A Soliloquy on Waffle House

Last weekend, some friends joined me for a kayaking and camping trip in the mountains of North Carolina. After breaking camp on Sunday morning, we were starving and wanted a good, old-fashioned, Southern greasy breakfast before hitting the road for home. Our preference was unanimous: it HAD to be Waffle House.

Despite being armed with a PDA equipped with GPS, we knew all we had to do was look for that friendly yellow sign...after all, we ARE in the South. Waffle Houses are more prolific than hog farms in the Carolinas. Imagine our shock and disappointment when we were forced to settle for a Waffle-House-esque imitation. Sure, it had hash browns with all the accoutrements and strong coffee, but it just wasn't the same.

Yesterday, on our way to a hike near Columbia, my boyfriend and I were elated to find a Waffle House on our way out of town. In spite of the fact we were cutting it close on time, we opted to take the chance. We were jonesing for the "Waffle House Experience." I'm sorry, but IHOP is for pussies.

Waffle House is as ingrained in my youth as sweet tea and Kentucky Homegrown. It's untelling how many late nights, in an alcohol- or oranically-induced stupor, my friends and I would converge on Waffle House at 3am, chowing down on greasy hash browns, trucker-issue coffee, and raisin toast with apple butter. But the food is only a fraction of the Waffle House Experience.

There's the pimply-faced line cook, grease-skating from one end of the grill to the other. There's the comical delineation between smoking and non-smoking sections (usually only a table's difference), the watery grits, and of course, the clientele itself, which ranges from late-night partygoers to truckers to prostitutes to regulars who keep the waitresses company in the wee hours.

People familiar with Waffle House make it their mission to create the most complicated order known to man, just so they can listen to the waitress bark it out the line cook:

"I need hashbrowns, scattered, smothered, covered, chunked and topped with two eggs over medium, a side of bacon and raisin toast with apple butter!"

The very best part, however, is the jukebox...full of old country songs from Hank Williams Jr. and Patsy Cline. Selection 100 on every single Waffle House jukebox in the country is "The Waffle House Family Part I," a catchy, jingly tune that's cheesier than the slice of half-melted American covering your hashbrowns. Here's a sample:

http://www.wafflehouse.com/musicmachine.htm

The waitresses at the Waffle House I frequented as a teenager constantly complained about that song, so on our way out the door, we'd pop in a few quarters and select that song five times. Then we'd sit in our car and wait for the waitresses to start looking around suspicously at the dirtbag who played the song they are convinced will play on the muzak in Hell.

I truly pity those on the West Coast who are deprived such a rich, wonderful, white trash experience that is...Waffle House.

A Walking Willendorf Statue

Hey, at least I'm walking. But as time drags on and I careen toward 40 at breakneck speed, I am stunned at the reflection that greets me when I get out of the shower each morning. Now, I was never thin. Those days ended when I went with my mom to pursue her graduate degree 80 miles away. I enrolled in 9th grade and Dad picked us up each weekend to go back to our hometown. Mom and I had a two-bedroom apartment within walking distance of her classes and my school. And we became "food buddies."

Here's how bad it got: We go to the grocery store and pick up a frozen pizza. If that wasn't bad enough, we'd buy extra sauce, cheese and pepperoni to go on TOP of it. Or, we would pick up a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese...the kind where the cheese came in the skinny round can. We'd pick up a block of Cracker Barrel Extra-Sharp Cheddar, sour cream and bacon bits and ADD it to the mac & cheese and chow down. I packed on 40 pounds that year and it never left me.

Granted, my weight has remained semi-steady ever since then, give or take 10 or 15 pounds, usually in the "up" direction. I give myself kudos for eventually learning that I can't eat like that anymore and lay around like a sack of potatos all day. By the time I reached 30, I was walking regularly and watching what I eat. But that change in behavior kept steady pace with my increasingly sluggish metabolism, so even though I'm far more active than I was at 15, and despite being more conscientious about my diet, I'm still heavy. And it has, and probably always will be, the single biggest bane of my existence.

I don't need to be skinny. Or "thin," even. Just comfortable in my own skin. Today, my legs don't cross comfortably. I have a freakishly large paunch beneath my belly button that enters a room before I do. I haven't tucked my shirt in in over 20 years.

When I was 32, I somehow was able to shed 15 pounds. I was still considered overweight, but I didn't have to shop at plus-size stores. I shopped to show off, not hide. Frankly, despite not being all trim and buff, I was nevertheless thrilled with my size-12 body. At the time, I didn't have much of a social life, nor did I have a lot of money to go out. So my free time was spent counting calories, taking long, brisk walks and going to the gym. There were few social gatherings with food and drink to tempt me.

