Bar Notes: Mister Disgruntled

Last night I had a run-in with one of the types of people that servers and bartenders dread across the board: the perpetually disgruntled patron.  It was a solid night, nothing too busy, but not dead either.  The restaurant received a call that a party of 12 would be arriving in 10 minutes, so we set to work pushing tables together and getting prepared for their arrival.

There was another large party of 10 or so in the restaurant celebrating the end of their fantasy football season.  They were mostly drinking, but it took a good bit of attention to make sure they had what they needed when the new party arrived.

This isn't last night's group, but the size and scope of the party was similar.

After the hostess took the initial drink order, I brought the drinks out to the table and greeted the 12 newcomers.  When I dropped their drinks at the table, I informed them of the dinner special and asked if they were going to be a single tab or separate tabs.  They told me that they would have 9 individual tabs across the 12 people dining.  Great!  I love having this information in advance.  I can do so much with this information as long as I have the heads up.

I set about taking their order, making careful notes as to their drinks so I could split the tab at the time they ordered.  I got through 11 of the 12 people when I ran into Mr. Disgruntled himself.  He was the last to order, and when I got to him I was greeted with this, "I'm going to be very specific, so I think you should write this down."  I already had my pad and pen in hand, so I nodded politely and took his order.  He ordered a hamburger (easy enough) but was specific about condiments and garnish (easy enough).  As I repeated the order back to him, he nodded, made one small correction, and then said, "If you don't get it right, I'm not afraid to send it back."

Awesome!

I could tell by the man's attitude that he was going to be a lovely customer.

I proceeded to flawlessly ring in every order, split the check nine ways, assign the proper drinks to the proper tabs, and continue to provide them with drink refills while managing my other large party and the other tables in the restaurant.

About 15 minutes later, dinner was served.  All 12 people were served at once with food hitting the table while it was still steaming.  The hostess helped me run the food, but it was difficult as people had moved from their original seats to converse.  We were auctioning off the plates (calling out the order to get peoples' attention) and dropping them at the appropriate spots.  In the hustle and bustle of it all, my hostess dropped a burger with cheese and bacon in front of Mr. Disgruntled.  While I still had food in my hands, I turned to see him throw his hands in the air like it was a stick-up.

"I didn't order cheese and bacon," he said, looking around the table. "I didn't order cheese and bacon."  His voice raised with every repetition.  The hostess looked at me aghast for a moment, wondering what to do.  I told him, "I'll be right there, sir."  I dropped off the two remaining plates in my hand, swooped over to his side, and removed the offending burger.  I returned to the kitchen to check the ticket to make sure I had rang it properly.  I had.  The cooks, in the confusion of multiple tables with one large party, had simply placed the wrong burger patty onto the wrong plate.  I returned to the table with another armload of food to be greeted with Mr. Disgruntled again.

"People tell me I'm too specific, but, obviously, I'm not specific enough since no one can ever get my order right."  I'm practically standing next to him as he continues to rant to his table mates.  "They say I over-explain, but I can't tell you how many times this happens to me."

I admit.  I hit red.  I have a thing about common courtesy and the place of empathy in a society.  The way this gentleman was carrying himself was entirely disrespectful.  I'm sorry, but just because I'm a server, doesn't mean that you have the right to address the situation, and my part in it, like I wasn't there.  I was ANGRY!  The last thing I heard was, "I thought I explained it perfectly."

When I returned to the kitchen, his burger was already in the window.  It was cooked exactly as he had specified, garnished correctly, and still steaming off the grill.  I grabbed the plate, turned, dropped it in front of him, and said, "Here's your perfectly explained burger, sir.  Enjoy your meal."

The comment caught the man unawares, as well as the speed with which the order was corrected.  The woman sitting across from him met my eyes and gave me that pinched "sorry-about-him" kind of look, and I was off to serve my other tables.

It wasn't my finest customer service moment, but it got the point across to that guy. As I walked away, I heard on of his friends exclaim, "See!  Kyle fixed it!"  I had introduced myself to the table earlier.  The guy devoured his perfectly explained burger and fries without further complaint.  In fact, I returned later to refill his fries and drink and the man was singing a new tune.

