All your love is missing is hate

I was hanging with my friend a while ago at his place eating grilled cheese and tomato soup. Most people would associate the food with childhood, but for me, I never had a point in my childhood where I had such a combo. My grilled cheese was always served with pear halves and I never had tomato soup until I was twenty.

Anyway, my friend has an amazing impediment. He cannot make grilled cheese. It's an ailment likened unto Derik Zoolander's left turn disorder. Try as he might, he just cannot do it. His girlfriend had to boot him out of the kitchenette and save the would be Dorito flavored charcoal bits, earning him beration and harassment of the culinary sort. The cute chattiness and whimsical insults made the scene endearing as she scraped the leftover cheese flakes from the pan into the garbage and handed me a plate with a delectable trinkets of flavor. During the serving, my friend looks at me and says "Don't we act like a married couple?"

I thought about it. I looked at it. I compared my marriage to the cute little exchange I just saw, and felt as tough there was something missing. there was a piece that Karen and I have that seems to make us, for a lack of a better term, less whimsical, yet stronger...

"I don't see enough hate," I said. This brought a strange look from the two of them to me. I could see the narrative "Hate... Is he telling us a joke? Isn't hate the opposite of love? Huh? Did we spike the tomato soup? He might not be used to all the Lycopene. We've been brought up with this stuff, he's been eating tomato soup for only 4 years now, he might be getting drunk.

"I'm serious" I said, "you need more hate I think." An uncomfortable chuckle emerged from the two of them.

HATE! yes hate. A marriage is strengthened by hate! Now let me explain: If everyday, day in day out, a couple is constantly enthralled in constant bliss, that means only one thing... They are lining to each other. even entropy dictates that nothing is truly constant, thus flux is always occurring in everything in the fractal of life. Therefore, to be happy all the time, is impossible. As Dennis Leary once said, "Happiness comes in small doses, it's a chocolate chip cookie, a cigarette, or a 5 second orgasm: you cum, you smoke, you eat the F*****g cookie and shut the F*** up!" Being constantly happy would in essence be an IV drip of those small doses, and more work that it would be worth. Bottom line: Bad days happen! Bad days happen more than good! Bad days are a constant! And given the chance of there being one day a week that is good... a generous assumption to be sure, that is one day a week for two people that is good. Odds are 1 in 7 that a married couple will have the same good day (86% chance of failure) and thus the good day will be destroyed by the bad day, and lets not forget the 6 bad days that overlap, giving two bad days for the price of one most days. Those are grounds to snap. explode, scream, swear, throw things, spit, splash, tear, dismantle, set up sleeping bags, make hotel arrangements, wash the blood from your gashed, vacuum dented forehead, rinse and repeat at least 6 times a week. This is only the natural progression of the entropic world. Anyone who pretends that a world like that is happy all the time is being dishonest.

By hate, I'm not talking about disdain, or angst, or disgust... all of which are reasons not to get married. I'm instead talking about hate in terms of honesty. Many would argue that honesty is what a marriage should be based on. I would take a stronger stance on that and say that pure honesty is a most powerful force in the human social world and that it must be tamed and used in order to be able to even consider marriage. To be honest with ones self is most vital. To know ones own weakness, to know the limits of ones strengths, to understand that despite the fact you might be right in the argument, the fight will continue until you are not, and to know that being wrong is not necessarily incorrect, though your weakness is exposed, is but scratching that surface of honesty's submission.

One must be comfortable with ones honest self to then be able to be honest with a partner. Once you do get married, You find that honesty with money and time becomes the next big hurdle that must be jumped. Many people would say that after you get married, it becomes about money. I say that it becomes about time and money. Money, by my own definition, is an object that has no worth unless it is exchanged for something else. Money is also an arbitrary value placed on a man's time and effort. T$=Money(rnd(infinity)). There is a relationship of time and money that is expressed in, more or less, the fact that one sacrifices time to make money. the honesty comes with what we sacrifice our money on. Video Games, Movies, Accent Clothes, Restaurant Food, these things that bring single people pleasure, now brings strife to the couple and to be honest that these things are a waste would clear up a lot of pain. But to change is to acknowledge in some way that the old way we were was wrong, and that attacks pride. Pride can be one of the biggest nails in the coffin of honesty, and as a result, the level of anger and hate gets pushed to the bottom of the pile serves as an agitator, churning other things into the top of the slurry, and making truly ugly reactions occur, like abuse and passive aggression. The explosion is what ultimately makes a marriage unhealthy.

