Also, most of you are from the States. I know like five people there. Who are the other twenty-nine of you interested in someone who gifts things which might be interpreted along the lines of 'I think your daughter should come with a warning symbol of some kind'?)
I haven't been talking about my days a lot lately. Not that nothing's been happening. I just have paperwork to do, J. had me working extra while Boyfriend and I talked until deep into the night for the past four nights, people want my Christmas wish list yesterday and I'm preparing for a
Monday was fairly uneventful, apart from doing J.'s nails. I'll be filing off the loud pattern and doing the green-red one on there on Friday, so the boss has two identical hands and a pattern more suitable to her stage in life.
Tuesday, Sis was alone in the studio, with back-to-back appointments from nine am until four pm. I was there for helping out, by which is meant scavenging for colors, refilling containers and helping discover that the phone has broken down to the point where it might hurt business. I talked way too much, but neither customers nor Sis seemed to mind.
Today, J. was running behind on her appointments by about twenty minutes. Not all customers appreciate that, but it's not something you can magically undo. I could make footbaths to shave off a few minutes, I could fetch drinks to placate customers and, at some point, I was promoted to toddler entertainment system due to a cute little baby requesting some visual and auditory stimulation as politely as all children below twelve months old can.
Language didn't matter, the person didn't matter, as long as they had a pulse, made eye contact and could make funny noises and gestures and pick up dropped shoes. I got told I'm great with kids and should get some. I pointed out that I eat pig-shaped candy and potato chips for dinner on some weekends. It only swayed them slightly. I do not want kids. I can barely handle Iggy.
Then J. wanted a set of shelves cleaned out, the contents moved to a smaller shelf, and all nail polish collected in a box. There was about two and a half liters of nail polish, all in glass containers of about eight mils. Yes, I'm aware that's over three hundred bottles of nail polish. J. made me count them. There's still about a hundred other ones in the studio, which is about fifty more than is warranted for the studio's size, in my opinion, but I'm not in charge.
Next, we cleaned the shelf out, got out the loose parts and put it to the side. Then a sofa was dragged down from the most unsafe staircase in the history of stair cases (Please note: the landlord of the studio does not care about regulations much, to the point where there's a biohazard in the basement and Sis' apartment has no insulation to speak of. The stairs haven't even made the list so far.), cleaned and put in the hall. It takes up more floorspace, but the room feels roomier without fifteen kilograms of beauty products in different colors, brands and functionalities screaming at you as soon as you come in.
Boyfriend was called in at this point to move the shelf to a different building, with me there to open doors. We moved the shelf, the loose bits and the nail polish to J.'s house and I got back to business of pouring drinks and hatching a devious plan as S. kept saying she should really stop smoking before the year is out.
The problem with delays is, they get bigger if they're big enough. Sort of how a snowball that's projectile size has more chances of staying on a slope than a twenty kilo ball of ice and slush. Eventually, the delay gets noticeable.
J.'s customer before the last one came in exactly when she had an appointment. J., at that point, was just done with building gel on a customer that wants a certain wow factor in her nails, rather than just a white tip. I. had gone home, Sis and S. had customers of their own. At which point I thought I'd be funny and offered to file off the gel for the waiting customer. J. actually asked this sweet, young woman if she was okay with the rookie coming at her with a file. She was fine with it. I refrained from asking if she was on crack only because I don't know how to politely phrase that in German.
It was quite possibly the most terrifying thing I've done all month.
I know how to file nails. Theoretically. I'm not fast at it, and sometimes I take a while to get the positioning right, but there's professional nail artists who do more damage than me at this point.
I asked at least three times to please tell me if I hurt her. I had a near heart attack when I noticed I'd rubbed a certain spot to redness. The skin was still there, but it wasn't happy skin. There was a square millimeter of pure anger and dustlessness, which is the filing equivalent of a flashing light and a siren before you risk being sued for bodily harm.
Okay, so maybe it wouldn't have gotten there, but I was extra special careful when filing. I checked for air under the edges of the gel (you can be an artist of epic proportions, after a few weeks the gel will slowly start to lose the fight against showers and handwashing), filed it away when it was there and realised that when J. was ready to take over that I'd rubbed the file against my own thumb nail until it felt brittle and thin. Yes, I'll put nail hardener on later and try and remember to wear file protection next time.
On a happier note, the mailman came a day early with my order of fifty fish eye buttons. Also, Boyfriend is working extra days this week as well, due to skivving at the casino. This means I got to knit his birthday hat to completion without him noticing, so there's at least a small element of surprise. I've hidden it somewhere in the apartment where he rarely looks. And since he reads this blog, I feel compelled to say, "It's not the dishwasher, babe. Stop searching."
I also put eyes on the hat for I.'s grandchild, but then decided it needed something extra. Raging pink and supersonic orange aren't enough to communicate screaming prepubescent femininity. So I knitted a tiny bow and stuck it on with a safety pin. The bow can be repositioned, removed, put on a bobby pin and worn... Whatever is needed. At the moment, the fish is a girl fish. I don't think five-year-olds care much about what their fashion choices say about their views on gender emancipation. I'm pretty sure Barbie would have been taken off the shelves if it were the case.
But the arrival of the buttons/eyes means I've run out of knitting projects. I want to knit hats for Christmas for everyone except Boyfriend, proper hats out of superwash merino, as said before, but it makes me want to limit my knitting for now a bit. Also, my yarn choices are getting limited. I've got a truckload of dark colored Bravo, but don't want to make boring hats out of cheap yarn. There's still quite a lot of fingering weight yarn (I know it when you're giggling, people, but it's the technical term for it) that Boyfriend gave me for my last birthday, but the sock-and-glove mood hasn't struck so far.
So I browsed the internet for horrific and socially unacceptable side effects of smoking. I can't bother people who don't want to stop smoking, but S. admitted she needs some kind of push to start the stopping process, and she's friended me on Facebook. So I found a Youtube video of how much tar gets sucked into your lungs over the course of 400 cigarettes. S. smokes about three to five a day, I believe, so that's three, four months' worth of cigarettes, reduced to a bubbling black sludge hardening inside your lungs and causing all kinds of diseases. Hmmm, delicious. I shared it with S.
But tar is mentioned on the package. I went on Wikipedia and discovered that there's a German page for hairy black tongue. This happens to (some) smokers with their oral immune system compromised. S. happens to care about her appearance, as all people working with the general public tend to do. Your tongue developing some chest hair for a few months seemed like the right thing to tell her about a few hours before bedtime. So I did.
Now, I'm not completely evil. And I know shock is hard to induce in smokers. Smokers who don't know about the risks are practically nonexistant. So I also shared a website with slightly less known little factoids. I got on a trusted German health website and shared the page on how your body detoxifies after your last cigarette when you're a regular smoker. It starts after twenty minutes, and then gets rid of the most immediate dangers in your body in the first forty-eight hours. On a purely physical level, quitting smoking is something your body is hugely in favor of. Brain chemistry usually makes it hard, but it's hard to sell 'kick your addiction' when everyone is like 'once you start, stopping will be pure misery'. No one mentions that your breathing is noticeably better by day three. You're not back at full lung capacity, but most if not all people agree that better breathing is a good thing.
Then I stopped terrorising her, since there's a fine line between ribbing and digitally shaking someone by the shirt and demanding they stop their wicked, filthy ways. I said goodnight and got a message back that I am liked. Yay.
And if the smoking thing didn't work, the hats get thrown out, J's furniture falls over and kills Cindy... Well, I made one person smile today. The fact that she couldn't yet successfully operate a sippy cup is irrelevant.
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