That started right as I was walking to the weekly farmer's market, in the college town that I now live in?
Although I brought my bigger umbrella, my shorts were completely soaked and the lower part of my T-shirt a little bit, too, the rain was so heavy and blew under the umbrella that much.
A few weeks ago I was chit-chatting with my one (West African) mailman and I mentioned how my one (tall) (thin) (sound guy) coworker who lives on the same street had his roommate move out early and that guy stuck him with the rent, and the guy also had a party right before he left and broke a mirror and replaced it with a jenky-looking one, and also he was back briefly to visit after he stopped paying rent, and he just went and stayed in the house like nothing was wrong, which my coworker tolerated because he was trying to get him to just pay something, anything, like when he was back he actually sat him down and they sat across the kitchen table and he looked at him and he told him that, like something, anything, please, just a few hundred dollars, if you can, though the guy didn't say anything and he left the next day without paying anything.
"Oh, I hear that a lot, every year," my one (West African) mailman was like.
And, he said that it's typical for people not on the lease to move out and stick other people with rent, or to take the mailbox key and it's $500 to replace it, or even to not forward mail and they just have paychecks sitting there in their old mailbox unforwarded.
"Their parents pay for everything, they don't care," he was like.
He also said that he was glad to be done with roommates, and that years ago before he got married he lived with a friend of his who would always eat his takeout leftovers that he left in the fridge, to the point where one day he left leftovers there and they *didn't* get eaten, so he actually stopped by his roommate's room and knocked on the door and was like, "Are you okay, bud?", he told me.
"Because I was worried," he was like.
A few weeks ago at the one (Thai) restaurant that I work at now, I was by the back area and my one (tall) (thin) (sound guy) coworker went to get a Singha beer for a customer, and it was the last one, so he was like, "That's the last Singha."
After that, I noticed a tune running through my head, and it was like, "IT'S THE FINAL SING - HA."
So, a bit later, I told him that, and was like, "DOO DOO DOO DOOOO, DOO DOO DOO DOO DOOO," etc., "IT'S THE FINAL SING - HA."
And, he got a chuckle out of that.
The tune was stuck in my head all night.
1) Stopping through the (Asian) bakery near the resthome where I used to work and where I always used to stop through to get these tasty little buns before work, it was super super busy, but the one (younger) (Asian) cashier woman recognized me and was like, "Nice to see you again."
2) When I was at the resthome to see a few people, a (Tibetan) coworker steps out of the elevator, sees me, and greets me in (Tibetan), and it makes me realize that I hadn't heard or thought about (Tibetan) or that particular greeting in a while, and "it brought me back."
Like last month I was chit-chatting with the one (gay) (Brazilian) visiting student who's in STEM, and he started asking me about the ancient culture related to the language that I've been studying pretty intensively over the last few years.
(Incidentally, he's decently into New Age stuff and believes in astrology crystals etc., and when you ask him how he reconciles that with his advanced study of engineering, he says it's just like the saying, "There are more things on heaven and earth...").
Anyhow, "What is their word for 'gay'?", he was like.
So, I was like, "They didn't have one, they lived in perfect harmony with nature, so there were no gay people in their civilization."
And, at that, he just looked at me straight for a second, and then, "Fuck you!", he was like.
This year at the local farmer's market in the college town that I now live in, I've been buying a thing of kale weekly from this one (older) (round-faced) (Southeast Asian) woman who has a nice stand and runs a restaurant kitchen in the other part of town.
(Her kale is so good and crisp and peppery, I love it in salads.)
But, after a few weeks of this and buying some bundles of green onions from another stand, I had a lot of little rubber bands sitting out on my kitchen counter, and really no need for them.
So, I decided to bring all the rubber bands back to her, to see if she wanted them.
And, when I did that the next time I shopped and saw her, she perked up, and was like, "Please!", and I gave them back to her, and she immediately pulled out this little clean brown paperbag like for a lunchtime sandwich, and she opened it up to dump the rubber bands in, and I noticed that in there were a lot of rubber bands of all different types, like she wasn't dedicated to always using just one type of rubber band to bind her kale, but whatever she had on hand.
...who is back from college and who grew up in the area and who is (evangelical) and who was (home-schooled) by his mom and whose dad is a STEM prof at the local university (and who thus might be not just evangelical, but also on the autism or ADHD spectrum or whatever the f*ck have you can go on with STEM people?):
1) He has (big) (frizzy) (blonde) hair and his shirts are a bit too tight, and he has a small simple cross pendant hanging outside his polo.
2) He said he's never eaten duck, nor held a fifty dollar bill.
3) He doesn't really notice stuff that needs doing around the restaurant like unfilled pitchers or tables that can be prebussed, and he leaves stuff half-done or not cleaned up, and he was just dumping the bussed plates etc. into the bins, instead of trying to sort out and stack smaller and larger bowls so that you can fit more in, until all the bins were full during only a medium heavy lunchrush, and I had to stop and resort them.
4) When he swept the floor when it was slow because the boss told him too, he swept way too thoroughly, but another time when he filled the ice cooler, he just dumped the bucket in the middle, instead of pressing it down and fitting another bucket of ice inside.
5) After he blew his nose once, he never washed his hands.
6) When folding silverware once, he dropped a fork on the floor, and then picked it up and went to go fold it into a napkin again.
7) He doesn't really swear, but says stuff that sounds like "dad gummit!".
8) With ordering staff meals, he would order the work-intensive-for-the-kitchen fried chicken dish repeatedly, until I kind of had to tell him that that was a once-in-a-while thing we could do, instead of every time... I also had to mention that we tried to all put in the same order usually, to save the kitchen work.
9) He used the 50%-off work discount when on shift to order one of the most pricy things on the menu, this big piece of roast salmon, to take home to his mom.
10) He said once that when it's busy, it's like Alice in Wonderland, and you're always late with everything, and he quoted that quote about lateness with very crisp and purposeful enunciation in his head-voice.
