Madame Johanna & the Things She Do
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The Most Pointless Story I've Ever Taken the Time to Write Down

4/23/2014

1 Comment

 
    Come with me on a little adventure, a journey for satisfaction that ended in subdued dumbassery...

    It's about 12:30am, and I'm getting a bit peckish. I'm scheduled for the next late-night bar shift, so it'll do me good to sleep in late tomorrow (today, technically) to have energy for work. So instead of sleeping off the munchies till they can be satisfied with a hearty breakfast, I head downstairs to get a snack.
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Let's be honest, I probably would have gone downstairs to eat regardless.
    I'm looking for something particular. Something that won't pester my sleep with guilt-ridden dreams about how little I'm off the couch and its correlation to the impending bathing suit season threatening me from the horizon of my calendar. The pantry offers no immediate snacks that wouldn't take preparation, and therefore noise: microwave popcorn, tortilla chips that would be useless without salsa, the like.
    So I head for the fridge. I am grateful to see it full, because many do not have that luxury. But I find myself with the first-world dilemma of having to weigh so many options against one another to make the best choice. I dismiss the easy option of leftover spaghetti and meatballs; some carbs with some starch and some protein to put a nice discomforting rock in my stomach that forces me to sleep on my side like a pregnant woman is the opposite of my current food goal.
    There's some leftover rainbow trout in a Tupperware container, but the idea of late night leftover fish is a little nauseating, no matter how delicious it was at the time and how delicious it will be when my mom makes it into fish tacos, or whatever.
    There's a bowl of brightly colored, hard-boiled Easter eggs, but something about going to bed with gritty yolk teeth and sulfur farts deters my appetite. The little drawer has cheese and deli meat, but there's nothing to stack them on because my brother already wiped out our supply of crackers before I could.
    My mouth waters at the sight of pickles, but I'm already not drinking enough water as it is. Snacking on what was once the world's most innocently healthy vegetable before humans came along and shot it up with enough salt to wipe out a slug colony would not a hydrated sleep make.
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For not liking salt, slugs are basically just brown pickles with slightly better mobility.
    That gets me thinking of vegetables, and when I open the veggie drawers I find three large cucumbers. But they're wrapped in plastic...and I'll have to cut them up, maybe peel them...wrap them up again...you win this time, laziness.
    Lettuce--no. Parsley--no. Peppers--no, I will not wake myself up with pepper burps. Cilantro, onions, radishes--no, no, no. I'm starting to lose hope. There isn't much left, except for some salad mix and some celery, but who would just snack on that--
    Before I can close the refrigerator in defeat, I return to the celery. I had bought it a while back, because a Bloody Mary just isn't complete without a celery stalk. I usually keep celery in the fridge for this very purpose, because nothing ruins a Bloody Mary night--who am I kidding, a Bloody Mary morning--than a lack of edible decor.
    A strange and mildly upsetting realization dawned on me in that moment, as I was standing in the kitchen in the middle of the night, barefoot in my yoga pants, glowing in the chilled yellow light of the refrigerator: celery is not exclusively used for Bloody Marys. That would be like using lemons only as a garnish for fancy dinners, and ignoring the potential for lemonade or lemon drop shots or shitty lemon-flavored candy. How many times had I just glossed over the presence of celery because I wasn't drinking at the moment? I snack a lot, like, probably too much, so I'm at the fridge more than I should be; my mom keeps blaming the energy bill on my brother's computer, but I'm pretty sure it's because I always have the fridge open. I have gone in that drawer on a number of occasions. For fuck's sake, I eat salads often enough that I should have noticed the celery lingering there in the front corner of the drawer at least once. But no. Celery has been like the awkward, gawky girl in high school who was following her heart and being herself, all the while praying that it was enough to get the cute boy she liked to pay attention to her.
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Me. The celery was me.
    The realization is strange because, duh, people eat celery all the god damn time. Some people eat it for their own health and pleasure, while others eat it because it comes with chicken wings and they'll eat anything edible within the proximity of chicken wings; they would eat the Styrofoam container if it hadn't made their poops so uncomfortable the first time they tried it. People eat celery, and I never even noticed it in my fridge. It must have an amazing shelf life, because I did not buy that celery recently but it was still hella fresh.
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THAT fresh.
    The realization is mildly upsetting because I'd only ever associated this vegetable with alcohol. It's like if I'd been a starving potato farmer who used the entire crop to make vodka, not knowing of the mashed, baked, and fried goodness that could come of it. So I shamefully pick up that celery with a sigh of, "Wow, I'm an alcoholic."

    ...There's no point to this story. I'm not going to wrap it up with some metaphor about noticing the little things, and this isn't that moment when I turn my life around and quit drinking. I just felt really dumb. There is some consolation, now that I'm eating the celery, that I also realize celery is really fucking boring unless it's drenched in ranch dressing or peanut butter. I chose the latter.
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I hear it is also good dipped in tomato juice mixed with vodka, horseradish, a splash of Worcestershire sauce...

    **Addendum: I managed to fit farts, burps, and poops into this post. I therefore dedicate this post to my dad, who is the champion of all three.


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**UPDATE**
4/23/14 6:08 pm
This entry has been so well received, and I thank you for that.
To celebrate, I went out and bought the fixin's for Bloody Marys.
It really is celery the way god intended.


