The madness of the first warm day of the year.

It is always very interesting how people just go crazy when the first warm day of the year arrives.

That day also happened to be a day when I began work at 4pm rather than 5pm as I had been for a while, and I didn’t realize that all day until I got my standard work-app phone notice at 3pm that I began work in an hour and I saw it and I was like WTF and I had to run around and get ready in a rush so I could be out the door in time to catch the bus in, which was unusually packed and warm and stuffy and the people were so weird and talking loud on the phone and stuff, including one (middle-aged) (black) guy who turned out not to be talking on the phone at all, but rather talking to himself.

Then, when I sat outside on a park bench to kill ten minutes before I walk in and start work, and also when I’m working a bit later and am by the doors, you can just hear cars revving and speeding up and down the street, like they’re revving so loudly and speeding so much that the sound actually travels into the restaurant.

Like, people seriously lose it when the first warm weather hits, and it’s like, just get me home and out of this, since when people get like that, you just don’t know what the f*ck is going to happen, and you don’t want to be in the middle of it or out and exposed when some asshole runs his car through an intersection or turns around a corner at too high a speed and loses control of it and it goes onto the sidewalk or something like that.

Just better to be inside; once people get it out of their system, the other, later warm days will be calmer, better to wait for that to be out and enjoy the weather.

A valid reflection that I saw on social media:

It's America 250 and also the World Cup, but the current occupant of the Oval Office so affects the national mood, that it's like these things that should be so big and so joyous just aren't registering at all with people at large.

It's like he just sucked the joy out of these pretty big national events, that's how bad he is.

Foreign language study for dual citizenship purposes.

The notoriously hard language that I’m intensively studying for dual citizenship purposes is such a little bitch.

There’s so few cognates that even most news articles are impossible to read. If you know a language with cognates, you can fill in the gaps if you don’t know one word or maybe two, but what happens if you don’t know four or five?

Like, that's the situation that I've been facing. 

So, basically I’m using an online flashcard app to memorize simply thousands of vocabulary words, and I can already see how much more I can understand when I come across a previously largely unintelligible sentence that I had read months ago, but still, it’s tremendously discouraging when you get a new text and you realize that you don’t even know a fairly standard, important word like “estimate” or “improvement” and you can’t even identify a part of speech because so many of the endings look alike and because so many of the words at play are unknown.

My father’s one cousin writes once or twice a year around Christmas or Easter to give “greetings from the whole family,” and I usually used to write her back a few short very ungrammatical lines in reply, but with this latest round of contact around Easter, I really rolled out the language study and I told her that I was studying it again.

She immediately replied back with a longer email, and it was good to have so much text from a native speaker in an authentic communicative situation.

(Unlike her kids, I think she never really studied [English] as her foreign language, she did something else like [German], I believe.)

She wanted to see family pictures, too, so I had to gather some together, and then it took me several weeks to write back, and this email of like 7-8 short paragraphs explaining the pictures and giving news took TWO HOURS to write and edit, including making sure that I had all of the right little accent marks over everything, since the keyboard on my laptop isn't set up for that.

Like, wtf.

I did tell her when I apologized for the delay, though, that I was not only gathering family pictures, but the language is hard, so for me this isn’t an easy, friendly email, but rather homework.

And, I inserted a “laughing with pinched eyes” emoji.

I do hope the humor came through with that.

Spring allergies.

My spring allergies are always horrendous now, in the college town that I now live in…

Once you get outside of the town, it’s pretty rural, and everything in town has nice vegetation that’s almost southern and pretty much comes into bloom all at once.

I juice up every year with a nasal spray so the steroids have taken effect by the time that stuff really gets going, but even then I have problems, especially with post-nasal drip that makes me cough, which is a big problem at work when I’m waiting tables... If a cough suddenly comes upon me, I have to make sure to cough into my elbow, and I also have to make sure to tell customers that I’m not sick, there’s no way that I would come into work if I was sick, I just have bad seasonal allergies that are hard to medicate for, I tell them.

(There’s nothing grosser in a restaurant than an obviously sick employee.)

