The other day I was farting around on the internet I’m not exactly sure what site I was on when  a group of news articles popped up that weren’t  articles that were actually part of the particular site I was on at the time.  The article that caught my attention was titled “13 movies where they actually did it” and the article had a picture of Mila Kunis.  My first thought was please tell me Friends with Benefits was one of the 13 and that she did it with JT (Justin Timberlake, I call him JT). The second thing that popped in to my mind was, “who wouldn’t want to know what 13 movies they actually did it in?”  Click, followed immediately by an alarm that made me think I was trying to click on something way worse than an article detailing the 13 movies where they actually did it.  Apple security apparently did not approve of the site I was trying to get on and provided a phone number I needed to call immediately if I ever wanted my computer to be functional again.  Shit!  I sure am glad the kids and Shirley aren’t here.

Calling the phone number provided seemed like way too much work so after clicking on the icon to try and close it a half a dozen or so times, I turned the computer off.  A short time later I turned the computer back on but it wanted the log in password, which was a password only known by Shirley and only known by Shirley for a short time.  She changes passwords as frequently as most people change their underwear because after changing them she immediately forgets what she changed them to.  So, texting her and asking her for the password would be entirely fruitless and quite frustrating.  I guess I was going to have to wait to find out what 13 movies they did it in as well as continuing to search for the perfect watch and order “The Right Stuff” on amazon prime (this requires another password that typically is changed on a bi-weekly basis, as well as our Apple ID, I really need to break free from my wife when it comes to this stuff but I am more afraid of technology than I am of going over the Mackinac Bridge and prefer that she have the majority of the interactions with things such as Pandora, Amazon, and Apple).

Obviously, it was a busy Saturday for me.  Ultimately I ended up going for a run after I couldn’t get on the internet, but prior to that I had posted a blog and cleaned out the refrigerator. Cleaning out the refrigerator is akin to other household chores such as changing the furnace filter, organizing your closet, or removing all the clothes from your kids drawer that haven’t fit them in two years.  The tasks themselves really aren’t that difficult but for some reason they are mentally overwhelming to the point that it takes months to get up the actual where with all to accomplish them, but once you actually get around to completing them you derive a tremendous sense of accomplishment, I was glowing after I had cleaned out the fridge.  That being said, I probably waited a year too long to clean out the fridge, I found moldy pepperoni between the bottom of one of the drawers and the bottom of the fridge, I didn’t even know Meat could get moldy, especially pepperoni, I don’t even think pepperoni has an expiration date.  But as much fun as I was having browsing the internet and cleaning out the fridge, my Saturday excitement was going to culminate later that evening.  Hell or High Water was playing at Woodland Celebration Cinema and its only show time was 9:15.  For those of you who don’t pay attention to movies  Hell or Highwater is nominated for an Academy Award for best picture.  My brother saw it illegally on line and told me it was definitely worth checking out.  Pretty sure if I tried to see a movie illegally on line my computer would not only make an annoyingly loud alarm sound, it would probably explode as well.

What I don’t get is that there are people out there who are proud of the fact that they haven’t been to the movies in years (Doug Dougerson).  What are you a communist?  While I realize they have movies in other countries, they pretty much suck, (mainly because they aren’t in English and you have to read while you watch, who the hell wants to read a movie?) movies are about as American as baseball and Apple Pie so if you don’t like movies, and this could easily happen, you may end up getting kicked out of the country for being un-American. “yeah, I haven’t been to a movie since Top Gun was in the theaters”.  Might want to keep that to yourself, pretty sure after Mexicans people who don’t like movies are next on Trump’s agenda.

While I understand the draw of getting a movie for free online that is actually current, there are things you ultimately forego by not actually seeing a movie in the theatre.  First of all, previews.  If I am going to a movie and realize I am going to miss previews I cancel my trip, ok I don’t go to that extreme, but it does throw off my movie going equilibrium if I miss part of a trailer.  Furthermore,  when you either watch a movie illegally or rent a movie legitimately there are either no trailers or the trailers are for movies that have been out for at least a year.  My favorite thing to do when it comes to trailers is to do a review of the trailer with the person I am with and let them know if I plan on see the movie that is being previewed.  Can’t do that at home watching on line.   You know what else you can’t do at home, you can’t smuggle your own snacks in, granted you can eat whatever you want at home, but that isn’t nearly as satisfying as bringing in your own king size Milky Way and Diet Coke that you would have paid $12 for at the concession stand.  You know what else you don’t get when you watch a movie at home, theater popcorn, that’s right no one can replicate theater popcorn, even if they are rich enough to have one of those popcorn machines, the popcorn machines replicate bar popcorn which is a notch below theatre popcorn.

