When Last We Left Our Heroine ...

I have not been writing.  Anywhere.  Much.  There's not much to write.  Here are the contours of my red-carpet life:

1.  Once a week I waddle over to physical therapy in a futile attempt to ameliorate a worsening case of sciatica that affects my right side.  The therapist and I chat as I lie on my back and let her push my big toe into my nostril.  On the other days I stretch myself while looking at a Dexter DVD upside down.  It all seems to help.  For a while.  Lately the pain has come back with a vengeance and if Husband No. 1, Cuthbert, is nearby I am prone to bite his shoulder, not with passion but with chagrin from having turned over in bed too fast.

2.  I am taking the same mathematics class that brought me to my knees last semester.  Different professor, different angle.  Up until this week it was familiar.  Now we are studying logic, er, make that Logic and its Rules of Inference:  Modus ponens and modus tollens.  Ugh.  I wasted hours 'net-surfing yesterday instead of cracking the code of this stuff.  Cuthbert thinks I am getting my comeuppance.  Maybe, but I still can't see what's wrong with the following:

All Australians have noses.
I have a nose.                           

Therefore, I am an Australian.

whah?  whah?

3.  Lately, I have been thinking what it'll be like to be student teaching at my age.  I will tell the students that they're actually quite lucky.  The odds are that while I may be in class on a Friday, perhaps I'll die in my sleep over the weekend and they won't have to take the exam.  Morbid and black humor is an acquired taste and I have a hunch it doesn't work with American teenagers (just like it doesn't work with Husband No. 1), so I'll have to come up with something else.

4.  Went to go see a marvelous work-in-progress last night at New Haven's The Big Room.  Abe Gomez-Delgado's "Isla de la Mona (Part I)".  One thing I will say is:  had me fooled.  You can read about it via the link.

5.  Spring is coming.  The days are longer and warmer.  Now that some of the snow has melted I've discovered that the leeks are still green.  (In a nuclear holocaust all that will be left are plastic bags, cockroaches and these damn leeks all over my yard.)  It is a season of renewal and I am hoping that it lifts my boat, too.

That is all.

As My Grandmother Used to Say ...

... well, suh! (aka will wonders never cease) when there was a wholly unanticipated turn of events that made life work out for the better.  And before le deluge d'hiver of the past few days, were Grandma Mamie alive she would have exclaimed twice -- once when the Pope of New Haven announced his resignation and the other when the Pope of the Rest of Youse announced his.

Well, I'm back.  No novel stories to tell about the blizzard.  We were relatively unscathed -- we have a driveway; we had food, heat, DVDs, fiction and copies of the New York Times dating back to 1967, electrical power and a block full of motorheads who like nothing better than using their snowblowers for hours on end.  So, what the hell.  If ever there was a time to sit back and enjoy it, that was the time.  And if you don't count the prospect of having to eat some long forgotten glass noodles crammed in the back of the cabinet (in case of culinary emergency) because there was no getting to a market as a tragedy, it was practically a no foul, no harm event .  Husband No. 1 and I both, ehem, work from home, so it wasn't like the enforced togetherness led to homicidal thoughts, and good weather and bad we always argue about who has to take out the garbage, recycling and compost so why let 3 feet of snow change that dynamic, n'est-ce pas? 
 
I leave you with this:  while it is beginnings that give our lives joy, it is endings which give our life meaning.

Saturday Poetry: The Circumcision (another excerpt)

She hit him with the lion's paw.

He punched her belly

then ran.

She left the cat running --

flopping, twisting

howling and hissing --

to chase my brother

down the hall.

Our head turned to follow the race.

There was nowhere to pass

only overtake.

At first he laughed.

He was 13 and fast.

She was his Mother!

His Mother!

For her, though

this was no game.

Desperate and cornered

he leaped through the plate glass door.

The glass and he screamed.

The crown imbedded in his skull

shone brilliantly

before he fell to the grass

his flesh and blood among the shafts.

He touched his brow in wonderment.

He turned to look at our Mother's face

her body framed in the pane's sunburst

the arm poised for murder,

and galloped from her rage.

She charged to sever him

and came to her senses

in the waning light.

She saw his teammates frozen

with mitts in hand.

The jagged glass.

(The money!  The money!)

My brother prostrate

His face bleeding

My father diminished

Our heart throbbing

The beast growling

Her chest heaving

The arm lowering.

