11.27.2003 Two eleven year-olds waltzed into my restaurant today, looking like they were ready to sell us cookies or ask for our support in a fundraiser. I think they looked this way to me because I remember very little about being eleven. Not knowing what else to do, I sat them at a table and gave them menus and a wine list. None of us seemed particularly sure of what was going on. They ordered an arugala salad, a mesclun salad, and an order of tofu-leek potstickers. Several minutes after I'd brought their salads, one of the girls approached the bar, behind which I stood polishing glasses, and asked me whether they had remembered to order potstickers. "Absolutely," I told her, smiling before continuing my sidework. Five minutes later, returning to concentration from the daydreams I entertain while polishing glasses, I realized that eleven year-olds have no concept of meals brought in courses, and that the girls thought I was neglecting them. We all looked embarrassed when I explained the delay between the courses. After they'd left, I found that they'd tipped me seven dollars, the majority of which was in quarters.
11.26.2003 I feel like this is a time in my life that I will miss, and rightfully so. I spend much of my time doing what I want, I am comfortable in each of my circumstances, and I find that I am constantly surrounded by people I love and care about--none of which are always the case. Fall is depressing and it hits me hard, but I can't deny how much I appreciate virtually everyone I spend my time with. Sentimental comments like these are not meant to be read by anyone but myself.
11.21.2003 This game was less fun than I had hoped.
Since the sender made up an email address for the purposes of this game (anonymity4now@hotmail.com), hid behind a pseudonym (tommy2tones), and gave me no hints beside the fact that I don't know him, I had nothing to go on except for an IP address (68.83.129.218), with which I determined that he lives in Philadelphia.
Were I a member of the FBI, I would be able to contact both Comcast (his ISP) and Hotmail (his hiding spot) and ascertain more personal information. However, since I am not a member of the FBI, nor will I ever be allowed to join said organization (given my heroine addiction), there were simply not enough clues.
Using a port scanner, Adam Conover was capable of determining that he has a Compaq, uses Windows, plays Doom, and has both Napster and Gnutella installed. However neat, none of these clues especially helped our cause.
I do, however, know three people who live or have lived in Philadelphia: 1. Julia Frey, who now lives in New York and is far too busy to perpetrate such a challenge.
2. Craig Perrino, a friend I haven't seen in years and whose IP address would have been linked to Villanova.
3. Keelin, my ex-girlfriend, who lives about a mile from the computer lab where I now sit. In all probability, tommy2tones is one of her friends, possibly Colin Stewart, though really this is a shot in the dark.
Well tommy2tones, thank you for the outlet for wasting time. I'm sorry it proved a waste of time.
With this email, you have until Friday, Nov. 14, midnight, to figure out who I am and post it on your site with a picture of me.
if you do, i will mail you twenty dollars, cash.
this is not a joke.
-[pseudonym]-
Friday the 14th? That was last Friday! What the fuck kind of incentive is that? Do you mean Friday the 21st? Because that would really make this game a lot more fun.
Because I'm in the library, pretending to work, I thought this would be a perfect time to recommend a few songs. I have no illusions that anyone will download them, I just want to be able to say, "See, I told you that was good last November. You should have listened to me then!" I would say that too. I am so petty.
I recommend these songs, but really I recommend these albums:
M. Ward - Involuntary
The Books - There Is No There
Ben Gibbard - Hometown Fantasy
The Wrens - This Is Not What You Had Planned
Nick Drake - Hazey Jane (bootleg)
The Clientele - House On Fire
The Books - Tokyo
Looking at my room, at the clothes on the floor, and the apparent lack of distinction between which clothes are clean and which are dirty, you would hardly think me the sort of person to arrange song titles by their length...
11.15.2003 1. I went to the movies alone tonight. I feel I have matured a great deal, though admittedly my systems of measurement are imprecise at best. The man who sat next to me came in ten minutes late, and I filled him in on what he had missed. As long as I am proud of such things, I will never believe in altruism.
3. At work we are allowed one complimentary meal per shift--in addition to the staff meals, which occur roughly every six hours. As of today, however, we are no longer allowed to order desserts as our complimentary course. When I was told this I became outraged to the point of being very polite and getting back to work. I would remind you that job security is an issue. But I do take personal offense to many of these managerial changes, as I like to think myself personally responsible for many of them. I order desserts every day. I love stealing bread from the pastry station. If I smoked cigarettes, I would toss them casually on the sidewalk.
11.14.2003 I've become so acclamated to my working routine that I'm not quite sure what to do with my day off. Being able to decide what to do with my time feels peculiar and wrong, and carries with itself an incredible sense of novelty. I went out to lunch. I went to the mall. I called many different people and asked them to do many different things.
On the way to the mall, where I went to buy warm clothing--or, barring that, brandy--I thought about what my co-workers were probably doing at that moment. Bringing a cup of hot tea to a crabby old woman. Telling a customer a scripted joke about the massive size of the soup spoons. Polishing glasses. Because I wasn't around to deal with it, I fantasized about a customer making the worst order I could imagine, and then I imagined my co-workers having to deal with it. These thoughts and others make me smile. These are day-off thoughts.
Then I realized that my restaurant does to-go orders, and I had a phone.
Then I began practicing different voices.
Like the stitch pattern on the scarf I would buy an hour later, the plan was very simple. I would call up, using a voice I had perfected that was distinctly different from my own, and I would order a succession of items that our restaurant no longer carries, becoming more and more upset with each denial. Having taken and overheard fifty of these calls, I was fairly confident that I knew already, word for word, how the conversation would go.
"[Ben's restaurant], how can I help you?"
