A child’s questions inspired by biblical stories.

So, my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) has been reading her oldest daughter who’s like six some adaptations of biblical stories from Jewish and Christian and Islamic traditions, since she wants her to know them.

And, it turns out that her daughter is really fascinated by the story of the baby Moses getting left in the bullrushes, since there’s just something about the story that just really fascinates her.

And, once when God was mentioned, her daughter asked her who God was, and so she explained to her that he’s someone big and great who looks over everything.

“So where is he?”, she was like, and my friend had to explain to her that he doesn’t live anywhere, but he lives everywhere, including in you, and you can talk to him, if you want.

“So is he good or bad?”, she was like.

. . .

An evening at the (Thai) restaurant a few months ago:

1) A table of like three (middle-aged-to-older) (white) people sit on the patio, and they all decisively order a beer right away when they sit down.

“You’re the party table of [restaurant name],” I’m like, “Only be careful,” and at that I gesture to the pavement where someone had spilled their curry, which had left a stain that made it look someone had vomited there.

2) Like 8:30pm or so when we’ll still pretty busy, a(n early 30s-ish) (bit taller than average) (skinny-to-normal-build) (medium-skin-toned) (shaved-headed) (black) guy with (very unblinking) (wide open) (very light-colored) eyes comes striding in towards the back of the restaurant as I emerge from behind the back of the counter with a full water pitcher, and as we go to pass he suddenly turns towards me and motions to grab the water pitcher and bring it to his mouth as he says something about how he needs something to drink, as I suddenly pull the water pitcher back out of shock even before I fully realize what’s going on.

“Okay,” I’m like, “Wait here, I’ll get you a glass of water,” and I go back around the counter and I get a Styrofoam cup and put some icewater and a lid and a straw in it and I go reach over the counter and I give it to him, and he immediately turns and rips the lid off and starts drinking from it, and without even looking he throws his arm out and fires the lid as trash onto the then-empty wallside table where we sometimes keep some takeout, as he goes to go striding out the door.

And, I notice that my coworkers suddenly saw all that, and so I’m like, “Did you see that?”, and they hadn’t seen all of it, and so I explain to them what had happened, and I say that as soon as I realized he was trying to take and drink water out of my water pitcher, I just wanted to get him some water and get him the heck out of the restaurant, since he was that crazy.

And, I’ve never seen that guy before, and I have never seen him again.

. . .

A sign of the increasing (homelessness) problem in the college town that I now live in:

Like a month ago, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones tells me towards the end of the shift that when she came in like ten-to-five for the start of dinner shift, there was a(n older) (black) man peeing by the dumpster in the back alley just outside the restaurant back door.

. . .

(I ask her, and she’s never seen that in all the years working there, though once years ago she saw a[n older] [white] woman squat and pee in the bus shelter by a big box grocery store on the far side of town, while she was waiting there for the bus to come home after going shopping there.)

A (new?) hobby of a coworker…

…shown to me by my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones, as she pulls out her smartphone to show me what she had just ordered online so she could do it at home:

[it’s a picture of various (Disney princess)-like figures, only knockoffs, and they’re in various poses with a lot of white space in between them, and you can needlepoint it].

. . .