Jigsaw cheating.

My one jigsaw puzzle of a canyon is so miserable -- the pieces look so much alike, and the fits can be so poor -- that I've started to use the printed alphabet grid on the back to properly orient the pieces and sometimes figure out roughly what section of the image they go in, to go try them out there.

At first I thought it was cheating, and then I justified it to myself, that it was merely using an atypical source of information.

It's such a miserable puzzle, that I really want it to be over already, "by any means necessary."

"What's seitan?", the customer asked.

I replied, "He's the angel who fell from heaven, in certain systems of Christian dogma."

A joke with customers at work (2 of 2): Wine.

The other week at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, two vivacious (white) (female) college students came in, and when they each went to order some merlot, I made sure to card them, since from the look of them there was a chance that they were underage.

(They were each 22.)

And, when I delivered their wine to the table, I was like, "There you go... And it looks like you guys can't get any mer-lower."

And, they loved that.

Later, too, I told them that I had come up with a joke, and I asked them what someone who smokes pot says to someone who drinks wine.

"Oh, I should know that," said the one, as the other one said, "Sounds like us."

And, they didn't know, so I replied --- "When you go mer-low, I go high!"

And, they also liked that one.

. . .

A joke with customers at work (1 of 2): Currants.

A few months ago, a table of four (tired-looking) grad student types came in to the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now in work clothes very late at night, and they all got beers right away, and then when they went to order their food, they mentioned that they had been harvesting currants all day, as part of one of their prof's projects.

"So do you have CURRANT RESEARCH on your CV?", I was like.

And, one (slim) (blonde) (mustachioed) guy said no, but that prof whose area it is always makes jokes like that, it's a thing he's known for.

Later, too, I came up with another joke as well:

Q: What's a currant harvester's favorite drink?

A: Busch Light.

. . .

("Bush light.")

Repeated joke at work.

A few weeks ago at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones said out of nowhere that she's worried about me, that one day someone is going to kidnap me, because they opened a tomb and they need someone to read the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for quite a few years now.

And, the next time we worked together, she repeated that same comment again, and each time she said it, she just had this big mischievous smile on her face.

You could tell that she was quite taken with the scenario.

More election aftermath.

1) I've been listening to Philip Glass's "Satyagraha" like I have been the past two weeks, only a lot more, and although I knew that it was in Sanskrit, only two days ago did I realize that there was a lyrics insert, and that every single word is actually a close adaptation of the Bhagavad Gita. So, I had actually been immersing myself in the words of the Gita for hours on end each day. And, it turns out that the most moving parts that I had found myself listening to and re-listening to without knowing what they were, were Krishna arriving to teach Arjuna, and Krishna talking about his many incarnations across all time.

2) I've been thinking a lot about people who I know from other countries -- my (Thai) coworkers and the speech restrictions and abolition of political parties there, and an old (Tibetan) coworker whose mother hid food in caves because she knew that the (Chinese) were coming, and then when that began happening, she went away and lived from cave to cave and moved by darkness until she made her way to (India), and an old (German) (Jewish) resident at the resthome where I used to work who saw a synagogue go up in flames as a little girl, and to this day she won't go back to participate in memorialization services put on by (Germans). And a (Sudanese) relative of my (half Sudanese) (half British) friends (the brother-sister pair), he recently fled Khartoum with his young family and had to live in Egypt and find work to support them, and this was in the past several years. Such different lives, and not all under functioning democracies. I think about all of them, and I think that I've been relatively fortunate in my life so far.

Addendum.

Like has so often happened in my life, something unexpected occurs to me very very suddenly and it just feels right and I do it, and only later do I reason through the emotional logic and see why something felt so right in the moment.

With reaching out to try to mend 3 broken relationships in the immediate aftermath of the election, basically I had realized much much earlier in time that stuff was broken, but it was too close in time then, and then later I was in a good place and I had distance and I had some deeper regrets, but since I was in a good place, I also didn't want to open up an emotional can of worms and disturb my hard-won equanimity.

So, with the election results, I made the immediate decision to try to reconnect, and only later did I figure out it was because not only was it something positive that I could do right then that was in my control, but also because I was like, "Well, this is f*cked and I'm emotionally raw, so why not reach out, it's not like I can get any more emotionally raw right now."

Election aftermath:

1) That night, I slept incredibly fitfully despite popping a few Benadryl, and despite a trick I have for overcoming insomnia (masturbation -- they say it releases some sleep hormones after you shoot your wad), I wasn't able to get hard and jack off.