Then I met a guy. I put on about half of what I lost. Then we broke up, and it threw me in a deep depression that stole my appetite for almost a year. Despite ingesting fewer than 1,000 calories a day for almost a year, I only lost what I had gained in that relationship. Once my heart recovered, I made new friends and sculpted a busy, robust social life. That's where things went downhill weight-wise.

Five years, and too many vain attempts later, I'm back to where I started, plus about five pounds. And it consumes my every waking moment. I think about it in the shower, at work when I try crossing my legs and my knees get sore from the effort required to keep them together, when I bend over to tie my shoes and it steals my breath.

My boyfriend tells me at least 10 times a day how beautiful I am...how he knew the first time he set eyes on me that I embody what he's looked for his entire life: a woman he will never grow tired of looking at. We'll be talking about something as mundane as tax deductions, and he will interrupt me and say, "God, you're so beautiful."

I believe him, in that I believe that HE believes it. But I don't. And it steals the joy - not to mention the appreciation - of being what every woman wants to be: beautiful, graceful and desired. It isn't fair to him, and I feel so guilty sometimes when he tells me that. He deserves a woman to blush and be thrilled over such kindness.

This is no way to live, and I'm losing hope that it will get any better. I'm not sure I have it in me anymore to even try.

Monkey-Roped

Back in grad school, I took a high ropes course with my fellow residence life staffers. I was a residence director for a co-ed, upperclassmen hall. All the RDs and RAs were participating. For those of you who don't know, high ropes is an obstacle course that's about 40 feet in the air. It's a teambuilding exercise, designed to instill trust and closeness in a team. It usually starts with you climbing an unsteady rope ladder onto a slim beam of wood suspended between two trees. That's the easy part. There are obstacles that require partners to get you through it (thus the trust-building), and other areas where you're on your own and must draw on the encouragement of others to get through.

One part, which they called the "Monkey Ropes," requires you to slide your feet along nothing more than a rope while you grab another rope hanging vertically in front of you with both hands. As you stand there, your legs shaking and praying you don't lose your balance, you must release one hand, lean over, and grab the next rope for stability. Only then can you release your other hand from the first rope and move forward. Think of a monkey swinging from vine to vine in a jungle and maybe you'll get the picture.

I was talking to a friend last night, and I think I might have coined a new phrase for a relationship strategy so common it's practically universal. I call it "Monkey-Roping," where you won't let go of one relationship until you're fairly confident you have another one to go to. It happens all the time.

Certainly I can't be so original! Convinced I wasn't the first person to conjure this metaphor, I googled the phrase and came up with nothing. Excellent!

This is the strategy we've come to use in our professional lives, where we change careers five to ten times in our lifetimes. The preferred method is to have the next job lined up before we leave the one we have. And I think we've allowed ourselves to carry that principle into our personal lives, where, just like our jobs, nothing is permanent and loyalty can be both fickle and fleeting.

If you've been the victim of monkey-roping...where your significant other breaks it off with you because he/she has another relationship lined up, you've been "monkey-roped."

I must say, this is perhaps the cruellest of relationship strategies for the hapless victim. You can be dating the biggest loser known to man, but guaranteed, he or she will have someone waiting in the wings the second the relationship ends. While out with friends the next night trying to forget the jerk who made your life miserable, in the happy couple walks, giddy and acting as if they finally met "The One."

What is so genius about this strategy is that it's usually you, the victim, who chose to end it. The "monkey-roper," as it were, makes life intolerable by checking out of the relationship, breaking dates or not showing up at all, or just being the biggest asshole or bitch known to mankind -- which, if whoever is waiting behind door #2 even knows about you, only serves to give your soon-to-be ex-lover an alliance against you. You're the bitch...or the asshole, as it were, when it's THEM who has put you in his/her back pocket until someone better comes along.

The monkey-ropers are different from cheaters. They don't officially start the relationship until they've made you miserable enough to dump them. But they've been laying the groundwork for months. You suspect something's up. Your partner has "mentionitis," where your soon-to-be replacement crops up in the most innocent of conversations.

You: "You know, I just don't get why cereal has to be so sweet!"
Him: "Megan only eats cereal where sugar isn't listed in the first five ingredients."

You: "That movie really sucked."
Him: "Megan only eats cereal where sugar isn't listed in the first five ingredients."

To my knowledge, I've never been cheated on, but I've been monkey-roped more times than I care to count. Seemingly out of nowhere, attention is replaced by attrition. Closeness is replaced by withdrawal. You didn't see it coming, but there it is. He's unavailable. She's mentioning this person all the time. And the most infuriating part is that when you confront them with your suspicions, they become sanctimonious, indignant that you would dare question their fidelity or loyalty.

