A shit mystery.

The other week I cooked up a big huge pot of beef barley soup and had two gigantic bowls before bed, and then the next morning at the first smell of coffee I suddenly had to go to the bathroom, and when I sat down and let loose, it was just like a steady row of composed and well formed and decently sized shit droplets, all a subdued red brown color.

Usually, it's like a liquid machine gun, after I eat barley.

I wonder what happened?

I did have a couple baked potatoes, too, maybe that affected things and helped bind all the barley together to the point where it was like a normal shit.

Later that day I had to shit a second time, and though I thought that that shit would be the one like a liquid machine gun, it wasn't, it was the same kind of shit as before.

I've honestly never had this happen!

Life certainly can be weird.

Comment of a (Nigerian) coworker.

The other week at the resthome, my one (Nigerian) coworker said that people in his country have been talking about whether their president has been replaced by a clone.

Basically, he went away to Britain for medical treatments for like four months and let the VP run things, and now he's back, and people are saying he's a clone.

"I do not think that is true, but that is what the people say," my one coworker was like.

He also said that this kind of stuff happens in Nigeria since you simply don't have the amount of press coverage that you do in the U.S.

"Here, they hide things, but the press looks, and they say more," he was like.

An odd person on the subway.

The other week when I was going in to work in the early afternoon, I was sitting at the north end of the one subway car, and there were a few (mid-30s) (black) males sitting around my end of the car, and they look pretty normal, but then one of them says something that's really loud, and it's obvious that there's something wrong with him, even though he looks clean and is decently dressed and everything, because his voice is too loud and what he's saying is disconnected from what's going on, or something like that.

Anyhow, later on, this one (white) guy gets on with a baby carriage and goes to my end of the car, and one (black) guy gets up and moves to the middle of the seat to make some room for him so that the guy can sit closer to his daughter in the baby carriage, and then they're on the car for a while, and then when he moves to get off the train with his daughter and wheels the carriage towards the doors again, that one weird (black) guy suddenly notices that he's carrying a small paper takeout bag from a restaurant and is like really loudly, "Is that food? Can I have that?", and the (white) guy is flummoxed but ends up being like, "Yes," and then he gives it to him right before he leaves.

Later, too, a (younger) (white) yuppie couple is on the train and they have a takeout box from a bakery, and the guy at some point sees that and is like, "Is that food? Can I have that?", and the (white) guy from the yuppie couple demurs because he said that he bought it as a thank-you present for a friend who's apartment he was staying in, but then like ten minutes later he pulls out a gigantic cookie with yellow frosting and calls out to the guy and gives it to him anyways, and is like, "Three cookies should be enough for her anyhow."

Even later, after the yuppie couple left, that same weird (black) guy starts talking about his takeout bag and randomly announces to someone else across the aisle from him (a friend?), "I'm not eating this now, I'm keeping it as a surprise for later on, I'll open it up and see what's in it."

. . .

He made me nervous.

Also, I think the first (white) guy, the one with the baby carriage, may have been French.  He had a bit of an accent, I think, when he talked.

Some people on the subway on my way home after work the other night:

A (30-something) (moustachio-ed and bearded) (Latino) dude watching his phone while it plays rap music really loudly, and this (very fat) (30-something) (Latina) woman who walked onto the train with him and who's obviously with him but is just sitting there cramming him into his seat from the side with her bulk and is looking around nervously, and they're sitting in the two seats facing backwards, and they each have an open bottle of Miller Genuine Draft that they're sipping from, and they both smell like alcohol, even from ten feet away.

Wisecracks about reality ghost shows.

My one client with disabilities really, really, really likes reality ghost shows about the paranormal, and every once in a while she's watching one while I cook or clean and so I watch it with her and we discuss it.

For some reason - maybe TV and film production subsidies? - a lot of these shows nowadays seem to be filmed in Canada, and the other week a guy who was relating his one big paranormal experience started out his story about how back when he was young back in Ontario he was sitting on his front porch with his parents playing euchre, and as soon as he said "euchre," we started tittering, it was so Canadian.

A few minutes later in the show, then, he talked about meeting some entity in the basement and being freaked out and running up the stairs and through the living room, and as he was relating that, I added in "...and then I was running so fast and suddenly I fell, I tripped over a cribbage board," and my one client with disabilities started tittering.

Then, a bit later in the same show, that same guy was talking about how that same night that that freaky stuff had happened in the basement, he was sitting in the living room watching TV, and then he realized that the temperature was dropping and that he could see his own breath and that the entity was back, and my one client added in, imitating the guy, "But then I was like, 'F*ck no, wait a minute, I live in f*cking Canada, it gets f*cking cold up here,'" and she made me titter.

During the next commercial break, I told her that we were like Mystery Science Theater 3000 for paranormal reality shows, and that there should be shadow shapes of our heads up on the TV screen.

Comment of a very old artist who lives at the resthome.

At the resthome, there's this one artist who's very old, almost a hundred, and when I was visiting with her the other day, she was lamenting the demise of circuses, though she agreed with me that it was bad to keep lions and tigers and elephants and whatnot caged up.

After that, we got to talking more around that subject, and I mentioned how my (now dead) (maternal) grandmother went to the wedding of her one friend's niece who had run away and worked in carnivals for a while, but then come back.

"Her wedding dress had a low back," I was like, "And when she walked down the aisle, everyone was talking because they could see all these tattoos all up and down her back."

"What were they?", the artist asked me.  "Were they nice?".

And, I had to confess that I didn't know, and I felt slightly embarrassed and ashamed, like I was making fun of the bride, too.

I also remembered at that time that part of that story might have been that the groom's party or maybe it was everyone wore cowboy boots, but I wasn't sure, so I didn't say anything.

Ethiopian politics.

The other week at the resthome, one of my (Ethiopian) coworkers was saying that she really really likes the current prime minister of Ethiopia, and that she doesn't like American politics at all, and she made a face when she said 'American politics.'

"He's a nice man," she was like, going back to talking about the Prime Minister, and then she was like, "He does so much good, and everyone likes him."

Our one other (Ethiopian) coworker who was sitting there nodded and agreed with her, too.

My one coworker then pulled up the Prime Minister's picture and Wikipedia entry on her phone, and I read through it, and it had all this stuff in there about him freeing long-time political prisoners and reaching across ethnic boundaries and whatnot.

He did seem good, at least from Wikipedia.