2) In thinking through what's important in my life, I've decided to try to begin the process of repairing 3 broken relationships from different parts of my life, since they're among my regrets. For some reason, it just feels right, now.

A question of mine:

Do dual citizens or like recent citizens who are immigrants from (India) ever vote by mail and then change their minds about who they're voting for and want to go back and change their ballot?

. . .

(It's had to have happened, from everything I've seen at the restaurant... I bet some election authorities somewhere have fielded calls from someone who already sent their ballot in, but now wants to go back and change it...)

A lunch shift at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now.

The other week on a midweek weekday at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says that on the previous night's dinner shift an eight-top of (South Asian) students came in at like 9pm, and she had finished pushing the two tables together and laying out the silverware for them, and then they were like, "Can we sit in the window?", and she had to go prepare that table then, for them, all over again.

"What time did they leave?", I was like.

"Nine-fifty," she was like. "Not too bad."

And, she said it was like four entrees for the eight of them, and it's fine because it's an automatic tip, but she doesn't like it when people are picky like that or want to change things like that.

She then started reminiscing, too, about her last trip through the city that I used to live in, that she was in line at a Starbucks there and five (South Asian) girls were ahead of her, and one got a three dollar coffee and the other four weren't buying anything, but each had a large water bottle and they were each telling the barista that they wanted their water bottles full of "extremely hot" water.

"They have a coffee pot like us," she was like. "How can that be extremely hot?"

She also said that there was a woman standing behind her, and she was just looking with anger up ahead at those girls up ahead of them in line.

"I would have said something," I was like. "Not if I was the barista, but if I was a customer behind them and there was a line, I would have said, 'Excuse me, if you are not a paying customer, please wait and go after us, we're waiting to put our orders in,' and then, if they said that their friend was a customer, i would say that their friend was a customer, not them, four people is a lot of people to do that for."

And, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker said that the barista didn't seem very happy with them, either.

In turn, I observed that on my recent trip into a neighboring state I was walking around a small town with some historic sites and while I was doing that I really needed to go to the bathroom, so I stopped through a pizzeria on the town square and I asked them if I could use their restroom and they let me, and then when I came out I saw they had cans of soda in a cooler for sale, and so I bought a can of Diet Coke and paid with a five and left the change as a tip.

"Yes," my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like, "Exactly."

Besides all that, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was also saying her new novel is coming out in a few months but she needs someone to design the e-book cover, and we chatted about that some and it turns out that it's not just romance she writes, but fan fic romance around K-pop stars.

"And you make money off that, right?", I was like,

"No," she was like, "More passive income," and she said she gets around a hundred dollars a month off of her novel sales.

Later, too, she was doodling, and I went to look, and she was signing her pen-name over and over and over again on this sheet of paper (her pen-name is a flower name, in English).

Some barbershop happenings.

The other week at the one local barbershop in the one (college) town that I now live in, I go in and there's an expensive-looking leather-banded gold watch sitting out on top of a folded chair in the row of folding chairs against the one wall where customers used to sit and wait before the pandemic and everyone started waiting outside, and the one (scraggly-bearded) (white) (townie) barber who runs the place says that a(n Indian) student didn't realize that they don't take credit cards and he wouldn't leave his phone there for some reason, so he accepted the watch, and he was holding it there until he came back with the money.

He also said that he used to accept student IDs as collateral, but a few times people just left them there since they could get them replaced for free or for maybe like three dollars, and he could swear that one guy actually came in twice and did that, like a long time apart, but he actually did that twice, he thinks, and anyways, because of that he stopped doing that, now he needs like a driver's license or your phone or something.

"You should put the IDs people left up on the wall like a Wall of Shame," I was like.

"Eh," he was like, "I would hold them a week and then throw them out, when it was clear they weren't coming back."

Then, he was like, "And that would work for locals, they wouldn't want to see their face up there, but what do students care, they're here for two, three years and then they're gone."

He also said that earlier that day a guy came in and was complaining and complaining and complaining about his haircut and he went back and fixed it like five times, and he got the feeling that the guy was doing it so he could try to get money off the price, but finally after the fifth time he was like, "Okay, that's a free haircut for you," and then he told him never to come back.

"Indian?", I was like.

"Yeah," he was like, and then he said that sometimes people have this trick that they tried somewhere once and it worked out for them then, so they just keep on doing it everywhere they go to try to get stuff for free, and that was probably what that was.

. . .

(If that watch-band was leather, could a[n Indian] wear it? Maybe he was Pakistani or Bangladeshi or something like that, maybe Pakistani, since they seem richer and don't seem to have a thing about cows.)

Another coworker backstory (2 of 2): Shopping local.

