So, a few months ago, the guy at the stand with the big, cheap, good cabbages said they'd be having them for most of the season, since they did the plantings where they'd be coming in regularly.
But, now I need cabbages again, for a soup and for sauerkraut, and suddenly the entire stand has stopped coming into the farmer's market!
Like, it's not just them having no cabbages, but they're not coming in at all!
And, right when I need them, again.
...at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, where I now work at:
1) I start my dinner shift on the early side at 4pm and am by the host stand wiping menus when my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military) comes in even a bit more disheveled than usual, and the smell of liquor just rolls off of him, especially when he speaks, so to be nice about it and to tip him off and keep him from getting in trouble, I lower my voice and theatrically grimace and am like, "Hey, you know, you can really smell the liquor on you..", at which he pauses all woozily and then is like, "And I can still feel it inside me."
2) Since the name of my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military) starts with an "M" and he's been upgraded to management lately, I start alliterating a lot and saying everything is "[his first name]'s masterful management," like how when he's not busy with something he steps in and helps his employees out or like how he got everything together and all the fills were done etc. and we all clocked out early at exactly 8:59pm, so, like, when that happens, I remark upon it and describe the phenomenon and am then like, "Now that is some masterful management," and when the clock-out thing happened, too, I was like, "That is more than masterful management, that is magnificent management."
He was greatly amused at all of that, too, and at one point earlier on he was like, "More like misguided management," to which I was like, "No, at worst, your management is just midd."
3) I grab some food from a reception to take home but wolf down the two-and-a-half homemade cream cheese-and-chicken taquitos cooling in a catering tray right then instead of packing it up, and then the bus driver rides the brakes a lot on the way home and it's all just too much for me and so I have to go lie down for like two hours before I feel normal again, once I get home, and while that's happening I get a post-work message over the work messaging system from my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military), saying how he can't stop thinking about what I said to him when he walked into work and how funny it was, and I message him back that I was trying to be nice and tip him off and keep him from getting in trouble, which he says he appreciates.
Like about two weeks ago, I was walking home at night on the sidewalk that passes by a modern church-addition to a historic church where the offices and preschool are housed, and as I go by the fence by the playground and under the big tree that overhangs the sidewalk and that blocks out the street-lights there, there on the sidewalk in the shadowed area is a mass, and as I get closer, I see legs pulled out, and it's most of a small young rabbit, the back legs and the torso but no front legs or head, and instead just a small crisp bloody twist of flesh that slightly curls up and to the right all in one direction, where the rest of the body should be but is not.
One of the public defenders who was there was a regular at the one (Thai) restaurant where I used to work at, which I had been wondering about, whether that would happen or not for a trial during jury duty, whether she would surface or not in some capacity.
They do ask you if you know or have associations with any witnesses, any of the other jurors, any of the courtroom staff or lawyers etc., and I would have had to 'fess up to that, just like how the one nurse-practitioner at my doctor's office said that she knew another juror i.e. me (although she would not say how, because she said that HIPAA prevented her from disclosing that -- very professional of her!).
Anyhow, that public defender was honestly one of our favorite regular customers, and she didn't socialize with us or anything, but she was always very nice and pleasant, and we'd try to do her special favors, like once she was in late for lunch and she was sitting out on the patio and waiting for people and she said something about how she was hungry, so I offered to bring her out her salad from the lunch special right then, since that's what she'd be getting anyways and we could "bend the rules" and get it to her ASAP without her formally placing an order and then she could place her entree order with the rest of her party once they arrived.
And, too, once when I was at the table refilling water or prebussing plates I overheard her talking to a friend about a thing with her kid and summer camp, where he said that he wanted to go but then right before it started he wanted to back out, and so as she relayed to her friend that she had said to him, she was like, "Hey, buster, we asked you before and whatever you decided would have been fine, but you committed, so we need you to follow through with that commitment."
I mean, I didn't know her, and it took me a long time to connect her to the name that appears in the newspaper, but still, she was a regular customer who I waited on for a period of like three to three-and-a-half years, and that's not nothing.
I recognized one or 2 of the other lawyers, too, but they were more neutral, whereas with her, she built up so much goodwill over the course of those years, that I had strongly positive impressions of her before she even began speaking, and I honestly felt like I would have hands-down paid more attention to whatever she said before any of them started speaking, though of course I wouldn't have felt obligated to please her with my decision, and none of the lawyers including her had ever surfaced yet at the new restaurant where I've been working since January.
Again, if I had been called up, I would have said as much, as well as mentioned that she was a "top-tier" customer who was a favorite of a lot of the staff, whether she knew it or not.
I wonder what the judge would have thought of that, or the other lawyers who came into the restaurant.
Everyone was called back for the 2nd week, and then that same Monday I was called in again to the courtroom as a potential juror for a murder trial, although I wasn't called up into the box for the first round of jurors or even for the second round, where they finally got enough people to sit and enough alternates.
