Subway Tales (2 of 2): Alikeness.

Like a few days later, I was on the subway car, and I had shorts on, and one of my knees had a bit of a scab on it from when I had tripped and fell a few days earlier.

Later on that same trip, a (younger middle-aged) (white) guy comes on the subway also in shorts, and one of his knees is a bit scabbed up, too, likely because he also fell at some point, very probably right around the same time that I did.

Earlier on that same trip, too, a(n older) (middle-aged) (white) guy in jeans and a grey t-shirt and a baseball cap comes on the subway, and he's very thin, no musculature at all, and he has a goatee and a hard-bitten look around his face and his face has got a bit too many wrinkles for his age, and on his forearms, there's scabs here and there up and down them, from what appear to be trackmarks.

Subway Tales (1 of 2): Some (black) (male) teens.

The other week when I was on the subway, like three (black) (male) teens came through the car.

They stood in between the cars, with the one door open behind them into the car where I was, and while they stood there, they smoked some marijuana, the smoke wafting back a little bit into the car, so that everyone sitting towards that end of the car could just barely smell it.

A few stops later, they came back through and let the door close and went out onto the subway platform, one of them still holding the blunt.

A (Jewish) resthome resident talking to me about her new great-grandson...

...and holding her arms out to show how big he was, the last time she held him:

"Just like a three-pound brisket!"

. . .

A sign of my being broke:

My nice-looking grey jacket that I got almost a decade ago is just fraying from age on the sleeve cuffs and at the bottom hem, and tearing in the lining, and it's just old, though it's been mended once, and there's really no way that I can afford a nice-looking new coat now, since it'd be a couple hundred dollars and after my rent and bills and groceries for the month every month, I have like maybe $300 left over.

And, that's with my parents paying my student loan payments every month, out of some inheritance that they got when my great uncle died a while back.

If I had to pay student loan payments on my current income, I'd be $5 short every month, assuming that all my spare cash went to student loan payments and I never had any savings or emergency expenses or anything!

Going to graduate school really destroyed my family's generational wealth and has helped drive me even further downward from the middle class, more rapidly.

I had around 15 years of lost earnings, and then I got out of my degree program in debt and with a degree that didn't really lead to any special employment, so instead I could only get employment that just barely covers my expenses, after more than a year-and-a-half of job search.

"Classic story."

That's actually the standard situation for a lot of people, nowadays.  I'm actually better off than many since I have a bit of inherited wealth that covers my student loan payments, though from everything I can tell, that's basically been around a third of what I'll get if/when my parents and family die and proportionate money flows to me.

A third of our family wealth, wiped out by student debt that didn't even result in a decent profession where a person can maintain and set a bit aside.

It's pretty astounding, actually.

Kind gesture of a (younger) (black) (woman) to me after midnight...

...and when we were both on a relatively packed train car, and like 2 or 3 stops before mine this (black) (female) (homeless) person lying across 2 seats with her head on her backpack started shouting into it how she would kill them and they kept trying to drag her into hell, and everyone on the car got silent and looked at her out of the corner of their eyes, and then when I got off at my stop and am walking down the platform I hear:

"Hey, here!"

(And with that this [younger] [black] [woman] leans out the subway door and underhand tosses my black knit cap to me, since it must have fallen out of my pocket when I was getting up to leave and was slinking out of the door without trying to attract notice of the homeless woman down at the other end of the car.)

Job perks.

I really do love how we get a free staff meal at my one resthome job.

I maybe bring in a few pieces of fruit as snack, otherwise I'm good to go for a meal while I'm there, and I can often take some home to boot, as well.

The other day they had this nice little salad made up, with pieces of cheese and a hardboiled egg and a nice creamy horseradish sauce dressing, just a bit.

I had one and one of my (Tibetan) coworkers didn't want his, so I got a second one to bring home, too, which I had the next day.

This is my first job, I think, where I've consistently gotten food.  It's great!

I really do think it's helped me stretch my grocery bill.  Depending, I might get an extra 4-5 meals a week out of it, so something like a quarter of my weekly meals are now taken care of.  It helps!

Tales of the elite dog store.

The other week I went out for a few beers with my one ex-neighbor who's from Louisiana and is a Katrina refugee and who used to manage a bookstore but now works at an extremely elite dog store in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city.

Right away, she dumped a lot about her job, right when we first met for the beer.

Like, middle-level rich people walk their dog around all day, but high-level rich people have someone to do that for them, and they just stay inside their apartments a lot, when they're not at another house of theirs.

One of those high-level rich people was once at her house in Miami, and she called the store for them to overnight ship her a couple of bags of dogfood that could be gotten anywhere, and the shipping bill was like $60, just as much as the dogfood itself, for like a total of $120.

"Like, we appreciate your business," she was like, "But, really.  I mean, she just knew to call us, instead of finding a store nearby."

After a pause, she was like, "It's just another world, money doesn't matter."

She also was telling me that another one of those megarich women is more ambitious than most, and what she does is move into an apartment and redoes it and sells it, and then she goes and moves into another apartment nearby and she does the same thing, and she just does that over and over and over again, moving like a block or a half block away and redoing her new apartment, all the time in this small little wacky rich neighborhood that's a few blocks wide by a few blocks wide.

She also said that sometimes she finds out little backstories about her customers, like the (fatter) (older) (rich) (white) woman with a little dog named "Schmokie" that she's always talking about, like calling up and ordering something for "my Schmokie," and it turns out that this woman is a highly lauded neurosurgeon who goes around the country teaching other neurosurgeons cutting-edge techniques, while her house husband stays at home, very likely with her Schmokie.

As an aside story, too, my one ex-neighbor said that this small-batch dog treat company sent in an order of treats that were darker than usual, and everyone was calling up saying that the dog treats were too dark and too thick for their dogs, and they needed lighter and thinner ones, right away, and it was either the mid-level rich customers themselves calling, or the servants of the high-level rich people, since the high-level rich people had told their servants to go and call the store for them.

"Their world is so wide and so small at the same time," she was like.

Too, her other two coworkers are hot, and when one of them commented that people treated her differently, she was like, "That's because I'm short and fat, life is always like that for me, open your eyes and notice."