Monday, September 10, 2007
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Dissapointment
Very few things promote creation like disappointment, depression and drugs.
Fortunately for me I've experienced very little of the first two of these and generally shied away from the last one (at least lately).
By most objective measurements I have a pretty good life (though, admittedly, even the most objective measurements of "quality of life" are very subjective). Is my life perfect? Far from it; I'm overworked, underpaid and generally unappreciated (though, thankfully, not by my family).
If my first statement is true (that the 3 Ds are good for creativity), and you couple that with my second statement (I'm a generally happy dude) then, by extension, I must not be very creative lately.
Happily I think I can say that this is a case where 1+1 does not equal 2. (I've never been good at math anyway...I hate all that linear thinking and certitude.)
Disappointment, depression and drugs may promote creativity, but they sure as shit don't do a damn thing for productivity.
Fortunately for me I've experienced very little of the first two of these and generally shied away from the last one (at least lately).
By most objective measurements I have a pretty good life (though, admittedly, even the most objective measurements of "quality of life" are very subjective). Is my life perfect? Far from it; I'm overworked, underpaid and generally unappreciated (though, thankfully, not by my family).
If my first statement is true (that the 3 Ds are good for creativity), and you couple that with my second statement (I'm a generally happy dude) then, by extension, I must not be very creative lately.
Happily I think I can say that this is a case where 1+1 does not equal 2. (I've never been good at math anyway...I hate all that linear thinking and certitude.)
Disappointment, depression and drugs may promote creativity, but they sure as shit don't do a damn thing for productivity.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Management
I came home tonight and these 1,001 words are what came out of me. (It's not hard to find my motivation.)
This is my first draft of the scene complete with syntax errors, tense disagreements, and questions about where, exactly, to place it in the manuscript. Numerous typos habe been corrected by the grace of Microsoft.
[George used to manage a big corporately owned bar or restaurant, some Lettuce-type place. A themed “restaubar” – loud and bustling]
They had studied the “art” of ahm-bee-ahnss (or at least they hired someone who claimed to study it) and had combined it with precise mathematics and had created a place where sound bounced and echoed. The music was up-tempo jazz, a seemingly innocuous music that in its cadence occasionally flirted with frenzy, causing all around it conversations to accelerate, personal volumes to rise and all manner of pacing to hasten whether it be those of the diners (table turnover is how you make your money, baby) or the bussers who flitted from table to table like nectar-ingesting birds.
They had counted the tables and chairs in their most symmetrical arrangement and had realized seven servers and three bussers could run the place with incredible efficiency. So they zigzagged the tables and nightly scheduled six servers and two bussers, They hired managers who drove them all like dog-track greyhounds – front of the house managers aggressive as pit bosses and kitchen managers angry as put bulls. And like those infamous dogs, they were castoff if deemed incapable or unwilling to perform.
Why would you go back to waiting tables after being a manager? Isn’t that going backwards?
You don’t step down from restaurant management; you step away from it.
Management in the restaurant industry is not like managing in the real world. It’s not anything like people’s perceptions of what it means to be in charge. It bears no resemblance to being a manager in a large bank, or a headge-fund manager, and nothing at all like managing a baseball team. In a restaurant you’re not in charge of anything – at best you’re a shepherd, nothing more than a wrangler of people, people who are often insecure or egomaniacal (very few restaurant people are in anyway moderate) and sometimes both.
Waiters are generally not much more than transients, and like transients they are often aloof or indifferent to the ways of the larger world; they seek no more than a modicum of stability in the most basic necessities – housing, food, love. And how do you motivate a person with so little too lose and only a pocketful (at best) of cash to gain? Often they are incompetent, unable to keep anything resembling a regular job and even less competent at keeping regular hours…regularly going to sleep when most people are getting to work.
Why would I quit? The place was a cave.
How do you mean?
