Life advice from a random bar patron.

The other week I was at the local brewery that I go to, and the one old bohemian guy with the (Japanese) (stewardess) girlfriend was in there, with some (young) (ponytailed) (white) guy who I had never seen before.

And, like always happens, the bohemian guy talks up my research pursuits, and how I just do in my spare time as a passion, since it truly impresses him.

Later, the (young) (ponytailed) (white) guy and him were outdoors, too, and the young guy like out of nowhere was like, "That's cool, you do what the f*ck you want, when you wake up in the morning, you should look in the mirror and point at yourself and be like, I do what the f*ck I want."

Then, he was like, "Really, you should try it, just wake up, look in the mirror, and be like, I do what the f*ck I want."

Then, he was like, again, "Just try it."

Brazilian acquaintance (2 of 2): Encounters with men.

So, the one (Brazilian) visiting Ph.D. student who's in STEM who I know from around town said that (gay) men here suck, and no-one wants to have sex.

He also said that once back in Brazil, in the middle of a (married) man f*cking him, the man stopped and commented that his *ssh*le was nice and felt exactly like his wife's p*ssy.

One night, too, we checked out a few historic local bars on a slow weeknight, and when we were heading back towards the busline that gets me home, I suggested we stop for a nightcap at some bar on the edge of campus that seemed respectable, but actually turned out to be a huge dark concrete-floored room with a picnic table at one end and a picnic table at another, and a small bar, and like $3 heavily alcoholic mixed drinks in plastic cups that small groups of (undergrads) were chugging one after another after another as they clustered around the picnic tables and sometimes migrated between them or up to the bar for more drinks.

And, the undergrads was really just a bunch of (frat) guys and just a very few girls, and some of the guys had arms around each other, and sometimes were occasionally singing to the (electronic) jukebox, very, very loudly.

And, my (Brazilian) acquaintances eyes just got huge, and you could tell he was stunned.

"They are so gay," he was like.

"Yes," I was like. "This is where frat porn comes from."

And, he was just stunned.

When he regained his senses, he asked the (townie) bartender if they were gay.

"Maybe some of them in eight or ten years," he was like. "It takes a while for them to figure it out."

Like a week later, too, my one (Brazilian) acquaintance suggested we go back to that bar again.

Brazilian acquaintance (1 of 2): Economic perspective.

So, from around town in the college town that I now live in, I've gotten to know a visiting (Brazilian) Ph.D. student who's in STEM.

He said that his university has a class on international educational systems to widen students' horizons, and the one thing that they continually point out to them about (American) universities is that universities here are more beholden to capital and corporations and so not to be surprised by that if they see things going on that wouldn't happen in Brazil.

He also needed some spare cash, too, so I linked him up with the (Thai) restaurant, when they needed temporary workers to plate food for some afternoon event on campus where a bunch of different restaurants were all selling food at once like at some kind of fair or something like that.

He liked it, but he said that the one (Thai) (female) restaurant owner with the tired face is "capitalist."

"What do you mean by that?", I was like. "What exactly did she do?".

"Little things," he was like, and he said that they hadn't sold all of the food by the end of the event, but she was still trying to sell it even though it was getting cold, and even though the university event people had told them to stop.

"That's understandable," I was like. "She didn't want to waste it."

"But they told her to stop," he was like.

Restaurant events the other day:

 1) I wake up after my third or fourth alarm and it's 10:25am, so I have to hurry and throw the coffee on and eat an apple so I can get to the restaurant and open it on time at eleven. When I reach the kitchen sink, a mildly unwashed bowl is sitting out that I had put a sliced orange in and eaten from the night before and it's swarming with ants, like easily twenty-five to thirty of them just within the surface of the bowl, so I take the spritzer bottle of rubbing alcohol that I use to clean my smartphone screen, spray them with it, and then set the bowl down in the sink to soak some, with some Dawn dishsoap in it and water poured over the top. I unthinkingly leave my front curtains closed, depriving my sunflower seeds of their much-needed daily mid-day sun.

