Tag Archives: Hospitality

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A Lot of Words About Sleeping and Shit Like That

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I feel like I will go to sleep. I went to sleep after the last post. It was great. Yesterday, I was sitting in the park on my break and I went to sleep there. It was fitful, but at least it was sleep I guess. This morning, Molly woke me up at 7 AM to say she had been awake since 5 AM. I fell asleep again until 7:30, when she woke me up for good. I am very sleepy now and have to be up at 7:30 tomorrow to go to a basketball game with Morgan and some people from work. To play basketball, that is, and then after that to go to work for twelve hours. I have Sunday off, though, and Morgan will be moved out by tomorrow afternoon, so I don’t know what I’ll do about that. Try to go back to regular life, I suppose, unless I get drunk on Saturday night and have to sleep most of Sunday away.

I guess by the time you’ll be reading this though, by the time you do read this, it will be Saturday already, since I’m scheduling posts now because I’m worried that I’m going to miss a day or something or just not feel like it, or really because I was in the mood to write such a long post a few days ago that I wanted to break it up for you, but it turned out not to be that long at all and I already wanted to start writing again by today. I probably won’t have time tomorrow, though, so that will be good.

Anyway I guess I would just delete this whole thing, but I’m trying not to care still.

I guess I’ll take a nap, fuck it. Twenty minutes and then get up and do the dishes. Get the hell out of here. Hit the fucking road, jack.

Last night, the bar manager wasn’t working and life was so stress free. I should do something about it, I guess, tell her off and stop listening to her. Cut her out of my life. Deal with her. I don’t know. Live in the moment. Or just quit my job, I guess, I don’t know. It’s also stressful that a lot of people are leaving my job so I don’t know who is going to cover the shifts that I need off coming up in the summer. But I give people the advice all the time: the less people they have to cover your shift, the less they can afford to fire you if you don’t show up for it. But then I end up feeling to guilty about the whole thing.

I want to get back into my honesty routine and all of that, but this last week helping my little brother out I guess has been fulfilling enough to my inner critic that I’ve let myself just sit around on balconies eating Cadbury eggs and shit like that.

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What Happened Since Thursday

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A subway train and an iPhone 7 billboard

It’s Sunday. Somehow we got here again. Halfway through the week I didn’t think I would make it. Somewhere around Thursday I thought that was it for me. The girl I am obsessed with wouldn’t text me back fast enough. My wife wouldn’t text me back. I couldn’t focus on my job. Time was going so fast and weird.
Some cranes in New York CityI reached out to my nihilist friend who moved to France last year. He understood what I was going through, as best as anyone can over text messages. He sent me a video and a podcast and we talked about how annoying everything was.

I didn’t have time to listen to the podcast or watch the video. I went back into dinner service not sure how I was going to make it. I told a sympathetic coworker, who has been in a bad relationship for years, about my wife and I getting ready to have kids and how I thought I might be trapped working in restaurants forever.

I didn’t know how I was going to make it through dinner service. I ate some Altoids.

I decided to get a haircut the next day. My hair was crazy and I hadn’t slept much, so I figured that was probably the problem.

On the way home, the girl called me and we talked about nothing because her phone was broken and I couldn’t hear anything she was saying. She said she was going to get a flip phone. I said cool yeah that’s badass smartphones are for tools. She said something I couldn’t understand. I texted my friend who’s a barber now and made the appointment.

On the bus ride, I watched the video and my mind was blown. The guy basically taught a class why thinking people are nihilists these days and how that’s not much different than mental illness but it is just a little different. And a whole bunch of other stuff too. And that’s when I remembered that life really was suffering, which is such a relief to remember because when things aren’t going right I always think what did I do wrong? Of course, there are plenty of things that I’ve done wrong and continue to do wrong.

At the barbershop, we gossiped about people we both knew and how we couldn’t understand the things they did, and we laughed about that. We talked about how awesome we were, and my friend said I looked like Don Draper now that I’ve been working on this hair style for three months.

When I got home I decided to focus on bringing sexy back so I made my wife cookies and I pulled out my chest hairs one by one and I shaved and trimmed and did some pushups. Then I went to work and I didn’t text anyone and then I went home and went to sleep.

In the morning, I fucked my wife for the first time since she went off birth control. Then I walked to work and treated my customers like apparitions.