It was a loud, unhealthy and generally dangerous place to work. The place could kill you. Second hand smoke, easy access to alcohol and attractive, insecure females were among the most obvious of the dangers. He often wondered why they gave helmets to miners. If a cave, located sometimes hundreds of feet underground, collapses, the only thing a helmet is going to do is provide a convenient place to store what’s left of your head when they eventually dig you about, assuming they even bother.
Every night the rattle and crash of seven or eight or even ten hours would stow away in him, hiding until he eventually laid his head down on a pillow or the armrest of the couch, remerging as a constant high-pitched ringing in his ears like the chirping-whine of late-summer crickets nesting in his head. It was slowly making him deaf as he monthly lost a tiny bit of hearing capacity in his upper register.
Most nights he would lay in bed, thumbs jammed into his ears, fingers splayed across his scalp as if he was keeping his cranium from lifting off, and he would listen as the ringing was eventually replaced by the hollow, bellowy rasp of his own breathing. After a bit he hears the blood coursing through skull. Eventually the rising and falling of his chest fall into sync with his steadily beating heart. He falls asleep that way most nights, on his back, elbow bent, hands loosely cupped around his ears as his fingers slowly release his scalp from its trembling, white-knuckle grip.
But the place worked in even more insidious ways, luring with cash and rich foods and friendships with too many people as neurotic and unstable as yourself, a veritable circle jerk of co-dependency. What was at first exciting became frustrating, then depressing, then mind numbing and the numbness eventually becomes comfortable. There’s a reason so many people take anti-depressants…it’s just plain easier.
It’s a trap. You learn to love it or you get the fuck out early. You love it, if for no other reason, than it’s different. It’s only marginally different…after all, most people work for the profit of someone else, usually many someone elses. He didn’t have weekends off, but at least he didn’t have to wake up early.
Manage? Never again. He’d done the math. If you made an average of $150 a night, and worked 260 days you cleared 40 grand a year, and you still got to take off over a 100 days a year…that’s like taking three months off work. If you worked at a nice enough place (or at least busy enough) and averaged over $200 that was over 50 grand a year. What’s a manager make? Forty thousand. What’s that after taxes? Not even twenty-seven grand. Fuck that. I’d rather do without the responsibility and have the flexibility if having a shift covered if I don’t feel like working. Or the flexibility if being able to tell someone to fuck off. In Chicago there are over ten-thousand restaurants. Whey deal with the bullshit when it’s a buyers market?
In the restaurant business you’re really nothing more than a day laborer, and he knew it. At least as a manager he received his money in the form of a paycheck. And no one he knew could save a dollar to save their life. In the hands of most servers cash was as good as gone the second it was earned.
This is my first draft of the scene complete with syntax errors, tense disagreements, and questions about where, exactly, to place it in the manuscript. Numerous typos habe been corrected by the grace of Microsoft.
[George used to manage a big corporately owned bar or restaurant, some Lettuce-type place. A themed “restaubar” – loud and bustling]
They had studied the “art” of ahm-bee-ahnss (or at least they hired someone who claimed to study it) and had combined it with precise mathematics and had created a place where sound bounced and echoed. The music was up-tempo jazz, a seemingly innocuous music that in its cadence occasionally flirted with frenzy, causing all around it conversations to accelerate, personal volumes to rise and all manner of pacing to hasten whether it be those of the diners (table turnover is how you make your money, baby) or the bussers who flitted from table to table like nectar-ingesting birds.
They had counted the tables and chairs in their most symmetrical arrangement and had realized seven servers and three bussers could run the place with incredible efficiency. So they zigzagged the tables and nightly scheduled six servers and two bussers, They hired managers who drove them all like dog-track greyhounds – front of the house managers aggressive as pit bosses and kitchen managers angry as put bulls. And like those infamous dogs, they were castoff if deemed incapable or unwilling to perform.
Why would you go back to waiting tables after being a manager? Isn’t that going backwards?
You don’t step down from restaurant management; you step away from it.
