New college town people (2 of 8): Bank.

At the one local bank where I went to go set up a savings/checking account, they had some brochures with a cartoon tomato character on them advertising savings programs for children, and also like a three-foot cut-out of the same character sitting in the corner of the bank lobby, by a treasure chest of Christmas toys for children with handwritten instructions posted on it that you can take only one, and if you take more, you have to share it with your brother or sister.

So, after like forty-five minutes of setting up my accounts, the (white) (later middle-aged) (permed) bank lady asked me if I had any questions, so I said I did, and I quickly went through everything that we had just gone over, summarizing all the different steps that would be coming up (when my money would clear, when I'd get my debit card, etc.), and double-checking that I had understood everything correctly, which I did.

Then, after that, she was like, "Anything else?", again.

"Yeah," I was like. "Why is your children's mascot a tomato?"

"Oh," she was like, "Every spring we give people tomato plants, we're known for that."

. . .

(During the middle of the account process, a [middle-aged] [out-of-it] [scruffy] [black] guy came up to the teller window with a ten euro note, asking to cash it, and when they said they couldn't do it, asking to find out how much it was worth, and they told him, and he went away.)

New college town people (1 of 8): Framing shop.

At the framing shop where I was getting a print framed that the one resthome resident who wanted to die gave me so that I'd have something to remember her by, the one (older) (moustachioed) (white) worker helped me pick out a brown-ish paper edge and then a brownish-black wood that not only looked nice with it, but would also match my furniture.

Then, when I finally went and picked up the framing job llike a week later, the (younger) (vaguely stoner/hippie-ish) (very thin) (moustachioed and bearded) (white) guy worker said how nice it looked.

Then, he was like, "And you should have seen how it smelled."

And, after I said nothing, he was like, "It's walnut, walnut really smells when you cut it."

Weird window sight.

So, the window in front of my kitchen table in my new cottage looks right out into the yard, and for a while now there's been this weed stuck in the middle slat of the window pane that goes right across the middle of the window, like the top of a Queen's Anne Lace or something that has dried up and lost a lot of its branches, both the ancillary ones and the main ones.

The other day, then, I kept my blinds up longer than usual till it got dark out, and once when I glanced up while I was sitting there at the table, I saw that weed sticking there and it seriously freaked me out, when it gets darker out it looks much thicker than it actually is and so it looked exactly like a dried-up curled-up chicken claw just hanging there against the window, sitting there in the middle of space.

A text received this month...

...from my one (Ethiopian) coworker who's on the bigger side, who had moved to a different department but who I'd still see around the resthome a lot when I worked there:

Hi [my first name], how are you? How is new city right there, it is not easy all of a sudden you move from here, and it not easy we work together for long and now no [my first name] in [resthome name], I wish they call me if they did a a fair wel party, but no body remember me, any way have a good one [my first name]!! It's [her first name] your previous co-worker

. . .

Honestly, aren't so many of my coworkers and residents from the resthome the nicest? It's honestly one of the best jobs that I've ever had.

A dream of a fresh beginning for someone else.

The other week I dreamnt:

I was in the South visiting my one friend who does singing telegrams, and after I met some of her acquaintances on a college campus there, on a very pleasant mid-summer day that wasn't too hot at all, we ended up going to her designer flower shop and helping arrange these large-ish baskets that she had to get together to send out to some people, and with the baskets there was much glass around them and almost like fabric bottoms to them and much greenery inside, and they completely filled both of your arms, and the shop had high ceilings and white walls and pale yellow counters, and also there was these very large windows that looked out directly onto the campus green.

And then, I woke up.

. . .

(I had emailed her recently since I had lost my phone contacts a few months ago, but I hadn't heard back, so she had been on my mind.)

Miscellaneous small new experiences:

1) I've been consistently sleeping like eight-and-a-half or nine hours a night, which is a bit much for me; I wonder if my body is releasing all of the stress that I'd been keeping in from living in a deteriorating city.

2) Even though my new landlord told me to throw out all of the mail for the (previous) (evicted) tenant, I did open up some billing stuff that came in to make sure that it wouldn't be anything that he would need, and the letter ended up saying that he missed a psychiatric/psychological appointment sometime in mid-October.

3) The hurt in my back is slowly disappearing (probably because I'm not riding in to the subway to commute anymore? - the saddle of the replacement bike that I got after my previous bike was vandalized this summer was doing things to my back, I think, even though I'd ride it for just 5-10 minutes at a time to get to the subway stop and back).

4) When I went on a far bus route to go drop off some couch cushions to get reupholstered at a family owned business that's been around for decades and now seems to be run by a bro-ish son or two, I really got hammered with carsickness on the way back, I think because it was a small shuttle bus and not a regular large one, and it took all of these side roads and was always going on curves and starting and stopping, and on top of that I wasn't eye-level with the street and it had become dark and so my body couldn't easily look out the window and figure out what to expect with the way the bus was moving...  When I finally got home, I almost vomited when I stepped outside of the bus, and it took simply hours till I started feeling all right again.

5) When I went to go wash a bowl in the morning from eating the previous evening, there on the bottom of it lay a light dirty grey turnip-ish colored nub, that had an odd little dip on the top of it.  I couldn't figure out for the life of me what it was, but since it looked like a vegetable scrap, I put it in my mouth and bit into it a little, and I got a rather sharp-ish orange bite, and all of a sudden I realized that it was the navel scrap from an orange that I'd peeled the previous night, and when I went to go throw out all of the scraps, it must have fallen into the bowl in the sink and sat there and aged overnight and changed color a bit, from white to light grey, and that's why I didn't recognize it at first.

More reading the Bible (2 of 2): Ages and achievements.

In reading 1st Kings, it also struck me when I started getting into the divided dynasties for Israel and for Judah, how this one king was exactly my age, and like another one was a few years younger.

It's odd to think of someone your own age running a wartime polity in the Ancient Near East.

Like, how do you even manage?

Sh*t was crazy back then.