Animal You're Most Like?

I finally figured it out:  I'm a hermit crab.  Met the little buggars walking to the beaches of St. John.  I don't know what sets off their sensors -- perhaps changes in air pressure as you prepare to step on them?  They retract into their shells, and like infants, think themselves disappeared.  As you can imagine, it hasn't been working all that well for me either.

My vow this year is to do less.  That translates into less studying (but more learning), less eating (period), less worrying and less carrying the same old baggage in the same old ways.  Some days are different; others a repeat of the past.  No need to catastrophize, though, I must try again.

So, yesterday, in the spirit of Doing Things Differently I went to a workshop organized by New Haven's Just Moves and I danced.  You could say it was dancing for social justice, which doesn't make any sense if you haven't done it yet, but the longer I've lived here during a time where there has been so much violent death, the more the work of Elijah Anderson and others I've read, the longer I've been conversation with people who classify disfiguring and murderous violence as a public health emergency and a human-made disaster, the more I am convinced that smart policing alone is only part of the solution.  Part of the solution comes from the heart (connectedness) and the belly (having a primal hunger satisfied in communion with others).

So, here I am a self-professed human crab who cooks two times a year (if pressed).  This should be an interesting experiment.  to be continued ...

Ungrateful Wretch That I Am

It has been more than 5 weeks since I last wrote anything about anything or anybody here.  Not like there has been a shortage of news, horror, privation, misery and human comedy of late.  Not in the world; not in this house.  But, the truth is that depression often gets the upper hand with me and I've long since outgrown the need to show the bloody stump.  So, I will talk around it's margins with the expectation (and hope) that it will all make sense.

Firstly, I was on vacation for about 2 weeks in January.  Vacation is still an alien concept to me -- my parents were too poor and disharmonious to take any real ones with 4 kids (and I don't count the 20+ hours driving to South Carolina every 4 years avoiding the segregated diners and peeing on the side of the road as a vacation) and I'm from the mid-west and what's the point of livin' if you ain't workin'?  On the other hand, my husband, the continental, thinks it's in the American Constitution that each and every one of us should have no less that 5 consecutive weeks off every year (and twice on Sunday).  So we have had this strange dance for years where you have to pry my cold dead hands off the keyboard and he would, if it didn't have the taint of slavery, truss me on top of the truck and drive towards warm weather.  The latest outcome was a trip that we took with Fred to St. John, of the US Virgin Islands.

I lied a bit.  I left messages that I was out of the country, if only so as not to rack up a $500 cell phone bill from all the roaming charges, but St. John is technically part of the US, a poor relation who gets less attention than does Puerto Rico.  They take US dollars and put up with mainland tourists, their life's blood.

We went there because of the snorkeling; it is considered to be one of the premiere places on the planet, and they were not disappointed.  I, who hardly bathes, was the third wheel to 2 men who stayed in the water for hours swimming with barracudas, sharks, stingrays, jellyfish, and all other manner of spotted and benign life.  I snorkeled for about 60 seconds and when I reached the moment where I couldn't touch the bottom I had me a good ol' panic attack and promptly tried to separate Fred's right arm from his shoulder.  That's enough of that, and I spent the rest of my days sunbathing and reading David Balducci novels.

This is my second snorkeling vacation, and for me it has the character of a teetotaler going on a wine-tasting junket in the south of France.  Other than the location, what really is the point?  So much of what makes being in St. John worth it is in the water, a place I spent little time in.  Left on shore to my own devices I spent time watching people watch us.  For, you see, the 3 of us are like the opening line to a profane, but very funny joke:  A nigger, a chink and a paddy walk into a bar ...  We are so unlike the usual recreational colonialists who go there because tourist = rich white American on St. John, that, especially with the absence of any identifying jewelry, no one could figure out what our relations were.  It was obvious we weren't swingers nor siblings.  But, it was ambiguous if any of us were married and, perverse bitch that I can be, I wasn't going to make it any easier for anybody to figure out.  (I'm reminded of that weight loss pyramid scheme where the slogan was Lose weight how?  Ask me now!!!!!)

