Christmas Eve

It's a quiet Sunday night at the grand old hotel. Most of the guests have already arrived and gone to bed. One arrival remains. I finished my paperwork in the first hour I was here, so I'm at the front door waiting on the last arrival and reading a book about John Steinbeck. As often happens, reading about writers makes me want to write.
Much of the quiet is due to the absence of some of the usual people. Keven, the overnight houseman, has Sundays off. Karen, from Loss Prevention (our pretentious designation for our security department) has decided that she doesn't want to work on Sundays either. I haven't asked her yet how she's managing to maintain her 30 hour per week work requirement to keep her health insurance. Her husband, and my best friend, Ted, called in sick earlier tonight, and his absence makes things particularly quiet. So it's just me, and Jay, and Mike: valet, front desk, and LP.
The kids from Paycom are here this week. They are a group of uncommonly attractive twenty-somethings here for some kind of training. We get a different set of kids each time they stay with us, which is about every three weeks or so. One of our bar waiters commented recently that Paycom must have some pretty shallow hiring standards to have every person in every group to be so attractive. The valet staff doesn't care for them. They don't tip, and often they exhibit a rather privileged attitude, which probably is encouraged by the fact that I bring all their cars around early in the morning. I'm sure they think that I do that because there are so many of them and they all come down at once. Some of them might think it's because they're special. The actual reason is because we don't have universal health care in this country.
To elucidate, all of our morning guys have their kids on their health insurance, which means that they don't get a substantial paycheck. All of their spendable income is from their tips. If the guest doesn't tip, they're basically working for free. I don't have that problem, so I bring around the Paycom cars before the morning guys get here. All the morning guys have to do is hand them their keys.

Mike just walked by and asked if there were any homeless people. I haven't seen any. In fact, I haven't seen homeless Joel in a week. Normally he's camped in the third floor of the heated entrance to the parking garage next door. He frequently stops by to buy candy bars and get coffee . Nobody has seen him since last Monday morning. I'm kind of worried about him.

I'm missing Ted tonight too. I have a book to give him, and I wanted to tell him about how I totally trolled one of my FOXhead friends on Facebook. I was able to do it solely because this guy never ever looks anything up, never does any kind of research or fact-checking. He's perfectly happy in an ignorance that suits his prejudices. He posted a meme that said "Kill one terrorist and the world is outraged. Iran shoots down a commercial airliner and kills 179 civilians, crickets!!!!!" I replied, "Haven't heard much about flight 655 either. 290 people killed on that one." He liked that. Now, is he going to do any research and find out that flight 655 was the Iranian airliner that the Americans accidentally shot down in 1988? Not a chance.

Okay, I'm done gloating.

My Dad and I went to the airport to pick up my brother. Tomorrow is Christmas, because that's the way the Savage family does things. We haven't seen each other in years, and I expected the ride back to be full of conversation, but that wasn't the case. It might have been the group dynamics. Our Dad would have been a captive audience had Scott and I engaged in the usual stuff we talk about when we're on the phone. I've often had the fantasy of talking politics with Scott at the dining room table in front of my parents,but somehow in the car it just seemed wrong, and we, all of us, have never been good at small talk. But we have Monday night and all day Tuesday before I have to go back to a normal schedule.

Now it's lunchtime: 2:30am. Still two and a half hours before I have to start bringing Paycom around. I might get a lot of of this book read before then, unless i get sucked into Netflix. We'll see how I feel.

The Opossum and the Tumor

It's been interesting watching the Solemaini case playing out on Facebook. My friends on the right are all talking about the tumor. My friends on the left are talking about the opossum -- which my friends on the right interpret as being pro-tumor.

The Heavy Lift

Optimism is not exactly something that’s just lying around on the floor, waiting to be picked up. It’s something we have to work for again. It’s a heavy lift, but a necessary one. All we have as we enter 2020 is, well, us. - Charles P Pierce in Esquire

Tuesday evening, New Year's Eve, as I was standing in the shower, getting ready for work, I had the thought that 2020 was going to be a year of loss. I don't what that means. I'm not generally a pessimistic person. I'm not prone to premonitions, like Gaby, nor am I the unrepentant cynic like my bff Ted, but I just haven't been able to shake this idea from my mind. I wouldn't know how to discuss it with anyone. It's just there. And I don't know what to think or do about it.