A very weird dream of a music concert.

Earlier this month I dreamnt -

I'm in like a lobby somewhere with my mother, and I suddenly realize that Katy Perry's "Smile" tour isn't being cancelled because of coronavirus but is somehow still pressing on in revised form, and I'm being pressured by mother into attending even though I have this huge sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach about going because of coronavirus.

Next, we're inside and at the back of what's like a large dinner theater room with these big round tables with white tables cloths on them and there's like red curtains and an elegant carpet, only, there's like two seats at every table towards the back and facing the stage because of distancing, and here and there there's like these gigantic solid cuts of meats shaped almost like a gyro stack but like three or four feet high, just sitting there on the table with slices cut off of them, since that was one of the dinner entrees that you could order.

Except, we don't order, and even though that's technically allowed, I still feel very uncomfortable, because everyone else got the dinner theater ticket or whatever.

Next, Katy Perry sings with minimal accompaniment, and then everything flashes forward and my eyesight is no longer located in my conscious head, and I can see a room where the tables are cleared and there's a small group of people clustered together up towards the front of the stage, with this one (middle-aged) (geeky) (black) woman shrieking along to the climactic chorus of some song, to where it's impossible to hear anything else.

And, even though I'm not in that room, I keep thinking that this isn't good with coronavirus precautions.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

Wart confusion.

My wart on the web of skin between my righthand thumb and my righthand forefinger reappeared, so I've been using wart remover on it to try to burn it off gradually and get rid of it all over again, like I had done so many years ago.

After a certain point, however, it seems like the skin gets bulky when you try rolling it between your fingers, so you're not sure if the core of the wart is still there at all, or if it's just your skin getting all leathery and bulking up from being abused after all the repeated exposure to the acid.

A dream of something wrong, again, as always.

Like last month I dreamnt-

Somehow (I can't quite recall all of the details right now, and I'm not sure I ever will), my Blackwell's Handbook of Dialectology was missing, permanently.

And then, I woke up.

. . .

An achievement against my deep-seated environmental neuroticism: More paper waste.

I'm very proud that it's been like a year now that I track my research and writing hours and whatnot and that the sheets of paper I keep gumtacked on my wall in my living room I only use on one side, because I'm afraid that if I flipped them over and used them again that marks from the previous side would come off onto the wall as I wrote on the new side.

For me, throwing away that used up sheet of paper after each month is done is really an achievement.

Apartment drama: Burnt popcorn.

Like a month ago, I was making myself some popcorn as a snack, and I wasn't watching and it got really burnt all of a sudden, to the point where it smoked and you could see a haze in my apartment afterwards.

Like five or six hours afterwards, I pick up my phone, and it was a text from my landlord wanting to know if I had turned the heat on for the year or something and if everything was all right (he and his family live upstairs from me, though they're considerate and not nosy at all).

I texted him back right away that I had had my phone off and that I had only just gotten his text just then, and I said that it wasn't my turning the heat on, it was burnt popcorn.

He texted back and said that he thought that it had smelled like popcorn.

Odd kitchen sight the other day: Inadvertent gelatin.

Like a month ago, I had drained some pasta into a pan that I use for cooking rice, so I could reuse the water and get the nutrition and taste from that, as well as keep the residual heat in my house.

(Neurotic environmentalism is me, definitely!)

Then, like five or six hours later, I go to dump the rice into the pan, but the water's all set in there like some thin beige pudding; the starch in the used pasta water and the cold temperature in my apartment must have combined to make like a gelatin or whatever.

It was trippy, but a little bit of heat made the water all normal again, so the rice could cook in it.

An Achievement in Environmentalism.

A few months ago at my one resthome job, I went to go get my one takeout container out of the top of the cupboard in the staff office so I could go and take some leftovers home, but it wasn't there.

"You have to put your name on it," one of my coworkers was like, and they said that someone else had probably taken it.

So, I took a takeout container with the name of my one (Thai) coworker on it, and I made myself try to remember that I'd wash it out later and take it back right away, before she needed it and noticed that it was gone.

And, the next time I was home, I not only washed that container out, but I also took out all of these plastic salsa containers that I had that I was keeping around for some reason in my kitchen cupboard at home, and when I took her container back, I took those in, too, and I put them in the cupboard too, for whoever would need them whenever.

And, when I did that, I saw that my takeout container had already been returned, by whoever had taken it.

And, like two weeks later, when I went to go get a takeout container, I saw that a number of the salsa containers had disappeared, since I'm guessing that almost definitely people have been using them to take stuff home in.

What an achievement!

"Reduce, reuse, recycle."

Back porch step misperception.

Last month, a handful of times I came out of my apartment through my enclosed back porch to go to work since I keep my bike there, and as I went down the back steps I saw a smashed toad corpse sitting there on the last step, only to look again and realize that it was actually just a crushed empty peanut shell.

You simply have no idea how much this crushed empty peanut shell looked like a toad corpse, if you just glanced at it; its peanut shell top looked the mottled top of a toad, and the white insides visible around the edges kind of looked like four legs, if you just looked quickly.

Parking lot misperception.

A couple months ago when I was taking out the trash for my one assisted living client with disabilities, I was going through the parking lot to the dumpster, and like right there I suddenly see a small dirty greyish-pink mouse fetus all dingy and curled up on itself, sitting out there on the pavement.

Then, I realize that it's a squeezed lemon slice, from a very pale lemon.

Weird Hanukkah synchronicity.

Since I'm trying to live my best life now, I'm trying to read the whole Bible in translation in this nice academic study edition that I have, and rather than start at the beginning, I decided to start with the Prophets, since that seemed more interesting, at first.

And, the Minor Prophets were the best to start with, since a bunch of them are super short and it gives you a huge feeling of accomplishment to cross a lot of books off of the table of contents list like right away like right at first like right when you right begin.

Anyhow, I did that, then Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, which are super long books and which took forever, and then since the order of the books in my study edition roughly follows the orders found in various pockets of Christianity, I started into Daniel, and it ended up that I got to the latter part of the book during Hanukkah, which meant that I was reading stuff about Antiochus IV who features in the Hanukkah story during a resonant part of the Jewish liturgical year.

How cool is that?

And it was a total coincidence!

Addendum.

I also asked my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker if I could compensate her somehow for helping me with my haircut, but she shook her head briefly and sharply and was like, "No."

I then said that I would have to take out a thank-you ad in the skeptic magazine that I give her my old issues of or in the newspaper, something like -

ALL ATHEISTS ARE NOT MONSTERS!

[her first and last name] IS LIVING PROOF

- and I was all mock-serious and swept my hand in front of me as I pronounced the wording, and then I laughed.

"You make up a situation, and then you laugh at your joke," she was like.

Self haircut (2 of 2): Trimming help.

With the haircut that I gave myself, there were some uneven places around the back and it looked particularly bad on a day when my hair stuck up, like the Friday that I came into work at the resthome and my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker gestured to my hair and was like, "No good!"

So, that shift I asked my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker if she could take five minutes and take some scissors and trim it up here and there, so she did that later that evening in the resthome laundry room, when it was quiet and we were between things to do and maybe probably because it was a time of day when no-one would come across us there, though if they did, I'm sure that there really wouldn't have been any problem.

I love my job; I live in a big city and know these random people from all over the world who are all pretty nice people, and I scamper up and down staircases around a resthome all day and help people, and there's fun random stuff like getting my hair cut on the sly in a laundry room.

What's not to like?

I'm like someone that you would find in a quirky non-fiction book for tweens.

Self haircut (1 of 2): Unexpected aftermath.

On Election Day I gave myself a short haircut so that I don't have to bother with my hair for a while, and since there's no way in heck I'm going back to a barber shop any time soon, what with the Covid spike and all.

I had mostly done it in front of my bathroom mirror with my beard trimmer, but I also at one point went into my bedroom to try to do a little bit of final careful trimming, since it seemed uneven in places and my closet mirrors are bigger and the light was better in there.

Like a week later, I was in my bedroom and I noticed what seemed like a small clump of dried grass on the floor, but when I went down to pick it up, I realized that it was a small flat heap of some hair from my head, and the brownish color made it look like dried grass.

Resthome quips: Elevator, complaining, hat.

At the resthome where I work, I usually assist this one retired engineer to get back to his room, whenever he comes back home after dialysis.

He has a very quippy one-liner sense of humor, too.

The other week, one of the 2 elevators in the lobby was out and it was taking forever for the one that was still working to come, so he was like, "What is this, the local?"

And like right when he said that, it finally came, so he was like, "And that's why you complain, it makes stuff happen."

Like a few minutes later when we finally got back to his room, too, I helped him take his coat off, and when I asked him for his hat so that I could hang it up in his hall closet, he was like, "No, leave it on, it covers up how I don't have any hair."

Usually he makes maybe one joke or two at most, but that day he was in quite the peppy mood.

Greetings at the resthome.

Like last Friday at the resthome, I delivered dinner to the one resident who always gives me candy.

And, I wished her a happy Friday, a "Shabbat Shalom," a "Happy Hannukah," a good weekend, and last but not least, a happy upcoming Biden presidency.

"Boy!", she was like, laughing, "You got 'em all covered!"

Thanksgiving story.

My one (white) (townie) coworker at the resthome said that her and her (Ecuadorian-American) husband are for safety's sake keeping their distance from her mother-in-law even though she lives upstairs from them, so on Thanksgiving she bundled up some food and left it on the back steps and called her to come and get it.

Thanksgiving aftermath: Broth project.

I always keep vegetable scraps in my freezer until I have enough to make broth, and sometimes chicken bones, too, if I have any left over from staff meals at the resthome.