This year, too, my post-nasal drip developed into a small sinus infection, and for like 3 nights in a row my coughing woke me up at like 4/5/6am in the morning, where I’d have this heavy cough that wouldn’t stop until I finally got up out of bed and went into the bathroom and bent over the sink there and the change in position and sharp snorting would cause this simply gigantic dark hunk of congealed phlegm to tip over from my nasal cavity into the back of my throat, often catching there at the edge and causing me to choke, though, until finally I could snort sharply enough to get it into my mouth and spit it out into this hunk that just hit the bottom of the sink and sat there as like this big brown thing surrounded by a small pool of clear saliva, it was always so weighty, and massive.

Finally I got another strategy, too, where I would put a cough drop in my mouth when I laid down in bed to go to sleep, and I just let it rest in the side of my cheek…  Basically it would slowly dissolve all night long and keep my salivary glands going, and that would help enough with the post-nasal drip to mask it or to wash it away or whatever it does to help me so that I don’t wake up at night.

What a mess, and your personal state of unwellness simply does not match the vibe of the springtime.

New job personalities…

…at the (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, that I now work at:

1) A (blonde) (make-upped) (college-age) coworker introduces me to this one (younger) (white) customer who’s a friend of theirs who’s visiting from out-of-town from a town to the south of us, and that friend comments that she’s in the service industry, too, although she works at “a hillbilly country club.”

“You guys should serve moonshine cocktails,” I was like.

“Actually, we do,” she was like.

She also said that she sells a shit-ton of pickleback shots, since she tells everyone that it will help them with their golf-swing.

2) In the early part of the shift before any rush and people are chatting, someone asks me how I’m doing, and I say great because I just filed my taxes, and at that my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker says that it’s a great feeling to have that off your chest, he just filed multiple years of back taxes since he hadn’t paid his taxes for like five years, and when I raise an eyebrow at that, he vaguely says something about a medical condition and insurance and treatments, although he doesn’t say anything about not being able to manage paperwork, and he's just all very mysterious about it, even though he's the one who mentioned everything first.

Tidbits from my new job…

…at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel:

1) Because we serve ranch dressing with several appetizers, customers comment now and then about how good the ranch dressing is, and I find myself often telling them about how former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos had this like food fountain back at a family wedding in Michigan, only instead of serving like melted chocolate that you could elegantly dip strawberries into, it was filled with ranch dressing.

And, people think that’s awesome, by and large.

2) The POS tablets that we have to carry around are super-weighty and I would find them pulling down my apron halfway through the shift, often at inconvenient times, and I just couldn’t find a way to tie it right now matter how hard I tried, that is until my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker told me his tip he figured out, just loop it through the back loops on your pants before tying, that makes it more secure, that’s what worked for him before he got these like stretchy black hiking pants for his workpants that have these ginormous side pockets that can actually expand to fit the whole tablet, he said.

3) It's tough when customers order a hamburger and then say at some point later that they want cheese on it, since your first major choice on the menu is to classify something as a hamburger or a cheeseburger, and once they start off as a hamburger but then go the cheese route, you have to go back and delete everything you did and start it anew as a cheeseburger, since if you keep it as a hamburger and add cheese it’s a different, higher price, which is no good.

4) Quite surprisingly, the fried cauliflower has like a buffalo wing flavor somehow mixed into the breading, and so I find myself making sure to ask customers if they’ve had that dish before when they order, and if they haven’t, I let them know that in advance, so there’s no surprises. 

A good deal of the time, too, people end up changing their appetizer order, once they find that out.

5) Sometimes when (white) ladies who drink wine order cabernet sauvignon, I take it to the table and am like, “Who called a cab?”

Two recent cottage problems:

1) The sink in the bathroom backs up, and though I run my finger around the upper inside of the drain to dislodge any gunk, that makes it even worse, where no water will drain through it, even after sitting overnight.

(In the morning I find an old bread-knife that I never use in one of my lesser-used drawers in the kitchen, so I stick it down the drain and twirl it and voila, unclogged.)

(I then put Dawn dish soap all over that mother-effing bread knife, all up and down its blade, and just kind of leave it out in my sink.)

. . . 

2) A cluster of ants have swarmed on something that fell under my kitchen table -- a dropped piece of food? - and gradually I realize that there's ants here and there all around them, and extending all the way to the front door of my little cottage.

(I spray rubbing alcohol over all of them that I see, and I then get a rag and dump a ton of Dawn dish soap over it and wet it and rub everything down, going from the food to the front door.)

(I have to rinse out the rag multiple times since there's so many ant carcasses caught up in it, to the point that I even consider throwing it out, though I don't, I rinse it again and leave it to be laundered.)