In China, I would make a point of occasionally posting about the things that I actually liked about that place. I did it as a matter of fairness: no place is all either good or bad, but this blog tends to focus on the bad. That’s actually by design. No one actually likes those stories where everything was awesome and you were great. Those stories reek of teenage bravado¹. A story about the time shit went south real fast always makes for a much better yarn.

And that’s what this blog is principally about – a good yarn about my shitty life. But to be perfectly honest, while I dish a whole lot of that out, we need to cleanse the pallet a little bit from time to time.

So I am pretty happy to say that most of the people I have found myself working with at my jobs (both the baseball job and the hotel) like me and treat me very well. It’s not a perfect hit rate, but I would be confident saying that damn near 95% of them do, and the ones that don’t aren’t all that well received themselves. I for the most part feel welcomed at these places, and the people there are happy to joke and pass the time with me.

Largely, I bring it up because of how concerned I was with the first job I had here in Richmond. When I worked at that shitty Irish Pub I was pretty much disliked by all but two people, and when the numbers are overwhelmingly against you in that fashion, its pretty easy (and kind of right) to assume that you are the one doing something wrong in that case. That was a pretty large concern I had. But I can now look back at that period kind of objectively, and I realize that there probably wasn’t much wrong with me. It was just the place and the people I was working for.

So fuck them. I’ve moved on and am better for it.

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