Avdat

Casserole seasons

Here in the south we have mild winters. Another way to say it is that we have long springs and long autumns. The leaves aren't all down until after Thanksgiving, and the city's leaf removal efforts don't begin in earnest until December.

Now this December we've experienced a cold snap and some snow. I welcome it. It really puts you in the Christmas spirit, especially in these parts where snow is rather rare. But now the snow has started to melt, revealing a truly revolting sight: soggy, half-rotten piles of leaves under the discolored snow.

It's gross. It's... it's... it's SEASONS TOUCHING! That's what it is. It creeps me out like when I was a kid and the foods touched on my plate.

I'm glad that this big storm blowing in from the west coast is going to swing out into the Atlantic and leave us dry on Christmas Day. This city needs a good two weeks of hard core raking and leaf removal before it can snow in decency again. Just like you need a clean plate before you go get dessert. Apple pie sitting in mashed potatoes and gravy residue just won't do.

Stimulate me

So, Congress and the President are going to stimulate the economy with a payroll tax cut. I heard someone somewhere say that a family making $40K per year will take home an extra $800 in 2011. That works out to $67 per month. Do I feel an extra night out at Ruby Tuesday coming on? Oh yeah!

Why, with an extra $67 in your pocket, you can show that lady who just tattooed the name of your band on her forehead how special she really is. You can even offer to spring for her kids. Ladies like that--when you act like you care about their kids. 

(Admittedly you don't really have a choice since she's got them this weekend. But it is a generous offer on your part, especially considering that the boy's father totally screwed you over when he fled the scene of the accident, leaving his dime bag to be found in your unconscious lap by the police. You went away seven months for that!)

So it's a Long Island for you and a strawberry lemonade for your lady (because the refills are free)! Long Island refills aren't free, but you know that if you drink half of it and complain that you can't taste the liquor, the unctuous manager will pour you a new one on the house. Sliders for the kids (extra well done--nobody in this house is gonna puke tonite!) You'll have the half rack of ribs, but you want that broccoli well done too, just like your meat; and a ribeye for your lady.

She knows the drill as well as you do. She'll gnaw on half that steak and then complain, "I don't know... It's just a little too... It's a little too... fatty." It's a ribeye, you moron; it's a fattier cut of meat! But she knows she can weasel out a free dessert if she's insistent enough.

Anyway, ribs, steak, drinks and kids dinners come to, we'll say, $57. And when you think about all the free stuff you weaseled out of them, you made out like bandits!

You leave three twenties on the table. You round up the kids who've been running up and down the aisle for ten minutes now. You walk away with a to-go box of limp french fries in your hand, avoiding the pile of parmesan chicken pasta left on the floor when that boy of hers tripped a server, and tell your waiter not to worry. You can keep the change. Why? Because you got a tax cut!

Where did the extra seven dollars go? Condoms. Cuz later on, you gonna have some shake with those fries (heh, heh). You're feeling full, expansive, generous. Life is good.

Meanwhile, you were the only table your hapless server had the last hour he was on. Why was he working so late, even though he worked a double? Because he's either too stupid or too principled (the two do seem to go together) to flirt with the hostess or the manager, the two people who have absolute power to get him home at a decent hour. So add his base pay of $2.13 to your $3 tip, and once he tips out the bar and the hostess, he made the minimum wage that last hour he worked. That is, the minimum wage for 1997, unadjusted for inflation.

In the aggregate, more take home pay means more nights out, which means more Florida farmers and Kansas ranchers will expand their operations to meet demand for all those steaks, ribs and lemonades. Plus there will be more truck drivers hired to haul all this great American food to restaurants, and more servers hired.

But remember, clawing our way out of this abyss starts with one cheapo family begetting one chump server going home with a chump change burning a hole in his pocket, just aching to do some stimulating itself.

I love this country.

And I'm not bitter.

Running drunk

I cannot say enough good things about the awesomeness of the blog Exercising While Intoxicated. Dude ran the Bay to Breakers Half Marathon and drank a beer every mile.

That'd be, uh, 13 beers.

I'm quite sure I've never drunk 13 beers at one time. Ever. Much less while running a half-marathon. I mean, put 13 beers in me, and I wouldn't even be able to run to the toilet. I wouldn't be able to sit on the toilet. I wouldn't be able to... Well, you get the point.

You're questioning the man's sanity, but you should be questioning mine. I got up and ran 13 miles Saturday morning--stone cold sober. At least that guy has an excuse; he was drunk. I am without excuse. It's a seriously sick mind that runs 13 miles without a guy with an ax close on your heels.