One must always be honest. One must always be comfortable with their honesty. One must be able to sit down and have a brutal reaction with a bad day. Those who convert time into money see to it many times that one will have a bad day, and a marriage that is honest will allow for someone to sit on their couch, rant and rave, yell at each other over bills and housekeeping, and in the end have that hatred going for them.

"I think that for a marriage to work, someone has to take into an account the person he or she loves. If that person is someone you honestly cannot be without, even if you hate that person with every fiber of your being, and that sentiment is shared, that couple is ready to work at that marriage, and it might not be the easiest thing, but at least both people will have the drive to keep the marriage alive; The couple must be attractive to each other especially when they repulse one another." That was the only reply I could muster, then I finished my sandwich. It was a sandwich type I was not used to eating with tomato. and while the notion of fruit soup and buttery sandwich seems repulsive, they have been a loving marriage for generations.

Many Leaders, no Leadership

Many of my entries have been about work as of late, and I'm beginning to understand that If one works in a place he or she does not have the heart to work in, then that place can be hell. Or perhaps put another way, heaven and hell might in fact be one in the same, depending on what life you have led. If a choir of angels singing about God is excruciating, imagine living that through eternity.

My point being, I want to be a band teacher. I've wanted to since the first day the Russ Newbury shook my hand and told me "good work" on a piece I wrote my senior year in high school. I wanted that kind of experience, to be able to shake the hand of a student of mine, say well done, and influence them on their otherwise unresistant ambitions.

I work at a restaurant. (Not quite a band teacher, is it?) This restaurant happens to have some fine workers in it. Some fine workers are the store leaders. The basic tenants of being a leader is to be able to lead. This is where the logic falls apart. These people cannot lead to save their worthless hides. Final syllogism: The restaurant has leaders that don't lead (once again, if you follow the math on this crap, that is W sub r/(leaders+(-leaders))=undefined quantity: because one cannot divide by zero.) In essence, this place runs itself on pure pissy ego and not so much on strong foundations.

I was in an unpaid for meeting yesterday about our current progress in the store over the past year. It was about 1 million dollars off projected due to a few undeniable factors. The city of Bozeman is pretty much anti-big box store. In order for Wal-mart to expand their store, the needed to jump unreasonable hurdles, including funding a mass transit system to compensate for the jobs that the city would lose and gain from having the store open in town. By making the claim that Wal-mart would kill 100 jobs in the city, they forced retribution on the store, which they replied that they would add 200 jobs to compensate. The rebuttal was that the 100 unemployed would work for the Wal-mart and have no way to get there, thus mass transit was necessary for the whole city. and Like a gay guy telling me about his plight with his lifestyle change, Wal-mart said "fine, you win, I'll agree with you," not so much because they had a point, but because you can only take this crap for so long before you get tired and cave.

so, back to the subject, 1 million dollars off. Joe cut his losses. He has been here a year and expects to turn a profit. no one makes a profit in the first year, any economy wise human being can tell you that. He then explains the accountability aspect of the job. "I am a nice guy, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but when you walk on me, I'll drop the hammer." I think if you talk in metaphor cliches, you need to be beat and told how to convey words with real thoughts and not broad speculations. either way, he did have a point, show up for your scheduled time and work hard. However, this accountability should run both ways and doesn't. Joe shows up every day, I'll give him that, but the fact that I had to scour up someone myself and get a day off that I requested a month ago indicates to me that he is not putting in his fair share of the work. I am also confused on many job operations and timing issues that I must be able to accomplish. Ask questions, he says, Joe, i tried, you told me that you would get to it in a minute and that you had something more important to do. You did, yea, I'll give you that, but you never got back at me with any answers, so I stop asking. What's the point of asking when I have to find the answer my fricken self anyway? I have been "instructed" 6 different ways on how to close my station, all of which seem to conflict with one another. I never have a free moment and yet I'm always the last to leave. I don't know what they want clean at any given point in the night, don't know when to close a fryer, don't know where things are in the walk in cooler, and really, it's because no one has stood up, taken any sort of leadership role and made sure that standard practice is followed. It's absolutely irritating to have a damn cheerleader pretending to be a coach, waving her damn pompom and cheering "let's get this kitchen clean" instead of running practice, going over the plays, giving push ups to the slackers and giving instruction to the ones who need it.

I wish I was doing what I want to do now. But I do what I must.