Tips

So I enjoy going to restaurants.  I enjoy the company of a friend and good food; it is a chance to catchup and reacquaint with my friends.  The meal is a bonus for me, good healthy food that I don't have to make, maybe I get an idea or two for dinner for another day.  

Lately dinner has cost, for two people, close to $100.  I remember when four people cost that much, granted twenty years ago, but still prices of stuff have not doubled in that time.  Maybe my choice in restaurants has gotten more exclusive, but that is not what this entry is about.

I started working with a former waitress and we were talking one day about her former job.  She made $10/hour plus tips and the cooks earned just $15/hour.  She thought that was fair.  It sounds fair.  She worked 12 hour shifts and had no formal training, unlike the people who made the food.  Well she is the reason why people come into the restaurant, because of her good service, right?  Wrong, I have gone back to restaurants with good food and bad service, but not gone back to places with bad food and good service.  Good service is easy to provide, relative to good food.  Sit the customer, I've out menus, ask about drinks, gather requests, distribute food correctly (but if the y don't give the right food to people we switch as it is not a big deal), ask if things are good, ask if coffee or desserts are needed, present the bill.  Yes that is a lot of work with plenty of patrons too so it is work.  But the chefs also work hard, cooking the meals getting the seasoning right, cooking the meal correctly so people don't die and it is cooked to customer specifications, so multiple meals are ready at the same time and are still hot, multiple sets of customers; they are trained people with years of experience and schooling or apprenticeship.  

Which is more important the food or the service?  

In the above situation with my coworker, in one shift she got $120 +$200 in tips or $26.67/hour and the chefs got $15/hour.  

I went to a restaurant recently, there were 24 tables and three waitresses, they were all full and I stayed there for an hour.  Granted they would not be full for the entire shift of say eight hours, but let's just look at my meal.  My table was cleaned up from just vacating people and we sat down, my waitress watched over eight tables.  If she had a total of twenty-four customers and they all spent as much as I did, $100 and she received the same tip of $16, then she had an hourly tip rate of $48/hour and add her wage.  

I do not object to paying a tip. I do not object to paying for the meal, if it is good and had value, but I object to the fact that wait staff get all the tips.  I heard of a restaurant owner that skimmed from the tips 1% off of the value of the meals  from the tips and bought a $50,000 truck tax free.  

I think at tips should be split more fairly or that tips should be reduced.  If half the tips went to the chefs this would be better.  Makes me wish I was a waitperson.

A little note

I have been contemplating writing this one for a while, delaying mostly because I have been picking up more people who know me as a person.  The subject matter is not one that most people would understand, but I am going to try to explain it so that they will understand.

There are two big factors and a bunch of small ones.  The first big one is that I am a sex addict.  What does this mean?  It comes from my Asperger's, a condition that is no longer recognized by the professional body of psychiatric professionals; we are all Autistic now.  ASD people tend to obsess over certain things, trains, planes or automobiles, or in my case, Sex.  Actually that is a pretty common obsession, considering how sex obsessed our culture is and how much emphasis is on it to prove that you are having a successful relationship.  Honestly, most guys do not think about sex once every thirty seconds, I think I heard that most men think about it three times a day or less.  I am trying to calculate how many times I thought about sex yesterday without using hyperbole.  I think about sex about five to ten times an hour, sometimes more, sometimes less.  For the record, when I am talking to you, I am not thinking about sex, but when there are silences and pauses when I am not thinking over a problem or not listening to a conversation . . ..

Okay I thought up another factor, so change that to three major factors.

I am very introverted, less now than I used to be.  Yes, before I was a virtual shut-in, inside my head, and always could never tell people anything and very slowly open up and form extremely deep friendships that have lasted decades.  Deep enough that they remember me fondly and look me up on Facebook.  Well not the ones that I told that I was attracted to, they felt I had betrayed the friendship and never want to talk to me again and there are a lot of them too.  Part of my learned introversion, don't talk about it or bad things will happen and part of my soul will leave me forever.  I learned that one too slowly, so I guess that is another factor and a pretty big one, now that I think of it.

