Bar conversation.

The other week I was at the brewery and ended up staying late a bit -- there was an informal lecture there and I watched masked in the back, occasionally removing my mask to take a sip from my beer -- and then after it cleared out, I ended up hanging out at the bar and talking with the one (young) (cooler) bartender who wears thigh-high boots and likes anime.

And, this other bartender came in, this (older) (bald) (white) guy with a long beard and "music guy" vibes, who bartends at a few music bars around town, and has for years.

He and the brewery's bartender talked a bit, too, about working in bars and restaurants, and he got to reminiscing about the time a few years ago a (Mexican) guy who worked back in the kitchen pulled out his phone and showed him a picture of a vagina that looked like a Big Mac.

"Well damn, boy!", he roared, "You just ruined two of my favorite things to eat!"

He also said that he listens to music so much at work, that when he gets home at night, he just sits there in the dark and the quiet a lot and hangs out with his cat, who'd gotten pregnant recently and "she'd walk around on the lawn with her little titties hanging out."

"Getting time to go," he was like then, and he bought me a beer before he left.

Property taxes in the city that I used to live in.

So, my one (Romanian) colleague was passing through town on his way back to the city that I used to live in, and he stopped by and brought some food that his mom made and we went to the local brewery and got some beer and ate stuffed cabbage and this addictive little salad made up from roast eggplant and maybe olive oil too or something like that.

And, he was saying that he got his second property tax installment for the year, and it leapt it from like $1600 to like $4200.

And, he lives on the edge of a bleh neighborhood in a good apartment, but no-where that's particularly convenient or attractive.

He said that a number of neighborhoods have been like that, including my old neighborhood that I used to live in and an adjoining neighborhood to that and a portion of a (black) neigborhood way on the other side of the city, and it's been in all of the papers.

First of all, I can't imagine what those valuations will do, when they trickle down and reach renters; renters just don't have the money to spend, especially given how gas and electric and food inflation has been squeezing everyone this year.

Second of all, his monthly cost including the assessment on his building is still what I was paying in rent every month!

So, on the one hand I feel bad, but at least he has equity, unlike all the money I was burning a month, and that in a 1BR that had been a good deal, at that.

It's like my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) observed to me earlier this year; his rent and heating at a really really shitty multi-person apartment way at the far edge of London are more than an old coworker's of his who had stayed in the same job and moved up a little bit on the career ladder and who had boughten a condo in a good neighborhood way back when, where the property value went up sky high, but at least he has that asset, and he's paying less in taxes and heat to boot than low-end renters who are barely scraping by.

I was texting about this with my one professor friend who studies (modern) (Czech) literature, and she was astounded by how much property taxes went up, but she also thinks the world's gone mad, with how that compares to rent.

All I can say is, I made a very wise decision to move. I can't imagine having to deal with all of this financial chaos, and right when the recent minimum wages increases in the city had petered out, too, with all of the politicians claiming that it's all okay because minimum wage is finally $15 an hour and indexed to inflation. Just super out of touch.

Pad thai fervency.

A few weeks ago my one (Thai) (newlywed) coworker was saying that she always tends to eat the same things for our staff meal, like a lot of fried rice, but the previous week she had actually eaten pad thai three days in a row.

"It's better when [name of one of the Guatemalan cooks] cooks it," she was like. "He adds more sauce and stirs it."

I wasn't sure what to think about that, but then the next time I got pad thai, it had more sauce and it was more integrated into the dish, and it was so so much better tasting than it had been before.

The extra lime I added helped a lot, too; it was one that's been in my refrigerator since late summer that I had boughten for the watermelon that had spoiled, and the rind was getting a bit brown in a big spot or two, but otherwise it was still good, so I use it now, to add more lime juice to the pad thai whenever I bring some home (it's cut open and just sitting out on the rack in my refrigerator, up on the top right).

It's actually to the point now where I'd go and order pad thai if that one cook was cooking, whereas I wasn't opposed before, though it wasn't something that I necessarily sought out.

Endearing restaurant detail.

Sometimes when I open up the (Thai) restaurant for the day, the kitchen workers turned on the miso soup warmer too warm, and when I get there, the little kettle is shaking and quivering and making a metallic ring in its container, while hot water bubble ups around the edge and spills over the sides.

So, I turn down the heat level to 5.

An insightful customer the other day.

Like 3 or 4 weeks ago at the (Thai) restaurant, these two (older) (white) (business-suited) men who seemed like lawyers came in -- we get a lot of business from the local courthouse -- and then when I was repeating their order back to them to make sure that I got it right, the one (fatter) and (older) one was like, "You are very, very detailed," and he left that comment just hanging, to show me that he saw who I was, somehow, as he looked deeply at me.

And, I told him that I had a Ph.D. and just kind of worked part-time at the (Thai) restaurant and lived in a cottage and did what I wanted in my time off, since the economy had been suffering a multi-sectoral collapse this past decade in areas where I'd been professionally s trying to set myself up, and it was kind of a trend, and other people my age I knew who were in a similar position were kind of arriving at the same place and doing the same thing.

"Living the dream," he was like.

And, he said that the economy had recently been unfair to a lot of people.

Then, the other guy asked me what I studied, and, I told him.

Coffee mystery.

Like three weeks ago at the (Thai) restaurant, one of the (Guatemalans), the very thin one with a very long face and BO, the one who washes dishes a lot, he kept coming out of the back to drink coffee a lot, and I was worried that there wouldn't be any coffee left for the customers who we made up the pot for, and then my one (Thai) (newlywed) coworker said that there weren't any customers we made it up for, she made it up for the kitchen since they had asked for it.

And, that made sense to me because it was damp and it had gotten very cold out -- it was perfect coffee weather! -- but, that also made me wonder, why was it only a one-time thing that we did it then, and why weren't we doing it at other times during other similar weather? Did they not want coffee then, too?

I kind of want to know, but not enough to ask them; they might think I'm weird, or they might ask for coffee more often.

Mysterious blogging list fragments...

 ...that I can no longer remember what they meant:

- trade coffee + tea

- ch[an]g[e] wh[e]n second jelly bean

. . .

Soap oddity.

I can't get any real froth out of the remaining sliver of this "shave bar" that I have, that I use for the shaving cream for my shaving.

I keep it on top of my replacement full bar and I try to use that at first, but I fail every time and then I have to resort to the full bar.

I hope it gets used up soon, so I can be done with it.

Night shift routines.

A few weeks ago at the (Thai) restaurant, I came in to cover a night shift, since they needed someone to come in and cover it for them.

From force of habit, it was hard not to bring out free little side salads like we do at lunch.

And, like right before close, I pop back into the back kitchen, and suddenly all you can see everywhere is like 6 (Guatemalans) crawling around everywhere on the counters and by the stoves and up on the stoves by the stove hoods, and there's soap suds everywhere and they're scrubbing, and there's water all over the floor, and that's them cleaning for the night like they do every night, I see and I'm guessing right away when I walk in and see them like that.

Like, there were (Guatemalans) everywhere, all over my field of vision at different levels, like one over here and then one over there and then one way up there, not like normal people standing around a room in different places, it was like they were all at different heights and were just visually everywhere, overpowering you, among all this metal and soap suds, just glistening, and then them with their dark brown skin and black bristly hair and bright blue polo shirts and beat-up worn blue jeans, just scrubbing in these busy little motions, all five-and-a-half feet of each of them, everywhere.

Area homelessness (3 of 3): Incident, redux.

Like last week at the (Thai) restaurant it's 11am on a Monday, and I'm opening the front door with the key and the push-handle on the front door pops out, and just as it does that, the (older) (black) homeless guy with sunglasses and a light grey coat walks by on the sidewalk outside and he hears that, and he swings towards the door and starts shouting, "Why are you locking the door on me? Are you locking the door on me?", and he seems very angry, and he starts grabbing at the door, and I try to fiddle with it and actually lock it again, but that doesn't happen, so I back off normally like I'm just doing stuff normally, and he yanks the door open and comes in the front of the restaurant and is shouting at me that he is a "United States veteran" and knows "Senator John Kerry from the United States Marine Corps," and that I shouldn't lock the door on him, and several times he takes paces towards me, and I back up and speak firmly and loudly like I had learned at a self defense training years ago, and I'm like, "Sir, I was opening the restaurant for the day," and I was like again, "Sir, I wasn't locking the door, I was opening the front door of the restaurant for the day," and although there was a ton of people in the back and they were busy with a large catering order, no-one was coming out, and I kept speaking firmly and keeping distance with my one hand stretched out at him to establish my space, and finally, he whipped around and left.

And, wouldn't you know it, just that day I was thinking of taking pepper spray to work and keeping it in my back pocket in case something like that should ever happen, but I hadn't, since I thought that would be paranoid of me.

My one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at phones did end up coming in and seeing the end of that, and she said that every once in a while a homeless person comes in, and like 4 years ago she called the police about it, and they said that they could come in and give a warning, but there's nothing really that they can do about it, and so she's never tried calling them again.

"I think I'm going to start taking pepper spray to work," I was like, and she just nodded.

And, I have.

Area homelessness (2 of 3): Incident.

That weekend when I was at the one brewery that I go to, the one (younger) (white woman) (local student) with (pulled-back) (brown) hair who's a new bartender was bartending, and she said that people at the one local hospital ER where she's doing her internship were remarking recently that they've never seen so many homeless people coming in when it got cold out.

"Were these new employees, or people who'd been there a while?", I was like.

"They'd been there a while," she was like. "And they said there'd always been some, it makes sense that you're cold and you need somewhere to go and so you go to the ER, but they've never seen so many, it's, like, a noticeable jump up."

We also were talking more about the recent midterm elections, and she said that she had a lot of faith in Generation Z, and she pays attention and votes but tries not to obsess about politics since her boyfriend does and gets all worked up by it and that doesn't do anyone any good, and she thinks that crime being up everywhere right now isn't just the pandemic, but it's also due to "the political climate."