As these things go, being the black one of the trio and a woman to boot, people will say things to me that they wouldn't dare say to 2 men who could jackhammer them into the ground with one hand tied behind their backs.  The best of the worst was from the dreadlocked fireman.  Each day we drove down from our vacation villa passing the firehouse on the way to the beach, and waved a greeting to these guys who have the easiest and best job on a land mass completely surrounded by water.  Each day they acknowledged us.  One evening in the car with Fred (the chink) on our way to see 2 friends who coincidentally were vacationing at the same time and spent most of their days laid up with the flu and ear infections, the fireman says to me:  I'm watching you.  I say to Fred, I want to stop there when we go back.  But, the evening was long and although I'd planned to get all passive resistance and gandhian with Mr. Race Man, I just let it go.

What was unsaid and unspoken between the fireman and I can be traced back to the long history of African bondage, colonialism, slave rebellion, class privilege (for St. John et al. used to be one of the playgrounds of the Rockefellers and their ilk), and supplicant status that is the Virgin lslands.  He and I will never have that conversation.  Like the Louisiana that I knew in the late 1970's, St. John is another place on earth that won't see me again.

 

They Were Babies

I have been silent lately, busy with the end of semester.  But what happened in Newtown, CT today can't go unacknowledged.  I know no more and perhaps less than you do.  I don't want more details because those that have been revealed have been terrible enough.  This I do know:  most of those who died were babies.  Babies.  Square-headed, pouched-bellied, knee-hugging babies.

Only one event has taken me back to church for solace since I left 40+ years ago.  One was 9/11; this may be the other.

I leave you Charlie Pierce.

A Gift of Thanksgiving

Truth be told the bar is getting lower.  As far as my math course goes, I just want to finish all the while learning what I can.  Knowing that it is superficial and prone to being washed away the moment I stop attempting proofs in a particular section.  All of this is now a rehearsal to take this class again.  Getting back on the horse.  Hair of the dog.  yadda yadda yadda.  So far I haven't looked at my midterm grade because it will contribute to my disappointment, it will do nothing to make it any easier for me to work one problem at a time.  A post or so before, I likened this experience to pregnancy.  Now extending the metaphor, a stillbirth.  It will have a name and it will leave its traces and if you look closely you will see evidence of having had the experience.  But not the one I expected and hoped for.

So, a gift to me and to us all is Krista Tippett's interview with Brené Brown. 

I Am One Fit Short of A Psych Admission

No poetry, no nothing these days.  Having bad dreams about losing math tests, although losing them may be better than handing them in blank.  Anyway, a link to something so funny I had to stop.  It was starting to hurt and I stopped breathing.  Now, this is some good satire .... Laugh alone, they break out the syringe.  Laugh with others, the staff of life.

Enjoy.

Studying Math is Like Being Nine Months Pregnant

It's not really, but I have to same feeling of just wanting this to be the hell over with.  Each week this goes on I define success downward.  Today I feel finishing the class without withdrawing or taking an imcomplete is almost valorous.  Eeeeh.  Not much to report because it's all-math-all-the-time, but I found this succinct criticism about Libertarianism.  A movement, a politicaly philosophy I've not studied and yet have an instinctive aversion towards.  What follows is as good a response as any of what I see as some of the inherent contradictions of it all.  It's in reply to a Eunomia (Daniel Larison) blog post, Does the GOP Have a “Libertarian Problem”? Not Really: 

 
Sad Paul Ryan says: November 17, 2012 at 10:41 am

As Ken_L and mercurino suggest, the GOP does have a libertarian problem. More correctly, they have a LIBERTARIAN FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS PROBLEM. The Republican base feels that they are prospering in spite of the government that seeks to create dependency among “others”. That is to say, if the government would just get out of the way and leave them alone (economically), they would have even more money to spend as they please.
What’s wrong with this picture? Well, if the most ardent base supporters are really the Tea Party old white people with an aversion to a black president who is confiscating their assets to pay for “Obama phones” and the like, then you can’t be a bold truth-teller and serious policy wonk who solves the deficit by ignoring the fact that most federal government spending goes to old people. It comes FROM the young and rich, Republican and Democrat alike, but it goes to maintain the standard of living of the elderly, who are disproportionately white, Republican, and possessed of crotchety policy views. Get your government hands off of my Medicare people.
This is a problem that Republicans will continue to have, even as the Tea Party rump slowly dies off. There will always be people pushing for a more authentic libertarianism, whether that be in Ron Paul’s memory or not. However, there’s a reason that libertarianism does not a governing coalition make. If you want to live the Randian life, go and build your mansion, private roads, and private wells amid the squalor in developing countries where the government is so small and weak that it couldn’t harm or tax you if it tried.  (emphasis mine)  In these United States, however, if the Republican Party becomes the libertarian party, it will never be heard from again.

