcage story this week, even though it wasn't on Wednesday. The new Ribcage slogan is Stories on Wednesdays: Mostly.

But in all reality... who the hell would've thought that Ribcage would still be running after 19 months? It's kind of crazy because the second book (of three) isn't even done yet!

Funny, the week after I write a story about hammering down and NOT being lazy, I'm here to say that this week's story will be posted tomorrow!