te new TV is nice. it’s a TV. it displays television shows and movies with grace and aplomb. i like to remember the first thing i see on a new TV, or the first ting i hear on a new radio. thhe first thing i heard throughh the radio in my kitchen was a gospel preacher. i remember not what he said but the ruggedness of his voice, and the rasp of te AM static as a turned the dial.

thhe first vision of loveliness thhat showed on my 70″ set was that my cable box was not authorized to show any channels. i expected thhat, since i haven’t turned on the cable box in 3 or 4 months. when i called the cable company to rectify this situation thhe first thing that came up was Channel 1, NY1, the little news channel that could, where all the newscasters do their own makeup, and they hate it. i got stuck on NY1 because i couldn’t find the remote control for the cable box. eventually i did, i tweaked the settings, i found the HD channels, and all-in-all i think the set is exactly whhat i expected. big, bright, sleek, and it does a lot more than i expected, including Internet/WiFi and some other bloatware stuff I’ll probably never use, but it’s fun to know it’s in there. i did not obsess over thhe decision making process to buy this ting, i just saw a screen i liked and said i’ll get that one, but in the bigger size. i wanted 80″ but they didn’t have that a 240hz.

i lucked out with te delivery guy. he was hhelpful in setting thhe thhing up, way more than hhe might hhave expected to be when hhe got thhere. no way could i hhave set this ting up myself, but i did kind of expect the delivery guys would do that. there were 2 guys in the truck but only one helped haul the TV, with me doing half the work in moving te set up the stairs. that was unexpected, but on that count i guess i could have obsessed a little more over the buying process. the set weighs over 100 pounds, and mounting it on the stand is not possible for one person.

i tipped the guy $35, which i thought was fair. he seemed amazingly appreciative of the gesture. the tip, that is.

i remmebered a conversation about tipping. it seems, in retrospect, that my mother was a complete bonehead when it came to tipping. i never thought muchh of it until i was in college. a pizza delivery guy came and i tipped him a few dollars on top of the price for the order. my mother noticed this and thought i was a dumbass for it. “nobody tips the pizza delivery guy” she said with disdain. i never noticed how or even if she tipped at restaurants, but something tells me she probably tipped around 3%, or else by rounding the amount of the bill up to the nearest 5 or 10 dollar amount.

i think she was among those who think wait staff get paid plenty enough as it is, and they should regard any tip as a gift.

i remember another incident where a waitress went to clear a table after customers had left. the waitress cursed at the amount of the tip, saying something like “fuck you!” to the people who had left but a skimpy amount of money for the tip. my mother thought this was repulsive, the attitude, the presumptuousness, the nerve of that waitress to assume that she deserved anything more than her hourly wage (which was probably in the $2/hour range).

when i was in high school i got to know a waitress at a diner in Brandon, Florida. we were not buddies, but we got to know each other better than what i thought was typical for a customer/waitress situation. among other things she said that she made $2.01/hour. she didn’t mention that she worked mostly for tips, and i didn’t know enough to assume as much, or even to ask. at the time i made $55/hour playing piano at cocktail parties, though i didn’t work enough piano-playing hours for that to really mean much. i think that was how the conversation started, though. i said that what this diner needed was some live music, some classical chamber music or a piano soloist. Me! she thought that was strange, this being a diner and all, a diner in a bumfuck town no less. she rolled her eyes but i continued, assuring her that this place would do gangbuster business if they got a Steinway concert grand, cleared away a few tables, and hired a pianist at $55/hour to play Tchaikowsky and Liszt for 3 or 4 hours a night. She thought that sounded delightful, then mentioned that she made $2.01 per hour working as a waitress at this place.