Some recent life tidbits:

1) Even though it’s a large, well-known insurer, my new ACA insurance plan company is extremely disorganized, where they don’t release in a timely manner the first premium bill that you’re supposed to pre-pay so that you “lock in” your coverage for the upcoming year, so I go ahead and set up my out-of-pocket premium information in the system and look up my amount due through the government award notification letter about my subsidies, then I pre-pay that amount so that they have the money in advance and the bill gets paid whenever it comes due, or so that I have evidence of attempted payment in case something gets messed up and they try to say that I didn’t pay the first premium in time and they attempt to deny me coverage.

2) When I tell my mother over the phone about how I read in the local newspaper that a famous Olympic athlete had attended church services at a church a few blocks from my cottage that she and my dad had passed by and seen when they had visited me over a year ago, she immediately asked if he was Catholic.

“No, Methodist,” I was like.

“Well, we’ll forgive him for that,” she was like.

3) After his Thanksgiving party, the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) who I know saves the turkey carcass for me so I can make broth, after I tell him that it’s worth saving for that purpose and he should do it.

4) When it’s a snowy day and I go into work, I forget to take my indoor shoes with me, so I have to wear my light snow-apporpriate boots all shift, at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now.

5) As I eat my post-shift soup there – it’s better if you eat it there, it’s one of those dishes – my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker comes by with a specialty chicken dish modified with potatoes and a lot of spice that a regular customer orders, and she asks me to try a piece, and I do, and she asks if it’s warm, and I say no, and she says that the guy ordered it and said it wasn’t warm, and so they reheated it on the skillet and brought it back to him and he tried it and he said it still wasn’t warm, but she doesn’t believe him.

“It’s not warm,” I was like, bluntly, and we couldn’t figure out what happened, but I kept affirming that if I was him, I would send it back, too, since it’s not like the dish is usually like.

So, since I already had one mistake to take home that day, we left it out for the next person who would come on shift at 5pm -- our one (Chinese from China) coworker -- and I said that I would stop through to potentially pick it up afterwards, if it turned out that he didn't want it (he didn't).

A story of a life milestone, and turning-point.

A few months ago the one (gay) (Colombian) (STEM) grad student who I know from around town had his dissertation defense, and his family came to visit him for it, to see it.

And, his mom had visited him here before, but not his father, and it ended up being this whole thing for his father, where he saw this giant campus all at once and then this professorial gathering where his son had to speak on his work, and it just made this gigantic impression on him, and like during the entire dissertation defense he was crying, to the point where my friend tried not even to look towards that part of the room, it was so distracting.

“In my entire life, I never thought that I would have a son who did something like this,” he said that his dad told him, and after that his family went on without him to go visit his aunt and her family in Texas, and his uncle told him that his dad just could not shut up about his dissertation defense when he was there, it was like he would just go on and on and on and there was nothing else that he would talk about, just only that.

And, he also said that after that, his father started relating to him differently.

Like, he was looking for things to do with his parents, and they don’t like museums, but they like to eat, so when he took them to see some monuments in a fairly nearby big city, he made sure to take them out for ribs afterwards, and he somehow got into a fight with his parents because they each wanted to order a whole thing of ribs and he said that that was too much food for them, and somehow it became this whole big thing and they all started arguing and everyone got mad at him.

And, because he later got ashamed at the fight, he went and apologized and he said that he hoped that he didn’t ruin everything – “You did,” his mom was like – “She’s not a person who comforts,” he said – but, his dad on the other hand was relating to him like an adult, and he’s always been known to have a temper, and he said something about how sometimes you get mad and you get carried away, and it was okay, and he was just relating to him like an adult, now.

“So did they eat all of the ribs?”, I was like.

“Yes,” he was like.

“Wow,” I was like. “Then what were you arguing with them for? Maybe you did ruin it.”

A kitchen happening in my one small cottage that I now live in:

A raw onion that I had been using for my usual morning toast-and-raw-onion-and-avocado breakfast sat out on the refrigerator rack and it was almost done, it was like just one thick ring that was left, and when it gets accidentally knocked off from there it falls to the floor and the onion’s internal rings decouple from one another so like one small one is here and one bigger one is a bit farther over and then one even bigger one is even a bit farther than that, as if it bounced and skittered and left a small ring wherever it hit, until no more were left to decouple and everything had settled down to a rest.

