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We are twenty percent tippers. More, if you’re fabulous or one of our regular bartenders or servers.

We are also tipped employees. One of us has made a long career in food service. Restaurant jobs aren’t just for teenagers and those not smart enough or hard-working enough to get a “real” job. Americans are generally pretty uncomfortable being served–what with that curious bootstrap fetish we’ve got and all–and seem to pretty consistently overlook the fact that waiting tables takes more intelligence and physical effort than your average “real” cubicle job.

There’s a lot to be said (and quite a lot that has already been said) on that topic, and I’m not going to get into it here. Blogs don’t change minds–particularly when the topic has so many emotional hot buttons (money, our conceptions of work and worth)–and the converted don’t need more preaching.

But I will say this: when it comes time to tip your server, you have the opportunity to work a little magic. It’s very simple, and it won’t even hurt the first time. Once you get used to it, it will actually start to feel good. Here’s how:

Get your bill. Do the math. Decide what you believe the tip should be (twenty percent, fifteen percent), to the penny. Then round up, not down.

That’s it. One more dollar than you might otherwise have left. Your wallet probably won’t even notice. (Side note: If your wallet does notice–and there have been times in my life when every single dollar counted–you probably shouldn’t be in a restaurant in the first place.)

Your one dollar buys more than you ever thought a buck could get. Your server who–let’s give the benefit of the doubt–takes pride in his work and was doing his damnedest to make sure your meal was a great one, won’t take the bump from, say, 18 to 22 percent lightly.

Imagine that you received a performance review a dozen times a day, and that your boss adjusted your salary based on not only your job performance but also on the quality of the entire department’s work. That’s what waiting tables is like.

Sure, your buck could go to someone who doesn’t deserve it. Maybe your meal turned out alright because someone else was paying attention when your food was up, or caught the mistake when your order was put in wrong, or tidied up after the kids at the next table so you didn’t slip on the cheerios all over the floor. Maybe your server was hiding in the office texting while all this happened, and shouldn’t get that dollar.

It’s a risk that’s worth taking, because the joy you spread is far more important than “losing” a point in the grand game of Who Gets To Be Judgy-McJudgster and Be More (Self)Right(eous).

I hate that game.

And it’s not overstating the case to bring Joy into it. My fella is the sort who takes an enormous sense of satisfaction from doing a job–any job–well, and receiving appropriate feedback. A smaller tip doesn’t just bum him out; it makes him question everything about his own performance (questions which are usually totally unwarranted). A larger one (and, remember, we’re talking one lousy dollar), is an affirmation that he appreciates more deeply than you might think–and, by extension, makes the next table’s experience just that much better. Your dollar buys a smile, puts lightness into steps, and brings relief in a world where there’s precious little of that to be found.

What a bargain.

I’ve never really believed in New Year’s resolutions, but I suppose that the Jan 1 transition is as good a time as any for a person to take a new direction or follow a dream. Ours has been in earnest motion now for some months, but this day–keeping with tradition, sort of–seems a good one to lay it all out.

As you may have gathered, we’re taking the long walk this year. This is something I’d planned to do solo about seven years ago, but then life did its thing and I found myself with a career in EMS and staying in a city I never expected to like as much as I did. Time passed, various lightning bolts struck, and here I am these years later with the good fortune to have a partner who embraced this dream wholeheartedly. So now we are two–twice the planning, but twice the hands working on putting it all together.

It’s gonna be good. But, more importantly, this is the opening act of a totally new chapter in our lives–bigger than moving across the country, bigger than changing jobs, bigger than anything either of us has ever done before.

2011 was a year of more self-examination than usual. A year in which what I’d always found not quite right turned into downright unsettling. A year in which I did a lot of work explicitly clarifying my values and deciding how to make my life more closely match them.

We spent a great deal of time thinking and talking about what’s necessary and what’s not, in the smallest and largest senses. About how we’d apportion our waking time if half of it weren’t already automatically beholden to an employer. About what satisfies us, in a deep way. And how to make that happen.

What ultimately killed our restaurant plan was the realization of what it would mean to finance the project. Nevermind the enormous commitment of time and effort the place itself would entail (sweet labor though that might be, to folks like us). Owing a bank such a huge amount of money would dictate how we’d be able to live for all the years before we could pay it back. That’s an awful lot of control to willingly surrender.

It began to look like a trigger we weren’t meant to pull.

