A playful resthome resident.

One of the resthome residents is this short and well-dressed distinguished-looking guy who's a hundred and one years old, and he displays dementia and has lost much of his verbal capacity, but a lot of the time he can be quite quick-witted and playful, non-verbally.

For example, I have to walk with him and escort him to and from the dining room, and one day when he was one of the last ones out, I was a bit ahead of him and so I turned around and walked backward, just to f*ck with him.

He was amused by that, and then all of a sudden he stopped and mugged looking around me, like something was coming up behind me and like I was going to trip and fall and get hurt somehow.

LOL.

Another day, he was eating slow too, and I had escorted the other residents who I was supposed to assist that day back to their rooms, and I came back to get him, and he was still at his table, leisurely drinking coffee.

He had been folding a (cloth) napkin, so I took another one and carefully folded it into ever smaller triangles, until you couldn't fold it any more, it was so fat.

Then, next thing I know, he takes that napkin, fiddles with it and with his, and all of a sudden he's holding both of them up in front of me as two overlapping napkins, one pointing up and one pointing down, and together they form the Star of David, and he's chuckling gleefully.

So, after he set those down, I took the two napkins, unfolded them one time, put them together again, and held up an even bigger Star of David in front of him, which made him laugh again.

Then, I put the napkins down, and when I went to unfold them another time to get even bigger triangles, he laughed pretty hard, and was like, "Oh boy!"

One time, too, I was assisting him in this short hallway with a cement floor, and my one (male) (Tibetan) coworker was passing by, so he stopped to say hello for a bit, and when the older gentleman was walking by this one stain on the cement, my coworker pointed to it and was like, "Hey [his first name], did you do that, did you do that?!".

At that, the resident paused, took his hands off the walker and turned, and mimicked like he was waving his dick and pissing on the floor.

At that, they both chuckled, and my coworker then explained to me that one time the resident had gotten confused and he had thoughten that he had pissed on the floor when he had seen that, so they both go and joke about that now.

That gave me the idea of more risque humor with him, so that very same day when I took that one resident into the dining room, there's these little round half-dome plastic lids where the kitchen workers set out sample plates of what's being served that day.

Me and him have joked with those before, where one time they were both empty and I gestured to them both like something was there, and he paused like he was thinking them over and deciding between them before pointing to one of them and being like, "I'll have that one."

Also, another time I took them and clapped them both together in front of me like I was some monkey at the circus or with some organ grinder, and still another time I took one and held it up like a bell and I struck it and made bell sounds like "BONNNNGGGG," at which he pulled out his backscratcher from his bag on his walker and went to go strike it like he was hitting a bell.

Anyhow, this time I took the two round half-dome plastic lids by their little handles on top. and I put them against my chest like I had breasts.

He paused and laughed, and then he paused and made his eyes go half shut and he stuck his tongue out and shook his head back and forth, as if his head was between two breasts, and he was going crazy licking them.

LOL.

I didn't quite expect that reaction.

It goes to show you, dementia can change people's capacities, but people are themselves just the same.

One (Jewish) resthome resident on Sukkot.

This one (Jewish) resident of the resthome where I work for my one job was saying how she's always liked Sukkot, and how it's a festival to celebrate the harvest.

"It's a happy festival," she was like.  "We don't have too many of those."

Tibetan hello.

One of my (female) (Tibetan) coworkers, the really nice one who was anxious about the body of the one resident being taken me away so soon, taught me the typical Tibetan greeting the other day, and she said that I should go and surprise the other Tibetan who was working with it.

So I did that, and that (male) Tibetan coworker was surprised, and pleasantly so.

I asked him what it meant, too, and he really couldn't explain.

"It's like 'hello' but better," he was like.  "It's like all the good things."

Once, too, a few months ago, me and him had been talking about Tibetan names, and he couldn't really explain a lot of them either and he used explanations like that, like that the name is "something really good," so I ended up googling them, and the names all turned out to be all of these Buddhist concepts and stuff.

I find it interesting that when all of that kind of stuff meets the limits of my coworker's vocabulary, he explains them all by saying that they're "really good."

I wonder how much of those names and sayings are like that on a conscious level for Tibetans, every day, and how much of it is like when you meet a woman here and her name is Hope, since you don't really think about that name at all as a concept unless you're asked about it, it's all like background in your mind.

A dream of things off.

The other night I dreamnt -

I'm looking in my bathroom mirror, and for some reason my eyes hone in on my nostrils and I start looking at them.

After a few seconds, my right nostril I see in the mirror is all clear, but I look at my left, and it's full of tiny hairs from the edge and the top of the nostril, all sticking out at like an eighth of an inch long.

And, I realize that I had forgotten to trim that nostril with my nosehair scissors.

Then, I wake up.

. . .

Score at the drug store!

Like a month ago, I came home from work after a long day at the rest home, and I had dinner and read, and it was getting near midnight.

And, I was hungry for ice cream.

So, I went to the local 24-hour drugstore, and wouldn't you know it, ice cream was on sale, 2 quarts for $8, and even though they mostly still had plain vanilla and a really crappy caramel flavor, I was able to find Mint Chocolate Chip and Cookies and Cream in the back of the freezer, since I was looking for those 2 or maybe some Rocky Road.

I got that and a big bottle of wine, and then when there was a line at the automated checkouts, a (younger) (pudgy) (male) (hispanic) clerk opened up a cash register, and I went there and he was chatty, and we chit-chatted as he rang me up and I put the ice cream and the wine into a cloth bag.

"Look at that," I was like, at a pause in the conversation.  "So much happiness in one bag, and only sixteen dollars."

"A bag of happiness," he was like, "That's so funny."

On rice.

Towards the end of this past summer, I noticed that every now and then I'd crave a bowl of rice with soy sauce in the morning, so in addition to my usual breakfast, I'd cook up some jasmine rice, douse it with soy sauce, and wolf it down last thing before I left the house.

I'm thinking now that maybe that was a response to all those 90-degree days and hot nights where I was sweating a lot, and I was needing to replenish my salts.

On another note, I've said it once and I'll say it again, if I was Asian and a drag queen, my stage name would be "Jasmine Rice."

A grandmotherly quirk.

My one homecare client said that if her grandmother was alive, she'd have used swear-words about Trump, even "sh*thead."

To her, 'sh*t' was her worse word that she could use, even worse than 'f*ck.'

"That's weird," I was like.

"Yeah, isn't it?", my one homecare client was like.