Another day at the (Thai) restaurant where I now work:

1) All of the tables have these lovely little glass bottles with a few flowers in the them, and this (older white guy) and (older Asian woman) couple who always come in commented on how nice they looked, and if they were there for Valentine's Day.

"Oh, that's probably it," I was like, and I told them I'd ask the owner about it.

And, when I saw the one (female) owner with the tired face, I told her that they liked them a lot, and she said yes, they were there for Valentine's Day, and she also said that they used to do that more, but customers would always knock over the vases and sometimes they would crack the glass and they lost a lot of glass tabletops that way.

"We put them over there," she was like, and she gestured over to the like six small tables we have pushed up against one wall of the restaurant to set out the various takeout orders on, and suddenly I noticed that like four of those small tables were lacking glass tops.

2) This one (scrawny) (late middle-aged) (rough-hewn) (white) guy with a not-unkind face and a lot of tattoos comes in and sits by himself and eats up front, and I notice that he has an Eye of Horus on his arm.

"If you don't mind my asking," I was like, "What's the story with the Eye of Horus on your arm?"

"Oh," he was like. "I'm a Freemason, and they think it's a big deal."

As it turns out, he's a traveling nurse from the Midwest, and is in town because of the medical staffing shortage. He said it's bad everywhere because people retired because of the pandemic, but it's even worse in California where he was a for a while, since there the housing prices and the housing shortage are driving nurses out into other states.

A day at the (Thai) restaurant where I now work:

1) A (young 20-something) (Asian-American) customer getting take-out asks us to tear up the credit card receipt she leaves behind, since she doesn't like her "information being out there."

2) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and I talk about how a lot of time (Indians) don't tip much, and she tells me a story about how this one time at the (Thai) restaurant on the east coast where she used to work at, this huge table of (Indians) came in and ate a ton and the bill was over $200, but they only left a $5 tip.

"And they were messy, I need thirty minutes to clean up after," she was like.

3) The one (short) (Pentecostal) (Guatemalan) from the kitchen and I are chatting a bit, and it turns out that he's in a local soccer league and plays games every Friday night and Sunday, and his position is forward, though he didn't know the word for that in English and he had to make gestures in the air for me, drawing out a soccer field and where all of the various players make their homes.

4) Another (young) Guatemalan and I are talking about how business was on Valentine's Day, and he says it was good, but not compared to last year, the tickets for both take-out and dine-in only got up to like 150 tables, whereas last year they had gotten up to like 200.

"See," he's like, and he pulls out his smartphone and shows me a picture of an order ticket that he took the previous year, and there is a number in the very low 200s that's circled with some photo-drawing graphic, amidst all of these pink and yellow squiggles on the border from some graphic overlay application.

He also tells me that he went to the end of high school here, and he would like to practice English more.

Addendum.

It's funny, my one art school colleague who wears women's clothes was saying the *exact* same thing about unionization when we had talked a few months ago...

Like, it's so time intensive to unionize, and then to negotiate a contract, and then you don't get much at the end of it.

It really is a tremendous amount of work, for maybe a few thousand dollars more like three years down the line.

I've seen in the news about people who unionized back in the mid-2010s and are now on their second contracts, and some of them are starting to see really sustained gains, but for everyone else now, it's like they missed the moment, and it's too late to have that solution really take effect any time soon, maybe you're talking real change like 7-8 years down the line with a second contract, and who knows what prices and the world will look like then.

Also, like what do you even do for jobs anymore?

They're all crap and the internet is liquidating what monopolies aren't, and labor laws have been so weakened that that means of redress isn't really functional.

It's no wonder that people who've been facing this horrible economic situation for like 10-15 years are  just dropping out; I mean, working doesn't get you anywhere, and nothing else really seems viable, so why not check out and work as little as possible and enjoy life?

I mean, at some point, you just have to live, instead of worrying about trying to chase down every single chance from a severely restricting pool of opportunities.

Economic biographies (2 of 2): Architect.

Like a month ago at the local brewery when the weather was decent, I went to go grab a beer and drink on the patio, and I heard some (nerdy) (white) guys who I'd never seen before talking labor stuff at the bar, so when the one was leaving and walking past where I was sitting outside, I said hello and asked him what his involvement with labor was.

And, it turns out that he's an architect who always teaches some side classes at universities near where he lives, and he actually was teaching at the one art school that I used to teach at way back when, back when I was heavily involved with a unionization drive there!

Overall, he says that an architect might get $40-45K off the bat after graduating with a BA, and then with an MA you might get to $60K, but then you have all that debt to pay off.

"I warn the students at the beginning of every class," he was like, "But they don't listen."

