Addendum.

Is word spreading around town that there’s two brothers who are waiters in 2 different restaurants?

When I began my new job, I had prepared for people from the last restaurant recognizing me, and then in like my first month at my new job a (trans) (STEM) customer asked me when I was serving their table if they could “ask me a weird question,” and when I said yes, they asked me if I used to work at a (Thai) restaurant, and I was like, “No, that’s my brother, he’s the hippie vegan one.,” and then they were like, “Oh,” and it seemed like they really didn't know what to think.

In retrospect, I should have asked that guy if my brother was a good waiter, or if he was “judge-y” when people ordered meat.

Tidibits…

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

1) “That’s not enough protein!”, a (white) mother says to her (late middle school or early high school age) son who just wants to get like french fries and a grilled cheese for his food.

2) When it’s slow at the beginning of shift and I wash the huge front doors and windows, I make sure to open the door for any customers going in or out, and later I go help one of those entering groups by stopping by and getting someone a refill or whatever.

“I’ll do this for you,” I was like, “because you were nice and didn’t smudge my windows.”

3) After I finish the windows, I’m just full of myself about how good they look, and so I not only (selectively) show them off, but I also comment to people how I’m showing them off after I show them off.

And, when I say that latter bit, the one (short) (perky) (daytime) manager tells me that you should have seen her after she de-limed the dishwasher, you couldn’t shut her up for days.

4) When this one big and chaotic group in the back dining room that was handled by someone else and who had some of their separate checks already cashed out gets the rest of their checks, a few items are misplaced, but since the POS is a POS, the task of reassigning things which is already hard to do is somehow made even harder because you can’t unmerge the separate checks due to how some have already been paid.

And, the one (athletic) (Asian-American) (semi-manager) tries to help me, but after spending like 5 to 8 minutes and realizing that one check that was already cashed out already included some misassigned item, she says it’s good, just run the credit cards that we have and give them back their bills, but don’t include the itemized receipt with the stuff that you hand back to them unless they ask for it… The one bill in particular was the problem, but the amount we were charging her was less than she should have paid, so it was just better all around to have her pay less and pretend like everything was resolved properly.

So, I did that.

5) One (young) (hiply-dressed) (black) (male) customer who’s in with a (mixed) group of friends makes a joke about one of our salads that has a name like Ghislaine Maxwell and calls it the Ghislaine Maxwell salad when he finds some reason to talk about it, like, asking people if they had tried it, and I hear him doing this, so I tell him that it’s “criminally good.”

6) Back in one lounge there’s a group of young people, including one (fatter) (white) (young) (gay) guy who seems vaguely familiar from my last job, and when I’m by there he asks me if I have a brother who works at the one (Thai) restaurant that I used to work at.

Afterwork chill.

After work since I’m cut early, I order a grilled chicken sandwich and then add in a side salad to boot, only the grilled chicken breast is absolutely enormous like to the point where you could slice it in half and it’d still be two full meals, and also the side salad was a pasta salad and I didn’t realize our side pasta salads are also pretty big, like bigger than our salads with greens and whatnot, like so substantial that they could really be a meal in themselves if you were hungry but not hungry-hungry, if you know what I mean.

And, somehow I ate all of it, and it was like my stomach distended outward and rested uncomfortably in front of me, like I was pregnant, with my solar plexus pushed upward and outward as well, just really really quite the sight.

Also, the one (bearded) (bleary-eyed) (goateed) bartender with (mental health problems) was around, at times sniffing and wiping his nose with his wrist and maybe his hand, and at one point eating nacho chips and chewing with his mouth open.

He also apologized for his shortness with me earlier, about something.

New workout results.

I truly am in love with resistance bands.

The workouts are short and sweet, they’re not hard on your joints, and you can really see results super fast, and that’s besides how cheap they are to buy and how they really don’t take up any space in your apartment.

When I’m at work now and holding out plates in each arm as I'm bussing, I can feel the muscles in my forearms through my shoulder and especially into my back, and I’m just like, GRRRR.

I also notice in my forearms, how they’re a bit wider and they tense up now and look bigger, when I grab things.

I was discussing this with my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military), and I even flexed a bicep for him.

“I see shadows, man,” he was like.

I think he was referring to how muscles get so big in their curvature that they actually start casting shadows?

A very disconcerting experience at my new job…

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

I start like at 4pm and so a little bit before that I stroll in the front doors and it’s bright and sunny and quiet with large beams of light streaming through all the windows and no staff are around and there’s just a lone man at the dining room corner table, eating, and since I need hot water for my tea I just walk up to the espresso machine and take it from there like I usually do, and the entire time that I’m in there for minutes and minutes, there’s just no-one around, so it’s like I’m someone who just walked off the street and decided to use the espresso machine, and I only finally see staff when I wend my way through the restaurant and go through “the server alley” on my way to go dump my stuff in the breakroom/changing room that we have downstairs with lockers where we can go throw our stuff before work.

And, before I finally see someone, it’s totally like the beginning of a zombie movie, where life is breaking down and everything is empty and nothing is normal but lone scattered people are in denial and are still trying to force themselves into normality as a coping mechanism, while other people are going into spaces and claiming things because the social boundaries that used to be in place that they’d be violating are no longer there.

A story from a (gay) (Colombian) grad student…

…who knows the one (gay) (Colombian) (STEM) student who I know from around town and who recently finished his degree:

Neither Madonna nor Lady Gaga had ever been to Colombia, and then they announced their first tours there within a very short time of each other, one going to Bogota and the other to Medellin, and so it created this crisis for all these (young) (Colombian) (gays) because most people only had money for one concert but not the other, so if they wanted to go see both they’d have to not only buy a second concert ticket but also travel, and so it was like this big huge crisis for a lot of people and he was in college and he didn't have money, either, and he actually had to go ask his parents to borrow money so he could go see both concerts.

Some recent-ish offness:

1) Already twice in like three months I’ve gotten mild sinus infections at my new job, where the air is dry and I’m always unmasked the entire shift.

2) One day going to work, I keep checking my pockets and it feels like something is missing but I’m not sure what, and then I’m outside the door and I realize that I don’t have my wallet, so I have to hustle back inside to get it, since it has my bus-pass in there and I couldn’t get on the bus to go to work without it and it has my money in it, too, which is what I’d need to get on the bus if I didn’t have my bus-pass, so, like, without it, either way I’d be f*cked.