Today my entry was delayed by my decision to accompany my son and Lala on a little outing that turned out to be not quite so little after all. The main reason for this was because at one point our next destination was close “as the crow flies,” but we were driving, not riding crows . . .
Even cynics have to admit that, at least some of the time, good things just come your way.
To hardcore cynics though, even the good things tend to look vaguely train-shaped.
There is no profit to be made in the destruction of the planet. It is very bad for business.
If the spectrum linking everyday depression to Major Depression sometimes hinders understanding of it, it also offers an opportunity for empathy. Because almost everyone, at some point, experiences feelings of sadness, of hopelessness, of emptiness, not to mention lethargy and irritability.
To paraphrase some advice I read a long time ago, be good to the people around you; you never know when you’re going to need them to do something really stupid for you, like pulling you out of a fire, or pushing you out of the way of an oncoming vehicle instead of doing the sensible thing and just getting out of the way themselves. Heck, for that matter, you never know when you’re just going to need someone to call 911 for you, and that’s not the best time to have just finished calling someone a worthless excuse of human garbage.
I’m just saying.
If you want tolerance, one of the things you have to do is be tolerant. If there’s another way to make that work, I, for one, have never seen it.
What follows is funny story I heard from a server last night. I’m not sure I fully believe this actually happened to her because I’d like to think that nobody would ever say this without being kidding, but the story is funny none the less:
So I had this table, big party, like fourteen people, and I got the impression that they were not going to be good tippers (You get a feel for that sort of thing after a while.), but I wasn’t too worried about it because this was back in the days when we were allowed to automatically include the gratuity on big parties. I gave them my best service, and, yes, they ran me ragged, but they weren’t really mean about it or anything, so there was that, and the final ticket, of course, came out to several hundred dollars.
Like I said, I’d already gotten the feeling that no matter what I did there wasn’t going to be a big tip in my future, but what I wasn’t prepared for was there being no concept of tipping at all! (And, yes, they were American, where, like it or not, tipping is part of the culture.)
“Okay,” I heard one of them announce once the bill had arrived. “Who ordered the ‘gratuity’? Because that is expensive!'”
You know, yesterday’s joking aside, it’s good thing that I was only playing at being paranoid instead of being actually paranoid. Can you imagine what the reaction of someone truly convinced they were being monitored would have been if they had found an unidentified electronic component in their laundry?
The other day as I pulled my laundry out of the dryer, a small object tumbled out of my underwear.
It’s probably a tracking device, I laughingly thought to myself before taking a closer look at the object to determine what it really was.
The item in question turned out to be about the size of a button, some kind of electronic device, complete with . . . a . . . power source?
Hours later I figured out it was a LED component from a broken fidget spinner that Lala had picked up and left in her pocket when she did laundry, and I only figured that out because in passing she’d told me the story of her discovery, and L. accidently hit the button that triggered the (almost invisible) lights when he was examining it.
But those were some weird hours before I figured that out though, let me tell you!