And now back to my regularly scheduled, "Truth or Dare! Use the PMI to prove that for all natural numbers, 8 divides 5²ⁿ – 1."

What Happened

Too weary to think, so cuttin' n' pasting from post election analysis.  I've been reading quite a lot of it -- after all, when math isn't going well for you, why not wallow in schadenfreude, eh?  (I'll stop mañana, because The Boot That Is Headed for My Teeth is never far away, and dag, I was in Ohio in 2004.  I know how it feels.)  Anyway, the story that's emerging (and damn if my NYT didn't go missing this morning) is that the election results as they rolled in were a complete and utter shock to the Romney campaign, much less the prospective celebrants in Boston.  There are few things worse than losing, but thinking you're winning only to be losing is one of them.  The evidence was there and had been there in abundance.  The Romney campaign chose to ignore it.  I'll allow voters or partisans that delusion, but a battle-hardened campaign staff, a person who's run for high office before and top-drawer political Svengali's?  That's pretty astonishing.  I can't wait for the book, and rest assured it won't be written by Mark Halperin.

Anyway, much fascinating commentary to glean. Got this comment from Eunomia:

CitizenE says: November 10, 2012 at 11:03 am

Romney presented himself as the ultimate politician. A weather vane in other words, a hologram, an etch a sketch. Even among his supporters, those to the far right presupposed he would kowtow, as he did through the greater part of the campaign, even in his selection of running mate and his endorsement of Senate candidate Mourdock, to their interests if elected. Those more moderate would tell themselves in an act of self-mesmerization, he only did all those things because that is what all politicians have to do, and his truer perspective, a moderate one, would win the day once elected to govern. He presented nothing actual or concrete in terms of policy proposals, so no one could pin him down about anything, and to the degree he did discuss policy, on one day of the week he would say one thing, the very next day, the exact opposite. And he managed to insult a majority of the voting electorate with a political tourettes, nowhere better exemplified than out of the country, when he assured the city of London, a city that famously rebuilt itself after being bombed to smithereens, that they were of course likely to screw up the Olympics somehow (of course, this was, and here’s the kicker, based on his own experience–the ironies abound). Romney was a horrible candidate, that won one round out of the fifteen, the first debate when he caught the President napping by basically aggressively arguing for things he had heretofore opposed.
If our economy were not foundering, and if Barack Obama were white, Mitt Romney would have lost the election by double digits. He overperformed at the polls, not underperformed.

This Country Belongs to Everybody

As a Close Contemporary and Associate who shares the same DNA (and still owes me money from junior high) so eloquently put it in response to my e-mail where I said I put my This-Shit-Is-Gonna-Stop-To-Day gameface on and marched to my polling station:

I was far more into it this time around as well. These arrogant muthafuckas don’t understand. This country belongs to everybody. Not just their plastic asses. Fuck them. First person who says something slick gets roasted. God bless Obama. Black people better step the fuck up.

 What he said.

It's snowing and blowing and I have tons of proofs to do (or be done in by).  But I am still both jubilant and mad.

2:11 am Nov. 7th Obama 303

The future has won.  As it always will.

That is all.

Apres Mardi

La Deluge ....

Obama was right:  Voting is the best revenge.  I've had an Obama bumper sticker, (perhaps even two) for almost a year.  Never fastened it to anything but kept it nevertheless.  It wasn't until I was talking to a Close Contemporary and Associate who shares the same DNA (and still owes me money from junior high) the other day and we both said, despite the fact that between us we haven't got 1 good knee that if Obama doesn't get the second term he deserves, we will be rioting in the streets.  Enough is enough.  I am so angry at all the 19th century, misogynistic, social darwinistic, smug, complacent, nativist worshippers of St. Reagan who have convinced themselves that Mitt Romney would be a good president because ... well because He's White!!!!™.  These people have lost they mother-effin' minds.  It's the 21st century all over the planet, bitchez.  Deal with it.

Once of the biggest lessons Husband No. 1 taught me:  You're in a bar.  Two guys are getting into it.  When they stop making noise, that's when the knives come out and the chairs start flying.  If they're still talking shit, finish your beer.

