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My Ideal Life

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Photo attributed to flickr user Zanthia

I have thought about this topic for a while now, ever since, I left Thailand after the Full Moon party over last New Years. I looked around at all the people, who had retired on the beautiful island of Koh-Phangan, or in Thailand in general. Or all of those people who had quit their jobs, or semi-retired from a profitable venture, strapped on a really expensive backpack and are now strutting around the Earth, collecting stamps on their passports. Or whatever the story might be of the loads of people I met on that island and during the quiet hours of the Full Moon madness.

I have been trying to imagine what my ideal life would look like. Would I work from home? Would I be a Professional Travel Blogger, travelling and writing, and making money at the same time to support a life-time of travel with T? Would I be a Professional Yogi, doing yoga at retreats all around the world, getting paid for helping people, and travelling at the same time, my two loves? Would I travel for six months of the year, and work at home for the other 6 months as a yoga teacher and server, saving up as much as I can from my work, fulfilling my nomadic nature?

The main themes in my dream life are travel, yoga, lots of amazing authentic international foods, and writing. These are the four things I need to have in my ideal life – in varying quantities. The big question now is – how to create a life from these four ingredients? What should the quantities be and how should they mixed together?

Some things I definitely do not want in my ideal life are a 9-5 job, restrictions to my time and freedom in anyway, restrictions to the place I live in, restrictions in finances due to debt or inability to earn, restrictions in my physical body in any shape or form.

I want to continue learning, and growing on this spiritual journey that I have chosen to be my path, with lots of travel, yoga, food and writing. How do I create from this? I am going to let this percolate a bit more in my head and then go from them. Let me know if you see anything striking that I have missed.

Who do you hang out with?

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Photo attributed to flickr user rubyblossom

I was speaking to a friend of mine, and she said the following:

If I get this job, it will be a huge lifestyle change. Even my interests will change, because I won’t have all day to be on Facebook and research all my conspiracy crap. I’ll have to wake up at 6, which I never do, and take the train for an hour one way, and work with very cosmopolitan people, and be in one of the most prestigious parts of the city. My wardrobe and attitude will change. Hopefully not in a bad way!

I started thinking about it and I realized that it was true for me as well. When I was working as a server, I spent all day watching TV, doing nothing useful with my time, I worked at night, so I never got a good night’s sleep, I always slept in till late, and I started drinking more than I normally did, I lost a lot of weight because I wasn’t eating properly, missing meals, and eating crap from the restaurant, gulping down food when I ran to the back to grab some other customer’s plates, I spent too much time partying, and not enough time planning, and my conversations were based on what other people did, not anything at a higher level.

When I joined this company, the people here spoke differently, more refined. I had to get up early, go to bed early, I had to dress conservatively, but properly, I had to make sure I was well groomed, I had to speak differently, I had more income and weekends off, so I had more time to spend with friends, and going out to events with family.

It really did matter in my life, who I was hanging out with, and how my attitude changed.

Same thing was with the friends I had in my life. Right now I am hanging out with some people who make much more money than I do, who are a bit more sophisticated in the way they view the world, they care about their appearance, they own homes, they have cottages, they go on vacations, they have dinners at fancy restaurants, and so on. Until I hung out with them, I didn’t realize how my life was different back then. Before them, the only outings I would have are going clubbing, I never went to restaurants much, I hung out with people who lived with their parents, so I didn’t have a space to go to and hang out with friends. We always spent time outdoors. Somewhere outdoors. Mostly they spent time drinking and getting drunk at bars.

My outlook on life and the way I spend my time has completely changed due to the friends that I spend my time with.

What do you think of the observation above?

What I learnt from handling cash as a server

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I used to work as a server in my past life. I worked at a bar and grill restaurant, and I enjoyed the work. I liked the fast-paced nature of the job, I loved chatting with the different people who came to the restaurant, and I loved getting paid in cash every night.

I liked handling cash on a daily basis, because the feel of using paper money to pay for items is a very different feeling from paying with a credit card. Paying with a credit card has a very detached feeling to it. You do not actually really think about it twice before swiping your credit card to buy yet another black sweater when you have 3 others in your closet already. You do not really think that this is real money you are spending on real things, that will need to paid off in the future. This isn’t really your money you are using to pay for that car repair, or dinner. This is someone else’s money which you are going to have to pay off and if you don’t plan it out right, you might not have enough money to pay off that bill. Which will be really sad to say the least.

When I started working at the restaurant, I had a big fear of handling so much money. I would sell upwards of $2000 a night and I started worrying about losing wads of money, I had nightmares about it, and I started really fearing going into work. That was only in the first week though. The more I started working with money, the more comfortable I got with it. The mistakes that I would make with losing a dollar or twenty here and there, due to carelessness, were completely eliminated. I made sure I took care of every single penny as I remembered and understood how hard I had had to work in order to earn that one penny.