"What is your internship in, by the way?", I was like.

"Dietetics," she was like.

"Like L. Ron Hubbard?", I was like.

And, she didn't laugh, and from the way that she stared at me blankly, I don't think she got the joke, either.

Area homelessness (1 of 3): Incident.

The day before Thanksgiving, there was this (older) (well-dressed) (slightly churchy) (black) man who came in by himself and sat in the window of the (Thai) restaurant, and he seemed to be on the phone a lot, and then at one point a(n older) (black) guy in sunglasses and a light grey winter coat saw him as he was walking by and popped in and came up to him, and only when the customer pulled out his wallet to give him a dollar, did I realize that the passerby was just some random (homeless) person, and not someone who knew him from earlier somewhere and had saw him somewhere randomly.

And, as the passerby went to go out, he stopped by the front register and was lingering there, so I kind of walked halfway up the restaurant from the back, to keep my eye on what he was doing.

And, he saw me and shouted something about how he was "a United States veteran" and he served in the "U.S. Marine Corps with Senator John Kerry," and I said something deferential to defuse the situation, and he shouted a few more things, and then he stormed out.

Later, it turned out that the customer up front had lost his wife this past year and it was his first Thankgiving without her, and he was going to his mother's with the kids this year.

He also asked what music we were playing since "it's not what you'd typically hear at a Thai restaurant," and it turned out to be contemporary R&B, since Spotify or Pandora or whatever had played this nice song by a (young) (black) artist that my one (Thai) (newlywed) coworker had liked and she'd hit the "play more of stuff like that" button, and it had.

"You never know where people are coming from when you talk to them," the man said thankfully, as he left.

Pleasant customer interaction the other day...

...at the (Thai) restaurant where I now work at:

"You trying to keep me here?", says a (fatter) (older middle-aged) (white) woman with glasses and an artistic scarf sitting by herself at a back corner table, as I refill her just-emptied water glass after she had already paid her bill and I'd bussed away her empty plate, and when I look confused, she explains that she'd promised herself she'd that when she finished that glass of water all the way, that's when she'd go back to work.

Kitchen ants.

It's surprising how many little kitchen ants I'm getting around my sink this winter; many days, I easily kill somewhere around 10, and that's even after I soap down the counter around there with Dawn and even sometimes spray peppermint oil extract around everywhere, to destroy their little paths and keep them away.

It seems to be worse when it's colder out; I wonder if they come inside since it's warmer, then.

The perils of a back alley cottage!

A dream of a friend.

Last month my one professor friend who studies (modern) (Czech) literature texted me about a dream she had --

I dreamt i had to tell you i was running late because i was helping a male stripper who had melted his penis tip by swing [sic] it around candle flames...but I'd be there soon

 -- and I texted --

Was that what really happened, or an excuse you made up

 -- and she texted --

Not made up. Really delayed me trying to fix things

. . .

Pickle juice.

I've been on a bit of a pickle kick lately, and I always have a big jar of pickles sitting out in the corner of my refrigerator, but then there's the question of what you do with all of the juice that's left over when you're done eating all of the pickles.

I had been sipping it whenever I felt like I needed some salt, but then I had a bright idea and added it in to a soup that I had made with a little onion and chunks of potatoes and then kale, as like a sourer and a salterer agent!

It's almost like a (Romanian) ciorba, a traditional sour soup that you can make with sauerkraut juice and whatnot.

The taste isn't quite the same, and it's not like there's good bacteria in corporate pickle juice, but it's not bad and it sure is environmentally neurotic, and so I'm a fan.

Odd customer interaction.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant, this table of two (white) women came in very late in the afternoon, one woman round and with frizzy hair and vaguely (Native American) patterned clothing, and the other thin and drawn in a (purple) sweater and with a distinctly confused look on her face.

My coworker handled the order, but then later they called me over, and they asked me if there was any other type of sauce for the spring rolls, and the thin woman had a few pills out on the table and kept stammering, and she kept mentioning something about how she was "sensitive" to peanut sauce, and I said that I didn't know of any other sauce that people used with them, but then I listed some sauces like egg roll sauce and sweet-and-sour sauce, and I offered to get them for her, but she said she was "sensitive," and she kept pointing to the top of the spring rolls where bits of peanut were visible, and so I offered to take them back and get them off her bill.

"What happened," my one (Thai) (newlywed) coworker asked when I came back, and I told her, and she said that the woman put the sauce on top of the spring rolls like that herself, it doesn't come like that, and then she asked what she had said exactly, and I kind of repeated, but then I just said that she just seemed confused, and she even had some pills out on the table.

And, she said that she must be, since she asked about the spring rolls, and she told her what they were, and that they came with peanut sauce.

Later, after she interacted with the table more, she told me that that woman did seem very confused.

Then, finally, on the way out, as the two women were leaving and I said bye pleasantly, the thin woman tried to apologize as she left, but she couldn't get the words out, and all of a sudden it clicked for me that she must have had a stroke and it had affected her linguistic capacity, and that she talked like one patient who had had that who I knew back briefly when I worked at that one retirement village.

And, I told my coworker that.

"I bet when you said the word 'peanut,' she heard it, but she couldn't process it cognitively," I was like. "She must have had a stroke, I bet that was it."

Those women tipped like 20%, by the way.

"Box."

One of my biggest surprises from working at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now is just how many times a day that I find myself saying the word "box."

"Can I get you a box?", I'm like, or someone is like, "Excuse me, I need a box," or it's like I just come up to a table and I'm like, "Hmmm, seems like you guys need a small box," and I say it all with this tone and it's all like you guys needing a small box.

Honestly, it makes me feel like some kind of weird f*cking pimp. 

Sometimes when I talk to customers and we start saying the word "box" a lot, it's like I start having an out-of-body experience and my conciousness is standing three feet away from us looking at us go on and on and on back-and-forth just talking about boxes.

It's weird.

Customer chit-chat.

At the (Thai) restaurant, spiciness is on a scale of zero to four, and fours never get ordered, let alone the secret scale beyond that, where we have eight (the scale actually jumps from four to eight).

The other week, though, this one (placid) (middle-aged) (white) couple actually ordered both of their meals with fours, and I also brought out the "side spices" of dry chili flakes and the chili paste for the guy to maybe use with his order, which he did.

And, when they ordered, I told them that they were rare in how much spiciness they liked, and we talked about it for a little bit, not least because when I read back their order to them, I made sure to double-check that they wanted "the maximum four on a scale of zero-to-four" for their dishes that they were ordering.

Anyhow, they were a good table, and when I was getting them to-go boxes etc. and asking them if they needed anything else, I was like, "Do you need a bag for the boxes?", and when they said no, they were fine, I was like, "Okay, would you like a portable IV so you can mainline chili paste into your veins?"

And, they liked that, and the guy was like, "I wish."

Language games.

 

So, it turns out that Wikipedia says that one of the (indigenous) languages that a lot of the (Guatemalan) back-of-the-house staff speaks developed tones, unlike some of the other neighboring related languages and unlike how they think the mother language functioned.

So, I was telling this to my one (Thai) (newlywed) coworker, and I suggested an experiment:

The next time one of the guys who spoke that language came out of the kitchen for something, we should have him start counting and recite numbers for her.

And, we did that, and she could totally hear the tones.

And, I asked, and she says that when Americans count in English, there's no tones, in comparison, you can just hear the difference.

One time after that, too, I asked a guy how you say "Buenos dias, senor" in his language, and when he told me, she said she could hear the tones in that, too.

Bartender marriage.

Down at the local brewery, the one cooler college-age woman with Goth-ish tendencies is marrying her boyfriend coming up, and they're also going to have a kid.

"How long have you been dating him?", I was like.

"A couple of years," she was like,"And I've known him forever before that."

"That's solid," I was like. "That's totally enough time to make sure he's not a serial killer with a storage locker somewhere that he's keeping from you."

"Oh no, he would never do something like that!", she was like. "He's too lazy."

(And, she meant it.) 

She also said that she's getting married at this one historic church that's actually near my house, and I was like, "No way!", and I told her that it was so close that I could probably slingshot rice over from my place.

Language revelations.

So it turns out that there's not one, but **two** different indigenous languages spoken by the (Guatemalan) guys back in the kitchen.

It turns out that the one fry cook and his brother speak something different from the rest of the guys, so if they start speaking that, they can't understand them at all.

I was poking around a bit, and it turns out that what they speak is actually spoken by more people in (Guatemala), but what with immigration patterns, they're in the minority here, and this other rarer indigenous language is actually more prevalent locally.

Lack of Spanish vocabulary.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant when one of the (Guatemalan) cooks was plating up a plate of fried pork potstickers, I asked him what they were called in Spanish.

He said he didn't know.

A (Thai) restaurant line or 2, about crab rangoons.

At the (Thai) restaurant where I now work, for some reason we serve 5 crab rangoons in an order.

So, whenever there's a table of 4 and they order the crab rangoons and then there's one left on the plate in the middle of the table, I'm always like, "Can I bring you a knife so you can cut it up 4 ways?".

Then, when they chuckle mildly and say "No," I'm like, "Would you like me to throw it up in the air like a jump ball?"

And, that last line usually makes them chuckle harder.

Amazing healthcare access.

I'm astounded at how much better my healthcare access is where I live now.

Like, I realized this fall that I had a strange mole on my back, and right away I could get a GP appointment, then the referral to the dermatologist was prompt and smooth, and then the news about slight abnormalities in the biopsy came back in a week, and then I was able to get another follow-up appointment for removal within another two weeks.

Like, that's insanely easy and efficient.

If I was still in the city that I used to live in, I'd have to locate my new GP that year (networks change so much!), then try to figure out a dermatologist from the bad and narrow listings, and then maybe have to travel for over an hour-and-a-half to get there, and who knows when I'd even be able to get an appointment anyways, and then by the time you have a follow-up appointment, you might be in the next calendar year and you'd have to find a new provider etc. and ensure carry-over of paperwork and care.