Corporate scams.

I really do feel like corporations are increasingly trying to scam people, where they put in false and inflated charges and try to avoid doing stuff in writing and just overall they try to make you fight it, in really insidious and nasty ways.

Like, after my recent ambiguous car damage with Enterprise, they sent me a hugely inflated bill for like $2500 that included charges that weren’t contractually valid like lost use and depreciation, and they tried to fold in repairing random pre-existing dints that fell below the contractual damage threshold, and beyond all of that they could never provide the damage report that I filed by phone the day after the damage even though the staffer on the phone said that it was time-stamped for insurance purposes and that I could get it later from the local franchise.

(“They did this to you because you were a nice guy,” my [West African] mailman told me, saying that I should never have reported any marginal damage at all, in the first place.)

I mean, I sent a letter and challenged the bill and they ended up waiving all the charges, but the whole thing was just slimy, like Enterprise wasn’t even trying to read the contract and do the right thing, but instead just used it as an excuse to try to run up charges and fuck you and/or whatever insurance you carried.

It brought back memories of the anesthesiologist that I had for my first required-by-my-family-history colonoscopy, where they were out-of-network but they legally could only charge in-network, but they sent me an out-of-network bill anyways and they would never run it through insurance even though I demanded that in writing, and then they sold the bill off to medical debt companies like it was valid debt when it wasn’t that at all, it was just some made-up charges.

(“The scam is real,” my one [art school] colleague who wears [women’s] clothes said when I showed him the bill and told him about the situation.)

Then, the debt companies wouldn’t run it through insurance because that should have been done by the provider, not them, and it was just like this zombie bill with no validity that I got a letter about every once in a while and that lasted until like 2-3 years later when a local church bought up the medical debt for pennies on the dollar and waived it as some sort of jubilee initiative, which is nice, I guess, but which also makes me wonder how much of medical debt figures that you see cited around everywhere are due to this fraudulent billing and not due to people’s actual need and inability to pay.

And, that hit me totally like a story that I saw in a local newspaper, where a local ambulance company appeared to have been automatically billing people improperly for out-of-network services and then making them fight it, rather than trying to actually bill what was actually legally valid and actually owed…

And, that reminded me how several years ago at the tail end of the pandemic I had a Greyhound busride to a nearby big city and they never sent the bus but they also never officially canceled it and so they tried to claim that their policies don’t offer refunds for delayed busses, and I had to contact the state attorney general’s office to get my ticket price back.

Like, they were trying to not produce paperwork by which you could show that the bus was canceled, so as to to attempt to just improperly keep your money! Like, you can’t set up a bus or a plane and sell tickets and then cancel the service and keep all the money, but that’s what Greyhound was trying to do!

I also recently had an experience with my electrical supplier, where after my yearly contract expired they were jacking the kilowatt hour price by 25-30% and so I switched to community solar but couldn’t be placed right away, and so I called my previous supplier to cancel out my contract at the designated number and left the message, but they never canceled my contract and I ended up getting my next electricity bill at that higher usorious price.

And, when I called again, that same number was also busy with no reps available, and it again led me to a voicebox to leave a message and no-one ever called me back from there.

Like, they must deliberately set it up that way, so it seems like you can cancel your contract, but it doesn’t leave a written record and they can continue on with their services and overcharge you!

This density of interactions with slimy companies is just astonishing to me – this must have always been around, but it seems to be getting worse…

I was mentioning this to my mom, and she said she recently had a $35 surprise “phone transfer” fee when she had to get a new smartphone, and she had to fight that, too, since no-one ever told her that that was a thing when she was buying her new phone, even though the older lady who helped her set up her new phone was very honest and very good and helped her quickly and well with everything.

What a world we live in.

An insight into (Brazilian) culture.

When the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) who I know throws parties, a huge part of it is having YouTube or some streaming something-or-another hooked up to your large-screen television, and everyone sings and dances along to music videos and concert performances and stuff that are put up there at the front of the room, with different people wanting different stuff pulled up at different times.

