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need to sleep, too much to do
- http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/08/shared-sacrifice-of-whom.html <--this is illuminating. My real 'ah HA' moment came close to the end;
This is something I have been trying to figure out since 2005, no joke - why is American commerce so heavy on the deference? I'm very glad to have finally seen it spelled out like that; it really is the inequality, stupid. It's the way we all work for businesses that we couldn't afford to patronise on the wages they pay us.
-I needed a new audiobook for my dental appointments & graveyard shifts this week. It had to be something I Should Have Read By Now, it seemed pointless for it to be something I already owned a copy of, and as I said before I have a slight preference for dead authors when it comes to beloved μTorrent. tl;dr I decided to try Nabokov's Lolita. Conclusion; the narrator is really Equius. It's the whole florridly detailing your ridic kinks thing. This is my headcanon and I'm sticking to it.
I don't even know why I'm still listening. It feels stupidest when I'm at work, where at this time of year one purpose of that sneaky earbud is that it allows me to pay no notice to the Daterape Song, which has made its creeperass way back on to the quaint middle-american music loop. Rape song in one ear, rape book in the other, wow do I get bored of what passes for culture. If I'm still listening for anything it's Dolores herself, who is a genuinely realistic horrible twelve-year-old.
-I am still godawful about injections. I'm not scared of needles or anything, I just hate them because they hurt. The dentists figured out after the first appointment that they really needed to give me NO2.
It is pretty good. I am kinda unsure as to why people would do it for fun, though. I mean, I did like the extreme physical restfulness but I figured that's because I'm an insomniac and therefore have some kind of mental sleep fetish. It leaves my head superficially intact, enough so to keep paying attention to the audiobooks just fine. It did give me one awesome mind-editing moment, though; I accidentally started reading dates the right way round again for the first time in many years. They wrote down the time of my next appointment and I got incredibly confused. Coincidentally the mental transposition I made was from December 6th to June 12th. /terrible fan, terrible human being
-trying to find promising apartments has been even more excruciating than I expected. like, this is about as bad as London flathunting and I am trying to do it at a distance AND we so very cleverly decided next week would be a great time to be going up there and looking at places without figuring out when we would be able to call all these goddamn landlords. I lit. do not even know. I didn't know if it would be, culturally speaking, worse to call people today or on Friday or Saturday. Because I didn't know and I hate telephones I didn't call anyone today. I did, at least, get more of a grasp on the goddamn geography. I think we'll wind up in Somerville at this point, but mostly I am just clinging to the fact that if we keep putting one foot in front of the next we will eventually wind up in somewhere that isn't GA. I am so lost, seriously, but not yet truly terrified. (That part comes later).
In Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels, Rachel Sherman describes how workers in the deluxe hospitality service sector are trained to cater to every whim of guests. The workers go so far as to train the guests to want more, to be demanding, to express their every wish to strangers. This is hard cultural work, especially where patterns of social equality and self-reliance taint relations of servility with memories of royalism, unearned privilege, and oppression. But the vast inequality of resources on either side greases the transaction, as a butler angles for a tip each hour that the guest may earn in one minute.
This is something I have been trying to figure out since 2005, no joke - why is American commerce so heavy on the deference? I'm very glad to have finally seen it spelled out like that; it really is the inequality, stupid. It's the way we all work for businesses that we couldn't afford to patronise on the wages they pay us.
-I needed a new audiobook for my dental appointments & graveyard shifts this week. It had to be something I Should Have Read By Now, it seemed pointless for it to be something I already owned a copy of, and as I said before I have a slight preference for dead authors when it comes to beloved μTorrent. tl;dr I decided to try Nabokov's Lolita. Conclusion; the narrator is really Equius. It's the whole florridly detailing your ridic kinks thing. This is my headcanon and I'm sticking to it.
I don't even know why I'm still listening. It feels stupidest when I'm at work, where at this time of year one purpose of that sneaky earbud is that it allows me to pay no notice to the Daterape Song, which has made its creeperass way back on to the quaint middle-american music loop. Rape song in one ear, rape book in the other, wow do I get bored of what passes for culture. If I'm still listening for anything it's Dolores herself, who is a genuinely realistic horrible twelve-year-old.