Like, one of my healthcare providers this year scanned through my medical records, and he was like, "Yep, that's a lot of different providers."

It's just astounding to me how basic ACA insurance has lost basic functionality in so many major metropolitans (or so I've read, and saw with my own eyes in one). Like, the networks are so narrow and fly-by-night, that the sheer onerousness of it all discourages basic care.

I don't know if it's the smaller size of the place that I live in or the tight insurer-hospital network relationship like they have in some places, but if it's that or if it's something else entirely, whatever it is, I'm thankful, because now my basic ACA insurance is back to like how good it was when it debuted, and maybe actually it's even a slight hair better than that, believe it or not.

Nice work perk.

I think at work that I can not only get a staff meal, but I can also bring back in a take-out container and re-use it to bring the food home in, rather than getting new containers every time and just throwing them out everyday...

I wasn't sure if I could do that -- would it somehow be unsanitary back in the kitchen? -- but I brought one in and had them plate rather than put in styrofoam the fried rice that I was getting that day, and then I went to go get my reused take-out container from the utility room where we keep our coats, so I could transfer the food into that, since there should be no sanitation problem with something like that.

"Oh, you can give that to the kitchen and they can do that for you," my one (young) (Thai) (newlywed) coworker was like, when she saw me and I told her what I was doing.

"[The names of the owners] won't mind?", I was like. "I don't want to do anything unsanitary."

"Oh no, they will love that," my coworker was like (implying that they'd like it, how I'd be saving them money?).

Potential life trajectory of a barely known coworker.

So, one of the (Guatemalans) from back in the kitchen is moving home soon, after living here and working at the (Thai) restaurant for more than a decade.

I don't know him much, he's shorter and very thin but with a huge inset double chin, and he always wears these big wrap-around safety glasses when he's cooking at the huge industrial stovetop, but he seems very nice, like he seemed genuinely appreciative when I once thanked him for my staff meal by saying "Gracias por mi comida, como siempre" ('Thank you for my food, as always'), and he seemed genuinely nice and amused when he corrected the way that I say "Excuse me" in Spanish, telling me that it's not "pardones," but "pardon" (where the f*ck did I pick up that that word is a plural? I must have been saying it that way for years, and no-one ever corrected me). 

Anyhow, my one (young) (Thai) (newlywed) coworker asked him what he's going to do back in Guatemala, and he said that he's thinking of opening up a (Thai) restaurant.

I mean, why not? He certainly knows how to cook a range of the food.

But, my one coworker said she wasn't sure there'd be a huge market for it.

A striking English language learning technique, employed by a Thai person.

A few weeks ago, my one (young) (newlywed) (Thai) coworker asked me to say the word "Netflix," so that she could hear the tones that people use when they say it.

Like, seriously.

Now, whenever I heard the word "Netflix," I can't help but hear that it's always like two low tones in a row.

Like, what the f*ck is up with that?

And, do a lot of other (English) words have tonal patterns that speakers always use without knowing it?

Factoid about Thai culture.

In Thailand, they play Elvis's "Can't Help Falling in Love with You" a lot at weddings.

The (Thai) restaurant's Pandora or whatever was playing that one day, and the (wife) of the (young) (Thai) couple told that to me.

And, I asked her if they played that at her wedding, and she said that her and her husband got married, but it was just on paper and they haven't had a big celebration yet, they're going to have that next year after they move back to Thailand.

"His voice is so low," she was like, and she sang, "Ohhh," imitating Elvis. 

Later that same day, too, Pandora played that same song again, and some (older) (white) customer guy made a comment to me about the authentic Thai music, and so that made me be all like, "Well, actually...", and I shared that trivia with him about Thai weddings.

And, he didn't know what to say.

My coworker then told me like five minutes later that she had played that song again, since she had been thinking about it so much since we had been talking.

Seasons at the (Thai) restaurant.

They set up a (Christmas) tree in the big front window the week before Thanksgiving.

As soon as I saw that and the (Guatemalans) from the kitchen were straggling out to go get soda from the pop machine before the day started, I pointed to it and was like, "!Feliz Navidad!".

And, one guy was confused about what I was talking about, and then I gestured some more at the tree, and then he was like, "Oh," and he wished me a "feliz navidad" as well.

. . .

(They all drink big things of regular cola, too, and yet somehow they don't seem to put on weight. Like, what's up with that?)

A tale of my (West African) postman.

So, like a month ago I was reading on the front porch, and my one (West African) postman stopped by, and we chit-chatted some like we pretty much always do.

And, when I said that my job was going good but I was tired a lot and I needed to caffeinate properly in the late afternoon to get my energy back, he told me that back before this job and back before when he was married, he worked as a gas station attendant at a gas station out by the highway, and one night he got home from the club one night at like 2am and went to bed, and they called him at 4am to come in, and though he said he only got 2 hours of sleep and he told them that, they made him come in to work at the gas station.

So, even though he never drinks coffee or anything, he got to work and he got a Five Hour Energy Drink and drank it, and for like ten minutes it was like it wasn't doing anything and he thought it didn't work, and then all of a sudden he felt like his chest was crushing, and then it gave him so much energy, that he couldn't get to bed until 6am the next day, and when he did, he totally crashed, and he was getting calls on his phone and he wasn't answering them and people were worrying about him and thought that maybe something had happened to him.

So then, after that, whenever people would be interested by the Five Hour Energy Drink stand right by the cash register, he'd point to that and tell his story, and tell people to be careful with it.

He also said that he doesn't drink tea or coffee, just beer, "Any beer I'll drink it," which surprised me, and I told him so.

"Oh yeah," he was like, "I'm like that."

Two sets of interactions with the (Thai) restaurant owners's (Thai-American) children...

...when they were in the restaurant for like two days straight, when they had some school off because of parent-teacher conferences:

1) I told the younger one who's like early middle school that "back in my day" parent-teacher conferences only lasted for one hour, since all of the children were perfect and the parents would come in and the teachers would just be like, "Your children are perfect," and then the parents could leave again right away, and that's how it was with all of the children, and she just looked at me and was like, "Wow."

(I'm not sure if she got that that was a joke.)

Later, she was doing her (French) homework, and so I started quizzing her and telling her about Romance languages and Haitian Creole as a daughter of French etc., all in really simple accessible ways, and then I asked her if she knew about Haiti, and she didn't, so I told her that it's a country in the Caribbean where around the time of the American Revolution there was this huge slave revolt and they went and set up their own country, and at that her eyes sparked up and she was like, automatically and genuinely and partially to herself, "That's cool"

2) When the next day they were both eating at a corner table and I got water to go around to the customers, I stopped at their table like they were customers and very formally topped off the water in both their glasses, which took them a second to see that I was doing it as a joke, and then I very formally asked them if they had "one or separate checks," at which the (older) (high school-aged) daughter right away was like, "One, and she's paying!", flinging her finger out and pointing across the table at her little sister.

"Okay," I was like.

So, like ten minutes later when I had time, I took the back of a receipt and drew up a mock receipt for them, with the cost as "$37 million," and then a bit where tax was "$.03," so the entire bill was "$37,000,000.03."

Only, by that time, the little sister was gone.

So, I went and served it to the older daughter anyways, and she looked at it and was like, "Inflation is getting crazy!".

Later, too, I saw the little sister and I asked her if she had gotten the bill.

She had, she told me, "And I'm not paying!".

The smile of a coworker.

So like once a week I work with the one (late middle-aged) (Thai) woman who's been at the restaurant for like ten years, and who is a blaze at taking orders over the phone.

And, she's not talkative or super friendly, but she isn't mean or anything, either, and it's fine to work with her, since it's just a day at work, without any drama, though usually without many substantive coworker interactions outside of what's necessary for actual job duties.

The other week, though, when it came time to order our staff meal, I asked her if we could do beef pad see you, and she said she doesn't eat beef, but pork or chicken is fine, and so I asked her if we could order pork pad see you, and she said that was fine, and then I thanked her a lot, "Since usually I don't care, but today I have a big taste for pad see you, and I just really, really want some pad see you today," and for some reason that gave her a big smile -- maybe because a (white) person really wanted this particular form of (Thai) food, and she could see that I did indeed really, really want it on that particular day?

I wonder if her other (white) (American) coworkers behave like me.

Two customers the other day at the (Thai) restaurant:

1) A (tall) (young) (thin) (black) guy in a (Puma) shirt who I recognize from a bit ago, only he walks in without waiting to be seated, and he seems twitchy, and when I come to the table once he's counting a huge wad of cash in front of him and he's keeping it kind of half-hidden under the table, and when after he leaves I pick up the credit card receipt, the numbers for the tip and the total aren't added up quite right.

2) A (fat) (younger) (white) (darker bearded) (kind of autistic-seeming) guy who has a business card and who has a (jubilant) (white) (middle-aged) (female) friend with "vacation energy" with him, and together they have like a $54 meal -- major beverages, an appetizer, two entrees, one pricier -- and when they leave and after he puts it all on his card, there's a $5 tip.

Like, that works out to less than ten percent.

Some of my recent job routines this fall...

...at the (Thai) restaurant where I now work:

1) Sweeping leaves away from the front door and cleaning up the front entryway from them, and brushing them off the sidewalk and out from around the front sidewalk patio furniture, every day when I help open up;

2) Spot-sweeping the interior for stray rice grains and whatnot, and making sure the chairs are straight so everything looks super nice and subliminally clean for when the first customers walk in; and

3) Once when it was slow, taking a towel and some table cleaner, and spraying a little table cleaner on the towel, and wiping down the two pairs of salt and pepper shakers that we keep on hand, since they were getting pretty sticky on the outside, and doing the same with the two soy sauce bottles, too, even though those weren't quite as bad.

