Don't Be This Guy, Please.

 
Restaurant etiquette may not be universal, but the version of it I grew up on is well known and practiced in many nations and cultures, including Great Britan.

So, The Man and I are weekending in Budapest. I don't take pictures of famous things in cities anymore. All those things have much better pictures on the internet. I take pictures of smaller things I see. Mostly. This post    will have some of them.

I was interested to note that four deployments to war zones really does affect one's, well, affect. The Terror Haza did not phase him much. I however, have now been there twice, and being thus far a war-virgin --thank all the gods--, ... I'm not going back in. Sorry future visitors to my world, I'll be drinking a limonade with gin over at Karma. I'll be easy to find, and Just Far Enough Away from That.

But, we also wandered in the park, took in some art, went to the Great Synagogue,, did Budapest-y things. And then, we went to dinner at this little French joint in the old city of Pest, Gerloczy Cafe and Rooms deLux (where I hope to stay next time!! Swank at the price!). I mean, come on!, an excellent breakfast is In The Cafe Downstairs. Yes, please. And, it's the sort of place that serves good duck and good mackerel while projecting a pretty beach scene from the Normandy coast onto the wall opposite. There were little fairy lights and upside-down growing plants in special upside-down pots hanging in the tree over the spacious patio. It was completely charming in it's somewhat neglected Hungarian way. Good eye, The Man.

It was Tuesday, a night most restaurants do not expect to get slammed, and this was Gerloczy's unlucky Tuesday. They were all the way in the weeds, completely at sea. Hungarian service is traditionally leisurely, and this was a French joint, so I was doing my service math as HU / F = 45 to 60 min from order to plate. But, it was a longer time than that. Our server was impeccable, precise, efficient, eager for our comfort and happiness. The kitchen, however was overwhelmed. Ok then. Tonight is Slow Night for us and a really nasty Fast Night for the staff. The food was good, not write-to-your-mamma good, but good.

And This Guy. He and his whole family looked pretty peeved even as they were seated. They just had this slightly spiky sort of We Will Not Be Satisfied air about them, and boy were they not satisfied. They ordered, they ate, Mom and Dad and Son and Daughter, all in nearly complete silence ... grimly, you might say. And then, the server came to them and asked, in English as they were Brits, "How was everything?" And This Guy says, "Well, if you had not asked, I would not have to be truthful, but since you asked I will tell you." Notice how This Guy makes the totally undeserved reaming the server is about get all the server's fault. Love him. Oh yes. "The service is slow, the food was barely tepid when it arrived at table," blah, blah, blah, "and the something-he-had should have been just a little softer than al dente." Picky eater much? Flashing some culinary power plays in order to intimidate the server? Tacky, brother, tacky. After a breath, This Guy continues, "I am very disappointed. I see that you have a full house on a Tuesday and very likely the kitchen is overworked and has decided to take short cuts. However, I have emailed with the chef some six months ago as I researched this vacation, and she assured me that ...."

Dude. Shut up. Six months ago? Who are you? ... I mean other than a manipulative git.

Because there's this rule about etiquette in restaurants. If the food is not good, you say so BEFORE you, and I am not kidding in this case, clean your plate of all of it. Not a morsel left. Complain after a bite or two. It's like sniffing the cork and sipping the wine, people. In case the wine has turned, you get a minute to think it over BEFORE you pay for the bottle. Same thing goes for the chow. Complaining after you eat the whole meal is foul play. You are trying to rip the place off. And they succeeded. This decent, charming restaurant gave all four of them some merch, lovely T-shirts and their deepest and sincerest apologies for the inconvenience of ...

Some Bad Luck.

As they rose to saunter grimly off in triumph, the daughter, all of about 14 years old said, "Oh, that's nice. They've given us shirts to mend it."

Nice life lesson there, Dad.

I'm just glad This Guy wasn't an American. I would have had to apologize for him.

The One Percent

Four women and I are working on a project here in Papa. It's a ton of work, so one evening several of us went out to dinner together to  enjoy each others' company rather that doing comparative analysis of widgets and website editors. We're on the walking street in the centrum (pron: tsentrum), dressed for a girls' night out, speaking English, walking between dinner and a strong spiked coffee before heading home. Also on the street, three young men from Papa. They're dressed like most teens in Europe these days, the fashion rage being a re-hash of 1980s soft core punk.

