Sometimes I’m Awesome

I often joke that it’s too bad waitressing doesn’t pay better, since that is my one great talent in life. Seriously, guys: I was a really, really good waitress. I may not be the smartest, prettiest, most athletic or most creative individual, but damn am I good at waiting tables. I worked as a waitress at several different restaurants back in my late teens and early twenties, and I’m pretty sure I know how professional athletes at the top of their game feel — I was that good.

(Except for the one time I dropped a ramekin of sour cream on some dude’s pants. And the other time I messed up the check for a party of eight and they got in a screaming match with my manager over how much they owed until I suddenly remembered that one of them had already paid for their portion of the check like an hour earlier and that I did in fact have his cash payment in my apron the whole time. Other than that, I was impeccable.)

The fact that I was so good at waitressing is actually somewhat unfortunate, because who the hell wants their one talent to be waitressing? How boring! Luckily, I was reminded this weekend that I actually do have one other talent lurking beneath the rest of my mediocre capabilities: I am surprisingly good at baking and decorating cakes and cupcakes!

This is particularly shocking since outside of the Universe of Baked Goods I am truly the least artistic person on the planet — I can barely write my name in a straight line, and forget about drawing or painting or sculpting or anything cool like that. But I worked at a cake and candy supply store in high school, and I picked up some tricks of the trade. I’m no Cake Boss, but I know just enough to make things look impressive…and just enough to make me the go-to dessert-maker for any family event.

(Which is a blessing and a curse. Usually a curse. Do you have any idea how long this shit takes?!)

This weekend was my little sister’s wedding shower, and I whipped up four dozen cupcakes (half chocolate, half carrot cake) and decorated them with owls (because she likes them and because they’re cute. Duh.) Indulge me for a moment and allow me to show off my handiwork:

Not bad, right?! I still can’t claim this as my greatest talent, though, if only because it took me nine hours to make these, largely because I wasn’t brilliant enough to realize that I could have simply purchased an owl-shaped cookie cutter to cut out the owl shapes, a fact that dawned on me at 1am after I had just spent three hours hand-cutting four dozen fondant owls. If cake decorating was really my thing, I would have thought of that ahead of time!

I would never miss something so obvious while waitressing.

Now, would you ladies care for some dessert, or shall I bring the bill?

What a Difference a Year Makes: Merry Christmas!

I barely remember last Christmas. No, I wasn’t drunk — I had a 24-day-old son and hadn’t had sufficient sleep in, oh, 24 days. I remember precisely four things about Christmas 2011:

1. I was really, really tired.
2. I had no clothes to wear since I thankfully no longer needed maternity gear but wasn’t even close to fitting back into my real-people clothes yet, so I made my poor sister dig through every item in her closet in an effort to find something loose enough to lend me so that I wouldn’t look like a hobo during our family party. I think I tried on 10 different items to no avail before finally finding a big enough shirt, which I of course paired with leggings because actual pants simply weren’t an option for me until Bubba was about 3 months old:
3. I was really worried about the prospect of drunk relatives — supply of which is certainly not limited — demanding to hold my fragile new son and me not being able to come up with a good excuse with which to deny their request (I had a vision of someone insisting upon holding him and then tripping over one of the seemingly countless children in the house and/or one of their toys on their way outside to grab another beverage), so poor Bubba spent most of the day literally strapped to my chest:
   “Sorry, he’s all cozy in here! You can hold him later when I take this thing off…” (i.e. never)
4. I didn’t buy a single present for the baby — not because I’m a terrible human being (although you could make a case for that), but because I am cheap and saw no reason to spend money on presents for a baby who didn’t need anything and surely wouldn’t know the difference — and I felt kind of bad about it despite my sound logic.

Everything else was a blur. I don’t remember what gifts I received or gave (I did buy gifts for people who were old enough to understand…as far as I remember, anyway), what we ate, or who was there — it was just another of the many, many sleep-deprived days I slogged through during Bubba’s first couple months of life, the type where you spend the whole day slack-jawed and staring blankly into space, just hoping you don’t fall asleep while standing up because smacking your head on the floor would suck.

This year, things were different!

My Martha Stewart Moment

Despite a couple of admittedly serious obstacles — namely, scarcity of creativity and an even more pronounced lack of talent — I love crafts and “projects” of all sorts. Sewing, scrapbooking, jewelry-making, pitiful attempts at painting…I love it all!

Unfortunately, the cruel twist of fate that has rendered me both a craft-lover and a sucks-at-crafts-er results in very few crafts actually coming to fruition.

The lack of creativity is a problem, obviously. There have been many times that I’ve been struck by a crafting mood, only to stare at my box of assorted “art supplies” (I use that term loosely as the box contains little more than some half-dried tubes of paint, a lot of construction paper, and a few stickers; it is fitting that my materials, much like my finished crafts, would fit right in at any preschool) for an hour trying to decide what to do. The right side of my brain simply refuses to cooperate in my crafting ambitions. Sometimes I’ll be able to formulate a vague idea of what I might like to create (“what this house needs is some Christmas spirit! Red and green! And…like…Christmas stuff?”) but that’s typically as far as I get.

It’s the talent deficiency that is the real hindrance, though. On the extraordinarily rare occasion that I’m able to get past the planning stage and actually attempt to create something, the finished product is virtually unrecognizable compared to the vision my creativity-starved brain agonized to cobble together. I am incapable of cutting or sewing in a straight line, I have NO eye for color or design, and I have a serious problem with neatness. Please examine the below samples as evidence of my deficits: