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.