The sad thing is, while a lot of the movies that are nominated for the academy awards are not main stream, typically the best picture movies are well know, or at least a few of them are.  Directly after the nominees were announced, I had only seen one movie that had been nominated, Arrival, and it was awful.  I  wasn’t familiar with any of the other nominees and was only turned on to Hell of High Water by my movie pirating brother.  With the latest trend in movies and the Academy Awards I think Trump has it all wrong,  instead of wasting his time destroying the Mexican economy and making sure that human suffering is at an all time high by persecuting immigrants, he needs to get Hollywood to make movies that people actually like and are willing to go see and he also needs to make sure that entertaining movies are nominated, not movies people are suppose to think are good but actually suck, like Arrival.

Not only is Hollywood making either movies people don’t give a shit about or movies based on comic books, I also heard they are re-doing Ocean’s Eleven with an all female cast, wasn’t the remake of Ghost Busters bad enough?  What else do they have in store for us?  Platoon starring Meryl Streep, Kate Blanchett and Julia Roberts?   Come on Hollywood give the movie goer what they want and recognize movies that are good because they are entertaining not because some sheltered film critic thinks its artful.  Pretty sure none of the 13 movies where people actually did it won an Academy Award.  What a travesty!

“Yeah, so we just found out they are changing the entire course around, they are moving the front to the back and the back to the front, they are going to keep hole 9 as hole 9 but everything else is getting changed around.”

“Sounds like you have a real problem on your hands.”

“You’re telling me, the way the course use to be you would end at hole 9 and then go right by the clubhouse on your way to ten, now ten is going to be in the opposite direction of where you need to go to get drinks and food, the set up is a major inconvenience and they just up and did without getting all of the members input on it.  I was actually texting with three other members from the club, my partner from last year, Jimmy O, and another guy and none of us can believe it.”

“You know what you have on your hands, and this is quite serious, maybe you should be sitting down for this, it sounds like you, Jimmy O and the rest of the members of your country club have some real world white people problems, that’s right white people problems.  Maybe you want to get in touch with the Trump administration and see if he can do one of those executive orders requiring them to return the course to its original set up.”

Basically tha is a word for word replay of a conversation that I had with one of my law partners about his latest in a series of white people problems.  I probably shouldn’t give him too hard of a time since his membership at a country club allows me to play at his country club a couple times a year.  That being said, I did text him after our conversation and ask him how many black members they have and his response was “0”.  He claimed they had some black members a few years ago but at the present time their club is about as diverse Donald Trumps cabinet.  (I’m just guessing that it is primarily comprised of rich white guys, although there is at least one rich white women heading up the Department of Education, way to go Donald!)

Is it unusual that white people hang out with other white people?  Do African Americans want to join this predominantly white country club?  The reality is, as much as we are aiming for a diversified nation, we like hanging out with people who are like us because people like us allow us to remain in our comfort zone and are much easier to socialize with due to commonality.  For example, when Shirley and I had our first kid we still had a few couple friends who didn’t have kids.  We went out for dinner with one such couple shortly after Tod was born.  Haven’t heard back from them since.  Listen, I don’t like to hear about other people’s kids and I have kids of my own, there is no way people who don’t have kids want to hear about other people’s kids.  Furthermore, while I can stay off the topic of my kids, and even if I do discuss my kids, my stories are quite entertaining and humorous when it comes to discussing my kids so I could keep kidless people entertained. The same can not be said for most parents.  This makes it nearly impossible for couples with kids and kidless couples to integrate.

While I would like to think that in the bigger cities, and this seems to be how its portrayed in the movies and on television, there are plenty of opportunities for people with different backgrounds and racial make ups to become friends, the same doesn’t seem to be the case in West Michigan.  I play basketball at a number of different places in the area and have made acquaintances with a number of black guys who play hoops.  However, this has not grown into a situation where I can call any of them close friends.  Why is this?  It’s not that I don’t like any of them, they are all really nice and great guys, I think the main thing is that when I have hung out with some of them off the court, it is readily apparent that they are one thing I’m not, cool.  I have mentioned this before, but I think it speaks partially to the hurdle that remains in play when it comes to white black relationships.  Black guys are just cooler than white guys and when you are that much cooler or less cooler than someone it’s difficult to establish a meaningful relationship due to the overall inequity in coolness.  In a related note, there was one guy who use to play at one of my basketball locals, and he was by far the best player there, when we would have conversations I found it difficult to understand him for a couple of reasons, first of all I am hard of hearing and secondly he had a really low voice.  Most often if I didn’t catch what he said I would just laugh in response to his statement.  He could have told me his mother died or he was diagnosed with cancer and my response would have been to laugh if I didn’t understand him.