A few weeks after that, one day me and my one (newer) (Guatemalan) (indigenous-looking but monolingual Spanish) (female) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now were talking about the local farmer's market, and I said that the quality of the vegetables is better there, but it's also so important to buy locally, because it's better for the farmers and it's better for the local economy and also the money circulates more than if you shop at a supermarket and the money leaves the area.

And, she agreed, and then she told me that back at her home back in Guatemala, she had a garden, and she grew avocados and apples and tomatoes and potatoes and a lot of other stuff like that, and that's where she got all that produce, she never got them from a store, at all.

Another coworker backstory (1 of 2): Other lives.

Like a month ago my one (newer) (Guatemalan) (indigenous-looking but monolingual Spanish) (female) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now asked me about a talk I was giving, and so I told her a little about it, and I said that I have a doctorate and am an expert on this one very famous dead language and when I'm not working I spend all my time reading and writing, but I don't work in a university because there's no permanent work and because many professors won't give you a permanent job if you are intelligent and competition, it's difficult like that.

And, she told me that back in Guatemala, she used to drywall houses.

Something new in jigsaw puzzles that I haven't seen before:

This one company prints a grid of letters on the backside of their jigsaw puzzles, so if you ever have an unclear fit and you go to flip the pieces over to check to see if the fit is right, you also have the match of the letter-grid to help you see that.

But, if it's not a fit, sometimes you see that the letters belong to a different section of the puzzle, or are oriented differently, which is like the piece telling you how it orients or where it goes.

To me, that additional information is almost like cheating.

Some surprisingly rewarding environmental neuroticism:

When you can't squeeze anymore out, I now take a pair of scissors and cut right across the middle of a quote-unquote "empty" tube of sunblock, so I can then poke my fingers deep inside it and wipe around the inside and scrape up every last possible bit of it that's left...

With my last tube of Neutrogena SPF 70, too, I was able to do that like 4-5 times -- which is quite a lot of sunblock left in that tube that you wouldn't otherwise use, when you think about it!

I also then gently fold the top part of the tube and set it inside the bottom, and depending on where I cut, sometimes the seam is so smooth and unobtrusive that you can't even tell it's a cut-open tube with the top half nestling inside the bottom, the re-ordered image and text parts matching so well, or at least looking that way when you glance at it.

Two jokes that I made the other week with one five-top table at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) When it turns out that the (college-age) (alternative-looking) (white) girl of the party of five is there for her birthday with her (white) family, and I had already guided her away from one stir-fry and to one fried rice, when she had asked me for my recommendation:

"Man, I hope you like that entree, because I'd feel horrible if I ruined your birthday."

2) When they don't order dessert:

"Man, I wish I had known that earlier, because I would have put a birthday candle in your fried rice!"

. . .

Two forms of jigsaw puzzle neuroticism:

1) I now owe 5 jigsaw puzzles to the "Take One, Leave One" jigsaw puzzle table in the local public library's foyer, but I'm planning to give my more-attractive used jigsaw puzzles to the local charity resale shop so they can sell them, and use the other, worse-in-my-eyes ones for that table, to make up my obligations there.

2) I've decided to keep up a series of assembled jigsaw puzzles to see what they look like together, since they have thematics that kind of gel and the color schemes seem like they work -- one that's drawings of summer campers, and then one a two-puzzle set where one is a close-up of a wicker basket of bell peppers and the other one is a stack of bolts of bright Southwestern-style fabrics, and then two different ones where they're photos of sweeping canyon panoramas.

Force of habit:

For like a week now, every time I take a shower and get out of the shower, I turn to the nearby shelving to go and get a Q-tip, before I remember that they ran out like over a week ago.

A joke in (Spanish)...

... to my one (newer) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker, when I go back into the kitchen and she's kneading this giant vat of crab rangoon filling, and it's full of just chunky clumps of cream cheese:

"Parece como mi gringo panzon" ('It looks like my white belly').

. . .

Sunrise, Sunset:

1) The other week a(n older) (short-coiffed) (dyed blonde hair) (white) (woman) behind me in line at the local hippie co-op was like, "Hey, don't you work at the Thai restaurant?", while like a week-and-a-half after that, a(n older) (white) couple who were in at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now said that they were surprised that I still worked there, since they'd seen me there a year-and-a-half ago when they first moved back to town, but they hadn't seen me since, so they had assumed that I wasn't working there any longer.

2) A few weeks ago when a (younger) (Mexican) couple was in at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now with a baby stroller and a young baby, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker observed that as regular customers we have seen them come in together when they were dating, and then when the woman was pregnant, and now they have a baby together.

