Wage/rent proprotions.

That one super busy weekend night was pretty amazing, tips-wise.

Like, between the tips and the base wage, I was making almost $24 an hour for 5 hours straight, at a place that's like a 6-minute walk from my house and where I get a free dinner afterwards.

Since my basic rent and utilities is like $600 a month, I basically nominally earned a fifth of that monthly cost in just over one half day's work!  Yeah, there's taxes, but that's still a shit-ton of money.

My life is so much easier here financial-wise than the city that I used to live in...  There I had it pretty good like that when I first moved there, but it never really regained balance after the 2009 economic crisis, though a lot of people were hoping it would. There, it was like every time that wages went up or something happened to make your life easier, some other expense would go up and you'd be back to square one and the shitty middling endless grind that reigned since 2009.