What a dreary day it
Posted by: Liz | From: August 01, 2003
What a dreary day it is outside! This summer sure hasn't felt like much of a summer, what with the late start and now this early autumn business. There better be some serious sun pockets hiding in the upcoming two seasons. And I mean serious. I am completely tanless this summer. This is a first for me. Not that I'm a usual glossy bronze or anything, but typically my summer calls me out into the sun for numerous sun-related activities wherein a tan comes upon me. This summer, no such luck. Boo that. Boo all that shit, yo.The trash trucks that roam down my streets have painted across their rears, in bold black letters: "DON'T LITTER."
If I walk from Union Square to work in the mornings, I pass a mattress store that has lots of displays in the window. One such display is a minature mattress with a cutaway section so you can see the inticate inner construction of this miracle mattress that supports you like no other. Atop this small mattress is a cutout of a woman's body, laying on her side, back towards you. She is presumably sleeping soundly and--holy cow!--she's in the buff, so you can trace with your eyes the lovely dip of her waist and curves of her buttocks. That is, however, if you aren't distracted by the exposed SPINE you can also see pertruding along the cutaway of her back. She's not a hot naked sleeping girl! She's dead! She's been murderd and her back peeled away from her supine body! Look away!
Today is a co-worker's last day, so we took her out for lunch yesterday at this fancy Greek restaurant. Everything was pretty good, but we had a very strange waitress. Youngish and with flyaway tan hair pulled into a messy ponytail, she spoke with halting English. I had a feeling she might have been French or Italian, though. Possibly not Greek. She seemed utterly unsure of herself the entire time she was taking our orders. (I had an appitizer greek salad for my entree, as there were no vegetarian things on the menu, but after realizing that the salad was only tomatoes, cucumbers, and feta, I asked if I could get some greens with it, too. She assured me it came with greens. But it actually came with green, singular, being a lonely piece of lettuce upon which all the other stuff was piled. A garnish, if you will. Luckily I was all filled up on bread, so no biggie.) She would sidle up and, even when none of us were talking because we were waiting for her to come over, she appeared loath to interrupt us and took a minute to break into our conversation. Even when we weren't talking. And then-and this is the baffling thing to me--as she was clearing the plates, she pointedly started humming loudly. Now, if we were in a diner, and Lorraine our brisk and never-faltering, sure-of-herself waitress, swept in to collect the dishes and was humming a bit while whisking things away, I would not be surprised. That Lorraine, she's all business but likes a little hum to distract her! But this girl was obviously neither brisk nor all business and neither whisked or swept anything. She was just humming rather oddly and awkwardly. I had the thought that she was perhaps a French girl and someone had told her to play the part of a Greek waitress and that in Greece, things are brisk and airy and one might hum as one is taking dishes away. Maybe she was humming under orders? I think humming is one of those things you can only undertake under your own inclination. Humming under duress is pretty awful.
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