(The way [Brazilians] use technology is very, very different than us, even with similar technologies and websites and whatnot; for example, my acquaintance would have stickers made of photos of himself, and once he sent me a jpeg sticker of him seriously reading a book, to show that he was thinking about something that I had just texted to him…  They also FaceTime a lot and move the camera around to share where they’re at with their friends and family, probably as a way of bonding, it seems.)

Anyhow, during one party, I noticed that some videos that people were playing seemed to come as teaser “freebies” from some online exercise class company, where they taught you a dance to some song and then they practiced it with you for the duration of the song and then you could click a link to sign up for online exercise classes with them if you wanted.

“These are exercise videos?!”., I asked the one (nerdy) (worked-out) (Brazilian) (visiting Ph.D. student) who I know and who was there doing the dances along with everyone.

“Yes,” he was like. “This is how everyone learns the same dances for Carnival.”

A dream from a few months ago…

The other month, I dreamnt –

I have a tube of brown makeup cut open so I can get to the last of it, and I’m rubbing it on my face in big circles, as it gets more brown and brown on my cheeks and temples and forehead, although not around my eyes, since I haven't rubbed it in close to them there.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

(I often avoid putting on sunscreen too close to my eyes, since I have a bad habit of accidentally getting it into them.)

Another post-Christmas shift…

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

1) There’s a small wreath hung over a thermostat on the middle of the big wall where the most tables are, that wasn’t there before Christmas.

2) My one (younger) (taller) (Latino-American) coworker comes in and he didn’t have time to do his hair before work, and it’s all rumpled and blown out like some kind of 70s man, and everyone comments on it all night, with me even saying that he just needs a dress and makeup and some pearls and he could be a New York Doll, which reference he doesn’t get and so I make him cue up their debut album on his BlueTooth.

3) Two (very gay) (grad student-age) customers are in – a (taller) (skinny) (white) guy and a (shorter) (broad-built) (bearded) (black) guy – and when I walk them through the alcohol choices, I recommend the hot sake, which they go for, and at which I whip out my usual joke, that it’s the most alcohol per dollar and so I call it “the fraternity and sorority option,” which they’re amused by, especially the (shorter) (black) guy.

Later, too, they order another bottle, and so when I’m checking on them well after that, I ask again if they’re okay with the sake and they hesitate and seem profoundly unsure about ordering another one but they also seem to be leaning towards no, and so before I even know what’s out of my mouth, I’m like, “Are you sure you guys don’t need a third?”, though thankfully they didn’t notice what I had just said.

4) I ask my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones if she specially picked out for me the lavender scent of the bathroom scent diffuser that she got me for Christmas because I once brought her back lavender honey from a trip that I took to go visit my parents and so she knows that I like lavender, and she says no, she got the same gift for everyone and they were different scents and she just assigned them randomly.

5) My one (Chinese from China) coworker fills me in on the recent mailbox thefts from his building where they caught on videotape a guy bundled up in a hoodie opening up their apartment maibox apparatus with a stolen post office key; he had been into the main post office in town and the police hadn’t gotten them the report yet, but the postmaster there said that it was probably the key that was stolen last summer when a local mailman got held up, since it can open the post office boxes all around town.

6) The one (college-age) (insecure) (fat-faced) (female) (Korean-American) customer who often gets takeout from us and sometimes dines in was in with several of her friends, and I didn’t help her table, but I notice that she ordered her extra limes for her pad thai in advance, since the last time I helped her we ahd brought out her pad thai and only at that point did she ask for extra limes, which I at that time had gotten her, but I had also said that she could order them at the time of ordering in the future, and that way she wouldn’t have to wait for them, in the future.

7) Two (college-age) (white) girls come in and it’s super cold and the one asks about if we have liquor, and I card them and the one says she forgot hers and the other says she has to go to the car, and I say it’s fine, I won’t make them go outside in this weather, and they’ve never had hot sake before and so I bring them samples in the little cups and they like that and so they order a bottle, and later they’re going to order another bottle but the one has to get going and they don’t have time for a whole one and so I offer to get them a half bottle and pro-rate the price, which they take me up on, and when they leave, they both leave huge tips.