An Open Letter to Doormen

Dear Doormen,

Hi, my name is Elias and I am contacting you regarding your friend, another doorman. I did not have such a great experience with you guys and I now have mental anguish because of it. It's really not that bad, and I'm not going to commit any hate crimes against doormen, but I see how you guys are now.
Like for one, I know you always need a tip, but there's a limit on how much I can tip you.

For example, when you take my bags to my room, why do you expect me to be so generous as to give you a crazy tip that will make you quit your job? If everyone gave you twenties you'd be making more money than me. It also depends where you are located to be a doorman. If you're in Austin, the minimum tip amount I believe you should be receiving is no less than five dollars and no more than ten dollars as the maximum tip amount per bag per trip to the room. This is only in luxury hotels, no La Quintas.Unless it's Christmas and I'm Donald Trump, you're not getting any twenties from me. I can carry my own bags thank you very much. I hope I'm not offending you, it's just that you're a bit more needy than I am and as guest, we don't really need much except maybe the pass code to the swimming pool and what channel HBO is on. There are only certain instances in where I would be provoked to give you more. For example, if a doorman has some sort of nice conversation with me or just looks like a cool guy and we share a laugh, of course I cant leave him hanging there with five bucks.

When it comes down to it, you guys aren't much different from your distant valet parking cousins who take care of your car, which I think is a lot more important than rolling a suitcase. Now those guys carry much more value to me than doormen. Sorry, but they do and you know it's true. It's for a much shorter time and you don't really see them, but deep down you have a greater trust in them than most people which in turn if you're not the valet guys from Ferris Bueller, I can show a greater appreciation for. It's not you, it's me. So the next time we meet, I hope you'll remember these things, and just be cool with it. I know it's your job, but that doesn't mean make it a job. Just hold the damn door.

With Much Thought,

Your Favorite Hotel Guest, Elias

What it's like to be a bike mechanic

I got asked the other day what I do for a living and I told them I do homework and go to school. But I also work as a bicycle mechanic sometimes too. So I'm going to share a little bit about what I actually do as a bike mechanic.

I started working there two summers ago, and mainly during summers. The shop opens at 10 and usually everyone gets there about 9:45 because they had just gotten back from a ride and need to shower and do whatever before we open. But I won't focus on them as much.
So most mornings, I make sure everything looks good, normal stuff. Sometimes someone will be making coffee or if the Tour de France is on, we'll be watching that. What I do besides being a mechanic is everything else and everything no one else wants to do. I've done just about everything there is to do in a bike shop environment (except clean the bathrooms, I'm not into that). Some days I'll just be stocking things for a large part of the day and talking to customers about Lance Armstrong, assuming I know what he's up to recently because they can't relate bicycles to anything else. Or some days I'll be on a lunch run on a bike, those are always fun. One of the weirdest things I've had to deal with though is during my summer working there, a woman had walked in with a bike, completely painted white and asked if I could fix it up. She looked like a student at UT and was probably the most desperate person I've ever seen in my life. It was one of those 'ghost bikes' you see on the side of the road with some flowers and a picture of the person that had died. She brought in a ghost bike. I really didn't know what to do. I stood there staring at the bike, unsure of what to tell the woman. It's pretty much like someone giving you a smelly body bag and asking if you can clean it for them. Not saying she killed the guy, but same concept.

"Do you think you can fix this? I need to get around."

On other days, I'll be changing the lightbulbs in the most hard to reach places, testing out bikes, re-arranging anything that can be re-arranged, once to the point of renovating the entire bike shop.

A lot of the time it gets boring, except for Saturdays and Sundays, those days are crazy. People will come in with bikes, wheels, children, dogs, questions, wanting to rent bikes, wanting to know what Lance Armstrong is up to these days, wanting to know if they can do this on their bike, wanting to know how much this will cost, asking if we sell bikes here, and the thing I hate most, asking if they can speak to someone else.

I usually get that a lot, almost every day I'm working there "Is there someone else I can talk to about this?" or "Wait, do you work here?" or hesitating to trust me with their bike.

Yes, I do work here and no, there is no one else you can talk to.
But it's not that bad, I've actually had someone say they prefer having me work on their bike when they bring it in, now that's cool.

I didn't touch on everything, but there's a little bit about what I do as a bike mechanic. 

Is being a local such a bad thing?

As I was walking in Whole Foods today buying organic organics in the organic section, I noticed a man who was wearing a shirt that read "I AM A LOCAL" in bold letters and then had a clothing company's name in Austin along the bottom of the shirt. And I guess it's something to be proud of, but the way it was worn by that guy made it look like everyone else would say something like "Yeah, so what?". Or how everyone else encourages others not to move here with the most pretentious intentions. But it's really not such a bad thing. So many people come to Austin and what are you going to do about it? Get over it. Austin is no longer a secret. Because of all this, being a local isn't really a big deal.There's at least 700,000 people who are just like any other local in Austin. It's almost the same as saying you're a local in New York City; it doesn't entitle you to anything at all.

They're not even locals yet.

And it's so hard to not be a local when you are a local and other "locals" are doing things that actual  locals have been doing forever. That's when you spot a fake local.

Fake local: (Noun) - Someone who claims to be a local to a city when they've only been living for less than ten-ish years, or has the newest area code, or cannot pronounce street names correctly, or is a student living in a city only for school.

And for being an adult, and voting and stuff now, I still don't think I'm really a local. And you know what else, no one is really a local. For it to be true, you can only really call yourself a local in the final seconds before your death. Only then can people recognize it and spot a true local. It's like saying you're on the distinguished plan in high school, but still on the recommended plan until the very last day when a counselor will decide whether or not that student meets the requirements for being on the distinguished plan. Same deal.

