What's the Value of Good Service?

I went to Spain for the second time this past summer. Last time I'd visited, I was twenty years old and studying abroad in Valladolid. This time, I went to Barcelona and Madrid. The whole reason that we flew into Barcelona was because my all time favorite band, Gogol Bordello, was playing there, and I considered this a sort of mecca.

Anyway, it was fantastic. Amazing food, amazing experiences, and amazing company. This was also the first vacation with "friends" I'd ever taken; I studied abroad, and I went to Italy with my parents, but this was such a different experience.

A few months before,  I'd started waiting tables at a local restaurant. My boyfriend had waited tables all through college, and he encouraged me to give it a shot. It was fine--the job itself wasn't so bad. But I hate working for anything corporate, and this place was unbelievably so. We were often told that we needed to "surprise and delight" our guests, and that we would see our tips go up because of it. In fact, we were ranked on our tip percentages. Considering the area, I felt this was a little unfair. The fact is some people don't tip, no matter how much you surprise and delight them. I mean, it's just the way it is.

Anyway, Americans are huge on "good" service. But the funny thing about Spain is that they are definitely not. There are usually about two waiters out there for twenty tables, and they'll get to you when they damn well feel like it. They're busy, so when you hesitate, they roll their eyes and tell you to hurry up and make up your mind already. (They also smoke in front of you, which is really strange to American sensibilities.)

Of course, they aren't working for tips. It's considered rude to leave anything more than a euro.

But it's actually kind of nice. Aren't you tired of obsequious servers constantly asking if you need anything, or rushing you in and out so that they can flip your table and make more money? (In case you didn't know, that's usually how it's done.) In Spain, they don't care if you never order--just don't cause problems or hold them up.

It was honestly refreshing--no one pretended to be your pal, and they helped you when you asked for it.

Blog Prompt: November 8

I'm a recovering gym rat.

When I was in high school, I ate whatever I wanted--but I ran about 15 miles a week, so it was all a wash. (I also played in the marching band, which afforded me a little extra exercise.)

But somewhere along the line, it didn't matter if I ran 5 or 20 miles a week. I couldn't eat whatever, and I started getting injuries from trying to overdo the exercise.

When I went to college, I changed my routine a little--I still ran about 4 miles a day, but I alternated my cardio with other exercises, like the elliptical.

Because the elliptical was so boring, I had to switch it up a little. I went to the "man" side of the gym--and found that I liked the way I felt after lifting (relatively small) weights. My best friend, a triathlon runner, laughed when I told her. "Of course runners need to do some weight training. You've got to have some muscle to be fast."

But as time went by, I found I was addicted to cardio, despite the fact that things like running had lots of negative effects. At a certain point, they didn't even help me keep a steady weight.

After a particularly painful foot injury (never wear Toe shoes...ever), I found that I couldn't even jog on the treadmill. It was depressing!! If I go for more than a few days without some kind of sweat-inducing exertion, I go stir crazy.

A friend of mine suggested that I start doing mostly weight training, with about 15 minutes on the bike on the side.

"But I'll get big!! Girls aren't supposed to do a majority of weight training."

"No, you won't," he replied. "You just don't have enough testosterone. Trust me. You're just going to be toned."

And he was right. While it is still a struggle to balance out the two, I've found that weight training makes me feel better, not bigger. And honestly, I could go only 2 or 3 times a week, and I was just fine. In fact, I was in better shape than I had been when I ran four miles a day. (I was a lot less injury-prone, too.)

Now I want to get back to running, but I know it's not the be all and end all. And I know that weights are good--even for girls.

As a teacher, I think that I have a slightly different perspective on the idea of scoring voice in student writing. On one hand, I think it is vastly important. It shows an awareness of audience, an awareness of self, and a mastery of the craft. (If you can write with voice, you can do anything.)

But making an argument for grading voice scares me. Yes, I enjoy reading voiced papers more than the average, dull, wash, rinse and repeat essay. Yes, I think that voice illuminates any given topic. But there are a few issues that I see. For one thing, voice is a sum of its parts: attitude, tone, diction, syntax, punctuation. Wouldn't it be easier to score those things? Why do we have to call it "voice"? As a field, composition is already considered a soft science--we don't operate on standard definitions, and it seems that we are always squabbling among one another. Scoring voice might be one more nail in the coffin that is the field of composition studies. If we are ever to be taken seriously, we should probably stick to things that can be measured.

How can you say that, my expressivist colleagues might ask. Well, here's the thing. I'm all about voice--I think it's vital to good writing. But can you really teach voice? I can teach diction. I can teach syntax variation. I can teach tone. But I can't teach anyone how to be themselves on the page. If I can't teach it, I don't know that I should be scoring it. If we expected students in a biology or an algebra class to learn something as ethereal as voice, and then be scored on that thing that we couldn't honestly teach, we'd be laughed out of the department.