By the time the group left that night, the man shook my hand, thanked me for accommodating his group (he was the one who called ahead), tipped me almost 30%, and made sure to say he would come back again in the future.

Sometimes we go into a situation thinking things are going to be one way when they are actually going to be another.  This goes for that man and for me.  He came into the situation thinking he was going to be disappointed by his experience, and it almost made it come true.  I quickly followed suit and thought this guy was going to be an asshole and never redeem himself.  Both of us were wrong.  There were a couple of bumps along the way, but we inevitably found our way to having a mutually positive experience.

In both our cases, we needed to get past ourselves and simply focus on the other person.  He didn't understand the work involved in serving a party of his size with separate tickets and other restaurant concerns, and I didn't think about the fact that he might have had some really negative restaurant experiences that jaded him.  In the end, we both proved our first impressions wrong.  I guess we just need to keep our minds open to the experience and let it all shake loose as it will.

Sometimes even our negative experiences wind up doing something positive for us.

Man Notes: Chopping Onions (I'm Not Crying)

In the past six months I've been in the position where I've cried publicly.  Both situations were at the funerals of family members where I served as officiant, but it has caused me to think about the cultural conditions of men's tears.

Graphic provided by the Good Men Project

Historically, men shedding tears didn't carry the stigma it does in the modern day.  There are biblical references to tears, samurai cried over tragedies, and even Abraham Lincoln knew how to strategically shed a tear for rhetorical effect.  The history of manhood does not come at the expense of tears. In fact, in some cultures, it was seen as honest for a principled man to cry as a sign of his disappointment with the world's spiritual failings.

Within the last century or so (I'm not a historian), the masculine ideal has been radically transformed.  In some corners it is no longer acceptable for a man to cry, even under the most extreme circumstances.  The stoic male has been elevated to an unsustainable standard, and many men feel trapped by the shaming feminization they receive as the result of having an honest and sincere moment.

In thinking about this topic, I stumbled upon "Mann on Men" at the website askmen.com.  First off, the website operates under the banner, "Become a Better Man."  This implies that the website is looking to make men into a better form of themselves, but I quickly drew offense to the type of man they were wanting me to become.  For instance, here's a gem I found in the article "Mann on Men: Crying":

"Women need to cry because it isn’t exactly ladylike to punch a hole in a wall. It’s the only way a woman can show real emotion and still remain a woman. Men can get physical. Men can break things. Sure it’s Neanderthal and barbaric, but it’s the way men do business."

My first thought was, "Is this for real?"  The list of offensive ideas in this segment almost outweigh the number of sentences in the segment itself.  I refuse to believe that the only real and legitimate outlet for a man's overwhelming emotions is violence and destruction.  This hyper-masculine ideal is poisonous to young men and, without the help of a real mentor or role model, causes many perfectly well-adjusted boys to begin to self-shame when they have an emotion that might threaten to overwhelm them.  It's hard to believe that violence and destruction, even if aimed at inanimate objects, is seen as being less "costly" to a man's well-being than the honest expression of an emotion.

Breaking down at my uncle's service.  Can't point the finger and absolve myself at the same time.

Mr. Mann goes on to offer a neat little trick that should help those men caught in a weak moment from allowing their emotions to get away from them.  He writes:

"Disconnect from everything emotional and take big, deep breaths. If that doesn’t work, picture the hottest broad you’ve ever been with buck naked on roller skates. If that don’t cheer you up, you’ve got a rough spot ahead."

Sage advice, right?  I love how the ideas of violence and sex are the only two ways in which a man can come to control himself.  This advice is about as dated as "think about baseball during sex to avoid orgasm."  Men have to come to understand that they are allowed to be complete and whole beings with a rich emotional life.  Just because they are men does not close the door on the entirety of the emotional spectrum.  In fact, it is my belief that we need to allow them even greater access to it in order to avoid emotional disorders that are sometimes more often associated with masculinity like violence and substance abuse.

Now, does this mean that men should cry at the drop of a hat?  No, I don't think anyone, male or female, should cry at every possible situation that causes discomfort or emotional distress.  We are all required to comport ourselves with a degree of composure.  Crying isn't masculine or feminine, it simply is a part of being an emotional creature.  In researching different aspects of masculine crying, I ran into this guy again.  I enjoy his satirical take on the issue.  In fact, I don't think it even needs to be all that serious of an issue.  I think we can have a good time and still address the stereotypes that constrict masculinity in a positive way.