A verdict on intending to be a professor...

...by my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair):

"I really don't know why I spent so much time trying to fit in with people who are so awful"

A (Thai) restaurant customer the other day.

This (early older age) (white) couple is in, and the wife orders a dish, and she asks if she can order this one particular way if it's not too much trouble, and she specifies that she wants more broccoli but less pork, and so I say that I think I can do that pretty easily, but I need to double-check on the ordering screen.

And, I can do it, so I do it, and then I report back to her.

"...so that should never be a problem if you ever want to order that way again," I was like, closing off everything that I was following up on with her.

"That's good to know," she was like.

Then, she was like, "I just wanted more broccoli, so I figured that I should have less of something else."

An upstairs neighbor.

The one (young) (Latina) fronthouse upstairs neighbor who has a hippie vibe also has a first name that's the name of a type of bird, so like over a month ago when I was reading out on the front porch and she came in after work and was walking by and said hi, I was like, "Want to hear my joke?", and she was like, "Sure," and then I was like, "I'm surprised to see you here," and when after a long pause she was like "Why?", I put on a sweet but hammy mug and was like, "Because fall is here, and I thought you would have flown away south."

And then, she was like, "Oooooooooh!!", with a tone like she found what I had just said to be cute, and then she was like, "I wish I could!"

Another time, she was asking me what I was studying, so I was telling her, and at what point I referenced the Babylonian exile of Israel.

"What's that?", she was like, and I explained some, and she still had a blank look on her face, and it turned out that she had absolutely never heard about it before.

"My parents tried to raise me without exposure to religion," she was like, not apologizing, but not unapologetically, either; she was just being factual.

A pleasant find the other day.

So, the other day after I finished a jigsaw puzzle that I had bought from a local resale shop and that had said on the back of the box in big scrawly green marker writing that there was one puzzle piece missing as of January last year, I discovered that somehow there were actually *two* pieces missing.

But then, like a day later, I'm looking at the puzzle from a different angle and in a different light, and I see down in the lower lefthand corner that a very dark puzzle piece was sitting out on top of a very dark puzzle section so that it blended in, and I pick it up, and it turns out to be one of the two missing puzzle pieces.

So, the note on the box turned out to be right after all.

An odd smell the other day:

For like half a day afterwards whenever I'd go over by my kitchen after frying up a big pan of potatoes and onions, it'd smell strongly of urine for like a second or two, then it'd just go back to smelling like fried potatoes and onions again.

My Halloween.

So, for Halloween this year, I sat out on the front porch with the one (hippie) (vaguely hispanic) (undergrad) girl who moved in upstairs, since it's her favorite holiday and she wanted to give out candy to any trick-or-treaters who came around during the designated hours for trick-or-treating that the town had designated for everyone.

She had told me this when I was sitting on the front porch that afternoon reading, and her and her one (skinny) (slightly odd) (Latino) roommate were clearing crap off the porch to make it more presentable for Halloween.

"And I'm going to put on a cowboy hat," he was like.

And, I glared at him.

"My culture is not your costume," I was like.

And, he seemed disconcerted and didn't know what to say.

Later that night, it was very rainy for the first part of the night, so very few trick-or-treaters came, though eventually the rain let up and some did.

Like, there was this (Asian-American) mom with a (cute) (young) son dressed up as Harry Potter who came by.

And, as soon as they left, I was like, "We shouldn't have given him candy until he denounced J.K. Rowling."

And, they seemed disconcerted and they didn't know what to say.

Later, too, the one (hippie) girl was saying that she has one grandfather that the family never talks about, who her grandmother found crossdressing after so many years of marriage and they kicked him out, and plus he did drugs and lost a leg, too.

"What happened?", I was like. "Was he wearing a garter too tight and passed out from the heroin?"

"You and the trans stuff," her one (skinny) (slightly odd) (Latino) roomate was like to me from a bit away on the porch, as he sat out on this big armchair they had out, in a cowboy hat.

Some restaurant stories (3 of 3): Angry (older) (white) (women) day.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant, I was joking with my one younger Thai newlywed coworker that it was "Angry White Woman Day."

Like, at this one table, the (old) (grizzled) (moustached) (flannel-wearing) (white) (husband?) guy laughed at me when I pulled out the notepad because it was our stapled together receipts and crumpled to boot, and then later the (older) (white) woman with (blonde) hair and a (triple) chin called aside my coworker to tell her that the salad didn't have any dressing, and that it was "disgusting" since there was a slice of tomato that contained the little brown rough bit where the stem goes in.

(When I cleared their salad bowls later, that little bit of tomato was sitting out on the slip of red sticky paper that you wrap around the napkin when you roll silverware.)

Later, too, there was this group of three (older) (white) people, and the woman said they hadn't been in there in like five or six years but she remembered when we had "real" lunch specials, and when I took her curry to the table it sloshed all over the bowl rim and I had to take it back to the kitchen to clean up, and when I brought it back to the table I said something about how our problem was that we were too generous, and one of the guys laughed, but she said that she didn't like how I brought it out just to take it away again, and later she called me over and said she only found one peanut in the curry, and there it was sitting out on the rim of the bowl, so I brought her more peanuts, but the kitchen guy had assembled a cup of crushed rather than whole peanuts, and she put them on her food and she said that she appreciated it but they weren't real peanuts, and then later when they had paid and they were sitting around talking for a long time and I was getting them refills, she asked me for a styrofoam cup so she could take her refill with her.

"I'm sorry, but I don't think we can do that, and I don't want to get the manager mad at me," I was like. "But I'm happy to keep you refilled while you're sitting here."

I had actually given a Styrofoam cup like that to someone who had asked me for something similar a few weeks earlier, but there was no way that I was going to stick out my neck like that for this particular customer. I mean, why?

Some restaurant stories (2 of 3): Customer.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant, this (bearded) (young) (middle-aged) (white) guy was saying that he couldn't eat spicy food anymore, since he had been eating too much mango habanero from Buffalo Wild Wings, and now he doesn't have much of a stomach lining left.

Some restaurant stories (1 of 3): Coworker.

So, at the (Thai) restaurant where I now work, I overlap with the wife from the (young) (Thai) (married) couple a lot.

She likes getting fried rice and beef for the staff meal -- if you leave at the same time, the place prefers that you order the same thing, to cut down on work for the kitchen - but I try to not get the beef, since I'm afraid with all the fried stuff that I've been having and then beef on top of that, that my cholesterol will go through the roof.

But, the other week I'd been eating healthily, and so I suggested to her that we get some beef that day.

"Every once in a while is okay," I was like, "But not too often, otherwise I'll be working and I'll have a heart attack and then you'll have to work alone again at lunches."

(She had told me that this summer they were so short-staffed that she had to work alone a lot of days at lunch, and on those days she wouldn't open up the patio and let people sit outside, since the distance to go out there was too great and if she did that she wouldn't have been able to manage all of the tables.)

"And then you'll be a ghost," she was like, playing along with the idea of me getting a heart attack from eating beef too much.

Also, after a huge table of like five (young) (Indian) people, we could see on the credit card bills that they all tipped between $1.40 and $2, which didn't even reach 15% at the higher end.

"Indians don't know how to tip properly," she was like. "Thai people too, but I learned here."

Two garbled dreams.

The other night I dreamnt --

I'm listening to Sia cover this major Top 40 song that's not hers, and the people I'm around are grooving to it like it's normal, and I'm wondering how I missed it on her CDs, but somehow I did.

- and, at another point that same night, I dreamnt -

I'm on this gray tiled and vaguely airy space with cut-outs down to a lower floor, and I'm at a table with like three men in suits, and it's the upper level of a mall, and they're interviewing me for a journalism job. And, they say that I need to write a feature story before I can plausibly apply, and I realize that my freelance stuff is left off of my resume and I tell them that, but it already doesn't matter, and I pledge to myself to write a fuller resume for initial submission next time.

And then, I briefly wake up out of troubled sleep.

. . .

An interesting shit...

...that I took the other day:

It was long and very dark brown and like a long sinuous coil at the bottom of the bowl, and then the top pop was this big slightly fluffy pile that was a lighter brown and that looked like it all fell out of my ass all at once like BLORP.

I'm guessing that that must have been from two different phases of eating, though they both came out of my ass all at once during the same time period.

On teaching.

It's interesting how questions about my teaching at the college level have reemerged this past half year.

Like, my one (Romanian) colleague was asking me why I wasn't seeking to teach at the local community college, and when I said that it was a lot of work to set up syllabi for not that much money and no guarantee of a steady job in return, he said that in practice people find steady people and they get reemployed and they're just there indefinitely.

(And, I've heard that one before, and that was what I was referring to when I had said that there was no guarantee of a steady job in return, that even if your department likes you, there can be a sudden budget retrenchment out of left field from the upper administrative level and you can still get jettisoned, but at that point you're repeating the conversation and what you both already really know, and so what's the point of talking any further on that subject.)

I've also gotten people asking me why I don't try pursuing teaching a dead language at the local university, and with that I'm not opposed if they handed me a syllabus and I didn't have to put that much work in, and maybe if I could secure a formal affiliation title that was good for a number of years, but it was almost like they were asking me what was wrong with me, where I didn't want that, like it was some good deal or some great honor or something.

But, I mean, why kill yourself to teach a beginning language when it takes away time from your own stuff, and sure, it'd be fun for students, but it's not like any of them'd probably be conversation partners without another 7-8 years of work, and that includes graduate students, since it's a limited pool and even then talent needs time and with a lot of projects people are interested in, it's not clear beforehand which ones have the ability to pan out, and even if they do, it's not like there's a future for them, though I guess if someone had the right attitude and a good idea and sought me out, I'd be open to helping them?

I mean, to even teach full-time right now in these areas and you're in "a good job," if you have a conscience you're running around putting out job placement fires and trying to overhaul a way of doing things that's dated and that's like pulling teeth, to try to steer things in healthier directions.

