It's 8:00 PM Saturday night. Mary is at work, Cole and Miles are on a ski trip with their father and his new girlfriend, and my parents, married 36 years, skipped out the door two hours ago with a bottle of wine and a plate of chocolate covered strawberries, enjoying this fine Valentine weekend like a couple of red-cheeked newlyweds. The house is empty and still.
Today marks two weeks into this project. That's fourteen days of protein shakes, fifty-six tides of sweat pants, and a fortnight of online emotional dictation (in daylight, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee...). If it's true that it takes the human body about thirty days to establish a habit, then by tomorrow's workout I'll have reached the halfway point. Hopefully, the power of routine will ease the pressure of due-diligence, as the difficulty in establishing a new habit is that in the process you must first break the old ones. To become an active go-getter, I must first stop being a lazy shit.
An experience from today to illustrate this point:
I've been in the food service industry since high school: serving, busing, hosting, food expediting, bar backing, bar tending, cocktailing and even managing. Aside from actually preparing the food, I've occupied and excelled at just about every position a restaurant has to offer. So, when when Gary the cater waiter decided to criticize how I stack my busing trays I instinctively shot up my eyebrows and looked down my nose.
Under Gary's school of thought, glasses on a busing tray should be given about an inch of wiggle room on all sides. Gary believes that if glasses touch, they will knock each other over and, as such, should be kept at a safe distance. In this way, should one glass fall on the journey from table to dishwasher, the other's would be left unharmed. The notion that a falling glass might knock down other glasses like a tray full of loud, sharp, crashing dominoes was not something Gary cared to think about.
I feel Gary's tray-stacking philosophy may subliminally reflect the way he interacts with people.
The truth is, in tray-stacking (as in life) wiggle room lets things wobble and wobbling things tend to topple. A la bundles of sticks, herds of herbivores, and the U.S. of fuckin' A., when things stand united they are much more difficult to knock down. Unfortunately, Gary's belief system was also structured sans wiggle room.
Difference became disagreement, disagreement became dispute, dispute blew up into a full fledged scene. It wasn't long before my seniority status, experience level and moral compass were all called into question. After about twenty minutes of spitting and spatting, Gary's failing arguments (as shaky and as unstable as his tray) finally culminated with a resounding, "This is the way we do things here, man." I couldn't help but be baffled. There I was with facts and physics; logical evidence that proved Gary was practicing a poor habit and yet he refused to yield. Gary got angry. Gary got nasty. Gary abandoned all professionalism, called me a 'bitch' and a 'bastard' within the span of a sentence and made things really awkward. In five more minutes, I estimate Gary would've been ready to throw down.
I was confused. I hadn't yelled. I hadn't call anybody names. Was Gary really taking dirty dishes this personally? Did Gary come from a long line of tray carriers and dishwasher marriers whose proud traditions were being affronted by my new-fangled, 21st-century ideas? Possible, but not probable, though the principle is likely the same. This wasn't about trays; this was about much more than trays. This was about pride and Gary was seething with it.
Gary has been busing trays a in his own particular way since as long a he can remember and his way has served him as faithfully as a 1950's, white-picket housewife (Gary had never once dropped a tray). To even consider changing now would be like walking out on his sweet, docile, sexually-repressed marriage for that younger, free-spirited, scantily-clad divorcee who just moved in up the street. It seems Gary is more loyal than that and I guess I respect him for it.
As Gary so stubbornly demonstrated, it sucks to admit when you're wrong. It sucks even harder to admit that you've been wrong over and over again for an extended period of time, perfectly committed to something perfectly inferior. There's some level of shame, disappointment, and regret that comes with change and, I suppose, this is why people are so averse to it. As is the case with a misguided habit, it often seems better to suffer silently with the tried and true than dare to throw caution to the wind and brave the unknown. Or maybe the human animal is just a jackass willing to stubbornly deny reason until disaster forces their hand. Try as I might to illustrate a bold new way to stack his tray, Gary's gonna have to break a few glasses before he finds some wiggle room of his own. In the meantime, nobody likes being told the ideas they subsist on are weak.
...Damn this house is quiet.
Day 14. I feel good.
Thanks for reading.
See you tomorrow.
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