Hi everyone.  This is Acadia from superficialgallery.com and I am writing this as a favor to my wonderful friend, Julie.  As someone who chooses to not reveal anything about myself on the Internet, the fact that Julie has been so incredibly honest and forthcoming has always and will always baffle me.  She is incredibly honest and like anything else, the more true something is the funnier/more poignant/more effective something is.  People have built in bullshit detectors and while Julie might be lots of complicated things, dishonest is not one of them.

But all of that honesty takes a toll.  The birthing process is always painful, and given the depth and breadth of the trauma Julie has undergone over the past year (all of which she shared here publicly), I am sure that you can understand that she’s kind of tired.  Add to that the fact that the site is costing her more money than it makes.  Then imagine what it would be like to be scared to look at your own pending comments because you are getting trolled by your own mom.  This has been going on for months, and yet she has kept writing until now.

So what’s different now?  Practical things.  The site(s) are bleeding money she doesn’t have.  Her health is for crap and what was previously a source of fulfillment and pride has become a looming wave of stress that she, to be honest, does not need to deal with.  I cannot imagine what it must be like to feel so crappy and still be able to make visitors feel welcome, make casual readers smile and make her useless failure of a mother feel like she had some sort of power by allowing her to leave the shitty comments that she left.  Julie and I spoke about just making it so her mom could not comment at all (would not have been difficult) but Julie said it would be better to let her think she was being effective that way rather than hurt more people by finding another medium.  Grownups should not have to make those kind of decisions but Julie did.

And she knows that not all of the decisions she made were good.  People were hurt by things she said and how she said them and where she said them.  People who deserved to have things related to them in a personal, respectful manner were informed instead in ways that could only be described as horrifically insensitive and completely inappropriate.  Things like that happen when people trick themselves into thinking that being selfish is a virtue.  Julie is no longer tricking herself and will fix the mess she made offline (where it should have been handled anyway).

Now, before you all go thinking that I somehow hacked Julie up, stole her site and have her hidden in one of her beloved stalker vans, I assure you that she is alive and well and you can find her on Facebook.  She is having seizures and needs to fix her finances and needs to get all of the things in real life worked out before she can think about coming back to the site.  And if she does come back to the site, she will need to decide where internet stops and real life starts.  Trying to make them one thing is too hard and it chewed her up.

So like they say…if you love something, umm, I guess go find it on Facebook?  I don’t know.  It’s not like this is a eulogy.  It’s just that the site is going dark.  So go away…go on!

Sorry folks.  Blog’s closed.  Moose out front should’ve told you.

Holy mother of pearl I had the two most fucked up days at work this past weekend.  I was all geeked out and ready to write on Friday afternoon but figured since I wrote in the middle of the night before it’d have wasted that post so I decided to wait until today.  Then NYE happened.  What a mess THAT was.

Let’s start with Friday.  I went in at 11:30 and was asked how I felt about going behind the bar since the bartender was sick. I’m a cocktail waitress.  I’m very comfortable with alcohol and I won’t ever turn my boss down for anything so I got a ten minute crash course in bar tending and then was super excited to do it because I felt like Tom Cruise in “Cocktail” and it was a Friday afternoon so I didn’t expect to be that busy right?

WRONG.

The place was mobbed.  The dining side had a party of 22 come in who ALL drank which never happens on a lunch shift and it’s the bartender’s job to fill those orders but the printer wouldn’t print out what they were and I had a substantial amount of people sitting at the bar so I didn’t have the time to fill every order.  The girls themselves were walking back behind the bar grabbing beers and mixing drinks and we were all Googling how to make certain blended ones we weren’t sure of.  I made a White Russian.   Yay.

One gal took the bar dining side, I had the bar and the other two girls worked the crowded lunch floor by herself.  Even with the bartender on staff it would have been a little hectic but I loved every second of it.  I made decent money and the day flew by.  I’d happily be a daytime bartender from now on but I’ve decided to become a certified trainer so I think I’ll just stick with one upgrade at a time.

Then comes New Year’s Eve.  What a disaster that was.  I went in with the mindset that I’d pull in $300.  Nope.  $84 big ones.  I had a full section, it was just full of people who clearly never go out and obviously don’t know how to party because they had about two beers and left $3 tips.  We were cleared out by 1 and I had a MASSIVE fat super gay guy scream at me then to my boss about me because he was REALLY drunk.

His friend cashed out their check at 12:20 and at 1:10 the big guy ordered another drink so I brought that with the new check with him.  I said it’s NYE and we have to have a credit card on file but since he’d been there already I can have him close it out now or keep it open if he wants to keep drinking.  His friend came in and I said the same thing again.  The big guy didn’t seem to understand that we had already closed the tab out.  His friend did.  He said please close it again, he’s done drinking so that’s what I did.  Holy hell you should have seen the receipt.  I’d have taken a picture of it if the handwriting was readable and it didn’t have my work name on it.  He wrote how terrible I was as a server and how I will destroy that company if I don’t get fired then he yelled at my boss about me for a solid 20 minutes and I almost cried because I was already on the verge of tears having had no one to kiss at midnight that I just decided to be in a shit mood for the rest of the night.

After the big guy left we all followed my boss into the back to explain what we saw him to to me and my boss actually paused to wash his face with soap because he said that guy spit all over him.  Ew.  He knew I wasn’t at fault, admitted the guy was just hammered and only teased me about it for the rest of the night but that guy killed my New Year’s Eve party.  None of us made money because all you broke-ass people stayed at home and I didn’t get my real New Year’s celebration until I happily found a pair of Pillow Pet slippers that fit me at Walmart at 5am.

So that was my work weekend in a nutshell.  How was yours?