We still had our finger on it the day I broached the thru-hike subject. We talked about what it would take to make this happen–paying off the last of our debt, saving money, shedding possessions, reconfiguring our budget, making do with less–and then it dawned on us that this was the exact same plan for making our wildest of wild dreams happen: this was the way to hike the AT, yes, but it was also the way to get off the hamster wheel of work/paycheck/stuff for good.

I think angels sounded a high, clear note, and the sun got a little brighter.

This was possible. And we were going to make it happen. And the key wasn’t–as I’d long been taught, as we’ve all long been told–getting a better job and making more money. Our yearning for more has been misplaced–we don’t need more money, more things, more degrees, more titles, more on our resume; we need more time that actually belongs to us. We need more real meaning from our labor. And, unless you’re independently wealthy, getting this kind of more means having less.

If you’re okay with that, the math works in your favor. Me, I’d rather have fewer nice clothes and more time to write. A smaller house and a bigger garden. Fewer nights out on the town and more long days in with a chore list of my own making.

It’s a funny thing, though, shedding all those years of conditioning. Even when you know, down to your core, that this is the right thing to do, you find yourself resisting in unexpected ways. Relinquishing my professional identity and the status that comes with it was an important step, and it’s made some of the other de-attaching go more smoothly. But we still run up against the cool tee shirt problem: when discussing exactly how much of our considerable book collection to offload, I had the realization that I was attached to more than just the books themselves: I liked what stuffed bookshelves said about me. Even though the only people who are likely to see the inside of my home already know that I read, that I’m intelligent, that I have diverse interests, I was still clinging to that physical symbol of these attributes.

The Man Friend has a great expression: these things that we hang onto, that we use like bumperstickers to advertise about ourselves are identity bangles. Like the bracelets, they rattle around saying look at me! Look at how [smart/cultured/fit/well-connected/pious/rebellious/whatever] I am! They’re cultural shorthand, a substitute for the hard work of actually getting to know each other.

I can’t get rid of all the books–I love me some library action, but there’s something to be said for being able to pull a well-loved tome off the shelf any time you like, to re-read in its entirety, or just to sample a few choice passages. I find it extremely comforting. But there are plenty volumes on those shelves that really are just filler–books I’ve read once and won’t read again, books I read and didn’t even like, books that I own because I think–as an English major and a “serious” reader–I should own them. That’s the very definition of superfluous.

So I suppose what we’re really doing is working out our own definition of what is necessary. Time? Yes. Food? Yes. Shelter? Yes. Creative efforts? Yes. Most of our stuff? Not so much. Money? Not as much as we think. And, maybe most destructive and unnecessary is the stress that comes with all that we’re working to purge. For, after all, being invested in a job you aren’t in charge of is simply borrowing someone else’s stress. For people like we two, who are inclined to become invested in any job we have just because we like to see work done well, whatever it is, it’s impossible to work for bad managers and not get upset about it. And a paycheck just isn’t sufficient compensation for that kind of irritation, not anymore. Money may indeed make the world go ’round, but there are other forces that can take its place, once you’re able to wean yourself off that dollar-sign teat.

Our position statements:

• Monetary income is a poor measure of the quality and meaning of one’s work.
• Paychecks are meant to be spent, usually on shit we don’t really need, supporting a global system of consumerism that is, on balance, not a great thing.
• The more toys you have, the more you want–and the more of your time you sacrifice to work for more of that almighty paycheck.
• Have less, want less, buy less = have less reason to work for someone else. This frees up an enormous amount of time to do things that have real value for us–whether concretely, as in growing our own food, or more abstractly, as in more time to create and write and meditate and pay attention to what we can do to help our neighbors.
• We want that.

Kicking all this off with a six-month exercise in living a life stripped to its bare essentials seems right. Even if we don’t finish the trail this time–very few do, though I think we’re more prepared (in all ways) than most–it’s come to be about more than just a simple thru-hike. And there is gold waiting at the end, however short or long the rainbow itself may prove.

Let me take you on a bit of a ramble:

We’ll start with plants. On my ride to work, there’s a stretch of road with no shoulder. Just a hair past the white line, the asphalt ends, and a steep bank climbs up for thirty or forty feet, eventually leveling out where Interstate 40 passes overhead. In hilly terrain, this isn’t unusual–roads here are carved out of ridges, blasted through mountains, trenched between wooded slopes. The “shoulder” is forever trying to reclaim the paved-over territory, reaching out with branch and vine and shoot. Fleets of blades are sent forth every day to mow, trim, clip, and saw all this lushness back from signposts and guardrails. The work must seem neverending, and I imagine it’s easy to adopt a win at all costs attitude toward all that relentless vegetation.

