Three events on one Saturday a few months ago...

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

1) As I get back from lunch shift and start dinner shift after my one-hour break -- I had entered the restaurant through the alley door -- I look out through the front window, and there's like six police cars swarmed on the main downtown street that's right in front of the restaurant, and there's some situation with three (clearly teenage) boys, two (black) and one (Latino), and police are pulling them out of a (sporty) (yellow) car and handcuffing them and filling out forms and getting evidence bags etc., and someone tells me they pulled a big gun out of one car, too, and also some plastic baggies (of drugs?).

So, in between different duties -- and all those police cars drove customers away, for a while! -- I watch the police cars, and I also make several jokes to customers and my coworkers, like, "The police came because this woman stole my heart," and, I tell my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker who sometimes uses this nose freshener smelling salts inhaler thing that I always call "Thai cocaine" and who during that chaos got some food delivery made to the restaurant, that she can have food delivered for her to the restaurant, but it's a bad idea to have Thai cocaine delivered, because this is what can happen, and she needs to be more careful how she behaves when she's at work.

2) Because my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones isn't feeling well and I'm taking over her dinner shift, I pretend the entire night that I'm her, like, I'm diddling with the iPad that shows the Spotify music and email and delivery app interfaces, and I pull up Google Chrome like she does and I open up a baking recipe and some information about gardening and then I leave those tabs up, since she does that and I'm her, now, and I make sure to show all that to my coworkers, and they agree that that's what she does, and that I'm doing it now, too.

3) I finally drop a joke that I've prepared because my proper (Guatemalan) coworkers are on shift, where I tell my one (newer) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker that here in our kitchen there's two (American) cities that work here, and I point to the guy named "Orlando" and I'm like Orlando, and then I point to the guy named Diego and I'm like, San Diego, to everyone's general amusement.

I guess after I did that, too, she was talking, and even though he wasn't working that night, she had said it's actually three, if you count our coworker San Antonio.

A coworker's desire to learn (English).

One of my (Guatemalan) coworkers who always jokes with me in (Spanish) was telling me for several months that he really wanted to learn (English), and occasionally he would ask me to tell him how you say a(n English) phrase.

Like, he wanted to say stuff like, "I am looking for work" and "I cannot work tomorrow," and he always wanted help with the pronunciation of "and" and words with "L," like "a lot."

And, from conversations with him and another coworker, it was clear that his first language is indigenous and his second is (Spanish), and that he had absolutely zero exposure to (English), since they really didn't teach it in the schools back when they were in school, although that's starting to change now in (Guatemala).

Also, he doesn't just know one indigenous language, he knows a bit of a second related one that's in the same region where he comes from.

Anyways, I kept telling him that he should practice with Duolingo and that it's free, and one time when I stayed in the restaurant on lunch-break when we were closed for the afternoon, I even had him download it and I showed him how it worked, and I walked him through the first lesson.

And, afterwards, I'd ask him how it was going, and he always avoided the conversation, and then he said he took it off his phone because he didn't have enough space, and then he'd ask me for words, and I'd tell him that I could help him with words, but the app on his phone was always available and it was a lot quicker and a much more efficient way to learn new words, and you could learn a lot of words just by using Duolingo a little bit each day.

Then he had the app on his phone again, and finally he said that he didn't like the app, since it was teaching him words like "coffee" and "tea'" and those weren't the words that he wanted to learn.

So, I had him open up the app for me, and I showed him how the lessons were themed, and how it started out with ordering in a cafe, but then it moved into greetings and introductions and ordering in a restaurant and talking about your family, and yes, the first lessons were stupid, but just do them and you'll quickly get to the better material for what he wanted to know.

Then, like less than a week later, we work together again, and he's so excited, and he starts practicing all of his new (English) with me, like "Hello" and "How are you?" and "What's your name?", and he even starts using it situationally, like, he brings a rack of clean glasses out and he needs to pass by someone, and he's suddenly saying, "Excuse me, please."

And, he was just ecstatic, and you could tell that his pronunciation had improved, too.

He also started asking a few of my (Thai) coworkers their names, since they don't speak (Spanish) and he had maybe heard their names once or twice, but had always forgotten what they were.

And, I told him in (Spanish), that he now had repetition of (English) from two sources, from the app, and from talking with us at work, and he began to ask me words that expanded off of the basic words and phrases that he had already learned, since he wanted to move into more complicated interactions, you could tell.

It really makes you realize how trapped he must have felt, around these people all day, only a portion of whom he could really communicate with.

My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker also was asking him how many lessons (units?) he did, and he was counting on his fingers, and he said something like fourteen.

Fourteen units, in less than a week, from someone who works a lot.  That's a lot.

"He's really smart," my one (tall) (Chinese from China) coworker commented, too.

Which, I could always tell from talking with him, and his sense of humor.

It really makes you realize how life put him where he grew up with minimal access to education and a need to immigrate for money, and it could have been much different for him, if instead of washing dishes and doing prep cook things all day, he was channeled into education and an accordant profession from his teens (though, to be fair, he's twenty-four, so there's still a lot of time).

How many people out there in the world are like that, you wonder?

It just makes you very angry that we're losing public education in this country, at least at the collegiate level in some areas. He is *exactly* the type of person who deserves immediate access to all forms of education, all the way through full college.

It's like horizons are contracting.

A new response to a (bitchy) (Guatemalan).

Either because he's a bit mean-spirited or he doesn't have a good sense of humor or both, my one (Guatemalan) coworker still very occasionally calls me Senora ("Ma'am").

Usually, I'm like, No, no senora, but the other month, I tried something new.

"Senor," I was like, "Tu debes estudiar mas espanol. Senor es un hombre, Senora es una mujer."

