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.