A Story about Pizza by Don Miguel Ruiz

THE MAGICAL KITCHEN

Imagine that you have a magical kitchen in your home. In that magical kitchen, you can have any food you want from any place in the world in any quantity. You never worry about what to eat; whatever you wish for, you can have at your table. You are very generous with your food; you give your food unconditionally to others, not because you want something in return from them. Whoever comes to your home, you feed just for the pleasure of sharing your food, and your house is always full of people who come to eat the food from your magical kitchen.

Then one day someone knocks at your door, and it’s a person with a pizza. You open the door, and the person looks at you and says, “Hey, do you see this pizza? I’ll give you this pizza if you let me control your life, if you just do whatever I want you to do. You are never going to starve because I can bring pizza every day. You just have to be good to me.”

Can you imagine your reaction? In your kitchen you can have the same pizza — even better. Yet this person comes to you and offers you food, if you just do whatever he wants you to do. You are going to laugh and say, “No, thank you! I don’t need your food; I have plenty of food. You can come into my house and eat whatever you want, and you don’t have to do anything. Don’t believe I’m going to do whatever you want me to do. No one will manipulate me with food.”

Now imagine exactly the opposite. Several weeks have gone by, and you haven’t eaten. You are starving, and you have no money in your pocket to buy food. The person comes with the pizza and says, “Hey, there’s food here. You can have this food if you just do what I want you to do.” You can smell the food, and you are starving. You decide to accept the food and do whatever that person asks of you. You eat some food, and he says, “If you want more, you can have more, but you have to keep doing what I want you to do.”

You have food today, but tomorrow you may not have food, so you agree to do whatever you can for food. You can become a slave because of food, because you need food, because you don’t have it. Then after a certain time you have doubts. You say, “What am I going to do without my pizza? I cannot live without my pizza. What if my partner decides to give the pizza to someone else — my pizza?”

Now imagine that instead of food, we are talking about love. You have an abundance of love in your heart. You have love not just for yourself, but for the whole world. You love so much that you don’t need anyone’s love. You share your love without condition; you don’t love if. You are a millionaire in love, and someone knocks on your door and says, “Hey, I have love for you here. You can have my love, if you just do whatever I want you to do.”

When you are full of love, what is going to be your reaction? You will laugh and say, “Thank you, but I don’t need your love. I have the same love here in my heart, even bigger and better, and I share my love without condition.”

But what is going to happen if you are starving for love, if you don’t have that love in your heart, and someone comes and says, “You want a little love? You can have my love if you just do what I want you to do.” If you are starving for love, and you taste that love, you are going to do whatever you can for that love. You can even be so needy that you give your whole soul just for a little attention.

Your heart is like that magical kitchen. If you open your heart, you already have all the love you need. There’s no need to go around the world begging for love: “Please, someone love me. I’m so lonely, I’m not good enough for love; I need someone to love me, to prove that I’m worthy of love.” We have love right here inside us, but we don’t see this love.

What makes you happy is love coming out of you. And if you are generous with your love, everyone is going to love you. You are never going to be alone if you are generous. If you are selfish, you are always going to be alone, and there is no one to blame but you. Your generosity will open all the doors, not your selfishness. Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant. We become selfish when we believe that maybe tomorrow we won’t have any pizza. But when we know that our heart is a magical kitchen, we are always generous, and our love is completely unconditional.

Ceeblebrities

Ohmygodohmyogdohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod

I served the velvet-voiced Mr. Ian Hanomansing last night, or as I will henceforth always refer to him, Dreamy McCbcnews. I think I drooled on his donair, and couldn't help but grin at him every time I passed his table, despite the fact that he was with his wife and kids. I hovered around their table busying myself with tidying tasks in order to eavesdrop on their conversations. He tipped well. If anyone is intersted on bidding on it, I have his beer glass, lip print intact, for sale on EBay.

tabernacle!

Dear friends,

So much love. As a result of overwhelming pressure, I've gotten off my What Not to Wear-watching ass (which I'm starting to think might be complimented by something in a houndstooth) and decided to continue giving you little e-pieces of my Diddy-loving heart. Take it!

Some people really know how to ruin your evening. I got sworn at a lot in French last night by a guy who didn't get the fries he hadn't asked for with his Italian Club Sandwich. Why was he mad, you might ask, if he didn't order them? Because they're pictured on the placemat, my friends. And what's on the placemat is truth with a capital T. I especially enjoyed the fact that we'd been speaking in broken Franglais (for my New Brunswick readership that's 'Chiac') the entire time and when he broke off into a stream of church-related obscenities really seemed to think he was being sneaky and that I wouldn't understand him. "Speak in English" urged his sympathetic looking lady friend. "It's fine," I assured her, "I'm still following along quite well," though he did manage a 'fuck' or two just in case. His friends hung their heads and furiously dug into their succulent Tuscan Chicken Salads. But for the rest of the meal the guy and all of his friends were sweet as a Brownie Skillet to me and tipped me heartily. So the question is, why? Why are people such raging lunatic assholes when it comes to dealing with service people (who, in this case, didn't even screw up! And believe me, I have screwed up, forgotten to place orders, placed orders wrong, dropped stuff, all of it. And I don't care enough to hide it when it happens, rather, in a somehwat adult like fashion I own up to it and apologize and give discounts. I don't need to lie about it.) I was working overtime to serve these people (we close at 10, said incident happened around 10:30) and didn't care because I was having a good time talking with them and laughing at my own pathetic attempt to speak french after a long hiatus, and suddenly this jerk has to spoil my good mood. The only logical conclusion I can come to is that Francaphones are evil and that they should all leave the country. Oh no wait, that was my hillbilly co-worker's opinion, not mine. I always get those two things mixed up. I wish I could remember if it was me who referred to an originally-from-India Mt. A professor as a Paki or someone else. Hmmm....