Management in the restaurant industry is not like managing in the real world. It’s not anything like people’s perceptions of what it means to be in charge. It bears no resemblance to being a manager in a large bank, or a headge-fund manager, and nothing at all like managing a baseball team. In a restaurant you’re not in charge of anything – at best you’re a shepherd, nothing more than a wrangler of people, people who are often insecure or egomaniacal (very few restaurant people are in anyway moderate) and sometimes both.
Waiters are generally not much more than transients, and like transients they are often aloof or indifferent to the ways of the larger world; they seek no more than a modicum of stability in the most basic necessities – housing, food, love. And how do you motivate a person with so little too lose and only a pocketful (at best) of cash to gain? Often they are incompetent, unable to keep anything resembling a regular job and even less competent at keeping regular hours…regularly going to sleep when most people are getting to work.
Why would I quit? The place was a cave.
How do you mean?
It was a loud, unhealthy and generally dangerous place to work. The place could kill you. Second hand smoke, easy access to alcohol and attractive, insecure females were among the most obvious of the dangers. He often wondered why they gave helmets to miners. If a cave, located sometimes hundreds of feet underground, collapses, the only thing a helmet is going to do is provide a convenient place to store what’s left of your head when they eventually dig you about, assuming they even bother.
Every night the rattle and crash of seven or eight or even ten hours would stow away in him, hiding until he eventually laid his head down on a pillow or the armrest of the couch, remerging as a constant high-pitched ringing in his ears like the chirping-whine of late-summer crickets nesting in his head. It was slowly making him deaf as he monthly lost a tiny bit of hearing capacity in his upper register.
Most nights he would lay in bed, thumbs jammed into his ears, fingers splayed across his scalp as if he was keeping his cranium from lifting off, and he would listen as the ringing was eventually replaced by the hollow, bellowy rasp of his own breathing. After a bit he hears the blood coursing through skull. Eventually the rising and falling of his chest fall into sync with his steadily beating heart. He falls asleep that way most nights, on his back, elbow bent, hands loosely cupped around his ears as his fingers slowly release his scalp from its trembling, white-knuckle grip.
But the place worked in even more insidious ways, luring with cash and rich foods and friendships with too many people as neurotic and unstable as yourself, a veritable circle jerk of co-dependency. What was at first exciting became frustrating, then depressing, then mind numbing and the numbness eventually becomes comfortable. There’s a reason so many people take anti-depressants…it’s just plain easier.
It’s a trap. You learn to love it or you get the fuck out early. You love it, if for no other reason, than it’s different. It’s only marginally different…after all, most people work for the profit of someone else, usually many someone elses. He didn’t have weekends off, but at least he didn’t have to wake up early.
Manage? Never again. He’d done the math. If you made an average of $150 a night, and worked 260 days you cleared 40 grand a year, and you still got to take off over a 100 days a year…that’s like taking three months off work. If you worked at a nice enough place (or at least busy enough) and averaged over $200 that was over 50 grand a year. What’s a manager make? Forty thousand. What’s that after taxes? Not even twenty-seven grand. Fuck that. I’d rather do without the responsibility and have the flexibility if having a shift covered if I don’t feel like working. Or the flexibility if being able to tell someone to fuck off. In Chicago there are over ten-thousand restaurants. Whey deal with the bullshit when it’s a buyers market?
In the restaurant business you’re really nothing more than a day laborer, and he knew it. At least as a manager he received his money in the form of a paycheck. And no one he knew could save a dollar to save their life. In the hands of most servers cash was as good as gone the second it was earned.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Monday, July 9, 2007
Swearing Redux
Three different people have openly called me out.
Shit, piss, fuck, cunt...these are the words with which the the road to disappointing your friends and family is paved.
I have no intention of teaching my son to swear. I don't think it's cute or funny when a three-year old says shit.