Since last time they had been so interested in content overlaps with what I've studied at the graduate level, I sat there and started collating a list of everything related to killing and death in my head, for if I was asked that again:
- I've taught on why cults go violent, which includes not only self-directed violence (the mass suicides of the Heavens Gate UFO cult), but also cults that kill (e.g. the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system), for which I assigned students victim testimonies.
- One of the most moving experiences in my life was meeting Peoples Temple survivors at an academic conference and looking at personal photo albums from Jonestown and before, the photos of which certainly included the dead, and everyone who died at Jonestown wasn't a suicide (a common misconception about that mass casualty event).
- For academic writing, I've covered stuff like ISKCON killings (the Hare Krishnas).
- For popular writing, I've delved into why Luigi Mangione snuffed a CEO (radicalization through stuff like self help literature).
- For the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively since the pandemic, I read about stuff like enculturated corpse mutilation and display during warfare and retainer sacrifice and I have even attended an online conference where retainer sacrifice was covered... A local animator who got cancelled who I'm friends with has gotten interested in this topic, too, so like over the past couple months we read an Open Access academic book about human sacrifice and ritual killing in Antiquity, and just that past week we discussed things like evidence for Phoenician child sacrifice (a lot of early excavations were mishandled, but it seems that they did indeed sacrifice babies and infants), as well as headhunting in the more-recent past.
- For the one ancient language that I've been studying since the pandemic, I've been regularly reading through an ancient text corpus over the past couple of years, and it includes stuff like spells to help the king ascend in the afterlife through his slaughtering and consuming the gods.
- For the one ancient language that I've been studying since the pandemic, a major theme is magic that threatens the gods, and I have a recent article where I translated some magic words and it turns out to be a magician's threat to hunt down and knife and kill a deity, if he doesn't do what you want.
That is like so much stuff, that you could easily forget to list it all out in the moment. And I mean, if they want to know if you watch Law and Order and have been a victim of a crime or if you've seen gunshot victims when you're a nurse at work, I'm sure they'd want to know academic work around murder and killing and whatnot.
I wonder what would have happened if I had been called up and if I actually listed all of that off from the jurybox, in like an extended monologue: "Peoples Temples survivors," "ritual killing," Luigi Mangione... Some (black) family members (of the victim?) were in the back observing jury selection, so they probably would have been like wtf, and maybe the defendants too.
I would have stressed after all of this that I was being serious and that this occurred in formal syllabi and in peer-reviewed publications etc. and that it was only a small part of my work over the course of like 20 years, but I still wonder what they would have thought about me, probably that I was a freak or something.
Like a week-and-a-half ago, I dreamnt -
I'm on a rounding hillside just below the crest and someone official just outside of my range of vision is explaining to me the process of animal corpse disposal, as we review these small piles of animal carcasses that are mounded up here and there on the green grass, and as I look at a grey-and-white wild goose with bloody gore around its chest and neck where the wing meets the body, they explain that sausage-makers can take these bodies as-is without close inspection and it's entirely legal, and that's what ground up and put into the meats that I like so much.
. . .
(. . .)
Like a month ago at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel where I work now, we got a new handheld "POS" where it's like the same screens that you see as before, but on smaller modules that are less heavy and that also have all this stuff on the front so that you can swipe credit cards tableside.
And, they've been encouraging us to use them, to save time when it's busy.
I didn't really do it at first since I hate learning new technology, but since then I've started to do it, at least selectively.
If it's super-busy, I tend to offer it to everyone, but if it's not, I then split, where I offer it to the younger generation, but typically not to the older generation.
In general, I've noticed that younger people love it and they just see it as a plus because it's a more convenient form of payment, but older people tend to feel that it's somehow tacky.
And, I've quizzed customers about this, and found out as much.
"I like it since you don't have to carry a wallet," said a (faintly-accented) (college-age) (Asian-American) student in with her (college-age) (Latina-American) friend, and then when I explained my logic and thoughts, she said that she could see how some older customers would like a printed check "and that whole production," which she said nicely but in way that was like she was not quite stating the judgment that she actually felt towards them.
Like, from younger people who I've quizzed, only one (younger) (white) woman who was in with her boyfriend agreed with me, and she practically burst with emotion and was like, "YES, I have always thought that was tacky!", and I commiserated with her and pointed out that we have a lovely kind of elegant setting and a nice cocktail list, but then we go and do tableside payment?, it just doesn't make sense to me.
As for older people, they tend not to like it, and one (early 60s) (fatter) (white) lady with (helmet hair) who's a regular along with her husband said that she finds it awkward to punch in a tip while the waiter stands there, and imagine how that would be if it was bad service, and if it's good service, she feels like she panics and just hits the highest button on there, whereas if it was a printed receipt, she'd probably take her time and leave even more money, so in a way, we're shorting ourselves by using the tap-to-pay, maybe.
From everyone I've talked to, too, no-one feels like it's stereotyping, to regularly offer it to younger people, but not to older.
