An endearing malapropism of my mother.

When she asks me about what exactly I’m studying so much with the one foreign language that I’m studying a lot for dual citizenship purposes – I honestly have been studying for more than an hour a day during certain stretches these past number of months – I tell her that it’s not really related to anything that anyone would know and that it also doesn’t have borrowings like from Latin, so almost all of the vocabulary is completely unrecognizable and unpredictable, and so I’m just memorizing thousands and thousands and thousands of new words, otherwise you can barely navigate texts or interactions at all, without that fundamental base of knowledge.

“So you’re really starting from Ground Zero, aren’t you?”, she’s like, trying to understand.

Spring habits (2 of 2): Sleeping.

As I’m getting ready to go to bed, there’s alerts on the radio about severe storms sweeping through the area, and it seems that they will be doing so all night.

So, when I go to bed, I don’t turn on my humming noise machine that I always have on.

Instead, the rain falling on my roof suffices for white noise to help me sleep, but also without that noise machine, I’ll be able to hear any tornado sirens all that much more easily.

Spring habits (1 of 2): Cleaning.

When the temperature first sharply gets warm, the concrete pad on which my cottage rests is still cold, and that difference in temperatures causes huge condensation on the white ceramic tile that is my floor throughout the entirety of my house, and you can see little pools of water by the corner of your bedroom at night, and behind the furniture you can see like how the settled dust there is now almost like a mild little muck, from how it united with the standing water.

So, as part of spring cleaning, I pull back all of the rugs and furniture, and mop everything up with rags wet with water and Dawn dish soap, to clean out the muck and any mold or whatever that might have started to grow there.

. . .

(“I hate that,” my one [younger] [plumpish] [hair streak-dyed] [mid-Southern] coworker is like, when I tell her about the sludge-formation at my apartment, and it turns out that she’s had places where that has happened, too.)

Daylight savings time.

At work at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel that I work at now, I’m passing through “the server alley” and overhear some coworkers chit-chatting as they stand by the ice machine, and they’re talking about adjusting to time switches and how hard it is on their bodies and how much they hate it.

The next day, then, I wake up and it seems super late from the time on my smartphone, and suddenly I realize that daylight savings time had happened overnight, only I wasn’t aware it was happening at all until that moment, and then I realize that the fact of it happening that night must have sparked my coworkers’ conversation on the previous day.

Addendum.

Sometimes, I feel so trashy.

“He has children in the room from fucking his wife’s pussy, and here he is turning around and looking at some random waiter guy?”.

But, that’s really what was going on there, and if you didn’t notice it, you have part of your brain left out, and if you don’t want to talk about it, you’re simply avoiding reality.

Sometimes life really is just genuinely trashy like that, for those who have eyes to see.

Like, he humped his wife and inseminated her and her pussy and her womb and that kid who came out of it are all just there in that room with him, but he’s thinking about some rando dick.

Like, that’s really the essence of that situation, to the point where no other description even seems possible.

Just so trashy.

A late winter day at work…

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

1) A gigantic group of people from a neighboring state is in the large-group dining room, and it’s a bunch of families with kids because a of huge all-weekend soccer tournament thing going on, like forty or fifty people or so all together.

And, as I go around the tables to refill waters and ask people if they want top-offs on sodas, it suddenly becomes apparent to me that a large number of them are (Bosnian), and at one round table full of dads, like a men’s table where the men have gathered and are drinking and talking apart from the kids’ table and this other mixed wives-and-kids table where one (skinny) (blonde) (middle school-age) (boy) is so tired that he’s actually resting his head on the table as if to go to sleep right there in the restaurant, anyhow, over at the men's table, this one (taller) (late 40s) (bearded) (slightly potbellied) (Bosnian) dad guy like visibly lights up whenever I come near the table, always staring directly at me and my eyes as if to try to catch them, and I also see him turning his head to look at me in the main dining room as everyone from their huge party is leaving in spurts and drabs, processing out from their back dining room to the main door of the restaurant.

And you can just feel it, like, (Bosnian) (dad)-guy wanted me, that much.

And, of course, my first thought was, “Still got it.”

Then, my second thought was that he was checking me out not only when he was there with his man-friends at their man-table, but when his wife and one or more of his young children were physically present in the room, too, he was that into me.

You could just feel the hunger radiating off of him… Just an unbelievably filthy dirty and intense experience, like, he had children in that room from fucking his wife’s pussy, and now he’s turning around and looking at some random waiter guy?

I wonder if he thought of me later, when he masturbated… I really do think that I clicked for him on that level, who knows, maybe my pheromones turned him on or something, I was only a few people away from him at his table, that can happen sometimes in those cases, where someone sparks immediate attraction in someone else like that.

That guy was just that hungry, that (Bosnian) (dad)-guy.

2) After I clock out, I say something to a coworker, and my one (make-upped) (Eastern European last-named) (master’s student) coworker, who always seems to be examining me because I don’t fit in in some way, though she doesn’t quite know how, anyways, she immediately and in a somewhat patronizing tone of voice is like, “Weird,” and then she’s like, “[My first name], did I just hear you swear?!”.

(I have folksy G-rated language that I use a lot with customers, and sometimes that carries over into my interactions with coworkers.)

And, I pause a bit at first because the interaction was offputting, then I’m like, “Me, swear? F*ck no!”

