An unexpected return.

The biggest result of my counter-top popcorn air-popper?

I am buying locally-grown popcorn again.

For, it pops entirely in the air-popper, in a way that it simply would not when heated on the stovetop in oil.

Christmas revelations:

1) When I was on a quick trip back to the city that I used to live in, I was able to catch up with my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend and her family, and she was telling me how her kids’ religious education is going, like how she’s exposing them to different religions and holidays and ideas, and how their one (nice) (female) (Kenya-born) (evangelical Christian) babysitter is also permitted to talk to them at an age-appropriate level.

And, a few weeks ago at dinner, her oldest daughter said something about Jesus being dead, and her middle son who’s like 4 or 5 just stopped everything right then and was like, “What, Jesus is dead?!”, and it was just the biggest news in the world to him.

When we went to go play Legos, too, I was looking for ideas about what to build, and his first suggestion was a cross.

2) When I was hanging out catching drinks with the one (nerdy) (worked-out) (Brazilian) (visiting PhD) student, he told me that his participation with (Afro-Brazilian) religions is really recent, and only goes back like this year.

After his partner died in a car-crash, he said, he actually was in another car crash where this motorcycle veered into his lane and his car and the guy flipped off the motorcycle and was hospitalized with severe injuries -- right then I almost wanted to say that it sounded like he was cursed, but something told me not to say that -- and anyhow he was absolutely hysterical and he was so distraught that he could cause other people a death like the one that he had just suffered, that he had even thought about going and killing himself, if the man passed away from his injuries.

And, out of nowhere, without him talking to anyone about this, this girl he knows gives him a call, and she says her uncle had called her and told her that she needed to call him immediately, and this uncle guy who doesn't even know him at all is in a(n Afro-Brazilian) religion, and that’s how everything started, with his friend the guy’s niece even getting into it through him.

We also did a few things over Christmas, too, and at a zoo he was drawn to the wolves howling, and at a museum he was drawn to the medieval armor, since his orisha bears attributes of war.

During various ceremonies, too, he said, he has had various spirits ride him, and some spoke and designated him as their child, although he says there’s a lot of stigma in (Brazil) against this sort of thing, since it’s (black) religion.

Some odd customers all in one night…

…during this one night during the week before Christmas this past year, at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) A table of four where it’s one (lower middle-class) (white) mom and her daughter and her boyfriend and some relative, only the daughter is trans and has this very flat female forehead and long straight female hair but also a scraggly blonde-brown beard, and the family relative seems not all there and orders a Mello Yello and then returns it because he doesn’t like it, and then when I ask, the mom specifies that nothing is wrong with the soda like the syrup is running out or the carbonation is wrong or anything like that, it’s just that he doesn’t like it, and so I go and I refund the soda for them.

2) A table of four where it’s like two (lower middle-class) (white) parents and their two (adult) (white) (nerd) sons, and one has long (trans?) hair and noise-cancelling headphones, and they speak so softly that I have to ask them “No ice?” after they say something after ordering a Thai iced tea – “I said, ‘A Thai iced tea would be nice,’” they repeat for me, then – and the other is (fat) and (hairy) and has a huge tablet out on the side of the table and is looking at something with video games and then like a chat message board, throughout the entire duration of the meal.

And, as I’m inputting their orders up by the host station, suddenly the mother is at my side, and I stop what I’m doing to ask her if she needs assistance, as I wonder if they decided to go and make a sudden change on their order or something.

“Are you open on the twenty-fourth?”, she’s like.

3) One table asks for boxes when they’re not even halfway done eating (!), and then when they leave, they hit the automatic handicapped door opener thing, and then after they pass through and turn around and see that the door is still paused open, they go and try to start pushing it shut.

4) A (mid 30s) (white) (lesbian) couple sit down, and when I take an order from the (fat) (arm-tatted) (butch) one, her voice is way too low, like she’s just starting on testosterone.

5) A woman at a table vaguely near the front door suddenly gets up and scampers over and without asking us at all starts trying to draw shut the thick ceiling-hung curtain that we pull open and maneuver around to keep drafts from the front door from bothering diners, when the weather gets like that.

6) When a table of three walks in – two (older) (shriveled) (college town-ish) (educated) (white) parents and their teenage daughter – I ask them if they're dining in or picking up and they say quite normally that they’re dining in, but when I then ask them how many, they suddenly don’t speak, and the wife just silently holds up three fingers.

7) When a(n early 30s) (alternative/yuppie) (white) woman orders a vegetarian dish, I ask her if it’s okay that there’s oyster sauce in there, and she’s like, “Is that vegetarian?”, and I tell her that for some people it is and for some people it isn’t, and then she’s like, “I want vegetarian,” so again I’m like, “For some people it is vegetarian, and for some people it isn’t,” and then she thinks for a few seconds, and declines the oyster sauce.