"Ahhhhhhhhhh!", she was then like, with an agonized look on her face. "What am I doing with my life?"

Addendum addendum addendum.

Years ago, too, my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) commented as someone who has known a fair number of people who have been employed in academia, that academia "seems like a lot of busywork" -- i.e., it's basically chock-full of time-consuming activities that don't really do anything and ultimately aren't all that productive.

And, she too works for a government bureaucracy, which seems at least to me fairly efficient.

One you start prying into academia and the logic of tenure, a lot of it is hierarchically-enforced and counterproductive practices that make no sense at all except for maintenance of tradition and image-needs of those in "the club."

On that note, my one art school colleague who wears (women's) clothes once also remarked that academic can be very confusing, since it's so rigid and hierarchical and stultifying and yet it's always saying that it's completely the opposite.

Addendum addendum.

Years ago my one (straight) (white) colleague who's into BDSM told me that his supervisor was discussing his dissertation project well after completion, and he said something about how it should have been done a whole different way, something along the lines of, "You know, we really should have done X, Y, and Z during data collection and analysis."

And, my colleague said he just sat there and thought to himself, "Ok, fine, maybe, but why didn't we have those conversations during the initial planning stages, instead of after years of work had been put in?". But, he bit his tongue, even as he just shook his head at how wacky it was.

He's worked in similarly-skilled jobs in the federal government (I think), too, and he said that you just don't see that blithe lack of common sense and lack of basic planning like you do in academia among the tenured.

Addendum.

Also, one of the stupidest f*cking things I've ever seen in my life is how in the Humanities, you write a dissertation, and then if you get into a tenure-track job, you spend years RE-WRITING THE SAME MATERIAL IN A DIFFERENT FORMAT, because you have to have a book as part of the job requirements.

Can you imagine that being a job-practice in any other half-sane field, where you spend years on a project and you've moved it through to completion on the level of findings, and then they're like, "Um, now we want you to say pretty much the same thing, but with different organization and style, and that's what you should be doing for the next several years," with them never really going back and revisiting the process and modifying *that*, so that on the one hand you can achieve whatever the desired final product is the first time around, and so that on the other you can then move on in turn onto something else instead of performing years on essentially what's an unneeded re-write.

It's just colossal mismanagement and sheer waste of time and energy, and it just makes the field look so extravagant and out-of-touch, and even strange.

The behavior of tenured professors is so much appallingly worse than people at large know, and inasmuch as it takes place at places that get public money, it's really unacceptable.

A vicarious insight into how academia is not like many other workplaces:

A (beatnik-like) (lower-class) (white dude) colleague who's tenured at a pretty major public university was pretty much asked to stop participating in so many creative theses, he said, since it's expected that everyone does like 3 every 4 years or so, and he did 30, probably because (I'm assuming) he finds it intellectually invigorating and even just plain fun to be around people with a creative bent.

Basically, he was making everyone else look bad, so they wanted him to stop doing what he likes and what he's good at, even though no-one else particularly wants to do that work.

End of the story is, he's tenured, so he respectfully pushed back and said he'd do how many he saw fit.

But, still, can you imagine that at any other normal workplace, stopping someone wbo's dedicated and who's good at their job from doing what they want to do?

Like, at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, many of us in the front-of-the-house have our specific roles that we gravitate towards (helping tables, manning the counter, packing food), and those different preferences and talents are recognized and valued, and no-one would imagine just trying to disrupt or hamstring any of that.

Yet another way that tenure's "lifetime jobs" actually hurt the mission of education and research when actually put into practice, much more than one might think at first.

A crack at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, after some (tattooed) (middle-aged) (white) customers say that after dinner they're headed to a famous local "battle of the bands"-type competition where local bands do cover sets of famous bands, and when I ask how they make sure that there's no repeats of who they're covering between bands, they say that that's taken care of at the registration level by the judges, and that they also forbid covering bands that people have been doing too much lately, and when I say like who, they say lately it's mainly been the Go-Go's:

"So" I was like," You're saying the Go-Go's a no-go?"

. . .

(The [tattooed] [middle-aged] [white] wife of the apparent couple among them seemed appreciative of that line, and not only smiled, but repeated it out loud once, after I said it.)

A running joke I began making at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, after my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker said that her right thigh hurt from her periodic birth control shot:

"Birth control is a scam," I'd be like. "I have sex all the time, and I never get pregnant."