So the next time someone calls themselves a local, you'll know that they're faking it.

Then and Now: Coffee

In my younger more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Coffee stunts your growth. Now I'm much older and wiser and drink coffee when I need to, but not as a morning routine. My dad is shorter than me, and I'm short. But my mom is shorter than my dad, so who am I? Coffee (thats a math joke). But then I look around at the rest of my family, and they're short too. It's almost like I'm Snow White and the more than Seven Dwarfs. Then I come to school and I'm the shortest of the group. But anyway, I googled my burning question and it turns out the be false. What a relief, now I can drink coffee by the gallon. But coffee is much more prevalent in my environment than it should be. I see it everywhere in the mornings, I see it in advertisements, I see it where I work to be used as more of a drug than anything else, I see it as birthday presents, and even in my own hands. But one thing I just haven't gotten a hold of, Starbucks. I just don't get it. I'm pretty sure I've talked about it before, so I won't go into my problems with Starbucks. So I've slowly been slipping into this whole coffee fad, and then I've noticed my teeth are looking a lot less white than they used to. So I stopped. Now I only take coffee in from an IV, and it seems to be working out pretty well. Just kidding, but I did slow it down to about a cup every other day, mostly at night. From what used to be something I saw as not very attractive to my five year old self is now something I use to my advantage. I use it for cycling, which makes a huge difference from winning and losing, but of course not around NICA, which bans the use of caffeine in cycling. I caught on to that from a friend who's a world champion in mountain biking and he drinks it religiously. In any other case I use it for late nights when I need to stay up. Mornings and coffee don't mix with me, just because it's too mainstream. Coffee as a drink is as far as I am going  to take it, no more no less. Not art, not as a present, not as a lifestyle, but as a drink that I drink. But there are certain situations when coffee becomes a part of a lifestyle, unconsciously. Like if someone asks "Well would you like to come upstairs for some coffee?" or "Hey maybe we can go out for coffee sometime".

You see, tea drinkers lives are much more simplified, that's why I sometimes prefer tea over coffee (unless it's social, then I go to coffee). Because tea is not as flamboyant as coffee. Coffee has more friends than tea because tea has only two friends, Green and Black. But tea can always make amends for  more friends, because if the Brits can do it so can we (just don't add milk).

Note: I am not a pretentious coffee or tea drinker. I'll even microwave my instant coffee to prove it. 

Elias & Friends Season Three 2014-2015

Season Three of Elias and Friends Beginning September-ish 2014

Kidnapped all of Late Night's sketch-comedy writers. This year is gonna be great.

The worst books I have ever read

I've read a lot of good books in my lifetime. I've also read many bad books. But the bad one's are the one's you never hear about. I stumbled upon this question as I was ease dropping on another student and teacher. Well not really, they were talking fairly loud, and I could hear it.
Anyway, they were talking about how they've read so many good books, but end up sometimes choosing books that they had no idea would be so bad because they only looked up "Best Books for  "x" ", not "worst books" or "books to never choose for an English class" because sometimes teachers love to throw those in.
So here's a bit of some of the worst books I have ever read (not in any particular order).

Herman Hesse, author of Siddhartha 10 years after it's publishing

The Master and the Margarita Bulgakov

An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore

Animal Farm Orwell

Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler

Catch-22 Joseph Heller

Siddhartha Hermann Hesse

If you ever have the chance in your life to read these books, don't. Although some might praise these books as a must read, they're books that are a must read for the wrong reasons. You might have read one of these books and found them to be cool, but for the average reader, not so cool.

Going off topic: Surviving on my own

In two years, I'll be in college. I don't know exactly where or how, but I'll be there. That also means I'll be put out into the wild to survive on my own. I can't remember the last time I've been out on my own for at least a week, ever. If it was, I was probably with someone or having my parents on me 24/7 asking if I'm "okay". But I'm not babied, no that's not the kind of  kid I am or was. I prefer to be treated like a normal person. For example, whenever I'm at Thundercloud picking up a sandwich with my mom or dad, the guy never talks to me. He just says "lettuce, tomato, onion?" with no side conversations whatsoever. But the last time when I was on my own, the guy had opened up to me about how bad his morning was and into serious depth about his girlfriend and personal life. But if I were working there, I wouldn't want to be talking to a momma's boy about my morning either so I guess it's a normal thing. But then the worst part is that I'll have to be paying for it all the time and paying bills which means getting an actual job doing actual things. I mean, the only adult things I did today was drink coffee and have awkward conversations. But no Starbucks. Starbucks is probably the last place I'll pick up coffee. I'd usually just go to any restaurant or coffee shop next to my house, because it's all the same really. There's only two kinds of coffee in this world, pretty good coffee, and eh I'll drink it. There's no cafe latte with a mochachino frap vanilla and cinnamon category in this. That's not even coffee, it's warm milk! It  falls into the pretty good category. The instant coffee you make at home is also pretty good if you add enough creamer. Then there's the one's who drink it with only sugar or only one thing. That falls into the "eh, I'll drink it" category.

I majored in sociology and look at me now! (3rd time I've used this picture)

I went into a Starbucks one time. It was the first and the last time I went there. I walked in and asked for a large coffees. The girl there said "We don't have large coffees, we have ventis." So I said "Alright well give me a venti." They also spelled my name wrong but hey, they work at Starbucks. I won't give them too much of a hassle. But anyway, then they asked what I wanted. I said "I told you I wanted a venti." But they wanted to know what to put in it and I said "COFFEE." "Well what kind? there's a menu." And by now I'm a little frustrated with this girl and so I just said "Surprise me, just give me one of those vanilla cafe swirl things." or something like that, you get the idea. I was then charged four dollars for coffee and milk that tasted like hot cocoa. That was the first and last time I ever went to Starbucks.