On my break, I told the girl I am obsessed with to meet me at a bar when she got finished working. She said she would so I sat in the bar drinking beer and listening to the podcast that my nihilist friend had sent me. The podcast was amazing, but as time went on, she didn’t appear, and I got sad.

Then I walked back to work and to my locker and there she was, getting ready to leave. She hadn’t come because she hadn’t gotten off work yet. I asked if she was eating at the restaurant before she left. She said yes. I said good.A tall streetlight in Brooklyn

I put my plate at one table and she put her plate on the table right next to it, instead of across from my plate so we ate together diagonally, so not really what I had in mind. She asked if anyone had made a will and my bar manager said she didn’t need a will since she had nothing of value, no family, and no partner. I said oh well there you go, easy. Then she seemed like she was about to cry. I said she had friends, but I didn’t know what else to say. I should have told her to remember that life is suffering.

When the girl that I’m obsessed with left, she texted me that she hadn’t seen me on the way out but that she hoped I had a good night.

I told her to have a good one, too, and then my bar manager handed me a pint of beer to chug because she had made a mistake and poured the wrong kind.

Later she gave me four ounces of vodka and people asked me where I was from. They said I had an accent.

Then it was midnight and it was time to go and I polished glasses while the chefs and cooks drank Modelos that a customer had bought them from the pharmacy across the street.

On my way out the door I checked out with the manager and she told me to get a pint container. She filled it with Jameson and told me to come out with them to the bar. A chef asked me three times if I was coming out. He told me that he had wished his ex-girlfriend happy birthday last night and they ended up fucking. He asked if I thought he had a problem. I said no I texted her happy birthday, too, what’s the big deal?

The other chef handed me a Modelo and I chugged it and went home. Last night I got home around 1:30 and chugged a quart of water, hoping that today could still be a productive day.

I woke up at 1:30 PM and went outside. It was too warm for the clothes I was wearing and I bought an iced coffee. Tonight I’m going out to eat with my wife, her sister, and my in-laws.A subway train and an iPhone 7 billboard

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Watch Out for Pranks Today, Everyone Will Think Less of You If You Don’t See One Coming.

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Some cars and a traffic light.

I’ll never let my kids work in restaurants

even though the maitre d’ said everyone should be required to work in restaurant or at least retail so they know how to act when they go out in the real world

fuck that better for my kids to carry on blithely without ever considering the emotional turmoil they’re putting people through

because they’ll have enough of their own without dealing with the possible pain of others

the kids will probably have brain damage or debilitating diseases in which case they’ll be damn lucky to work anywhere

and even if they were healthy they’d just rebel and go work in restaurants so I’ll just have to burn their restaurant down.

Some cars and a traffic light.

Sometimes I lie on the street.

 

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It Doesn’t Matter 

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This is a picture of some colorful graffiti on the Manhattan Bridge

Look at this shit

Yeah so anyways. At work now. On break. Supposed to be a reallll bitch tonight. Why doesn’t that sound new? Because it’s always supposed to be like that. Spent all morning making a birthday card for my friend and bought him coffee beans. Turns out he took the day off for his birthday. People called out and it’s a skeleton crew. Not interesting not interesting. Boring bullshit. People are going to have fun if they want to have fun and if they came to find something to complain about it’s about to be a fucking cornucopia for them bitches.

Follow this link to hijacked amygdala where people write interesting things.

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I’ont fuckin’ no!

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Like I said, I’ve tried shit like this before. Being nice to people and shit, thinking up back stories for them that explain everything that annoys me about them. Sure, people are annoying as fuck in the real world, but they’re much more annoying in restaurants. That’s ground we already covered. That’s ground we covered twice or three times.

But yeah let’s get off that by starting a new paragraph. Boom! Subject changed, mother fuckers.

Ho damn where we at, it’s a new paragraph. Paragraphs are fences for words. We bout to hop this fence!

Pow!

Yeah I tried that shit before, sure, but that shit is mentally and emotionally exhaustin’. Making up stories about people, giving people space, thinking about how complex and rich is their inner life. Thinking about that Neil Gaiman quote about people having incomprehensible universes inside of them. Consider all that and be like, you know, let me give these crazy fucks a chance.

The trick isn’t to control their bullshit by figuring them out. Or rather, trying to figure them out, since you don’t know shit about what other people are thinking and you will probably never get close to figuring anyone out, much fucking less someone you don’t even know.