So my theory that black people are cool and white people aren’t can be easily validated.  Biggy Smalls = Cool

Ice Cube= Cool (at least until he started doing those crappy disney movies, those may have invalidated his coolness a bit)

Prince= Probably the coolest

Michael Jordan=Cool

Denzel Washington= Cool

Shaq= Cool

(I am not mentioning women here because it’s a well known fact women aren’t cool similarly to how they aren’t all that particularly funny)

So, thats just a smattering of the coolest black men out there.  Larry Bird was probably one of the best white basketball players of all time and he’s the antithesis of cool similarly Jon Stockton who spent his entire career playing point guard in the whitest place on earth, Salt Lake City,  is the center of the sun in his coolness factor.  Are there any white performers who are cool?  Yes, Justin Timberlake and Adam Levine, that’s the entire list right there.   Tom Brady, possibly the best quarter back of all time, handsome, married to a super model, but not cool, he can’t be cool he is a spokes person for UGGS (as much as I love UGGS, there’s nothing cool about them).  Likewise, Joe Montana, another phenomenal quarterback is a spokesperson for Skechers, you would never catch a black athlete touting the how the skechers shape up is able to accomplish the difficult task of keeping your ass toned.

Lastly, if you still aren’t convinced just compare how white guys dance to how black guys dance.

Realistically, while most of this is said in jest, there is a much higher likelihood that the coolness barrier will be broken down as our society continues to place an emphasis on eliminating color as a factor when it comes to who we choose to include in our social circles.  My kids attend a school where they offer financial assistance to prospective students and their school is located in an area where they can pull in a diversified student body.  When I was a kid all my classmates were white like me which had an impact on how I looked at the world.  The diversified student body has already had an impact on my kids, my oldest was watching Mary Poppins with Shirley and he asked “why aren’t there any brown people in this movie?”  His world view is one in which everyone is part of it, I never noticed the inequity in the makeup of the cast of Mary Poppins or any of the other children’s movies I viewed growing up white in a white suburb in one of the whitest parts of the United States.

 

 

 

“Living for Jesus a life that is true, striving to please him in all that I do..”   Hold on, don’t try to re-enter my URL, you are at the correct blog site, at least I think.  Imagine singing that song while holding hands in a circle with either your fellow middle school male classmates or adult males ranging from their mid twenties to mid fifties.  That right there was my personal hell when I was growing up.  Every Monday from September through May I was forced to attend cadets, basically Boy Scouts for the Dutch without the need to defend a ban on gay leaders because homosexuality was a sin.  As a cadet you engaged in such fun activities as soap carving, knot tying (I still suck at tying knots, which really shouldn’t be that difficult) and leather working, just to name a few.  Every session of cadets was concluded by the entire cadet core gathering in a circle and holding hands while singing “Living for Jesus” all being done in a darkened room.  If you woke me up in the middle of the night and told me to sing “Living for Jesus” even 25 plus years after having sung it, it would be a flawless rendition but for my terrible singing voice (when I sing, my kids tell me to stop).

While Cadets wasn’t always terrible, it was at least 99% of the time.  There was the occasional gym night where we were able to try to hit our most hated counselors in the head playing dodge ball.  As well as trips to see the Harlem globetrotters and to the Hudsonville high school swimming pool, they had a fricken high dive!   However, the only other thing that made it even palatable was the fact that my counselor could do a spot on impersonation of Daffy Duck.  If you can do Daffy Duck there’s no way you can’t make friends and influence people, if I could do Daffy Duck the sky would be the limit.  How hilarious would “I just crapped my pants” be spoken by Daffy Duck?