. . .

(That wasn’t the only stuff that was happening all night. I also got various coworkers to try on my holiday hat with reindeer antlers.)

An exchange, around planning.

When I was making plans to go back to the city that I used to live in and I was feeling out maybe hanging out with my one (professor) friend who studies (modern) (Czech) literature, she said that she was available on this one day, but it depended on what time her ex-husband picked up their daughter, and you couldn’t always plan around that since he’s “late and unreliable.”

“Sounds like the manuscript tradition of the Acts of Peter,” I was like.

Workplace drama.

So, a few months ago on like a Friday night, this (skinny) (mid-20s) (mustachioed) (light-skinned hispanic) guy with vaguely (hipster) clothing comes in through the front door and tells me quite normally that he's picking up, so of course I send him to the back counter, and after he leaves, it turns out that he was all weird and just super super quiet when he went back to the back counter, like he was practically whispering the woman’s name that he was picking up the order for, to the point where my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker had to ask him to repeat the name like two to three times, before they could finally hear what it was and give him the right order.

And, after he leaves, our one (younger) (taller) (skinny) (Latino-American) coworker comes over, and it turns out that the order was for his (cool) ex-girlfriend.

“I wonder if that’s her new boyfriend,” he was like, groaning.

So, we go and take the receipt and plug it into the system, and it kicks up her name and some guy’s name, and as he starts googling the guy to see who he is, we open up the order history for his (cool) ex-girlfriend and we can see that they’ve ordered together like three times, where she always eats the stir fry that she ate when she was with him, while the new guy was trying around a few  different dishes before finally arriving at eating the same thing as her.

And, I start making jokes like he should have left a note in the bag for her, and at first I say that he should be like, “I didn’t spit in the food,” but then I say that he should have bought a mango sticky rice and tucked it in there for them with a note to his ex being all like, “Enjoy this dessert, I thought you needed something sweet,” at my saying which our one (chubby) (Thai) coworker broke out in a smile and was like, “Yes, yes, that’s the one, you should write that.”

Our one (younger) (taller) (skinny) (Latino-American) coworker then had to go out on a delivery run, and then when he came back I told him that he had left one investigative thread undone – “I’m telling you this, to help you as a journalist,” I was like, since he has a history of working on student newspapers -- and when he wasn’t sure what that investigative thread was, I pointed out that they had both their names under her phone number, and so I pull up the order history under the guy’s name, which he hadn’t looked at since we had only pulled up hers, earlier, and it turns out that they had ordered together under his name like 3 times starting like 6-7 weeks after the break-up, before she shifted the ordering back to her name for the like 3 times extending through the order on that very night.

“September?!”, he was like, “September?!”.

And, he then stated his disbelief that she had started dating the guy so soon after their break-up.

“But when did you start dating that girl you’re seeing now?”, I was like, and he did some counting in his head, and he was like, “Yeah, I guess it was around then, too,” but then his mind turned back to the situation at hand and he still couldn’t believe it, and he was like, “September?!”.

I then suggested that he send our one (chubby) (Thai) coworker to go do pick-up in his name at the bar/restaurant where his (cool) ex-girlfriend works, and he liked the idea, but he said that he would send his current girlfriend instead.

“But what if they fight?”, I was like. “Who would win in a fight?”.

And, he said that his (cool) ex-girlfriend would win the war of words, but his current girlfriend is a boxer and she’d win any physical fight.

“Then she would win,” I was like. “In a situation like that, words ain’t shit.”

. . .

(Oddly, after this he let us in on a coworker backstory, too, that the one [white] [female] [townie] delivery driver was in the same boxing club that his current girlfriend is in, and she was even a national amateur champion or something.)

A New Year’s greeting exchange.

I texted the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) who I know and his one (nerdy) (worked-out) (Brazilian) colleague a New Year’s greeting, in the one obscure language that they both know that I have been studying for potential dual citizenship purposes -

[“Happy New Year!” in that language]

and then I texted –

(That’s “Happy New Year1” in [name of the obscure language].)

- to which the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) replied back –

Vai dar teu cu

And –

That’s HNY in guarani

- to the great amusement of his colleague on the conversation.

. . .

(I think that means “You’re going to give up your ass” in Portuguese.)

The jigsaw puzzle preference of a (well-dressed) (local) (older) (white) woman…

…who I meet at the “take one, leave one” jigsaw puzzle exchange table at the local public library, as we both look through what puzzles are set out there:

Her favorite ones are the ones with gridded squares like rows and rows of movie posters, she says.

. . .

(. . .)