One subway ride with four scary people...

...that happened last month:

 1) A(n old) (skinny) (black) guy with a small portable cooler who pulls down his mask to get something out of it and eat out of it and is continually talking to himself, sometimes intermittently in a very high voice, and then he looks down the car at a (fat) (young) (black) woman sitting on a bench and looking at her phone and is like, "She is fine...", and starts rambling off about her.

2) As we pull into a downtown station, the train abruptly slow and stops and the conductor announces, "Move away from the train, let us move in," and then starts up again, and then stops and gets back on the intercom, and this happens a few more times, and as we pull in I see (two) (skinny) (high school-age) (black) kids standing very close to the train and just laughing their heads off, presumably because they were doing something to f*ck with it as it pulled into the station.

3) A (like mid-20s) (very heavyset) (light-skinned black) guy with a huge, half-burnt almost cigar-like roll of what smelled like marijuana who comes in from another car and walks through ours, slowly striding up and down it and languidly glancing back and forth to each side like he just wants someone to even try to say something to him.

A spur-of-the-moment false (Romanian) plural.

Like a month or so ago at the resthome, my one (Romanian) coworker said that the other week her daughter asked her what the plural for "lemonade" was (singular: 'limonada'), and without thinking, she was like, "Limonazi" (with a fairly common plural variant ending that triggers a d-to-z palatalization).

Except, it's actually the very regular "limonade'.

"Limonazi," my one coworker was like, "I can't believe I said that. That sounds like someone who comes from the country, 'Please, give me limonazi.'"

. . .

(I now know enough of the language where I immediately got not only how plausible, but also how ridiculous that plural formation was! Go me.)

Fat (Latina) girls.

Every once in a while on some afternoons when I'm sitting in my living room with my windows open, there's this pack of (high school age) (fat) (disaffected) (Latina) girls who slowly stroll past on the sidewalk outside heading south, all wearing black and all listening to some music on some big speaker that one of them has (a more modern version of what back in the day was called a 'boom box').

And, I never recognize the music, since I'm old.

Except, like last time they went by, they were blasting Radiohead's "Creep," with that all just playing all loud, as they meandered down the sidewalk.

How 2 Mormon missionaries faced the pandemic.

So, because my one (Mormon) colleague who I chat scholarship with is doing a project involving the Book of Mormon, I decided that I needed to get a copy, so I can better understand some sections of his book proposal and whatnot by going back and reading the underlying scripture whenever I think that it's necessary.

So, I looked online, and in order to get a free copy, I had to have the missionaries visit, so I decided that that was fine, and so I signed up for that.

They looked incredibly young - like college freshmen, and the one even younger! - and I got permission from my landlord so we could sit out in my building's backyard on the furniture in the open air.

Because of the academic project talk around my needing a Book of Mormon, I ended up a few times going off on tangents, like how some crazy historical Jesus people say Mary Magdalene was his wife, and how Jesus might have been a Pharisee, and how smart-"aleck" (! - I was considerate) doubters have been  around for a while, and how Hinduism was brought to the United States.

I had been open in my contact form about the reasons for the visit, but I don't think they knew how to respond to all of that (they kind of just listened).

Anyhow, with the pandemic, they said that they really didn't know anything because they're kept away from media, but they had come across murmurs and a Walmart rush, and then some bureaucrat in their church reached out to all the missionaries in the metropolitan area and was like, "It's time to go store food, boys!"

They also said that social media guidelines got relaxed, and for a long time they were reaching out to people on Facebook, and also by calls.

Also, both had been golfing in the city; one at an outright golf course, and the other at a driving range.

Afterwards, I texted my one (Mormon) colleague and told him that they wished him luck with his book project, and he asked me how the visit went. His response to my tangents was like, "Well, it's probably healthy for them to find out that there's a lot to know about religion."

I also mentioned where they came from and how one lived in a really, really black part of the city, and he was like, "Wow," and he said that the place where that one came from was small and white even by Utah standards.

(I told him that he seemed to be keyed into basic issues affecting that particular neighborhood, so it looked like he was at least talking to his neighbors, and that was probably a healthy learning experience for him.)

My one (Mormon) colleauge also said that the age of missionaries had recently shifted downwards, so they probably both really were like college freshmen age, more or less.

Broke the top of a thick glass dish.

Like last month, I broke the top of a thick glass dish like you can use in the oven; I was using it for pasta, and when I pulled it out of the fridge to go get some pasta and had set the lid aside, somehow it slid off where it was sitting on the narrow counter space by my sink, and it flew to the floor and it just shattered into so many pieces, some large, some small, and a very few the size of like specks of sand.

After I picked up the larger pieces and then swept the floor all around that area, I noticed that the top of my foot was bleeding; somehow, a large piece must have grazed it or gotten flung into it and then went elsewhere, since I had this small broad "U" of flesh cleanly cut out just a bit deep like a small little flap, with all this blood gradually seeping out from under it.

The Different Lives of People.

This summer at the resthome, a (tall) (young) immigrant from (Burkina Faso) started working in the kitchen.

After the 4th of July shindig where we both worked, I asked him how long ago he had immigrated, since I assumed it was recently, and then I could ask him what he thought of his first Fourth of July celebration.

But, he was like, "Three years ago."

And, he explained that before he started work at the resthome, he was working in a factory in a city to the north of us, for two-and-a-half years.

That hit me as odd - most new immigrants who work at the resthome start up with that as one of their first jobs in the country - so I asked him how he ended up working there.

And, it turns out that he knows a (Ghanaian) guy in the kitchen somehow, and he turned him on to the job.

Two-and-a-half years working in a factory, when you're in your 20s, and in a foreign country as well.

Can you imagine that?

Dead microwave.

So, my microwave died in late spring.

I noticed a few times like right before it broke down that there was this burning smell when I went to go microwave something, and then I noticed that the cord was frayed like right above the plug, I suspect from maybe when I was cleaning and moved the cabinet on which the microwave sits, and maybe it jammed against the wall at a certain angle or something like that, and so the cord got ruined.

So, I tried to straighten out the cord, however slightly.

Then, the next time I went to go microwave something, there was like this "POP!" and a very sharp smell of something burning like something major had shorted out, and that was that, though I made sure to go get a towel and have that between my hands and the microwave cord when I went to go unplug the microwave for the final time.

I thought about maybe seeing about fixing it, but I didn't think it was worth it; I got that little microwave from my grandparents and it's very, very old, though that also makes me kind of sad, that it couldn't last forever like the little floor rug push broom and the little 1950s red-and-white plastic broom-and-dustpan set that I had also gotten from them, too, years ago, back when I was gathering things to set myself up in an apartment.

I also looked into buying a microwave off of my one assisted living client with disabilities's (lesbian) sister before they moved, but it was put way back in her storage unit and she couldn't get it out and I couldn't be there the day they moved, so that didn't happen, either.

Instead, I've just been using a stove top pot to reheat food that I eat, and if I have pasta or something like that that wouldn't reheat too well in a pot, I just eat it cold, instead.

It's actually kind of surprising how easy it is to live without a microwave. I wouldn't have thought!