Photo Cred:
The Fresh Prince: Bel Air, probably.
Brown pickles: From this article about a young man in Australia who contracted a rare parasite from eating a bunch of slugs. Otherwise known as the least-sexy ailment ever contracted from nature.
My Booze Salad: This list of variations on the Bloody Mary, because people don't know something amazing when they have it. Fuck, I'm super thirsty now.
1 Comment

Pointy Bras and Sunshine

4/15/2014

0 Comments

 
    It's funny how some men think that certain things are compliments. Like earlier this month, one customer told me, "I don't want to sexually assault you, I just want to take you out for dinner," in response to my teal ribbon for Sexual Assault Awareness Month. He defended the "compliment" by saying that he was only interested in my brains, and my intellect, because I seem like a genuinely interesting person, which made it far worse. Now he made it seem like, if he was attracted to my body (which he was, because he'd told me so on several other occasions) then he would want to sexually assault me. Such gentlemanly words to woo a lady with!
    I had a man at work a few days ago give me a compliment that was almost fine. It was weird, but it was fine. Then it led into my favorite wtf conversation I've ever had about social inequality. Which, wow, that sounds terrible, I wouldn't read that. But you should. Otherwise why the balls did you come here?
    He calls himself Big Bill--because apparently that's what all of his ex-girlfriends have called him. Lol, casual big-dick joke. He's in his sixties, maybe his seventies. So addendum: Lol, casual-almost-a-century-old-but-also-big-dick joke. He told me that I was the prettiest bartender he'd ever seen. That was nice. Then he told me this:
    "If I was a hundred years younger, I'd ask you out on a date. And we'd have a good time, too."
    If he had stopped at him asking me out on a date, it would have been sweet. Strange, because what do you say to a stranger who says that to you, but sweet. What got me was the second part of that, when he said that we'd have a great time. What part would be great, the part where he's asking me out? I'm sure that'd be fun for him. Unless I say no, which didn't seem to be an option in his mind. I almost said something about it, about how he'd be lucky if I said yes, but I just gave him his Bud Light and went about my business.
    His friend, a bit older than he was, made a comment about how different things are today than they were in the 50s. He talked about how dating was different, how the ways that kids have fun today is different, and how things are not as good as they used to be.
    "I wouldn't say that," I said.
    "No, it's true!" he said. "Things were much better in the fifties!"
    "Oh, yeah?" I asked.
    "Trust me," he said, "you would have loved living in the fifties, it was way better."
    "Yeah, for you!" I laughed. "You're a white man. It was probably fucking great for you."
    His answer was awesome.
    "What, are you black or Indian or something?" he asked. "Why would it have sucked for you?"
    I was so not expecting that response that I had none to give. All I could do was laugh some more, because that was the most balls-out clueless thing to say. I was not alive in the fifties, obviously. I was barely alive in the eighties. But the internet provides some insight as to the status of women back in this supposed golden age, and we all know that the internet never lies.
    My parents were born in the fifties (don't tell my mom I told you), and my mom makes coffee for my dad every morning for work because he has to get up at the asscrack of dawn and she doesn't work anymore. What a tender gesture of love; my dad recognizes this and does not complain about whatever brand of coffee she chooses to buy because coffee is coffee at 5:30 am.
    If this were still the 1950s? Well...
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    And that's over stale coffee. Can you imagine what would happen if he caught her cheating on him? It would probably inspire another dozen sequels in the the Saw franchise. This ad is like if there was a commercial today of a girl on trial, being questioned about what she was wearing the night she was raped, and then words show up on the screen saying, "You should have shopped and J.C. Penney." Let us playfully address some very sinister and culturally accepted realities of society, shall we?
    But no, being a woman was totally great in the fifties. Just ask these guys:
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Now if I want a man to dangle me off a cliff by a tiny rope, I have to sift through the icky Craigslist crowd.
    I'm not arguing that I would have had a better time than black people or--good lord--"Indian" people in the fifties, because holy shit. But these guys would not accept that I am much happier to be a woman today, despite all the bullshit, than I would have been in the fifties.
    "You don't know what you're talking about," Big Bill said. "You weren't there."
    "No," I conceded, "but if I was, I'd probably be married with six kids by now."
    "Well, how old are you?"
    "Twenty-five next month."
    Neither man disagreed.
    "Yeah," I said, "I do not want kids anytime soon."
    Oh, boy. That statement was a big hit.
    "You don't want kids?" Big Bill's friend asked. "I don't believe that."
    "Maybe someday, but who knows."
    "Are you married?"
    I laughed. "God, no."
    Big Bill's friend told me about his daughter, who had never wanted kids and always said she wouldn't have them, even though she was married. Then she accidentally got pregnant, and, "Oh, boy, the light of her life those kids."
    "Good for her," I said. "But not for me, at least not right now."
    "You don't know what you're talking about."
    There's a lot of obvious bullshit that goes with him saying that, but I told him, "I know that I'm a twenty-five-year-old part-time bartender living with my parents and a fortune's worth of college debt."
    Apparently, unpreparedness for motherhood does not mean that I am unprepared to be a mother.
    "You'll change your mind," Big Bill said.
    "Well, till then," I said, "no fucking thank you."
    They laughed, and I was able to escape to a different side of the bar where guys weren't telling me how women's history is all pointy bras and sunshine, and how I need to have kids to be happy. I realize that that kind of thinking is damaging to society...when it's in someone who is going to be alive during the next several elections. I don't think I'll have that problem here. So
I was comforted by the fact that they were not saying these things out of malicious intent, just home-bred ignorance. They were just speaking their minds, not attacking me.
    And their tips. I was also comforted by their tips.
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I know not these "morals" of which you speak.

Photo cred:
Coffee wife: this slideshow

Wife about to plummet to her death: this slideshow
Morality busting money: this site I found while Googling "make it rain" images
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    Author

    Mme. Johanna is a SUNY Brockport alum and a gaudy jewelry enthusiast. At 29, this ambitious young woman can often be found declining event invites on Facebook and looking at pictures of her niece while she drinks wine on her couch, accompanied by her beloved dog, Dorothy Barker.

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