About two weeks ago, on this same stretch of road, I noticed something different about the wall of green off my right elbow. Seven or eight feet up, a distinct, horizontal line had appeared. Everything above it was still an insistent emerald facade, leaves overlapping like tight shingles, the bank behind invisible. Everything below–the lower half of small locust trees, mostly–was yellow going to brown, three months too soon.

I don’t know what they sprayed, or when they sprayed it. I don’t know if I breathed it in some damp morning, spread it a little farther down the road on my tires, or picked up a film of it on my arms, my legs, my clothes. I do know it ended up in the river, because everywhere is a watershed. I do know that I generally don’t believe them when they tell me something that kills so effectively, so indiscriminantly, is safe and not to worry my pretty little head about it.

Consider:

Persistent Herbicides in Compost

“Environmentally-Friendly” Herbicide Isn’t

Higher than expected rates of herbicide volatilization

Monsanto creates yet another monster

How a “safe” herbicide still kills frogs and bees

I could go on.

But it only makes me feel both full of rage and completely helpless (much like when I watched Gasland a few weeks ago–a movie you should see, too, despite the yucky feelings it will engender), and that’s not a pleasant sensation.

Here’s what I’m having a hard time with: I take it as a given that shady doings are in progress every day–shady doings that endanger your health and mine, all for the sake of lining a few select pockets. Shady doings that the masses participate in and accept as normal (eg: using nasty chemicals to clean, deweed, and impart a “fresh” scent to their home and yard; using a car to travel less than two miles; eating factory-farmed, highly processed “food” because it’s cheaper on the front end; and so on) because that’s the end result of effective spin. Shady doings that are becoming more firmly entrenched and exempt from legal oversight.

I know this happens, and it probably happens even more than I suspect, even on my most paranoid, cynical, angry, depressed days. I know it, but I’m still surprised to see it. Maybe some part of my brain is still trying to hold on to the notion that people are inherently good, and that’s the part that registers surprise. Maybe, as an act of self-preservation, I’m practicing some sort of unconscious, selective amnesia, so that I forget the rampant bad stuff until it appears again.

Whatever the case, I’m not sure which is worse: my impotent rage in the face of injustice, or my naive wounding every time I’m reminded of something I already know. Either way, I feel like a cranky kid, wanting to scream and smash things until somebody makes it better.

I don’t want to be a cranky kid. I grew up for a reason, right?

(Right?)

But all this paranoia only breeds more paranoia. And paranoia, I’ve decided, has roughly the consistency of creamy peanut butter. A little bit is compelling. Too much, and it sticks to the roof of your mouth. More than that, you slowly lose the ability to chew at all. Your jaw is paralyzed; your airway blocked with nutty brown goo. Then you choke and die.

Here’s a sequence of events for you:
1. Notice liberal application of herbicide on roadway, presumably by city or other government entity. 2. Recall the raspberries along the greenway are just ripening, and that you planned to pick some this week. 3. Remember who owns the greenway. 4. And what sort of landscape maintenance methods they prefer. 5. Decide the raspberries have probably been poisoned. 6. But, raspberries! 7. Consider risking it. You can wash them, right? Maybe not. 8. Recall everything you’ve ever read about persistent environmental toxins. 9. Which reminds you that modern life is, by its very nature and despite your best efforts to avoid it, toxic. 10. Fill with rage; weep in despair. 11. Overthink it until the gears in your brainbox seize up and begin to smoke. 12. Choke, die. (And still no raspberries.)

I have to admit that this sequence of events–or something very like it, minus the death part–happens inside my head more often than is probably healthy.

Something happens when a thinking person confronts the world as it is. If the thinking person has been going to yoga class regularly, reading Pema Chodron, and can maintain at least arms’ distance during this confrontation, she can cling to some scrap of something that might pass for compassion or simple, neutral open-heartedness. But without all that (and let me tell you, my schedule hasn’t allowed for yoga class lately), she just thinks. And thinks some more. And I’ve not found that thinking gets one to anyplace warm or fuzzy. Thinking, analyzing, stripping and ordering facts, in fact, paints a fairly dismal picture of the way things are.

