Build-up to Christmas this year…

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

1) The (Thai) (wife) restaurant owner with the tired face buys hunter green paper napkin rings to mix in with our typical maroon paper napkin rings, so that together they’re red and green and look like Christmas.

2) I debut my homemade Christmas hat, which is the same one that I put horns on for Halloween, only now I put on big brown construction paper antlers like a reindeer, since my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones said during Halloween that I should do that for Christmas.

Only, she seems super apathetic about my hat, which I remark on to a number of people, since she was the person who had encouraged me to do that, and then she goes and bes apathetic

“That’s because she’s jealous,” says the one (Thai) (wife) restaurant owner with the tired face.

3) A big table of like 6-7 people including a high chair come in, including this (older) (scrawny) (bearded) (white) man who seems both intense and vaguely out of it, like he waves for us and says that they’re ready to order, and he like takes offense when he orders a vegetarian dish and I ask if fish and oyster sauce is okay in that dish.

“It’s under vegetarian,” he’s like, confrontationally.

“Different people have different definitions and preferences and we try to respect them all, that’s why we ask” I was like.

“So is there any sauce at all?”, too, a (younger) (white) woman at the table asks, when she orders a similar vegetarian dish but wants it without fish and oyster sauce.

(The answer is yes, because we substitute for those if they’re in there… Somehow, we’ve never fielded that interpretation of the option before, though! So malleable is language.)

Later, too, when the kid in the highchair drops some food, the old guy looks at him all exasperated and is like, “Why did you do that?!”, which makes me wonder if he has some sort of early-stage dementia, since all of his behavior is so inappropriately calibrated to all of the audiences I’ve seen him interacting with, although the woman who might be his daughter seems odd, too, so who knows, it might just be a weird family.

4) At one point this (plump) (grad student-age) (darker-skinned) (South Asian) woman with big fluffed-out hair sits at a small table at the back, and I ask her to move to the waiting area at the side since it’s getting busy and tables are filling up and we might need that table for dine-in customers soon, and she seems confused but moves, and then later I see her sitting at another nearby small table with a menu and dine-in stuff set around her, which makes me realize that she must have slipped in without being seated and assumed that people sat themselves, and then eventually we must have realized what was going on and some of my coworkers must have brought things to her.

(She leaves a normal 15-18% tip on her meal.)

5) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says that she’s tired from working so many days in a row, and I point to my antler hat and act like I’m a reindeer and am like, “You’re tired?! I had to drag around Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus all day in their sled, and they were heavy!”

A cold snap (2 of 2): Another day.

1) When I walk into work, it’s a new month and I have to get my new timecard ready, and when I go to put it in the timecard rack right there by the ice machine, there is my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker’s new timecard, and by the part where you fill in the month, she wrote -- -- -- “last month Dec.”

2) My one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones said it was just a slow-to-normal lunch shift that past Sunday, but so many people wanted hot water with their meals instead of normal water that we actually ran out of clean mugs that we could give them (we have like 18-20 or so).

A cold snap (1 of 2): One day.

1) I wake up early and shovel before going in to work a double shift, and by the time that I come back around to my cottage from the front of the house, there’s a thin layer of snow already back where I had begun.

2) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker calls in over the phone to order a duck soup and have it out and hot waiting for her so she can eat it before her shift starts, and I don’t recognize her voice over the phone, at first.

3) During my hourlong break, I want to go somewhere and get a hot coffee but it’s so cold, and so my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker who just got on shift says she’ll make me some good coffee with her various coffee contraptions that she’s brought into work, and so I just sit at a table at the side of the restaurant during my break and drink the coffee that she made me, without going outside at all.

4) The (new) (stoic-faced) (female) (Guatemalan) kitchen worker is coming back from the restroom and she pauses to look at these wrapped presents that we have up as like holiday decorations, and she pretends to take one for herself and walk away with it.

And, it’s the biggest one, so I remark on that in (Spanish), and she just smiles and is like, “Si” (“Yes”).