New culinary discovery:

A cut-up raw tomato laid on top of my morning sauerkraut makes it amazing, since even though I don't eat them together in the same bite, the juices drip down onto the sauerkraut and somehow make it a lot better, like less biting and like somehow just giving it a more robust taste, somehow.

Coworker backstory:

The other night at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was saying hello to the one (younger) (Lao) cook and asked him how he was doing, and he said good, that he had just finished a hard test that afternoon, and that made me a bit surprised since I didn't know that he was in school, and it turns out that he's in a nursing program at the one local community college.

I really have no idea how long this has been going on.

English translation of a conversational Thai phrase?

Twice now when I've been discussing mild interpersonal drama stuff -- once with my (chubby) (Thai) coworker and once with my (taller) (new) (Thai) coworker -- each have at some point said to me (in English) some variant of "it's going to be okay."

My hunch is that this is a translation of a common (Thai) conversational response.

Like, the first time was when I got back from my conference/vacation, and I didn't have a very good present for my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones -- she's so hard to shop for! -- and she was a little mad at her (small) gift, in comparison to the coffee beans and bottle of sweet white wine I'd gotten my other coworkers.

So, when we were texting about that situation, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker at one point said to me not to worry, and she said that line about how everything was going to be okay.

More recently, too, my one (tall) (young) (Latino-American) coworker had brought in his laptop to work for some reason, and he was using it at the back counter when it was slow (community college homework?).

And, when he had it closed, I noticed that the back of it was covered with all of these rockband stickers, and also this one sticker that said --

FUCKING AWESOME 

-- which made me take out some masking tape and write on it --

PLEASE, NO PROFANITY AT [name of the Thai restaurant where we work]!

-- and, I put that piece of masking tape over the offensive sticker on the back of his laptop, pointed it out to my one (taller) (new) (Thai) coworker, and we waited for him to discover it.

When he found it, she was already gone for the night and I was at the front of the restaurant doing my closing duty of sweeping the floor, and I heard him read it out loud to the (white) (female) (townie) (liar) delivery driver, and he wasn't sure if it was funny, and he almost seemed confused, like maybe the owners or someone had seen that sticker and put that masking tape over the profanity on his laptop.

So, I was texting my one (taller) (new) (Thai) coworker about this entire situation, and when I mentioned that he seemed confused and maybe thought that it was the owners who had done that, that was when she texted me the variant of how everything will be okay.

I can't remember ever hearing something like that from a native (English) speaker in a equivalent low-stakes conversation, so it almost certainly must be them translating something from (Thai).

Rotten potatoes.

When I returned from my recent conference/vacation, my cottage smelled like rotten potatoes.

As it turns out, I had an eight-pound untouched bag up in the cupboard above my fridge where I keep my wine and whiskey, and it had gone bad, like where several or more had rotted, and there was this thick molasses-like slime accumulating at the bottom from where they'd molded and leaked out from in between the potato-bag's plastic net-meshing and started to change into something else, as the slime gradually settled and dehydrated and left this thick caking of mold on the fake wood, staining it.

Usually I'd be motivated to pick out the good ones, but there were small gnats flying around from where they'd started breeding, so no, I just picked it up and ran it outside and ran and hurled it into a dumpster in the back alley.

THONK, it rang metallically, as the eight pounds of rotting potatoes hit the dumpster-side.

I then washed the bottom of the cupboard with rubbing alcohol and then Dawn dish-soap in turn, and I lit a scented candle in there to try to burn away the rotten potato smell.

(I don't do candles, but I had been given one as a gift as part of a small going-away present giftbag from my one [very short-term] [Chinese-American] ex-coworker at the one [Thai] restaurant where I work now, when she was moving on to her HR job and wanted to thank everyone for her chill job that got her through graduation... I have to admit, it was a nice gesture, but it was even more nice to finally have a use for that candle!)

Basically, I hadn't been drinking any whiskey in a while, and I had gotten those potatoes I think back in June with the intention to make potato salad during the summer, only I had forgotten about them.

Sigh.

I really do hate food waste.

Inquiry into the local healthcare staffing situation.

The other week at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, two (younger) (white) women in scrubs were in for lunch, so I chit-chatted with them a bit, and it turns out that they were on lunchbreak from the nearby major hospital system.

And, I asked them if they were still having short-staffing with CNAs, and I mentioned how several years ago someone from there told me that it was so bad, that they were having to substitute in LPNs for CNA work.

And, they didn't know.

"We do more clinical stuff," the one was like, "So we really don't see that."

Two economic musings:

1) What with the discussion of home prices starting to make its way into presidential campaign talk, I was thinking back to a number of friends around my age who've gotten recently screwed or have just gotten by by the skin of their teeth, with home ownership.

