Snapshots from a food licensing class:

1) The instructor is this (rounder) (pleasant) (white) guy from Wisconsin who drives a Tesla and who says he goes to church, and who shares trivia like about how an egg won't set at the top of Mount Everest, and how once he got to buy 10 pounds of truffles for $2300 with a P-card at this one place where he worked. His wife, he says, is really good at backing in a camper, and you would be surprised at how many Amish people have cellphones. He also follows this industry website that "doesn't cover all of the outbreaks or the recalls, just the interesting ones," and here and there during the training he refers to certain stories he heard from there, "but you wouldn't have heard about it, because it's not in the mainstream media." 

2) People there have neck tattoos and gear with American flags, and this one (older) (fatter) (white) (apparently gay) chain restaurant manager behind me has slicked back hair and this massive smoker's cough but only occasionally properly coughs into the crook of his arm, and one girl says she was an anthropologist who lived in Africa and there got malaria and typhoid fever, and then when asked, she specifies Ethiopia, and then when asked why she lived there for 7 years, she simply says, "Love." 

3) Once someone was working at a fast food restaurant and people started complaining about a smell near the soda fountain, and then when they went and looked, they discovered that a homeless person had smeared shit all over the soda nozzles. 

One girl who worked at McDonald's once had a guy throw his own shit at her -- it happened so fast that she's not sure how he launched it, it was like a car crash, she says, though she thinks he held it on a towel -- while another time when she was working the drive-through, a guy handed her a warm cup of his own piss. 

"That has to be some kind of fetish," I was like, "The piss and they guy who threw his poop. They were making you be part of it." 

Then, when she didn't quite know what to say, I was like, "Men are like that."

Weird self-observation.

You would think that I would miss my coworkers and the residents at the resthome, since it's one of the best jobs that I ever had, but I really don't at all. Being out of the unpredictable safety situation in the city is so worth it, that it doesn't make me nostalgic for that at all, since one would come with the other. And that says a lot about why I had to move.

Remnants of a dream...

...that I should have blogged about sooner, since I'm pretty sure that I'm already forgetting some vivid details: I'm walking across a college campus around 7 or 8am before people are out, and as I turn a corner, there's two (lanky) (slouchy) (white) guys who are walking and who seem to change their direction to come towards me, and so I go into self defense mode and authoritatively and loudly tell them to stop and to not come any closer, but they demur and then they do, and then the next thing that I know, somehow I have a large book from out of my backpack, and with it I'm able to stop the course of a knife coming towards me, like to the point where the knife actually plunges a little bit into the book, and then somehow I'm in a large high-ceilinged vestibule with many high windows and there's folding tables out like for a college orientation event, and I'm talking with some (college-age) girl and then standing around off to the side waiting for police to arrive, so that I can make my report. And then, I wake up. . . .

Stunned a bartender.

The other week, I was in at this local country music bar on a slow night since pandemic numbers have been low, and the (young) (white European) (immigrant-born) bartender was telling me that the past weekend had been busy, not only because of this local arts festival, but also because it had been the local university's "Mom's Weekend." "You mean like cougars?", I was like.

"The magic mall."

I'm starting to call the mall near me in the new college town that I live in, "the magic mall." Like, for years I've been looking for certain coats, and I not only found them this winter, but when I was up there the other day for an errand, I stopped by and found some spring jackets and rain coats that I'd been looking for for years, and they were not only a great fit and the right colors, but also all on sale!!! Like I say, it's "the magic mall." (Though, to be fair, their shorts and polos selection sucked, though that may be more a factor of this year's styles and colors, lots of weird patterns and also strange pastels and Easter egg tones.) I've been trying to figure out what the difference is with this particular mall; I mean, I've stopped by the same stores looking for the same coats in the city that I used to live in, and also the metro area where I used to go to visit family when they were alive. As far as I can figure, it's maybe the time of year that I was randomly there, or also that maybe there's less shoppers passing through there, so the good stuff doesn't go as fast as it does in a major metro area. In regards to that last point, my mother also said that the population shopping there might be even smaller than the area population, since college kids wouldn't go shopping there, but rather with their families whenever they were home.

Feeling old.

"What do you mean that an Auntie Anne's pretzel costs $5.45?" (That's what I thought the other day when I was at the mall and I ordered a standard basic pretzel with salt, and then I got rung up at the register.)

More toothpaste revelations.

If you take scissors to cut open the top of a toothpaste tube, you not only get all of the stuff that's lodged up towards the tip that you can't get out, but also all of the stuff that's spread all down the tube in this very thin layer that you can't really feel from the outside, but you can see when you open the tube up. I honestly have gotten like another 8-10 brushings out of there easy, it surprised me.