The second factor, now the fourth, is that I am not a real man.  Bold statement, but I can explain.  Most guys have the ability to think of nothing.  They do things and they get done but there is no thinking involved.  Women do not understand this, some don't believe it, and I, to tell you the truth, don't either, because I can't do that.  Probably part of the reason I am so obsessive and why women treat me like one of them.  I also think in terms of relationships, I fall in love with people before I approach them, not that this is a female thing, it is more like a Me thing.  There is something about me that is distinctly female; I am not sure what it is, but it is something that women have told me for many years.  Women have treated me like a girlfriend, telling me about their deepest secrets, their fears and concerns; their boyfriends — length and girth, but also that fantastic date they had last night with all the details.

The most female part of me that really kills me, is that I NEED an emotional connection in sex.  I have heard, many times, many women, that sex is fun but not fantastic until they are connected emotionally to them; no orgasms until they are in love with them.  This is me.  It kills me because the people I have a connection with, whom I love, would feel betrayed if I broach sex with them, so I don't.  I don't have the social skills to ask someone who I don't have a connection with, who I feel comfortable with.  So, I don't have sex.  

This is why MPTR hurt me so much.  When I came to accept that sex was always going to be a disappointment, there was a measure of peace in my life.  With her, virtually the only time love and sex have been paired, there was joy in sex.  Clinically, there was a positive reinforcement to my obsession for the first time ever.  

So my obsession has gotten worse.  I have, at first been trying to separate my emotions from sex, unsuccessfully, by visiting professionals, prostitutes.  I have been trying to feel what I had with MPTR, More Passive Than Rain, without the emotional connection.  I can't do it.  I came back to Smallville because my obsession drove me to it.  And without it, I just want to die.  I don't love MPTR now, she drove it out of me, part of me thinks she knew what she was doing (that would be the irrational part of me) and now I am left with this constant pressure obsession, with no means to satisfy it.  I want to die.

I work 12 hour days so I am too tired think about it constantly, but it is there waiting for me.  I know that by putting it off by working too hard, I am making it worse for me when I stop working, part of me does not care who I hurt as long as it stops.

This was supposed to be a post about why I visit professionals, but now it reads like a suicide note.  I don't care anymore

The Longest, The Licker, and Me

It has been too long since I wrote here.

I have learned some things since I have been here last.  Most notably is how much my psyche depends on me writing here and how much I need to do this.

I need to do this really bad.  I am about to break my second rule, talking about work.  I work, as most people do.  I work in a labour intensive job, everything is done by hand and there is a lot of work.  I work with people.  People.  Two people work together, three people means there is politics.  Four people means thar are factions and political parties.  I work with three other people so there are political parties and there are factions and there are sides.

I am on the good guys side, but everyone is a good guy in their own mind, that is the way everything works.  But the truth as they say is a three edged sword, your side, their side and the truth.  I try to see the truth and that is difficult because it means putting aside what you believe and trying to see the other person's side.  

At work today, we had a total failure to communicate.  The factions that never talked in the first place started to fight without fighting.  Let us step back.

It all comes from the top, as it usually does, the top likes to micro manage and does not like to give up control.  The longest there feels that they have earned rights.  The most qualified feels that they know what needs to be done.  The licker licks where they get the most response.  And the follower follows the one that tells him what to do.  That is the basic outline of all the people involved.  I am the follower.  GardenerGuru is the most qualified.  And the rest are who they are.  Anyone who has worked where I worked can put names to them all.  

Enter the New Girl, new cashier, weeks late when we needed to train her.  GardenerGuru is not responsible to train her, but the one who is training her does not do it.  WaifGirl, does this sound familiar?  LongestThere believes that training should be done by throwing her into the water and seeing if she can swim and if she can not learn what all the products that we have at the busiest time of the year, with the highest volume of customers, oh well!  

After about a week, usually GG and I give up and start to train the new girl on the sly, because her lack of knowledge makes everyone look bad, but there is no time to wait and do that, we have to do it now.  But that is not why we fight.  We fight because people leave for lunch and there is no accounting of how long they take and GG is tired of not doing her work to cover for them.  She is tired of me with my Superman complex swooping down to cover for them.  I have been coming in a little early each day to get work done, because we are not staffed sufficiently.  For instance, I worked 70 hours last week.  If I have to keep covering for them, when they take extended lunch breaks, I will have to come in earlier each day to do my own work.  My syatic nerve in my thigh hurts, I spent an hour after work trying to get MicroManager to understand what is going wrong and why.  I am tired and need sleep.

