Dear Waitstaff and Bartenders of Chicago: A Letter on the Subject of My Poverty

Dear waitstaff and bartenders of Chicago,

You are the reason I cry at night. Please stop giving me dirty looks when I only order one cheap beer and nothing else. I used to be a server myself, and your piercing stares inject gooey guilt right inside my soul, leaving me a veritable Cadbury Egg of shame. My friends want to go to bars, and I want to be social, but I simply cannot put down the kind of money you want me to.
Here is how the math of my life breaks down right now:
My internship pays me $7.50 an hour.
After taxes are removed, I get a paycheck for $500 every other week.
So, I make $1000 per month. Wow.

$1000
-$550 rent
-$80 CTA
-$35 internet and cable
-$20 electricity
-$20 gas
---------------------
$295

Now, divide that by 30, and I have less than $10/day to feed myself (this is assuming impossibly good fortune: that I have no health issues, nothing I own ever breaks, nobody has a birthday, and I do not need any toiletries, toilet paper, cleaning products, hair cuts, or clothes). This also means that if I buy a single movie, play, or concert ticket, pay one cover charge, or buy one DVD or book, I pretty much have to eat ramen and drink water for the next two days.

In conclusion, dear servers, I am not a bitch. The economy may be kicking your ass pretty hard, but it is probably kicking mine harder. I can either buy one shitty beer and tip you >20%, or I can buy two beers or a real drink and—like millions of jackasses across America—tip you nothing. Either way, I have $3 to feed myself for the rest of the day. SO STOP FRICKING GLARING AT ME!

Yours,
Anneliese

Two Things: Why the Last Two Days Were Awesome

Two things you probably already know if you are one of the people I irritate with nonsense text messages all the time:


Thing 1) Last night I ate a whole brick of cheese. It was LEGEN… wait for it… wait for it… DAIRY!


Thing 2) This afternoon, I walked into the lunchroom at work. Masked by a draped paper towel that simply read, “FREE” in blue Sharpie, an unidentifiable object sat in the middle of the counter. The room was full of people, and yet nobody seemed the least bit interested in this object.

“But it’s free!” I thought, “It’s a free thing just sitting there, asking to be taken. Who doesn’t want a free thing? What is WRONG with these people?”

I walked over and lifted the paper towel. The free thing was a VHS copy of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner. It is mine now.

Obama Babies: My Freaky Preggers Envy

I do not want children right now—maybe ever. And yet, I have this weird envy of all the people who are going to have Obama babies. It's this extreme form of celebration—just as permanent as getting a tattoo—in which I simply cannot participate. I could have run home from the rally with some random dude and had protected, celebratory, election night sex with some and then gone out Wednesday and adopted cat... but it wouldn't have been quite the same. Besides, cats die in, like, twelve years, and I want the world to know that I was on the winning side of this bitch FOREVER.

Dear Mr. Greenfield: My First E-mail to the RedEye

I promise to stop talking about the election soon. I am fairly certain that—once upon a time—I used to think about other things. But, as long as the world keeps talking about the election, that is all I have to respond to.

For example: this morning’s RedEye starts off with a little, anecdotal article by Jimmy Greenfield about election night. The piece is called “My historic night—sitting on a couch”. Jimmy talks about how he regrets not having gone downtown for the election night rally, citing several reasons for his home-bodied-ness. One of his reasons was an assumption/fear that, were he to go downtown, he would miss the CNN coverage of the event, and his Blitzer/Gergen/Borger/Toobin addiction would eat him alive. For some reason, I found the prospect of soundly and callously bursting his bubble to be so enticing, that I had to write my first ever RedEye response e-mail. It was entitled “My historic night—watching CNN in Grant Park” and went as follows:

Dear Mr. Greenfield,

I just read your article this morning, and I have something I should probably tell you. Oh Jimmy, I don't know how to say this; it seems cruel every way I put it, but it must be done: I was in Grant Park on election night, and I was watching CNN.

Every jumbo-tron in Grant Park—assuming you were close enough to see them—was displaying CNN right up to the moment the election was called. For hours, I watched Wolf Blitzer speak to me in an image stunningly clear and twenty feet tall. Two days before every Super Bowl, I dream that— suddenly and without warning—I win a raffle for the biggest, most beautiful TV I could possibly imagine. Tuesday, I saw that television... and it was playing CNN. I may never recover from the mammoth majesty of Will.I.Am's colossally radiant hologram or Anderson Cooper's titanically magnificent hair.

You could have had it all.

I am so very sorry,

Anneliese Toft

Berliner Zeitung: The Reason I am INTERNATIONALLY INFAMOUS

God, I am AWESOME!