We can encourage voice, but we cannot truly teach it. So why score it?

First Drafts

Anne Lamott's writing process is a lot like mine; she seems to have trouble distancing herself from her worries and, as a result, can't seem to get anything down on paper. I do like her idea about the one-inch frame, though. Sometimes it's easy to be overwhelmed by page requirements, or grand notions of writing the world's next novel--it's hard to live in the moment and just fill half a page.

The most difficult paper that I've written (yet) was actually about my own writing process. I'm terrible when it comes to writing about myself. To make things worse, I'm pretty neurotic about writing itself. I have to have exactly the right spot, the right drink, the right music...but none of that matters if I'm too keyed up to write in the first place. I spend a lot of time starting and stopping--by the time I'm done writing, I've usually written about five introductions, and amassed a stack of scribblings that just came to me while I was supposed to be doing something else. My house is always really clean when I have something tough coming up, too--it's easy to find anything BUT writing to do.

I don't really know how I finally got over that writer's block. I just started thinking about experiences that I'd had that seemed to symbolize the steps I went through as I wrote. Instead of worrying about the final product, I just put one foot in front of the other and pieced together all of the little bits.

The Voice of Reason

Okay: this is a post that I started a few weeks ago and never got around to finishing. Enjoy!

So I've been reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, despite the fact that I have many pressing assignments breathing down my neck. Thus far, it has been exactly my kind of read: philosophical yet simple, artistic yet base. A study in contradictions.

Still, I've read a number of books in this vein. I always enjoy them, but generally lack someone to share them with. I'm left reading myriad passages aloud to my patient mother, who does not love the prose, but the reader.

Not this time! When I first opened the book, which I ordered on Amazon.com (used), I was thrilled to find that its previous owner had written in it. Certainly I'm not the only nerd out there! At least one of you has to love finding traces of another reader. (Don't be shy!)

As you might have guessed, I immediately turned to pages 107, 123, 262, and 265. I don't know what I was expecting; maybe I thought that the pages were some kind of secret code, or that the list itself was something akin to that game that students used to play with textbooks in high school. You know...on page 23, it says: "Turn to page 34." And then on page 34, it says: "Flip to page 72." After much searching, there was usually some invariably disappointing message like, "Steve was here," or "I hate school!" Still, it's all about the journey, right?

Anyway, there wasn't anything special on those pages, aside from the occasional underline or check beside the text, both of which could be found throughout the text.

I continued reading, making note of check marks and underlining whenever I came across them, but not really thinking all that much about them. Then I came upon this page:

So at this point in the story, the narrator is describing one of the main characters and said character's inability to stay faithful to his wife. It is all couched in rather sympathetic terms, as though we the readers should feel sorry for Tomas in all of his debauched glory.

In response to this, my doppel-reader wrote, "What an ass!" in the margin. At first, I simply laughed because this reader, who I presume is female, wrote what most people were probably thinking. Not only that, I was able to share the text with someone else (an unknown someone else) without having to explain the first thing about the book. It was like finding a ready-made companion.

Now that's all well and good, but then I realized something: I actually hadn't been thinking that. Because this entire portion of the text (which moves from one character to another) was devoted to Tomas, I found myself actually sympathizing with him, as opposed to his wronged and miserable wife, Tereza. As much as I hate to admit it, I was entirely wrapped up in the artsy nature of the novel, and, as a result, willing to forgive all number of transgressions committed by the pathetically flawed main character.

Thank God for doppel-reader! Her cursive wit brought me out of the land of the novel and back into reality, where cheating is wrong and that's that. In real life, I would never have empathized with the narrator's flimsy defense of Tomas; but alone and buried in a world created by Milan Kundera, I found myself playing by his rules.

I don't believe that I have a tight conclusion for this piece. Instead, I'll simply say that I learned two things. First, a book is always better shared. And second? Well, the written word is more powerful than most people realize.

How Not To Include Politics in Your Music

This weekend, I had the good fortune of attending a Massive Attack concert at the Fox Theater. For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the group, it is (according to Wikipedia) "a collaborative music duo from Bristol" as well as the "progenitor of the trip-hop genre."

Okay, so what the heck does that mean? Basically, these guys (and occasionally gals) sing awesome, haunting melodies to an electronic though elegant drumbeat. My personal favorites are "Paradise Circus" and "Atlas Air."

The concert itself was pretty fantastic. Despite the fact that I was about three rows from the back door and surrounded by couples that felt that their love was meant to be shared, I had no problem seeing the stage. Sound wasn't a problem, either. Actually, my head is still ringing.