So, after Thanksgiving, I fired the turkey carcass in a big Ziploc bag that my one assisted living client with disabilities gave me - it just fit! - and then I took it home and I put it in the freezer next to my tupperware containers of vegetable scraps, to keep it until I was finally ready to cook up some broth.

This week, I finally boiled it all down, to make this very rich broth, and since I had enough scraps, I actually swapped out the water in my small stew pot like 3 more times so that I had 4 batches of broth to make up some simple cabbage broth stuff in my big stew pot, so I'd have it to pour over rice as a huge tasty series of meals.

Interestingly, I had boughten this (Chinese) or (Asian) cabbage or some such at my local supermarket last month since it was on sale and it was a lot cheaper than the normal cabbage I'd get, and after I cooked it up, I totally realized that it's the kind of cabbage that you get like at (Chinese) restaurants in your (Chinese) food that you order.

And it's been sitting there at my grocery store all this time!

Laconic joke variation.

With the one really chill but fairly non-communication resident at the resthome where I work, the other month I asked her if she wanted to go up to the rooftop patio.

"No," she was like, "I'll jump off."

I didn't quite know what to say to that at first.

Then, I was like, "That's dark."

"Yes," she was like, "It is dark."

Cute cat quirk.

Last month I brought in medication to my one assisted living client with disabilities so she got her medication on time, and when she went to go open the bottle and had just unscrewed the lid, her cat appeared and leaned up on the bed looking expectantly at her.

The cat thinks the plastic pill bottle getting unscrewed sounds like the plastic cat treat jar getting unscrewed!

"No way," I was like, and my one assisted living client with disabilities was like, "Yeah, she does that sometimes."

Poor decision made when groggy.

Last month on my day off after I had slept in a ton and I was still super super groggy and I couldn't wake up at all, the mail came in, and when I went to go get it from my apartment foyer that my mail slot drops into, I saw that my neighbor had gotten three letters, too, that had been misdelivered to me in my apartment.

I opened the door to see if any packages that I was expecting had come in (they hadn't), and then without my thinking at all, I put the three letters there on my doorstep to go take down later to his mailbox around the side of the building, since I was so so sleepy and I was still in my boxers and I still needed some more coffee in order to do my best to try to wake up that day.

Then, like an hour later, I went to go get the letters from my doorstep to go take them down to my neighbor, but they were gone, and it suddenly clicked with me that it was kind of windy outside, and that the wind must have blown them away.

Very very poor planning on my part, but I was tired and I wasn't really thinking, and I hadn't really encountered a situation like that before.

I guess now I know what I should do in the future, if anything like that happens again.

Toe flesh.

Last month, I was taking a long bath, and when I went to go scratch loose skin off of the sole of my left foot, there was like a layer of flesh at the base of my toes that came off in like huge wraps, like one wrap per toe, and maybe one that stretched across the between-the-toe area to encompass the base of two toes, one on each side.

It was like my toes lost a layer of flesh, but just underneath them and only up towards the foot, not at the toe pads or the toe tips at all.

Ham water coffee.

Last month, I made up a big pot of pea soup, and I separately boiled up the ham bone and the onion and celery scraps, to make a broth that I then strained and added back in to the pea soup.

Interestingly, as the pea soup settled, it was not only more watery on top, but after I threw it in the refrigerator, that top watery layer also got semi-gelatinous, I must have cooked the ham bone down so much!

Like the next day, I then boiled up water in the same broth pot, to make my morning cup of instant coffee. (I've been using instant because I ran out of regular and I'm seriously spacing out trips to the grocery store because of the pandemic, I'm going like every four or five weeks, seriously). And, as I boiled it, the water gave off this ham odor, though the coffee tasted just normal, when I whipped it up and finally sipped it.

I was a bit disappointed, I almost wanted to find out what ham-flavored coffee tastes like. You can put a slice of lemon into instant coffee to make it taste more like normal coffee, so who knows, maybe the ham water would make it taste like a latte or something.

LIbrary conundrum.

The library in my city cancelled all fines like last year.

So what happens if you're reading a book, and it gets recalled?

This is not a theoretical question, either!

Last week a book got recalled that I was finally getting into after a year, and between the recall date and my work schedule and the Covid epidemic, I was like, "Fuck it," and I decided just to keep it and read it and polish it off, and so I did that, and I returned it like a week overdue.

They also are quarantining books for up to a week before they pass them on to other patrons, so I figure that that might give me some leeway with them seeking to penalize me somehow, too, that and the fact that there's a pandemic going on.

Lost blog post...

 ...because the note that I jotted down for myself is now opaque:

confused Italian w/knowing

 . . .

 What the f*ck on earth could that have been? 

Backstory of a (Tibetan) coworker: Drinking wine.

The other week I checked in with a group of residents at the resthome and my one (older) (blocky-built) (Tibetan) coworker was there, and I asked them if they wanted coffee or tea or juice or anything, which they didn't.

"Maybe barley tea?", I was like, joking with my one (Tibetan) coworker, but she looked confused and was like, "I don't drink barley tea," and then I realized that I had said the wrong thing and so I was like, "Oh, I didn't mean barley tea, I meant tea with barley flour, do you want tea with barley flour?".

"Oh, you can get that?", she was like, and when I said no, that I was just joking, she laughed.

She then said that all her life she drinks tea with barley flour, that's it, no alcohol, and that one time back in India all her friends were at her house drinking wine, and all night she just drank tea with barley flour, and she ended up cooking for them and cleaning all night and doing everything, while they just sat there and drank wine.  "But I don't drink wine, nooo," she was like.

A little bit later in that same conversation, she asked me to explain what "neither" was.

It was surprisingly difficult to explain.

Two bits of conversation and an exchange...

...from the resthome, recently:

1) I said I was tired to my one (townie) coworker who was working a double and has been working a lot of extra days lately, and as soon as I said that I realized how it sounded and I said I shouldn't say that to her of all people, "but it's lucky you're a woman, since women can take stuff, unlike men, who act strong but are actually posing and actually b*tch and complain all the time," to which she was like, "Yeah, but that still doesn't mean women always want to have to handle things..."

2) A coworker working at the front desk and another coworker were talking about someone who works in our building or used to work there, and one was like, "She actually said her husband wears adult diapers so he can keep gaming, if that was my husband, I would be so embarrassed, I would never talk about it, but she goes around talking like it's something normal..."

3) My one (townie) coworker showed me a video on her smartphone of how her two-year old son drums on her butt, and the look on his face when he pushed her shirt up and saw her tattoo for the first time.

Biden win memory flashback.

I forgot to blog about this till like now -

A few days after it happened, I was talking with my one (Togolese) coworker from the resthome kitchen about the declaration of Biden's victory on that one Saturday afternoon last month, and she said that she was driving in her car with her kids, when all of a sudden people started blowing carhorns everywhere and she realized what was happening, so she started blowing her carhorn, and her and her kids started cheering right there in the car.

This was in the one neighborhood just south of the resthome that has a lot of immigrants who live there, she specified to me when I asked.

So tired lately.

I've been so tired lately.

Part of me thinks it's the early sunset and the change in weather, and a part of me also thinks it's my "ten minute a day coronavirus workout" that I've been doing since March and which has really been increasingly kicking my butt cumulatively since then, thoough I do admit that my butt is certainly looking rounder.

(My one assisted living client with disabilities told me that the other day, in fact; "Your butt has been looking good," she was like.)

My one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker and my one professor friend who studies (modern Czech) literature have also told me that they've been tired the past few weeks, though, so maybe it is just the weather.

Three Thanksgiving memories:

1) My one assisted living client with disabilities said that growing up, her mom used to use a sausage grinder to grind up cranberries and orange pieces to make this homemade cranberry sauce, and it was really good.

2) Putting halved onions and peeled potatoes and stalks of celery on the bottom of a cookie tray that you have your turkey on when you roast it makes all of the veggies really tasty, and it's almost you're doing pot roast vegetables, my one assisted living client with disabilities pointed out.

3) That sound when you pull turkey meat away in great sheets from the inner membranes on the inside of the turkey breast around the rib cage is just sickening, when you go to pull the leftover meat off of the refrigerated carcass.  It's like thin and moist and it just goes on forever, it seems.

What an Economic Change.

Back when I was contemplating a Ph.D. in the mid-2000s and then getting into it, the common wisdom was that you might need a little hustle to transition sectors.

Now, it seems that the common wisdom of the last few years is that you may need a new different degree to segue into jobs outside of academia.

Just insanity.

Consulate mistake.

 Like a month ago, I showed up at the (Romanian) consulate on a Thursday like the consulate official had requested, to discuss some status update in my application.

And, I show up, and it's the wrong day.

It turns out, if you talk in a Dracula accent, "Tuesday" sounds a lot like "Thursday."

Current karaoke list...

 ...for the next time that I go to karaoke, whenever that is:

1) "Dancing in the Dark."

2) "Big Yellow Taxi."

3) "Rhinestone Cowboy."

I've been collecting some good songs to sing in my head, whenever I heard them on the radio or wherever.

I think "Dancing in the Dark" and "Big Yellow Taxi" have quick verses that would be hard to nail, so if you did that, people would be impressed, and both of those songs have a persona that would be fun to sing in (turgid and driven and horny, vs. incredibly and shockingly pure).

I do wonder about some of the rhythms in "Big Yellow Taxi," though; I've tried singing "Both Sides Now" at karaoke easily like two or three or maybe even four times now, and somehow it always comes off leaden with me like I can't quite catch the beat, rather than the effortless emergence that comes out when someone like Judy Collins sings it.

I also think "Rhinestone Cowboy" would make a great karaoke impression, when you get to that part -

 But I'm gonna be/

where the lights are shining on me.../

LIKE A RHINESTONE COWBOY!

- since the lyrics and singing karaoke just go so well together, and the world of the song and the world that you sing in would just merge together dramatically in one single moment, at that moment.

