Two sets of recent poorly-tipping and non-tipping customers...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) A group of three (very young) (Chinese from China) girls who use some phone app to scan the menu and convert it into characters -- "Why do they need that?!", I was like, "All the words are like 'vegetable' and 'noodle' and 'sauce'!" -- and who all have drinks and appetizers and a few expensive entrees and dessert, too, and who split the bill evenly and all go to pay ApplePay for their $28 share of the meal ($28!), and 2 of them leave a $2 tip and the third leaves no tip at all.

And, when my one (Chinese from China) coworker does the spiel about was everything okay with the food and service etc., they say yes, and he points to the tip, and one is like, "We don't have the money," and they leave.

(And, they had a decent amount of food left on the table, they didn't even leave clean plates, and, like many [Chinese from China], they just don't do leftovers, so it was like a $90 dinner that they claim they can't afford, and they don't even bother eating all of the food, while tipping shit to your face even when challenged.)

2) A young (South Asian from South Asia) couple come and take a table by the window and flirt, and when after they've looked at the menu a long time, I stop by their table, the guy is like, "Come back in five minutes," and so I just let other people take the table, and they order a few expensive entrees -- one fish, so they're (Pakistani) or (Bangladeshi)? -- and dessert, too, and at some point I see the (young) guy lean across the table and put a fork-full of mango stick-rice into her mouth, and when they go to pay the $69 bill, they leave no tip, so my one (Chinese from China) coworker who's helping them does the spiel, and the guy looks in his wallet and pulls out a crumpled one dollar bill, and gives it to him.

And, when he comes back to the back and tells us this, I see that the (young) couple is still lingering by the doorway, so I run up and am like, "Oh, oh, was everything okay!", and quite blankly the (young) guy says yes, they like our food a lot, they've been here three times already, and so he catches me offguard like that, and so impulsively right away I say something like that if that's the case, the tip should be minimum fifteen percent, the total is even listed at the bottom of the receipt if they have a problem with math, "it's a cultural expectation," and it's the way that the servers make money, "it's a cultural expectation."

And, they just look at me like they've never heard this before and they don't know how to process it, and I say something to end the interaction and turn around.

(I'll see how they tip next time they're in -- if it's still bad, no service like refilling water glasses from me.)

Thinking back.

At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was burned out for a bit, but she couldn't find time to take time off, since she said that the (Thai) (husband) boss always needed her and couldn't run the restaurant without her.

"You see how he calls me!", she was like, referring to how he always needs her in the kitchen to pack takeout and how he calls her sometimes if she's away doing other tasks.

And, I had to remind her how he's getting spoiled...  I have worked at the restaurant longer than her, from just after the peak of the pandemic, and so I told her how I had put my resume in at restaurants around town, and how they had had a sign up on the door that they were closed that weekday because of the worker shortage, and how I came back later to apply and then at the interview he told me that people didn't want to work anymore, and now, now what's happening, but he has a lot of dependable workers and he even took down the big driver/server application sign that he always had up in the front window, since he doesn't even need to keep resumes on hand anymore for when anyone quits unexpectedly.

"He's spoiled now," I was like, quite seriously.

Destruction.

A hunting-cabin from my childhood is slated for destruction, and I will not have a chance to visit it before it is gone.

It was ramshackle and behind a drive with a chain that you would open up, in a rural part of the state more than an hour from my childhood home, that my parents and their friends had bought when they were young and continued to use as they married and had kids, and we would stay there, sometimes, sometimes with my mom and sometimes without, depending on what was men's weekend and what would be for families, and at certain holidays like Fourth of July people would bring tents and set them up on the lawn or on this mown-grass field by the entrance-drive.

It had a tar-paper roof and a shed annex and an outhouse and a pump and a gazebo with a hammered-log floor, and inside a dart table and a hanging metal lamp and a loft that you'd climb up into and a fan high up over the main room that spun crooked since once some people had broken in and vandalized it a little bit and tried hanging from the fan, when they found there was not much to steal, and there was a large round table there, too, where people would play cribbage and sometimes euchre, and the cribbage board was a large flat board that someone had carved tracks and put nail-holes into, for all the pegs and whatnot. 

People had pig-roasts and coolers full of pop and those plastic-tube freeze-pops, and in the kitchen my parent's one eccentric friend would listen to opera simulcasts on Saturday afternoon -- something that I do, now -- and would do crossword and word puzzles from this one certain puzzle magazine -- one that I subscribe to, now.

After the friend group broke up, the property split between my father and his younger brother, my uncle, who eventually ended up just owning the whole thing.

My brother has been back occasionally, but I haven't, for years, and so my uncle told my brother and he went, but I didn't have a chance to, because of the distance and short notice.

Somehow it was always there, and I thought that I would have a chance to go back, one day.

Sickness.

One night very late at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, this one (bearded) (orthodox) priest comes in by himself, one who would show up every few weeks for lunch with another priest and this (young) (big-nosed) (trusting) (ethnic-looking) (white) college kid who I had just assumed was a priest in training.

