Another customer the other week at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

A (short) (late 50s) (Irish-accented) man who is part of a five-top, and when he and his (thin-faced) (Camilla Parker-Bowles-haired) wife order and I hear their accents, I ask them if they are (Irish), and he says yes, three of them there are, and the other two are American, and I'm like, “I thought you were going to say that yes, three of you are Irish, and the other two are unlucky,” and when I heard a chuckle from him but I also saw some other people’s heads snap back and turn to look at me, I was like, “Sorry!”, and he was like, “Well, *I* don’t mind,” and then later when they were asking me what crab rangoons were, I explained to them the history of them as part of South Seas-inspired cuisine following the return of American navymen from the Second World War, and they got some, and later when I check in on them and how their apps are, I ask specifically “And so how are the crab rangoons,” and he looks up at me dramatically and throws up one finger into the air and puts on an angry voice and is like, “Inauthentic!”

Some restaurant tidbits...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) A (Latino) family of four including a (rotund) (Puerto Rican-accented) (all-white-wearing) father and the (short-haired) (eyebrow-pierced) (college-age) daughter come in, and it turns out that the whole family is vegan, so I lead them through the menu and give them some recommendations and even make sure that their fried rice doesn’t have egg in it.

Afterwards, the dad comes up to me and asks me if they let me keep tips here, since they haven’t had service like that “for a while” and he could Zelle me, though I tell him it's all good, we get tips and we actually split them since we share all of the work fairly, and to just leave it on the bill, and thank you very much.

(They leave $40 on the like $100 bill.)

2) A (fatter) (late middle-aged) (black) lady asks what this one entrée tastes like, and I tell her, and then she says out loud that well she can order it, and if she doesn’t like it, she can always just send it back.

“I’m actually not sure what our policy is on that,” I’m like.

“Well, can you check,” she was like.

So, I hustled back to the one (tired-face) (female) (Thai) restaurant owner, and she says we can do that.

“Even if they taste it and just don’t like something, like it's not even made wrong or anything?!?!”, I was like.

“Yeah,” she was like.

“But what happens if they order something else, and then they don’t like that one either?”, I was like. “What do I do then?”

“Memorize their face,” she was like.

 (Moot point -- the lady ended up liking the dish.)

Learning tidbits (2 of 2): The learning of others.

So, my one (Mormon) colleague was saying that ChatGPT has really been sweeping through his (state) college and creating all sorts of havoc.

Like, over the past number of years, he had been carefully and thoughtfully redesigning his (huge lecture course) curricula to include all of these writing assignments, since the dominant philosophy had been that you can never really replace careful pedagogical feedback on personal development of thought among disparate individuals, and that was how you got results and made your profession irreplaceable.

(Somehow he managed that, with a course with hundreds of students and like a dozen TAs.)

But, now there’s so many students doing ChatGPT, it’s not worth dealing with, what with the time-cost of monitoring for potential academic integrity violations and then student disciplinary procedures and stuff, and so he’s had to go back and rewrite all his course materials, and mostly he’s defaulted to doing the most crassest topic-specific multiple-choice quizzes.

Just imagine, all that student tuition money for that!

It’s really like a downward spiral to the emptiest form of credentialing.

Learning tidbits (1 of 2): My learning.

A number of months ago, my mother was asking me if I had ever considered going somewhere to study that one ancient language that I have been studying intensively for the past number of years.

“Like where is the best place to study that?”, she even asked.

“[The town I live in], [the state I live in],” I was like.

And, she didn’t get what I was saying at first, but I then explained to her that I really had uncovered a niche and was arguably the best in the world. And, that though I could benefit from studying this one difficult script of one language phase with specialists, I really didn’t need to study under someone, and how would that work, anyways, when I’m already coming in and correcting major sh*t that they depend on and had never noticed was wrong.

“That would just be awkward,” I was like.

And, she had to agree.

Addendum.

It sounds silly, but it was so big for me to buy a container of sea-salt for my morning avocado-and-raw-onion-and-sea-salt-on-toast breakfast that I've been having lately.

For years now I have reduced living costs so assiduously, that I automatically screen out anything higher cost that I don't really need, like I would never buy sea salt, I'd just use instead the regular table salt that I could get at the lowest price at the grocery store.

Yes, it's only like a dollar or two, but choices like that add up, and for years now I have reduced costs at the margins wherever I could...

Several years ago my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brothers-sister pair) shared an article with me, about the portion of our generation who had been "left behind" economically and could never gain traction anywhere (it's like around 10% more than you'd think, compared to the preceding generation), and anyhow in it there was this woman saying that her life is fine, but she looks up every now and then, and she's living like she did fifteen years ago.

That quote really spoke to him, and it spoke to me, too.

Same low-cost apartment, same scrimping on grocery bills, hardly any new clothes, no nothing.

At some point I think I was supposed to be able to get a house?

At least I'm in a position where I take vacations again.

Repetition of errands.

So, like a week-and-a-half before graduation, I made sure to start getting errands done, since the restaurant is always slammed and I wanted my house in order for that, and also since I’ll be tired for a while afterwards, if the level of business is anything like it was last year.

So, I ran to the local grocery store to get food – especially avocados for my morning avocado and raw onion with sea-salt on toast – and then I made a special trip to “the Meat Lab” to pick up sausage, since I wanted to get there before they closed for the summer, though when I went there, I found out that they wouldn’t be closing for the summer this year.

Anyhow, like four or five days after that, and a few days before graduation, what happens except there’s an amazing sale on corn-on-the-cob at the local grocery store, and “the Meat Lab” re-stocks sausages, including the one kind that my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) had just been texting me about, to buy some and bring some for her family, the next time that I visit.

So, what do I do, but like run those errands again and go to both of those same places, within less than a week.

It really was exceptional circumstances.

It did give me a chance to pick up some blueberry-pineapple brats at “the Meat Lab,” though, which I was skeptical about but was going to try anyway, and then the (fittish) (white) (college-age) girl in an (evergreen) sweatshirt at the register was like, “Those are great,” and she told me that she eats them with honey for breakfast, like, she grills them and cuts them up and puts honey on them, and she has them along with french toast and stuff.

Addendum.

With my writing hours, too, I never give myself a vacation.

Anything I don't do one week, carries over to the next, in terms of missed writing hours, or missed overall project hours.

Like, even when I have a week-and-a-half of vacation that led to 2 weeks of missed writing hours, that means that I carry over in the margin of my schedule the fact that I have to "make up" 12 writing hours now, in addition to the 6 of the present week.

Sometimes, these extra hours that I need to "make up" carry over for several months, till I finally polish them off.