I also think that people will vaguely recognize the verse and know that they know the song, but they won't quite realize what it is until like half a moment before you slide into the chorus, and then you'll have the audience caught up in wondering what it is and they'll all be in the palm of your hand, if you're feeling it and they feel your presence.

A Dream of Something Wrong.

Last month I dreamnt-

I open up the tin of instant coffee that's on my kitchen counter to go take a scoop out of it, and I can see the metal container bottom through the little coffee that is left in there, and there's far less left in there than I had thought.

. . .

(Since I space out going to the grocery store because of Covid, I've somehow been missing sales on my regular coffee that I get and so I haven't been buying any lately.  So, instead, I've been drawing down the supply in my pantry, and so to stretch out the coffee that I have, I've sometimes been using up some instant coffee that I had boughten ages ago in order to collect the unusual tin, and I'm like halfway done with that, not all the way done with it like in this dream.)

Coronavirus reflection: Resthome resident socialization.

It's interesting to see how resthome residents have settled into a new normal of socialization, after communal meals and activities were cancelled because of Covid.

A number of them get together regularly now in small groups to play dominoes or to play Scrabble or to have an afternoon coffee and chat, and during election season I noticed that the one resident who's a retired school nurse would have this one retired (Swiss) psychologist over to her apartment every debate, to watch it together and talk.

Mail issues.

I've missed like the last three "every two weeks" copies of this one religion-affiliated newspaper that I subscribe to, and when I called up the place on the phone this week, they said that they'd been having this happen on-and-off all spotty like in different cities across the U.S., ever since the postal disruptions during the election.

The lady on the phone also said that her copy got delivered all late a few weeks ago, even though it's produced and mailed to her out of the very same city that she lives and works in.

Later that day, I saw a post office worker by my door and so I ran and opened it and asked them about the delivery stuff and whether there's been issues since during the election.

"Could be that," the (30s-ish) (black) (female) mail carrier was like, "Also you had a substitute carrier the past few weeks, and he was shitty, we got a lot of complaints."

Addendum.

When I went to go pick up my turkey at the resthome this week and take a Covid test before heading to work at my private client's, I ran into my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker who was on shift and in uniform and walking across the lobby, when I walked into the building.

"What are you doing?", she was like, looking at me there when I wasn't working and all in my civilian clothes.

"I'm here for the turkey and for a Covid test," I was like. 

Then, after a short pause, I was like, "What are you doing?"

And at that, she laughed, since I said it in the same direct tone-of-voice that she uses.

On another note, I do worry about people going to go deerhunting this year after the holiday, it can be like a Thanksgiving thing where people gather from all over and be together, often in small cabins with poor air circulation.

My one (hippie) friend from Michigan is worried as well, that people will go and do it regardless of the Covid pandemic.

"People here have to have their deerhunting," she was like, "It's their holiday, too."

Thanksgiving excitement.

This year I'm really looking forward to Thanksgiving, quite unexpectedly so.

Usually I don't do anything or I go over to a friend's, but last week the resthome announced to us out-of-the-blue that they were giving us a turkey and sides as a thank-you, and to keep us from going out to stores during such a busy time of year.

So, I'm going to make it up at my one assisted living client's with disabilities, and then leave some leftovers there for her and her sister and her partner!

Usually they'd go to their aunt's, but that's cancelled this year, and she knows how to cook a turkey but can't really do it anymore or at least right now, given her condition, and her (lesbian) sister and her partner aren't good with cooking like that and don't want to risk trying to make a turkey.

Before this her (lesbian) sister was thinking that she'd just make a green bean casserole for her and her partner on Thursday and then bring some leftovers over for my client the next day, and she's still going to do that, but now there will be a turkey, too!

It was exciting to read about turkey preparation, and I'm going to chunk up vegetables and put them on the bottom of a cookie tray and lay the turkey on that, and I'll use the drippings to make gravy and maybe add it into the instant stuffing that the resthome gave us, too.

I also read up on sweet potatoes, and I'm going to make some mashed sweet potatoes with some brown sugar added in.

I'm also also going to use an oil rub and butter pats and some strips of bacon fat laid on top of the turkey to keep the turkey breast nice and moist while it cooks.

It was so much fun to chit-chat about prep and cooking techniques and ideas with my client, and she told me about how years ago she made up her first turkey ever and accidentally baked it upside down, only to have it come out with the white meat so incredibly moist, since all the fat ran down in the bird and settled in the white meat parts that are usually sitting out on top.

Years later, too, she saw some chef on TV or read about it or something like that, and they recommended doing just what she did.

"I guess I was ahead of my time," she was like.

Since her cat also now follows me around the apartment if I have a treat in my hand and will lean up on things in order to get the treat if I set the treat down on something, I joked that I could also set a cat treat on the oven when I go to open up the turkey to check on it on Thursday, and then BOOM close the oven door real quick...

(I also joked when I was behind the kitchen counter that has an overhang on the other side that extends out over the litterbox, and when her cat was using it, that I could start thumping my hands up and down on the counter real quick, to see what the cat does. "Oh no!", she was like, "The poor thing will never come out again," and I was like, "But it will teach her important lessons, about surviving in the wild." Later that night, even though I didn't do that, she thought she saw cat turds on the floor, but it was actually a couple of dryer lint pieces that had somehow ended up there after I'd done the laundry earlier that night.)

It really is such a ray of light in an awful year, especially since we had our first resident death last week, someone who was in their 90s and got it from a private caregiver who was in their apartment a lot and was asymptomatic.

Some subway passengers the other day:

 A (short) (old) (paunched) (Latino) guy in a plaid shirt, who comes in and stumbles down the aisle as the train kicks up, and then grabs a bar and steadies himself and sits down and readjusts his facemask to make sure it goes over his nose, and behind him is a (taller) (fatter) (broader-built) (Latino) guy with a(n indigenous) nose and (longer) (graying) hair that needs product and is fluffed out in back apart from a bit of it that's desultorily pulled back into a braid, and now and then he talks loudly to the (old) guy in (Spanish).

Then, a (very dark-skinned) (middle-aged) (homeless) black guy enters the car from another car using the between-the-cars rickety pathway that you're not supposed to use, and he sets himself up and announces to everyone that he needs money or snacks or whatever you can give, and the (younger) (Latino) guy goes to his pocket and pulls out a wad of cash wrapped with a rubber band, and he pulls out a dollar to give to the homeless guy.

Like fifteen or twenty minutes later, then, a(n older) (very dark-skinned) (homeless) guy with his facemask hanging down around his chin comes through the car dragging a big black garbage bag full of boxes of toothpaste, and he goes person to person trying to sell it as he comes down the car till finally the (younger) (Latino) guy calls him over.

"Six," the homeless guy is like, pulling out a big economy carton of two huge tubes of toothpaste, but the (younger) (Latino) guy shakes his head and is like, "Five."

"Okay," the homeless guy is like, and again the (younger) (Latino) guy goes for his rubberbanded billfold, and he sorts through some twenties till he gets to the singles, and he counts out five and gets them to the guy, only he drops one on the floor and has to pick it up in the process before he gives it to him.

Later later, a (fat) (young) (very dark-skinned) (black) girl comes on the car and sits down near me, and she occasionally rocks back and forth some, and when she sees some (shaved head) (jacked) (white) guy standing nearby wearing a tricked-out mask with canvas bits and a big ventilator hanging off each side of it, she says "I need one of those" out loud, to no-one in particular.

Like five minutes after that, too, she pulls out her smartphone and fiddles with it and sticks it in her hoodie pocket, and it plays some modern country music song that I vaguely recognize the sound of.

Farewell to a coworker.

The other day my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker said that my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker quit, and she wouldn't say why at first, but when I pressed her she said that she said something about having to take care of her aunt.

"Or maybe her husband earns more money and she can stay home?", I was like.

"She have no husband," she's like, and then when I press her, she says that she never presses for information about anyone's personal life, they usually talk about other things, but she doesn't have a husband.

"But she told me she has a husband," I was like, and I was thinking back to her stories about how he's tried to cook and he burns food and you could tell from her face that she thinks it's cute.

"She say that, but it not, in their culture, you are married, or nothing," she was like.

She then asked me who he was and if he lived here, and I said that I thought he did, since he has a lab job at a hospital in a nearby city, and that I thought that they lived together.

"No," she was like, "They can't."

She then said that some nights when she didn't want a ride home after work there was some guy picking her up, and she asked her who he was, a boyfriend, and she told her, "No, a friend."

Now I wonder if I should have looked for a ring, if (Ethiopian) (Muslims) even do that.

4 scenes from the resthome:

1) For my one (white) (townie) coworker who likes to doodle and sketch, I pin up a drawing puzzle on the notice board in our office so she can pick it up the next time she's on shift, since I had been telling her about those type of puzzles from the puzzle magazine that I subscribe to and I had said I'd leave one for her the next time I worked, since I thought she'd like them and she should try one out.

2) My one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker asks me why I don't want to work extra shifts like 6 days a week or like 50 or 60 hours, and I say I'd rather have time than money, and she says she'd rather have money than time.  She also adds that she has to send money home when she can, and she asks me if I support my family.

3) An older resident who likes to tell jokes bought us all ice cream from Dairy Queen, as a thank-you for how hard we're trying to make things easier for them during the pandemic.  I ask for a second one from the box of Blizzards that he had brought in, and he's like, "Sure!".  When we're talking, we get on the subject of how he's originally from New York City, and I ask him how he met his (dead) wife; in the 1950s, he went to a singles camp with a friend, kind of like a Catskills things but for singles and in Connecticut, and at limbo night the second week they're there he starts talking with a girl behind him and they hit it off, and when he encourages her to go under the bar, he touches her butt.