3) When coworkers are off work because everyone got cut early and a few are down at the other end of the bar having (half-price) cocktails and chatting, I too get a (half-price) cocktail, and they invite me down, but I politely decline in order to go sit by myself at the other end of the bar because I need to do my daily vocabulary flashcard study for the one language that I’m learning for dual citizenship purposes, and I say that I have to do it then, because I didn’t have a chance to do it before work, and if I don’t do it then I’ll get home and I'll be lazy and I won’t do it at all.

4) I chit-chat with the one (young) (taller) (macho) (Guatemalan) cook, and he tells me that he just speaks (Spanish), he doesn’t speak any “dialect.”

5) As he comes out through the main dining room to leave for the night and pick up his (half-price) cocktail in a Pepsi to-go cup, the one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) cook has an incredibly nice green jacket on, and I compliment him on it, and he then starts showing me all the details of its fine workmanship and even its label, and it turns out to be some (Italian designer) jacket that someone had left in the coatroom at the last location of the restaurant and it was there for months and month and months, and so finally he just grabbed it, because it was clear that whoever’s it was, they weren’t coming back for it.

“It fits you like a glove,” I was like. “Nice find.”

A warm-weather spring day at work:

1) Somehow the bus flies through campus and I get to work like 20 minutes early, so I go to sit on the bench outside across the street from the employee entrance, where a thick health insurance company plan booklet sits splayed out, and I move it over as I plop down my workbag and pull out a magazine to do crosswords.

And, I’m doing that for only a few minutes, when this (thin) (early 50s) (wild-eyed) (black) man in dark pants and a heavier leather jacket comes to sit down next to me, right beside my big bag of stuff.

So, I gather it up to move on.

“Hey man,” he was like in a surprisngly normal voice. “I was just here first, but you can sit here too.”

“Thanks but I need some quiet time,” I was like, and I moved away, circling the building to look for a good bench that was out of the sun… 

And, as I came out around on the other side of the building and went to cross the street, too, I see him getting up from the bench and heading across the street to pace a bit between some cars, before heading back towards the bench to linger there again.

2) When I’m making sure to adjust dessert stock so the numbers on our pads reflect actual availability, the one (short) (perky) (daytime) manager walks by and we talk about that, and there’s a few things I don’t quite understand about dessert availability and presentation, so she offers to show me, including getting some out from a back fridge and plating them, which she does with me step-by-step so I can learn.

And, while doing that, she gets called away for setting up for a large university event, and my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker asks me what I’m doing and I tell him, and I mention how I don’t quite know why she’s doing that now if she has all the event prep stuff to attend to, and he’s like, “Yeah, she’s actually really stressed out about that now, but that’s just how nice she is.”

He then offers to take me downstairs to some storeroom that I didn’t know about, which we then do together.

“...and the tarts are there,” he’s like, at one point, gesturing inside the freezer.

“Like pies or women?”, I’m like.

3) Somehow the large-group dining room has a reservation of like 40 for a university event, only somehow it’s not on a department tab, but rather a bunch of individual bills, and then I hear my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker tell the one (quiet) (introverted) (tatted) (white) manager that not only is the check situation that way, “But we need separate bills for separate bills,” because all the individual people also want to pay for their alcohol separately.

(Because they’re getting reimbursed for food, and not for liquor?)

“Fucking A,” the one (quiet) (introverted) (tatted) (white) manager is like.

4) As I cut through a small darkened lounge area to get to the area with windows to help a new table there, the one (quiet) (introverted) (tatted) (white) manager is lingering in that empty lounge looking at her phone, and I startle her and she’s like, “Hi, [my name]!”, and that visibly startles me, and then, nicely, she's like, “I was just saying hello!”.

Then, because her top and pants match the color scheme of the walls and chairs, I say that she fits in like a chameleon and I didn’t see her, and she surprised me.

5) As I’m walking out of the area with windows where the new table is sitting – it's two (older) (white) couples catching up, one woman of which I help navigate the menu to find rieslings and moscatos and the one older man of which wears a navy hat and orders a summery berry cocktail that I had highlighted on the menu – I hear the one wife say to everyone, “He is so nice.”

6) At the end of the night, the one (tatted) (white) (teetotalling) cook pulls out a tray of cupcakes and pasta salad from the weekend that wasn’t used for some event and leaves it out on the kitchen island for everyone, and everyone attacks the cupcakes – “Carrot cake?!”, says my one (make-upped) (Eastern European last-named) (master’s student) coworker – but no-one seems to be caring about the pasta salad.

“If no-one wants this, I’ll grab it,” I was like, at which point the one (younger) (blonde) (bespectacled) (art school grad) dishwasher was like, “Hey, I’ll get some too, if you want to split it,” and I talk with him, and he says something about how he doesn’t have enough money for groceries this week, so I offer it all to him and say that if he wants it all, take it all, I just didn’t want it to go to waste, but he says he doesn’t want to take it from me, so I say that I’ll just have a bit of it, and he can have the rest, and so I go and grab an appetizer plate and a fork from “the server alley” and scoop a bit of pasta onto that and eat it, and then I dump the rest into a to-go box that I had brought back there for him, since he was right in the middle of doing dishes when the pasta salad became available.

He also mentions my standing invitation to different people to go to this new bar that opened up, and he says maybe this weekend, because that night he’s going over to another bar, to have some drinks and flirt with the bartender there.