In that way, I turn you over to two of my favorite comedians, The Flight of the Conchords:

In the end, I think men and women should allow themselves permission to cry in emotionally overwhelming situations.  We all bear the responsibility of maintaining our own emotional well-being, and sometimes that means having a good cry.  Don't let the shamers get you down, but, also, don't let your emotions get away from you either.  As with most things, there is an appropriate middle ground we all need to strive for.

Writer's Notes: Writer's Tools

One of the most productive creative periods in my life was the result of my little rodeo notebook.

My trusty companion for a long time.  Now in pieces.

The rodeo notebook was a pocket-sized notebook that I could carry in my back pocket.  I carried that thing with me everywhere for years.  As you can see, it went through some wear and tear.  The binding didn't hold any longer and this is what's left of it.

The rodeo notebook fell apart years ago.  I haven't carried a writer's notebook with me since then.  I think this is a big mistake.  I often have ideas out in the world, in the moment, in the "wilds" of my life, and not in front of the computer.  As such, we need to have a writer's notebook with us to document the stray thought, the line of dialogue, the interesting character sketch that prompts a story.

I put a notebook in my jeans and a pen in my pocket and I'm equipped for any moment of inspiration no matter what.  And that's the idea here!  Writers can't be expected to be in possession of perfect memories.  Every attractive idea that crosses our mind is competing with a million more.  My problem is that the really good idea I had is often followed by another attractive, but less successful idea.  If I don't write down the good ideas, then I'll never remember them all.  I get distracted by shiny, attractive things be they ideas, women, cars, etc.  Just ask my wife.  She'll vouch for me on this one.  The writer's book solves any number of problems.  It allows me to take a moment to write down an idea and then rejoin a conversation instead of obsessing about it while pretending to listen.  Again, just ask my wife.  She's a trusted resource when it comes to my attention, or lack thereof.

So, in the spirit of touting the benefits of the writer's notebook, I'd like to introduce you to my new one, "Trusty Brown."  I had been talking to my wife about how I needed a new pocket notebook when she spied this free giveaway at a Portland Arts and Lectures series event with Chris Ware and Chip Kidd.  A new pocket notebook and free?!  How can life get any better?

My unassuming new pocket notebook!

I've already dedicated the first page to blog post ideas.  I'm still a little behind so I've only been posting on the promises lately, but the sore throat is almost gone and I'm almost caught up on my grading.  Life is good, people!

If you don't have a pocket notebook, get one today!  You'll be surprised at the results.  Let the brainstorm begin!

Promise-ary Note: Promise #8

I've drawn the new promise for the week:

I love getting mail, and this promise is the beginning of what I hope will be a correspondence relationship.  I have a couple of people in mind, but I haven't fully decided who I will mail letters to yet.  This will be a paper letter with an envelope and a stamp.  I know, right?  Completely unheard of in this day and age.

I love the idea of letters.  It's a romantic notion, a meditative one.  A handwritten letter is the opposite of instant gratification.  Letter writing is the art of meditative affection.  It means that you were sitting in a location thinking only of another person, imagining them, creating a conversation out of thin air with them.  It is focused energy and devotion.  A person who writes you a letter is someone who cares, who had taken time out of their day to think only of you.  It is the type of friend I want to be, but often am not.

So, to you three lucky recipients of my letters, know that I'm writing to you out of a deep and abiding love and affection.

Promise-ary Note: Cleaning Out Comics

My task for this week was to give away something I didn't want to give away.  It took me a long time to figure out what that thing would be, but I finally stumbled upon it as I was picking up my new comics for the week.  To my dismay, the logical answer was comics.  The moment this realization came to me, I was a little heartbroken.  I'm a collector of stories, of pages, of print and images.

Giving up comics means saying goodbye to stories I've loved and cherished at some point in my life. I do revisit old comic storylines.  I go back into my "super secret" attic space and nestle down alongside my longboxes.

(Let it be said that I'm reluctant to break down the following numbers as my wife reads the blog, but here we go.)