Why did my parents make me attend Cadets?  My best friend growing up (who was the youngest of five and his parents were really old, well probably chronologically similar to my age with my kids, but they seemed really old back then) never had to go to cadets and he had the misfortune of attending a Christian Reformed Church.  Were they punishing me?  Did they think that someday I would actually need to tie a bowline knot or make my own belt?  Not likely, I’m pretty sure they made me attend cadets because they had to do similarly awful stuff as they had also grown up in the Christian Reformed church.  I realize I make it sound unbearable, and in all reality there are worse religious fates one could suffer, for instance growing up male in the Catholic Church and having a 9 in 10 chance of being molested, but to this day the only thing that I actually have to show for the years of catechism and cadets is my ability to still sing Living for Jesus and that I memorized the first question and answer to the Heidelberg Catechism.  “What is your only Comfort in Life and Death?”  “That I am not my own but belong to my faithful savior Jesus Christ.”  There’s a little more to the actual answer but that’s the Reader’s Digest version.

This beg’s the question, do I need to transfer to a Christian Reformed church so that my kids will be forced to endure the same terrible experiences I had to as a child?  Granted, there are other terrible things that I could inflict on them apart from the Christian Reformed Church, but the way our current society is trending they are unlikely to be options when my kids get a bit older.  First of all, my parents didn’t believe in anything but the bare minimum.  I was provided with socks, underwear, blue jeans, and a shirt on my back.  If I wanted anything beyond that I had to earn it.  My mom acquired a button up turtle neck sweater that she made me wear, she either pulled it out of a lost and found where someone was trying to permanently lose it or purchased it at a very deep discount.  Needless to say, this thing was the opposite of fashionable, I would like to think that it was so hideous it distracted people from my terrible acne and braces, but what it actually did was complete the self esteem crushing trifecta.   Bad skin, bad teeth, and bad fashion.  So, I decided I had better get a JOB if I wanted to overcome my mom’s fashion ineptitude.  In sixth grade I had a paper route, seventh through ninth grade I worked on a celery farm (aka working in the muck) and after that I painted apartments and houses.

Acquiring a job at that age taught me how truly shitty manual labor is but it also instilled a work ethic and built character.   First of all, I can’t envision my two kids even trying to get a job at the age I was able to garner employment and secondly I don’t think anyone is going to want to hire that generation of teenagers.  Millennials are terrible human beings, how bad is the next generation going to be?  Furthermore, there really aren’t that many jobs available to teenagers, as much as I would like to force my kids into working in the muck for at least a week if not an entire summer, most muck farms no longer hire kids, no they have not automated farms yet, but farmers have discovered that migrant workers do a better job and are much more reliable than teenagers.  The thought of my oldest venturing out on his own into the workplace in his teenage years is unimaginable, especially in light of the fact that if he can, he has people do everything for him, including wiping his butt at the ripe age of 6. (He won’t poop at school because he wouldn’t have anyone to wipe for him). I have attempted to implement tough love and tell him repeatedly “I’m not wiping your butt!  You’re on your own!”  However, he is persistent and he just goes into a downward dog pose with his bare ass pointing to the heavens, and repeatedly says “Wipe my butt!  Wipe my butt!”  Eventually I relent, I suppose I could try to wait him out, but there’s only so much I can take.

Two other things stick out to me that were traumatic and impacted me as a person.  First of all, when I was in fifth grade, I signed up for rec league basketball.  This was a bit dicey because it meant that I would be exposed to the public school kids.  I didn’t ride the bus and all my friends were from the christian school, therefore the public school kids were an unknown quantity, did they bite?  Did they use anything but foul language to communicate?  Is it possible that they masturbated even more than I did?  I was about to find out, not about the masturbating thing, no kid in their right mind would admit to that, if only I had known about the 90/10 rule (90 percent of adolescent boys masturbate and the other 10 percent lie about it).   Eventually I stumbled upon an article from James Dobson who was a Christian author, he said jerking off, well he didn’t use that term, but he said it was a okay.  Having known I wasn’t the only one partaking in this act that I thought was an abomination would have saved me countless hours of self loathing,  however that self loathing was never enough to get me to go cold turkey.  In all honesty, it’s the one reason I’m not particularly thrilled about having boys, but weighing that against tampons makes me realize the never ending “dirty” sweat socks are totally worth it.