Well, I've stopped talking shit about this election.

Peter Coyote's The Progressive Case for Obama

Bing.  Go.

Read.

Pink Bush

Thanks to Cuthbert, here's the Pink Bush:

 

A Tragedy's Anniversary Without Press Coverage

On the 4th Tuesday of every month I attend the general meeting our our neighborhood's community association.  It's something we've done since arriving in New Haven and finding out about the group.  My ties to West River have grown and deepened, and the neighborhood's initiatives toward community building have done the same.  That particular night, my friend, Ellen, Lilli and I were walking home the block and a half from Barnard School and we were overtaken by a swarm of teenagers.  They quickly parted around us on foot and on bikes and we could see that they were heading towards my house.

Four houses down we met A, who had been at the meeting, too.  He is by temperament both cautious and suspicious.  Perhaps for good reason; and perhaps he is this way as only people who have given others reason in the past to be cautious and suspicious can be.  He was getting ready to call the police.  I told him wait, I saw my neighbor, Eric, in the crowd, talking to kids, keeping an eye on things.  We went down the street and a hunch I'd had since the first teenagers overtook us was confirmed.  It was a year ago that Marquell Banks was murdered in the house 2 doors down from ours. These kids, some who knew him, some who did not, collected to grieve, and to discharge an inchoate, unspecific anger towards the house's tenants.  I'm sure if Eric hadn't been there some kid would have tried to get inside the house.  (The tenants coming home saw the crowd forming and left to sleep elsewhere.)

It is that palpable anger that made A want to call the police immediately.  Even a wise cop can only ameliorates it briefly.  And wise cops are rare.  But, it's a year later now and these kids are still angry, still looking for the answer to the problem of one of their own killing another of their own.  Marquell's family is traumatized.  The tenants, who have young children of their own, are traumatized and stigmatized.  (This is not conjecture on my part.  This comes from conversation and witness.)  The teenagers who came to mourn are traumatized.

We, the adults of this street in particular, and this community in general, need to reclaim the obligation that we've assigned to the police.  We've demanded, in the name of public safety, that they also fix what's broken in the social fabric and by doing so wash our hands of responsibility to each other.  As a community we've made great strides in that direction when the issues address a material lack, we fall short when it involves matters that are made more difficult by a lack of trust and no belief in agape love.  When those events happen we resort to calling the cops and deluding ourselves that the problem's been solved.  It hasn't, and I expect to see some of those same kids back again next year.

Le Petit Morte

Which according to the French, or more specifically the male cultural and linguistic superstructure, is a description of orgasm.  But I claim it as the point at which we lose electrical power when Sandy does its damage.  So, blog while the blogging is possible, I say.

I missed posting Saturday, a combination of study, grappling with the post that follows this one, and simply being outside to register all the various colors of fall here in the Elm City.  In the backyard where I can see them are a few Burning Bushes, an inconspicuous evergreen that peacocks in the fall and produces gold, red, almost sienna-like leaves.  This year, in this fall so mild that the heat is off more than it is on, our burning bush has produced hot pink leaves.  (This is where a savvy blogger would insert a picture.  The picture of our hot pink deck chairs alongside the bushes.  Yep, that's what a savvy blogger would do.  This blogger says Hey! Use your imagination!!)

Fall:  meals full of roasts, root vegetables, heavier wines and elegaic music.  Friday we went to SCSU's Garner Auditorium for Music Haven's fall student concert and potluck.  There is something magical when a child falls in love with an instrument as I did when I fell in love with the violin at 9.  The stage was decorated with tiny cellos, violins and violas (violi?), and basses that begged for the tallest kid with the longest fingers to play.  And all the gifts that come from the effort -- the love of music, the self-discipline, the reward (applause and admiration) for monumental effort, the poise that comes from performing, and the entree into new worlds -- all those gifts were on display.

The university is closed today and tomorrow (as it was when Irene happened).  It is an example of unearned grace since I'd be taking a quiz this afternoon if the university was open.  So, Sandy has bought me more time to study, to write, to do what I can while I still have juice.

Saturday Poetry: What She Saw

Her eyes are in a bored frenzy,

whirring cherries in a slot machine.

The question stalks her

and all her friends with their

advanced degrees

who decided to stay home:

what will I do?

They fasten onto

her daughter, so she can

watch and watch again

as Ruby goes

down

                the

                                slide

for an eternity.

