A memory of like two months ago.

At the resthome like two months ago, suddenly the state public health department guidance changed, and next thing you knew the dining room was full, and activities were happening again.

So, we began escorting people to and from activities and to and from dinner, and we had to start grabbing our dinner again like a half-beat off from the main dining room, where we got our staff meal after the residents were served and then had to go wolf it down and then go off and run to go help them get home.

No more tray deliveries, no more assistance with activity carts that did per-room or per-floor stops.

Instead, the dining room, and the social hall and the activity room.

Suddenly, without expecting it, suddenly everything felt normal again.

Overheard coversation at a bar patio, in a university neigborhood.

This (early 20s) (fragile) (mildly chunky) (white) woman is talking about her anxiety and then about the research of this (mid 20s) (balding) (fat) (black?) (gay?) guy, and then 2 friends join them, and then when they start talking about their summer jaunts she says something about how she's going to stay soon at some expensive hotel, and they're like, "What?", and then she's like, "I never told you about that?", and she says that she spent a lot of money there when she was on Adderall, and in the spa they wrapped her in some bandage stuff and then set her in a pool and left, and no-one was around and she started to freak out, and now she gets like 2 days free there every year.

"I thought pressure like that was supposed to be comforting," her generic woman friend said.

"It's supposed to be," she was like.

Then, after a pause, she was like, "I should write a short story about it."

"You should," her generic woman friend was like. 

. . .

(Later I texted my one professor friends who studies [modern] [Czech] literature about how rich and obnoxious the graduate students now seemed, and she said that they were all like that now, and seriously entitled, too.)

Overheard laundromat occurrence, in my neighborhood.

This (young) (thin) (white) townie woman comes to the open front door of the laundromat and calls out to the two (late middle-aged) (more hard-bitten) (fatter) (white) townie women sitting there doing the laundry that people bring in to do in bulk for a per-pound charge, and she says hi, and without really letting them talk she also says that she wanted to let them know that since she left she got set up in work at this one nail salon, and the owners were laundering money and the manager got hauled in by the feds, but it's better money than she was making there, it's actually the best money she's made in her life, and then she said a few other things, and then she left.

And, the first (older) (more hard-bitten) (white) townie woman was like, "I hardly know her."

And, the other one was like, "She's lying, she's trying to pull something."

A bit of fondness about the Romanian language.

Something that's really grown on me is how crazy it is that there's this group of people out in the Balkans calling themselves Romans this and Romans that like two thousand years after the empire had crumbled there, and actual Romans would be appalled at whatever their language had become, where there's this plural case marker that's "-lor" that must come from the Latin genitive plural "illorum," but you can use for the genitive *or* for the dative.

I honestly think Romans wouldn't know what the hell to make of it, it's just crazy.

I honestly think they could more understand something like Spanish that had lost all of the cases, than whatever the hell that thing is.

History can be pretty f*cking whack.

Differences in bug bites.

It was so odd, last month when I was at the beach, biting flies were out, and though I mostly swatted them off me before they could really bite me, two did in fact bite me bad, one on the fatty lower left part of my lower back, and then another on the inside of my right thigh, like right towards the outer edge of this huge birthmark that I have there.

Only, they swelled up, and would swell up again later if you scratched them a bit or they rubbed up against the cloth of the clothes that you were wearing, but they didn't itch as bad for me as mosquito bites, which I usually feel driven to scratch really bad to the point where the very thin top layer of my skin comes off, the itching is so bad.

These bites were different.

Odd sight in my bathroom the other day:

 A bandaid on the doorjamb, stuck up like five-and-a-half feet off the ground.

. . .

(A few days earlier than that, I had had a bandaid on and it was coming off in the shower, so I ripped it off and flung it over the top of the shower curtain and in the general direction of the wastebasket, which sits just to the right of the base of the doorjamb. As best as I can figure, the bandaid must have somehow fallen and flung itself against the side of the wood, and never made it quite towards the wastebasket.)

Three resthome happenings...

...on the same gray day:

1) Before my shift, I go into the resthome salon for my second haircut of the pandemic, since I had been cutting my hair at home and I only had started getting a professional haircut again when the resthome salon finally reopened after everyone got their vaccinations, and after it's all done and the (older) (French) hair stylist shows it to me, he's like, "The last haircut was half correction, now this is a haircut!"

2) The resident who I swear always has a southern accent wore a bright yellow blouse, and when I said it was so cheery and nice on a day like that day, she was like, "If that's all it takes to make you happy, then great!"

3) With this like 80-piece mini-puzzle the one (very introverted) resident gifted to the common room but then said I could take home and do, I had taken it home and timed myself (twelve minutes and thirteen seconds!), then I brought it back in to challenge my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker since she does jigsaw puzzles, but she didn't even take it home to do it, instead she did it in a quiet corner of the closed activity room on the very slow, very late part of that same shift (ten minutes and five seconds!).

"That's good," I was like.

"I used to be faster," she was like.

"That's very obnoxious," I was like. "You win, and then you say, I used to be faster. You need to be more gracious in victory. You're supposed to say things like, 'I was lucky,' or, 'Don't worry, you will do better next time.' Not, I used to be faster."

And, she laughed.

She also said that most of the time she doesn't even look at the picture, she just groups the colors and goes from there, besides looking at the shape of the pieces.

A few weeks ago her daughter-in-law also gave her a sudoku book and taught her how to do that, and she's already done like ninety of them and is almost done with the book.

I also told her that I told the one (very introverted) resident who gave us the puzzle to use, that if we had a major argument and never spoke again, that it was all her fault.