Better not to get involved.

Response to my recent presentation was also very interesting -- there wasn't any. Like, the keynote speaker was just like, "You know a lot of languages."

And, one lady who studied with this guy who wrote a smart and solid textbook and who I found out from her had died tragically, told me that I had summarized just enough so she could get the big picture and didn't feel like anything was left out, and that she wished that he was alive to be able to see my presentation.

It's like I'm some rando swooping in and should easily be their all's peer, but instead I'm just some rando, and will be that way for the indefinite future. I just don't slot into any tracks, especially now that my Ph.D. is growing dated, and given the reqs that I see in job ads that cross my plate. 

One thing I'm very glad of, though, is that I never tried pursuing all the post-doc nonsense where you're pulling 70 hour weeks every year to get another yearlong job; I see people on social media who are doing that and they can't advance their own work, and then with some of them their employment has stopped, and they're just in very, very bad places, after being "in the running" for years.

Another rotten watermelon.

So, it turns out that my last watermelon of the year was rotten.

There were like 4 left at one stand in the second-to-the-last week of the farmers's market and several of them had slightly compromised rinds, but I picked an apparently clean one, and kept it on my counter all week, only going to open it up like a day or two before the next farmers's market.

And, what do I discover, but there's a little rotten juice on the counter, and a large soft spot that'd developed on the underside.

I flipped it over and washed it and tried to cut it out, and there was a small section with some really good pink watermelon flesh, but overall it had that fizzy and slightly alcoholic smell of internal rotting and it was relatively pervasive within the entire watermelon, and so I had to go and chuck the whole thing.

I think it probably would have been all right if I had opened it and begun eating it and stuck it in the refrigerator right away, but I didn't, and so it went bad.

I guess I have to chalk that one up as an $8 donation to a local farmer, where I got nothing in return.

(Narratives like that are helpful coping mechanisms.)

A tipping trend?

The other week, the one (young) (Thai) wife at the (Thai) restaurant where I work told me that nowadays there's tons of people tipping like $4 on a $35 bill, but you never used to see that; even like a year ago, you'd get people tipping $8 or even $10 on a $35 bill, but nowadays that doesn't happen, everyone just tips low.

"I wonder if it's a sign that the economy is getting bad again?", I was like, and I mentioned that prices are up everywhere, so maybe that's one of the only places that people can economize.

I also said that it didn't make sense to me, since 10-15% tips were something from when I was a child, it's been 15-20% tips for easily two decades now, so everyone should know that and be on board with it by now.

Stump.

The other week I was going out to the back alley from my cottage to go put something in the neighboring apartment building's dumpster -- my one neighbor was bitching a bit ago about small bags with vegetable scraps, I think, and so why use my own trash for that? -- and as I went up to the dumpster to throw something in it, something scuttled at the tree line right behind it, and all of a sudden a squirrel jumps out away from me at eye level, and I notice that in the treeline there's this gigantic rotting stump the height of a man that I had somehow never really noticed before.

Like a week after that when I was walking through the alley, I stopped and looked at it more, and even stepped onto the edge of a neighbor's yard to peek around and look into it, some.

There's just these huge decaying chunks tumbled into the inside off from the ring of edge around it, almost like a miniature collapsing volcano crater.

It's really an attractive place for an animal to be. I know that if I was a squirrel, I'd want to go hang out in there.

Restaurant rudeness.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant, there's this big order of appetizers etc. that comes in like a half hour before we close for the afternoon, but the person isn't showing up, and when we go to call their phone, there isn't any answer.

"I wonder what's happening and if she knows that we close at [the hour that we close for the afternoon]," I said to the wife from the (young) (Thai) couple, since we were just standing around waiting for her, with nothing else really to do, even as the kitchen was closing down behind us.

"She knows," she was like, and she said that when you go to order online, that pops up, and also the customer made sure to specify to pay in cash, which rarely happens and which means that we have to wait around for them and we can't just leave the order outside the door like if they pay by credit card and go and do that.

So, we wait, and like more than forty minutes after they placed the order, and more than twenty minutes after we'd usually close the doors, this (very fat) (young enough) (black) woman shows up to pick it up, and uses some card to take like fifteen bucks off, and tips two dollars, and then leaves.

"How rude," my coworker was like.

"How much was the order?", I was like.

"More than thirty after the card," my coworker was like.

"Don't worry," I was like, "She's really fat and she ordered a lot of deep-fried appetizers, she won't be around for long."

Different familial norms.

With the two of the (Central American) guys who are brothers and who speak the one rarer (indigenous) language a lot, it's very striking to me, what a strong family ethos they have.

There they are in a windowless kitchen for so many hour a day for so many days a week, together, working side-by-side.

You wouldn't see two Americans like that.

Restaurant prank (2 of 2): Me.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant, the kitchen was pretty empty except for one (Central American) guy by the stove, and I headed over to put my lunch order in his queue of stuff to cook, and I had to walk into the little area where it's usually busy and we're not supposed to go, except for maybe when we give them our personal order to cook after-shift like I was doing just then.

And, just as I was turning around, there's a tap on my shoulder and it makes me jump.

And, it's another one of the (Central American) cook guys, who was coming back from somewhere with something and who I hadn't seen or heard approach, who decided to prank me and scare me by coming up behind me and tapping me on my shoulder all of a sudden.

And, as my head whips around to look, there he is, laughing, though not at me, but with me.

I have to admit, he really got me!

What a friendly thing to do; and we hardly talk at all.

Restaurant prank (1 of 2): Husband.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant, I was working with the wife of the one (young) (Thai) couple, and her husband came in and sat at a rarely used corner table and drank a pop and watched videos on his phone for quite a while.

As the lunch rush was dying down, we were passing by and I caught her attention and then I whispered to her, "That man at L3 is so strange, I think he's drunk, and he just tried to order twenty-three beers."

And all of a sudden, her eyes got all big and scared and you could see the gears start whirring and she was like "L3...?", and then what I just said clicked, and she started laughing.

Later, she told me that he was in between classes, but he doesn't like going to the library, so he comes instead to the restaurant, sometimes.

When our shift had ended and we were all going to leave, too, he was ahead of her heading out the door, and I was like, "I am so glad that man is leaving now, he is so strange, ten minutes ago he tried to order forty-seven more beers," and I got her to laugh again.

My right toenail.

It's like a dark blue-ish purple from underneath, probably because the shoes I wore to present at that one conference that I went to recently were a little too tight on the one side, for some reason.

When I was clipping my toenails the other day, then, I was really interested to see what would happen.

When the nail on that foot got clipped away, though, there was nothing odd about the nail, and the skin that I could then see underneath where the nail was also looked normal, too.

I've never had a toenail look like that before.

A surprise at the (Thai) restaurant:

It turns out that the kitchen workers aren't (Mexican), but rather from a (Central American) country and they all speak a(n indigneous) language to some degree, that I've seen mentioned in the paper and in job ads for translators for the local hospital and school system.

And, one of the fry-cooks is even more comfortable in that language than in (Spanish).

"I had no idea," I was like, to the wife of the one (young) (Thai) married couple.

"You never hear him speak with his brother in that?!", she was like.

It's really mind-blowing to me, that here I am working at this little restaurant kind of in the middle of nowhere, where I unlock the door onto main street and pull out and set up and unwind a patio umbrella every morning etc. etc. etc., and then there's this relatively rare language just spoken daily like twenty feet away from me, all this chattering that's been going on in the kitchen all this time and I had absolutely no idea at all about it.

Like, what the f*ck.

Two couples at the (Thai) restaurant:

 1) A (late middle-aged) (very overweight) (white) couple, who got some crab rangoons as an appetizer and who both ordered the standard fried rice, but with little or no vegetables at all. They say that they used to work at the car dealership on the other side of town back when it was under a different owner, and they used to get that take-out all the time, so now that they're back in town for a bit, they had to come by and get some.

"So is it the same like you remembered it?", I was like.

"Oh yeah," they were like.

2) A (hunched-over) (very dark skinned) (Arab-looking) guy with stubble, across from a(n elegant) (tastefully veiled around her neck and head) (Arab-looking) woman, and the guy says that he did his nuclear engineering Ph.D. back at the local university like eight years ago, and he "spent a lot of time here," so now he had to take his wife here, while they're in town.

"I'm showing her everything," he was like.

And, we get to chatting, and she's an MD, and she'd never been through this city, before.

Restaurant people (2 of 2): A new coworker.

So, the other day when the wife from the (young) (Thai) married couple got her period and called in sick, she also called in for her dinner shift, and the (potbellied) (balding) (bespectacled) (Thai) restaurant owner asked me if I could come in to cover for her, which I did.

And, I worked with this (young 20-something) (tall) (thin) (Thai) guy, whose name I had seen on the schedule, but who I had never worked with before then.

He had a laptop out and was working on there in between stuff -- it was a slow night -- and I asked him if he was a student, and he said yes and then he said no, and then he said that he had been in school in Florida but he had dropped out, and now he's doing a coding bootcamp, and that it doesn't really matter with coding if you have a degree, it matters more what you know.

And, later in between stuff, we talked more, and he said that he had wanted to move to the big city where I had been living ,but it cost too much, so he came here, since it's cheaper to live and you can get by without a car, and what does it matter anyways, since he sits in front of a computer screen all the time, sometimes for like 12 or 14 hours a day.

And, even later in between stuff, when I mentioned that he probably was glad that he wasn't in Florida because of the hurricane, he said that he had had a house there that his parents had bought him, but they kicked him out when he didn't want to go into engineering like they wanted.

