Saturday, Sept. 10
I didn’t believe my manager at the restaurant when he said it was my job to scrape the gum off from beneath the tables. “Gum?” I said? “Under the tables in an upscale restaurant?”
But 20 minutes later, I found myself on my knees wielding a knife in my glove-covered hand, crouched beneath the tables, scraping gum from the undersurfaces of 25 tables.
This is not something I would lie or even exaggerate about: I scraped 40 pieces of gum into a paper bag.
My first look beneath a table prompted shock and disgust. While I maintained the latter emotion through the afternoon of scraping, the shock wore off as I moved from table to table with my knife. Shock soon gave into fascination. I had no idea the lengths people go to to hide their gum beneath tables.
Most people clumped their gum into a nice round ball in the dead center of the table, easy for me to grab onto and pull off. Others chose to clump it into the small spots where the legs meet the table. While this gum was harder for me to reach, it was still easy to grab onto because of the nature of the clump.
The gum — and therefore those gum-chewers — I directed most of my hatred toward was that which was spread out like spilled paint: thin, wide, flat. It was impossible to get my fingers onto, and tedious for me to remove with a knife because it was dry. It came off like dried paint chips flying this way and that across the floor, onto my uniform, hardly ever into the bag I carried.
These gum-chewers obviously went to great lengths to conceal their gum, and I hated them for their meticulousness. Why couldn’t they just ball it up, stick it to the underside, and be done with it already? Why spread it out thin? Were they being considerate of the next guest?
I imagine their thinking to be along these lines: “If I don’t want the gum I’m chewing right now, I’ll take it out of my mouth and spread it thinly across the underside of this table. That way, I’ll make sure that the next person who sits here won’t accidentally get stuck to a small ball of gum and be disgusted. Perhaps they’ll hardly notice it there at all!”
This is logic, people, pure and simple. And this is why the human race is a genius one.
Sunday Sept. 11
Nothing can screw up my day like messing with my morning routine.
I’m up at 5:30, showering, getting my supplies ready for school, feeding the cat, etc. And then I’m out the door by 6:45, headed up Chapel Street toward Starbucks. I like to get there by 6:50 or 6:55, to make sure I can get to school at 7. I did this routine to the T on Friday morning, parked my car outside of Starbucks, walked up to the door, and saw all the lights off. I went into a sort of panic mode.
I am not a coffee drinker. I don’t really enjoy straight-up coffee, unless it’s after dinner, and even then I don’t always like it. I own a coffee maker, but the only thing it’s made recently is filtered hot water for tea. I have two pounds of coffee in my freezer that I haven’t even opened since before Christmas. I just don’t think to drink it, I guess.
Except for during the school year. I have to have coffee every morning — but only a mocha or a latte. I can’t really do anything else. For a while, I was going to Bruegger’s on Whitney Avenue for their Pumpkin Spice coffee, but that was seasonal, and I haven’t been back since last fall. (I’ll give it another shot this
year.)
The vanilla latte or white chocolate mocha at Starbucks gives me enough sugar — and definitely enough caffeine — to get me through the first hour before school. And then the kids’ energy takes over from there and keeps me going. But that one cup gets me focused, gets me warm inside, and makes me feel like a teacher.
So on Friday, when I reached the locked doors of Starbucks and realized my routine had been officially messed with, I told myself to calm down and to find an alternative. I opted for Atticus and walked over there with furrowed brow only to realize that they didn’t open until 8. Panic rose again in my chest, and as I walked back to the car I saw a woman (incidentally the same woman I denied a cup of coffee to a week or so ago) start dancing and pulling her sweatpants down.
Perhaps her routine had been messed with, too.
In the end, I settled for French Vanilla at Dunkin’ Donuts on Park and Chapel. I gave a man some change when he asked for it and bought him a donut on top of that. I was a little later than usual getting to school, but it was an overall good day. I cannot wait to get back to Starbucks tomorrow.