Remembering the early pandemic.

The other week, I was thinking back to the early pandemic.

Masks weren't recommended then, just social distancing, so it was a nightmare to be in subway cars, with just all of these people breathing all around you.

And, I was so nervous at work, that I'd rip out the puzzles from the local newspaper when I was at the resthome and I'd do those compulsively, and then when I had downtime at my one assisted living client's with disabilities, I'd do this sketching/art type puzzle in my one puzzle magazine that I subscribe to, that I usually would never do because it's detail-oriented and takes a long time and is kind of boring, but at that point in time I found it soothing, likely because it absorbed all my attention and made me not think at all about what was going on all around me.

Yet another subway ride in from like over a month ago:

On the subway platform in the early afternoon, there’s a (young) (black) guy smoking pot in the little booth shelter in the open air, and after I get into another one and a(n older) (black) guy in a (wheelchair) comes and joins me, a (young) (black) guy with a face tattoo comes in and sits down and lights up a cigarette, just letting the wind blow the smoke into our faces.

In the car later, a (late middle-aged) (grizzled) (black) homeless guy enters from through the door to the next car, and he has all this fresh unwiped nosebleed blood running down his face and onto his chin and neck, and he just slowly walks down the car, stopping and pausing every now and then, and not really looking at anyone or really doing anything.

Right before I get off at the station where the resthome is, a (big) (bulky) (black) guy is suddenly at the other end of the car, muttering and yelling threats, and people start slowly moving to the other end of the car towards by me, readying themselves to get off and go switch cars as soon as the train reaches the next station.

My mother on cell phones.

To wrap up my uncle’s estate, my mother has started using a cell phone for the first time, his one.

The other week she was all proud of herself and was like, “I know how to text now, and I can even put those faces in there, what do you call them, emojis” (she pronounced it "emo-jays").

Then she said that she was texting her best friend and had told her this, and she added some clapping hands.

“Why that?”, I was like.

“Because I did a good job,” she was like.

She then said her best friend texted her, “Isn’t this fun?”, and she texted her back and was like, “No.”

. . .

My one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) told me that he finds it fascinating how older people use social media, since it turns out that the platforms are open to other uses that other people just don’t do, but these people don’t know it and so they go and do it anyways.

Like, someone he knows or someone known to someone he knows had this grandmother or mother or whoever who joined Facebook, then they friended their daughter or granddaughter or whoever and went through all of their posts and “Liked” every single one, just "Like," "Like," "Like," over and over and over.

Eventful morning before work the other month:

I’m up having coffee in my dining room, and I can see one and then a second snowflake slowly drift down in front of my house.

And, like twenty minutes later, it’s totally flurries, and when I set out to bike in to the subway stop to go go into work, the wind is like blowing right into my face and I have to turn my head to the side to keep making headway, and I think about hopping off my bike and walking the rest of the way to the stop, though that would make me late for work.

A (Tibetan) on death.

The other week at work, my one (older) (blocky) (Tibetan) coworker asked me how my uncle who’s been in poor health has been doing – her brother has been in bad health, too, and a while ago we were both taking time off of work and traveling to see them around the same time – and I broke the news to her that he had passed away this winter, that he had kept how bad he had been getting from the family because he didn’t want us to worry, and then the next thing we know he was in the hospital again, and now he’s gone.

“I’m sorry,” she was like.

Then, she was like, “All die, not all at the same time, but all die, some now, some later, but all die.”

. . .

(I’ve noticed that [Buddhists] can make little offhand comments that really emphasize the prevalence of death and suffering in ways that people from other religious traditions just don't, especially not when someone who they're talking to is undergoing a bad situation. But, I guess that's the tradition.)

Cat antics.

Because my one assisted living client with disabilities and her (lesbian) sister are going to be merging households at some point, they’re beginning to merge their cats, and so her (lesbian) sister’s cat is staying in the living room at my client’s apartment, while her own cat is more restricted for the time being and is largely staying in her bedroom.

Anyhow, her sister’s cat is quite cute; a lot of times he sticks close to me and tries to attack the broom whenever I sweep, and they say that he attacks vacuums, too.

Once I came out of the restroom, too, and I felt something on my left leg, and he was standing right there really close to me, so close that I could feel his whiskers and his fur on my leg.

(I tend to wear shorts around the apartment when I work, since they keep the temperature on the hot side.)

Another time, too, I was unloading the dishwasher and turned around, and he was standing right there, and then he’d look inside ground-level cabinets whenever I opened them.

Yet another time, when the (lesbian) sister was there once I started playing with her cat using the broom, swiping it out at him so he’d bat at it, and the sister was like, “You know, this is all fun now, but wait until I'm using my ritual broom and he does that.”

(She’s neo-pagan.)

A striking to-do list for the next morning...

...that I made up for myself last month one night after I realized that the hair on my balls was itching me and that I had some leftovers in the fridge that I needed to take into work and eat soon or they'd go bad -

SHV. 

   ~ BALLS

TK. CHICKEN 

- which translates more or less to... -

SHAVE BALLS

TAKE CHICKEN

. . .