Beth wrote a post the other day about the jobs she has held, and asked about her readers’ past job histories. I think my answer is too long for a comment box, so I’ll post my reply here. I want to do my whole history in one post, but I can’t. I have worked a LOT of jobs. We’re going to do this 5 at a time.

1. Arvada Center: bugging you at dinner time; 1992 (age 17). I answered an add for a job opening at this fancy new theater opening in my town. I was quite the theater geek in high school, and with hopes of studying theater in college I thought a job at a theater to be a great place to start. I was the first interview they held, got all the way through it, got offered the job, returned the next day, and then realized I had no idea what job I had landed. Turns out, I managed to land a telemarketing gig, selling tickets for upcoming shows. I couldn’t sell you an umbrella in a rainstorm. I lasted all of like two weeks. What I learned from this job: When interviewing, ask what the job you are applying for is. Especially if they are vague about it.

2. Bowling Alley: deep frying shit; 1992-1993 (age 17-18). My step-mother worked at this bowling alley about 30 minutes from our house and they were in need of someone to work at the snack bar. I was in need of a job. I have no idea what my hourly wage was, but I bet it wasn’t much. I worked 3 or 4 nights a week until 1 a.m. The first time my heart stopped beating almost entirely, I was at the bowling alley. The hospital was only a few minutes away. The first time my car was broken into, I was at the bowling alley. What I learned from this job: How to make ranch dressing, that car windows are kind of but not terribly expensive to replace and that being a short-order cook is one of the all-time hardest jobs on the planet.

3. Dry Cleaner: Giving you other people’s clothing back; 1993 (age 18). A couple from my church owned a small dry-cleaning business and they needed someone to work the front counter. A girl I was trying very hard to be friends with at church also worked there and thought I would fit right in. My job was to take your stuff, give you a little tag with a number on it, hang your clothes and send them back to the cleaning area and then take your tag when you came back in, find your stuff on the rack, give in to you and make sure you were charged correctly and received the proper change. This doesn’t sound hard, and in fact it wasn’t, except that those little wire hangers get all sorts of tangled together and if you are not paying very, very close attention Mr. Jones goes home with his nice blue suit and Ms. Jackson’s unmentionables. I was not one for paying very, very close attention to anything. The girl from church ended up being the very first Jehovah’s Witness that I ever heard swear, and I was, of course, horrified. What I learned from this job: The back of a dry cleaners smells really bad, swearing is fun, and that I never really liked being a Jehovah’s Witness anyway.

4. Gas Station: Wearing brown Polyester pants and steel toed shoes, and looking really hot in them; 1993-1995 (age 18-20). My dad bought my brother a car in 1992. In 1993, my brother took off and never really came back. My dad got stuck with a car payment he was not totally prepared to handle and so took a little weekend side job at a local gas station. He got married in July of 1993 and they needed someone to cover his 2 or 3 shifts for the 2 weeks he was on honeymoon. He asked me to help out and I, not having anything else going on really, thought I’d fill in for him. I worked there for 2 years. I worked 5 or 6 shifts a week, taking weekends off to go stay in Greeley with my boyfriend. I worked with really fun people and actually made a not-awful wage. Excepting the uniform, I kinda liked that job. The manager of the place taught me how to balance the books and do the daily banking and order the fuel and do the payroll. My co-worker Bob got me to snort a line of Pixie-Stix in the office. My dad and I worked one shift a week together and that place was never so clean and organized as it was that shift. We listened to classic rock on the radio and I learned every brand of cigarettes in the universe. How I quit that job is a long story with a short end; my boss was old and going crazy, making her less than pleasant to work with in the end. My friend and I decided one day that if we didn’t eat a real Philly cheesesteak we would fall over dead and die, and when I asked my crazy ass boss for a few days off to go get a sandwich, she said no in very loud tones and I went anyway. We drove from Denver to Philly and back. For a sandwich. It was the best goddamn sandwich I have ever eaten. What I learned from this job: People really do drive off without paying for their gas, no one ever, ever should have to endure polyester on their skin, Pixie-Stix in the nostrils dries ones eyeballs out, light accounting and that any job can be fun if you work with the right people.