Back to rec league basketball.  I have noted previously my mom had no fashion sense, back in fifth grade I was relegated to wearing dress sock regardless of what activity I was engaging in.  Looking back I think it’s because it’s such a bitch keeping whites white.  Regardless, I was thrust into the great unknown of public school kids playing basketball in Sunday socks.  WTF Ardis? (that’s my mom’s name, I can use it because there’s no way she knows how to access my blog “I thought I was on WIFI, I don’t know how I used 10 gigs of data this month?”).   She’s on my phone plan and eating through data like a fat kid eats through a piece of cake which is a topic for another blog though.  I am a dick and I think my kids are giant pansies, but I don’t think I can even make them wear Sunday socks when they play sports.  Especially my oldest, he’s got enough obstacles to deal with, I saw that they were doing jump roping in his gym class when I dropped him off 15 minutes late the other day, I asked him that night how it went and if he could do it and he said yes.  He’s full of shit, I’m certain he tripped over the jump rope at least 37 times if he even tried to do it in the first place.  However, there must be some happy medium not quite as extreme as exposing them to ridicule from a bunch of devil worshipers and pagans, something that will make them uncomfortable as well as chip at their self esteem and make them doubt themselves.  Seriously, I don’t want kids with more self esteem and confidence than I had growing up.

My dad also probably has no way of figuring out how to get to my blog even though I provided him with the link, but he did do a number on me growing up.  First of all, I did mention I had a bad case of acne growing up.   He would refer to me as pizza face or claim that if someone squeezed my head it would explode.  On top of that I had the metabolism of a meth addict so no matter what I ate I remained rail thin.  His go to nickname when not insulting me for the my bad skin, which I inherited from him, was bean pole.  The result of all of this torment at the hands of my dad is probably the opposite of what any psychologist would expect, or human being for that matter, You can’t hurt my feelings.  Honestly, it takes a lot to make me feel bad, you can hurl whatever insults you want at me and I am unaffected.  I particularly like it when people refer to my baldness as a way to insult me, I’ve been bald for quite sometime and I had nothing to do with it.  Your’e a fat ass douche bag you can change both of those things.  (not you the reader, typically the person who insults me has a number of qualities that are all brought on by their poor choices in life). I have thrown out minor insults at my kids and playfully made fun of them, however, based upon Shirley’s reaction to this, there’s no way I can come even close to the level of ridiculing my kids that my dad did with me, and to a lesser extent my siblings.  Fortunately for my kids, Shirley can’t be around all the time so I can get some deflating jabs in at them every once in a while, however, they have wizened  up to the point that they now report back to mom when I commit any significant transgressions.  While I am thankful in part to my dad for making me emotionally unbreakable, being supportive  and self affirming, while feeling entirely unnatural growing up in a Dutch household, is much more likely to bare fruit than my dad’s approach.

 

 

 

“This is Gabriel thank you for calling Dish Network, how can I help you?”

“Gabriel?  As in the angel Gabriel?  I’m going to need some divine intervention to lower my Dish Network bill, what can I do to get this thing down to double digits?”

“Well sir, first of all I need to tell you that this call may be recorded for quality assurance..

“Hold on there, you guys record every call?  What do you do with all the recordings?  There must be tens of thousands everyday, nobody goes back and actually listens to these calls again do they?”

“Ok, I admit we just say that, we stopped recording these calls ten years ago, but it sounds so good when we say it and it really makes the caller think that if we screw up on our end there is an avenue for them to correct our mistake.”

“Well Gabriel your secret is safe with me as long as we can get my bill down to the GNP of Kenya, can we do that?”

“Even though I am no longer being recorded, I’m still going to be honest with you and say no, I see you have HBO, how about this?  Right now you are paying $20 a month for HBO, I can lower that to $9 a month for the next six months.”

“What happens after six months?”

“It will go up to $22 per month but in six months you won’t even remember that you had HBO for $9 a month and you never look at your bill, it’s auto pay right, so you won’t even know about the increase.”

“You’re probably right, but I really can’t pass on HBO for $9 a month, I’m practically stealing from you guys at that rate, granted I haven’t watched HBO since the season finale of Game of Thrones in June, but you never know when I will be in the mood for Short Circuit 2.  Will this six months get me through all of the next season of Game of Thrones?  I heard they were having some delays with filming.”

“You will be lucky if you are able to get the first three episodes, but there is Girls, that is one of our highest rated shows, that right there is worth $9 a month.”

