First my father (who was buying it for my very-difficult-to-get-presents-for mother), and then my mother told me about this book, so I heard about it from them; and in the first place it was picked up at random by my father, who knows that my very-difficult-to-get-presents-for mother enjoys reading memoirs written by neurotic people with a sense of humor.
I waited until down here to put an excerpt, mainly because I wanted to defend my choice of excerpt. I am quoting this bit not because it is perfectly representative of the book at large (not that it isn’t – it’s a collection of personal essays, and this is the beginning of one; it’s just not the best bit the book has to offer), but because it is so true of me.
Even if you are a waiter for a very short time, you are doomed to have waiter nightmares for the rest of your life. You go into work and your uniform is missing or you can’t figure out how the tables are numbered or you’ve suddenly developed a limp. Your dead aunt Rose, who was always impossible to please, pops up at one table or someone you made fun of at camp or an ax murderer is demanding their appetizer. You miss your wedding because no one will cover for you.
Seriously, that is me. Not the waiter part (happily I have never been one and I don’t think I will unless I become completely destitute and no one else will hire me, because I hate, hate, hate obnoxious people making idiotic and ill-considered demands, to obey which I have neither the time nor the inclination), but the dreams part. I dream about my jobs so much. It’s ridiculous. When I worked at the romance novels online bookstore, I was constantly having dreams – boring dreams, as it wasn’t a high-stress job – about doing my work there; when I worked at the college bookstore, I was constantly having dreams about the bookshelves all falling down and crushing people, and coming to work during the first-week rush and losing my voice (ha, ha, nope, that wasn’t a dream, that actually happened), and running over the children who were always there with a book trolley loaded with chemistry textbooks, and arriving too late to prevent someone from impaling someone else with a box cutter.
Well, anyway, back to talking about this book. It was a nice, friendly, amusing collection of personal essays; and the stuff she wrote about her grandmother was very sad; and heeheehee, who is scared of moths?