5. Grisanti’s: Finding creative and nice ways to tell you to fuck off; 1994-1995 (age 19-20). In the same parking lot of the gas station was a little Italian restaurant called Grisanti’s. Of course, I knew the whole staff. They came to buy their Mountain Dews and their Benson & Hedges Menthol’s and their condoms from us. The manager of the restaurant was friends of sorts with my dad and one day asked him what the deal was with the hot little blond chick. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that conversation. Anyway, undeterred by what I can only assume were some rather inventive threats, Ray the Manager found me one day at work and offered me a job on the spot. I learned from job 1 to ask what I am being offered, and it turned out to be an ok offer, to be the lead hostess at the restaurant. My job would be crowd control, assigning tables to servers, being the reservationist and training the other hostesses. This was a very hard job. People are exhausting; hungry, suburban people doubly so. I worked at the gas station during the day and the restaurant at night. I met my Sagittarius Tim there. He was A) 9 years older than me and B) my boss. What I learned from this job: No one likes to wait for a table, call ahead seating is the single worst idea in the history of ideas, that I was (and still am) astonishing good at working in the restaurant industry, that drinking 15 shots of Perma-Frost in the course of 30 minutes or so gives one a week-long hangover and a peculiar and lasting hatred for all things peppermint-smelling, that I love Sagittarians and that sleeping with your 28 year old boss when you’re 19 maybe isn’t the hottest idea one can ever have.

Next up: Awesome jobs #6-10.

Today is the day one of my 157th* period. That number should be a lot higher, but I got to take of a lot of months off due to some fantastically awesome birth control, and a lot more months due to some fantastically failed birth control. Nursing took a chunk out of that number. So, in almost 19 years, I have pulled off only having to do this shit 157 times.

And after 19 long years of reproductivity, of mature womanhood, I have but one thing to say:

This shit still motherfucking sucks. I have a goddamn inner-tube of pain. Grrrr.

But, being National Compliment Day, I will be cheery and nice while I eat a whole carton of Bon Bons and chase it with a bag of the saltiest chips money can buy.

Ready?

Wow, you are totally awesome. You are so funny and witty and nice. Did I mention cute? Dude, you are way smoking. The pants make you ass look fantastic! Did you do something different with your hair? New pomade? Are those highlights going on in there? Whatever it is, keep doing it for sure. You don’t look a day over 28, seriously! And that thing you said the other day? Sheer poetry. You simply blow my mind. How did I ever get so lucky as to have you for a friend?

*Yes, I actually busted out a calculator for this post. Sad, isn’t it? Any hobby suggestions?

Also entitled, “Why the hell aren’t more people doing this?“

AirTran Airways on Tuesday defended its decision to remove a Massachusetts couple from a flight after their crying 3-year-old daughter refused to take her seat before takeoff.

The (family) said they told a flight attendant they had paid for their daughter’s seat, but asked whether she could sit in her mother’s lap. The request was denied.

She was removed because “she was climbing under the seat and hitting the parents and wouldn’t get in her seat” during boarding, Graham-Weaver said.

And to that I say, Good on yah, guys.

Seriously, folks, I wish this happened more. Maybe you think I’m a big meany-pants for saying that, but come on. I can’t tell you how many times I have been ridiculously put out in some situation or another where somebodies horrid little angel is making a scene. I’m not saying that my kids are angels; god knows they are far from it, but there’s this little thing call being the parent. It’s a novel concept they just came up with where in the adult in a situation, um, takes charge of it. This is my favorite part of this story:

(The parents) , said they just needed a little more time to calm their daughter, E.

“We weren’t given an opportunity to hold her, console her or anything,” (the mother) said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

How about disciplining her? Ever heard of that one?

