A lot of people don’t believe jobs should make a living wage. They argue that if you want to make enough money to survive, you should get an education or work your way up out of entry level, while conveniently ignoring the fact that they’ve made education wildly expensive and that minimum wage is so outdated that in some places you can make double or triple minimum wage and still not be considered making enough to survive as a single adult with no dependents (I make over 3x minimum wage and rent on a small 1 bedroom apartment is over half my paycheck, if I don’t work OT shifts I don’t go grocery shopping that month). They also like to complain that no one wants to work anymore. My personal take is that if a job is worthwhile enough to society that someone needs to do it, that person deserves to make enough to survive, but apparently that’s a wildly socialist take in this country.

Once the immigrants are out they’ll just start onto the next group they don’t like. I have a family member who told me during Trump’s first presidency that I should “get out” and that I was no longer welcome in the country, simply for the crime of no longer being the good little brainwashed conservative I was raised to be. (I’d have loved to get out, but that takes money or education and I was raised with neither because conservatives like their children stupid and I’m trying but fuck it’s difficult to gain an education as a single adult in this economy)

They don’t want anyone here who doesn’t shut up and fall in line and you’d better be a heterosexual white nationalist Christian while you’re at it or you’re going to be fucked sooner or later.

I remember a little while ago when it was in the news for a very short time that they found several mass graves in PA of Irish who were brought over to be indentured servants. I don’t remember if they had determined what the cause of death was, whether it was illness or murder, but it stopped being news pretty quickly because no one really cared.

This is my random uninformed opinion, and I’m well aware that there are problems with it and it’s not the solution, I merely throw it out there as food for thought. I think every worker should make a living wage as base pay, but as a teenager I worked a job that was a tipped job (not food service).

It was in the late 2000s and early 2010s I made about $5.50 hr base pay, which was twice what my employer was legally allowed to pay me as a tipped employee, although by law at the end of the week if my tips didn’t get me up to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 they had to make up the difference.

I loved it. I did it for several years and at the end of every year I averaged $12+ an hour, and I was one of the employees who worked a larger chunk of slow shifts which obviously skewed my hourly average downwards. For a 15, 16, 17 year old teen in 2008 when the economy had crashed that was REALLY good money. Every other job was either a minimum wage job, or waitressing for tips. If I worked a busy shift I could work 4 hours and leave $100 in tips richer, plus my base pay. I don’t make $30 an hour now working in healthcare.

Anyway, all of that lengthy word salad to say that while I understand and agree with the arguments that tipping culture allows companies to not pay living wages, for teens and college students, who are probably always going to struggle, rightly or wrongly to get a well paying job, finding a job where they are mostly paid in tips can be a life changer. I worked hard in high school and stashed my tips away and when I turned 18 I had a (very) used car that I purchased myself and almost 10k in savings that I used to sustain myself through my 20s when I was trying to launch myself into adulthood through lower paying jobs that didn’t pay a living wage. I do not come from a privileged background, my parents didn’t help me with anything and in fact from the time I was in elementary school I had to work for basic life needs, so having that savings from my own work was a safety net that would have been almost impossible to build up $7.25 an hour.

So I take hours to fall asleep if I’m on a day shift schedule (I can go to bed at 9 or 10 and still be awake come 4 or 5 am) but when I work night shift and go to bed at 8 or 9 am I’m asleep within 15-30 minutes. I don’t usually dream that often, it seems to correspond more with my mental health. If I’m going through it I dream more. I think it’s both an escape mechanism and my brain’s way of processing things. Normally I don’t notice I start dreaming right away when I am in a full night’s sleep, but I’ve definitely hit the 5 minute snooze on my alarm, fallen back asleep, and had an entire intricate dream before the alarm woke me up 5 minutes later. I can also get incredibly amazing 3 minute long power naps and go from being dead on my feet to completely refreshed and ready to go for hours. No surprise, my sleep schedule is fucked. I work nights and go to school days and sometimes go 24-40 hours without getting sleep and actually function pretty well.

My partner at the time also witnessed both cats having a cat fight on top of me while I was asleep and said I never stirred. He also once found one of the cats sitting on my chest, slapping me repeatedly across the face and crying little distressed meows, unable to wake me. Now that I’m single I’m still a heavy sleeper, but I wake up if the cats call for me. I’ve also had a couple people throughout my life tell me that I’m such a still and quiet sleeper that they had to check my pulse because they couldn’t tell if I was breathing and they started to get scared.

A few years ago I had small unexplained tender bruises on my chest and arms that would not heal for several months, long enough that I was beginning to get a little concerned (is it cancer?).

One night I was lying awake at 3am when one of my cats chased the other into my bedroom and onto my bed. 4 paws came flying onto me, perfectly landing on each tender bruise before launching back off of me, then the other cat landed on me with his paws in the same spots before jumping off in chase of his furry friend.

Mystery solved, and that’s how I figured out just how heavy of a sleeper I am. My cats had been using my sleeping body as a launchpad for months and I was none the wiser until I happened to be awake.

Me all the time talking to my cat:

“Girl you are fat as fuck… … … It’s ok. Me too.”

We’re both working on it.