I need to be in control, because The Licker, looked at the New Girl's time sheet and then told the Boss that she is coming in late and recording her time as if she was on time.  But the thing is, The Licker, did not read her time sheet correctly.  The New Girl has been stressed from this new job and her dog dying and mounting Vet bills and while she has been late, she has also been failing to enter time at all.  So tomorrow, I have to resist telling The Licker, that she had better keep her nose out of other people's time cards until she learns to read them.  I want to hit her in the nose.  Licker thinks she is senior to me, she gets paid more because she licks better than me.

True I don't like The Licker and she does not like me, but I don't like her because of stunts like what she pulled today and stuff like that.  She does not like me because she sees me working the long hours as me licking harder than she.  I work the long hours, because when I work, I don't want to die.  Fuck you Licker, I don't have a reason to live, let me just work.

Bitter

I was talking to GardenerGuru yesterday at work, the subject being my evilness.  That I have evil thoughts.  These thoughts are the things that I could do if I were actually evil or just stopped caring.  Then it came out; she told me that I was mean.  That I said mean things to people.  

Because she is a friend I did not react but instead reflected.  I sought out the truth in her words and how I was mean.  I looked at all the comments that I had said to other people that had shocked me and the ones that surprised me, the nasty little things I have said that came unbidden to my lips.  I have said some truly nasty things recently.  Some of them had been building for a while like a letter to MagicEyes that was inspired by a comment of hers from months before. Once I spouted a couple of racist comments toward a native acquaintance, because she was accepting the negative stereotypes others put on her all her life and she was acting like they were true.  I remember the harsh comments that I made to MPTR when she called me on the phone.  I remember them all and how after I said them they shocked me, that I had said them, except the ones to MPTR, they still shocked me a little but they were almost justified in my mind.   

I asked her, GardenerGuru if I was nicer before my affair with MPTR.  She said I was more happy-go-lucky.  So that was it.  What had changed in me since then. 

I was unhappy before her and unhappy afterwards too.  My life was filled with unrequited love before and after so it was not that.  There are two things then that might be it.  MPTR betrayed me.  I was stupid yes, but she betrayed me.  She betrayed the first love that I had that was not unrequited.  And there is more.  I know I have mentioned this before, but as I I have said many times, before MPTR, sex was an unsatisfying experience, something that I had accepted as something that would never change and would be an always thing. I had accepted that I would have friendships and masterbation and that is it.  I might meet someone and have a brief unsatisfying relationship, just to remind myself why I was alone.  But I had a relationship that was satisfying that ended in betrayal and now I am left knowing that there is something better and I don't have it.

Betrayed is the wrong word.  Passive to the point of inaction is the appropriate word, but the end result was that I was left without and hurt in Smallville.  Hurt with knowledge that there is something out there for me if I can find it again.  So hurt and frustrated.  Bitter and angry.

I don't want to be bitter.  But I don't know how to stop.  I am not just bitter; I am empty.  Last year I tried to fill the emptiness with MagicEyes, but the problem was I was too bitter and it was leaking out of me as meanness.  I am vindictive too.  Vindictiveness comes from a good memory and meanness, so in my case, good memory, inner bitterness and constant anger is making me a bad person. And my comments are not gauged for meanness; they are randomly mean.  They are sharp mean comments that hurt and appear to come from out of the blue.  They are aimed at anyone who slights me, at least in my perceptions.

The emptiness that sits in me I have to fill up with something. And it can't be work, because work only lasts so long and then it is gone.  I just don't know.  I feel dead inside.  Dead and bitter.

Superman

Once upon a time there was this young boy named little Greenpsychopomp.  He was raised by socially liberal parents in a strict and lax environment.  His mother cooled meals every day and forced him to eat his vegetables, even when she obviously cooked the spinach too long and the broccoli too.  She made some meals fun and exciting by cooking curry and making fabulous desserts like pineapple upside down cake and fish eye (tapioca) pudding and stuff like that.  His parents were careful about many things, like language and undue influence of political belief.  For instance they talked about voting in every election, but would not tell us who they voted for, because that was a private thing and should reflect your own personal beliefs and not dictated by others, like them.  Obviously they voted left of center.  Centrists and right of center people make sure their children know what they vote.

