An odd night at the grocery store.

The other Sunday night at like 7pm, the grocery store I go to was *packed*.

Eventually, I realized that because it had been a nice day out, most everyone must have been out doing things, and people put off their shopping till later, after the sun went down.

When I went to get a cart from the coin slot thing, there were only like 3 there, and when I came out, there were none, so I had to wait and look around for someone to return a cart so I could chain in my cart and get my quarter back, and then what do I see but a(n older) (Asian-American) lady wheeling in a couple carts from out in the parking lot.

"Here," she was like as she came up, and I chained my cart in and got my quarter back.

"Thank you so much, that was so nice of you to do that!", I was like, and I observed that the store was slammed, and so the workers must not have been able to come out and do that.

On another note, midway through my shopping that night, I needed to go to the bathroom really bad, and a (young) (black) girl slipped into the single occupant restroom ahead of me, and I had to wait and was dying.

When I finally got in, the shit just burst right out of me, but there was no more toilet paper and no paper towels, so I had to fish clean strips of toilet paper out of the basket to wipe my ass with.

I figure that they must have been strips that people used back when there was toilet paper, to lay on the toilet seat so that they didn't have to sit down on it.

The shit was so violent I waited a minute to see if more would come out, and eventually someone began knocking on the door, since they were waiting for me.

Unionization class levity:

The other week I was at a weekend employment law class with a lot of people from unions, and one (fattish) (Mexican-American) guy who was sitting to my right was a ball:

1) When they had a big list of things you could be fired for if you weren't unionized, one was "Being overweight."

"Shit, I'm in trouble," he was like.

2) When they had a big list of worker's-compensation-per-body-part-lost, the prof was reading through it, and he got to "middle finger."

"That'd be a tragedy," the guy was like, shaking his head.

An observation of an undergraduate library coworker from Massachusetts:

"I wasn't all that surprised by what happened with Hillary, since I had seen the Martha Coakley campaign."

A dream and an omen:

The other week, I had some Haribo gummies in the evening, and then that night, I dreamt -

I was looking at my stove, and the front had come off, and the gas was somehow trailing along the pipes that came out from the burners and constituted the exposed framing and there were small licks of blue flame here and there on the stove front, and I was worried if everything was okay, because somehow it seemed like the small flames shouldn't be there, but someone whose face I couldn't see told me not it worry, it was supposed to be that way.

. . .

The next morning, coming out of my back alley on my way towards the subway station, I looked down like I always do at the sidewalk in this one place where the frost had eaten it all up to make sure I didn't hurt my ankle by stepping in a place where the sidewalk wasn't even, and down there in one little divot was a lone Haribo gummy cola that someone must have dropped.

It struck me like an omen because I had been eating them the night before and then because of the dream, but I didn't quite know what it would be an omen of.

An observation from a school crossing guard the other month...

...who I saw in the morning as I was walking towards the subway and bikeshare station to go get on my way to school:

In response to my "Good morning!" on a warm morning, she was like, "Good? I need winter!".

. . .

The weather was so freaky for mid-winter.  We'll look back at these memories as the onset of climate change, one day.

My new (borrowed) catchphrase:

"Not today, Satan!".

For example, if a friend is like, "C'mon, [my first name], stay out for just one more, you can just be tired all day at work tomorrow," I can wag my finger and be all campy with them and be like, "Not today, Satan!".

A joke I keep making at work.

At my library job, we "shift" books during the middle of the term when work is slow, which is basically expanding them out across tons and tons of rows like an accordion in order to create room, because new acquisitions have begun to cause so much crowding.

At some points, too, we have cardboard markers, and have to "integrate" huge new sets of books, usually like a lot of new encyclopedias.

So, the other week, I began being like with my coworkers, "Did you hear about President Trump's new executive order?".

Everyone was like, "No, I didn't see the news, what is it?!".

Then, I was like, "It's actually directed at [name of the library we work at]," and as soon as they started to think that something was up and I was setting them up for a joke, I came in with the joke and was like, "We can shelve books, but we can't integrate."

Sometimes, too, I'd then add, "Buh-dump-bah," imitating the sound of a drumbeat closing off a joke.

Most everyone liked that, and my one (black) supervisor chuckled and was like, "Keep it up, [my first name], keep it up."

Another (black) (younger) supervisor who's very California-y and nonchalant was just kind of all drolly like, "Resist," which made me laugh a lot.

I was like, "You win for best response: 'Just resist and do your job,'" and I laughed again at her response, since I found it so funny.