2) At the restaurant, I set out the new umbrellas we have to replace the broken ones, and later when I'm serving some people, one empty rice bowl looks dirty like there's some residue from egg roll sauce over the back part of it, before I realize that that's the sun shining down through the muted red fabric umbrella and onto the white bowl.

3) A (serious) (old guy) with a beard and a (mop-hatted) (very thin) (loud-talking) (late middle-aged) (white) woman come in and order a bunch of appetizers as their meal, the (white) woman insisting that she wants Spicy Level 2 and not 1, she doesn't want White Woman Spice.  As I walk around, I hear her talking to the man about her Percocet prescription, and then later she accosts me from the table and asks if we have yogurt or anything like that that people order and eat when they ordered too hot, and I say no, and before they leave, I look over, and she has her chair pulled back and her head is dipping down and her arms are crossed across her chest with clenched fists, much like a corpse being wrapped up for mummification.

4) Three (townie) (white) women are in, two (middle-aged) and one (old), all in summer white and all with all of their hairstyles "just so," and the one orders a shrimp and steamed vegetable dish -- lunch-special portion, but not regular portion -- and then asks if we can add more vegetables to it. When I say that that costs extra and is around the same price as the dish off the regular menu, she's quickly like, "No, that's okay, it's fine"

Addendum.

My favorite reaction of a (seemingly autistic) (college-age) customer --

Me (stopping by as I run around the busy restaurant, holding out pitcher): "Do you need some more water, now?".

Them (putting a hand over their glass): "No."

[fifteen minutes go by]

Them (calling me over): "I need more water now."

Another unhappy customer the other day:

A couple goes and sits outside, a (young) (white) guy with a baseball cap and a (blonde-ish brown) beard and a (young) (crisply-dressed) (vaguely brown) woman with a shapely bottom, and when they order, they each get drinks, and he gets an entree, and she gets an appetizer and a cup of soup and two entrees all for herself (one with extra meat), as I figure out from the way they put the order in and the way they don't want plates to share everything.

And, I automatically wonder, is she bulimic?

Anyhow, I bring the soup out when it's ready, and then I bring the appetizer out, and she's like, "I'm ready for my meal now."

And, I can't figure out if she's autistic like some of the STEM people we get in or what, so I'm just kind of blank for a second, and then she's like, "I want to eat this with my meal, I'm ready for the other food now."

And, I'm just kind of floored, since she never said that she wanted the appetizer served with the meal, and was it like she was just assuming that we had all of the other dishes ready in back ready to come out whenever at the drop of a hat, risking them becoming cold and nasty?

So, I said something like that we could do that, but we needed to know in advance at the beginning of the meal, and we would have put the order in differently, and that the main dishes were still being cooked and weren't ready quite yet, and I was sorry.

And, I couldn't read the expression on her face, but I apologized again, profusely.

When they left, the tip was like 20%, and, her food was mostly all eaten.

An unhappy customer the other day:

This (slightly fatter) (mid-20s) (hispanic?) (dating?) couple comes in, and the guy seems deferential to the the girl, who seems very tight about needing another minute with the menu and everything.

And, it's busy, and she asks a question about the egg rolls and if they have eggs and are vegetarian and I say something like yes if you order the vegetable, and then they're not ready to order and I go and do multiple things with other tables, and then when I come back like 10-12 minutes later they order a sampler platter, no comment.

And, later, the guy is like, "Is there chicken in these egg rolls?!"

And, we have to go replace them, and I check the menu, and it simply says "egg rolls" as one of the items that appears on the sampler platter.

And, I guess in their minds there was continuity in our conversation about the egg rolls and they had assumed that they would be vegetable on the sampler platter, or that I would make it so, but they had never double-checked or connected the conversations and the items (I don't know wtf is on a sampler platter, except spring rolls! - it's just a bunch of stuff).

And, when they left, the tip was like two dollars, on a forty-some dollar bill.

I almost felt it was like the guy trying to throw his weight around, to impress this prickly girl.