Pronoun addendum.

At the (Thai) restaurant, I always find myself using numeric pronouns like "you two" or "you all" instead of "you guys," since I'm deathly afraid of accidentally setting off a trans customer, especially one of the nerdy autism spectrum computer sci trans women types that we get in a decent amount.

You just never know when someone will decide to take something the wrong way.

Restaurant chatter.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant I was lingering by the front host stand and waiting for two (younger) (white) people to decide on their order -- a guy with a scraggly blondish-brown beard, and a (rather fat) girl with a rough-woven purple sweater with a big faded pink heart on the front -- when Katy Perry's song "Unconditionally" from her Prism album came on over the speaker system.

So, I just stood there listening to it, and when they looked a minute later like they were finally ready to order, I strolled over and was like, "Are you two ready to order, or would you like to groove out to Katy Perry while you look at the menu a bit more?"

Restaurant antics.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant, I was working a weekday dinner shift that was kind of busy, and when I popped into the kitchen to pick up two appetizers, the crab rangoons were plated, but the one (younger) (more quiet) (Guatemalan) cook was only just picking up the eggplant tempura out of the deep fryer and going to bring it over to the hot appetizer area to plate it up.

So, since he's nice, I decided to f*ck with him.

"Mas rapido mas rapido," I was like, "Estan esperando," and I snapped my fingers all the time really obnoxiously.

('Faster faster, they're waiting!')

And, he just looked a bit shocked, but he kept going at the same speed that he was going, and all the time that he was doing that, I just kept snapping my fingers and was saying, "Mas rapido, mas rapido"

And, finally he plated it up, and then he was like, "Corre, corre!' ('Run, run!').

And, he said something else in Spanish, but I didn't understand what it was.

Much later that same night, too, it was getting to the end of the night and some table of (math) graduate students ordered dessert, and I popped back into the kitchen to see if it was ready, and there he was again, heating up some custard as the coconut milk was boiling on the stove.

And, he saw I was waiting for the dessert, and I just started laughing, and didn't say anything.

"Mas rapido?", he was like.

"No," I was like, "Ya son muertos, no tienen comida" ('No, they're already dead, they don't have food').

Anyhow, the next day when I opened he was there, too, and after saying something about "mas rapido" when I first came in, he asked me if we could make up coffee for everyone in the back, so I did that, and I brought him a coffee cup to which I had taped a bit of an old receipt where I had written on the back --

PARA SENOR RAPIDO

-- which is something like, "For Mr. Fast," I guess, and right away he showed it to another coworker and they laughed, and he kept that little sign on his cup all morning long.

Restaurant coincidence.

For all the months now that I've been working at the (Thai) restaurant, I never had a "sub out bell pepper for broccoli" substitution, and then I had two in one day from two completely separate random people, and then I've never had that same request again, since.

Isn't life funny like that?

Grating restaurant personality.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant, this (slim) (dirty-looking) (vaguely drug-addled) (younger blonde girl) came in to pick up a delivery app order from a major vendor, and like you always do, I scurried up towards the front of the restaurant as I reeled off my standard line, "Hi, can I help you, are you picking up an order, what's the name on the order?".

And, she was like, "I don't know," and just stood there by the front doorway and shrugged.

"I'm sorry," I was like, "But what's the name on the order?".

And, she was like, "I don't know," and then she held out her phone to me as I was walking up so that I could read it, and there on the name slot was just several Chinese characters.

"See, I told you I don't know," she was like, and she laughed somewhat bitterly, though it was clear she was trying to attempt to make a joke.

Anyhow, the order wasn't ready yet and she had to come back, and I saw her then pulling the same build-up and joke on my other coworker who was working with me, and they also did not laugh at her strange and weirdly bitter behavior.

Two economic reflections:

1) You really can't make any plans, nowadays, because of the question marks hanging over so many job sectors, and because you don't know whether prepping for any given job sector will be worth it. With a lot of potential directions, you could be left with all this time and money sunk and not even just no pay-off, but even heavy debt, to the point where you're worse off for even trying. 

The uncertainty is immobilizing.

2) The other week, my one friend from the South who likes cults was saying that her much-younger sibling was thinking of trying to move to a big city, but rents are cost-prohibitive, and so they're frustrated, but they're just staying at home and living with their parents for the time being, since it's not even worth the money to move out on their own in the small town where they're from.

"I think we were the last generation where you could just go and move to a big city without having a job nailed down," she was like.

Two future blogpost notes that no longer bear meaning:

Something about "gift certificate + return," and something else about "bagel" and "30 [person] l[on]g [line?] while wait and see".

Like, what?