Restaurant Angst

I have been sitting in the Cafe for about ten minutes now. No one on the waitstaff has said a word. In their defense, they all seem to be very nice and may not have noticed. It is one of those lovely mellow moments in a normally busy place with the added confusion of laptops keeping most table turnover  in a holding pattern. I forgive them.

This is new to me. I am a former high strung New Yorker and bad waiter. Patience is not my strongest point in a restaurant situation. I used to take it really personally. "Stop afflicting me with your incompetence!" I would yell in my head and shoot them ugly glares. What a relief to just not give a shit any more.

Somewhere along the line really bad things happened to my family. It used to be so much easier to look at the  the pain annoyances in my own life and cling on to my own image of being a victim, try to bury my head in the shit storm sand but, you know?...anger really wears you out.

A while back I was doing a murder mystery playing an irate restaurant manager.  Pissed Off was her defining characteristic. She stomped around and bitched for three hours straight. I maintained her inner victim until she finally....if I remember correctly....shot someone. Or wrestled someone to the ground. Or antagonized someone else into shooting someone. One of them. Whatever it was, I finished the night and went home exhausted with a headache. Whether she was real or not, it was my body carrying around that real angst and it totaled me for a whole day.

I'm finding out in my way past 40 years that sometimes it just ain't worth it. There is too many real problems out there waiting for me. The truth is, the restaurant is just slowing down its ability to make more money, I was warm, dry and not particularly hungry at that moment and no one was yelling at me or making me feel bad in any other form other than being too busy to notice my existence.

The waiter came over and was very apologetic. He was also handsome and seemed to be a sweet person. I took my time being at his table with my laptop open and he didn't seemed to be pissed off back at me for camping, either. I will come back and don't care if he ignores me. Sometimes its nice to be left alone without the pressure of a menu anyway.