4) The (shorter) (youngish) (Mexican-American) activities director lets me print out a few short things in his office, to save me a trip to the public library and exposure to any germs there.

A dream of a store.

Last month, I dreamt -

I'm in this very cramped and crowded discount clearance store with the white metal shelving and the tall anonymous pasteboard ceilings, and I'm looking at this shelf full of chunky portable radios that is so full or radios that it's almost more like a pile of radios or a heap or radios than a shelf of them, and I'm looking for a radio to replace my one at home that's broken and won't quite work right.

. . .

(The quiet end of the volume of my similar radio from home has been broken since forever, and lately now and then the volume will cut out sometimes when I go to change the channel or cue up a new CD, so at some point soon I probably will indeed need a new radio.)

"Day of the Dead" quip.

When it was my work shift nearest the "Day of the Dead" this year, I wished my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker a Feliz Dia de los Muertos ("Happy Day of the Dead").

Then, I was like, "Y porque eres una eskeptica, yo dijo, Feliz Dia de los Muertos para Siempre" ("And because you're a skeptic, *I* say, Happy Day of the Dead Forever"), and I tried to emphasize my phrasing so that the words "muertos para siempre" ("dead forever") strongly grouped together.

I'm not sure if it translated, but she was like, "Good one."

I also asked her if she did anything growing up in her village back in Mexico for the Day of the Dead. She said they did something on the altar in their home, and then went to the cemetery where all of their dead relatives were buried, to visit them.

My parents on the Trump campaign.

Something that struck me in the closing days of the election was how disturbed my parents were to see a bit of a Trump rally in their state on TV.

"There were three nuns behind him!", my mom was like. "Your father and I couldn't figure that out, what a lack of common sense," and she went on to say how there was swearing at his rally and he's a bully, too.

For her and my dad, it seems like in this instance it 's a visceral personal behavior issue first and foremost and not anything with his policies, though I know they've been appalled and disturbed by his "inhumane" child separation policy right along. 

And she made no mention of abortion or anything like that, as a buy-in for the nuns.

Cat progress.

After like a year of my giving her 2 treats every time I start shift, the cat of my one assisted living client with disabilities is finally starting to warm up to me.

Lately, she's started scampering towards me sometimes when I get on shift and start to open up the treat jar, and she's finally started understanding the game where I chuck a treat on the floor and she goes to chase it; she even comes out into the living room right away now, when she hears the treat hit the hardwood floor.

The other week, too, she walked up to me on my client's bed,and stopped there and let me pet her, even on her belly, only the second time that she's ever let me pet her at all.

(The previous time was a while ago when my client's [lesbian] sister was petting the cat, and I snuck my hand up in among her hands to go and pet her, which the cat was fine with for a few minutes, she's cool with that approach sometimes, they had been telling me.)

Addendum.

After that (Spanish) mistake at work, I texted and messaged people over my smartphone to let a few friends who speak (Spanish) know about it, including my one (Spanish) professor friend who I know from my university that I attended for my doctoral program, but then we got started talking about other things, like how his (pregnant) wife is.

(Good, but they're lying low because of Covid and because she's feeling beat out from late-stage pregnancy stuff.)

And, at that, I said that that meant they had less options for a gender-reveal party, but they could still do something at home, like maybe have people over for dinner and serve creadillas if it's a boy, or maybe something with eggs if it's a girl.

(I said this to bring up creadillas and poke fun at him for being Spanish.)

And, he messaged back -

Pescado o polla 

 . . .

Spanish mistake at work last month.

Last month at work at the resthome, my coworkers weren't ready to get their staff meal yet and the kitchen staff wanted to know what was up, so I called each of them in turn over the walkie-talkie to ask if they wanted the fish or the chicken, but when I finally got to my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker, I decided to speak in (Spanish) and was like, "[her first name], que quieres, el pescado o la polla?"

And, right then I was turning to go to the buffet that was set up for the meal delivery, and my one (Mexican) coworker from the kitchen was standing there and so was the one (Nigerian-American) kitchen manager who speaks decent (Spanish), and they were both just standing there looking at me and their eyes were both huge, and my one (Mexican) coworker from the kitchen finally spoke and was like, "No no no, [the Spanish version of my first name], no."

A small event at my apartment.

The other week at my apartment, there was this big fly buzzing around every once in a while, until suddenly it wasn't anymore.

Then, like the next morning, I go to pour out some water into the coffee mug on my kitchen table that I always use for my water, and as the water rises up to the top of it, there's something on it, and it's the corpse of the big fly.

I picked it out of there with my fingertips, and it felt surprisingly crunchy, like it was barely waterlogged at all.

Carbon footprint.

So, I finally got around to calculating my yearly carbon footprint.

It's like 7 tons, though it's 10 tons if you add in the flight for my worktrip to Germany last year.

I calculated, too, that like 400 mature trees would compensate for that every year.

Thankfully, last year I got like 150 trees planted for my birthday.

I think I'm going to keep paying attention to this one reputable reforestation program that you can donate to, and the next time they have a "twofer" matching donations campaign, I'll order 125 trees and they'll match 125 trees, so my 400 trees will be out there growing and one day they'll take up the carbon that I emit every year.

Once I do that, too, who knows, maybe I'll throw some donation money to more trees every once in a while, too, so they're out there growing and I'm giving back to carbon capture above and beyond what's needed for just myself.

Two great things about my resthome job:

1) Back when the Trump tax exposes were coming out in the New York Times, I rustled up another resident's leftover papers to deliver to the one retired professor resident who I always talk politics with, since she only subscribes to the Sunday Times, and she was really into the story when it broke on TV.

And, I did that on the clock!

2) This one petite very nice resident who I sometimes deliver dinner to always has a little candy bowl out on her dining room table, featuring an array of small candy bars and peanut butter cups and Hershey's kisses and whatnot, and I've been in the habit of grabbing two and thanking her before I leave, after delivering dinner.

"Take more!", she says, every time.

A Dream of an Assisted Living Client: Vocabulary surprise.

Last month I dreamnt-

I'm lying on the floor with a number of people watching a nature special, and there's a picture on screen of a stony plateau abutting the sea, and a seal clambers up on top of it.

At that, I turn to my one assisted living client with disabilities, who's on the floor a few persons down from me, and I'm like, "Do you know what the German word for 'seal' is?".

"Uh, I don't know," she's like, "Maybe, uh, See... hund?".

"How did you know that?!", I'm like.

. . .

(The day of the night of that dream, my German vocab app taught me the word for 'seal,' which is Der Seehund, like the "sea-dog." I sometimes tell my client fun or funny-sounding German words I come across, and as soon as that came up as new vocabulary, I thought to myself, "I'm going to have to tell her this!".)

Addendum of two little bits:

1) At a doner place near the hotel, the (Turkish) guy who worked there heard my broken (German) and asked me if I was (Polish).

2) In one newspaper article, I found the word "die" three times in a row, like "die, die die," which was something like, "Those, which the..." (it works in Germany since the verb appears at the end of the sentence in a clause like that).

I found that quite endearing, in a language.

My worktrip to Germany (7 of 7): Red light district.

On one of the two days that I really had time off during my worktrip to Germany, I took a tram out to one side of the city to this big park, and I took a few hours and walked through that and by the major university and then back to city center.

And, I ended up passing through the several block red light district, which was like completely empty since it was like 7 or 8pm on a weeknight, and one sign I saw advertised Latina women at what seemed to be a place of prostitution, and another place looked like a club and had a sign above the door -

DAMEN & TRANSEN EINTRITT FREI

- which is like, "Ladies & trans*women - entrance free."

Then, when a few blocks later I was really down in the city center, it turned out that I was in the seedier immigrant part of town over to the west of the train station, the red light district blended into that and I hadn't quite realized it when I had been by there earlier.

My worktrip to Germany (6 of 7): Working-class Germans.

On my worktrip to Germany last year, it was interesting to get these glimpses of insight into the lives of everyday Germans.

Like, there was this tabloid article about a girl who got a tattoo of a ring of sausage on her thigh, and from the photo of her in the tabloid, she wore short shorts and you could tell that her thigh was just big and beefy and jiggly and you just got the vibe that she had short gross sex whenever she had it, and always probably drunk.

One tabloid article, too, had an article about an Advent calendar, where every day was some sex toy or erotic massage lotion or something.

Also, on my daytrip to see a historic site near the city where I was based, I stopped off into this small bar near the train station, where it was super tiny with just room for a bartender walled in by the bartops into the middle and then these narrow aisles and like a bench back in back that you could slide up into and sit up at the bar, and a dartboard near the end of one aisle next to the door, and it was locals stopping through, including this one guy who was getting off of shift from this home for the disabled and this (fat) (middle-aged) factory worker woman with crazy curly hair and a gruff voice, who was wedged into the bench at the back and who would greet everyone coming in, since they all knew each other, it seemed.

And, they all smoked.  

That was another thing about my trip to Germany, it was crazy how prevalent smoking was everywhere.

Sometimes there'd be a separate smoking area when you'd enter a place, but it'd be like in a foyer between pairs of sliding doors ( = the entrance to the hotel where I stayed), or in a supposedly separate roomlet poorly walled off from the main room with big glass panels, where you could still smell the smoke coming in from that area ( = a cafe near the hotel where I stayed).

My worktrip to Germany (5 of 7): Immigrants.

During my worktrip to Germany, it was very interesting to see how recent and older immigrants were woven into everyday life.

At the tram station near my hotel, a(n older) (Turkish) woman manned the little ticket booth / convenience store kiosk where I'd buy my daily tram tickets and a copy of Bild, the trashiest (German) tabloid that I could find.

I noticed that her store - or, rather, the store where she worked? - had a framed picture of Ataturk up on the wall.