He also said that he was making about as good pay as you can get in the city where I used to live, and some colleagues of his at the art school told him to stick around since there was a new unionization drive  happening and after that happened "things would be different," but he said he couldn't wait any more, and  so he picked up stakes and moved this fall to the college town where I now live.

"A few thousand dollars more in four years isn't really going to help much," he was like, meaning possible contract gains by the time a union was put in place and a first contract was negotiated. "The numbers just don't add up."

And, he said that with home prices being what they are, any chance of him buying in the city evaporated, though where we live now, it's still feasible.

And, he was saying that unionization just isn't worth it on a cost-benefit basis for an individual, though I got him to agree that you're better off with one than without one, and he said he was tapping into what activism he could down here around those issues.

Economic biographies (1 of 2): A sound guy, and his brother.

At the (Thai) restaurant, one of my new coworkers is this (tall) (thin) (young) (white) guy who did community college for sound and then transferred to the local university to complete his degree, but dropped out during the pandemic.

He says it's not worth the money, since a lot is gigging when you know skills, and his professors have told him that, that he has them and that it's not worth enrolling.

Overall, he says he would be happy to do something like daily sound production for newscasts at a local  TV station, but he says those jobs are all held up by old people who've been there forever and none will be freeing up anytime soon, and then he does some freelance stuff around here, but he really should move to the big city where I lived, since there's more people looking for collaborations there.

Until then, he's happy he at least got a job at a local music venue, since it's a way to know people and he gets to hear a lot of live music all week, "which is good for my mental health."

He also says his brother was like a die-hard theater person who did a theater degree even though everyone told him not to and was involved in lots of hard-core sustained community production stuff, to the point where it seemed like maybe he could find somehow that he could make it work, "like he was that guy," only he didn't, and he burned out.

And, his brother and his girlfriend went to try to live in Denver, but the apartment they thought they had got pulled out from under them, and then with rents being so high, they started blowing through their savings with no real place to live, and so they both had to come home after like a couple of months.

Restaurant freak-out.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant, the lunch rush was starting and I was dashing around and putting together a Thai iced tea, when the half-and-half ran out.

And, I flung open the refrigerator door to get another carton, but none were there!

So, I started to freak out, since then there were all of these new tasks all of a sudden, to tell the owner we were out of half-and-half, to run back to the customers and to tell them we were out and so see what would be up with that order, etc. etc. etc., besides of all the lost tips from not being able to make Thai iced teas and Thai iced coffees, which sell for like $4 a pop.

But, I told my one (middle-aged) (chubby) (Thai) coworker, and she was like, "They are there," and there they were, stacked on the shelf below where I was looking way back at the very back, from the bottom of the cooler to the top, in this like wall of half-and-half containers where the tops stuck out in this repeating texture like some molded prefabricated wall, or bees peeking out in tandem from a honeycomb.

New coworker.

Suddenly on the schedule there appeared this new coworker who was working tons of shifts, and since they went from zero to sixty, I had just assumed it was a student or something who had been gone and was now back.

Then, when I finally work with them, it's a (chubby) (Thai) woman around my age, who tells me that she had come to the U.S. over a year ago to work at her aunt and uncle's restaurant on the East Coast, but "it's very sad," it burned down because of a fire in an apartment in the building, and though they had insurance, they've never been able to find comparable rent since, since it was a place with a non-profit corporate landlord who gave low rents to encourage business in this one particular part of that city, and with everything else you can look at, it's more than double the rent, plus substantial utility increases.

And, her aunt and uncle are working at a different restaurant now, and she went to yet another one, but there you had to do everything from hosting to serving to some light cooking to butchering up the meat in the back, which she didn't like, so when she heard through (Thai) circles that the restaurant where I work needed help, she decided to try something different and move, and so she's here now, and is living in the same house as the one (older) (Thai) manager who's a whiz at phones.

The other day all three of us worked a dinner shift and it got slow, so I offered to both of them the chance to go home early, and the one manager said she couldn't because the owners rely on her to do some end-of-the-night paperwork, but my new coworker leapt at it.

And, the next time we worked, she thanked me, since she said that she knew that she lost some tip money by leaving early, but she was having a bad period that day and her stomach hurt and she just wanted to go home.

She also always talks about reading novels on her day off, and the other day when I asked her what she was reading, her hand leapt up to cover her mouth and she started laughing and she was like, "Oh, I can't say, I'm so embarrassed," so I was like, "Romance novels?", and she was like, "Yes, romance novels."

"That's cool," I was like, and I told her about my how my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker from my last job in the city that I used to live in read a ton, and like forty percent of what she read was romance novels.