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.

Shopping with allergies.

For the yearly sale on bulk items at the local co-op – like the beans and the rice and the dried fruit and whatnot that's in these large rows of plastic bins with flip-tops and scoops attached to them, as well as jars of spices across the aisle that you screw the lids off of and scoop out with smaller heavy metal spoons that rest in “CLEAN” and “DIRTY” plastic industrial dishwasher-like containers sunk into the counter there – anyhow, for that yearly sale on bulk items at the local co-op, I laid out empty yogurt containers on my counter as a reminder for myself the previous day, to gather them up and go in the next day and use them for the sale.

(You get extra money off your bill if you bring in your own containers.)

So, I did that, and although I had stored all of my yogurt containers tucked into one another with the lids piled in a neat stack on top, I discover at the store that somehow I’m two lids short.

(When I get home, I discover them slid off to the side by some other tupperware in the tupperware cabinet above my stove-and-sink area, in the little cottage that I live in.)

When I unpack at home, too, I also discover that I forgot to buy a couple containers of (free-range) eggs that I had been meaning to pick up at the co-op when I was there for the bulk sale, too…

Ah, shopping with allergies… You really have more cognitive impairment than you realize, and it’s only after mistakes become apparent that you realize that you're like that.

Another day at work…

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

1) A (South Asian from South Asia) table of five (twenty-somethings) comes in, and as often occurs, they hop all over the place with their order, and one (curly and messy-haired) (lighter-skinned) (bespectacled) (girl) gives this order with her hamburger toppings – she’s substituting a black bean patty, and then has a number of other specifications, like most customers do – and then after I key this all in on the keypad, she’s like, “Oh yes, and I want some cheese,” which is a b*tch, since you can’t add cheese at that point without majorly upping the price, you’d have to originally key in the order as a cheeseburger in order to get a fair price for the customer, so I tell her that in so many (nice) words for next time, and I then delete that item and I have to enter everything in again, partially from memory and partially from re-inquiring with her about toppings.

And, one guy wants a milkshake, which is time-intensive and we have to make ourselves, and my coworker gives me guidance in conjunction with the posted instructions that are tacked onto the dessert cooler back in “the server alley,” but I make the 3 scoops of ice cream too large, and though there’s usually some left over for you to pour into a separate glass and sip, this time there was enough to make an entirely separate second milkshake, so I get to have that, which is kind of nice, just that once.

The bill is $72, paid by the (imperious) (darker-skinned) (male) shake-drinker, with $0 tip.

2) In that same area by the blender and milkshake instructions and dessert cooler in “the server alley,” there’s two tall quart containers filler with mixed nuts and cinnamon-and-sugar dusted cashews, left over from a recent wine tasting event in the reception room where our kitchen assembled the charcuterie boards and the event staff brought in the wines for the wine tasting.

At first I grab them directly with my hand, but then I realize that’s gross, and so I take two soup spoons and put one in each container, and I use the spoon to lift the nuts up and dump them into my hand, from which point I then raise them to my mouth to eat them.

After I’m done eating, too, I just leave the soup spoons in the containers, for anyone who wants some nuts in the future.

The madness of the first warm day of the year.

It is always very interesting how people just go crazy when the first warm day of the year arrives.

That day also happened to be a day when I began work at 4pm rather than 5pm as I had been for a while, and I didn’t realize that all day until I got my standard work-app phone notice at 3pm that I began work in an hour and I saw it and I was like WTF and I had to run around and get ready in a rush so I could be out the door in time to catch the bus in, which was unusually packed and warm and stuffy and the people were so weird and talking loud on the phone and stuff, including one (middle-aged) (black) guy who turned out not to be talking on the phone at all, but rather talking to himself.

Then, when I sat outside on a park bench to kill ten minutes before I walk in and start work, and also when I’m working a bit later and am by the doors, you can just hear cars revving and speeding up and down the street, like they’re revving so loudly and speeding so much that the sound actually travels into the restaurant.

Like, people seriously lose it when the first warm weather hits, and it’s like, just get me home and out of this, since when people get like that, you just don’t know what the f*ck is going to happen, and you don’t want to be in the middle of it or out and exposed when some asshole runs his car through an intersection or turns around a corner at too high a speed and loses control of it and it goes onto the sidewalk or something like that.