And while you're the one who chooses to end it, you're also the one left feeling as if your insecurity, irrationality, or suspcicious nature (which you never had before) drove them away and into the arms of another.

It's as if you were the one who was dumped. Because, with a monkey-roper, you always are.

Controlling

A friend of mine just called in tears because she was just dumped by a friend who told her she was oversensitive and controlling. He told her, "If you don't want to be friends with me anymore, I could care less." This came as a total shocker because you won't meet a quieter, seemingly docile, kind-natured man.

What precipitated this confrontation was a incident involving a volleyball team they are both on. She is the captain and she notified the team via e-mail to be at the courts 15 minutes before the game to warm up. He and another teammate was already there playing a game with some other people when she arrived and were just wrapping up a game. They started playing another game and she got upset because he didn't ask her to play with them....she was expecting he'd stop and come to another court to warm up with his team. When she let him know this, he said, "We're already warmed up." Knowing her, she probably was in captain mode and came across as ordering him to come warm up with them.

Apparently, she was cross and upset during the match and they lost, and, according to her, so was he. She called me that night saying how upset and pissed she was.

She couldn't take it any longer, so she called him and let him know that he had hurt her feelings by "excluding" her, and he was very blunt and angry, telling her that she always blows things out of proportion, she doesn't "own" him, and that he was sick of it. To my knowledge, it was their first fight, but he's heard her complain about other people who have, in her mind, mistreated her. I guess he was of the mindset I'm in: when will I be the target of her insecurity and sky-high expectations?

You know....I'm on the fence with this one. She IS an extremely sensitive person whose feelings are hurt quite easily. One by one, her friends and lovers are dropping away, put off by her confrontations that they have hurt her feelings. I'm about the only one left, and I feel the dependency growing. I can actually see it coming: she's going to expect me to do something or act a certain way in the interest of "friendship," and if I don't deliver, she will confront me and tell me that that isn't the way friends should act. She is a very high-maintenance friend.

Perhaps she and I are friends because I see much of myself in her. I'm sensitive as well, and when someone hurts my feelings, I have to let it be known eventually. Sometimes it's been met with compassion; other times it's been met with anger and defensiveness. What I have over her, hopefully, is that I try to see where the other person is coming from and change accordingly. Generally, my sensitivity is directed to lovers, whereas everyone in Beth's life may feel like they're walking on eggshells around her.

So, I suppose that my friendship with her is not necessarily for a season or a lifetime, but for a reason: I can see how her extreme sensitivity drives people away from her when what she wants is for them to draw closer. Where is the line drawn? I don't think her friend handled it well at all, to be honest, but I suppose that he felt it just wasn't worth the aggravation of being her emotional caretaker?

Just a thought,
OB

Packrats

Dad's "Office," where he displays his own unique way to manage utter chaos.

I spent the weekend at my parents' house. I hadn't visited them since Christmas. Each time I go home, I am flabbergasted at how much stuff keeps piling up in that house. They've been there since 1974, so it's to be expected that stuff would accumulate. But they don't throw ANYTHING away.

For example, when I was home for Christmas, my dad was going through boxes that were pulled from the attic to make room for a renovation. He comes downstairs with this pink taffeta prom dress I wore in 10th grade, as well as a black New Romantic-style jacket (same one Nick Rhodes is wearing on the cover of the second issue of Duran Duran's first album). Both are covered in mildew stains and God-knows-what-else....rat crap? Insulation?

Our three-stall barn, complete with hayloft, which used to board horses and now boards groundhogs and family relics.

Dad marches into the den holding the items up and says with a smile, "Look what I found in the basment? Do you want it?" I said, "Goodness no. They're out of style, stained, and I couldn't fit an ankle into them, much less my butt. Why would I want them?" He said, "I thought you might want them for the memories. I'll set them aside for a yard sale or for Goodwill." Ummm...what on earth makes him think anyone would pay money to have these items? I told him to throw them away, but the next day, I saw them tossed into a box in the basement.

The hallway in the "Hannibal Lector" basement

That's my Dad for you. Classic Depression era. He can't throw anything away, but he spends copious amounts of time moving it around from room to room in futile hope that the piles of junk will will somehow get smaller and more manageable. Every time I go home it's a true trip down memory lane. I'll find a coat I wore when I was six years old, back issues of Bop magazine with Duran Duran or on the cover or Fangoria magazine, pillowcases full of old notes I passed in class...it's always fun to navigate my memories when I go home, but the sheer volume of stuff in their house makes me claustrophobic and makes me wonder if my parents have that "pack-rat" disorder that's been making news lately.