("Sir, you ought to study more Spanish -- 'Sir' is a man, 'Ma'am' is a woman.").

That made him pause and laugh, but we'll see if that little b*tch does it again.

I think I used the pandemic well.

Overall, I think I used the pandemic well.

I didn't have the stress of job uncertainty or isolation -- I had my eldercare job, then, with only the stress of getting adequate equipment, at first, and the increasing weirdness of public transportation -- and, overall, I was just able to re-adjust and find something to bide my time, that made sense for me.

Like, I read a ton of long works that I'd always wanted to read -- the Decameron, the Canterbury Tales, the Divine Comedy, the Arabian Nights, some of Gargantua and Pantagruel -- and I also moved into reading collections of religious texts that I'd always wanted to read -- the entire Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the "gnostic gospels" of the Nag Hammadi codices, some collections of Jewish and Christian apocrypha.

And, Gargantua and Pantagruel is stalled out in the pile of books by my bedside nightstand, but I'm still going strong with the apocrypha collections, having even realized that there's been like 5-6 fat volumes of further apocrypha in translation released over the past decade, that I wouldn't mind plowing through (five to six fat volumes -- that's a lot!!!).

I also used the time of library shutdowns to start studying intensively the one ancient language that I've now been studying for quite a few years and have now made myself into quite the expert in, since for that, you didn't need a full library, you just needed a textbook, which I had, and with that kind of thing, it's just a matter of time and discipline, to study vocab etc. and to push yourself through language-textbook lessons at a brisk but manageable pace. 

And, I had always suspected that I would find out major things about that language if I just sunk time into skills-building, and I did sink that time in, and since then I've just been uncovering major findings beyond anything that I could have ever anticipated.

Now, that's a bet that paid off, and it all began with how I decided to spend time, during the pandemic.

In general, considering how much chaos there was then and how much chaos has still been spilling out since then, I nevertheless used the pandemic pretty well, all things considered.

Like, even apart from the one ancient language that I learned, I've now read the Divine Comedy, and that's pretty cool.

A storm and its aftermath.

Like last month, I was home after work, and there was a tornado watch until like 3am, so I just chilled out and read and whatever, but I made sure to have my documents and laptop ready to go on my dining room table, in case a "head to the basements!" warning was called.

And, even though a lot of students were having parties and there was pleasant pop music blasting and it was a nice night and I was keeping my windows open and I would have preferred just to listen to all that, I made sure to have my radio tuned in to the local classical music radio station, in case they broke for a severe weather alert.

Which, they did, for an area other than ours, and then, what do you know, there was breaking news with a severe weather alert for our area, and the tornado sirens that the town tests every Tuesday morning start blaring, only this time for real.

So, I closed my windows and curtains, went to the front door and slipped on my rain-boots, and grabbed my stuff and a crossword and then my radio and ferried it to the basement laundry-area of the front house, to hang out there until the alert was lifted, which it finally was like after an hour, only for another alert to come in for a different part of the county, so I decided to just sit tight there another fifteen minutes, just to make sure, for there's no sense to ferry all your stuff upstairs, only to have to ferry it all down, again.

Then, everything was done, so I headed back up, and then I had the rest of my night like normal, and went to bed.

The next day, though, I open up my curtains and look out, and my neighbor's heavily-weighted basketball hoop is lying on its side, apparently blown over at some point during the storm by a strong wind-gust, I would think.

Grape and other gummies.

Because she knows that I like them, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now brought in several free sample packs of gummies that she got somewhere, one of grape gummies shaped like little dark purple grape bunches, and one of peach gummies shaped like little pinkish-orange peaches.

And, like I always do, I made sure to put some on a plate and share them with the (Guatemalan) kitchen workers in the back.

In fact, they enjoyed the peach gummies so much and ate them so quickly, that I poured out some more on another plate and brought that back as a second round of gummies, only this time I turned them all around in the same direction so that when you looked at them, they all looked like a plateful of little ass-cheeks.

"Quieres culo?" ("You want ass?"), I was like, pointing to the little candies, "Hay rico culo" ("Here's some tasty ass").

Later, too, when the one dishwater stepped outside to deliver a rack of clean glasses, after he did that, he paused and was like, "Dame mas culo, quiero mas culo" ("Give me more ass, I want more ass").

That day the coconut ice cream was incredibly frustrating, too, since someone had made the batch up wrong and it was almost impossible to scoop -- it'd take you five minutes to get out one scoop of ice cream, even if you let the metal scooper sit in very hot water before you tried to scoop it -- and so, after digging at that in the basement freezer, I told the kitchen workers about it, knocking my head with my fist theatrically and being like, "Hoy el helado es muy duro, como mi cabeza" ("Today the ice-cream is very hard, like my head") -- at which the one dishwasher immediately said something like, "Si, no es suave, como tu culito" ("Yes, it's not soft, like your asshole"), and just chuckled at what he had said very delightedly, since he had gotten me.

Further worry about being "scooped."

I think part of my worry with being "scooped" on the one ancient language that I've studied for a number of years now and have made myself into quite the expert in, is that I've increasingly realized that one major finding led to observations that produced another major finding that led to observations that produced another major finding, and this process may continue for quite a while, at least for the near-term future.

So, if people start tuning into what I'm doing -- and I do have to put my ideas out there to some extent, to claim them! -- they might start to see "the next thing on the horizon" and elbow in and get there first, if they're truly able to grapple with what I've produced.

I mean, many have gaps in their training where they're not likely to do this, but you never know.

Increasingly, I'm feeling chained to the college town that I now live in, at least for the next several years.

It's hard to get library access like I have here, and I'm worried to set aside any of this research for the moment, since it's not tapped out yet and I want it and all the (ultimate) glory for myself, both to discover more truly new things and to always be "that guy."