Like, they had a post-pandemic divorce and were forced to split with their spouse and look for a home but prices have now forced them to rent instead -- though, admittedly, one of those people did find an affordable house, because someone had committed suicide in it -- or, like how someone I know picked up stakes and sold their house and moved to North Carolina and then when that area didn't work out professionally like they had thought they moved back to my homestate, only for them to find out that the general rise in housing prices combined with AirBNB tourist area buy-ups had excluded them from the very market where they'd just owned before!

It really is something, to know like 3-5 people like this, just from my narrow social circle.

2) Overall, it's astonishing to me how it's been "always something" generationally, where it's just blow after blow after blow that you can't foresee economically, like (in roughly chronological order):

- the brewing student debt millstone;

- the 2008-9 economic crisis;

- the internet really coming into its prime and hastening deprofessionalization and precarious work;

- the internet really coming into its prime and increasing the amount of job applications and the intensity with which you have to detail them, including to circumvent resume-screening software;

- wage compression;

- lost years to the chaos of the pandemic; and

- rise in housing prices.

Conversely, there are some bright spots, like the Affordable Care Act, and the current strong market and higher wage floor for everyday jobs, currently.

Overall, though, you really do look back, and it's been like 15 years-ish of the ground shifting beneath your feet in ways that are very hard to anticipate and that are hard to cumulatively compensate for, if you've experienced multiple setbacks.  Like, one or maybe two would be doable, but multiple multiple ones?

I really do feel like the vibes are shifting and the way to go nowadays for a certain type of person who's had a certain type of trajectory is to "check out" and just not deal with the bullsh*t anymore.

Too much lost time and too little to gain with any decent chance of certainty -- why bother putting the effort in?

There's more to life than sinking ungodly amounts of time and energy into the mere hope of indefinite rewards.

Weakening of Linguistic Strengthening.

This whole new linguistic trend of saying "I appreciate you" to convey true thanks vs. the rote "thank you" seems to be spreading a little bit more but also conventionalizing and weakening.

Like, the other weak this (big) (bulky) (body-building) (Arab-American) (medical resident?) customer got a crap-ton of takeout (his daily calories and protein?), and he made sure to say "I appreciate you," but when I went to go cash him out and file the receipt, the bill was like sixty dollars, and the tip was zero.

Unless he's one of those mentalities where they think profuse words substitute for cold hard cash!

You do see that type, sometimes.

Addendum addendum.

It's interesting how on the whole (Chinese from China) students are a lot more conscientious with tipping.

Like, you get a few stinkers, but otherwise you see a lot of people trying to "do it right," even after they've just arrived into the country for school and it's clear they don't quote know how the system works.

Like, I've seen a (Chinese from China) customer go to pay the bill and give their credit card and they ask me to put on a 15% tip, since they don't know that they get the receipt back and they write it on that and the amount is then adjusted later to account for the tip -- something very endearing, since they want to do right, but just aren't oriented yet!

Similarly, I see a lot of tips that are **exactly** 15% to the penny -- stuff like $2.43 -- whereas a customer from a tipping culture might round up a little, to make it a flat $2.50 or to make the bill amount plus the tip make a round number in total.

My one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones was also reminiscing about a (female) (foreign) (East Asian) (presumably Chinese from China) (presumably student) customer who didn't realize the payment system and brought the bill up to the counter to pay rather than leave it on the table, and she had to explain everything to her, including the area for tip, and the customer was like, "Thank you, I don't know, I will take this and ask my American friend," and she took the bill and went back to the table and figured everything out with her friend.

"Someone has taught them," my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker was like, when we were discussing these differences, between the (Chinese from China) and (foreign) (South Asian) (student) customers.

Addendum.

At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (taller) (new) (Thai) coworker and I were talking about common behavior from (South Asian) customers, and she told me that her mom faces the same stuff all the time, at the (Thai) restaurant where she works that's closer to campus.

That restaurant is counter-service and the customer places their order and pays and then waits for it to be cooked up and then they take it to a table and eat it there or take it away, but a lot of times her mom starts cooking, and then a (South Asian) customer tries to change the order.

"NO, I CANNOT CHANGE YOUR ORDER," her mom runs out from the back of the kitchen and says, when that happens.

"Her boss lets her do that," my one (taller) (new) (Thai) coworker was like.

I pushed for more details -- with these requests, did they try to change ingredients, or switch entire dishes, like from a fried rice to pad see you? would the requested change change the amount that they had to pay, like where they were expecting you to negate or adjust the payment they'd already made? -- but she didn't know the specifics.

