Revelation of a coworker: Pandemic work, and happiness.

Like a month or so ago at the resthome, my one (new) (Jamaican) coworker who's from (Florida) was saying that back when the pandemic began, she switched to doing call center work from her house to keep safe, and it kept her safe, but it really got to her that she didn't see anyone all day since she's a people person, and so it turned out just simply not to be worth it, because of all the anxiety that it caused her.

She also said that she agrees with me that she'd rather have time than money, once your simple needs are met, and she's already checking Social Security levels to see what's the very earliest possible time that she can retire.

"Some people work so hard all their lives, then they retire to enjoy themselves, but they can't do anything any more," she was like. "What's the point of that?"

Resthome resident request.

A few weeks ago at the resthome, the one resident who I taught sudoku to called the front desk and asked me to come to her room to help her with something, even though she wasn't on my list of people who I was supposed to be helping that day.

And, I get there, and she has a folded up newspaper with a wordsearch face up, and she's like, "Help me find the word 'RAMP,' I don't think it's in there."

And, I stayed there like ten minutes, but I couldn't find the word 'RAMP,' even though I searched through the wordsearch horizontally line-by-line looking at the Ps, and then vertically line-by-line looking at the Ms.

And, I showed her a diagonal RAMI that I found and a vertical RAEMP, and about the RAEMP, she was like, "I found that one, too."

Then, she was like, "I don't think it's in there," and she said that she was going to look up the answers for that one the next day, to see what was in there.

Memories of WWII-era immigration...

 ...from the one resthome resident who always gives me candy:

Though she was 12 years old, her and her brother were put in the first grade at first since they didn't speak English, though the teacher made them sit in the coatroom all day since it was a normal class and she didn't know what to do with them.

Then, they were put in a special class for kids learning English, and they were there for a long time.

"That teacher was great," the one resthome resident was like, to me. "I'll never forget it. She would say, 'Nose,' and point at her nose, and 'Chin,' and point at her chin, and she'd say, 'Stand up,' and she would stand up."

I then asked her what was the first language of the other kids in the class, and she said she didn't know, except that a lot of them spoke Spanish.

2 memories of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., ...

...by the one resthome resident who's a retired school nurse, who was working at a very urban school at that time:

1) They didn't call off school, and she felt that she had to go in since she was pretty new at her job, and to get to school it took over an hour-and-a-half and she had to plan a pretty circuitous public transportation route so that she didn't have to go directly through the area where there had been rioting and looting, though she did have to walk through a line of the National Guard, as it turned out. Then, she gets to school, and like 9 teachers and like 12 students show up, out of a school of 2300.

2) Afterwards, everything changed, where before (black) residents who you'd see out were pleasant to a (white) woman in a dress - "Any white people there had to be government service workers, and they made you wear dresses, then," she was like - but then, everyone was on edge, and one day when she walked up to a different office 3 blocks up from the school, a guy was sitting out on a porch and they saw each other and she was about to say hello like she always did, but before she could do that, he just looked at her and was like, "F*ck you, white b*tch."

Anger at anti-vaxxers.

Like this month my one lawyer friend from Missouri was catching me up on her mom's condition, since like last month she was hospitalized all of a sudden for some emergency medical condition that forced her to have some quick unexpected surgery, though she's all better now, thankfully.

But, she had read in the paper about a similar woman in Florida who developed the same thing all of a sudden, but died since the hospitals were full of anti-vaxxer people with Covid, and so she couldn't get the surgery that she needed in time.

"She's like really, really angry at anti-vaxxers," my one lawyer friend from Missouri was like. "She identifies with that woman a lot."

Conversation with a (naturalized) (Mexican).

The other week, I caught up with the one (naturalized) (Mexican) engineer who used to date my one lawyer friend from Missouri, who I stay in touch with here and there, but who I hadn't seen in a few years.

We were catching up on career stuff, and he was surprised that I don't have much room for advancement in my current job, and since plausible paths forward take too much time or money and I'm happy just to do reading and writing stuff on my time off, that my new philosophy is to make enough to live and have a financial cushion, but otherwise work as little as possible.

"That's what we do in Mexico," he was like, and he shook his head. "The U.S. is becoming a third world country."

Neighborhood levity.

The other day like three to four weeks ago I got home in the evening on a day off when I had been at the beach, and my one (older) (Mexican) neighbor from next door was walking up the sidewalk on his evening stroll, and he had on a jersey of the rival baseball team from across town, of the 2 baseball teams that are in the city.

"Hi, [his name]," I was like.

"Hi, how are you?", he was like.

"Good, until I saw that t-shirt," I said, pointing at it.

"No, it's good now," he was like. "When I wear this, they lose."