How my jeans fit.

I can start telling sometimes when I'm putting on a little weight, since in this one pair of jeans I wear, the fat starts poking up around the edges of the sides, and if I wear a more form-fitting sweater, you can see that happening under it, it's like the opposite of how wearing a nice pair of jeans and an urbane sweater are supposed to make you feel.

Horrible reaction to allergy medication.

The other week midway through a shift at work where I came in tired for it, I started getting hot and woozy a bit, and I felt like I needed to go sit down.

So, I did that, but eventually it got so bad that I had to go talk to my supervisor, and I ended up going home for the day.

Even then it was super bad, since while I was waiting to change trains at one stop so I could take a bus home and arrive closer to my house and not have to walk so far, I felt like I almost couldn't stand up, and since I looked around and couldn't find any bench on the subway platform to sit on, I ended up just leaning against a wall and sucking it up, and even then I briefly thought about maybe just sitting down on the ground there on the platform, I was so tired.

At home, too, while I was lying down, I felt like I had chills, even though I was all wrapped up under the covers.

Overall I was on my second day of a super heavy duty allergy medication so my nose wouldn't run and I could work, and that's a big reason I was tired at work.

But, my one (male) (Tibetan) coworker said that those medications are no good sometimes, they can be too strong, so that night when I was a bit better, I went and I looked up the side effects from it.

As it turns out, you're not supposed to drink any fruit juice with that medication because it interferes with its uptake, and known adverse reactions include feeling hot, chills, and extreme fatigue.

That day at work I had gotten some water from the one water cooler where the kitchen usually cuts up fruit or cucumber slices into it, and it had pineapple chunks with some syrup from the can.

My theory is that I had that and that syrup started interfering with my medication uptake, and then when my medication started kicking back in again, it triggered the adverse reaction.

It said online to never use that medication again if you ever have an adverse reaction, so I won't anymore, and I'm now using one of those nose spray things.

This allergy season has been really bad for me.

I'm just glad, though, that I didn't have the flu, since it would have been horrible to bring something contagious in with me to work and be around all the old and infirm people.

Comment overheard in a super market line the other day...

...when a (younger) (hispanic) kid was asking his (middle-aged) (hispanic) dad for some sour candy he saw sitting out in the rack by the register:

"No you can't have that, what, do you want diabetes by the time you're twelve?!".

Tales of a(n Ethiopian) coworker (3 of 3): Love.

That same (Ethiopian) coworker was also giving me relationship advice.

"Always remember, seventy-thirty," she was like.

She then explained that you have to like seventy percent of a person, and just let go of the other thirty.

"Seventy-thirty," she told me very seriously, raising up her hand and slowly wagging her index finger at me.

Tales of a(n Ethiopian) coworker (2 of 3): Lesbians.

A bit before that, that same (Ethiopian) coworker was telling me about how there's just starting to be lesbians in Ethiopia.

"Didn't a couple get married there a year or two ago?", I was like.  "I think I saw a picture of them wearing veils, and kissing."

"You know everything!", she was like.

She also said that a couple of years ago, she and her brother and her sister were in a restaurant for lunch, and two (young) women were sitting at a table near them, and they started kissing a lot.

"I didn't know what to do," she was like, "So I laugh and I laugh, and my sister, she poke me."

She then said that her brother got mad and they all got up and left.

"What city was this in?", I was like.

"Addis Ababa," she was like.

"In a young, hip neighborhood?", I was like.

"No, normal neighborhood," she was like.

"Oh," I was like.

I then asked if the girls were also scooping up food with injera and feeding the chunks to each other.

Tales of a(n Ethiopian) coworker (1 of 3): Livestock.

The other week I came on shift at the resthome, and two of my (Ethiopian) coworkers were sitting at the table in our office when I walked in.

I had just picked up a free newspaper from the city with an urban farmer's dwarf goats on the cover, so for shits and giggles I showed it to them.

They talked for a bit in Amharic, and then they switched into English, and the one said they didn't look like goats, and the other one said they must be dwarf.

Then, the one said that in their country there was so many sheep and goats, everywhere.

"And now they are here," the other one was like. "We walk together."

It took me a second to get what she meant, but then I laughed, since she must have meant that they came over here, and the goats came with them, too.

I asked her if she meant that they travelled together to here just to make sure I got what she meant, and that was indeed what she meant, lol.

Radio show coincidence.

The other week I was having some dinner and listening to this Saturday night folk music radio show that I usually listen to, and as I was biting into a soft-boiled egg that I was having with my (black) beans and rice, the song "The Big Rock Candy Mountains" was playing, and the singer said the line "And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs," just as I was biting into my own soft-boiled egg.

I didn't know that was a line in the song, and both the line and the coincidence surprised me.