week 15:equal

(click image to enlarge)

i know that this weeks theme has been about the current decision of the supreme court and what that means for people to be treated as equals in a way that ought to have been settled around two hundred years ago.

today america is celebrating it's independance day. a country that believes that there are certain inalienable rights that not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of any particular culture or government, and therefore universal and inalienable. that everyone has the right to life, liberty and property.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

i don't really understand how two people who love each other and want to have the same rights and protections as man and man or wife and wife or however you want to put  it is more damaging to the institution than straight people getting divorced.

i used to joke that legalizing gay marriage was essentially legalizing gay divorce. that the additional revenue could only help the state, the simpsons kinda touched on this years ago when homer became a minister and charged to wed same sex couples. it was a pretty mercenary view, or pragmatic maybe. as far as i'm concerned the only people who should decide if gays' should get married are the individuals who wish to do so. i don't make that joke anymore.

this week i,m posting that i started last year and didn't get around to finishing. it was a conversation i was a part of back in college when i was working at a restaurant. after work we (the staff) would go to the bar a few doors down, drink a bunch of whatever was on special and sit outside on a deck patio in the back yard and smoked as we talked about whatever. there was this one girl that we worked with, its funny i cant remember name now. anyway she was one of "those"people that complained about everything. she was the greeter, she basically stood there, answered the phone and told people where to sit. she would complain if she was asked to do anything other than that. she wouldn't go get boxes from the back or help out the busser and waitresses/ers when it was busy, we called her üseless"behind her back. somewhere she had gotten it into her head that because she was pretty (and she was) and that the closest she ever came to the food was on her lunch break, that she was somehow better than the rest of us, the other greeters did not share this view. to this day i do not know how she managed to not get fired for all of that, there were rumors and a ton of speculation though.

well one night we were pretty drunk, it had been one of those rare heat waves in the city and the air conditioning wasn't working well, it was also super busy, power was down somewhere and the other people didn't want to cook, it was too hot. we were finally free, and were making the "most"of our after-hours time. 

so the conversation was going pretty good, we were laughing, drunk, and someone was passing around a pipe. it was a real nice night. 

and then she walked out back and sat next to us without being invited.

now it wasn't that we didn't not invite her, everyone there knew that every went there after close, we had tried early on to let her be a part of the group but she made it difficult to integrate into the group, making comments that were backward complements and saying things we were talking about we're dumb. by this point everyone had a resentment against her about her conduct at work.

i don't know why, or where all of this came from that night but we were talking about how the tips sucked that night and rent was coming up for some of us, when she jumped in with both feet and came out swinging with these little factoids about gender inequality...

now i know that there is a disparity between wages when it comes to higher paying professions, and that is wrong, and a little embarrassing when you think about what that says about our society, but here she was, fellow minimum-wage-slave like the rest of us (actually we found out later that she was paid more, meh) telling us how unfair that was. 

we had had it, we tore into her asking her things like what the hell did she even do there, that a monkey would be an improvement if only because monkeys aren't able to talk , when was the last time you had to do anything but write down names and point at tables. it was pretty rough, but remember this was after several months of dealing with her crap.

now at this point i'd like to be able to tell you that she broke down and revealed some other underlying issues, something like she was in an abusive relationship, or addicted to something or anorexic, saw her parents murdered in the street for some pearls after a show...

...nope.

she paused and told us to go fuck ourselves and left.

later that night we discovered that she had actually ordered a few drinks and had put it on the group tab. 

i eventually got a different job, she was still there when i left, acting the same and never speaking about that night, like it never happened. i know it wasn't the nicest thing in the world to have done to someone but i do feel to this day that she deserved what she got when she asked for it.