Here’s where I get all holier-than-thou…

My kids all had/have temper tantrums. They do it at the grocery store, at the movie theater, in restaurants, at church. ALL kids do it. And every single time they have, every single one I swear to god, I have removed them from the situation. Just ask the checkers at my local Safeway. They have been left with many an abandoned cart for an hour or two. Or ask the girl that works at the diner down the street. Go ask her how many meals we have paid for and left uneaten because our son decided that if he could not run up and down the aisles of the restaurant, people in France would hear his displeasure. There have been movies left, there have been swats on the butt in parking lots, their have been playdates ended before they began. Because if my nasty little heathens cannot figure out how to behave in public then they will not go out in public. And you know what? My kids are all perfect little angels in public now. They really are. Maybe not so much at home all the time, but if you ran into us out somewhere you’d be mighty impressed. They got the hint.

I’m not saying that those people should have abandoned their flight, and I’m not saying that flying with a three year old is anything short of heroic. All I’m saying is that there is a rule that says you must be in a seat, and not under it, for a plane to take off. In case these people didn’t notice, the airline industry in general has gotten mighty stingy as far as the whole “rule” thing goes in the past, oh, 6 years or so. You know your kids can’t crawl around on the floor, your flight is delayed and you have already had 15 minutes to get her into a seat, now seriously. Pick her up, put her in a seat, buckle her in and hold her ass down until the flight takes off. It’s not so hard, really. You’re, like, 3 times her size and stuff.

I know I’m going to take some flack for this one, but I just get all cranky when people refuse to parent their children and then scream and huff and puff when someone steps in and does it for them. If a great big hairy drunk guy was crawling under seats and hitting people, you bet your bottom dollar they’d have throw his ass off the plane, too.

But at least that would be totally funny to watch.

Today my beautiful nephew turns 15. Excuse me while I go throw up.

I came into his life when he was 5, and didn’t meet him until he was 7, but though I can remember life without him he cannot recall life without me. This boy, he loves his Auntie Mr. Lady. We talk on the phone, he introduces me to all his friends, we hang out and eat tots. Though his Mexican skin and his Italian attitude betray the fact that he is not actually my flesh and blood, I gotta say, he sure does feel like it. I seriously love him as much as I love my own sons, and I secretly wish I could just steal him and make him live with me.

Of course, any minute now he’s going to figure out that it’s not really so cool to be down with one’s old ass aunt, and all this will come to a screeching halt, and I will be replaced by girls and sports and god-I-hope-not-but-probably beer.

So I savour my precious little time left with my sweet, endearing nephew.

When he was 5, he told his mom that he was going to play in the NFL one day. She rolled her eyes and signed him up for gymnastics. When he was 7 or so, he told his mom he was going to play for the Dallas Cowboys in the NFL. She rolled her eyes and signed him up for soccer. When he was 10, he told his mom that he was going to be the greatest football player of all time for the NFL. She rolled her eyes and signed him up for Pee-Wee Football. Today he is the star wide-receiver on his freshman football team. He lives just outside Phoenix, where they take their football very, very seriously, and little girls all over have his name on their cheeks in black eyeliner*

and a few NFL scouts have already pulled his mom aside and talked to her about him. Him and his future.

I, naturally, have totally convinced him that the only way, the only proper, respectable way to go, is to get into CU and play for the Buffs and get signed by the Steelers. That way, everyone wins. He goes to college, he gets to realize his NFL dreams, and my fucking team will stop sucking total ass.

Everyone. Wins.

Anyway, happy birthday, my little E. Your auntie, she loves you. A lot.

*My little girl is no exception to this rule.

So, tonight we are hosting an Open House at the boys’ school before Choice ends in February. We have snacks and tea and shit for the new parents and give them tours through the school. It’s exhausting and kind of a pain in the ass, but our school has been in the news quite a bit lately and this is easier than giving 5, 374 indivdual tours (which we will do anyway, because you are special and your child is exceptional, of course).

We all have a little role to play in the making-the-open-house-work thing. Mine is to provide dinner for the teachers who are staying really late to be there for the tours. Our teachers, they rock.

My question is this: Is it wrong, and should I inform anyone, that I dumped and entire bottle of Black Ale and a few cups of a very nice Zinfandel into the pot of scrum-diddly-icious chili I made for the staff and will bring into the school tonight?