Anyways, when I was young, the first movie that I eve saw made a huge impact on my life, movies do that, so if you have children select the movies that they see first carefully.  Most of my friends saw a very important movie when they were 5.  It was 1977 and the most iconic movie of the age was debuted in this year.  For many children who saw this movie, it remained a significant focus of their life.  That movie was Star Wars; I did not see it.  My mother would tell me that I did see it, years later, but the truth is that she thinks that she let me see it.  The truth was though, she probably did not think a War movie was a good movie for a five year old to see.  So this was not the first movie that I saw.  A lot of my friends though saw it and had posters of it and a lot of Star Wars merchandising.  This I clearly remember, and I remember not knowing what it was about and so when my mother says that I saw it, I know she is mistaken.

The first movie I did see was in 1978 and it had a HUGE impact on my life: Superman.  Let me be clear, if I had not seen it I would still likely be a very moral person, but having Superman as the first movie that I saw has pushed it into overdrive.  I still sometimes daydream about having super powers and saving the world.  I sometimes do good deeds and don't tell people that I did them.  Once I even got up really early on Christmas Eve and drove a housemate three hours to the airport so that she could catch a early morning flight home to her parents home for the holidays, then turned around and came back.  First time I told anyone that I did that.  

When I was younger, hell, whenever I role-play in any game like Dungeons and Dragons or Exalted, I play with a Superman complex.  Lawful Good, also known as lawful stupid.  The alignment in D&D, is hard to play, one has to be unselfish and follow the rules of society and protect the weak too.  When the King of the country is oppressing the peasants, my character would have to intervene, no matter the consequences.  I typically play a paladin.  Most character types hate Paladins.  They are so righteous and good, the higher form of both though.  When a village is being attacked by a horde of evil orcs, it is my character that will step in to hold of the orcs to give the villagers time to flee.  And then I might just have to roll up a new character.

Unfortunately, playing a Paladin in a game and being Lawful Good is one thing in a game, but in real life it is often difficult.  According to the definitions of D&D alignment, your typical city person is Lawful Neutral, keeps their heads down and follows the rules, in the rural areas people are most often Chaotic Neutral, they like to do there own thing but for their own reasons, but never at the expense of others, at least blatantly.  My alignment is closer to Neutral Good, with Lawful tendencies.  I try to have a positive influence on others and hardly ever be selfish, to follow the ideals of giving is better than receiving and doing onto others.

Let me tell you that it is difficult to do this, I feel that this moral center I have chosen has hurt me over the years, that I want to be selfish sometimes.  Sometimes I want to think of myself before I think of others.  But it always comes down to some variation of, what would Superman do?  

Superman, would be a feminist.  He would see that women are not treated fairly and he would treat women fairly, so do I.  He has power though and he can do more than I.  If I want to do more I try speaking out on the subject to varying degrees of success.  Racism and Rationality too.  Tricky that one, because the ideals of most religions match my own, but most itinerants do not practice what they preach.  Since they don't practice their religious ideals, then their religion is suspect and they need to examine their morality in the absence of the cloak of religion.  

Rape, I have never been put in a place where I could confront one of my friends attackers; I would.  Perhaps this is one part of why some of my relationships floundered, they sensed that I would confront offending family members with anger.

Anyways, Superman, the first movie I have ever seen remains deep within my core and although I realize that trying to emulate him in my own life is a little insane, as only he can hold these Super-ideals, because he is Superman and has the power to enforce them, but does not.  

Woman

I haven't posted in a very long time.

There has been many things to say, many things that I am required to keep to myself.  Since there are people who know who I am who read this, I can't write them here, so I do not write them at all.

So I do not write at all. 

I am back at work and I am finding that the job is even more unbearable than ever before.  When I am not at work I am secretly hoping for death.  When I am at work I just go to the next thing and I hope that it gets better.

A friend asked me to move.  My friend asked me what is the tie that keeps me here.  My parents.  My friend said that they know what that is like, but what is the effect on myself; while I am here my life is at a standstill and I need to progress.  But what my friend is suggesting that I go and more to where they are going.  I ask myself, is that any different than staying with my parents?  

Two of my co-workers have been orphaned in the past week; their last remaining parent died.  For clarification, two different people, two unrelated people.  Then there is my boss whose parents are also on the way out.  If my parents died I would be relieved and devastated.  Relieved because I would be move closer to my own death.  When they go I will probably not have people to live for.

I don't want this to be about me, but it is; it is my blog.  I have been feeling dead inside for quite some time now.  And I am now a keeper of secrets, secrets that will die with me.  I want a crutch, someone to lean on.  I feel that I do not have that.  I am other people's crutch; I hold their secrets.  I do not have one.  There is no one, except this blog.  But I can't use it.  I wish that MagicEyes was still around, but I can't use her as my crutch in any case.  