He's going to hear bad words, probably sooner than I did - and I learned so early I don't even remember how old I was when I first heard someone say fuck. (It's all uncle Eddie's fault...he's 6 years older, so when I was only 10 I was regularly exposed to the world of a 16 year-old in the late 1970s...and that's all I'm gonna say about that.)
What I was trying to say (apparently I was unconvincing) was that of all the concerns I have about Jack's future, swearing is way down the list.
I'm not sure what, exactly, bothers people so much about potty language. It's not like swearing is the kind of thing that can keep a kid out of college (unless, of course, he swears at someone). Hell, swearing got Joel Goodson into Princeton. (There I go, defending swearing again.)
Seriously, I'm not condoning swearing amongst toddlers. Or even pre-teens. But teenagers, in any country in the world, are going to hear swear words. What's a parent to do? I accept it, and I plan to be an active participant in my son's life. When he says those words I won't over-react and wash his mouth out with soap (does anyone actually still do this?), or yell at him. I plan on helping him understand what's meant when people say these things, that words are almost never to be taken lightly, that you should mean what you say.
I can pretty much guarantee that even prince William has heard his share of people use unprincely language. In England, swearing is almost the national pastime...and unlike the U.S. they have a seriously long past time...they invented that damn language and they swear like, well, drunken Englishman.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Dog Days
It’s the middle of July and the only thing I want to see in the high 90’s are fastballs, but the warm summer is hitting its stride (just like the Cubs ) as we approach the All-Star game and the temperature is a near-record 96 degrees.
I’ve started reading three different books in the last week and I’ve put them all down. Between Jack, work, and day-to-day distractions (it’s amazing how quickly laundry, mail and un-returned phone calls can pile up) I don’t seem to be able to focus on anything for more than ten seconds – books, movies, conversations, even sleep exist in a world of fits and starts and seemingly endless beginnings without a single conclusion (it’s a near-miracle I can finish this sentence).
I still have an uncanny ability to amass scraps of paper with notes for current and future projects. Receipts, envelopes, the corners of newspapers are scrawled in barely-legible pen scratchings, occasionally disintegrating in the pockets of jeans tossed into the hamper and jackets hung in closets months ago.
The summer makes me lazy. I know I’m supposed to love it. As a Chicagoan I’m almost obligated to look forward to these balmy (muggy, sticky, sultry) days and nights as if they only come once a decade like some constantly deferred birthday party. But I don’t. I prefer it cooler, rainier, greyer; maybe it’s my eastern European lineage. Not all the time. But if I had my way it would be 58 degrees with passing fronts of enormous clouds, clouds as big as entire states stacked like plumes of chimney smoke.
Tomorrow it’s supposed to “cool off” to 89 degrees.
October can’t get here soon enough.
I’ve started reading three different books in the last week and I’ve put them all down. Between Jack, work, and day-to-day distractions (it’s amazing how quickly laundry, mail and un-returned phone calls can pile up) I don’t seem to be able to focus on anything for more than ten seconds – books, movies, conversations, even sleep exist in a world of fits and starts and seemingly endless beginnings without a single conclusion (it’s a near-miracle I can finish this sentence).
I still have an uncanny ability to amass scraps of paper with notes for current and future projects. Receipts, envelopes, the corners of newspapers are scrawled in barely-legible pen scratchings, occasionally disintegrating in the pockets of jeans tossed into the hamper and jackets hung in closets months ago.
The summer makes me lazy. I know I’m supposed to love it. As a Chicagoan I’m almost obligated to look forward to these balmy (muggy, sticky, sultry) days and nights as if they only come once a decade like some constantly deferred birthday party. But I don’t. I prefer it cooler, rainier, greyer; maybe it’s my eastern European lineage. Not all the time. But if I had my way it would be 58 degrees with passing fronts of enormous clouds, clouds as big as entire states stacked like plumes of chimney smoke.
Tomorrow it’s supposed to “cool off” to 89 degrees.
October can’t get here soon enough.
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