Also, in the downtown of the major city near where I was, I noticed that this one edge of the downtown area off to the west of the train station started to blend into Turkish barber shops and Syrian restaurants and whatnot, and some (very dark) (presumably African) (illegal?) immigrants started to appear here and there among the passers-by.

Also also, on a daytrip I took to see a historic site to a much older and much smaller town near the city where I was, there was these like (sunglassed) (leather jacketed) (Turkish? Syrian?) (young) guys just standing outside the train station, smoking and lingering and seeming on edge, and every once in a while answering their cell phones.

It was like they were full of energy, but had nowhere to go.

All in all, just very turgid.

My worktrip to Germany (4 of 7): So much meat.

It was absolutely astounding to me the sheer volumes of meat that seemed to be incorporated into everyday (German) life.

The hotel had this lovely breakfast buffet, one of the best I've ever seen, with cereal and muesli and scrambled eggs warmed up next to a thing of bacon, and there was a basket of rolls near these big jars of really good jams with huge pieces of fruit inside, and then they had this like total coldcut lineup, with pieces of salami-type stuff and cuts of liver and slices of ham, and even these like reddish-brown sausage bits that were quite chewy, that turned out to be a blood sausage, and maybe a few more slices of rotating stuff that they didn't have every morning that I can't quite think of right now.

(Those meats were next to some smoked salmon, and slices of cheese and a little jam jar full of horseradish; once there was also what they called an "egg creme," that was like an egg salad with a ton more mayonnaise than we'd use here, and some random-ass herbs mixed in.)

That shit was so good, to wake up to over coffee as you have like this ham and cheese and horseradish sandwich you made for yourself on a tasty tasty crusty bun, but still, it was a lot of meat.

When I got the newspaper, too, it was just astounding, like so many of the ads for supermarkets were all about specials on meat, a lot more than you'd expect compared to the specials on other food products.

Too, the bus stop ads had some giant prosciutto campaign going on, telling people that the way you could tell your family you loved them this holiday season was to serve them a giant tray of prosciutto, and there was a picture of like a three generation-family smiling as a (German) mom-type figure in an apron held out prosciutto to them and to you as well, the way the camera angle was shot for the ad.

This is above and beyond the doner kebab shawarma-type stuff that they have like everywhere, like gyros here, but just everywhere, like at shops that you'd run across pretty darn often, instead of some special shop that you make a special trip to.

Honestly, it was like everywhere you turned around in Germany, there was meat.

Their carbon footprint has got to be simply staggering.  I've never seen anything like it.

Halloween, Election Day.

 1) My landlord had some "Demon Slayer" costume from anime, and his wife was the counterpart. She wasn't a fan, but she went along with it anyways since she got to pick the anime costumes last year. Their little daughter was some cartoon character "Apple Blossom" who I didn't know, and their son was somehow some large cat where the costume was a blow-up figure like people put out on their lawns for Christmas, kind of, only you could wear it instead of putting it out on your lawn. I told him that he better be careful, because with that costume people might give him dead rats instead of candy.

2) Election Day I was sitting out on my chair on my stoop having coffee, and my (older) (Mexican) neighbor said he was glad to see me relaxing, since he sees me working and I work too much (I have my blinds open when I'm reading and writing in my living room, since I can focus better that way, with a connection to the outside world). I tell him that I actually don't work too much, since my jobs are active and social and that leaves me plenty of headspace for what I want to do on my time off, and at that he tapped his finger on his head and was like, "Smart, you learn from the people," and I stopped and I thought about it, and then I told him that yes, I do, especially when it comes to stuff I write about politics, I learn a lot from the older folks that I work with, and that I've actually asked people if I can quote phrases that they use. Later, I give myself a haircut over my bathroom sink, using my beard buzzer. My mom calls upset before she's going to bed since it doesn't look good for Biden, and I tell her that that's a factor of how the ballots have been counted, and that there's been articles about this for weeks. She says that she had been thinking that night about when she was a girl and they were discussing elections on TV, the commentators used a blackboard to illustrate their point. "A blackboard!", she was like, and I asked her if a passing stegosaurus ever interfered with the TV reception.

My worktrip to Germany (3 of 7): The people's personalities.

My limitations to talking with people was limited to English since my German is shit, but it was interesting to note (German) people's personalities.

It was like they were there and polite and nice and with you up until a certain point, and then they'd just stop and they'd look like a deer in the headlights and weren't sure what to do, especially in the presence of humor, which doesn't seem to be natural to them, and so they'd just laugh nervously instead.

Like, I was waiting at the hotel desk and was chit-chatting with the (young) (mid-20s) (German) clerk, and it turns out that the hotel was his family's business that his parents had started up years ago, and that he had gone to hotel school and then done an internship in Vienna and then come back to run the hotel, and his brother was the cook and did all of the work back in the kitchen at the attached restaurant.

"Why?", I was like, speaking in simple sentences and with basic vocabulary so that he could understand me instantly and without any problem at all. "Did your parents look at you and your brother..." - and at this point I put on a personality - "You, you look normal, you can work here, but you, you are ugly, go, go to the kitchen!"

At that, he just kind of laughed nervously and looked side to side, like he wasn't quite sure what was happening, though some small part of himself somewhere deep inside of him was maybe wanting to laugh, but he was struggling against it.

My worktrip to Germany (2 of 7): The people's looks.

So often when I was out and about in the cities on my trip to Germany last year, I'd be people-watching, and I'd keep seeing these very distinctive faces, like some young guy with a pig head and a big double- and triple-chin with huge fatrolls and stubble sticking out of it, and I'd realize that he looked like something out of an early modern woodcut.

My worktrip to Germany (1 of 7): Getting there.

Last year on my trip to Germany, I found myself taking a piss in the Munich airport, and something felt off, and then I realized that I was expecting more fat moustachioed guys in leather jackets malingering and furtively looking around.

That's when I realized that so much of what I expect from Germany, is shaped by watching Fassbinder movies.

Signs of academic morbidity.

So, my one animation professor friend from the art school where I used to work was saying that he's going to retire as early as possible, just eight more years to go.

He said that art school used to be more fun and people would put stuff up in the hallways, but now it's all weird and professionalized and it's just not as much fun as it used to be.

That's funny, him and both of the readers on my dissertation committee all feel the same way, and all want to retire as soon as they can.

For all of them, their profession has ceased to be pleasurable, and perhaps even tolerable.

That's certainly not a ringing endorsement for the health of a sector!

John Updike.

When I was out last month catching up with my one animation professor friend from the art school where I used to work, we somehow got on the subject of favorite authors, and and I began talking about how my favorite authors back in high school were John Updike and Margaret Atwood, both of whose work features a disproportionate amount of middle-aged people having languid affairs amidst feelings of social sterility and inner emptiness, just over and over and over in different variants, and I pretty much kept picking up one after another of their books, for like all of my teenage years.

We then started talking about the Rabbit series, and it was weird, he remembered major plot points, and I more remembered the weird little bits like a guy standing next to the stove and rubbing out a load into a pan of scrambled eggs his wife was cooking up on the morning after the night of their honeymoon, or barging in on your daughter-in-law in the bathtub and seeing her bright red pubes.

I haven't thought of that shit in years, and though I only read that stuff once way back when, it stuck with me, after all of these years.

It's funny, I've said for a while now that these 4 interests travel together:

1) Cults;

2) Weird sex;

3) The historical Jesus; and

4 Serial killers. 

Looking back, I got my cults and serial killers interest from pop culture shit, and my interest in the historical Jesus from my high school religion class, but the weird sex stuff I might have gotten from John Updike, and also the Thornbirds (my plot summary of it: "a woman f*cks a priest in the outback").

Life sure was different, back before the internet.

I also remember that in the Witches of Eastwick, the devil's penis curved downwards, not up.

3 curries on one day, almost:

1) I reheat some leftover vegetable korma from the resthome, for a second round of breakfast after my usual lentils and toast that I've been having recently.

2) After a late afternoon and early evening of catching up with my one animation professor friend from the art school where I used to work, I get home and make up some jasmine rice and reheat the last of some pea-and-potato curry that I had pulled out of the freezer earlier that week.

3) That night, I make up a big pot of potato-and-cauliflower curry for the next week or so, only, I don't feel like eating any by the time that it's ready, so instead I have some cold potato slices from some leftover chicken and potatoes that I had gotten from a special treat meal that a kitchen manager at the resthome had bought for her staff and then distributed leftovers to everyone from.

An odd manifestation on my body.

The other week I removed a band-aid from under my right thigh, which I had put over a scratched-off patch of skin where I had scratched off a mosquito bite so that the itching and swelling would end instead of just going on and on like it always tends to do with me.

It had been on that spot for like a week or two, and I had never peeled it back or touched it at all.

The scab was over the size of a dime, and oddly flat, and it had the thin and crunchy consistency like if a Jolly Rancher had melted on a table and then gotten hard again, and it was only attached to the skin a little bit at one point, otherwise it was just kind of sticking out all flat like the big wing of a coffee table or something.

I had simply never seen anything like it before.

I'm guessing it formed because the place of the scab meant that juices from me oozed out in that scab place all day on and off when I was going around and walking, and that that somehow fed the scab into a different consistency and type than usual, though who really knows.

Sometimes life means that you have to live with mysteries.

Signs of academic degradation.

It's striking to me how many scholars I know or who I see talking on social media, who simply don't have that much time to do scholarship anymore.

Earlier this fall I wrote a(n Australian) scholar who I've met at conferences to ask him about something he wrote in a book of his and to check on the status of a project he'd announced several years ago, and he followed up really collegially and sent me a pdf and gave me some good leads, but he also mentioned that he was finding it hard to find time to work on any of his projects nowadays.

It's all very sad, this guy is world class and decently recognized as such, and yet he can't even find time to work on his backlog of important projects.

