What a good quiche.

The other week at the resthome, there was an onion quiche at dinner.

It was nice and moist, and the onion slivers were big and meaty and partially cooked just right.

It was really quite good.

A new subway phenomenon...

 ...encountered over the past few months, on my commute in to the resthome on weekday afternoons:

(Round) (squat) (tan-colored) (middle-aged) (Indian) women who start talking loudly on their cellphones, in whichever language they speak, just speaking up and dominating the entire car.

. . .

(There's been a number of them the past few months.)

Phone devastation.

That same day a few months ago when I was going to meet my one (Romanian) colleague, I was riding my timeshare bike thing that they have in cities now, and something fell out of my backpack and clattered under the wheel, and before I knew what had happened, I ran right over my smartphone.

I turned around and got it, and it turns out that the bikewheel didn't go smoothly over it, but rather kind of picked it up and dragged it for a little bit against the asphalt, and so the bright metallic red case that I've been so proud of and liked so much for so many month already, got all scratched in broad swathes of even stripes of different widths, in like this splayed-out arc covering around like a third of the phone case.

And, it was like dirt got rubbed into those scratches, too.

With time and with the rubbing alcohol applications that I do after every time I go to work to sterilize my phone when I get home, though, the dirt is gone now, and now too the scratches almost look like some kind of abstract art, only pieces of the metallic covering are falling away in flecks, from the rim that angles up around the edge of the screen of the smartphone.

Memories of Romania.

A couple months ago,  my one (Romanian) colleague and I were talking, and he said that Romanians are "the Mexicans of Europe," since the immigration politics is the same; Romanians go to wealthier countries and do the jobs that no-one wants, and then a certain kind of politician just goes off and beats up on them and scapegoats them for whatever country's problems.

He was also telling me about how growing up, his area was pretty diverse in terms of ethnicities, with Hungarians being the largest minority, but there were Gypsies, too, and some Serbs as well, since they were so close to the border.

"The Communists weren't all bad," he was like. "At least they believed in education."

And, he said that as a matter of state policy when he was younger, his elementary school teachers would have to go around and fetch all of the Gypsy children and bring them to school.

He also said that his parents took pity on the Gypsies, and would try to hire them to do chores like cleaning out the drain pipes and roof gutters.

Only, they would take a few hours and do a little bit, but not really much at all, and then they'd say that they'd need some raki* to continue, and if they got that, maybe they'd do a little bit more, and then they'd say it was getting late and they'd come back the next day to finish up, and sometimes they would, but sometimes, also, they wouldn't, it was just like that with them.

. . .

* ( = fruit brandy)

Dreams (2 of 2): Czech folklore rituals.

That same night, I also dreamnt -

I'm in what seems to be the elementary wing of the old school building of the (Catholic) school of my hometown, there and also outside of it, sometimes, and there's this (younger) (late 20s) (somewhat mischievous) (blonde) (Czech) woman who I know is older than me, and she's wearing a long and long-sleeved light tan dress that's floor-length and gets much browner right around the edges like by the hem and the sleeves and the neck, and it's a bridal dress, and she's holding an apple, and she tells me that a real bridal dress would be brown and have more apples.

And, we're inside in the old cafeteria that doubled as a gymnasium space, only it's tall gray walls with light at the top where the windows high up are, and two of her friends are there next to her, and she holds her head out and face upwards and they pull out this thing that I know is a dried sheep foreskin and they put it up to her lips like a tie, and she mimes opening her mouth and breaking the bond, and then she's very happy and confident and satisfied, since she knows she can now speak her mind whenever she wants.

And, I ask her if that represents the hymen, and she says yes.

. . .

(This is all very, very odd, and also very specific, and I wonder if the whole Czech folklore thing is from when I read Milan Kundera's "The Joke" a few years ago, since I loved how it represented folklore reenactments. The whole thing with the sheep foreskin as a broken hymen almost makes sense as a folklore ritual, where a bride who consummates her marriage is now more free to say what she thinks, since she's bonded to her husband and no longer has to play games out of fear.)

Dreams (1 of 2): Bicycle.

The other week, I dreamnt:

I'm riding my bicycle, and it isn't riding right, and I look down, and large chunks have come out of the tire and you can see through to this dingy green-ish place of rubber lying underneath the black surface rubber, and I know that this happened because my bicycle is old, and the rubber on the tire is old and falling apart.

. . .

My latest catchphrase:

 "Well, don't say the gypsy didn't warn you!"

. . .

I got that from a British prison memoir from the 1950s, and I just love it, for occasions when you see what will happen in a really real way but someone is just shrugging off what you say.

I made sure to tell it to my one art school colleague who wears women's clothes, too, since he's not only a very perceptive person, but he also often wraps a veil around his head, and so gives off a fortune-teller vibe.