I worked the concession stand at my neighborhood pool when I was 15, and we never asked for tips. But now it seems like everyplace I go either has a tip jar or leaves a blank line on the credit card slip for tips.
If I'm paying with cash, I'll throw in my non-quarter change, but I've never left a tip on a credit card. Should I?
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If you google the title of a New York Times article, you can view as many as you want without paying. I know this is bad. We should support what we read... but I still do it. And I can't justify it. I feel guilty. At least that's a start.
I think I may have posted this exact sentiment before.
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I saw a sign on the bus a couple of years ago asking questions like:
Do you have trouble concentrating?
Do you often feel guilty?
Do you take frequent naps?
My answers were:
Yes
Yes
I fight sleep at work regularly
The bottom of the sign said, "Then you may suffer from depression..."
I guess I'm in the camp that says depression is a bit over diagnosed. This story about depression in Harpers is worth a look. It's six years old, but I read it for the first time last week.
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This is a good long-read if you're looking for a PTSD-tragedy-with-gun-control-undertones. (This cartoon cracked me up.)
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I got a Patagonia pamphlet in the mail today.
Look at this t-shirt.
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I just finished Into Thin Air (highly recommend.) I was talking to a guy on Wednesday who's spent time at higher altitudes (10,000 - 20,000 feet) (Everest's summit is ~29,000.) He was trying to explain how thin/low-oxygen air feels, and this description really stuck with me:
"When you come down from that altitude, regular air feels like cake."
This article in National Geographic might be worth a sniff if you've read Into Thin Air, or if you haven't and want to, or if you haven't and don't want to.
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Has anyone watched Rock Center? I don't recommend it. In fact I'd advise against it. It just happens to be on Fridays after Dateline (which is becoming an Irani household tradition) (Keith Morrison is surreal)
(And Josh Mankiewicz is underrated.)
Sometimes during a Mankiewicz interview, they'll just cut to a shot of him listening.
(and re Rock Center: I've gotten a lot of wear out of pretending to be Brian Williams going out of his way to tell people that the edgy Rock Center transition music is taken directly from his iPod)
Anyway this story on Rock Center a couple of weeks ago is about a single father of three who took a pay cut because the State lowered the income threshold for childcare subsidies from $50,000/year to $41,000. (He made $45,000, so he took a cut to keep his $1,700/month subsidy.)
The story shows the father wake up early, take his three daughters to daycare, go to work for eight hours, pick up his daughters, and come home. And it's not easy.
Nobody said raising three kids was easy. I sat next to an aspiring Ultimate Fighter on a plane a couple years ago who couldn't stop talking about how much he has to work to support his four kids, and if he didn't have kids he could quit his job and train full-time an have a better shot at a career as a professional fighter. But he acknowledged that he fathered the children and it was his responsibility to take care of them.
But this Rock Center story wants us to be outraged by the State.
It's not like the guy's family is hungry, or they don't have a place to live, or his kids are neglected, or someone is sick, or this guy is working crazy hours to keep it all together. This story is about a man who is unable to buy a new house AND have his child care paid for by the State. Forgive me for not being ready to call this guy a victim.
I guess the only reason I mention the story is that Rock Center is on in prime time, so it seems a bit irresponsible to run a story like this.
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I could spend a lot of time on the next picture and all of the backstories, but I'll keep it short for now:
A lot of small shops in my neighborhood have gone out of business during my stay, and a few small commercial spaces have remained vacant for years. Yet somehow this one Turkish rug store has stayed alive despite never having customers. (I've walked past it at least 200 times and at most I've seen a total of five people in there, and I almost never see anyone working there.) I assume it's a front for a money laundering operation, but I've been slightly afraid to go in there and ask the wrong question.
So finally I said fuck it and walked in there Thursday. The owner was an old, bald, light skinned, man, kind of reminded me of a bigger more beat-up version of my dad with a thicker accent. He was sitting in the back and immediately got up and greeted me. Long story short:
- He said he's been in the location for 32 years
- He does not own the building
- His rugs are not cheap: $500ish for 5x8. He says they're all hand-made, one-of-a-kind, "much better than the cheap stuff sold by the Pakistani and Indians" (from which I once bought a 3x5 rug for $15 -- his 3x5's were $100.) He says his rugs do not depreciate, and if you ever get tired of a rug, he'll buy it back. (I didn't ask how much he'd buy it back for.)
- I told him I wanted to take a picture of the rug to show my wife before I bought it, to which he replied, "Oh yes, you should show your wife first. The women are in the house more than the men, so you want to get one she likes."
Afterwards I go to a Sandwich shop across the street; the owner is a guy in his early 40's, very upbeat, motivated, really into doing things green and sustainable and all that shit. (his food is delicious.) So I ask him his thoughts on the Turkish rug guy, and he immediately assumes the guy owns the building. When I said he doesn't own the building, he seems genuinely surprised and thinks about it for a few seconds and then speculates that maybe the guy has a few big corporate clients.
I laughed for a full minute. This tiny rug store that once owned a URL, but has no website, and has a Yelp page but not a single review, and whose owner made one of the funnier unintentionally sexist comments I've heard in a while,,, and the sandwich shop owner was speculating that he caters to corporate clients!
Ok, last thing. The sandwich shop displayed a Green Business Certificate. Another long story short: there are a lot of funny business models out there exploiting the whole "Green" movement.
Even the sandwich shop owner acknowledged that it was a racket.
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How has The Sartorialist become my most visited blog?
Come on Dirk.
