Former Detention Officer turned WDO and Pest Inspector
Hobbies/Interests: Astrophysics, Gaming, Psychology, Brain Puzzles
American ๐บ๐ธ Woman โ๏ธ
First it was television/MSM, then social media. Now it is AI.
Things designed to tempt humans to wilfully forfeit their ability to think for themselves and think critically.
Anyone who thinks for themselves and critically is not my enemy. Steel your mind. Soften your heart.
@RealCandaceO How will I know what day of the work week it is without Candace telling me "Happy ____day" ??? @RealCandaceO WHAT DAY IS IT?!?! and at least edit this post to start with "Alright you guys..." - you're the best, see you Friday!
In Louisiana the woman at the bakery gave me thirteen donuts and charged me for twelve.
I told her, with respect, that she had miscounted.
She did not look up. She said, "That's your lagniappe, baby."
I did not know the word. I asked her to say it again. She said it the way you say a thing to a man who is plainly not from here but is trying, which I have come to believe is the warmest voice in the American language.
Lagniappe, she said, is a little something extra. Given for free. For no reason. You did not ask for it and you cannot give it back. The thirteenth donut is not a mistake. The thirteenth donut is the law.
I stood in that bakery and I understood that I had just been shown a secret.
I have crossed an ocean. I have buried a father. I have held a line that could not be held and I did not step back. And in all of it I had never once handed a man a thing he had not earned, for a reason that did not exist. These people did it before nine in the morning, over donuts, and thought nothing of it. I resolved, right there, to learn the way of lagniappe if it cost me the rest of my life.
It did not cost me the rest of my life. It cost me about a week, and it went badly.
My first attempt was at the hardware store, where a man had once dropped a free screw into my palm. I returned to balance the debt. I bought a birdhouse I did not need and told him, quietly, that the second birdhouse would be his lagniappe.
He said he only saw one birdhouse.
I said the second was coming. I would build it. For him.
He said, "...you're gonna build me a birdhouse."
I said yes. As lagniappe.
He said that wasn't really how it worked.
This was a hard lesson. Lagniappe is given by the one who has, to the one who happens to be standing there. You cannot charge it to yourself as a debt and deliver it as a chore. I had turned a gift into homework, which is the one thing lagniappe will not be. I left the birdhouse unbuilt, which I am told is the correct number of birdhouses.
My second attempt was worse.
My neighbor, a kind woman named Miss Brenda, brought me a plate of what she called "just a little dirty rice, don't make a thing of it." I resolved to answer her lagniappe with a lagniappe of my own, and, being a samurai, I could not do little.
I gave her a tomato from my garden. Sensing the gift too small to hold my gratitude, I added the rest of the tomatoes. Then the plants they grew on. Then I went back for the wheelbarrow, to help her carry the plants.
She stood on her porch and watched a foreign man advance on her home pushing a wheelbarrow of his entire garden, and she said, and I will hold this in my heart until the day I die, "Oh, honey. No."
Oh, honey. No.
She sat me down. She poured me sweet tea, which I now understand was itself a lagniappe, and which I very nearly tried to repay with the wheelbarrow a second time. Then she explained, slowly, that the whole point of a little something extra is that it is little. That a gift a person cannot lift is not a gift, it is a bill. That the tomato had been perfect. That the wheelbarrow had been a cry for help.
I had believed generosity was a mountain, and that the tallest mountain won. In eight hundred years no one had told me it was one warm plate handed over a fence with the words don't make a thing of it. I have made a thing of everything. It is, I am beginning to fear, my whole personality.
The next morning I left a single tomato on Miss Brenda's porch. One. The good one. I did not knock and I did not explain. That, she had taught me, is the art: you leave the little thing and you get gone.
She caught me anyway, halfway across the yard.
She held up the tomato. "This my lagniappe?"
I said yes.
"Well, alright then."
Well, alright then.
Louisiana is the finest place I have ever failed to understand. I get something wrong here nearly every day and nobody minds. They feed me, and correct me, and feed me again, and send me off with one more of whatever it was, for no reason, which I am no longer permitted to refuse.
I keep one good tomato by my door now.
You never know who is going to happen to be standing there.
A family claims their $200,000 Lego Star Wars collection was withheld after a Bricks & Minifigs store changed ownership
The dispute has turned into a viral investigation by YouTuber Reckless Ben
@ShinraYGO True. And youre reasoning is sound. I think the reason I'm using Dai over Primate comes down my skill issue ๐ I need to learn these Primate/Roar combos better.
Could you make a SixSam - Using Primate combos guide?