Plus, at some point he showed me this thin but substantial dull metallic ring he has that automatically monitors how much he moves and how much he sleeps, that's how he knows he sat in front of screens for 12 or for 14 hours, and he said he can get up in the morning and it tells him how well he slept and he'll know how he'll feel that day, and he pulled up on his smartphone his heartrate records and showed me where it spiked to 150, and he said that that was at a concert, and he pulled up videos of these neon green light shows from techno clubs where they were pouring out of the stage in these huge giant beams while all of these absorbed shellshocked kids were just jumping up and down with their hands outstretched towards the stage, just endlessly, and also at some point he pulled up some coding diploma or something like that and said it was an NFT registered on the blockchain, and also he said that his taxes this past year were a hundred and twenty-eight pages long, since he had to itemize all the crypto trades that he did.

"Cummies," he was like, pointing to the name of this one currency on the picture of his taxes that he pulled up to show to me. "You can use that to buy porn, I made a lot of money with that."

He also said that growing up, he never really ate (Thai) food, so when he started working at the restaurant, they thought he'd know a lot about it, but he just didn't.

"So if you grew up in Thailand and you didn't eat Thai food," I was like, "What did you eat all the time?"

"I don't know," he was like. "Like fried chicken and cereal, I guess."

Restaurant people (1 of 2): A monolingual customer.

The other day this (younger) (stubbled) (slightly prematurely greying) (rugged face) guy with a stylish coat and backpack came in, and he would speak into his phone and show it to me, and it turned out that he was a monolingual (Chilean) and je had come in to have lunch at the place where his friend from the local adult ed center's ESL class worked.

"Quien?", I was like ("Who?").

And, he said something like, "El guatemalteco" ("The Guatemalan"), and then he said something like, "El poquito" ("The short one"), and he made a wincing face and gestured with his chin downwards, to indicate that his friend is the (very short) guy who works in the kitchen, and who I later saw come out to say hi to him.

Overall, I tried to speak (Spanish) with him, but I kept accidentally mixing in (Romanian) -- orez for arroz ("rice"), and o for una ("a" with feminine singular nouns) -- and he kept looking at me like I was on crack whenever I did that, since it wasn't like bad (American English speaker) (Spanish), it was something else entirely, and just f*cking whack.

So, I explained to him that I study Romanian, and that it's like Italian and French and Spanish and Portuguese, and it's a daughter language of Latin.

And, he didn't know that, but he seemed intrigued, and later he said something about my language for where I come from, which I had to correct him about, since I'm not from there, I'm just an American who's studying it.

At some point, too, I also tried explaining "peanut" as "arahida," and he had to look it up and then made an "oooh" sound and was like, "Mani."

He also said that he works at the Panera Bread out by the mall, and he's been here for 8 months, and he came here for work.

When he left, for some reason he said "usted" for me (???), but I was like, "No no no no, soy un tu, soy un hombre informal, no necesitas dicer usted" ("No no no no, I'm an 'informal you,' I'm an informal person, you don't need to say 'polite you.'").

I really have no idea what the f*ck was up with that contextually, considering I was his waiter. Do people usually say "usted" to waiters?

Strategizing with my health, and with my pocketbook.

For work I've decided to get take-out (Thai) food pretty much every time I work, which is three or four times a week, styrofoam take-out trays be damned (I'll recycle them, and at some point I'll donate to have trees planted to compensate for that addition to my carbon footprint; for right now I'm avoiding stir-fries, since they come in these elaborate black-and-clear hard plastic take-out containers that you just look at and you know that they take up an ungodly amount of energy and petroleum to make).

But, I do worry about the healthiness of it all, so I've started avoiding beef (and instead going for chicken, pork, or tofu, and preferably soft tofu, not fried), and I always mark "less sauce" and "less oil" now on my little slip when I send it back to the kitchen, to cut down on the fat and the calories on my end.

I guess we'll see how this turns out in like a year at my next physical, when they run my cholesterol again.

I've also noticed that on days when I eat take-out (Thai) food, I have my breakfast, and then coffee and Diet Coke at work, and then the (Thai) food afterwards is like a big lump in my stomach, and I don't really feel like eating for the rest of the day, expect maybe something small at night.

I think I'll have to make sure that that something small is vegetables with a lot of vitamins, or sugar-free jello.

I really have no idea how this is going to turn out, health-wise.

The (Young) (Thai) Married Couple (2 of 2): Street encounter.

Around that same time, I was walking back from the library on campus, and who do I see coming towards me on the sidewalk on my route between the campus's main library and my house, but the (young) (Thai) married couple.

And, I shouted their names at them, since we were on the same side of the street, but it was a weirdly wide sidewalk there, and they were like six or eight feet over and minding their own business and so they didn't see me.

And, they startled, especially the wife, and then they said hi.

The very next day when we worked together, too, she told me that she didn't recognize me, since she only knows my face with a mask on.

"And I had a different coat and a hat on, too," I was like.

She also said they were coming back from this other (Thai) restaurant on the edge of campus, which makes me wonder if they have better food there.

The (Young) (Thai) Married Couple (1 of 2): Husband's backstory.

So, with the (young) (Thai) married couple at the (Thai) restaurant where I now work, the wife had a stomach ache the other day and called in, so her husband came in and worked her lunch shift for her.

(The next day, she told me that she gets stomach aches a lot when it's her period.)

Anyhow, I chit-chatted some with her husband during the slow parts of the lunch shift, and it turns out that he had to make sure he left at 2pm, because he had an engineering class that he had to get to.

"What's the subject of the class?", I was like.

"Clay," he was like.

And, he explained that his specialty within engineering has to do with evaluating soil for building sites etc.

"How did you become interested in soil engineering?", I was like.

And, he said that when he was a little kid, he always liked looking at building sites for houses and skyscrapers, but also when he was a teenager, he saw this movie about a prison break and the main guy was a civil engineer.

"And he dug a tunnel?", I was like.

"Yeah," he was like.

A favorite restaurant detail...

...at the (Thai) restaurant where I work:

We have a giant metal lidded warmer in back, and we use an ice cream scoop to scoop out the rice, before putting it into a tin of water nearby so that the rice doesn't stick and harden onto there.

Conference trip memory (3 of 3): Rooftop bar.

At this one rooftop bar near the conference site that everyone decamped to for a happy hour get-together after the second and last day of the conference, it was getting dark out, and people were breaking up and the bar was filling up, and I was standing in line waiting to get one more beer, and there was this kind of amorphous and haphazard crowd starting to clog up the bar area, as everyone was waiting to get their drinks there, and the one (middle-aged) (black) woman dressed in (all black) and (a stylish rumpled hat) eased herself around back behind the bar and got everyone's drinks, one drink at a time.

And, there was this (younger) (tall) (white) (bearded) guy, and this (shorter) (very white skinned) (very dark haired) woman with dark satiny clothes and slightly devilish eyes, and you could tell they were a couple, and they asked me if I was ahead of them in line, but they had been there first, so I told them that, and then we started talking.

And, it turns out that they now lived in Kansas, but they had lived in St. Louis for years.

"You know," I was like, "This is my fourth time here, but I just don't get this city, it's like I'm here and I see stuff, but I just don't get what it is or how it works," and I made a grasping motion with my hand, to represent my mental grasping.

"The way I see it," the woman is like, "is that it's like New Orleans, only it's young and raw. New Orleans has been around a while, everything's settled down, but here it's young and raw."

"Yes," I was like, "But what is it.  I mean, I'm here, but there's no center to it, it's just like stuff happening and people here but none of it matches up and I can't make any sense of it, it's like chaos energy or whatever the fuck you call it from Dungeons and Dragons."

"That's your problem," she was like. "Just don't think. Don't think. Just be here, and just live it, and don't think."

And, she looked at me very intensely with her weirdly devilish eyes, and she seemed gleeful, but she was also serious, because that was actually what she thought and the way that she lived her life, it wasn't some act that she was putting on at all.

And, I don't think that I seemed weird to them, and they weren't judging me at all.

It was like everything around me was happening, and none of it fit together in any way, and none of it made sense.

That city just has the strangest vibes.

Conference trip memory (2 of 3): More bus trip stop.

As I stood out in the back parking lot of the truckstop eating an Oreos-brand cookies-and-cream ice cream bar and sipping coffee from my thermos, while I was standing in a position where I could see what the bus driver was doing at all times so that he didn't accidentally go and leave without me, this (like early 30s) (vaguely darker-skinned) (thinner) (shorter) (Latina) woman with pulled-back curly hair and a clean crisp style even though she seemed like she didn't have all that much money, was standing somewhere near me, since she too had positioned herself to look through the door of the bus and was also standing there watching to make sure that the driver didn't accidentally go and drive off without her.

And, I thought to myself that she might be Dominican, though she was a little too light for that.

And, we started talking, and it turns out that she's from Venezuela, and so I sympathized with her about the Maduro regime, and I was saying how you never used to see that many (Venezuelan) immigrants, but now for like the past year or two, you see them all the time.

"Yes," she was like, "Life is more, I mean, life is... worse, now."

And then she smiled with a flash of humor and was like, "We are, in..., invade your country."

"Oh no!" I was like, "You are not invading our country."

Then, I made sure to use simple words and was like, "If there is not enough room, it is no problem, we will send Donald Trump to Venezuela, and you will stay here."

And, I got her to laugh.

Conference trip memory (1 of 3): Bus trip stop.

On my way back from the recent regional academic conference that I attended, I took a Greyhound bus, and like more than halfway on the way back we stopped off at this shiny clean truckstop by the side of the highway that had a McDonald's and a Subway and a video gaming parlor in it, for a fifteen minute break so that everyone could get out and stretch their legs and maybe buy food or whatnot.

And, the countergirl was like early 20s, but she had the lowest voice and the calmest manner and the dewiest eyes, and this big soft red hair like Farrah Fawcett, and I kept getting the sense that she was loved up all the time, but not in a nasty way, though all she was doing was standing there and saying "hon" and calmly ringing things up for people.

I mean, what must your life be like, to have not only that sort of presence, but also that sort of poise?!

It was truly exceptional.