I currently possess 17 longboxes of comics.  Each longbox holds between 200-233 comics each.  This means I am in possession of roughly 3400-4000 or so comics.  This is a collection that has been building since 1993 when my friend Seth Ferris got me hooked with my first hit of comic books. (Yes, I AM using the lingo of a drug pusher.  It is intentional.  I blame you, Seth.) It was the X-men Inferno storyline, and I was sunk from that moment forward.

With this many comics lurking around my attic, there had to be some I could stand to part with, and that's where today's task comes in.

I knew the back of the room was full of older books, mini-series, or series I'd stopped collecting, so I started there.  I came across some nice older comics in my search.  Retro gems like:

It doesn't get any teen angst-ier than Fallen Angels from the 80's

I also encountered some more recent books like:

When 22 pages of a story come out once a month, 7 years ago feels recent.  This comic came out in 2007.

Then there were creators I loved, but wound up not following specific storylines:

The rest is a mish-mash of alternate realities, mini-series, crossover tie-ins, zombies, and the like.

The point of this story is that they are all up for grabs for the first person to get in touch with me.  They will not be bagged and boarded as I am going to keep those for future comic purchases, but you will receive, for free, a long box of comics.  Let the race begin!!!

If I had to admit a dark secret, I do feel a little better getting rid of some of these books.  Hopefully they will live on in the lives of some younger person who will enjoy them just as much as I did.

Promise-ary Note: Playing Catch-up

If you haven't been following my promise experiment, then you can catch up here.

I pulled the meditation card last week, which was amazing in light of my anxiety dream that had me freaked out in the middle of the night. I worked through my 3 meditation sessions, and found myself feeling centered and calm.  But, then I fell sick, and so I have been away from the blog for a couple of days now.

Everyone one in my house is sick, so I have to admit that I "sifted" through my promises a bit to find one that I could accomplish that was low energy and achievable.  I came up with this:

I have a particular aversion to "stuff" in my house, but I usually rant and rave about other people's stuff.  This exercise is an experiment in getting me to look at my own possessions.  I will try and find something that isn't easy, something that actually hurts a little bit so I can understand what it is that I'm asking other people in my house to do.

Wish me luck.  I'll let you know what I decide in the next couple of days.

Personal Note: Anxiety Dreams

My dream consciousness begins with a sound, the sharp dry rasp of a cough in fact.  It comes from somewhere outside my room.  It is my daughter's cough, of this I am sure.  I am a parent and I know the sound of my daughter's cough from a mile away.  I listen from deep in darkness in what I am assuming is my bed because I haven't opened my eyes yet.  It comes again, and again.  That same dry, futile cough that does nothing to move or expel phlegm.

"Searching Dreams" a painting by Herve Martijn, a dutch painter.  Find his work here.

It comes again and again from the other side of the darkness that is my only other awareness.  Finally, I open my eyes and realize I am in my room, tucked away in the bed.  In the dream I don't know if my wife or the dog who normally sleep in the bed are there.  I don't even think of them.  I think only of my daughter and the cough.

I rise.

I move through the house silently, searching for my daughter.  I cross the hall to her room, but she isn't there.  I could have sworn I heard her cough from the other side of the door, but when I open it, she isn't there.  I hear her cough again, but this time it is from down the hall.  I move out of her room and further into the hall.  Her cough sounds like it is coming from downstairs, so I mount the stairs and descend into the further reaches of the house.  I search, always hearing her cough in the next room, around the next corner, but I can't find her.

I'm growing more and more anxious, more and more concerned about her cough as  I move because it seems like the individual coughs are growing more insistent, more frequent, and I don't want her to make herself sick with it.

As I move through the house, searching through room after room, I can't find her.  She is always "somewhere else," just beyond my sight, behind one more closed door.

I wind my way through the entire house, making my way back up the stairs again, and I'm becoming more and more unsettled by the whole thing.  I've already taken to calling her name.  I've been calling since I descended the stairs, but the only answer has been that dry hack.

Finally, I open the door to my office and turn on the light.  There she is.  She is curled up in the arms of my old friend Joel.  She is coughing and she is awake, but there is no distress in her.  Joel is equally calm, although he looks at her with a bit of concern.  When he sees me, he says, "I'm sorry.  I tried to take care of it.  I didn't want to wake you.  She's been at it for a while now."  He's so matter of fact about it.  He registers nothing about my panicked calls throughout the house, registers nothing about my pounding heart.  I cross the room to him and that's when I get my first glimpse at Shea.