"Yes, I'd like to make an order for take-out."
"Absolutely, sir, what can I get you?"
"I'd like to start with an order of your fish spring rolls. I don't remember what the fish was, whether it was salmon or cod, but I--"
"I'm sorry, but we no longer carry the salmon spring rolls."
"What? You don't? But they were so good! You got rid of them?"
"I'm afraid so. Sorry about that."
"Well, that's how it goes, I understand. Well, then can I have a cup of your green soup?"
"The parsnip-arugala?"
"Yes, I will have a cup of that."
"Ooh...I hate to do this to you, but we don't carry that particular soup anymore either. However, we do have a new squash soup that--"
"You don't have that either?! Do you still serve food at this 'restaurant'?
"(Nervous laugh). Believe it or not, we do. We changed our menu a few weeks ago to--"
"Well do you still make desserts?"
"Absolutely. Our dessert menu has double in size."
"Fine. Could I get one order of tiramisu, and one order of pannacotta to go?"
"Ooh...umm...actually..."
I was very excited about this. I practiced the whole speech, from beginning to end, what must have been ten times. I pulled over my car because I thought I would be able to better concentrate on not laughing if I wasn't driving (I was on the way to the mall, remember?). I composed myself and dialed the phone number.
"[Ben's restaurant], how can I help you?"
"Yes, I'd like to make an order for take-out."
"Wait, is this Ben?"
11.13.2003 Man, who doesn't remember this day in their internet career? I remember that day quite well. I had just successfully installed a wireless internet network in my parents' house, and they tested it right in front of me by searching for my name.
"My own son has a webpage?! I never would have guessed..."
I cannot adequately describe what this felt like. I struggle to find an appropriate analogy. It was all the horror and embarrassment of my parents discovering not only that I kept a diary, but also that it was always open for them to read--at home, in the office, or even on certain commercial airlines.
I like to keep secrets. This does not make me feel guilty.
11.09.2003 In light of Adrianne's hat showcase, I'd like to start my own underwear showcase. Here's how it works: you send me (ben@oldeenglish.org) a picture of yourself in your underwear, and I post it on the internet! Sound easy? It is! Be funny, be sexy, but above all--be visibly wearing underwear!
(I am simultaneously joking and dead serious. I feel this way often.)
UPDATE: I am too lazy to do anything, including photography and uploading. Like so many other contests I've initiated, it doesn't sound like I'm fit to participate.
I put things on my walls, and more and more my room is beginning to feel like my own. In addition to my own fancy room in a big old house, I have a fancy cat named Marcello who sleeps outside my door and sits in a tree near where I park and waits for me to get home. Because I don't get home until well after dark, and because the ground is covered in leaves, every single night of the fucking week he sends me into an irrational panic. I can never make out his dark figure, I can never see him coming--all I can hear are the hurried footsteps of something chasing after me in the dark. This is a portion of my daily routine for which I have to mentally prepare myself. Damn you, horror movies.
When I was a child and afraid of ghosts, I would rationalize away my fears by repeating to myself that my family and I were our house's first occupants, and accordingly there was no way our house could be haunted. Except now I live in a house that is two-hundred years old. I even have a picture of its occupants in 1860-something, standing in the front yard looking very serious. I imagine they had to hold that pose for a great while. I mention the fact that I live on an Indian burial ground not because I mean to imply that I believe in ghosts, which I don't, but because I wanted to demonstrate how much I've matured. I would have spent the first ten years of my life crying myself to sleep had I grown up in this house. Now I cry myself to sleep quite sparingly, and only then because I'm seriously allergic to Marcello.
11.08.2003 This morning I woke up in a state of panic because I woke up naturally feeling well-rested--a terrifying sensation when you wake up every morning to an alarm and go to work. Indeed, my senses were correct, and both of my two alarms clocks were flashing in unison. Need I remind you that my place of employment frowns upon lateness, absenteeism, and general human error--much in the same way that the human body frowns upon car accidents, arsenic, and steak knives.
While I had, in fact, slept longer than I should have, I only slept so much as to wake up at the exact moment that I should have left the house. (It is relevant to mention that I am a scientist about times and distances. I can compare in great detail the various routes from my house to my restaurant, taking into consideration all of the pertinent variables ((the number of stoplights, the number of patrol cars, old people)).) I managed to shower, dress myself and leave the house in four minutes. I associate this ability with being male--whereas my female counterpart at work, who lives in my town and most probably suffered the same power outage, failed to show up at all. Although her absence made my day considerably more difficult, I find some solace in the fact that she, like four other people this week, will probably be fired.
Reading that last sentence over again, I realize that I am the villain in all of the Care Bears movies.
11.02.2003 The proprietors of my place of employment,--the name of which I will not reveal for reasons that will soon become evident--fire someone new on a weekly basis. Some weeks they fire two people. This is troubling because:
A. I am a bad waiter.
B. I am not independently wealthy.
C. I have no desire to be fired.
I've never been fired from a job before, with the possible exception of my (seriously) short stint at Milagros, which doesn't count because I was "let go" before even meeting the rest of the staff.
Though I will not reveal the name, I will reveal that I work in a restaurant. You must be surprised to discover that I am not a waiter in a hardware store. I work six days a week, and sell more desserts than anyone else. Those details aside, I am constantly afraid of being fired. These fears are not groundless--as I mentioned, people with which I regularly spend my days are dismissed on a regular basis. We are constantly having to train new people. There is little initiative to train your successor well. After we polish the silverware, we dip it in turpentine. When we greet the customers, we ask to rub their bellies. Do as I say and you'll survive in this place.
