THAI NOODLE HOUSE (austin, tx) DISASTER

My friends and I just had the most insulting experience ever from a restaurant owner today, and after thinking about it for a while, I can't believe the audacity of this woman. I don't know if she was having some awful, shit-for-brains day or what, but this woman has definitely convinced me to never go to Thai Noodle House (which is located behind the 7-11 on 2602 Guadalupe St.), and let me see if I can convince you, dear reader, to never go there either! This woman deserves to have her business incinerate through the ground after treating a few of her customers in the shitty way that she did. And honestly, no woman who has a business sense like that deserves to have a prosperous and well-reputed business anyways.

My friends in the journalism department decided to get together after not seeing each other for a long while and settled for a Thai restaurant that's not too far from the communications building. Now, I want to make it clear to any Austinite who happens to be reading this that the restaurant we went to should not be mixed up with Madam Ma'am's, the other Thai restaurant on the Drag. I am in no way interested in ruining their business--just the business of the THAI NOODLE HOUSE. I sensed that something was a little strange when I first arrived at the Thai Noodle House and had settled in a seat with my friends. As my friends and I conversed with each other, I noticed the owner at one point going after two guys who had finished eating, and I was guessing the owner was just going after them because she wasn't sure they paid or not, but maybe it was more akin to what me and my friends experienced.

My friends and I were living it up and having a great time eating on the outdoor patio and enjoying the cool weather that has started settling in Austin. We hadn't all gotten together and hung out in a group for a long time, so we joked with each other, caught up on how everyone was doing and was having a great time. I think at times we were the loudest bunch at the patio, and hopefully, nobody was bothered about it, but we all had a great time talking and hanging out with each other.

Everything was going well--until it was time to pay for our check.

The total for our bill came out to be around $30, so we all decided that paying $8 each would be enough to pay the bill and leave a little cash left over for tip. One of my friends and I decided to pay in cash while my other two friends paid with their credit card. After we paid, we stayed at our table a little longer to talk, and while we were doing so, the owner of the restaurant returned to our table, carrying the change and credit card receipts in her hands. She thrust the receipt and change leftover back onto our table and asked in an adamant and demanding voice, "So, you're only leaving a $2 tip for four people?"

My friends and I looked at each other, confused. "You're only leaving a $2 tip for four people?" the woman asked again incredulously. My friends and I searched each other's faces for clues. I wondered if the woman intended on asking us to give her more change, but I didn't think this was possible because what restaurant owner does that, especially for a small restaurant that mostly has college students as customers?

After seeing the confused looks on our faces, the woman said angrily, "You're only giving a $2 tip for four people? Those people who work in there get no salary; they live off of their tips. How do you think they're going to live on a tip like that?" With that, she pushed the receipts and change towards us and walked away.

We all stared at each other in silence. I could tell we didn't want to give any more tip than we needed to (we're students, after all with very little money), but once we figured out amongst ourselves that this woman was actually demanding us to give the restaurant more tip, my friend Arianna put her foot down and stuck with what she decided for the tip. "I'm not giving that woman any more tip, especially after being so rude like that," she said, placing her receipt back on the table. I was dumbfounded by the woman's behavior and incredibly offended as well, so I decided not to give an extra dollar either. My friend Chantelle decided to fork over an extra dollar, and my friend Yookyung decided to stick with her original decision as well. We all were in agreement that the waitress didn't deserve that much tip because she didn't bother to check in on us while we were dining and talking (and we were there for about two to three hours), and she didn't even serve one of my friends a glass of water; the waitress didn't even bother to refill our cups throughout the course of our dinner.

After about a minute, the owner returned to our table, and after noticing that the tip didn't go up very much, she said in a terse and sarcastic tone, "Well thank you very much for coming," and walked off in a huff before speaking in her mother tongue to a waitress; I wouldn't be surprised if she was cursing us or something. We were a bit ruffled by the weird confrontation, but we brushed it off and talked a little more.

A few minutes later, one of the waitresses came back to our table, carrying the change in cash that was left over. The woman placed it on our table and said, "You can take back your change." At this point, my friends and I were stunned and bewildered to the umpteenth degree. If this was possible, we were looking at each other with cryptic looks mashed in with glazed eyes and half-open mouths. If the owner was making a big hoopla about this ordeal on behalf of her "shafted" waitress like she argued in the beginning, why was she returning the tip back to us? If her hired hands really weren't getting a salary like she said (which is so god-awful and wrong in the first place), why was she bothering to return the tip back to us? As a student who doesn't earn any money, I know when I say, "Any money is good money." For a person who doesn't earn a salary, I suspect the waitress would be grateful for any sort of tip, even if it was $2. I don't think the owner cared about her workers; this issue mainly dealt with the owner's wounded pride, and I have to say, for a woman who looked like she might have at least been 20 years older than me, she really needed to grow up.