"Fucking Bitches."

My first thought is, "So, that was excellent pronunciation." Because, you see, I've been called names on the street before, and it's getting a little boring. We walk on, ignoring them for a few steps, as women do the world over when harassed on the street. I failed in my allegiance to HollaBack here. The cell phone was in the bottom of my bag, but at about step four, I turned and looked at them, sternly, for a long time. My second thought was that teenage boys the world over need a few lessons in manners, but my Hungarian is not yet strong enough to have said, "That insult was delivered with perfect pronunciation. I congratulate you, little man, on your linguistic skill, but not on your courage. Were you alone, you would not have braved the reprisals four women. Iwill not even begin to imagine for you the frustration you will experience in the sexist life you appear prepared to live. And, just so you can be certain, I am a fucking bitch of what to you are extra-epistemological proportions." What I can actually say in Hungarian in this situation is, "Jo estet" ( pron: yo eshtate -- good evening). This does not pack the high handed diction of the classy version of "fuck you little boy."

I am, however, the international queen of The Withering Glare, which did its job here as effectively as in other locations.

But, then I had some conversations, made some connections. So, some anecdotes.

Papa is a smallish town in provincial Hungary. Descended upon it, all at once three years ago, came an international consortium in the form of a heavy air lift wing. Lots of people who spoke no Hungarian, lots of people needing homes. Homes became available. Other people's homes, homes rented at about 75% higher rates than any real estate agent had ever imagined here. Of course, this process inflated rental and home prices across Papa and in surrounding villages. Restaurant staff and store owners started learning English, or more English, toute suite. Partly, this was a bit of innate cultural generosity: Hungarians are often among the most generous of people, and they know that their language is a labyrinthine mine field for most others. Partly, this was good business sense: There are, relatively speaking, pots and pots of money to made from these foreigners.

In Papa, we are, I am, The One Percent.

That means the same thing here that it means in the US right now. It means that I am grudgingly tolerated. It means that many of Papa's citizens feel helpless in the face of changes to their world wrought by me and on my behalf. It means that I am part of a system that makes me, by analogy, Paris Hilton, and that creates fewer jobs for Hungarians than she does for Americans outside the paparazzi industry. In the US, I am a member of the middle class, or the upper middle class, really. I'm not upside down on my house, and my income (when I had one) was higher than that of 50% of my fellow and sister citizens. Here, I am Paris Hilton. I have a level of freedom, power, and social access that's embarrassing. I went to listen to the USAFE Band the other night, and I was ushered to the reserved seats for the fancy people.

One news report from the US recently informed me that over 900,000 people applied for 62,000 jobs at McDonalds, most of them floor jobs, literally the McJob of middle class high school days and working class everydays. 900,000 Americans would have been happy to get paid minimum wage with no benefits. In Hungary, it's been normal for people with magnificent educations, who speak 5 languages, play the violin, and can do higher math to make $500 per month.

Here, people don't garden because they want to be organic localvores. Here, people garden so that they can eat at all. A rooster crows every morning, just three houses over from my house. Two houses over, a man keeps a flock of pigeons. He feeds them, maintains a wonderful coop for them, and eats them.

I applied for a loyalty card to a local grocery store and the application was full of the usual marketing questions: gross income, number of kids, blah blah blah. The income brackets were defined monthly, per person in the household, and ranged from 10,000 HUF to 200,000 HUF. That's from $50 to $1000.

My rent is 400,000 HUF. Almost all the rents in this charming, crumbly, provincial town are $2000/month, for a house, for a two room apartment. A rent scale wildly out of proportion for this location, and that is creating some very difficult burdens for the people of Papa. For instance, there's a women's shelter here that I've come to volunteer for as they need me. When a woman moves out of the shelter, she usually stays in Papa, gets a job, an apartment ... and because the heavy airlift wing is here jacking up the local economy, she's up against some pretty stiff rental rates, and winds up living in a crappy apartment built in the 1960s by the Soviets. ... Not the local dream home.

I've heard a rumor that some people here are beginning to believe that the Hungarian government, not the most prosperous in Europe, is paying our rent for us, for all of us foreigners. This is preposterous, and dangerous, and hence testy teenage boys trying out their English on me.

