Cold Wars

I know I've not posted in a while, even though the ten business days was up a while ago, but--settling into the new place, new responsibilities, et cetera.  Hopefully I can be forgiven. ;)

Anyway.  For the purposes of this topic, we'll use Merriam-Webster's second definition of "Cold War": a condition of rivalry, mistrust, and often open hostility short of violence [...].  Funny thing about cold wars--two (or more, but we'll stick to two) sides of a conflict, each believing that they are Right (yes, with a capital R).  A line is drawn, sides are taken, with those who abstain from officially taking a side considered to be unofficially siding with "the enemy".

Really, personal cold wars aren't all that much different from national ones.  There's a conflict, say over money, a love interest, a perceived lack of duty/loyalty/honor/what-have-you.  Sure, the scale is different, but the basics are rather similar.  For one thing, lives can be irrevocably altered by personal cold wars; someone you thought was your best friend becomes your most hated rival, families torn apart over ideological differences, one's very outlook on life altered and shaken.  If you're the introspective type, it makes you wonder what it's all "for".  Is all of that barely-contained hatred really worth holding onto?  The problem is that in some cases, it might just be justified.

Of course, there's such a thing as going too far, also.  For instance, let's say that a personal cold war gets started over money.  One who feels "burned" by the whole affair may be a good deal more cautious with their finances in the future, not quite as ready to help others who claim to need it, yet still at least open to the possibility.  On the other, extreme, hand, one may become so much of a miser that they no longer feel anything but scorn and even hatred for those who claim to need money.  Or, say, a personal cold war started over a love interest.  The one who feels "burned" may become more cautious about whom they give their heart to, in any form of relationship, though still keeping their heart open enough for the possibility of friendship or even love.  On the extreme hand, one might become so hard-hearted that everyone is viewed with mistrust and open suspicion.  Lamentably, such "extreme" cases are hard to look down upon.

The real problem with cold wars on any scale is how to end them.  Some simply cannot be ended, merely put on the proverbial back-burner, set aside for other pursuits.  In my experience, personal cold wars are hard indeed to end.  Truces can rarely if ever be called; both parties find it difficult nearly to impossibility to trust one another again, even to simply the point of ending hostilities.  I wish I had some easy, step-by-step advice on how to do just that, but alas, I do not.  Many people have been involved in personal cold wars, and I would be surprised indeed if any have any concrete advice--though, of course, on such an issue as this, advice in indeed welcome.

The lamentable thing about it all is that personal cold wars destroy personal relationships--while not on the scale of national ones, such endings feel so much more brutal.  You cannot look at a spot that, say, you and your once-best friend enjoyed going to regularly without at the least feeling some sort of negative, intense emotion.  Often, such emotions are disgust, anger, or even hatred.  It's a shame, really.

I suppose that if I had advice, it would be this: Keep your eyes open, learn from everything that happens to and around you, and never lose sight of the good times once shared.  Even if the relationship is severed brutally, there still must be good memories there.  One cannot feel intense anger over a betrayal if one was not emotionally invested in the relationship in the first place.  Never forget the cause of the severance, but never either forget the laughter shared, the infectious happiness.  That might just make enduring the severance a bit more easily gone through.  Good luck to anyone going through just that.

Moving

Yep, that's what I'm doing.  On Wednesday the seventeenth, phone service is going to be shut off here and reconnected where I'm moving to.  Re-establishing an internet connection may take up to ten business days, though, so if there's not a post for a while, that's why.

I hate having a hiatus when the blog is so relatively new, but--them's the breaks, as they say.

Tipping Really Isn't Just a City in China

I don't understand the notion of tipping servers/deliverers.  By that I mean that I understand the process, but not the concept.  "Waiters need to eat, too!" people say.  Well, true.  The thing is, I don't tip my dentist after he roots around my mouth with his iron hook; neither do I give the kid behind the counter at Del Taco money for giving me my soft tacos.  The job description for waiters or food deliverers is pretty simple, simpler still in the case of food deliverers.  When hired on as a waiter, you are hired to take orders and bring the food to the customer.  As a deliverer, you're hired to drive the food to the customer's house.  Why does that deserve a tip?  To answer my own question, and to oh-so-subtly segue into another thing I don't get, it's because they're paid rather badly.  Payment is factored with the probability of tipping--they get paid badly because they should be tipped.

Think about that for a few moments.  You'll see that it's the scam of the century, and totally legal.  Let's say that minimum wage, across the board, was seven dollars an hour.  A restaurant can get away with paying a waiter, say, two dollars an hour because he's supposed to get tips.  While, yes, many places operate under a policy of "averaging" out--that is, a "target" is seven dollars, the restaurant pays two dollars, and at the end of the night, if the tips don't equal out to seven dollars an hour or more the restaurant chips in the difference--many don't.