And, there was this (short) (very fat and round) (punk-styled) (Latina) girl with heavier white makeup and earbuds who had been talking all the time on her phone on the bus, and she came up with her arms just overflowing with chips and pop and all sorts of fatty shit like that, and it rang up to something like nineteen twenty-four.

"That'll be nineteen twenty-four, hon," said the countergirl, as she calmly rang everything up, and just stood there exuding total presence and living totally and utterly placidly in the moment.

"Look at how I got that right," said the (short) (very fat and round) (punk-styled) (Latina) girl, as she held out a bill.

Then, she paused and was like, explanatorily, "I only have twenty dollars."

A recent table: Water, and noodles.

The other week I was waiting a table for this (older) (bearded) (white) guy with glasses and this (younger) (straight-haired) (slightly brown) (Asian) (college-age) woman (a professor and his advisee, or something like that?).

And, the guy was drinking a lot of water, so I was always coming back to the table to fill his glass back up.

"Thank you so much," he was like, after one of my trips there.

"No problem," I was like. "I'm always happy to facilitate hydration."

And, the (Asian) (college-age) woman laughed behind her hand, as she had when she and I were discussing something about the (Thai) restaurant's glass noodles and how good they were, and I had said something humorous to her about something or another, though I can't remember what, now.

A farmers's market interaction: Change-making.

A few weeks ago I was at the local farmers's market and was getting tomatoes from my usual stand and a few other things, mostly these big nice cucumbers that they had, and the one (Asian) woman who's always there at that stand with all the (white) women with slouchy tits was the one who came up to go and check me out.

And, she tallied up the cucumbers and the tomatoes verbally and was like, "It's fourteen, no it's fifteen," and then I was like, "Okay," and I paid her.

"You didn't check my math!", she was like.

And, I told her that I always buy kind of the same thing, and it's always like fourteen to sixteen bucks, so I figured it was right.

And, she didn't say anything, in reply.

Parental visit (4 of 4): A warning about ticks.

On that trip, I suggested that we go for a hike at a park, but my mother was worried about ticks, because of something her old friend Annie told her.

"Annie's sister lives on a farm and went to go feed the animals, and she came back with ticks all over her!"

Parental visit (3 of 4): Meghan Markle.

Around the time that I met my parents on our recent visit, Queen Elizabeth had died, and, oddly, it turned out that my mom had a lot of things to say about the royal family, and especially "that Meghan."

(She has this whole thing about how she wants to stick it to the royals and she comes in there and she isn't there that long and she tries to go and make everything about her and do things her way, and how she had broken relationships in her own family and now she has broken relationships there, and how her own sister said she'd cause trouble and she's a troublemaker etc. etc. etc ... I texted these opinions to my one [half British] [half Sudanese] friend [the sister of the sister-brother pair], too, and she texted back something like, "hear hear," since she hates Meghan Markle, too.)

Anyhow, my dad doesn't follow the royals that much, and when Meghan Markle's name came up, he was picking his teeth with a toothpick and was like, "That's that half black gal?".

"No," I was like, "She's the half white gal."

And, he continued to pick his teeth with a toothpick some more, and then he was like, "No, she's the half black gal, you'd call her the half white gal if she was in a black family, but she's in a white family, so she's the half black gal."

And, he continued to pick his teeth.

Parental visit (2 of 4): Navigation.

On my parents' visit, I often sat in the front seat as my mother drove, to help her navigate around the city where we met.

"So how are you doing back there?", I asked my dad at one point, since he was sitting in the back seat as we drove.

And, he started to make small heaving sounds, like the he was carsick and vomiting.

Parental visit (1 of 3): Train station.

So, a number of weeks ago when I went to go meet my parents halfway between where they live and where I live now, I took the train in, and I met them in this mid-sized city that I haven't been to for like 6 or 7 years, but that I sometimes used to come into, back in the day.

And, it turns out that my parents stayed in their car with their doors locked and one window cracked in the parking lot of a nearby fast food restaurant, and my mother texted me as much, saying that they'd be there waiting for me, since they were afraid of the homeless.

And, I get in, and there's easily like 25 or 30 homeless people just loitering around everywhere around the station, and I'd never seen anything like that before in that city at all.

And, my mom says that several of them even came up and tapped on the window to ask for money, while they were waiting in the fast food parking lot.

Recent dreams (2 of 2): Alarm clock.

Like last month I dreamnt --

My alarm on my smartphone starts going off in the morning, so I get up out of bed and walk into my living room to get it on my table, only it's not there and it's still going off and it's still far away, so I walk over to my kitchen and look in my one drawer where I sometimes keep it, but it's not there and it's still going off and it's still far away, so I walk around to several other places and rummage around there, but somehow I can never find it, and somehow it's always going off and somehow it's always far away.

And then, I rouse up sufficiently to realize that all of that action was only going on in my dream and I've actually been lying in bed the whole time as my alarm is going off on the table where it usually is, and the reason that the alarm was always so far away from me in my dream, is that it was actually that same distance far away from me in real life, and my mind was importing that distance into my dream as I thought that I was walking around, as my mind tried to engage in my daily routine but my body was actually lying in bed the whole time.

Like, isn't that trippy as f*ck?

Recent dreams (1 of 2): Carpet.

Like a month ago I dreamnt --

I'm by the far end of my kitchen table in my little back alley cottage, and in my dream my woven rug that is over in my living room area is actually running underneath my kitchen table, only it doesn't seem off in my dream, it's just something regular, only, when I go to lift it up, there's all of this moisture just sitting out on the tiles underneath it, and I'm glad that I lifted it up and found that out, so that I can go now and clean it up so that it doesn't just sit there and damage anything like maybe by causing the rug to rot or mold to grow there without me knowing it or something like that.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

Observation of a local (young) (black) (male) busdriver...

...that I overheard when he was driving through the heart of campus, and talking with some passenger he knew that was sitting up towards the front of the bus so that he could talk with him:

He said in so many words that he has to watch everything like a hawk when he drives through campus, since you never know what students are going to do.

"Like that guy right there," he said, as he drove the bus slowly due to a skateboarder up in the bike lane up ahead of him, "He could fall off that at any time, and then it'd be over for him."

He also said that the local transit agency doesn't even allow you to drive a route that goes through campus for like the first six months of your hire, they only let you do that later on.

Two tomato stories.

The other week, my mother was reminiscing about how she'd just sit on her grandmother's front porch as a girl and eat all of these fresh tomatoes with salt, and they'd make her mouth all full of canker sores and they'd hurt so much, but she'd still keep eating the tomatoes.

Also the other week, I was talking about the farmer's market with my one (Thai) (newlywed) coworker and brought in a few tomatoes for her in an old Burger King takeout bag so she could take them home and try those varieties, and then the next time that we worked together, she brought me in a big soft cookie in a wax paper bag, as a thank-you for the tomatoes.

Restaurant tidbits (6 of 6): Etc.

The one (stern) (older) (female) (Thai) manager with no sense of humor and who's worked there for over ten years is a whiz at phones; she can really handle all these calls coming through and all these people in front of her all at the same time, and she gets all the takeout orders placed and all the bills rung up and closed out so much quicker than you would ever believe is humanly possible.

Also, they use old receipts stapled together as order books, and I noticed that on the order system, they spell the word sauce as "SUACE," and some of the owner's friends, they tell you and you give them like ten percent off.

Restaurant tidbits (5 of 5): Some customers...

...from various shifts:

1) Two (late middle-aged) (fatter) (white) ladies who are having dinner and who I confusedly also bring take-out to, since I don't have the table numbers down and since it also turns out in retrospect that the other servers shoved some tables together farther down the dining room and so that made the table numberings seem off.

"Yes, that's ours," the one was like, "I'm taking some food home for my mother."

"Cool!", I was like, "But you were the one that said that, not me take-out is take-out, I wasn't prying where it was going!"

Then, I was like, "I don't want the boss to get the wrong idea."

(They seemed to love that.)

2) A(n older) (goateed) (blue collar) (white) guy with loopy eyes coming in for lunch like right at 11am when we open, asking for a fly swatter so he can hit flies while he eats, since he says they're a problem everywhere right now and he doesn't blame us for them, but they're bothering him, and that would help.

So, I duck into the kitchen and find the owner's (permanently tired) (Thai) wife, and she gets out from back behind the prep cooks this super duper-looking fly swatter that's like a tennis racket with a couple overlaid metal meshes, and a button on the side with a red light next to it that flashes when you press it, and what looks like room in the handle for a big heavy-duty battery or two.

And, it turns out to be like a mini bug zapper, that fries the bugs when you swat it into them and press the button.

So, I give it to him, and for like the next thirty-five minutes every once in a while there's like this loud dark electricity-sparking sound ZAWP that comes rolling across the empty dining room, and the guy like calls out to us and is like, "Got one!".

3) A(n older) (single) (white) lady with a photocopied crossword, and after I break down the chicken dishes for her, I ask her if she's a puzzler, and then talk crosswords with her.

4) This group of (four) (older) (white) ladies who all order drinks and apps and main dishes and get a lot wrapped up to go, and then as they go to leave, they ask me if that bakery up the street with the good dessert breads is still there.

"Yeah," I was like, "But unfortunately they're not open on [the day that it was then]."

"Just as well," muttered the one (oldest) lady, a skinnier one with the most wrinkles and these blonde up-curls, and who's wearing a tasteful sweater.

Restaurant tidbits (4 of 5): My new line.

I texted my one old (Chinese heritage) (Filipina) coworker from my one old resthome job, to tell her about how I've still been getting fed at work, but since it's a (Thai) restaurant, it's always (Thai) food all the time.

I was like, "I now probably eat as much Thai food a week as [our Thai coworker], because she eats Thai food at home and other food at work, and I eat other food at home and Thai food at work."

And, she texted me back with a laughing response, something like, "hahahaha."

I knew she would like that joke!

It's totally her sense of humor.