-I am still godawful about injections. I'm not scared of needles or anything, I just hate them because they hurt. The dentists figured out after the first appointment that they really needed to give me NO2.
It is pretty good. I am kinda unsure as to why people would do it for fun, though. I mean, I did like the extreme physical restfulness but I figured that's because I'm an insomniac and therefore have some kind of mental sleep fetish. It leaves my head superficially intact, enough so to keep paying attention to the audiobooks just fine. It did give me one awesome mind-editing moment, though; I accidentally started reading dates the right way round again for the first time in many years. They wrote down the time of my next appointment and I got incredibly confused. Coincidentally the mental transposition I made was from December 6th to June 12th. /terrible fan, terrible human being
-trying to find promising apartments has been even more excruciating than I expected. like, this is about as bad as London flathunting and I am trying to do it at a distance AND we so very cleverly decided next week would be a great time to be going up there and looking at places without figuring out when we would be able to call all these goddamn landlords. I lit. do not even know. I didn't know if it would be, culturally speaking, worse to call people today or on Friday or Saturday. Because I didn't know and I hate telephones I didn't call anyone today. I did, at least, get more of a grasp on the goddamn geography. I think we'll wind up in Somerville at this point, but mostly I am just clinging to the fact that if we keep putting one foot in front of the next we will eventually wind up in somewhere that isn't GA. I am so lost, seriously, but not yet truly terrified. (That part comes later).
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Also, call land lords Friday or Saturday. They probably won't answer if they have an office ('cause they won't be at their office) but they'll call you back on Sunday or Monday.
SOMMERVILLE =D (that's the "city" right next to cambridge!!!)
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SOMERVILLE. It seems to have some decent prices and Chris says it's a great place to live. Fingers crossed. Just hope we can persuade someone we will be nice tenants in spite of having two dogs and no jobs lined up.
I saw this and thought of you!
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One of the imo more annoying aspects of that kind of servility is that it means the front-of-house kind of people who are paid mostly in tips are basically allied with their tip-giving customers against management & the back-of-house payroll employees. Some of them will promise anything in the hope of another buck or two, however much hell it makes for everyone else who works there. :/
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Tip income is a massive pile of stupid, anyway. For one thing you end up with a bunch of staff who are really reluctant to do any work before opening/after closing on the very sensible grounds that they're only on $2/hr at that point. But however you slice it I don't get who benefits from there being that kind of two-tier workforce.
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And that's not even getting into the fact that the real reason they're losing money is the incompetent management and all the freebies they give out to their friends.
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OTOH writing "12/6/2011" is just plain weird. The mental gymnastics involved only proves Americans can't think straight... ;)
I LOL'd at your comment about the front-of-house vs back-of-house. You sound spot on about clearing up, too. I guess the two tier system makes rich people feel special - which is kinda like being loved. And in a society without a class system, where potentially anybody could end up being rich, the people at the bottom put up with it because they think they, too, could one day be rich and have all those benefits. Blighty is going much the same way.
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I think the tip income thing is more corrosive in the US than the UK - in the UK waitstaff get minimum wage plus maybe 10% tips, whereas in the US they generally get $2.13/hr plus about 20% tips. Inequality is more entrenched in the USA, not less, but I think you're right in that the superficial lack of a class system, plus the complete myth of self-made wealth, means that the rich get to pretend that they deserve to be treated like gods.
What bugged me in Blighty when I was last working/jobhunting there was that London was devolving into a support system for a few hundred billionaires, most of whom were not paying UK taxes, and to hell with the rest of us.
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I take all your points. The U.S. is much worse. But I am old enough (late mid thirties) to have watched the gap close - we're only 4% behind on that survey; twenty years ago I'd wager it would have been higher. Much higher. The introduction of the National Lottery, and the arrival of Big Brother and X-Factor, mean that people are starting to believe "it could be me", and that's removing any breaks the class system might have had.
The thing about Santa's in TRM's latest post (http://theredundantmarketer.blogspot.com/2011/12/good-and-bad-of-marketing.html) is worth a read, too.
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And damn, you'd never guess why so many people in the UK work for cash-in-hand daily pay, would you? The part I really love is how the government keeps piling free money into the banks so, supposedly, they can lend it out to people who need it at low interests rates so that we'll get the economy moving again. AWESOME.