A sign of trust.

My one (newer) (taller) (Thai) ex-coworker texted me out of the blue, to see if any of the (Brazilians) that I know have like 2 specific banking apps on their phone, since her (Brazilian) ex-husband wanted to send her a hundred dollars for their daughter’s birthday party, but there was all sorts of mandatory delays for the apps he uses and he didn’t have the necessary ones set up and if he used a bank there’d be expensive transfer fees.

So, I checked and they didn’t have those specific apps, but I offered to loan her the hundred dollars if she really needed it for the birthday party, which she said she might need, but let her check on some other stuff first, and finally she figured something out and she was able to get the money from her ex-husband after all.

Overall, though, it felt like it was just some level of trust between us, which I found very touching, for her to turn to me like that.

Oranges in the wintertime.

It’s always amazing to me how good the taste is of oranges in the wintertime.

Maybe it’s because I eat a lot of stuff like soup and potatoes and I have snacks of popcorn and like salads of kale and raw onion and stuff dowsed in some oil and much vinegar, but there’s just something that happens where I just really want an orange sometimes, and then I get one and they taste just so good.

Maybe it has to do with like my limited seasonal diet or like Vitamin C deficiency or something, but I’ll tell you what, whatever the reason is for it, they do just taste simply amazing, when I finally get some.

It's like I wolf them down and can't stop eating them. 

Two developments with home-goods:

1) The oil in my scent diffuser is not only getting lower bit by bit – something fun to watch, as I’ve never had one before – but the color of the oil inside is also gradually becoming a dark pinkish-purple, probably because the diffuser sticks are touching here and there some of the plastic flowers that are there among them to make it look like a decorative flower arrangement, and the dye there is probably being conveyed back down through those black porous sticks all the way into that glass-bosom reservoir holding all of the oil, and marking it.

2) I put water into an off-brand dijon mustard container, to shake it and create mustard-y water using all of the last mustard in the squeeze-tube, and then I put that into my lentil soup, which it makes super-tasty to an astonishingly surprising degree, to the point that I want to now do this with all my lentil soups in the future.

A gift from my mother that unexpectedly arrived in the mail:

A 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle that’s a picture of the Trevi fountain.

“I thought it would be fun for you because it’s smaller than normal,” she was like.

. . .

(The puzzle was the dimensions of an ordinary puzzle that size, and the box was squarish and somewhat smaller than normal, but it gave no other indications of containing a jigsaw puzzle of a smaller size than is typical for those types of puzzles.)

Post-quitting feelings.

After quitting my job, I was catching up with my uncle on the phone, that's my dad’s younger brother, and, like many times as an adult, I’ve been amazed at his insights into people.

Like, when I told him very briefly the situation, right away he said that the problem was my one (Thai) boss’s “inadequacy.”

He had been in the corporate world a long time before his retirement, so I can only suspect that a lot of those insights come from his experiences there.

Overall, though, the aftermath of my quitting felt very good, like I made the right decision, although I was walking across the street on a Monday and I glanced out of the corner-of-my-eyes into the window, there, and there was my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, working in the restaurant on what should have been her day off.

On astrology.

The New York Times recently had an article about a museum exhibit about the history of astrology that had this interesting comparison:

Alexander Boxer, the author of “A Scheme of Heaven,” about the history and science of astrology, argues that horoscopes during antiquity have more in common with modern algorithms than with the esoteric predictions of many contemporary horoscope writers.

“It was a very technological and math-heavy field,” Boxer said in an interview. He compared people’s views of ancient astrology to our modern relationship with artificial intelligence, which he said… also “offers advice via opaque data-driven algorithms that you, the end user, are expected to trust but not to understand.”

Just a very, very incisive comparison.

Additionally, when I sent that article to my one (Mormon) colleague who I do a summer book-club with, he texted back:

Thanks for the article. Quote: “According to Allied Market Research, a consulting firm, spending on astrology-related products and services is projected to increase from $12.8 billion in 2021 to $22.8 billion in 2031.”

How do we get in on that?

. . .

(. . .) 

A (Brazilian) insight on (English).

Several times I heard the one (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) remark to (Brazilian) friends that people say the word "cute" in (English) about grown people who they find attractive.

"Cute?", he was like, "Cute is a baby! I am hot."