Horseface Steve -- Servant

Service: The occupation or condition of a servant; helpful, beneficial, or friendly action or conduct; act giving assistance or advantage to another.

Let me see if I understand this: my goal as a recovering alcoholic -- as a decent human being -- is to be of service to other people? My question is: how is this going to benefit me? I don't see the upside to doing something nice for someone else unless they are going to be doing something even nicer for me. I'm not willing to trade nice act for nice act: I need to receive something nicer. And you can stuff a sock in the idea of being of service for no reward at all. A servant?!? I see myself in the master class. Servants do things for me, not the other way around. That way I have plenty of time to do all of the important things that I do, like sit at the coffee shop, staring into space, slack-jawed.

Shorty harangues me about service all of the time. He's almost as important as me. He told me one day that he stopped doing all of the very important things that he was doing and went to visit his father. He asked his dad if he needed help with anything. He was imagining great, important things. His dad asked him to change a light bulb on the front porch. There he was, an important man with an advanced college degree, doing the work of a servant. That's what it's all about: doing something nice for someone else that they want done, not what I think I should do for them.

Last Saturday SuperK and I picked up dinner and visited my parents. After we ate my folks asked if she could install a digital converter box on a couple of totally ancient TV sets -- that should be thrown off a cliff somewhere -- so that they would work when commercial TV makes the switch to an all digital format. I was irritated, and I didn't even have to do the work. I envisioned witty conversation about deeply personal or intellectual matters, and my folks wanted us to rescue a couple of decrepit TVs.

It's all about me.