A memory of this past summer...

...from a list that I was keeping about a day that I had to go get my blood drawn:

- "w[eir]d bl[ac]k guy end of train" (a big, stocky, mean-looking guy who came on to one end of the car from the doors between cars that you're not supposed to go through, so people migrated down the car to get away from him, just as the train was pulling into the station where I get off for work? - or, that may have been another time; they all blur together).

- "couple in waiting room" (the lady of whom pulled down her mask to talk loudly on her phone, forever)

- something that I can't read, but I remember was 2 (older) (white) people who were going to a baseball game, and the guy wasn't wearing a mask and it was totally obvious it was an attitude thing.

- this (taller) (bigger) (black) lady who was well-dressed in ethnic clothes and who might have been from (West Africa) who was out-of-it and listening to music, and who made some inappropriate burbles, and who got off at a station a few stops before my work, and who as we pulled a way I could see her clapping her hands over her head and spinning around in some kind of dance.

A glimpse into a new coworker.

Last month at the resthome, I got a new coworker, this (shorter) (middle-aged) (round-faced) (Filipina) woman who seems nice enough, even though I haven't had a chance to talk to her too much.

One night as we were leaving shift, I thought I saw something on her left forearm, so I paid attention more closely, and I noticed that it was some sort of tattoo, and so I asked her about it.

"Oh, this?", she was like, "It was my favorite K-Pop band, five years ago," and then she explained how she added some symbols so that it expressed hope.

Bragging, and a response.

Last month I was catching up on a lot of cleaning, and I finally finished my months-long project of going through old papers, and then a bit after that my one lawyer friend from Missouri rang me up.

"You have no idea how organized my Egyptian files are!", I was like.

"No-one has ever said that sentence to me before," she was like, laughing.

Resthome resident comment...

...by the one resident who's a retired school nurse, on this one city council member who had an exaggerated, unnecessarily personal political beef that blew up in the papers this summer and rubbed a lot of people the wrong way:

"Lower class black with middle class money."

. . .

(She said this in a way that you could tell that she knew that she wasn't supposed to say this to people, but it's what she really thought.)

Childhood story of a resthome resident.

This summer, the one resthome resident who used to be in the window-washing business was talking about being a child back during World War II.

Back then, there were all of these signs up in the neighborhood windows saying something like "My son serves in the U.S. army," and some were one color and others were another, and then at one point his mother told him that the one color represented people who had died, and suddenly it hit him just how many people had died and he knew exactly where in his neighborhood all of the houses with dead sons were, and suddenly it all just hit him, and he just cried and cried and cried.

Story of a colleague.

This past summer, it was interesting to catch up with my one art school colleague who wears women's clothes.

He lost the lease to his apartment and hasn't been able to quite find a good new one yet, and since he's working remotely a lot, he decided to move out to an extended stay hotel by the airport and live there for a while, since it's a few hundred bucks more expensive a month than an apartment would be, but it makes more sense than getting stuck in a long-term lease at an apartment that you don't like and that just doesn't work for you.

Though, he pointed out that Covid means no more free breakfast bar there.

Anyhow, he was telling me about all the school emails that he had been getting after the George Floyd stuff, just every time you turned around, saying that they care.

"It's the next form of capitalism," he was like.

He also said that he had been in contact again with this one guy he used to date (?), a (grandfatherly) (Puerto Rican) guy who he met at a dirty bookstore who has a couple of grandkids and everyone once in a while hits him up for a twenty.

The guy showed up to help him move, and he was touched.

Resthome exhortation over the walkie-talkie...

...by my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor:

"[name of a coworker] is gone to an appointment with [name of a resident], so help each other out, be a little buddha."