Maybe I’m genetically encoded for a tendency toward pessimism. Maybe it’s simple cognitive bias. Maybe I’m just right (boy, I hope not). But I can’t recall the last time my brain was overwhelmed with a snowballing, steamrolling, relentless mass of good observations about the world. They come, but they come in ones or twos–quite easy to get down without the too-much-peanut-butter effect.

But I suppose there’s this: even in smaller quantities, the good stuff is a pretty effective antidote to the seized, smoking brain-gears. You have to go looking for them, or at least make sure your eyes are open and ready to see them when they pass your way, but they’re there. Despite it all.

A short list from the last 24 hours:
Last night’s fireflies. (Every night’s fireflies.)
The farmer’s market bouquet on my desk.
Lemon cucumbers on a vine I grew from seed.
The good book I just finished, sitting on the coffee table.
Cold sparkling water after a few hot hours weeding.
A kiss from my fella.
Hearing from an old friend.
Stories about people in boats motoring toward gunfire, trying to help.
This photo of two women, married at last.

Mistrust–that general, world-as-a-shitty-place feeling–is a choice. Distrust–of Big Ag, of politicians, of the guy who used to live two doors down who never had his aggressive dog on a leash–is specific, and earned. A subtle difference, but important. It’s easy to conflate the two, and the byproduct of their unholy mating is paranoia-nut-butter. (Choke, die.) That gets us nowhere.

Keep the dis- alive–it is the fuel for action that change requires. What I’m working on is reining in the mis-, which feeds on the vague, stubborn negativity spilling into me from headlines, talk radio, internet forums, and watercooler bitching. I’m countering it with a little pure, prefix-free trust, gleaned from my short list.

It helps.

Last weekend, I participated in the Mountain Xpress Poetry Show, as one of the poetry prize finalists. (I’ll be sharing that poem soon.) Sitting in that historic auditorium, listening to other poets read their work and talk up the Asheville poetry scene, I was seized with the desire to devote more time to my own writing. There are quite a few regular reading events around town, and, for the first time in my life, I’m thinking seriously about attending.

Writing is, by its nature, a solitary task. Anyone can put words together for their eyes only. But being a successful writer–published, read, paid, all of the above, whatever that means to you–means bringing other people into that sheltered place, even if you never see them. Knowing that someone, somewhere is reading your words can in itself be terribly intimidating. Face to face, even more so. I’ve been on stage before, mouthing other peoples’ words, but I’d never read my own to an audience.

I felt my hands shaking, but my honest Man Friend swears he couldn’t see it from his front row seat.

The applause was like warm rain.

The brief accolades are part of it, to be sure, but more than that I want to use this simple love of good writing that this group of folks shares to fertilize my own. That applause–indeed, the very fact of every person there being there in the first place–is like damp earth to the scattered seeds of ideas that bump around in my head day after day.

Yesterday morning, as the pouring rain gave way to blue skies, I was shaking hands with farmers and cheesemakers and bakers and potters and getting similarly inspired. I’ve picked up a little part-time work with the North Asheville Tailgate Market, and attaching faces and names to the items in my kitchen makes my green thumb itch and my barnheart flare up.

True, I can be somewhat easily influenced by what I see–watching The Big Lebowski always makes me want to drink White Russians–but this is deeper. It’s a specific, reality-based reaction–seeing other people doing some version of what I wish I did more of is a great kick in the pants. I don’t watch movies and have the urge to head for Hollywood. I don’t read National Geographic and decide to enroll in graduate school and become a geologist. I don’t listen to The Kills and want to start a band. All of these potential life paths appeal to me, but more in a daydreaming, idle sort of way.

But the life of a wordsmith-farmer? Now that I could do.

If I wanted to become a diesel mechanic or a biochemist or a jewelry designer, I’d enroll in school, and learn from the learned. I’d hope to be taught by that sometimes rare figure: the great teacher. A great teacher sparks in the student a passion for the task at hand, a desire to read and investigate and explore on her own. Spending more time around the writers and farmers around me is accomplishing much the same thing. This is school, deconstructed, and I am so ready to learn.

Roll your eyeballs up to the header there and take note: I’ve added a Resources page where you’ll find all manner of useful, entertaining, and thought-provoking links. Its content will evolve as this blog does, but will always be related to the work we’re doing here, exploring sustainability in its broadest sense, and finding ways to bring more of it into our lives. After all, you can never have too much brain candy.