But, I want to find out!

My mother stereotypes.

For the first time ever in my life (I think?), my mother just laid out a broad-based black-and-white stereotype:

"Indians are rude," she was like, after she had asked me on the phone about how my previous shift at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now had gone, and I had said that there had been some weird customers, and then I explained the thing about how a lot of (South Asian) customers cause chaos and try to change orders etc. after they place them, which I now counter by doing what they request if possible, but then gently being like "Mistakes happen, but we appreciate it if your final order is your final order, to minimize mistakes in the kitchen if we have to talk to the cooks and interrupt their work..."

(I'd never gone into detail like that with her before, about all of the happenings with [South Asian] customers.)

(Additionally, the logic of the strategy is like correcting odd freshman behavior, back when I was a writing instructor; you not only point out correct behavior, but you also assume that they're acting out of lack of information and so you try to explain the full environment and expectations and how things work, though I suppose that works better when you're an authority figure with salary coming from elsewhere, versus a subordinate dependent on good-will and tips.)

As it turns out, when she used to work as a "stewardess" (not "flight attendant") back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my mom had some customers like that, and that stereotype was a by-word among that profession, to the point where she still thinks it fifty years later (!).

She was also saying that my godmother's (dead) husband had worked in customer service for the airlines for a while, and it was infamous to get a (South Asian) customer on the phone with a complaint, since there would always just be this repeated line about "Compensation, compensation!" and "I need compensation!".

New neighbor doings:

The (new) (front upstairs) (college age) (Indian-American) and (white) (dating-each-other?) neighbors have put a new doormat out that's shaped like a small cluster of cherries, so many nights when I get off work and go up to the front house to check the mail before I go in for the night, I walk up the front steps, and in the shadows it looks like a depiction of two big dangling testicles, just sitting there on the front porch.

Dust bunnies.

After I cleaned up from my bedbug scare and also did laundry for my recent trip, suddenly these big light grey dust bunnies were everywhere, especially in my bedroom, like just this surprising amount of them, even though I'd just cleaned my entire cottage top-to-bottom, including sweeping and even washing the floor there.

Like, you'd clean them up, and then you'd start seeing shadows out of the corner of your eyes the next day all about everywhere on the floor-tile, and you'd get down and look, and there, there were more dust bunnies again.

I think my putting this fake fur-textured blanket into the drier for prolonged periods of time to kill any remaining bedbugs or eggs did something to its fibers, and somehow that's what's producing the dust bunnies, although I never see any fiber-clumps up on that blanket on my bed.

A sign of increasing local homelessness...

...in the college town that I now live in:

My local bank that I've used now for almost three years, now has a sign on the front door that restrooms are for customers only.

. . .

(I asked what was up with that to the teller, and she said that they didn't want to, they've always let people use it, but people started stealing the toilet paper and even the bathroom deodorizer products, so they had to put the kabosh down... She also said that she recently found out that there has been a homeless man who takes a tent and sets up between the external drive-through ATMs under this big external canopy right outside the bank, on weekends especially long weekends once everyone is gone from the bank -- somehow he lost track of time recently, and he was there one morning when staff came in, and the jig was up, and none of the people at the bank had ever seen that before, either.)

An exchange about Jesse James.

When I recently toured the Jesse James birthplace, the guide in the adjacent museum was explaining something to me and mentioned some aside about Zerelda, and he then made sure to specify that he meant Zerelda James's wife, and not Zerelda James's mother.

Later up at the house, too, Zerelda came up again, so I took that opportunity to ask about how there came to be two Zereldas like that.

"It's a family name," the guide up at the house was like. "He married his first cousin, and she was named after her aunt."

. . .

(For like two days afterwards, this exchange would make me laugh, whenever I thought about it.)

A memorable watermelon.

Like the last watermelon I got of the summer season was just gigantic -- it honestly filled up both your arms, if you carried it that way -- and, I do have to say, though I feared if it would be of good quality, it was actually the best watermelon that I had all year.

It was just crisp perfect watermelon through-and-through, like every single bit of it, and it was gigantic, to the point where it visibly pressed down the white metal rack in my refrigerator, when I first put it in there and it just sat out on a dinner plate, to catch any fugitive juices from the disc-opening that I'd carved out up on top so I could scoop out the flesh from there and then rest the rind back on top, to sort of cover it.

The whole thing cost only ten dollars, too.

The next time that I see that (Mexican- and Mexican-American) farm family, I'm going to let them know how good it was, and that whatever they did with that watermelon with seeds and growth and whatnot, they should do it again, because it was truly a watermelon to write home about.

