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.