We decided to take back the cash that was so rudely brought back to us and stayed a little while longer. After a few minutes, we got up to leave when the owner came running after us and told us we weren't allowed to dine at her restaurant. One of my friends got so ruffled by this that she went up to the owner and told her she had no right to treat us in that way when we had paid for our meals. I can understand prohibiting a customer from coming to the restaurant because they were causing a commotion or stirring up trouble...but for not paying the tip she thought she deserved? And besides, like my friend Arianna pointed out, if she wanted a higher tip because she wasn't paying her hired hands a salary, why doesn't she just start giving them one? I was angry as well and told the woman I would tell my friends about the experience I had, but the owner didn't seem fazed by my threats.

"Go ahead!" she said. "Tell them. Just don't come back here!"

After talking to the woman more, the owner said that the next time we brought our faces to the restaurant, she would call the cops on us. Can you imagine that? The cops...all for a grudge the owner had against us because of a small tip. I feel like posting up fliers all over campus, telling students to boycott that stupid woman's restaurant. I don't know if that woman was having a bad day, but she certainly gave an interesting twist to mine. My friend Chantelle wondered if that woman would've treated us that way if we were all white, which I thought was a great question. In any case, I'm not planning on going to that restaurant anymore. I guess I'll have to settle for Thai Kitchen, which is a little further up Guadalupe, but I'd rather give that place more business than THAI NOODLE HOUSE.

MY BEST-FRIEND CURSE Pt. VI

The minute I pushed the send button, the inner depths of my brain screamed that I had done the wrong thing. This was a line I had no right to cross.

Liz's mom had bothered me for a long time because I at times thought she was being a little selfish. One time Liz asked me if my mom could take her to a concert we were supposed to perform in because her mom wouldn't be able to take her. When I asked her why, she said, "My mom has choir practice tonight at her church and can't make it." At the time my mom and I thought this was selfish of her mom to choose choir practice over her own daughter, but looking back, I realize we had no right to make such a judgment. What would either one of us know about raising two kids? I, for one, don't have one yet, so I wouldn't know anything, period. My mom decided to only have one child, so what would she know about taking care of two children of her own? What if this was one of the activities that kept her mom sane with all the hassles that came with living life?

Whenever I saw Liz's mom, I got the impression of an unhappy woman. I always felt like a sad cloud followed her wherever she went, and I didn't like the fact that she was always pressuring Liz to compete against her peers and pester her friends to find out what their grades were. Whenever I saw Liz becoming moody, it reminded me of her mom, and I think this underlying notion caused me to write that she "was becoming a lot like her mother" after telling her all the things I didn't like about her.

Sometime within the next 24 hours, she called me at home, crying over the phone, apologizing for all the accusations I made against her and explaining herself. I was subdued over the phone and tried to rationalize what I wrote to her even though a part of my brain was yelling at me to apologize for all the things I wrote to her. I hoped she wouldn't bring up what she wrote about her mom, but of course, I wasn't going to be let off that easily.

"I'm sorry about everything I did, but what do you mean about me becoming like my mother?" she asked through her sobs. "Do you have a problem with my mom?"

"No, it's not that," I muttered in quiet desperation. "It's just that your mom seems selfish to me."

"My mom's not perfect, but to me, she's the best mom in the world," she said over the phone. "I don't think you have a right to say something like that about her."

"You're right. You're absolutely right! I had no right to say those things! I apologize! I apologize for writing all those things about you. I don't know what came over me! Please, can you forgive me?" Those were the words that went by unsaid, and about two years passed by without anything being said between us.

Fortunately, my friendship with Liz has a happy ending. She and I touched base again briefly when we were seniors in high school after someone in our class died at Harvard-Westlake, but things didn't really clear up until we were in the third year of our undergraduate study during spring term of 2004. She was studying in Johns Hopkins, and I was studying off-campus for a semester at American University in Washington, D.C. I don't remember if she or I took the initiative to start chatting, but after catching up, we both knew we had a fabulous time conversing with each other, just like old times.

"Hey, it's great being able to talk to you after so long," Liz wrote.

"Yeah! It really has been!" I wrote back. "I'm glad we got to talk and everything after such a long time."

"Hey, I hope we continue to keep in touch, and I'm sorry for anything I did wrong to you in the past," she wrote.

"I'm sorry for the stuff I did wrong in the past as well," I wrote back. With that, she and I have continued to keep each other updated every once in a while, but I know she and I can never be the best of, best of friends anymore. At the best we can be extremely good friends, but never best friends, which, at this point of my life, I prefer. Liz will soon enter Georgetown University's medical school in Washington, D.C.

Things between Serena and I, however, did not end up going so well.

