Once again it is, was, or soon will be Green Bay Restaurant Week, a time when uppity eateries promote overpriced meals at modest discounts in order to encourage people already accustomed to overpaying to explore unfamiliar venues. I try to ignore events like Green Bay Restaurant Week.
I do worry that the promotion might be successful ... thus drawing crowds to a location where I decided to be.
The danger is something akin to biking to Seymour for lunch only to discover that you are in the midst of Burger Fest and there is therefore no place to eat.
Working in my favor is the fact that the restaurants which participate in this kind of promotion do not correspond closely with the restaurants where I am likely to find myself.
It is ever so slightly depressing to realize that the operative definition of success is a sequence of occurences which exclude me or disrupt my life. I'm not sure whether the definition can be reversed and I'm not sure I'd want to know if everything that excludes me would automatically count as success.
What would be even more perverse is if the failure of something like Green Bay Restaurant Week ALSO results in disruption of my life. This could be for example from closing restaurants which (foolishly) staked their future on Green Bay Restaurant Week. Then success and failure of these planned promotions become one and the same to me.
Restaurant success in my eyes would look a lot like continuing along an even path with neither collapse nor crowds. The practical problem with this view of others' success is that it is so hard to distinguish between stability and stagnation.
Stability in actual reality is a dynamic homeostasis whereas stagnation is a slough slowly filling with sediment. Even the definitional sentence is boring.
I like that.