What It's Like To Be

I have been working at Red Robin now for almost six months and I have learned more about human behavior and patience in that time than I have ever expected. I have finally reached my breaking point about being a server to the point where I have to journal about it for the world to see. There are things that your servers will never tell you. There are things we do because we have no choice. This is just the short things I know from experiences or what my fellow servers have told me.

I think learning lines is the worst part of my job. The long, boring task of remembering something that the general public will forget within a second of me saying it makes you realise that linesdont need to be remembered they need to be performed. When you look at the opening line of Hamlet, it could be a throwaway line anywhere else within the play, the line in question, "who's there" but when you deconstruct that line like we are back doing our English GCSE's, those two words set up the play perfectly. That line can be deconstructed as much as "To be or not to be" in fact in performance you can almost predict how that will be said, by the actor, but that the challenge of acting sometimes, how do you stand out? Maybe that's another blog I can write about sometime. But with that very simple line you can go in so many directions.

The boys were so angry. And who could blame them. They had been taken from their homes - most of them without anything to all their own - and taken to a state-run shelter for boys aged 6-12. They were officially "in the system".

Of course, I have to begin by telling you that this particular story started more than four decades ago, in the early 70s. But let us go ahead and make this its new inception point, the place where we can chat cozily about our present states, express hopes for our precariously-balancing futures, and weave a tiny bit of our past in there too by way of context and providing that always irrestible backstory that begs to be told.

Picture It: Opening Night.

Rural towns are often the home of thriving agricultural practices and deep-rooted family traditions. For Allen County, Kentucky resident Dr. Kenny Joe Manion, that is especially true and proven several times over with his success in showing dairy cattle––something he has both learned from family, and passed along.

In the booming age of technology, it is easier to be informed than it has ever been in the past. Between apps like Twitter and people recording their experiences twenty-four-seven, society has become inundated with surveillance, making it nearly impossible to do anything without being “seen”. This is especially true for police officers. Everything they do is recorded and scrutinized, so a lot of footage has surfaced over the years of men and women under the badge doing something mistakenly, unprofessional, sometimes even illegal, and out of context, it’s not surprising. However, what doesn’t get reported are the less exciting, monotonous calls these individuals respond to on a daily basis; the mundane, inglorious things that keep our communities safe.

Earlier this month, I wrote and published an article on how PETA was attempting to take advantage of the bush fires that were affecting Australian wildlife and why people should not give a single penny to them. Upon its publication, and to my own surprise, the article blew to the point where it had a lot more readers than I originally expected when I publish my articles on Vocal. One of those readers was Kitty (not her real name), a former PETA employee who was so devastated about the news regarding the fires in the land down under that she donated to the WIRES Organization. She described her time at PETA as being vicious and so, she shared her story to me, which I have been given permission to share with all of you.