MY BEST-FRIEND CURSE Pt. V

When I moved to Washington State, I got depressed. I didn't know it at the time, but when I think about it now, I realize that's what it was. I never wanted to admit this to myself, particularly to my mom, because I wanted her to think I was the strong, resilient and stable person she knew in Los Angeles. I wanted to remain her rock when she had problems with my dad. I wanted her to think I was independent and could get through life perfectly without needing anyone's companionship. I wanted to remain the person she saw through her eyes. I didn't want her to see me suffering through the same agonizing feeling of loneliness that made her miserable in her marriage. In the same way, I didn't want to see myself suffering like my mother. I didn't want to admit to myself that I missed my friends, my hometown and my school. I didn't want to admit that things in Washington State seemed so alien to me. It didn't help that my mom often chided and scolded me for not getting used to my new surroundings.

"You have to forget about your past and think about the present moment and your future," she would say. "You have to move on. By the time I was your age, I moved about 10 different times. Almost every grade I had to move because my family was constantly moving. You have it easier than me. At least you didn't have to be the new kid every year and leave friends you made constantly."

I often wonder if I would've received my new surroundings better if someone was able to sympathize with me and showed me that they understood what I was going through at an early stage in my transition period, but it didn't come from anyone I knew in my first year there, not even my parents. They were immersed with their own problems since they were taking over a business a friend of my dad's handed down to them and had to gain the trust of the previous customers to start building up an income. My dad was juggling a temporary late-night part-time job as well to balance out our living expenses; the stress caused him to drink more during his spare time at bars with drinking buddies, causing my mom to be at her wit's end since she was seeing our remaining income go down the drain. I felt I was in no position to talk about my problems since it seemed insignificant compared to the rest of the things going on with my family.

Just yesterday, I listened to a conversation someone was having with a co-worker at my internship at the Texas Bankers Association. She was getting remarried and was talking about the possibility of her daughter moving with her to another part of Texas to start at a new school. I admired this woman's ability to understand the difficulty a young adult would have when moving to a completely new place after living in one place for about 13 years and respected the fact that she was willing to have her daughter live with her father to finish school in Austin instead of living with her if her daughter's experience at the new school didn't work out. I understood my mom couldn't do something like that, but it would've helped out my homesick heart if she took the time to help me transition instead of giving me some tough love and telling me to get over it.

Since I had no one to talk to about my problems, I mostly kept to myself and tried to mend my lonely heart by reaching out to my friends back in Los Angeles. Since I liked to write letters, I hoped I could find someone who would find the time to write as much as I did. I was hoping someone like Serena would write to me more often, but instead, it came from Liz.

I never appreciated Liz's letters, which is a crying shame, because I realize now they were very funny. Her letters at the time reminded me of the listless chatter she made with me during the summer when she was bored with studying and her parents weren't around, and I deemed her letters unworthy of my time.

A couple years ago, I was cleaning out my room and came upon my shoebox of letters I saved over the years. When I sifted through them, I found Liz's letters in the mix and started reading them, and before I knew it, I was rolling around the floor of my bedroom, wrapping my arms around my belly to qualm the ache that arose from laughing so hard. I found myself wiping tears that squeezed out of my eyes from closing them so hard. Liz's letters were enjoyable to read because it brought me down memory lane and even reminded me of the things I had long forgotten, such as the names and taunts we made about the boys we each liked. Plus, Liz had one rocking sense of humor.

I understand now that Liz was the one who made the best effort to keep in touch with me, and the only reason I was blind to it and didn't appreciate it was because I was looking forward to hearing from other people and because I had broken the golden rule of relationships: I took her for granted. I always say that the only reason most of my friends keep in touch with me was because I made the effort to keep in touch with them (I think my mom often thinks I don't have a lot of real friends because of this), but I realize that Liz was one of those people who would've tried even if I didn't. It is something I regret now because I realize we would have one close and awesome friendship if I wasn't so self-absorbed and sensitive.

Most of my friends tried to keep in touch with me, but it mostly trickled to a close as the months passed by. I was secretly hurt by this but instead of admitting this to myself, I increased the volume of letters I wrote to my friends, hoping to encourage them to write back. Their letters always brought a smile to my face and I wanted more since it always brought Los Angeles close to my heart. As their letters became less and less, a wound developed somewhere deep inside of me; I felt like my friends abandoned me to suffer through my transition process alone.

One day, Liz ticked me off for some reason. I don't even remember what the reason was anymore, but I got mad at her, and without thinking, I sent her a scathing e-mail about the things I didn't like about her. My sensitive wound was pairing up with the loneliness embedded in my heart, and before I signed off the e-mail, I wrote about the unkind thoughts I had about her mom, and without a second thought, I pressed the send button.