And, while he's there, my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker tells me that that priest has been coming every night to the restaurant, since his son is sick, and he goes to the hospital all day and then comes to our restaurant for food, since he lives in the city that I used to live in and he had always come here when he came down for the day and visited his son at college, but otherwise he doesn't know the college town and other restaurants there, and so he just comes here now, every day, while his son is in the hospital.

And, they had been at the restaurant for lunch, and the son just did not look well, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker said, he almost looked yellow, he looked that bad, and they ran out without even finishing the meal, to get him to the hospital, where he started vomiting blood and they discovered that he had been eating a lot of spicy food and not drinking enough water and somehow all of that ate the entire lining off his intestine.

. . .

. . .

. . .

(I asked a few weeks later and he recovered, and they're back to coming in for lunch again.)

More death:

1) A (small) (old) (quiet but very nice) (New Age-spiritual) (German) man used to come into the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now every few weeks or so for always the same vegan dish to-go, this dish with like asparagus and mushrooms and fried tofu, and the owners even carried to-go packets of low-sodium soy sauce, just for him. After I stopped working lunch shift because they needed me for other shifts, I never really saw him again, except once out and around town, and then one day recently I came across his obituary in the local newspaper.

"That's why we don't see him for weeks!", my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker said, when I showed it to her.

2) A (strange) but (good-natured) (bearded) (older) (white) man with a lazy eye and his (younger) (fat) (smiley) (white) (brunette) wife used to come in every week or so for lots of fried appetizers, always both wearing black and sometimes leaving no tip and at other times just $2, and often with a big wire push-cart full of groceries, that we'd have to make room for over by them and that would block off use of an adjacent table since the push-cart was just that big, when you tried to wedge it in somewhere beside them.

And, sometimes you'd see them walking around town or resting on public benches or gardening-berms, too.

Then, we didn't see them for like ever, for easily more than half of a year, and then the guy comes in one day with some (older) (white) man, together.

And, when my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker goes over to him to say hi -- for some reason, the couple had sent her and just her a Christmas card at the restaurant, once -- she ends up kneeling down and talking to the guy a bit, and she finds out that his wife had been sick, and passed away of cancer.

Recent death:

1) A local seamstress who used to do work for my mother passed away, since she was (Jehovah's Witness) and needed heart-work but refused to have a blood transfusion, so they wouldn't operate on her at the university hospital where she had gone for a specialist evaluation.

"What a stupid death," my mother said, over the phone.

2) A major scholar whose work I know passed of Parkinson's, as did my one friend who used to deliver singing telegrams, who had ended up being moved out of assisted living and into a nursing home like one or two years ago because of falls, including one bad one where no-one found her for just hours and hours on end, as she lay on the floor after she had lost her balance.

She had been living at that nursing home with some (fat) woman who always watched television -- Medicare will only pay for double rooms, I believe -- and when I had called her around New Year's and couldn't understand her over the phone -- she's always been a low talker, and her (Southern) accent didn't help, but somehow it seemed physiological, this time -- so I told her that I couldn't understand her but I was glad to just chat on my end, and so I just had a one-sided conversation where I kept it light and told her what was up with me, and then when I called back a couple of months later her voice mailbox was full, and when I called a week after that, it was empty and I leave a message, only to have a text the next day from someone saying it was her sister and that she had finally succumbed to her battle with Parkinson's, and the date she mentioned was like the day after I had tried calling her and her voice mailbox was full. 

3) At the small local urban redevelopment in-fill mall, a small ethnic goods shop that was hanging on for several years for completion of a long-awaited hotel renovation and re-opening closed, about a month before that hotel finally did reopen.

(I hope the proprietor didn't lose too much money, on that. It would be sad if he did.)

Academic credentialism.

Over the past several years, I've followed my philosophy of "you interact with academics only inasmuch as is necessary to try to get something that you want," so I've applied to a few higher-profile conferences where I had applicable projects in the hopes of not getting so much feedback, but rather a paid junket where they fly me out to the conference city etc.

What I've noticed happen, though, is that at some point I get googled from the host city/institution, presumably since I don't write them using an .edu account and I don't have any affiliation listed on my abstract, and presumably since the work is very high-level and they don't know who I am and what to think.

So far, every time this has happened, I ultimately get turned down, and when I've later looked at who *has* been accepted, it's everyone who is already "in the system" and has positions -- that is, those who have more, get more.

In some ways it reflects very shamefully on the evaluators, to look at credentials like that as a proxy for content rather than at actual content. It's like the exact opposite of a true intellectual enterprise, open to ideas no matter where they come from, and evaluating by merit. 

In a way, my attitude is that if they don't accept top-notch work because it comes from the wrong party or because accepting it might make those with positions look bad, somehow -- whatever you do, you can't show people up! -- well, then they're welcome to whatever "intellectual exchange" they're having at their functions.

When I have described my research to random academics in totally non-related fields who I've come across, several have observed that crossing fields is very productive, to which I reply that it might be, but it also means that no-one accepts you or gives you resources beyond marginal publication and conference access, since you don't fit into what's happening and didn't come up through known programs and you don't really have any patrons anywhere.