Just better to be inside; once people get it out of their system, the other, later warm days will be calmer, better to wait for that to be out and enjoy the weather.

A valid reflection that I saw on social media:

It's America 250 and also the World Cup, but the current occupant of the Oval Office so affects the national mood, that it's like these things that should be so big and so joyous just aren't registering at all with people at large.

It's like he just sucked the joy out of these pretty big national events, that's how bad he is.

Foreign language study for dual citizenship purposes.

The notoriously hard language that I’m intensively studying for dual citizenship purposes is such a little bitch.

There’s so few cognates that even most news articles are impossible to read. If you know a language with cognates, you can fill in the gaps if you don’t know one word or maybe two, but what happens if you don’t know four or five?

Like, that's the situation that I've been facing. 

So, basically I’m using an online flashcard app to memorize simply thousands of vocabulary words, and I can already see how much more I can understand when I come across a previously largely unintelligible sentence that I had read months ago, but still, it’s tremendously discouraging when you get a new text and you realize that you don’t even know a fairly standard, important word like “estimate” or “improvement” and you can’t even identify a part of speech because so many of the endings look alike and because so many of the words at play are unknown.

My father’s one cousin writes once or twice a year around Christmas or Easter to give “greetings from the whole family,” and I usually used to write her back a few short very ungrammatical lines in reply, but with this latest round of contact around Easter, I really rolled out the language study and I told her that I was studying it again.

She immediately replied back with a longer email, and it was good to have so much text from a native speaker in an authentic communicative situation.

(Unlike her kids, I think she never really studied [English] as her foreign language, she did something else like [German], I believe.)

She wanted to see family pictures, too, so I had to gather some together, and then it took me several weeks to write back, and this email of like 7-8 short paragraphs explaining the pictures and giving news took TWO HOURS to write and edit, including making sure that I had all of the right little accent marks over everything, since the keyboard on my laptop isn't set up for that.

Like, wtf.

I did tell her when I apologized for the delay, though, that I was not only gathering family pictures, but the language is hard, so for me this isn’t an easy, friendly email, but rather homework.

And, I inserted a “laughing with pinched eyes” emoji.

I do hope the humor came through with that.

Spring allergies.

My spring allergies are always horrendous now, in the college town that I now live in…

Once you get outside of the town, it’s pretty rural, and everything in town has nice vegetation that’s almost southern and pretty much comes into bloom all at once.

I juice up every year with a nasal spray so the steroids have taken effect by the time that stuff really gets going, but even then I have problems, especially with post-nasal drip that makes me cough, which is a big problem at work when I’m waiting tables... If a cough suddenly comes upon me, I have to make sure to cough into my elbow, and I also have to make sure to tell customers that I’m not sick, there’s no way that I would come into work if I was sick, I just have bad seasonal allergies that are hard to medicate for, I tell them.

(There’s nothing grosser in a restaurant than an obviously sick employee.)

This year, too, my post-nasal drip developed into a small sinus infection, and for like 3 nights in a row my coughing woke me up at like 4/5/6am in the morning, where I’d have this heavy cough that wouldn’t stop until I finally got up out of bed and went into the bathroom and bent over the sink there and the change in position and sharp snorting would cause this simply gigantic dark hunk of congealed phlegm to tip over from my nasal cavity into the back of my throat, often catching there at the edge and causing me to choke, though, until finally I could snort sharply enough to get it into my mouth and spit it out into this hunk that just hit the bottom of the sink and sat there as like this big brown thing surrounded by a small pool of clear saliva, it was always so weighty, and massive.

Finally I got another strategy, too, where I would put a cough drop in my mouth when I laid down in bed to go to sleep, and I just let it rest in the side of my cheek…  Basically it would slowly dissolve all night long and keep my salivary glands going, and that would help enough with the post-nasal drip to mask it or to wash it away or whatever it does to help me so that I don’t wake up at night.

What a mess, and your personal state of unwellness simply does not match the vibe of the springtime.