Restaurant tidbits (3 of 5): Boss's wife.

Like has always been occurring since I worked for a long time in higher ed, I always inordinately fear when I start a new job that I will get arbitrarily fired for no reason at all on very short notice.

So, during my final (Thai) restaurant training shift on a Saturday night when they wanted me inside to see the food and get to know it and help pack stuff up (we have to do stuff like put bean sprouts and carrot shavings and a lime wedge on some dishes, and a cucumber slice and green onions on others), I started to get worried, since I ended up on the floor helping to bus tables and do random stuff for a very long time and so wasn't inside to help with all of that stuff, though when I ducked my head back into the kitchen when stuff had slowed down a bit and I could be back in there, they brusquely waved me out again, to go back to the floor and do whatever I was doing out there.

So, when stuff finally permanently quieted down and it was getting time for me to go, I checked in with the (Thai) owner's (Thai) wife, this (shorter) (stringy) woman with a (permanently tired) look on her face, to make sure that everything was okay.

"Because I like this job," I was like, "So if there's a problem, please let me know, so I can improve."

"Oh no," she was like, "Thank you, if you are not here, it will be big headache for me."

Also, at an earlier point in the evening, their (like middle school-age) (Thai-American) daughter was in to help at the counter, and when I went to go put a takeout bag on the table for drivers to pick up, she was like, "Excuse me, but that's unpaid, put it closer to here," since she noticed that I had mixed stuff up and wasn't following the system they have where takeout bags that are unpaid are closer to the counter, so no-one can accidentally pick them up and leave without paying.

They've also had like online order delivery drivers come up and take tips out of the tip jar, so it's also better to have those prepaid orders farther away from the register.

My first day of fall this year:

One sunny but colder afternoon  I see that the very top leaves of the tree in the yard next door are yellow, and I sink $20 to buy gems on Duolingo so that I can max out my current language course and see what that looks like, before the graphic interface massively changes on November 1st.

Restaurant tidbits (2 of 5): Eggroll sauce.

At the (Thai) restaurant where I now work, I had an evening training shift, and this (very early 20s) (stringy) (blonde) undergraduate in counselling with a very (blase) expression showed me how to pour eggroll sauce from these big plastic industrial strength jars into these little plastic cuppies for takeout.

"So is that all I need to know?", I was like.

"Yeah," she was like, "Except sometimes it's pink, and sometimes it's yellow."

And, she gave a sharp little laugh that was nonetheless somehow authentic.

"It's just like that, we really don't know why."

Restaurant tidbits (1 of 5): Coworkers.

So, at the (Thai) restaurant where I now work, there's a married couple of two (younger) (Thai) professionals, one who's finishing his STEM degree at the local university, and the other who did a corporate graduate degree in the UK and is now just working and biding time until her husband finishes her degree and they can move back home and get "real jobs."

I asked her how they met, and she said at college back in (Thailand), and then I asked her if they were both from Bangkok, and she said that she was but he wasn't, he was from the country, and so I asked her what his parents did for a living.

"Our parents do the same thing," she was like, "But it's random, we didn't know that."

And, I asked her, and it turns out that both of their sets of parents completely randomly are durian farmers, and they met through friends at college and got married completely separately from that.

"Oh," I was like. "It almost makes me think that you met through some social group at college, for the children of durian farmers, and you met there and you fell in love."

An external observation on my life:

 "Your life is always so different."

(Or something like that, as was texted to me by my one art school colleague who wears [women's] clothes, when I informed him that I had started up a new job at a local [Thai] restaurant and was not only working there a number of shifts a week, but also that I get one free basic meal per shift, so I come home any number of days a week with free [Thai] takeout, which is f*cking awesome.)

Wage decay observations.

My front neighbor who knows my one art school colleague who wears women's clothes observed the other day that they really, really want to buy their own place so they don't have to deal with rude upstairs neighbors anymore, but they can't because their job pays so low.

(And, they have contract campaign signs in their window, so I know that it's a union job, for what that's worth; they're some sort of counselor at the local university, and have been for years.)

I also had read something about how some lower-level higher education admin jobs and many social work jobs now all require graduate study, but they don't pay enough to the point where you can afford to pay back your degree in a timely manner.

I also also finally saw someone recognize that non-profit jobs have collapsed as a sector, which I mentioned to my mother, and she was like, "But you've been saying that for years."

An afternoon on the front porch of the front house.

I hear a light grating sound, and I look out at the big tree out by the front curb, and this squirrel is out on the trunk way up it scooting up the trunk and dragging up behind it a big paper chocolate wrapper with some metal still left inside of it, before it takes it out on a branch and noses into it and then drops it like twenty-five feet to the ground.

And, it then runs down the tree and around a little bit on the street, and once out by where the chocolate bar wrapper had fallen, but it never goes over right there to touch it again.

Later, the (older) (white) (dyed blonde hair) replacement postal lady comes by to deliver mail, and we talk about the weather.

"This is perfect," she was like, "Sixty, seventy degrees. Anything more than that, and it's too much for a fat girl like me."

I also mentioned the mosquito problem on the street, and I said that it confused me since there didn't seem to be any standing water anywhere, and so she reached out her hand and pointed over to across the street to where the wizened old hippie lives, and she was like, "She's a hoarder," and she reminded me that we don't know what she has sitting out in her backyard.

Touching farmers' market moment.

At the one stand where I buy tomatoes at the local farmers' market, this one (extremely short) and (rather brown) (indigenous Mexican-looking) woman was by the one end of the stand with her two young sons who were like four and five or so and were almost as tall as her, believe it or not, and one of whom was carrying a round loaf of artisanal bread and holding it back over his shoulder, so that you could compare the bread loaf to the size of his head, and his head was just a little bit bigger that that, and both of the kids were just super, super cute, they were that age, and they were kind of making a stir.

Anyhow, later after I had picked out my tomatoes, they were up at the register just before me, and the one (older) (white) lady with severely slouchy tits picked out two nice apples, and gave one to each of the boys, both of whom looked skeptical and one of whom then smiled.

And, after she left to do something and the (older) (white) guy was done getting change, he turned to the oldest kid and counted out the change into his hand in front of his mom, like he was the one paying.

And, the kid looked confused and then got a big smile.

Parking lot exchange.

For some reason, when he was in town, my one (white) colleague from Mississippi's texts wouldn't always go through to my phone, or vice-versa, so I had to call him up when I got out of work, for example, since he had never responded to my texts about getting together for dinner afterwards like we had texted about earlier that day.

And, at that point he was already setting up for the night in his SUV, out in the Cracker Barrel parking lot by the highway.

"They have a little section where people can pull over and sleep," he was like, beginning to tell me about the system they have and how he was going to use it. 

"This sounds like some shit like you're living out of your truck like a trucker and abducting women," I was like.

And, he chuckled and was like, "Oh no, you should see it, I took out the back seats, and put in a place where I can sleep..."

"And I soddered in these little metal U-bars for the zipties," I was like, interrupting him and imitating him like I was him finishing his thought.

"Oh no," he was like, "But there's really not enough room for a woman in there."

"That's why you chop off their legs," I was like.

And, we continued our conversation for a bit, and I said other things to that effect.

He also said that we should get together for coffee at my place the next day, and he'd be rested and we'd have a lot of time to chat then, since he only had like a three hour drive afterwards to a Cracker Barrel in the southern part of the state.

"But don't forget you need to budget in forty-five minutes for backroads so you can go dump the body in the reservoir," I was like.

"Thanks, I"ll keep that in mind," he was like, chuckling.

"You know," I was like, "Plastic tarp and whatnot, real Laura Palmer shit."

Friend revelation: "Checking out."

So, my one (white) friend from Mississippi is kind of checking out and making a major life change.

For years now he's been regularly phoning in some undergraduate teaching and doing editing as his main thing and then going out on tours and coming back to apartments that he'd have on short-term leases, or sometimes apartments that he'd share with girlfriends, but he's done with that now, and he's doing all remote editing, and since he can do that and he wanted out of a relationship with this last girlfriend before he had to pay October rent, he switched cars and got an SUV and adapted the back so he can sleep there, and he also has a battery-driven cooler and a place for this big water tank with internal filtration, and now he can drive around the country and linger different places and his only rent is his gas money, as he put it.

"And repairs," I was like, "If you have car problems."

He also said the last winter really got to him in the city, in a way that it just never had before.

"Bad vibes," I was like.

He also also said that he felt like he'd run out of options in the city and was thinking to when he was happiest, and he realized that it was on the road touring, so he thought that he could pick up stakes and make that work, after spending some time with his family in Mississippi, and maybe the winter in Arizona.

And, Cracker Barrels have designated sleeping spots in their parking lots where people can pull over and sleep, and you can use your Planet Fitness subscription to work out nearby and shower.

He also said he likes how I describe what I'm doing not as "dropping out," but as "checking out."

"If you check out," he was like, "That implies that you can always check back in."

But, he said that he actually didn't think that there would be any opportunities coming down the line that would be worth working towards, and when you're in that situation, you have to not worry about work and go and find for yourself a life worth living, though the one thing that does make him worry is retirement.

Mosquito revelation.

My one (white) colleague from Mississippi was surprised at the amount of mosquitos outside my little back alley cottage where I live now, when we sat out there and had coffee this past weekend.

I was telling him that I actually have to put on not only long sleeve shirts and pants when I'm sitting outside, but sneakers, too, since if I ever just wear sandals, the mosquitos actually just go and bite through my socks.

"What color are your socks you wear?", he was like.

"Black," I was like.

"That's probably it," he was like, and he said that he read somewhere once that mosquitos gravitate to landing on very black things as background camouflage for themselves and that he noticed once after that that once when he was walking around in shorts and sandals and black socks, that he was getting a lot of bites through his socks on his feet, but none on his legs, even though his legs were just right out there and all exposed because he was wearing shorts.

So, he thinks that that's what that is.