She reminds herself

between trips, that it is her task

to be in this moment, then the next,

even though at first she

didn't want to stay home.

But childcare took too much

of her salary,

and now studies say that

it's better, it truly is better

for her to be here.

But, it was an old woman,

the Ah Ma, who woggled --

their word for Ruby's

bowlegged, sashaying walk --

over to the slide to

reprimand her satin-capped

grandson trying to pry

Ruby's fingers off the bar

and force her

                down

                                                now

before she was ready.

That's what she's screaming:

I'm not ready.

Not ready, not ready.

No.

And the woman, in that instant

of infinitesimal distraction,

framed the grandmother,

who she would very much

like to draw, if she

Could convince the old

woman that she means no harm.

She didn't hear Ruby's

cascading scream

in time to halt her jettisoning

from the banked chute

into the bitter dust

beneath.

What did arrest her gaze

was the nimbus of brown

radiating over to where she stood

as she realized

that her child needed

attention, despite her own grief.

Gettin' My Geek On

Cuthbert found this t-shirt and I actually thought it was hilarious.  The screw has turned:

 

No Baby Einstein, Moi

I know.  I know.  It's been 2 weeks to the day.  You've kept up your end of the bargain by reading, and I have not.  But, even if Reading is Fundamental™ Math is Hard, yo.  And I had a mid-term and last week was the culmination of months of work towards the Congo in Harlem film series, and Cuthbert has returned from Ye Olde Sod and math is still hard.  Even my beloved niece, who attends St. Whozit, and who laid her mother and uncle on the floor as in ROFLMAO when she announced that they make the 1st graders study Math and other terrible things at her school, even she offered to help me with my homework.  I did not refuse her.

As some of you may know, we have been doing proofs.  As in prove that:

3√2 – 7 is irrational

   5  

Now, I've been called irrational and have been presented with sufficient evidence that proves it, but this is an altogether other matter and one that takes time.  I offer this in demi-apology for not writing while studying for the midterm.  I did okay, iff the professor grades on a curve.  The range of test scores out of a possible 100 were 7 to 93.  But, two months into this class my expectations are tumbling faster than Felix Baumgartner.  I'm just tryin' to get out of this one alive.  Have mercy ...

I have also discovered (not for the first time) that math makes you stupid.  That is, the more higher mathematics you study the more arithmetic you forget.  (One common complaint on these tests are the oh no you din'it! algebraic errors one makes that Cost Points.  I mean I had the definition of the negation of a limit dead to rights and then wrote:  |‌‌x-a| ≥ ∂, etc. ‌‌instead of |x-a| < ∂.  Oh, the shame.  But even stupider than that is what I did at dinner last night.  It's raining.  It's Friday.  Cuthbert and I have already eaten the low-hanging fruit -- the crackers, the cheese, the peanuts, and truth-be-told, neither of us wanted to cook dinner.  (Heh, heh as I pretend I'm ever willing to cook dinner.)  So, we decide to go out and he finds a new place close by, The New Haven Meatball House.  We go there, and have a meal served by a friendly young man with ear plugs which I always associate with the Maasai and other East African people, and the young man suggested we try some beers and when I said I liked 'em dark and stout (self-portrait as a glass of beer?) he started talking about beers like sommeliers talk about wine and brought me something fruity and dark called the Vampireslayer, and yeah buddy (as they say in Louisiana) it was good.  Great meal -- 2 main dishes, 4 exquisite beers, dessert and coffee -- great service all while Cuthbert and I discuss Christopher Hitchens, Niall Ferguson and Mitt Romney.  We get the check.  I calculate the tip, do the addition, sign off and we leave.

Just before we pulled into the driveway I realized that I'd made a mistake.  When we get in the house I start harassing Cuthbert -- get me the phone number! google the restaurant! don't you know he has to enter in the amount I signed and hurry up hurry up hurry up!!!.  When he wasn't fast enough I remembered I had the receipt and poured out my purse to find it and breathlessly, boozily called the restaurant and said:  Oh, no!  I just ate at your place and I added wrong and the total should actually be ...  Turns out the person I talked to was the person, Juan, who served us and he had my receipt and he was probably cursing out the sociopathic cheapskate who just up and left him a $5 tip.  And I made right by him and we signed off as BFF and damnit, math is hard.