A bell is a cup until it is struck

Swear to god I am never so brutally socially anxious as when I'm trying to tip a gogo dancer at the club because like. The idea to tip always enters my mind at the drunkest possible moment of the evening and I forget all the previous tipping moments and scromble around in my bag for a dollar and then have to navigate the crowd and while I'm doing that I realize that it is in fact the drunkest moment of the evening but it's too late to back out, she's already seen me coming with my sweaty dollar so there we are. Me (drunk, strange) and her (standing at some profound level of elevation.)

“When I encounter a character in a story, whom I have to live with for more than a certain number of pages, by St. Marx and St. Engels, I want to know where the money comes from that buys the character’s food and shelter — if the character requires any. […] There’s no class, from the upper to the lower, that doesn’t benefit from learning to ask that question. And there’s no writer who isn’t made a more aware person by playing with the various ways of suggesting the answer — and suggesting is far more interesting than stating — in his or her texts.”