obstacle course

having begun the past two Saturdays on the corner of 57th street and Stony Island, waiting for the #6 bus in the just-as-many-hours darkness—and then having spent the next 10 in the clearly acronymically challenged Illinois Restaurant Association's secret office on the 8th floor of a nondescript building on LaSalle and Lake, i am proud to declare that i am this close to being Sterilised...i mean, Sanitation Certified.

when i stepped up to the managerial plate at eX libris, off of which no one else wanted to eat, i was duly informed that i would have to go through an ordeal by this name. however, i cut straight to the mocking-to-high-heaven, thinking that such a titled event could never in 604395523 years take more than 45 minutes. upon discovering that it would consume the better part of the next 2 weekends, there was no way for me to eat my derisive words, even though i offered everything (up to and including first cooking them to 165°F; apparently they were made of something more culpable than poultry...).

i have long committed the sinful act of priding myself on never becoming bored; this was one of the most valuable lessons ever germinated in me by my parental units. however, extreme circumstances, at times, call for hitherto unexperienced reactions. i crouched in the back of the classroom, rows and rows of people (many of whom seemed unable to understand why they could not go to work if suffering from E. coli-induced hemorrhagic colitis) separating me from the leading authority on the subjects of Hand-Washing and mispronouncing the Latin names for bacteria. hallucinating some children hiding under the desks, she proceeded to refer to the washed-away substance using the highly-disguised term "shig" throughout the next 20 hours.

we told rollicking tales of Top Ten Food Poisoning Incidents, practiced using latex gloves, discussed the contents of the waste bins at our places o' employment, argued about the relative benefits of calibrating thermometers using freezing and boiling points...and then it was time to take The Test.

except for the rampant cheating occurring all around me (after the equally rampant confusion over filling in letter bubbles beneath names on the score sheet), the scenario was as much like the written drivers' test (that i happen to have aced 3 times) as could be without actually involving traffic diagrams. the multiple choice questions required that one choose the second-most stringent answer. as in:

how many times should a dutiful employee wash his/her hands during a 4-hour shift:
(a) 0
(b) ½
(c) 4
(d) 700,000

if i get my certificate in the mail next month, it will probably read "congratulations, a! we wish you all manner of success in your esteemed career as a Speech and Language Pathologist."

i'd brought my bicycle down with me in the morning, hoping to ride home in the evening. however, my lock has, in the course of the past week, turned into a horrific little traitor, freezing internally to such a degree that even what looks like scandalous intimacy (or CPR) has failed me. for many days i left the whole mess locked outside the library, but the temperatures have remained hostile to my cause. to make matters worse, i lent the other bike in my fleet to a friend, along with the less mutinous lock. finally, i discovered a brilliant tactic: pouring cups of boiling water over the whole apparatus. emerging in a rush of glory from the Confines of Sanitation, i noted the State of the Lock to be decidedly frozen. annoyed, but not yet muttering invectives (other than the almost-friendly "i'll thaw you yet, my pretty" and off-handed Alexander Pope quoting), i j-walked over to the doughnut shop down the block (because, apparently, all of the coffee shops in downtown Chicago, or perhaps only those 6 in the square block around the IRA, close mid-afternoon on Saturdays). presenting my usual request, i was appalled to discover that the monopolistic set of circumstances resulted in this shop, which shall remain nameless, being able to charge the same price for hot water as they do for their famous coffee. willing to return even to French kissing futility rather than become complicit in such blatantly abused power, i stormed back out the "in" door. after 15 minutes of heavy breathing and threats of unimaginable tortures and privations, the lock cracked open—by which point i was in no mood, especially because the sun was setting and i had no mittens, to appreciate the lakeshore up close and dark. moreover, the thought of letting the CTA complete its ruin of my gear system begun that morning coursed irresistibly through chilly veins.

for obvious reasons, the antidotes of choice were: voracious reading of the most theoretically challenging texts on my collection of syllabi, followed by the illustrious "Beer Olympics," whose sequence of feats culminated in a 3am dash to The Point, the participants wearing nothing but boxers.