There. Is. No. One. 

I have been using Facebook too much lately.  I have been using it as a place to write and a thing to read and as a friend.  Facebook is not a friend.  When you log in and see someone online I think about them, every time.  But that does not mean they are thinking about you.  It does not mean anything.  I have to stop thinking about it.

My policy, the computer code in my head that tells me how to act in situations about Facebook has to change.  Booted up from e school bus sitting program, only sit by yourself and let others sit down beside you; let them choose what level they want to have.  Currently FaceBook rule is: do not make a friend request, if they want to be your friend, they will ask.  I will have to get more stringent than that.

I can change my thinking.  I can change my behaviours.  I got used to the Cpack device and can now sleep with it on.  It took me months before I could sleep, but I changed.  I learned to use it to breath through my nose when I sleep too, something the technician had never heard anyone do.  I did all this so that if someone wanted to sleep with me they would not be disturbed.  That will never happen.  I am trying to date someone from another town, but she is a busy person and she never has time to meet.  We met once five weeks ago, she says that she wants to meet again but it has been five weeks.  Soon I won't have a day off and I will never get to see her if she wanted to.  She is supposed to text me if she has time today so I can drive the hour to meet her, to talk.  MagicEyes all over again except even less frequent.  But she is the only one that I have found.  

I did find a lot of professionals who want to spend time with me, if I am willing to drive two hours and give them two or three hundred dollars.  Not yet.  I am close.  I feel so empty. I would like to have something inside of me.  But professionals can't give give it to me.  If I go it is because I am desperate to feel anything.  It takes me a couple hundred hours to feel emotions for people and I need emotional connections to recharge.  My friend calls me a woman, because she says that is how it works for women.

I can't cry.

The Black Railsea Prism

I think I am not going to read another China Miéville novel again, for a very long time.  This was the second of his novels that took me weeks to get past the introduction and get into the novel.  I loved the story and when I was finally hooked the story bled out in a few days & I was done, but including the first quarter I must have read at no more than ten pages a day; the same was true for UnLondon.  Still I have never read an author who could blend SciFi & fantasy together so well that you could not tell which genera the novel fit correctly into.  This was SciFan at its, well, not greatest.  If it were really great I would have gotten into it and drained it of its content in a couple days. Opps I did not mention its name, Railsea.

Railsea, I was not sure what to make of it at first.  I thought I was a fantasy version of Moby Dick, transpose the sea for a wide plain, the ships for trains on a sea of rails heading in all directions, sometimes hundreds in one direction, & moles with whales.  Giant whale sized moles.  Killer bunnies the size of elephants, owls that make mythical Rocs seem hatchlings.  Add a sprinkling of technology that turns the sail trains, the steam trains and the diesel trains into matchbox technology.  

There are two stories, the mad Train Captain looking for the Ivory Mole who bit her arm off & a story of a young boy looking for the end of the world.  As in life not all stories can be finished.  I think the reason why it took me so long to get into the book was that the word & was the most common word & it was replaced by this symbol "&"; I became frustrated with this format.  

On the other h&, it did put to rest that theory that all human languages are built to be read at the same speed, no matter if they are shock full of information dense characters or lengthy drawn out character strings.

The second book I read was over twice as long and I plowed thought it in a couple of days.  I just finished reading it, The Black Prism, by Brent Weeks.  I just noticed that there was a map at the front which I missed completely.  The story was very cool.  Magic is pulled from light and can be crafted to do certain things depending on their colour.  There are seven colours so seven magics.  Sub-Red, like our infrared, is invisible and is about heat.  Red, is about rage and passion. Orange is about swaying emotions.  Yellow is about mass and strength.  Green is about life and wildness.  Blue is about order. Super-Violet or to us ultra violet, also invisible, is about subtleness.  There are people who can't use any magic and there are people who can use one, a few that can use two, less that can use more than one and only one who can use all.

Brent Weeks wrote a very nice story with nested plots between multiple characters with complicated backgrounds and differing agendas.  The main character, on top of everything else is lying to everyone, but despite this fact is the most honest and good person in the world.  Why he is lying and the consequences go back to the distant past when he was but a child.

To say that it was gripping, would be an understatement, I read 720 pages in less than 60 hours in clouding sleeping time, work and commitments.  Oh but you might want to read it after the trilogy has been finished . . ..