“Do I sound like a fat chick who owns 3 cats?  Exactly, I wouldn’t watch that show even if it had Scarlett Johansen do a cameo completely naked.  Seriously, just because some critics liked that worthless garbage with zero likable characters it became the new hip show.  Mindless sheep I tell you.  Regardless of the content, I really can’t get rid of HBO until my kids get in to their teens.  I’ll pull the plug on it right as they are hitting puberty so they won’t have the luxury of watching movies that have nude scenes in them, that use to be my go to as a teen if I wanted to see some nudity.  If Game of Thrones would have been around when I was a teenager my penis would have taken even more of a beating than Theon Greyjoy.”

“Are you planning on having internet when your kids reach their teenage years.”

“Yes, more than likely”

“They won’t even realize HBO is a channel.  I see you have the total sports package, I can cut that in half for 6 months.”

“Cut it in half, that sounds like an incredible deal that you are giving me, this is where I should ask how much the sports package is, but I’m not going to do that, for all I know it could be $50 a month and I am now saving $25 off my bill, granted it could also be $5, but i”m just going to roll with it.  Book it, lets keep that sports package at a 50% discount.  By the way, I should warn you I do this for a living, I am an attorney and by the end of this conversation you guys will probably be paying me for the privilege of providing me with satellite television service.  Let’s keep the savings going, what else can I do?  I see there are different channel packages here, I’m guessing I am currently signed up for america’s top 200, am I right there?”

“You got it, you are part of the top 200 that gives you access to 300 channels.  If you want to change packages you can create additional savings.”

“I fell like top 200 is a bit of a misnomer, there’s maybe 9 channels that I watch that I couldn’t get with an HD receiver, can’t we just do some type of a la carte system where I get to pick the channels at 5 bucks a channel, that would put me at $45 a month.  I use to mindlessly flip through channels when I had Comcast but they only had about a hundred channels, I stay between channels 138 and 155 now, TNT through the redone, that’s my safe area, anytime I get out of that range I have no idea what’s in store for me. ”

“If you mention the word a la carte again I will be forced to disconnect this call, can you imagine if you could go a la carte for you channel lineup?  Not even fat chicks with multiple cats would select Oprah’s network, the only thing that is keeping that going is the fact that Oprah has more money than god.  The game show network, I can’t even believe they are able to pull in advertisers, game shows are hard enough to watch when they are new episodes, how do you sell Hollywood squares with celebrities who have been dead for a decade?”

“I’m not sure what I was thinking, you never know when I am going to get a hankering for HGTV again.  While I use to watch their shows religiously, I grew tired of the same plot line on every improvement show, budget, encountering some unforeseen catastrophe, adjusting the budget, softening the blow of adjusting the budget, and successfully pulling off the remodel with the lowered budget.  May as well keep ESPN classic who doesn’t want to watch a sporting event where they already know the outcome, BBC in case I have a real bad case of insomnia, and definitely don’t take away TBS, I didn’t know they made enough Big Bang Theories to loop for 24 hours but if I ever have a closed head injury that leaves me semi comatose that’s the station for me.”

“So, what will it be?  America’s top 120 which gives you 200 channels or do you really want to bring in the savings with America’s top 50 giving you 100 channels?  Hold on if you go with the top 50 we would have to eliminate your sports package,but that would save you additional money.”

“When you indicate the number of channels you receive are you counting the music channels, there are like at least 50 of those, those don’t count do they?’

“Do they have numbers?”

“Is 952-00 a number?”

“They count.”

“Well, while I feel like the sound financial decision would be the Top 50, that channel lineup is probably almost as bad as television prior to cable being invented.  On top of that I can’t imagine life without the Redzone, that last half hour of the first set of games is the most exciting half hour of my week, no commercials either, it’s a life altering experience when the Redzone makes its way into your life.”

“So, do I pencil you in for America’s top 200?  That seems like the best fit for you.”

“What are my total savings?”

“We knocked it down from $140 a month to $120.50”

“Book it!  Although, I have one more question, is there a fee to block every bit of Amy Shumer related content from my cable package?”

Over the Christmas holiday we traveled to Arizona to hang out with Shirley’s sister and her sister’s family.  We flew out New Year’s eve day quite early in the morning and had to depart for the airport by 6am to give us the three hour cushion Shirley requires when traveling.  When we arrived at Phoenix Airport they had a system where you can check your luggage at the curb, this was quite a relief since we had 7 items of luggage that needed to be checked and I didn’t want to haul everything up to the ticket counter.  We were flying Southwest and a friendly looking gentlemen took our luggage and said “i’ll take your luggage for you.”  He was wearing a shirt with a southwest badge on it, making me think he worked for Southwest Airlines, however he said “i’ll take your bags for you” a second time, making me realize this guy required a tip.  Typically you don’t tip the people taking your bags at the airline counter so why would i tip this guy?  (why would I tip anyone for that matter, they are getting paid aren’t they?)  This is the dilemma I seem to run into every time i fly out at the end of a vacation.  By the end of a vacation I have typically spent all of my cash, on top of that Shirley never carries cash, so either I stiff someone who feels they deserve a tip, or I try to avoid utilizing any type of service that requires a tip.

