The (lesbian) sister of my one former assisted living client with (disabilities) says that the tree frogs that I love to hear so much during the summer here aren't tree frogs, they're katydids.
"Can't you hear that?", she was like. "They say katydid, katydid."
"No," I was like.
...in (English), after I ask him how he's doing and he puts his hand over his belly and he gives me this look of just utter pain and discomfort:
"I ate hot Cheetos."
The other week I dreamnt -
I'm back in the walled-in back porch of my last apartment in the city that I used to live in, and I bend over to get a pile of mail that's left in a dusty corner, as sun streams through the few windows and lights up the exposed two-by-fours and plywood everywhere, and, as I unfold some advertising fliers that couldn't be forwarded, I see around 6-7 letters of around the same size, and I look at the address, and they are all from my brother.
. . .
...at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
There's a reservation for like 7 for an hour-and-a-half before we close, but only one guy shows up like twenty minutes late, and he says he's waiting for his friends, and so I tell him that the kitchen will be closing sooner than he thinks and that everything will be getting mopped up, so if they want a leisurely meal, he should coordinate their orders and put them in before they all arrive.
And, he says okay, and then he goes outside and sits there and dicks around on his phone at a patio table, and much later he wanders back inside and puts in some appetizer orders, and then he goes and sits at the table and then all of a sudden like less than ten minutes before the kitchen closes, the entire group comes in to the empty restaurant, like well over an hour past their original reservation time.
And, they're standing around talking, and we're like, "Please order now, the kitchen is closing," and there's just these (younger) (South Asians) standing around in the empty restaurant and chaotically pointing at menus and discussing sh*t like they have all the time in the world, and we're like, "Please order now, the kitchen is closing," and even when some of them start to put orders in, they go back and correct or a friend leaps in to correct and it just takes up so much time for them to decide, it's almost like they're perusing the menu instead of finding something that's appealing and ordering that ASAP.
And, when the food is coming out, this one guy who wanted two stir fries of something and then said something about 1 after his friend leapt in to interrupt him and then he specified 1 heat level for that and 2 for a fried rice is like, "Where is the second fried rice?", and I was like, "I'm sorry, sir, there must have been a miscommunication, when I read the order back to you I specified one fried rice with a heat level of 2, so I thought that was the order."
And, even though he wasn't paying attention then, he was like, "Can the kitchen make another one?".
"No," I was like, "I'm sorry, but the kitchen is now closed."
And, that was that, though later towards the end of the meal one of the guys said something about how people were driving in from somewhere and were late, to which I shrugged, since I really had no response.
And, at some point around then, I told the fried rice story about how the guy wanted to order two fried rices and only got one since he didn't have his basic sh*t together, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones was like, "I don't care," not about my story, but about him not getting his second fried rice that he wanted, since she was just over that particular group or more likely she's just over that type of customer.
. . .
(Even though we stayed open 30-45 minutes past close, they left a $0 tip, although there was an automatic gratuity of 18% since it was a large party. In comparison, a table of five [younger] and [middle-aged] [white] women who came in exactly when they did and who were worried about us closing and who sat out on the patio all left nice tips, and a $20 on the table to boot. They were also very quick with their orders, and hurried up and got up to go when they saw us chaining up the tables; in comparison, one guy at the [South Asian] table was scraping the last bits of rice off his plate as he was laughing and talking and it was taking forever and he was the only one still eating, and only when he finished doing that did people start getting up to go to the bathroom before they left, even though they could have started doing that earlier so the group could have left earlier... One was still in the men's room when we shut the lights off and were all walking out, we didn't notice he had been in there still since it's a single-use restroom and like 2-3 of them had to wait around to use it, as we were finishing up the very last things to shut down the restaurant for the night... Honest to G-d, with the way these people behave, it really is like you're the waiter caste, where there's no consideration for you as a person, or monetarily, it's just them and what they want all the time with no reciprocal obligations at all, in a way that a[a American] would recognize.)
A few weeks ago I was chit-chatting with the one (Brazilian) visiting Ph.D. student who's in STEM, and for some reason he started talking about the relative beauty of various (American) college campuses he's seen.
"And Yale is so nice, I loved it," he was like, and then he mentioned something about the "European" architecture.
"So are you saying that European architecture is better than other architecture?", I was like.
"Okay!", he was like, pushing his chair back from the table. "You got me!"
A few weeks ago after some bad tipping from some (South Asian) customers, I went into the local nearby brewery and I was shaking my head at that and unloading about it to the (bro-ish) (white) (works-for-local-government-somehow) (part-time) bartender.
"But I guess I shouldn't say that," I was like, ending, "because it sounds kind of discriminatory."
"But dude, no, seriously," he was like, "I see it so much, sometimes they come in here and drink at the bar and they don't leave a dollar or anything, it's like zero per beer."
Later, he was also telling me how he's a bit sick of his deskjob -- something he's mentioned before -- and so he's thinking of getting like this circuit-riding bureaucratic auditing job, where you go around the state and swoop in and help county clerks or whatever set up and check in on their local government systems in relation to whatever the f*ck he does, and you'd be traveling around some and living out of hotel rooms in various semi-rural areas.
"That could be a pretty good deal," I was like. "It gets you out of the office, and you could have a woman in every town."
"Yeah dude, totally," he was like. "Like an NBA star."
The (Thai) restaurant where I work at won, and the (balding) (bespectacled) (Thai) (husband) owner got a photo op with the contest organizer and the 2nd and 3rd place winners.
The certificate is now proudly displayed on a shelf next to our liquor licenses and various health department approvals.
And, I asked the one (older) (Thai) worker who's a whiz at phones what the prize was.
"A box of vegetables," she was like, and she said that they used the various different eggplants in the kitchen as part of our dishes, and some of the kitchen staff took some, but there was a bunch of green tomatoes and some purple-y leaf vegetable left over that no-one wanted, and it was still sitting out in the back if I wanted to take it.
She also said that the 2nd prize was a $50 gift certificate for a local higher-end grocery store, and she thought that that was a better prize.
"It kind of is," I was like.
"It is better, if we ask if we can take it," she was like, "We are first place, we can take second place prize."