For all kinds of reasons both linguistic (on which I'm working), and political and legal (about which I can do fuck-all), these flowing tensions are hard for me, for us, to address.

But, I get it, little Hungarian man, I get it.

So, Dear the One Percent of the United States:

There are reasons both real and imaginary that we don't like you. You would do well to address them. Then, you could come out and live among us, outside your gated and guarded communities, without fear of being called a Fucking Bitch.

Dear FIDESZ,

We could be following some priorities out here that would make life for your citizens in Papa hurt a LOT less in the wake of this wing's arrival. It would be lovely to discuss those with you, and to work together to create some decent interactions in this community. Because, you know, you have truck loads of money coming from this consortium, and not much of it is benefiting the people here who are discomfited by our presence and effects. Developing some real, not just showy, lines of relation and some real benefits to the people of Papa would be, well, the right thing to do. Any room in your new constitution for that?

No? Too busy making life hard for women and gays and ethnic minorities, unbalancing the balance of powers, enshrining the Christian roots of the Hungarian plutocracy? Knock yourself out.

Country and Western Music in Hungarian

So, this morning I am slapped in the face with a cultural hybrid I never imagined. That is my failure, of course. The Man was gallantly sleeping downstairs with neighbor's dog (said dog feeling a little bereft and being too old to get up our suicide staircase), but I had the alarm on upstairs. Promptly, as is the nature of alarms, this one went off at 5:45 and played ... a country and western song in Hungarian.

Given the country music genre's origins in the English and Irish ballads, I would not have been surprised to find it there. But I didn't. Country music and line dancing are huge in Hungary and The Netherlands.

This makes sense. It makes sense on every level. The line dancing even makes perfect sense. It all explains the suspicious numbers of western boots I've been seeing around here.

So, the great American musical exports include not only jazz and rap, but something white people cooked up: country music and line dancing.

The circle is complete.

Speech: Rights are Responsibilities to Each Other

From the 1:28 mark to the 2:21 mark, Sheriff  Dupnik of Tuscon notes that the "mentally unbalanced" are easily influenced by our public discourses. This happens to be a psychological fact. If the rants and YouTube video are the shooter’s, I'd be will to tag him as schizophrenic. Schizophrenics are like radios and kaleidoscopes combined, their minds take in the world and reshuffle it. They almost all suffer delusions of "mind control" because they sense their minds are not in their control. Their maps of reality share points with ours, and then diverge radically. Their particular way of being broken is always a reflection of what is really going on.


So, for the love of all that’s holy, I beg our public servants, our political pundits, our bloggers and radio show call-in listeners to put the CIVIL back in civil discourse.

There are too many undiagnosed schizophrenics, and too many people feeling a serious lack of faith in life in the US at present. Acts like this can and have become the inevitable and necessary “thing to do” for such people. They will again. From the broken mind that shoots a president or a congresswoman, to the racist who commits suicide by cop at historical memorial to the victims of vitriol and rancor in another civil society only a few decades ago.

The real rancor and hate and the metaphorical violence of our public discourse finally killed people yesterday, destroyed and damaged the lives of many more, and bruised the free and civil exercise of our democracy. And this after many threats, much indirect violence in attacks on campaign headquarters, and so on. The most telling thing about this present horror and grief is that none of us are surprised by it. Somewhere in us, we all knew this was coming.

Our manner of speech is part of our civic responsibility. Civility is much more than a formal arrangement of society. It’s how we exist together. How we talk, what we say, our tone and intention, the images and metaphors we choose, all these have consequences. Consequences can be good, and they can be this tragedy.

That’s our choice. Everyday. On every stage. In every publication. On every talk show. In every church. In every home. At the tables of every coffee shop and diner and private club.

We are called by these deaths, by the destruction and disruption of of these remaining lives, by the grief of these families to take to heart the requirements of our civil lives together. The least we can do to honor these people is speak to each other as fellow citizens, not as smack-talking enemies on a battle field. A nine year old girl is dead. A congresswoman will never, ever be the same person again. In all the lives ended and damaged by this boiling over of our public sentiment, what glorious and irreplaceable potential for good and betterment has been forever lost?

The least the pundits and talking heads and political celebrities can do is Stop Stirring the Pot. It's been boiling for a good while now. Time to turn the gas down. Souls are on the line.