What sense does that make?

He's a talented specialist who does work that's important and gets read, and yet he can't even further his specialty, even though he's in a position where it looks like he could and it looks like he's "made it."

It's just sad.

Comeback of a (Tibetan) coworker.

The other week, my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor helped me out by doing something, so I thanked her in (Tibetan) over the walkie-talkie, and she said the equivalent of "You're welcome" over the walkie-talkie in reply.

And, since I was in the staff office when I was saying this and my one (blocky-built) (Tibetan) coworker was sitting at our staff table eating her dinner, I was like, "How do I say 'You're wonderful' in Tibetan?", since I was hoping that she could tell me quickly and I could follow up over the walkie-talkie with that.

But, she didn't understand what I was asking for at first, and the moment passed, so I didn't end up pulling that joke.

Then, later, all 3 of us were in the office together, and my one (blocky-buiilt) (Tibetan) coworker asked me out loud if I wanted to marry my one (Tibetan) coworker with an inappropriate sense of humor.

I didn't quite get what she was getting at at first, so I gave her a quizzical look, and then she was like, "Because you think that she is wonderful."

"Oh," I was like, and then I put on a voice and really loudly was like, "Of course I want to marry [name of our coworker], she is wonderful."

At that point, she was wiping down a counter, and without even looking up or missing a beat she was like, "No, I don't need you, I need money."

Confession of my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker.

Like last month when I came into work at the resthome, my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker was sitting at the table in our staff office, and after we had gotten through initial greeting formalities, she told me that this one resident who I rarely worked with and who had been on hospice had died.

"I feel so bad," she was like.

"But she was in a lot of pain," I was like.  "It was time."

"I was up all night, I was very upset," she was like.

She then told me that she had died like a half hour after she had gotten off of shift, and that during all that shift she had worked with her.

She would walk into the room, she said, and there she'd be, lying on the bed and hardly breathing, one eye open and one eye not, and not seeing anything if you went up to her.

Two bits of my life:

1) Before I leave my shift the other week, my one assisted living client with disabilities said I should grab a small Halloween candy bar from the bag of them on the counter that her (lesbian) sister had had dropped off earlier that day.

2) On my way home after my resthome shift last week, it was raining, and lightning got worse right when I got home, so after I sterilized my doorknobs I found that I had to kill time until I could take a shower and settle in, and so I did stuff like unpack my bag and then pack my other bag for the next day and then even like this ten-minute full-body toning pandemic workout that I've doing, till the lightning let up enough that I could squeeze in a quick shower and get clean and hygienically wash all of my exposed body area, and then live my life like normal and have dinner and settle in for a bit before going in to bed for the night.

Coworker magazine prank.

So, a few months ago I had asked my one (Mexican) coworker who's extremely skeptical about everything if she wanted to take the issues of the one skeptic magazine that I had begun subscribing to this year, after I had gotten done reading them.

She said yes, so, for the very first issue when I had gotten done with it, I took a little piece of paper and wrote her name on it, and on the title page where it says -

SKEPTICAL INQUIRER

The Magazine for Science & Reason

- I overlaid the phrase "Science & Reason" with the piece of paper with her name on it, so it looks like it says -

SKEPTICAL INQUIRER

The Magazine for [name of my one (Mexican) coworker]

- and then I gave the magazine issue to her that way.

And, I covered it up with my thumb, and then when I flipped through the different articles to show them to her and she seemed interested, I gave it to her, and I told her something like, "Oh yeah, and I forgot, I noticed this," and I walked her through the title, and when I got to the subtitle I removed my thumb to show her her name.

She didn't seem either amused or not amused, but when I went to go peel off the piece of paper to go throw it away, she was like, "No, leave it," to me.

I wonder if she's going to show it like that to her husband.

3 things, 1 day (3 of 3): Third thing.

At the beach, I see this (young) (black) couple in like their early or mid 30s walking by and holding hands, and as they do that, jet skis appear somewhere way out on the water.

And, the guy says to the girl, "Those are like motorcycles, but on water."

3 things, 1 day (2 of 3): Second thing.

At the beach, I realize that I forgot to bring a plastic fork with my tupperware - I bring my own tupperware and fork, to cut down on waste - and so I eat my meal by using my fingers, or a folded-over slice of roast beef, or larger unwieldy pieces of biscuit that I rip off of the big slab biscuit that I got with my meal.

The gravy and runny mashed potatoes are simply just a bitch to eat, and sometimes the green beans fall of whatever I'm holding, though my fingers work decently well enough with those.

3 things, 1 day (1 of 3): First thing.

At the cafeteria near the beach that I go to, 2 (younger) (black) guys are putting in their orders, and one pulls down his mask to talk to the workers, as he talks to them behind these giant hanging Plexiglass shields that divide the open kitchen from the ordering line.

A few minutes later, too, the next guy is actually laying his arms and head down on the counter and his mask is pulled down around his neck, so when he's talking, his breath is actually going into the gaps below the giant hanging Plexiglass shields, since that's where his head is at.

"What weird people," I say to the one (later middle-aged) (stoic) (Greek-American?) counterwoman who I know by sight, when she goes to ring up my order.

"You have no idea," she was like.

"There's a lot of them like that?, I was like.

"We're used to it by now," she was like.

"Gilead."

Last month, I saw the word "Gilead" in like 3 places within like less than 24 hours:

1) A book of the Bible.

2) Margaret Atwood's sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale."

3) A drug company ad in my latest copy of Rolling Stone.

. . .

Vandalism.

The other week last month I had to go into work on a Saturday since a coworker had asked me to switch shifts with him for some reason.

So, like I always do, I locked up my bike at the north end of the one subway station that I live by, and, as part of that, like I always do, I locked up my bike helmet next to the front wheel of my bike by putting the bar lock through both of them, so that my bike helmet was secured to my bike as my bike was secured to one of those kind of upside down U-post things that you see sitting out on streets that you can lock your bike up to them.

When I got home that night, then, my helmet was like busted in half, from someone probably leaning on the part that was sticking out the most.

My front wheel felt misaligned, too, when I started riding, like someone had leaned hard on the helmet and wrenched the wheel to the side some, too.

There's been so many weird people on the subway lately, that I wonder if it was one of them, or maybe a local kid or whoever going to or from one of the bars near the subway stop.

The funny part is, I've been living in this city for like fifteen years or more, and I've always been locking my bike helmet up with my bike like that, and this is the first time that something like this has happened.

Bad economic sign: Rent incentives.

This past Friday night, there were some very weird people going into the subway station at the same time that I left work, so I lingered and let them go onto the platform, then I slowly and cautiously went there, too, but I went to the opposite end, and I warned the only other person out there to be careful and to keep their eye on them.

And, it was some (Asian-American) guy who had only moved to the city a month ago, and this was like his third time riding the subway.

We talked a bit, and it turns out that he can work remotely, and so he had moved from San Francisco in order to save on rent and to be closer to his parents and to save on some money. 

(He had been paying $3400 a month for rent out in San Francisco!)

Anyhow, the neighborhood that he now lives in is one of the ritziest neighborhoods in the city, and he said that the building that he lives in is offering 3 months rent free on move-in...

Downward pressure on rents isn't a bad thing in itself, but it's definitely a sign of economic trouble in what's actually causing that downward pressure, what with all the unemployed and underemployed younger people who've had to move home, from what I've seen of statistics and all the stories that are in the paper nowadays.

The (Asian-American) guy, too, said that he had read somewhere that rents are down like 7-10% right now in San Francisco, from all the people moving out to work remotely and save some money.

Fun part of my job.

At the resthome, this one (black) (female) private aide who used to be a McDonald's manager and is cool as all heck really follows politics, as does the one resident who's a retired professor who she assists.

When politics was getting all heavy a few weeks ago with the Rose Garden superspreader event, we got in a habit where we'd be texting each other news articles and stuff as soon as some new development came out.

Isn't that awesome?

I'm also loaning her my memoirs of the women who escaped R. Kelly.

Like me, she reads them in like a day, sometimes reading them even quicker than I do, then we discuss them a bit.

Two conversations with (Ethiopians) (2 of 2): Crimeblog article.

Later that same week at the resthome, I was looking at this crimeblog, and there was a kid with a(n Ethiopian)-looking name who got busted, and so I showed it to my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker and to my one (heavyset) (Ethiopian) coworker when I bumped into them during a slow moment during the second half of the shift.

"Oh my god," my one (heavyset) (Ethiopian) coworker said, after I told her about it and texted it to her and she had started reading it.

"If my son, I am so ashamed," she was like.

"That's an Ethiopian last name, right?", I was like.

"No, more Tigrinya, he is probably from Eritrea," she was like.

Later that night at the very end of the shift, my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker was in the office with my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker, and she was like, "Show her that article."

I did, then, and then my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker started telling my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker that she wasn't surprised, there's some Eritrean gangs, including in her apartment building, didn't she know that.

"No!", my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker was like.

Two conversations with (Ethiopians) (1 of 2): "Boss."

My (Ethiopian) coworkers at the resthome told me how to say the word "boss" in Amharic, so whenever my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker is working in the supervisor position now, I call her that, in conjunction with basic Amharic phrases like "Hello," "Thank you," "Excuse me," and "You're welcome."

Usually, she says something like, "No, I am not aleyka, I am your friend."

A few weeks ago, her and my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker and my one (heavyset) (Ethiopian) coworker were sitting around towards the end of shift talking about something, and as I was coming up by them and greeted them each in turn, including with "aleyka," my one (edgy) (Ethiopian) coworker said something definitively and finally in Amharic and the two others of them gasped, and then she turned to me with a mischievous look on her face and was like, "Say that instead."

"No," I was like.

So, she said it again, and was like, "Say that."