Now I've been to a variety of concerts, and most of them (thankfully) focused on music-making, not politicizing. So for me, a seizure-inducing light show that contained statistics about WMDs was a new experience. For the most part, it was interesting; it even added a new dimension to the work that I'd previously associated with the treadmill.

But there was one track (complete with corresponding light show) that I just couldn't rationalize: "Better Things."

Like most musicians and superstars that have the luxury of a soap box, Massive Attack crushed the wooden crate with its weight. Their intentions were good. Really. During this song, which, for those of you who decided not to have a listen, discusses freedom, a small screen scrolled through numerous quotes that related to the subject. For the most part, they were well-matched. Take a gander at some of these:

"No one can be at peace unless he has his freedom." Malcolm X

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." Jean-Paul Sartre

"...If you're in favor of freedom of speech, then that means that you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for those you despise." Noam Chomsky

You get the picture.

Here I am, reading and considering each quote, when this one comes scrolling along:

"Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood." Augusto Pinochet

Hold it right there. Pinochet? Really? You mean, the Chilean fascist dictator who was responsible for the torture and/or death of thousands of his own people? According to the omniscient Wikipedia, 2,279 people "disappeared" for political reasons while he was in "office." Approximately 31, 947 were tortured under this regime--but that's not so bad, right? At least they lived.

So here's my question: why would Massive Attack choose to use this quote by Pinochet, a mass murderer and extortionist, when they could have easily substituted it with this nearly identical quote that is attributed to Thomas Jefferson?

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Oh, right. Jefferson is a dead white conservative male. In order to avoid citing someone so clearly evil, we instead turn to the immortal words of a fascist dictator. Ah, political correctness, thy name is irony. 

Oh, by the way-while researching, I found something interesting about the Noam Chomsky quote that I mentioned above. In context, it goes a little something like this:

"If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Stalin and Hitler, for example, were in favor of freedom of speech for views they liked only. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise."

So, if I follow this correctly, Chomsky is suggesting that we practice what our mothers (hopefully) preached: The Golden Rule. If you want to be able to exercise your right to free speech, you must be willing to allow others to do so as well. But--and this is a pretty major caveat--your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. Stalin and Hitler exercised their free speech to the detriment of others, which, to his credit, Chomsky condemns. Good for him.

In a sense, then, it could be theorized that Massive Attack used Pinochet's quote for the sake of upholding the noble Golden Rule that Chomsky cites in the latter half of his quote. Still, I'm going to have to say that I don't think they took the time to read the quote in context, seeing as the song ended just as these words flashed on the screen:

"Death solves all problems. No man, no problem." Joseph Stalin

And what makes me so sure that I'm right? This quote has been misattributed to our fearless leader. According to WikiQuote, the original source is a novel called Children of the Arbat by Anatoly Rybakov.

Something tells me these guys aren't big on research.

A Little Bit of Everything

So I just finished reading over the five types of writers as described by Betsy Lerner.

At first, I thought that I might fall under the heading of the ambivalent writer; after all, I have a lot of trouble settling down to write much of anything. For instance, I've been struggling to come up with a topic for my Understanding Writing as Process class. After three submissions, I've finally settled down on a topic. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if my research takes another turn. But who am I kidding? My head isn't filled with tons of ideas. I don't have this irrepressible urge to create. I live and breathe even when I don't write.

I do, however, drive myself to distraction worrying that I am not creative, and that this somehow makes me a lesser writer. I fret so much that I neglect the assignments that I do have the capacity to complete. I agonize over all of my papers, never sure whether or not I've actually fulfilled the assignment. By the time the deadline rolls around, I just have to hold one hand over my eyes as I turn over my work to the critical eye of a professor.

In all likelihood, I am more of a neurotic writer than anything else. Still, I had my own brush with the "wicked child" syndrome this afternoon. My first attempt at this post discussed an old friend of mine, an ambivalent writer whose flighty approach to literature drove me crazy. While it wasn't a Philip Roth style expose, it revealed too much for my taste. What if this ambivalent dreamer found the post? What on earth would he think? What would my other readers think of me if I spent several paragraphs pointing out all of the faults in a fellow writer?

So in true neurotic fashion, I deleted it. (If any of you read it before I had the chance to erase it, please strike it from your memory. It never happened.)

My point in all of these ramblings, and I do have one, is that none of us are all one kind of writer or another. As Lerner points out, we are all a mixture of the addict, the wicked child, the ambivalent one, the neurotic one, and, of course, the self-promoter. I think that the key is to ensure that each of these characteristics is proportional to all of the rest. The trouble really begins when we start to believe that we are all one thing or another.