You learn stuff when you run drunk. Dude learned that it's not a good pickup move to give your camera to two pretty Asian girls to take your picture, and right when one says cheese your mouth fills up with sick.

You should keep that in mind.

In seminary some of us hooked up with the Atlanta chapter of the Hash House Harriers. They call themselves "A drinking club with a running problem." Definitely not people who look like they belong on the cover of Runners World. A lot of jiggle in the pack as we moved down the way. A lot of guts that arrived at the finish line before the rest of the body. And a lot of leering, giggling, some groping too, and, well...

Basically you have the hares, who run off, and the hounds (everybody else) who chase them. The hares mark the trail with flour thrown on the ground, and to be sure it's more ground than sidewalk. You'll find yourself running through dry creek beds, not so dry creek beds, down natural gas pipeline right-of-ways, across people's back yards, and so forth. If the trail is lost, everyone spreads out looking for the next pile of flour. When you find the trail you yell "On-on!" and everyone tears off.

Because there's a keg at the end of the run.

Whatever motivates you.

But even the Hashers don't drink during the run.

When I ran the Richmond marathon last year there was a guy on Fauquier handing out Dixie cups with Yuengling in them. I gladly took one--this was mile 22 or so--and it really hit the spot. And now I'm vindicated! Dude assures me that beer and running are two great tastes that taste great together, although I would have preferred a shot of whiskey, because I'm suspecting the burn would have taken my mind off the awful pain of lifting leaden-like legs and crashing them down upon battered feet.

And now if you'll excuse me: I have to think harder about the merits of running while drunk, versus the merits of running while stuffing a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts into your gut at the turnaround point...

We work hard for the money

A Facebook friend asked, "How much do you tip your servers?" I replied by shamelessly linking to some of the rants I've composed here, but as I re-read them, it occurred to me that I could have been clearer. At points it sounds like I'm trying to excuse bad service. I'm not.

What I'm trying to do is address this problem: You give good service; you like your guests, and they appear to like you; you're sure you could not have rendered better service, and they still leave you three twenties on a $55 tab and cheerfully encourage you to "keep the change."I choose not to think these people are cheap, but merely uninformed. If only they knew more about the nature of the work and the pay scale, they'd be better tippers.

So this post will describe what's hard about restaurant work, why servers deserve good tips, and also what waiters and waitresses can do to give better service (which, I admit, I haven't written about yet).

A longish contextual theology, or what I learn about God by waiting on the Jerry Springer crowd

Last Friday night I sold $500 worth of food and took home $80-some in tips. Not bad after tipping out the bar, the hostess and the busser. The next night I sold twice as much food but netted only $10 more in tips. Why? you ask.

It was the eve of Valentine's Day, which brought out what my co-worker calls "upgraders." People who usually don't mind eating a greasy pork sandwich out of a dirty ash tray decided to take that special someone whose name is tattooed on their neck to our casual dining establishment.

It was off the chain. The Jerry Springer Show could have held a casting call in there. People showed up drunk, and we seated them. I approached one table and all five of them started yelling what they wanted all at once, like a bunch of little kids whose Ritalin had worn off. I had to become a preschool teacher just to take their order. "OK, let's take turns, starting with you, Ma'am. What would you like to drink?" I said sweetly while thinking, How do these people function in society?

I knew my tip was doomed when I presented the check. The two couples got into an argument over who was going to pay for the kid sitting in between them. After they settled up, one guy stuffed a couple of dollars into my palm and said, "Sorry I can't give you any more, but I didn't know the bill was gonna be so high."

Well yes, three sangrias, a martini, a Long Island, two mudslides a hurricane and a margarita do add up. Thanks for chugging my tip! After my tip-out to the bar, I'm pretty sure I lost money on you. But you do get points for honesty.

Here's a tip: don't be so cheap

I'm against religious violence as much as you are, boys and girls, but these people who leave their waiters tracts instead of tips really ought to be taken out back and shot.

When Bishop Cyprian of Carthage was sentenced to death he gave his executioner 25 gold pieces. Now there's a man who could teach the Sunday lunch crowd a thing or two!

In Paradise Lost, Satan famously said, "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven." But not if you get to wait on Cyprian.

Making sense

Richard Beck: Stop working on your relationship with God and start tipping your server better.

In which I call for a fair service movement

I made some good tips the other night. A $9 tip on an $18 bill, and a $40 tip on a $150 bill (nice! Thank you Russian-immigrant-sounding family!) But the server in the next-door section went home with just $25. Stiffed twice. And on a Saturday night!

