Anyone who, like me, has ever been an underpaid, under-appreciated member of the service industry knows how awesome it is to get a tip from a happy customer. Not only can that tip mean the difference between eating tonight and not, it can also make a terrible job more tolerable when you know that someone appreciates your commitment to providing the best service possible to each and every customer. However, when on the other side of the relationship, rewarding someone for a job well done is not quite so clear and simple; the line between thanking and insulting can be very thin. Some professions do not expect a tip, some see a tip as trivializing their work and some see tipping too low more insulting that not tipping at all. How can we be sure that our intended gratitude will be interpreted correctly? Continue reading
Category Archives: Life & Photography
Paper Anniversary
My husband and I are approaching our paper anniversary this weekend and I, for one, am very excited. Throughout our decade long courtship, we would get each other what ever little gift caught our fancy to commemorate the day we started dating until the tedious strangeness of shopping without each other and the difficulty of keeping the gift a secret got the better of us and we just stopped buying gifts. We didn’t stop acknowledging the day, but around year six, it started feeling odd and immature to celebrate a day neither of us could fully remember, and which bore little significance to our lives. It wasn’t like we were celebrating a thoughtful commitment, we were celebrating the day that he ask me a “rhetorical question” and I said something like, “yeah, sure.” This is why I was very excited to start the anniversary counter back to zero when we got married. I continue to be excited for being able to choose a meaningful gift based on tradition instead of a useless gift based on my panicked ideas the day I realize our anniversary is tomorrow. I am determined to stick to the traditional gifts due at every marriage milestone, not only because I think it will be fun, but also because I get teary eyed thinking about exchanging gold with my beloved husband 49 years from now. Continue reading
Marriage Expectations
Based on an actual conversation.
Gender, Power and Contradiction in Ancient Rome
This article will discuss women’s roles and behaviours in ancient Rome, particularly, the differing points of view regarding a person’s right to determine whether their child will be raised or not. The basis of the contradiction this paper will explore is one source, Oxyrhynchus Papyri 744, showing a social acceptance of post-conception means of family planning, while another, Ovid’s Love Affairs, says that post-conception family planning is morally wrong. In greater depth, the contradictory opinion held in ancient Rome is that one person had the right to decide whether a newborn infant would be raised by the family or exposed, while another did not have the right to decide whether they would continue with a pregnancy or have said pregnancy aborted. This hypocritical view can be attributed to the structure of power relations between men and women in ancient Roman society. Continue reading