...that I love:
Our holders for the pens that people use to sign credit card receipts are the bottom of a big plastic take-out tub like for curry, with a lot of blue rice in the bottom to hold the pens in place (the rice is just actual rice that they dumped in there, but it's turned blue over time, from all the pen points hitting it and spilling out a little bit of ink on it, time and time again).
Right before I moved in the fall, I met my parents in a college town in the state where I'm from, since it was halfway between us and we could get hotel rooms with separate airspaces and do stuff with masks like campus museums and still go around and eat outside and keep everyone safe, what with the pandemic and all still going on and them being part of the vulnerable elderly population.
Once, when we were walking around, we passed by this sub shop, where for some reason a window had been smashed and there was this plywood going up.
"Someone must have been hungry," my dad was like.
Overall, my parents were very disturbed by the homelessness they saw, like when we walked by a doorway and my dad almost tripped over the legs of a couple who were sitting there holding each other under a blanket with their legs sticking out into the sidewalk, or when we passed by someone laying out, howling, or he was standing outside having a smoke and someone really disturbed passed by.
The first night we were in town, too, we had lunch at a tavern outside, and our (young) (white) (gay-ish) waiter, besides saying "No way!" when I described to him some of the crime that had developed and the things I'd been seeing in the city that I was then living in, he was saying that some crime was up in the (yuppie) downtown there in that college town, but it was mostly homeless-on-homeless panhandling turf battles.
Like, the previous weekend on a Friday afternoon, a lady had gotten stabbed at a nearby corner out in the street, just right there in the middle of this (yuppie) college town.
"In [town name]?!", my one professor friend who studies (modern) (Czech) literature was like, when I told her that story.
She was really in disbelief, as were we!
I think basically that homelessness was up there, since it drew off of surrounding urban areas.
During that trip, too, we were standing outside and admiring some murals, and a guy unloading his truck nearby happened to be a city council member, and we chatted with him for a bit and he said that his friend was a mental health doctor at a nearby hospital system, and though there were always waitlists, there was nothing like they waitlists they had since the pandemic really got going, that they were massive and people just really needed help.
At the resthome where I used to work, the one (soft-spoken) resident told me that she wished that I could stay and that everyone would miss me, besides us having some conversations where she reminisced about how this famous architect who has her last name is related to her, but they never really did anything for her family when they immigrated to the U.S. and needed some help and reached out to them by letter.
Also, the one (very chill) resident was like, "Don't go!", when I told her that I'd be leaving soon, and the one (program) staffer brainstormed whether I could somehow make staying in the city make sense and there were options somewhere that I hadn't thought of.
Prepping for the colonoscopy was interesting.
Like, I made a ton of lemon and lime jello, and I mixed the lemon and lime at one point just to see what the lemon-lime jello would taste like (it was shit, but I ate it anyways).
And, they gave you instructions about bone broth and whether it was permissible, only the broth I bought was more ambiguous than what they had said, and so I tried to drain it through a coffee filter set in a strainer over a bowl, only a bit would drip through and then the whole thing would stop up, and even just shifting the filter around wouldn't really make more broth go through, and so I really wasn't sure if that broth was okay for me to drink, although the instructions that they had given me made it seem like it was.
Also, the day-of, my cabbie to take me to the hospital was this (slim) and (wrinkled) (baseball-caped) (South Korean) (army vet) who had lived in the United States like forever.
When I asked him about K-pop, he was like, "Of course I'm proud," and he said in so many words what a mind-fuck it was, to see a stadium full of Americans sing along to songs in Korean, and all of these kids just excited to learn the language.
Afterwards, too, I was surprised at how tired I was from the colonoscopy... They said to rest up and I did, but late that afternoon I decided to walk up like a block-and-a-half and get an ice cream cone.
And, mid-way going up there, all of a sudden I was EXHAUSTED.
But, I made it, ate some, rested up, and then headed home again.
The summer before I moved from the city, I had my first colonoscopy, since stuff runs in my family.
The health insurance was an absolute nightmare... There was only ever really one provider to pre-clear stuff or do it, and then I had to go locate a new primary care doctor, too, who sent me to yet another place for labs, and the actual colonscopy location was way on the other side of the city, like an hour-and-forty-five-minute journey in one direction by public transportation.
After my first consultation appointment on a Saturday the week before the actual colonscopy, I strolled back down a main street in the sunshine, and then passed through downtown on the way home, only to decide to try to stay out at a bar patio that I liked for a bit, since even though things were crazier in the city on weekends, I couldn't stay in forever, so why not test the waters a bit... It got a bit seedier at night even though it never used to be like that -- just weird people shuffling by -- but my one (straight) friend who was into BDSM texted me randomly and was back in town on his sabbatical and stopped through to hang and chat and catch up, and we hung out till like 10pm at night, at which point I went down the street of the patios and happy people eating outside, and hopped the subway home.
Only to find when I get home that the backwheel had been stolen off my bike, and I had to lift and schlep my bike all the way back home by walking.
And, I look online, and ten minutes after I left that yuppie bar strip in a historic good part of downtown on a Saturday, a bullet went through a restaurant window that I had passed by.
The other week at the (Thai) restaurant, I heard the (tall) (lanky) (white) (sound guy dude) and the (Chinese-American) guy talking to each other, about things of youth: they were talking about something having to do with world-building in the Assassin's Creed video game series.
Also, the (Chinese-American) guy was surprised when I told him that he should talk to the restaurant owners ahead of time about heading out of town to go rock-climbing for like ten days; I had told him that I had pre-cleared a two-week vacation for around then and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was also gone for half a week towards the beginning of that time period, and I had no idea how they would run things with that many people missing.
"You mean I have to ask like that?", he was like.
"I'm not sure if you have to," I was like, "But it's probably a good idea."
The other week I got woken up like an hour before I was ready to get up, by tornado sirens.
I went around and looked out my windows and saw nothing but unexceptional rain, and then I groggily got back into bed, but then I thought of checking my phone, and there it was, a warning to get away from windows and onto the lowest floor of your house and into a basement if possible.
So, I ran around, got my wallet, got my laptop, and headed out the front door within 3 minutes, and I popped down into the basement of the main house where we have the communal washer and dryer, to wait there until the time when the phone warning said the all-clear was.
And, I sat there and realized I should have my vital documents ready to pick up and bring downstairs with me, just like I could grab my laptop out of my closet by the front door.
I also tried to do my daily DuoLingo lessons, but it said I was "Offline" -- a clear falsehood, since all the while I was also texting people while I was in the basement.
They must have something built into the app, to keep you from using it and getting distracted while you have a severe weather warning up on your phone!
That would probably be bad for their image, to have someone doing their daily language lessons and ignoring alerts and then getting killed, or using up all the power on their phone while a blizzard is happening or whatnot and the power goes out.
My biggest thing, though, was, that I just need to take this massive shit, but I couldn't since I had to be in the basement.
Finally after like thirty minutes I went back upstairs and into my cottage again, and then I beelined directly to the bathroom and birthed this huge pile of blackish well-formed shit directly into the bowl, from the black-beans-and-rice that had been my main meal the previous day (and also maybe some dark green from a kale salad contributed to that color, too).
