The other week at work I was talking a little bit with the one (younger) (Guatemalan) worker who works at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now, and since she speaks a different (indigenous) language than our one (Pentecostal) (Guatemalan) coworker, she asked him to teach her a few words.
But, he wouldn't.
And, after she told me that, I gave her a small look like "What's up with that?!", and she gave me the same look back.
...in the college town that I now live in:
I'm walking home after work, and far off in a vacant lot that I pass by I see the first firefly flash of the year.
A bit ago at the recommendation of my one art school colleague who wears (women's) clothes I read this one memoir of the artist/philosopher Adrienne Piper.
If I remember correctly, one of the observations that she makes is that it's easier if you're a misfit to live in a foreign country, because if you're swimming against the tide in your native country, you're always out of step and it takes a lot of energy to always see others observing that, but if you live somewhere else, people will see right away that you don't belong and will never assume that you should, and so it's just easier to psychologically live.
Sometimes I wonder if she's right; trying to live abroad really does have that attraction for me, especially as I grow older and I'm professionally dislocated, and as I always tend to get these just fairly constant questions and looks from folks, about why I am in the place that I am and the insinuation that I should be someplace different. It's like this constant blame of me for not being someplace better, for not having money and not having a position and not having a house or whatever and being established somewhere, especially when they get scattered glimpses of what I do or what I have already achieved, it's like not only about why am I not a step above where I am now, but why I'm not two or three or even four steps up from that, they look at me and feel something is off and they just don't get it, and somehow they end up blaming me for it.
It's just weird.
It's interesting what the (Guatemalans) at work spontaneously ask me.
One time one asked me if I had a car or a truck, like he wanted to talk cars.
And one time another asked me if I owned a home, and he said he had a mobile home out on the farther northwest side of the city.
They're all younger, like early 20s, and I feel like this is where they are in their lives, saving money to buy cars and maybe a nice truck and like a home or something, and they want to relate to me on that level.
And, they don't judge me for not being there, and overall they seem decently fond of me, but somehow I get the feeling that at some level they're a bit puzzled at who I am and how I function and how I fit into the world.1) I have recently bought two watermelons and I have one in the fridge I'm eating and another one sitting out on top of my fridge ready to replace that one whenever I'm done with it, and then I come across one watermelon sitting out by the wall on my white-tiled dining room floor and I realize that I had forgotten that I had boughten that one earlier, and at some point too (although not sequentially) I also find another watermelon sitting out somewhere that I had also boughten earlier, only this one is far gone and rotting.
. . .
(I had this dream the night of a day where I bought two watermelons, and had started eating one and had put it in the fridge, and had the other one sitting out.)
. . .
. . .
2) I'm in line at an airport checkout counter chit-chatting with my one (Mormon) colleague as we're waiting to go to or leave from a conference or something, and as we are at the desk after she checks me in the counterperson asks us for what we'll read on the flight and she takes his book and scans the cover and assesses him a $5 fee, and I realize that I never told her about my book I'd be reading on the flight, but when I tell her that she says she can't adjust now and I realize it's her mess-up for not asking me earlier but she's acting like I did it and all I can do is wonder if I will get in trouble on the flight with having a book to read and not having paid their fee, if they go around and check covers of people reading to see who paid.
. . .
(I had this dream in a week where I've been corresponding a lot with my one [Mormon] colleague, since we're doing summer scholarly reading like we've been tending to do the past few summers.)
So, the other week the one (Brazilian) visiting Ph.D. student who's in STEM who I know from around town asked me if I wanted to go get the weekday taco special at a local bar, so went there and hung out on the patio and got some good cheap shitty beef soft shell tacos that they served in little paper trays with these little plastic cups of jar salsa and sour cream along with them, and we had some of those along with a few beers and just sat outside and ate and talked for a while.
And so when he was talking and wasn't paying too much attention, I moved some sour cream from inside my mouth and out onto the edge of my lower left lip so it was like smeared all over that bit of my mouth, and when there was a pause in the conversation, I was like, "This is good, this is so good," and then he saw what I was doing and looked away and wasn't exactly happy but also wasn't not amused and was like, "What is that, cum," but I pretended not to hear and kept being like, "This is good, this is so good" and finally he spoke again but more to himself and was like, "You are crazy," and then he just moved on and kept on talking about whatever he was talking about like I wasn't even doing anything at all.
So, the one (Brazilian) visiting Ph.D. student who's in STEM who I know from around town was saying that (Asian) men do have smaller dicks, but less so in (America), because here they're more mixed.
(And also better fed, I wondered, though I didn't say anything.)
He also says, though, that they compensate by becoming more skilled at eating ass, and there's absolutely nothing like it, and so people shouldn't let their stereotypes get in the way of being open to getting to know them.