It's a maddening aspect of the hospitality industry. Bad service will earn you a bad tip every time, but good service won't necessarily earn you a good tip.

I've blogged about tipping before, and Kyle's comment made real sense to me:

A couple years back, I told my dad that I don't consider the tip a payment for quality of service; I merely consider it part of the bill, part of my calculation for how much something will cost when I look at a price on the menu. Thus, no matter what the quality of service, my tip remains about the same (usually the nearest round number above fifteen percent). My dad, who is notoriously cheap (though he's been better since two sons had waiting jobs), was flabbergasted, but I think this is really the only attitude one can have if one wants to work for a Christian sense of social justice given the unfortunate realities of waiter pay in this country.

A "Christian sense of social justice" has spurred a whole lot of people to shell out a few more dollars for clothing that's not manufactured in sweat shops, or coffee that came from a farmer who was paid a fair price for his crop. Where's the justice for waiters and waitresses? In most states, we only make $2.13 per hour. If you're only tipping 10%, you're stealing the server's labor. We need a Fair Service movement to match the Fair Trade movement.

I can imagine service so wretched that a small tip is justified. There are some sketchy people in the hospitality industry, and on rare occasions, you might draw the seriously hung over waiter or the racist waitress whose service deserves a mere $2.13. Just remember that a lot of things can go wrong in a restaurant, and many of them might not be the server's fault. Stiffing the server often punishes an innocent party.

In the meantime, Mr. and Mrs. Casual Dining Customer, let me be so bold as to encourage you to be better guests by not committing the following gaffes (all of which either I or my co-workers have had to deal with):

1. For God's sake, sit where the host wants you to sit. It ain't for grins 'n' giggles that she's led you to that table. It may well be that the other table you think is so great is in a section whose server is totally in the weeds. Sit there, and expect to wait a while to be greeted. Even longer to get your food and drinks.
2. Don't try to order food and talk on your cell phone at the same time.
3. Don't order stuff that's not on the menu and take umbrage when it's not what you expected. For instance, I serve in a casual dining chain, not a Tiki bar. If you order a zombie, we'll give it our best shot, but casual dining in Richmond ain't lounging on the beach at Key West. Also, we ain't a fish camp. We don't do hush puppies. And another thing; don't ask for steamed spinach when it's not on the menu; complain that said steamed spinach doesn't amount to much (it wilts, you know, when you steam it!) and then when I bring out a Popeye-sized pile of steamed spinach, look at me with offended disbelief and say, "That's a lot of spinach, don't you think?" I won't say it, but I will think, "OK, Goldilocks, next time I'll bring out a scale from the kitchen and get the portion just right."
4. Don't think that coming into the restaurant for your to-go order absolves you from tipping. Especially if you drive a black BMW. I bring you the food just the same, and even if I make a tad more per hour for to-go service, I ask you, "What job on earth would you do for $4.00 per hour? Stop stealing from me!"

For extra credit: you parents of small children, resist the urge to feed them saltine crackers you've collected from the salad bar. The crumbs go everywhere, and when they mix with the condensation from the glasses, the stuff sets up like concrete. It's a mess to clean up. But props to you for being one of the better tipping demographics.

What I ate on vacation: bugs

I remember a Candid Camera segment in which this guy pops into a fast food restaurant to order a burger. Only it's a fake burger joint. As soon as he places his order, one of the staff leads a cow through the room into the back. Then the sound of a saw starts up, followed by copious amounts of bovine bellowing. Then silence, and shortly thereafter out comes the burger! Now that's what I'm callin' fast food! Naturally the guy was beside himself.

I had a similar experience at Thurston's Lobster Pound in Bernard Maine. You walk in and place your order at the window. In the window are three sinks, one filled with small lobsters, one with medium, and one with large. Say you order four small lobster dinners. Well, the girl yanks four lobsters out of the far right sink, throws them into a big tupperware container, and then the heavily-tattooed woman takes them away to boil outside the restaurant door. And in five minutes, Viola! Your lobster is served.

My younger son found the whole experience appalling. He's a budding vegetarian--of a sort. He does eat burgers, but he always asks if our sausage is the soy stuff and not from the little piggy that went to market. I'm not sure if he understands that burgers are meat too, or if he's just inconsistent. I haven't accused him of inconsistency, which, after all, is a feature of most adult's moral reasoning, so why should I expect more from a nine-year-old? Anyway, he was quite ornery at dinner, and only straightened up when his mother gave him pen and paper and told him to express his feelings in that medium. So he drew pictures of bombs falling on the lobster pound. My son, the eco-terrorist.