In most scenarios I don’t feel bad about not tipping, but this guy was hauling seven items of luggage, including my golf clubs, and it was entirely possible that he would send all of our luggage to Billings Montana if he didn’t receive the requisite tip.  So, I hit the ATM and came back with a twenty, he indicated that he had change if I wanted it, to which I should have replied sure, bring me back $18, but I let him keep the entire amount figuring it was the last day of the year and this may make up for any tipping transgressions I had in 2016.(I am pretty sure this whole scenario would be a lot less confusing if the guy wasn’t wearing Southwest gear, and instead had on a uniform that indicated he was an independent contractor in charge of getting baggage from the curb to the TSA)

While out in Arizona I had the opportunity to play golf.  This exposed me to another tipping scenario, that while not at all confusing, is a complete pain in the ass as far as I am concerned.  Not all golf courses have this, and there should be some type of federal mandate outlawing this practice, but in certain settings a course will have person typically in their teens waiting for you to get done with your round to wash your clubs.  Once again you have to plan ahead for this event so that you have cash, and that it is the appropriate amount, and when I say appropriate amount, I mean not too much.  These kids typically give your clubs a half ass washing as they eagerly await you to fish some cash out of your pocket to hand over to them so they can go pounce on the next unsuspecting victim.  While a lot of people who golf like to arrive early to hit the range and drop a few putts, in my mind, arriving early to determine the club washing set up is far more important than bombing a few drives to get warmed up.

There’s a few ways you can deal with the golf courses that offer club “washing”.  First of all, you can suck it up and begrudgingly tip the kid who has given your clubs the once over with his already besmirched towel.  This is a method I rarely implement, but had no choice but to utilize when my brother in law dropped me right in froth of the club cleaning kid when I was golfing with him in Phoenix.  I gave him two bucks and headed for the parking lot, shoulders slumped, knowing that two dollars I forked over could have purchased my drink at Chipotle on the way home.  My brother in law thought two bucks was quite meager, but if you do the math, two bucks for 30 seconds of work comes out to $240 an hour,  a lot of strippers would be happy with that kind of hourly wage rate.

My typical approach when I see that there is a club washer in my path to the parking lot is to stop at the 18th green and unload everything in my possession into my bag. I then make sure I park the cart as far as possible away from the club washer, at no time do I make eye contact with the club washer, in fact it is essential to pretend like you don’t even realize they are there, once the cart is close to stopping I hop out, grab my clubs and make a mad dash for the parking lot.   The other approach to avoid tipping is to tell the club cleaner something like “my clubs got so dirty today there’s no way you can get them clean” and then take your bag off the cart and walk to the parking lot.  This is typically quite an awkward encounter and should only be implemented if you were unable to plan ahead and make a mad dash for the parking lot.

While I make it seem like I am super cheap and stingy when it comes to tipping, that is not the case in social settings where tipping is required by society.  I have no problem tipping a server in restaurant because they are providing a service I want done and I want down well.  However, there are scenarios where I feel tipping is superfluous and should be done away with.  When I go to pick up take out from a restaurant the receipt always has a tip line, why should I give a tip to someone who walks from the register to the kitchen to grab my food?  Is this a scenario where a tip should be handed out?  The last scenario that seems somewhat ludicrous to me regarding tipping is at Starbucks, when I am purchasing a $4 coffee am I suppose to leave a dollar tip?  Starbucks is ridiculously overpriced to begin with and by throwing another $1 away I feel like my caffeine addiction is almost as expensive as if I had a drug problem.  However, there are exceptions to the no tip policy at Starbucks, if the barrista who reminds me of Natalie Portman is preparing my coffee I am obligated to leave a tip, partially because I have a thing for Natalie Portman, and partially because it’s hazard pay for her having to deal with my overall creepiness.  (Oh, she knew my order ahead of time, she must dig me, or maybe it has something to do with the fact that the 300 previous times she made my coffee I ordered the exact same thing)