I found the article in Berliner Zeitung in which I am mentioned. First, she accredits Annie Kerkian's jumping up and down and screaming to me, then she misspells my name. Thanks, Olivia Schoeller! No--seriously--thanks. Anneliese Koft is in an online article for a German newspaper acting like Anne Kerkian, and for that Anneliese Toft could not be more grateful. Obviously, I can never travel in the EU again. The constant recognition will be just unbearable.

http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/spezial/dossiers/uswahl/113610/index.php


Here is the Babel Fish translation of my paragraph:

The first sign for Obamas victory comes on this day already on the early morning from the otherwise republican village Dixville Notch into New Hampshire. Fifteen of the twenty-in voters in the place, which traditionally always selects as one first, are correct for Obama. A good omen, but correctly seriously becomes it only against 19 o'clock. The news stations announce the first important victories for Obama: New jersey, Illinois and Connecticut fall to the democrat, in the Grant park are with restraint jubilant. McCain wins South Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee. That the population-strong State of Pennsylvania goes at Obama, hop, dance and cry fans become only to be familiar like the 23-jährige Anneliese Koft. " Yes, Yes, Yes! " the student of the Indiana university calls, again and again. With its friend Anneliese Koft for the election campaign team worked, undecided voters convinced and never hope lost. The end the election campaign is for it the beginning of a new time calculation. At the arm it carries a Obama clock with wrong diamonds in the Grant park proudly: " If someone asks me for the time, say I, it am time for a Wandel."

Hahaha. Oh Babel Fish. You be not of the great with understanding to the grammar. The accuracy of you is being leaving something for desired.

Dear World: Letters Inspired by Election Night

Dear History,

How are your annals? From what I could see, they got pretty thoroughly pounded the other day. As far as American racial milestones go, you have been virtually annally celibate for what now, fifty years? Jesus. You really were in need of a good pounding, weren't you? Well, congratulations.


Heart,
Anneliese





Dear Other People In Grant Park,

Thank you. Thank you for being the nicest people I have ever met. You were all friendly and helpful and considerate—even when waiting in what was essentially the world’s longest and most claustrophobic airport security line.

Also, thank you for smelling like hope. I knew that compacting hundreds of thousands of people together for this historic evening would fill the air with the stench of hope, but—not having smelled it for almost a decade—I thought hope would reek of B.O.and head grease. It turns out, concentrated hope smells like flowers and freshness. Who knew?

Finally, thank you for not shooting or burning anything. That would have been embarrassing for Chicago.

Love,
Anneliese





Dear Lady Who Sung the National Anthem in Grant Park,

Please learn the words to the National Anthem. That was embarrassing for Chicago.

Smooches,
Anneliese





Dear Everybody Who Wasn’t in Grant Park,

I was fewer than fifty yards from Barack Obama when he made his acceptance speech. If you are wondering if this makes my life better than yours, the answer is, "YES!"

Yes. It does.

Suck it,
Anneliese





Dear CNN,

You are liars. Will.I.Am was not a REAL hologram. I know this because the RedEye told me so… in an actual article that someone actually took the time to write after actually researching it by interviewing actual physics professors.

Sorry,
Anneliese





Dear RedEye,

Are you kidding me? Seriously?

Haaaahaha. You. Are. Dumb.

I don’t even know,
Anneliese





Dear Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, and most of all California,

I am soooooo not talking to you right now.

Wait. Time out on Silent Treatment.

In this blog, try to avoid cussing to such a gratuitous degree that it overwhelms the sentence and distracts from the actual meaning of my words. That said, fuck you. You are a bunch of fucking douchebag, back-asswards motherfuckers. I hope that one day, someone tells you that your love isn’t real, that God hates you, and that you can’t raise a child because you would fuck it up just by being who you are.

Ok. Now I am REALLY not talking to you.

Fuck you,
Anneliese

P.S. Time in on Silent Treatment.

A Front Row to History: A Political Raffle???

“Anneliese --

I want you to be there with me on Election Night when the results come in.

We're planning a big event that will include tens of thousands of supporters in Grant Park in downtown Chicago.

We're saving some of the best seats in the house for 5 people who have given to the campaign before -- and who decide to make a donation one last time before Sunday at midnight.

If you're selected, you can bring a guest, and we'll fly you in and put you up in a hotel for the night. You'll go backstage at the big event and -- no matter what happens -- you'll have a front row seat to history as we celebrate the supporters who got us over the finish line.

Any donation counts -- whatever you can afford. Show your support at this crucial time with a donation of $25 or more, and you could join me on Election Night:

https://donate.barackobama.com/frontrow

This movement for change has been a testament to the power of ordinary Americans coming together to achieve extraordinary things.

I look forward to having you there on Election Night.

Thank you,

Barack”

Two things, Barack.

Thing 1: I just gave you $25. Like, on Tuesday. I make $7.50 an hour. Can’t I get retroactive entry into your raffle? How about you pretend that every time I have volunteered for your campaign, I have been giving you my time’s worth of donation? Even at minimum wage, I should still get a free raffle ticket. Damn it, Senator! I am broke!

Thing 2: Isn’t this a little tacky? You are raffling off the opportunity to get physically closer to you? You are just asking for some creepy, fangirl nonsense on this one. If you are already going to use your celebrity and the fact that a Grant Park Plus One is currently going for more than a ticket to see the Beatles (complete with time machine), then why don’t you just commit to the tastelessness and go all out!

“Help us out with $75 or more, and you could be one of the lucky three picked to be sung to sleep on election night by the Obama children! You pick the lullaby!

A $100 donation buys you a .00001% chance that Michelle Obama will
make out with you!

And for only a $150 donation, you will receive entry into a 1/50,000
chance that the candidate... himself... will teabag your mom!"



Ew.