For more information, please see www.sackvillepizzadelight.com

I'd also like to point out that Diddy's summer menu features the exact green tones that characterize my blog - if that ain't a match made in heaven....

bling bling

Last night I made 70 bucks in tips.

closure...but not of the restaurant

When my mom was visiting me in Sevilla we went to the city's Cathedral to visit it and feel intimidated by a structure built with the blood money reaped from the 'New World'. As we were entering there were two yankee tourists behind us. One said to the other, in that bored university dude voice, "Man, my dogs are really barkin". "I kneouuuu, mine teuuuuu", replied dude #2. The point of posting that anecdote here on my P Diddyblog is that i actually felt like using that expression last night after 7 hours of waiting tables and cleaning, because I think it meant that dude #1's feet were really tired and sore. I was exhausted, and in that one day gained an immense new respect for people who do this for extended periods of time, i mean for years of their life, or forever. I already felt like calling in sick today. Not a good sign.

I think what i like about P Diddy's is the finite character of the repetitive routines. Task after task is something completable, you never leave any loose ends not tied up at the end of a shift. Your tables get seated, served, cleared and reset. Closure. You start with a float. You take money, give change, collect tips, do your end of shift reconiciliation of money stuff, put it in an envelope and stick it in the safe. You have your float back at the end of the shift. Closure. I punch in at the beginning of my shift. I punch out at the end and I really, truly can leave work, not just physically leave but bring worries and stress and things to prepare for the next day home with me. Closure. Everything is so efficient. You punch your orders into the computer, they go to the kitchen automatically and when they are ready the printout is there lying on your food on the warming table to prove to you that it's all there. You barely even have to talk to anyone else. It's so clean and fast and easy. I don't think that kind of simplicity has ever been a characteristic in my life before. It's of course at the same time incredibly disturbing, knowing that everything from the secret sauce recipe to the flecks of colour in the carpet are identical to those of the PDiddys all over the place. Like how Subways smells the same in Barcelona and in Sackville. It's ugly. But my head has been swimming with uncertainties and open-ended plans for years now, and this PDiddy routine has been really bizarrely calming.

would you like a side order of colon cancer with that?

Ok so aside from the fact that I am directly contributing to the exaggeratedly premature deaths of people I went to high school with and motorcyclists from Bouctouche by encouraging them to clog their arteries with the greasy goodness splayed out in an all you can eat buffet, and from the fact that in my men's size medium button up collared work shirt i look, well, there's no easier way to say it - hideously unattractive - and aside from the fact that I have a slick layer of grease on my face by the end of even the shortest of shifts, aside from all that, i actually really like this job.

I've made an average of 7.50 an hour just in tips the last two shifts, that's a dollar more than I'm making in normal wages per hour. The people I work for, and with, are so nice, and even the customers are shockingly patient and friendly. I got thrown in off the deep end yesterday, sent onto the 'floor' after an hour and a half of orientation. So far no spills, messed up orders or fingers on the pizza as I carried it out.

The best part is the training manual and the Pizza Delight 10 point system...a sort of timeline of how to get people in and out in under an hour. They give helpful hints such as mini scripts you can use to sneakily 'upsell' someone's order..basically pressure them into ordering appetizers and getting the large garlic fingers instead of the medium, that sort of thing. By the way, and this one goes out to the Ontarians, did you know that Pizza Delight actually invented Garlic Cheese Fingers? We're supposed to work that little fact into our 'script' as often as we can. I like my manager because he seems to recognize that the corportate branding stuff is all bullshit, and says he only mentions it because they send a 'mystery shopper' in every month to check how things are going. I was curious to know if the mystery shopper was the guy in the 1995 Van Halen World Tour tshirt who came in yesterday reeking, and i mean like from across the room reeking, of weed and ate from the buffet without stopping for at least 45 minutes. What a good costume that would be!

I've got to go eat cos I'm back for my first 5 hour shift in an hour's time. We get 50% off of the restaurant food but seriously, after looking at all the disgusting scraps from people's plates and watching the way that people can shovel in multiple platefuls of that food without seemingly taking a breath, like pigs at the trough, I really don't think I'll be taking advantage of it very often.