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?