My older son isn't the slightest bit troubled by where his meat comes from. "Look, granddaddy; those are his eyes!" CRACK.

I was wondering to myself, If we did sell burgers the way we sell lobster, would we eat less meat? I think not. When most people farmed, whatever personal relationship between human and animal that arose on the farm didn't deter hog-killing season from rolling around. Today's industrial farming model makes the relationship between humans and livestock much more impersonal, but it also makes meat much cheaper, which I suspect is the determining factor.

There are a million good reasons to be a vegetarian. It's a healthier diet. The animals are subjected to discomfort, even cruelty, in modern confinement operations. It's good stewardship: It takes millions of acres of corn and soybeans to feed the cattle, hogs, chickens and turkeys we eventually eat. Why not raise food to feed humans directly instead of indirectly? Vegetarianism may also be a prophetic sign of the coming kingdom of God, when "the lion and the lamb shall lie down together." Oh, and it's cheaper, modern agribusiness efficiency notwithstanding.

And yet I'm not the strict vegetarian I once was. We do, on rare occasions, buy organic beef, and on long journeys like the one to Maine and back, McDonalds does seem to be rather handy and fast. And in the spirit of "When in Rome..." I ordered lobster last week.

I was of two minds about it. Going from living to dead pink in boiling water before your very eyes, and then setting upon it with the crackers, yanking the meat out of the claws, the legs, and dodging the, Ahem, green stuff exploding out of the body cavity seemed barbaric to me. My hands were sticky and slimy. Flecks of green ooze on my shirt. Plus, lobster meat doesn't have that much taste to me. I think most people actually like the taste of the butter, not the meat.

Then again, I was also reading Linda Greenlaw's The Lobster Chronicles while on vacation, and learning that lobsters are arthropods, underwater spiders basically, and nicknamed "bugs" by lobster fishermen. Their brain-mass to body-mass ratio is among the worst in the animal kingdom. They can walk into a lobster trap, but seem to lack the brainpower to turn around and walk right back out. They are, in short, stupid, revolting little creatures whose very existence seems to justify preying upon them by anything higher than they on the food chain.

And that's all I have to say.

Post-Easter blues

Did I mention how going to work Easter Sunday afternoon sucked every ounce of resurrection joy out of my soul?

It was a good morning. Coolish, but sunny and beautiful. Clear blue sky. Redbuds blooming. I got the boys ready for Church while Mrs. Avdat went ahead for handbell practice. (I am still thoroughly enjoying sleeping in on Sundays and worshiping with my family for the first time since... well, ever).

We sang Jesus Christ Is Risen Today, which brings tears to my eyes. I always react to that hymn the way that I ought to react to The Strife Is O'er, a sense of the weight of the world lifted from my shoulders, from the world's shoulders. Pastor Janet's sermon (with an acknowledged assist from Barbara Brown Taylor) was a slam dunk. "They were looking for the past but stumbled upon the future." Fair words of warning and promise to a budding Church Historian.

We went home, ate lunch, rested, and then I went in to wait tables at That Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten At Before.

Nothing bad happened. No rude customers. No co-worker cattiness.

But the very absence of novelty is what was so spiritually crushing about it. The same musical soundtrack of current pop hits and classic rock standards. The same menu, same smell of french fries. No ham biscuits like there were at every Easter family reunion we attended as children. The dark interior which dilates your pupils and makes it impossible to see outside. Not that there's anything to see outside. A strip mall parking lot. There is a Bradford Pear, the ubiquitous and sterile suburban organic yard decoration that provides the barest hint of nature if you look at it out from under the awning: brown in winter, white in early spring, brown again as its blooms wilt in the face of the inevitable late frost, then green.

Shortly, it wasn't Easter anymore. It wasn't spring anymore. It wasn't anything anymore. By the soundtrack and the landscape you could place my serving gig somewhere in America on either side of the century's turn, but otherwise the venue is as unplottable as Number 12 Grimmauld Place. Suburban wasteland.

I should be tougher. Dietrich Bonhoeffer managed to cultivate a rich spiritual life in a concentration camp, for goodness sake. I ought to be able to find God in a restaurant.

When Jesus returned to his hometown, they took umbrage because they knew the back story on this hot-shot prophet. He was just the carpenter's son; who did he think he was? Mark reports, "He could do no deed of power there because of their unbelief." I'm struck by the word "there," as opposed to say, "for them." It raises a interesting possibility, that there are spiritual dead zones in the topography of creation.

Are they all due to unbelief? Or can inspid art and culture do the same?