"No," I was like.  "That's a word for an aleyka, it's not a word for me. An aleyka can say that, no problem, but if we say it, we get in trouble."

And at that, I pursed my mouth seriously and shook my finger and was like, "No no no no, I will not say that."

Two stories of Zoom:

1) This summer when we caught up, a colleague from my old doctoral university said that you can tell a lot about the undergraduates from their room backgrounds on Zoom, like how rich all of them are.

2) A few months ago, the one retired nurse resident at the resthoome asked me if this one other resident had a bedside commode, and I didn't know and I couldn't say anyways and so I told her that, and then she said that the other week during a discussion group on Zoom, that that resident had gotten up and walked a few steps over and seemed to start using a bedside commode, right then and there on camera, and some staffer had gone off frame and gone running to prevent her from doing that, but it wasn't enough time, he didn't get there until after it seemed like she had finished.

Skeptic magazine.

This summer, I began subscribing to the one major skeptic magazine here in our country, since some stuff that I had been reading up on had come out of that orbit of things, and so I had decided that it was a good thing to subscribe to in order to keep up on stuff.

The first issue wasn't the best, but it was still pretty interesting, and so I told my one (Mexican) coworker at the resthome about it, and I said that she could have all my issues when I'm done with them, if she wants.

"I think you'd like it," I was like.

"That's because I am one," she was like.  "My mother and my husband tell me that, all the time."

Two bits of niceness at my one assisted living job.

The other week at my one assisted living client with disabilities's, my client's (lesbian) sister had left a note saying that there was some good corn in the fridge, and to go grab a cob and have some if I wanted.

Later that week, too, I was home at my apartment, and while I was there she sent me a text with a picture.

She was at her sister's and had been cleaning her toilet, and her sister my client had joked that where was the cleaning seal across the toilet to show that the toilet was clean, so she made one up out of something, and then sent me a picture of it since she thought I'd get a kick out of it.

(I did.)

Two signs of nowadays:

 1) I spazzed out this past weekend at the economic freefall that we seem to be in, only to check in with multiple friends and find out that they were all feeling the same way, and that one had even had a deja vu feeling that very same day and had sat and thought about it for a bit and had realized that it was how she felt at one point in 2009, and she hadn't felt anything like it since then but here it was again.

2) The branch library by my house and the main one downtown both have big signs by their library return slots, "NO BALLOTS."

A Young Couple on the Subway:

Both seem college age, her (white) or (Latina), him (Latino), both in mainstream fashionable clothes, and his hand is on her leg, and she's leaning into him and they're talking and talking and talking and just totally into each other, and he breaks away to stretch, and as the sleeve pulls down his left forearm, it's just rows and rows and rows of scarred-over cuts, like easily dozens of them, and it's totally like it's to the point where it's really just overlapping white lines with no flesh color showing at all in between all of the scarred-over cuts, except at the edges where maybe sometimes they peter out at different lengths kind of like a fringe.

New encyclical.

This past Monday morning sharp, I called up the (Catholic) bookstore downtown, to see if they had copies of Pope Francis's new encyclical.

The lady who answered the phone said they weren't in yet, but if I ordered online, it'd count as a preorder and I'd save 10% on it.

She then looked up for me the right web address for their online store, to make sure I had it before I hung up the phone.

I asked her, too, if it was bound in the same way as Laudato Si', which I had also gotten from them, since it was a very nice little bound volume and I liked that format a lot, and she said it was, and that it was even the same color green, since that's the color they gave to all of Pope Francis's writings in that series.

When we ended the conversation, she said "God bless."

Noise mystery, clarified.

Last month, I started getting woken up like a few times a week at like 9:30am, by the kids upstairs being like really super noisy, like noisy to the point where it was like them sounding like they were body slamming the floor and stuff, repeatedly, for like quite a while.

I let it go for a bit because I thought it was a phase or something, but then it started up like a week later, so I texted my landlord really nice reminding them to try to keep it quiet until like 10:30am, because of my sleep schedule being off because of my having a non-normal work schedule.

He said it was their son's online gym class on Mondays and Thursdays, and they'd figure something out.

Vegetable casualties...

 ...since I do my shopping like every 3-4 weeks with my little granny shopping cart to stock up so that I don't have to go to the store that often in the age of coronavirus:

1) A red pepper that had a little rotten patch develop at one end.

2) Heads of iceberg lettuce that had some outer leaves get gunky.

3) Two rotten potatoes at the bottom of like an eight- or a ten-pound bag.

4) Multiple cauliflower heads that started getting little black patches on the very outer tips of the florets here and there, where I'd have to scrape those places off with a knife before cooking them.

5) Scattered stalks of celery that get all weird greenish brown like a pervasive rot manifesting from underneath.

These are the fruits of caution, and the price I pay for safety, I think. It wouldn't be happening otherwise.

Anecdote of one resthome resident: A memorable pedestrian.

Last month, this one resthome resident who used to be a pediatric nurse was telling me about this one person she saw walk by the building the other day.

It was some guy in a wet Speedo, just walking down the sidewalk in that after he probably went swimming, all barefoot and with nothing else with him at all.

"How did he get into his apartment afterwards, if he didn't have keys?", I was like.

Rubbing alcohol competition.

Last month, the pharmacy near my house didn't have any rubbing alcohol, and so I left early for work the next day and got off the train a few stops south of the resthome, since there's a pharmacy right by the train station there and it's easy for me to get to.

When I got in, there was like two small bottles of 71% rubbing alcohol left on almost bare shelves, so I snatched them up.

As I was considering buying one of these overpriced small plastic spray bottles that came with some rubbing alcohol inside, these two (Latina) women, like a (middle-aged) woman and her (older) mom, they come by and snatch up a few of those small bottles, and they look and shake their heads at the empty shelves.

And then, this (tall) (young) (white) hipster guys comes up, and he doesn't see anything except those little spray bottles, but he hovers as the women leave, and then he darts down and looks all the way to the back of the bottom shelf, and he grabs a leftover regular-size rubbing alcohol bottle from somewhere way in back, where it had been out of the eyesight of all of us.

And, all of this happened in like two minutes.

If I had honestly gotten to the store like five minutes later, I wouldn't have gotten any rubbing alcohol at all.

At the checkout, too, the clerk told me you could only buy one bottle at a time or the system would lock, so he checked me out twice.

4 reactions to Trump getting Covid:

1) My one (blocky-built) (Tibetan) coworker said "Take care!" to me when we were leaving work at the resthome the other night, which is an unusual farewell greeting for her. 

2) People are wearing masks more on the subway.

3) After I told him that people are wearing masks more on the subway, my dad was like, "If that's what it takes for people to use common sense, then good deal."

4) One vivacious resident at the resthome was like, "At least we know now he's human."

Odd reaction to descriptions that I read in books.

Lately I've noticed that social distancing has become so ingrained, that some deeply submerged part of me crawls and writhes a little bit inside if I even read about some non-socially distanced activity.

Like for example, this past week I was finishing up Margaret Atwood's sequel to the Handmaid's Tale, and part of me crawled internally when they mentioned a choir concert/singalong in the closing pages, since it automatically seemed so inadvisable for you to go put yourself into that type of situation, even though the activity was described in fiction as part of a clearly fictional setting.

The same thing happened, too, when I was reading a book about the Jeffrey Epstein case, and the author described packing people into a larger courtroom for some important hearing involved with his case.

A pleasant day of resthome interactions:

1) The one resident who's a retired nurse and I were talking about the presidential debate, and I asked her what she thought of Joe Biden saying n'shallah, and she said that she hadn't caught that and wasn't aware of the phrase, so I had to explain it to her, and then I also said that I had read that people were impressed because he had used it in this particularly appropriate sarcastic way that you hear, like if you're growing up and you ask your (Arab-American) mom when the family is going to Disney World.

"Oh, like 'in your dreams'?", she was like.

She also had ordered a bin of specialty popcorn to distribute to all of the different staff in all of the different departments, since she doesn't like to do Christmas presents, but does Halloween presents instead.

But, she ordered some candy corn-flavored popcorn just to try it, and she saved it to open up with me so we could both try it at the same time.

2) The one (black) kitchen manager said she can't wait for the Kamala Harris - Mike Pence debate.

"She is going to eat him alive!", she kept saying.

Later, I bumped into her having the same conversation with this one (cool) (black) private aide who I regularly chit-chat with about politics.

"She is going to eat him alive!", the one kitchen manger was telling her.

"And you know that she's going to go after Trump, too," the one personal aide was like.

"Yes, she'll eat them both alive!", the one kitchen manager was like.

3) As I was clocking out and going to use the desktop computers in the library like they let me do now, the one (older) (gay) (Polish-American) front desk worker was like, "Isn't this a great place to work? Other places probably wouldn't let you do that."

"Yes," I was like, and I told him too how after dinner that night the one (super nice) (Togolese) kitchen worker wrapped up for me a piece of vegetable lasagna and some beet salad that was leftover from the staff meal and would have been tossed out into the trash.

"Yeah, other places, they probably wouldn't let you do that," he was like.

"Yeah," I was like, "It gets into too many problems of people overcooking and putting it aside for themselves and stealing from the place," though I made sure to say that that wasn't what was happening here, because it wasn't, it was people not eating their staff meal and those plates would have been thrown out if they hadn't've been given to me.

"Or they're worried that you'll get food poisoning and sue," he was like.

He then said that he used to work for a mobile home construction firm and they used to let people take home scraps, until one day a bunch of new two-by-fours "accidentally" ended up in the dumpster.

High holidays at the resthome.

High holidays at the resthome this year made it feel like everything is kind of getting back to normal after the peak of the Covid crisis.

Depending on the resident I was talking to, I recycled a joke that one guy had told me a while ago, "What did the rabbi say to the pope?", the punchline being, "Good yontiff, pontiff!".