When I get close to Shea, it is the open wounds I see first.  All over her body are small, crescent sores that glisten wet, but do not bleed.  Each sore is like a grotesque mouth grinning at me from Shea's arm, leg, or face.  The sores have appeared all over her face and one has curled the left side of her mouth into a cleft palette-like sneer.  Her lips are glossy with the seeping sore.  Her right ear is twisted and disfigured with the profusion of sores I find there.  I almost don't recognize her, and I turn to Joel aghast.

"What's wrong with her?"

"What do you mean?  She's got a pretty bad cough," he replies.  His voice is in no way sinister, in no way panicked.  He has the appropriate amount of concern for someone who only worries about a light cough in a child.

I stand Shea up in front of me and ask, "Are you okay, honey?"

"Yeah, Daddy.  I got a cough though.  Sorry to wake you."  This comes from Shea in her normal, sweet voice.  She's always so considerate, and she has no concern over the sores whatsoever.  I run my hands over them, feeling the slight pucker of flesh at each wound and the anxiety of the situation washes over me.  I can feel goose flesh running up my spine and into my hairline.  I itch with anxiousness...

And then I wake.

I wake itching.  While my consciousness in the dream birthed itself in sound, my waking consciousness rises to the itch, the creeping, full body, deep in the scalp itch of anxiety.  My breath is not rapid, but it is not restful.  My heart beats against the plate of my chest with more force than sleeping should require.  I am awake in the brightest, clear-minded sense of the word.  I don't rise through the mist of sleep.  I don't stumble through the cluttered room of consciousness and into clarity, but I rise bright and clear and aware of exactly what has happened, of exactly what my dream has been.

This is unusual for me.  I don't remember dreams.  Not with this amount of clarity I don't.  After using the bathroom and trying to return to bed, I give up on the futility of sleep at this point.  I know I will not fall easily back, so I rise and move through the real rooms of my house, the silent rooms of my house that don't even carry an echo of a child's cough.  I know exactly where I am going.

The nighttime view out my picture window.  A terrible shot, but you get the drift.

My house has a picture window at the front.  I find myself there, indian-style on the floor in front of the giant pane of glass overlooking my street.  It is after midnight and my neighborhood is silent.  I sit for a moment and gaze out into the semi-darkness.  My eyes adjust to the little bit of light coming from the streetlight down the street and the exterior lights of my neighbor's across the street.

The neighbor's light shines out at me from across the way, the nearby basketball hoop catching the light and glowing like a clouded pane of glass that, in another context, might be a patch of clouded sky, it's whiteness a promise of something.  I begin to breathe.  In through my nose.  Out through my mouth.  Again.  Breathe.  In through the nose.  Out through the mouth.  I focus on my neighbor's backboard, that clouded pane of glass.  "My window is dirty," I think to myself, noticing the dog's noseprints on the glass.  I straighten my posture and breathe, focusing on the backboard.  I do this over and over again, wiping stray thoughts from my head as I focus, deeper and deeper.  In through the nose.  Out through the mouth.  Breathe.  Again.  In through the nose.  Out through the mouth.

Picture provided by Jagaro - a meditation blog from New South Wales

I'm glad I chose meditation as my promise of the week.  After an indeterminate amount of time, I felt heart rate return to normal.  Even though the house is cold in the middle of the night, I was able to control my body temperature and focus on sustaining it through breath and concentration.  I felt my posture straighten, not through focus and control, but by my body coming back into itself, coming back through the controlled meter of breath and aligning itself, one vertebrae on top of another, my shoulders pulling back and down, opening my chest, and allowing me to breathe.

I eventually rose and found myself here.  In front of the computer.  I've been able to transcribe the dream with more clarity than I can ever recall having after a dream.  While I wrote this, some of the anxiety returned, the itch came back to my scalp when I remembered the open sores, but it contained none of the electric panic that rocked the earlier dream.  I had breathed that away, one circuit of breath at a time, in through the nose and out through the mouth.

It's something we can all use from time to time: a return to the power and simplicity of breath.