5) A very jovial (early 40s) (bearded) (South Asian) customer who’s visiting from out-of-town and eating out with his friend wants raw ginger with his tea, and so I say that we can do that for him but we request that he only put the ginger in his mug and not in the thermos, and I remind him of that again when I bring out the raw ginger, and he pretends to be confused and puts on a straight face and is like, “What, I need to put the ginger in the thermos?”, just to mess with me.

6) The one (smiley-faced) (Guatemalan) kitchen worker comes up to me and wants to know how you translate the phrase “Which one?” into (Spanish), and what it means.

7) By the end of shift, I’ve been at the restaurant all day, and I’d only been outside once, to take out the trash to the back alley dumpster as part of our end-of-shift duties.

8) At night in my cottage after I turn my lights off, I hear a loud crack from my nearby window like something could have snapped or possibly someone walked up outside and did something, and I leap up out of bed and go check that the front door is locked at 1:30am, including the outer screen door with its loose latch, and then I stay up a bit and look out through various windows and screens far away from the noise but from where I can obliquely see towards there, to make sure that everything is okay and that it’s not what I fear that it is.

Household hazard:

A small crumb-like object sitting out on my dining room table where I eat, and when I pick it up and put it in my mouth to try it, it somehow turns out to be a pebble.

. . .

(. . .)

Two recent dreams…

…that I had this past early winter:

1) Me and the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living client) with (disabilities) and I have second row tickets to see Paul McCartney at a smallish half-empty theater in town, and we’re hanging out towards the back with her girlfriend before the concert starts, since her girlfriend had only decided to come later and at that point that was the only ticket that she could get.

And, as we’re sitting there and talking, lights come up from behind the still-closed curtain, and you can see silhouettes of a band strewn about on raised pedestals coming through as music quietly strikes up, and as that happens, we both instantly stop talking and raise our heads and turn them towards the stage, and without even saying goodbye to her girlfriend, we just silently get up and walk towards the front of the house, to take our places.

2) I’m lying half-asleep in my bed in my bedroom in my little cottage in the one college town that I now live in, and my cat is lying next to me on the blanket and feels heavy there, so I shift positions and make it leap down onto the floor, where it runs around the room several times at high speed like a crazy person.

. . .

(I don’t have a cat.)

A challenge met with victory.

A few months ago at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was getting some snacks out of the one snack-bin that we have now, and there was all these new kinds of candy in it.

“Oh, there’s new candy!”, I was like, and as my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones stood there, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker told me that they both had bought some new ones and put them in there, since the last time that I had worked.

And, “Do you know which candy I bought?”, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like.

“Yes,” I was like. “It tastes sweeter.”

And, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones smiled at the sexiness of that line, but my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker just let it go by and she was insistent, she wanted to know which ones did I think she bought.

“The mango gummies and the Hi-Chews,” I was like, quickly and without stopping to think.

And, I was right.

“How did you know?”, she was like.

“Because we’ve worked together for so many years now that we’re like an old married couple,” I was like.

Addendurm.

That last convo really made me down on ever teaching college again – the student debt is just appalling – but then like right after that I saw several times that in-state schools are free for families under a certain income line, and that made me feel better, because it really does make college accessible and that would not totally pervert the student-teacher experience by making it somehow predatory and rapacious…

I had been thinking about this a lot lately, too, because during my recent conference this fall I caught up with someone who I know from grad school who had transferred to the conference’s host university after getting tenure at a low-level state school in another state, and she had been talking about how at her last school the graduation rate over 6 years was horrible and you’d get all of these poorer students that came in thinking that college was a path out and up, but instead they just got a lot of debt and not even a degree where they could hope to recoup anything like that.

That conversation really made me realize once again how people who get tenure often lack certain moral sensibilities, where they have to be okay with just horrible horrible situations going on around them, as long as they get a personal job out of it.

Which, is really not me, and is really not for me.