For services at Yom Kippur, it was hybrid and precleared through the one mega-important nurse who works upstairs in some office, where the services were held in the main activities hall and everyone wore masks and sat like 12 feet apart from one another, and doors were open and windows were cracked to keep airflow up.

There was spots for like 10 people and everyone else was watching remotely, but a few people dropped out from coming, so the leader of the services had to ask over Zoom if anyone wanted to come down, so they could get a minyan together and sing the Kaddish.

More on the midget-owned bar.

Like a month ago, the one receptionist at the resthome who used to own a bar told me that her and her husband were driving and they happened to pass the one bar in the city that's owned by a midget, and she mentioned to him that just the other day me and her were talking about it.

"I'll never go in that bar again!", her husband was like, to her.

"I had no idea," she was like, and she said that it turns out that years ago, he was in the bar having a drink, and the midget owner who lives upstairs had been watching everything on her cameras, and she saw that his car had a bumper sticker on it for his own bar, so she called down and said he shouldn't advertise his bar in her bar.

"Which is ridiculous," my coworker is like, "The bars are in completely different parts of town!  How could he steal her customers?"

But, she said, he pushed his drink back, said he would never drink in there again, and left.

She also added that a guy who owned a nearby bar that had a much later closing time would come in every once in a while and buy drinks for people and pass out ads in their bar, but that was different, those type of bars usually don't get much business till later at night, so they're not really competing and it's perfectly fine if their customers went there afterwards.

"But she actually thought he was there stealing her customers!", she was like.

Bits of two dreams from the same night:

1) I'm by my one friend the (Spanish) language instructor's house, and I walk up past the Burger King to the north of her, and its front windows are open, and there's just masses of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder in there, and it all makes me cringe inside, to see such crowding.

Next, I'm in a taqueria buffet banquet hall just north of that, and I'm walking one of those bikes that you can check out in the city through there and through all its chains of rooms with off white color walls and dull blue carpeting and dull sunlight leaking in the occasional dirty windows looking out at nothing in particular, before you get to the main buffet room, which looks a lot like that too, only it's bigger and has a big metal buffet cart thing with a peaked plexiglass roof so that you can look at the food as you reach in, but you can't sneeze on it. On the way there and back, I see many people, and although many are 3-4 feet apart, I think that they're too close together, especially on my way back through the smaller rooms where the tables are all crammed in.

2) I'm at an older super market with my mother since I came along with her to pick up things before a family party, and I see handwritten signs about sales from the ceiling, including one about a cheap sale on Edy's ice cream (like $2.39 for a big tub).

Later, I see a small sales display with lemons and limes from Israel, and there's a small box opened up, and inside the cover that's leaned open it says something like -

MOVE TO ISRAEL!

- and I know somehow from a talk with the workers there that that's a company that the owner patronizes through family ties.

. . .

(Links to my present life include neurosis about Covid-19; a few trips like the past 3 months to go visit that one friend who does indeed have a Burger King near her apartment; the brand "Edy's" appearing twice in crosswords I've done recently; and probably memories of etrogs bouncing around in my brain from seeing them during Sukkot at one of my places of employment.)

My one (Mexican) Coworker's Verdict on "The Lovely Bones."

The other week, I was asking my one (Mexican) coworker what she was reading, and she said she had finally finished reading "The Lovely Bones," which she had gotten a copy of somewhere and had been reading on and off for a while.

"I saw the movie, but I never read the book," I was like. "How was it? Any good?".

"Oh, it was okay," she was like. "It's not true, it's fiction, people come back and help people after they are gone. It's nice if it's true, but it's not," and at that she made a face.

"Wishful thinking," she was like after a beat, and then she went off to go do something.

3 bug problems last month:

1) Biting flies at the beach, when I went there.

2)  A giant silverfish scurrying by my backdoor in my closed-in back porch when I went out late at night to go get my sheets from the dryer downstairs, and another giant silverfish scurrying around the window sill of my living room when I was sitting in my armchair and reading late one night later that same week.

3) Itchy raised bumps all over my side and buttocks now and then, though sometimes appearing late in the day, and possibly being bedbug bites, though possibly also being raised welts from sensitive skin from taking showers so much because of the coronavirus and sweating a lot from the very hot weather, since no bedbug droppings were apparent in my bed.

Sweet mutuality, at one job.

 Last month, the one (lesbian) sister of my one assisted living client with disabilities texted me and asked me if I wanted some banana bread with chocolate chips in it, since she was in a social situation where she felt compelled to accept it as a gift, but neither her, her partner, or my client wanted any of it.

Of course I did, and I ate it all in like 3 days, some the first day when I picked it up, both at my client's apartment and then at my own apartment later that night, and then I had some for breakfast on like the 2nd and 3rd days and I polished it all off.

The next week, it was super hot out and the little super market near my client's house had ice cream on sale for $3 a carton, so I picked up a carton of Neapolitan for all of us...  It was a good price, and I really wanted some, and I figured Neapolitan would cover all of the bases in terms of flavors that they potentially liked.

It did.

A sign of punchiness.

Last month at my one assisted living client's with disabilities, I woke her up from a nap in order to give her her meds, and I unscrewed a water bottle that she keeps to refill and I gave it to her at the same time that I handed her her meds bottle with the top popped.

Then, while I was talking with her in a low voice so as not to wake her up too much, I tried putting the pill bottle top on the water bottle, and the water bottle top on the pill bottle.

Conversaton with a (Nigerian) coworker.

Last month at work, I stayed after my shift at the resthome in order to send off some emails on their desktop in the library that they have there.

Afterwards when I had finished and was heading out through the lobby to head out and go home, I bumped into my one (bulky) (Nigerian) coworker who works nightshift, who has hanging out there in the lobby and talking with the receptionist in some downtime between her duties.

"Hey [her first name]," I was like, "What's new?".

"New York, New Jersey, New Orleans, that's what's new," she was like.

We then chit-chatted some, and it turns out that she can't swim, and that back in Nigeria her parents were "traders," and they traded dried goods like beans and rice to the north of Lagos. 

"No vegetables," she was like, "They did not have refrigerated trucks like they have here."

Resthome staff meal: Tongue.

 Last month at the resthome, the dinner was either pasta or tongue.

"Do you want tongue?", the one (Thai) dietary worker who was passing out entrees was like.

"No," I was like.

"Okay, pasta for you," she was like, "That is four for pasta."

 She then said that only my one (Mexican) coworker would eat tongue.

Blogging list desideratum:

 "crumpled corners"...

I had that on my list as something to blog about, but I'll be darned if I can remember what it was.

Another Mundane Dream of Something Wrong: Cauliflower.

Last month I dreamnt -

I'm stirring a big pot of pieces of cauliflower that are starting to boil in water mixed with soy sauce, and I turn one big piece over and I see underneath the soy sauce watermark that that chunk is actually half rotten right through, not just a few spots here or there or anything, and I stare and I wonder how I couldn't have noticed it and ended up putting it in the pot, since the soysauce watermark wasn't on it originally to disguise it back when I was chopping up the cauliflower.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

(The week of the dream, I was making a big pot of vegetable curry, and 1 of the 3 heads of cauliflower that I was using had a section of it that was rotten, the first time I'd ever seen that on a cauliflower.)

Addendum.

I remembered, the reason that me and my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker were talking about visas and immigration is because I was studying German vocabulary on a smartphone app and was showing her the ridiculous words that are close to English, when we both had some downtime and were hanging out on some armchairs set up in the hallway on one of the floors of the resthome.

"So close!", she would say, after many words like "Die Hand" for "the hand" and "Der Arm" for "the arm."

Then, "Das wetter ist kalt" I was like, and I was like, "That's an actual sentence in German, The weather is cold, isn't that crazy," and I added that I think you can something like "Ist das Wetter kalt?" if you have a question, with words and word order just like in English.

"So funny!", she was like, and then she said that she'd have to remember that sentence to tell her one friend who lives in Germany.

"You have a friend who lives in Germany?", I was like.

She then said that her friend got married young and had a kid and left her husband because he was no good, and somehow she figured out how she could go to Italy, and she wanted her to go to Italy with her, but she didn't, and now she's in America, while her friend went to Italy and then eventually ended up in Germany.

"Where in Germany?", I was like, and my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker said she didn't know.

(Later she looked it up on Facebook, and her friend lives in Frankfurt.)

"What is better," she was like, "Germany or America?".

"Right now, Germany," I was like.  "If you can, go there."

I then told her about the difference in access to healthcare and wages and whatnot, and then she said that her friend works the same job as us but is on salary at a better wage and has vacation and everything.

"I will think about it," she was like.

Coworker aspirations.

The other week, I was talking with my one (cool) (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker at the resthome, and somehow we got on the subject of visas and immigration.

"Are you a citizen, or do you have a green card?", I was like.

"Green card," she was like.

She then said that she's not sure if she'll become a citizen, because she wants to maybe go back to Ethiopian= one day.

"You can't be an American citizen and an Ethiopian citizen at the same time?", I was like.

"No," she was like.

She then said that she wants to go back one day and open up her own pharmacy and stay there for the rest of her life.

I responded normally to that aspiration, but then I was like, "You know, when you do that, everyone will talk about you. 'Look at [her first name], such a nice woman, but she went to America, and she came back and now she sells drugs.'"

At that, she laughed and gave me a look.

Observation, on the languages of resthome coworkers.

Last month at the resthome, I was going through the lobby because of something, and there was my one (Mexican) coworker standing there for some reason talking to the one (Romanian) receptionist.

And, both were speaking (English), but it was striking to me how both are products of vastly different cultures and places, but both speak a descendant of (Latin), in one case brought across the ocean to a new continent.

Just something to think about.