The trick is to be kind to them and to hell with figuring them out. Who gives a shit about them anyway. This is about how you act and, consequently, how you feel. They may not even exist. They can go to the devil!

Fuck em!

But be really nice to them, too. 

Nah, not nice, nice kind of sounds weak. Kindness and niceness, what’s the fuckin’ difference? 

Well for starters, no one ever says, no more Mr. Kind Guy.

Anyways, this is the last day of my work week. No new gray hairs, so this kindness shit is still going well.

Also somehow I fucked up the chronology of my posts when I updated my first kindness post to correct obsequies to obsequious, that’s two different goddamn things.

Sorry if that fucks up your feed.

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Just For Tonight, I Will Try to Be Kind

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I started using the Headspace App a few months ago and have been fairly consistent in meditating for ten minutes every day. They have the option to increase the amount of time, but I haven’t tried to commit more than ten minutes. More than ten minutes and I’m likely to think I haven’t got the time for it.

I started out really well, I think, and then after a while I was less good at it, falling asleep a lot, letting my mind wander all the time. Andy, the Headspace guy, says you’ve got to train the mind even when you’re not meditating. Well, he doesn’t say it like that. He always says use a gentle touch with the mind. He says you should be noticing when you’re indulging in thoughts that take you away from the present moment and seek to gently bring yourself back to the present moment. So anyway I got to the point where I was letting my mind wander as much as I had been before I started “training my mind.”

But a few days ago I decided to “give it another go” and “get serious” again. Side note, does putting cliches in quotes absolve you of the literary crime of using them? “Fuck it.” Haven’t we been down this road before…

So anyway, I’m meditating on different kinds of “happiness,” as silly as that sounds. Yesterday, Andy said that I couldn’t feel happy if I was simultaneously being unkind towards anyone. And he said I also count as someone that I shouldn’t be unkind towards.

Today at work I tried to be kind to everyone, including myself. It worked well, even when I found it a struggle for a few moments when some customers seemed to respond with vitriol and condescension, and even when I forgot to keep “being kind” at the forefront of my mind.

One thing I tried to realize is that being kind to everyone and yourself doesn’t mean self-abnegation. It doesn’t mean you have to be subservient or obsequious. What’s the right way to balance being kind to an asshole and being kind to yourself…not sure yet.

But I’ll work on it. In the meantime, I’m on break, sitting in the sunlight and feeling good about the morning, which is not something to be taken for granted.

Paul Graham said that anyone who insults us hurts us twice, the first time when they insult us and the second time for however long we ruminate on it. By focusing constantly on kindness, you don’t have a lot of time to get hurt in the second way. Also, in regards to yesterdays’ rant about customer service and finding a way out of it, Bob Dylan says that everyone has to serve someone. And that’s really ok, because being waited on all the time makes me uncomfortable anyway. It’s good to serve other people out of our own free will and kindness, not out of avarice and not with bitterness. Is it possible to serve people at your job while feeling like you’re doing it out of the “kindness of your heart?” Maybe.

But in any case, it will be good to eliminate bitterness from my life, if possible, because Benedict Cumberbatch was right when he said, “Bitterness is a paralytic.” I think I’ve written a post about that, but I forgot about it until now. Maybe I have not made much progress in my career because I am bitter about the past, how I graduated college at the wrong time; how I took on too much debt for no reason; how I didn’t pay attention in school; how I didn’t put in enough resumes last year, or the year before that or the year before that. Translating that bitterness towards the customers gives it fresh life and keeps me from breaking free.

Now, I’ve tried to be positive about customers before, and that fails after a while. But maybe the way is not to be positive about what they’re doing, or who they are, because after all you can’t know those things, and when you think about it nearly everyone is as clever and complex as you are, but anyway to disregard all that and focus on what you can control, how kind you are to them and to yourself, that may be the way. So if someone berates you unfairly, not to stand there and take it as if you deserved it, but rather to return to them a kind response and to remind yourself that you don’t deserve that kind of treatment, and move on. Any thought you have about their hopefully impending horrible death is fine, you’re allowed to have the thought, since thoughts don’t define who you are, but at the same time you don’t want to leave the present and walk very far down into that fantasy.

And you especially don’t want to do it and rationalize it by telling yourself that it will make good material for a story, since bitterness the paralytic will keep you from writing any stories.

So for me I will not seek to understand people tonight at work, only to be kind towards them and towards myself. We’ll see how happy I am at the end of the shift.