I started converted everything I would buy into hours worked. For example, if I wanted to buy a car for $2000, I would convert it to working for a 100 hours, which is ten days in order to earn that cash. Ten days for a car seemed to put things into perspective. I would appreciate everything I purchased much more when I started looking at it, in terms of hours spent working on my feet, speaking to unpleasant customers, dealing with rude colleagues, working late nights and doubles, and all the other foibles that come with a server position.

In addition,  the feel of a twenty dollar bill while paying for an item is a completely different feeling than swiping a card. I really feel that I learnt to appreciate every single dollar earned and spent through my server position.

I am back to using a credit card now to earn Air Miles to use for travel. But I know how easy it to slip back into not realizing the value of the dollar spent when using credit.

Trust

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I was at work yesterday at my serving job, when my fellow-server came running to me, in tears. Her table had just walked out without paying their bill, which was $67. That was a bill she would have to pay out of her own pocket. It sucks, but the fact of the matter is that the walk-outs happen in the restaurant industry more often than you would expect.

It is a matter of trust, of course. We trust that the people who are eating at our establishment will ask for the bill, pay and then leave, so that we can all maintain a happy, cooperative society. It would be a horrible place to come eat, if we asked you for your payment up-front before you could enjoy your meal. That would make things awkward, uncomfortable, untrusting. You know how uncomfortable you get when you know someone around you doesn’t trust you and is watching you like a hawk, in order to ensure that they do not leave or steal or do something else illegal and detrimental.

Of course, the problem was that the girl would have to pay out of pocket. She worked a long 8 hour shift on her feet, washing dishes, serving people, chatting, laughing, and she got a bit of a tip for it, a 10% tip, supposed to be 15%, and now she would spend all of her tip money on paying off a bill for a group of white guys who could probably afford it, better than she could. Life sucks, and then it gets better (or worse depending on who you ask).

Every server has gone through the same thing and we all wonder the same question, why, why, why. Why did they do this? Do they not realize we pay out of pocket? Would it change their mind if they did know that the restaurant or the franchise doesn’t pay for it? Why would someone do such an evil thing? It is like getting suckerpunched in the stomach for the first few moments after your realize you had a walkout. You feel disoriented, and angry. Really angry. You want to call those people names, go to their houses and throw shit at their beds on them while they are sleeping.

After all that, all you can do is laugh at the world and laugh at yourself. Otherwise, you might cry.

Eating slowly

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I have always been a slow eater. I like to savor my food. I chew slowly, I linger over my meals. I am always the last one off the table, especially in this culture of eating quick, as a meal is one of the least important things you shall do that day. Working as a server, gives me great pleasure, as I get to serve people food and let them savor it and enjoy it, among their friends and family, and leave satisfied. And if they enjoyed my service, I get instant gratification in terms of tips. A win-win situation for all parties involved.

Of course, being a person who studies human nature, and who absolutely loves people watching, I love being a server. I wanted to delineate one thing that I have noticed that I thought was important enough to be shared. There are two kinds of eaters in the world. Fast and slow. There is no in-betweens. Seriously. I am not joking. There are people who linger over their meals. They will sit and eat, and eat, and eat, slowly, over a period of hours. When I first started, I didn’t realize this fact. So I would go over to them again and again, and bother them with good service, but it just bothered them. Eventually I realized these people are here to eat, and enjoy their time together. They chat, they drink, they eat, and they are merry. Conversation flows, as does the alcohol and food. I leave them to their meal, coming over to their table maybe once every half an hour. If they need me, they usually call me over. When they leave three hours later, they leave me a nice tip, as a thank you for their uninterrupted meal time. I love the lingering eaters. They signify how we should do everything in life. Slowly with enjoyment.

There are the others, of course. The fast eaters. The really fast ones. These ones ask me to bring their bills over as I take their orders. Could you please bring the bill over as soon as possible, so we can pay before we eat, and then we can leave as soon as we are done. They do not linger. They do not savor. For them food is just a fuel. It is something to be pumped into their body like gas. It costs a lot of time and patience for them, but it is something that is inevitable. These are the kind of people who always leave too many hours in between their meals and then experience cranky-fatigue-annoyance due to the lack of sugar in their bloodstream. They are usually not in the restaurant long enough to even notice their presence.

Now I shall make a generalization. The slow eaters I find are usually Europeans and Russians. The fast are Canadians. This is just a generalization. Of course, there are overlaps. But this is the way I notice the cookie crumbling.