Story of an out-of-control city, with crime.

The daughter of the one (older) (white) (female) (townie) bartender who I know from the local brewery works out on the West Coast in a decently liberal city there, and she goes out there to visit her quite often.

And, after one visit this past winter, she was just shaking her head at how permissive it can be with crime out there.

Like, her daughter’s crazy drinking friend has expired tags on his car and he hasn’t replaced them for years, but he doesn’t worry because he knows that they won’t do anything about that in the city, but he also won’t drive over into an adjacent suburb because they have actual enforcement there and he knows that as soon as he does that he’ll get busted and he'll have to pay for new tags and for a fine too or whatever they do to you when you have expired tags on your car and you're caught driving around like that by the cops.

Some (Brazilian) news (2 of 2): Finances.

Because he had some trouble arranging his finances to get together his first month's rent due to the exchange rate and scholarship disbursement dates and whatnot, I ended up loaning the one (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) that money as a favor to our one mutual (Afro-Brazilian) friend from his same lab, and since that time he did manage to pay me back quite a lot of that amount bit by bit here and there, only he was still a few hundred dollars short as his departure date neared.

And, I had gotten some good weightlifting equipment from him and taken that off the amount he owed me, and he tried to do the same thing with his flatscreen TV that he had actually gotten free as a cast-off from the one (vivacious) and (warm) (Brazilian) wife of the (older) couple around town, but I didn’t need or want that.

“Don’t worry,” he was then like, explaining that if he had to, he’d just skip out paying on his last month of rent, in order to have enough money to pay me back.

(Very instrumental of him.)

Some (Brazilian) news (1 of 2): Whoring.

The one (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) was saying that before he left (Brazil) for his exchange program here he went through some (Afro-Brazilian) purification ceremony, and as part of that he is supposed to keep himself chaste, only he hasn’t.

“I’ve been baaaad…”, he was like.

He was also saying that he won’t sleep with (Indians), though, because they’re “stinky.”

A sight in my kitchen this winter:

On the kitchen counter among some popcorn kernel husks that had fallen off the head of the air-popper and also just a few bread crumbs that had somehow gotten away from the toaster, a small black beetle-like bug, like just smaller than a pencil’s eraser end or so, and with elegant little antennae neatly curved back from its head, as it briskly moved in broad curves among all that food detritus.

Another day at my new job…

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

1) The (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner is saying that she had heard about the “no business that day” protest against ICE where people don’t go to school or work and also don’t do business or whatever, and she did consider closing down the restaurant for the day, but the protest method didn't make sense to her because it mostly just hurts the servers and staff by depriving them of income, and so she decided against it.

2) When a plate of nachos comes out across the kitchen service area and it’s for the owner, the one (younger) (plumpish) (hair streak-dyed) (mid-Southern) waitress is like, “Is that for [the owner’s first name]?”, and when they say yes, she’s like, “Then I’m going to have one,” and she grabs a nacho chip off the plate and eats it, before she heads off to go ferry it outside to her.

An evening at my new job.

I get the duty of plugging some of the ambiance-creating table lamps in to charge, and so I have to take them back to this curtained-off storage space back by the back kitchen entrance, to this little silver catering pushcart positioned under a power outlet to which is attached a massive phone charger cord terminal thing into which you can plug like twenty or so cords, since the table lamps have phone-like connectors and that’s how you plug them in every few days or so so they juice up and get sufficient electricity stored.

And, the way the cords just hang off and are tangled in these dense black tangles of wires that even extend down to lamps sitting on the lower shelves of the catering cart, it reminds me of something out of a sci-fi movie, like maybe the ship in Alien or something.

The busride home is driven by this (fat) (upper middle-aged) (pleasant enough) (African-American) driver who rides the break a lot, and since I don’t notice that at first and pinch the pressure point in my wrist, I end up getting super car-sick on the way home and I have to rest for like 40 minutes until I can feel normal enough again to go visit the one (gay) (Colombian) grad student who I know from around town, since he’s completely cleaning his apartment out since he’s graduated and moving away for an industry job.

“This is for you,” he’s like, giving me boxes of nutrition bars, “since you are in your protein era.”

I also get several shopping bags of stuff like shampoo and body wash and skincare lotion, in addition to much other food like a small dingy rigid cellophane-ish bag of these small baked shelf-stable cheese rings that are a regional specialty from where he comes from in (Colombia), where they are common snacks, he says.

Unexpected cup-cleaner.

A lot of days, I take in some tea, often herbal, to my new job at the (Irish-y) burger joint on the first floor of a historic hotel, and I do so in a ceramic-and-rubber-sleeved coffee holder cup that I think was a gift years ago from the one resthome that I used to work at.

I do this because I discovered that the air in that old building is dry “as f*ck,” as the kids say, and that if I don’t hydrate before and during my job, the air dries out my sinuses and seriously f*cks with me, even to the point of tipping my system over into developing another sinus infection.

Anyhow, I usually start off the tea with water that I boil at home, and then when I’m there, I usually refill it once or twice, mostly with scalding-hot water from the espresso-maker by the specialty coffee station, ever since the hot water nozzle on the coffee machine in "the server alley" there somehow got broken and then never fixed.

Anyhow, after doing that over the course of several weeks, I suddenly noticed that my ceramic cup looks gleaming white and almost brand new inside, apart from maybe some mild discoloration up towards the drinking-edge of the mug where water never touches or sits for any length of time.

That extremely hot water must have scalded off the tea-stains!

That must be it, I suspect.