Also interesting is that no one really knows for sure where it came from.  The most likely explanation is that it was a gift.  Put in today's terms, "Here, have some random money."  Some say that if there was no tipping, customers would have to pay higher bills, but I don't think that's necessarily true.  From what I can tell, having been a sort of "student of humanity", it seems more likely that it's a scheme.  I think that if there was no tipping, the restaurants et al. would have to pay their employees what amounts to minimum wage.  Though tips is a bit of a crap shoot in terms of how much one takes in at the end of the shift, it seems that the good days outnumber the bad.  As such, not many people employed in such jobs would change the situation if they could, and quite honestly I don't blame them.

I'm not saying that such people shouldn't be tipped.  Well--actually, I suppose I am.  I fall back on the analogy of tipping the kid behind the counter at Sonic Burger.  His job is to take your order and give you your food.  His employers don't jack him around and pay him terribly, so why do restaurants do it?  Tipping people who go out of their way, sure, I can see that--but I don't see the point of tipping someone who is doing their job.  Some people say that tipping is also a form of expressing how much one liked the service.  Well, I think that's bunk.  Most people I've heard of--not just people I "know", but just random people--tip flatly.  Whether a percentage or just adding a certain denomination bill and saying to keep the change, most people don't really try to factor anything into the tip.  "Here, have some money."

Now, having said all of that, I don't know how to change it.  I can't make employers pay better wages, and if I did I couldn't get them to pay better than minimum wage (which makes me wonder why an official "waiter" should get paid better than the kid at Taco Bell, but that's another tangent), so what should be done about it?  Heck if I know.  So, having said all of that, I still tip.  I am among the many who don't try to figure out tips; if the bill comes out to, say, thirty dollars and random cents, I'll toss out forty or forty-five dollars and be done with it.  Still, I am forced to wonder why such an obvious scam is perpetuated.  It just doesn't help that, in one fashion or another, I'm helping to perpetuate it.  Hmm.

Destinations, Simple Joys, and Discoveries

In the hey-day of Route Sixty-Six, the average family vacation would, in modern terms, be more likely dubbed a "road trip".  No destination in mind, just the open road and seeing the sights, as it were.  I miss that, and wish I had gotten in earlier on it.  A phenomenon I've noticed in my generation and the younger generations is this preoccupation with the destination, and I am somewhat saddened by it.  To be sure, my generation didn't start this trend, but we and those after us certainly continued and propagated it.

I wish to see a return to such a mentality of the journey mattering more than the destination.  Myself, I barely remember things from destinations, such as to a theme park, but I remember the journey itself with some clarity.  On a trip to Texas, I passed through the desert, and saw things I'd never even thought of.  Small things, mostly, but wondrous things to me nonetheless.  I'd never seen, for instance, mailboxes as art pieces before, but there they were.  I'd seen mailboxes set into designs, of course, like the animal whose mouth or rear end must be opened to deposit or retrieve mail, but some of the ones I saw on that trip--well, they defy easy explanation that would preserve the sense of amusement I felt just by seeing them.

Small things, as I said, but good things, exciting things.  I think that if more people were to simply go-- a vehicle or their feet, some money or working as they go, or something; just get out there and go--that they'd rediscover their culture in the most surprising and fascinating of ways.  Did you know that in Weiser, Idaho, there's a fiddle contest open to people around the world?  For a few days each summer, people from around the world gather and forget about everything--race, religion, politics, and everything else--and just play.  Imagine just happening upon something like that.  Spend a day or two listening to people pay the fiddle, then head back onto the open road.

What I'd like to do is, granted, nothing new.  Just get some friends and go along Route Sixty-Six, seeing the things it decides to show us, partaking of the world around me without bogging myself down with unnecessary details about where we're going.  I think more people should do that.  You do that, you travel without a destination, allowing yourself to remain open to whatever experiences your travels bring you, and you learn more about the world you live in.  You come across many microcosm symbolic of the different paradigms that can be found throughout the world.  You come across cities with Little Italy or Little Havana or some similar in them, where there are foods, people, customs, ideologies that you can only find in the "home" countries.

You go, you just go, and you see wonders that you might never see if you stuck to the quickest routes that get you to a specific destination.  You meet people of all walks of life, of all faiths and paradigms, on "road trips", and your own life is enriched by it.  You will see things that you never even conceived of, and even if you disagree with these things, your knowledge of the world is enlarged.  If nothing else, if nothing else, you will have stories to tell friends and family for years to come.  Imagine telling your children and grandchildren about the time you stopped in a diner you saw just because it looked "neat", while passing through a town you never knew existed even though it was in your state.  Those are the kinds of stories, memories, that build more good memories for years to come.