Dog names / coffee cups.

I'm staying at the house of my one friend from high school and her husband's house, and they just got a couple months ago a half-year old Golden retriever that had been pre-named "Bentley". I couldn't stand the name since it's kind of yuppie and doesn't roll off the tongue, so I kept calling it "Bender", and now her husband has started calling the dog "Bender" and is kind of pressuring her to change it.

Also, we went to this hipster breakfast place today -- the cook is tattooed, there's random 50s roadtrip souvenir shit on the walls, the food is kind of upscale yuppie-ish, there's a pirate theme in the logo on the menus and the doors -- hipsters are so predictable! -- and my friend after she got her coffee asked me to grab the empty coffee cup overturned on the placesetting next to me on the counter and give it to her, and it turned out that that one was dirty too, so she had to make do with the coffee cup she had, which had shit on the rim.

That reminded me back when I was a waiter at the local Big Boy back in high school. This one waitress Karen who smoked too much and said she hated everything about the restaurant (the manager, the people, the smell that stuck on your skin when you got home) but stuck with the job since the chain offered health insurance, used to have her after-shift coffee served to her in a white and not a brown cup in the booth where she'd count up her tips, even though customers would always get regular coffee in brown cups and decaf in white cups so that way waiters and waitresses walking around freshening up coffee with a pitcher of regular and a pitcher of decaf wouldn't have to ask customers who had what coffee and interrupt them.

Anyhow, one time I asked her why she demanded her regular coffee in a white cup, not a brown one, and she was like, "You can't tell the cup is dirty with a brown cup."

Years later I ran into her at the local coney island downtown, and you could tell she was very sick. I wanted to ask her about whether her health insurance came through for her when we talked, but it really wasn't the time or place.

Plus, years earlier I had heard a rumor she was excited about the Bob Evans opening up in town, since they offered health insurance too and it was her chance to leave Big Boy. Maybe she switched there and her insurance story was complicated.