Livestreaming.

When I recently threw an event, I of course didn't expect that everyone I knew and invited could make it, but I was surprised about the number of people who asked about whether it would be livestreamed (easily like 3-5 people).

I don't blame them, but that was just a layer of organization above and beyond the event that I wasn't willing to take on, especially since I'm just not that good with stuff like that.

Also, I think some stuff just doesn't communicate -- for some things you have to be present, and be immersed! -- and I'd rather make something like that special, where you really have to be there.

On professions (2 of 2): The future.

It's interesting to me how like the past 3 years I've had no sense of a long-term future.

Most people, if you ask them, they have a professional path, are saving for a house, have to work while their kids are in school, etc.

But me, people ask, and it's like, "I don't know."

Like, I can tell you maybe what I hope to work on with projects for the next 1-2 years, and I expect I'll be at my job and in the area that I live in for at least another year, but beyond that, I really have no idea.

My one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) was reflecting on this like half a year ago.

He was saying that everyone knows that your past shapes your sense of self, but no-one talks about how the future does too, and it's very disconcerting not to have anything like that in front of you, but just this big blank space that you can't even provisionally fill in with any relative degree of certainty.

On professions (1 of 2): Payscales.

Like over a month ago I saw an ad for training program for various trades involved with highway construction, including what you start at, how many years of apprenticeship, and then what you can get up to in terms of money and benefits.

What you can get to is definitely higher than what I make now, but, believe it or not, what you start at with hourly wage is right around how much I make now as a waiter at a very local restaurant with a solid business.

Like, if that type of job fits you, go for it, but it's still astonishing to me how oversold so many professions are -- "the trades" are a big thing that people recommend, but it's a long runway for training and then takeoff!

I mean, if you have to spin your wheels someplace and make a living as you move up, of course you do that in that type of job; that's what I thought that I had in eldercare.

But still, it's just astonishing to me how there's like this huge clump of jobs now with mushy wage scales and not that much differentiation between them.

A sign of the new front upstairs neighbors:

A pizza-box just sitting on the top of everything in the recycling-bin, and when I open it up, there's not only grease-stained wax paper still left in it, and a lot of crumbs, but also a half-opened and half-eaten pizza-dipping sauce with a ton of this yellowish-white sludge-y dip still inside, just right in there in the recycling bin.

Response of a native (Portuguese) speaker...

...when I emailed that one (former) (visiting student) (gay) (Afro-Brazilian) (STEM) student with some questions about the use of auxiliary verbs in (Portuguese):

"Ter" otherwise can work as an auxiliary verb as in "eu tenho feito muito exercícios" (I have practiced a lot of exercises), "eu tive pensando como você mamou aquela rola enorme" ( I have thought how you sucked that big dick) 

I don't know if "I have thought..." Makes sense for you... 

. . .

Another artist observation I've heard...

...from when I was talking with my one (art school) colleague who wears (women's clothes), about how I do all this good stuff in various realms but it's like never my moment:

He just observes that there's always the innovators who truly do new and interesting stuff, and then there's the "second generation" people who swoop in and popularize and get all the credit in the public-eye, though the people "in the know" know who was first.

. . .

(It really is rare that I hear this type of reflection from anyone else other than all the artists in my life.)

Tradeoffs.

Recently I've been thinking that when eldercare collapsed around me in the area that I live in now and I decided to just not try again for anything different, I made a very conscious decision to have time to pursue all the stuff that I want to do, outside of my dayjob.

My thinking was that a job search can be draining and just isn't worth the time and effort, especially if there's no obvious possibilities and no certain payoff on any sort of foreseeable timeline, and I'm already highly qualified for any number of jobs, so why not have the time, and maybe I'd luck into something from tentatively nosing around, and even if I didn't, I'd rather have the time.

And, I've had the time, and I've done great things with it -- even greater than I expected! -- but I guess somehow I had this hope all this while that something else would come my way, when it hasn't.

It really does bother me on some level, that I just don't have a recognizable profession.

It really makes no sense to anyone, and yet no-one can show me a worthwhile and doable direction or opportunity fitting into my fairly broad parameters (fair enough workplace, at least 50% active and interacting with other people, a morally neutral or "does good in the world" industry, something I can get into *now* or with fair enough certitude, without any huge investment of money or time).

Some very unpleasant (South Asian) customers…

…encountered by the one (older) (white) (female) (townie) bartender at the one (local brewery) that I go to, in the one (college) town that I now live in:

Two (South Asian) students – one male and one female – are out on the patio with drinks and it’s closing time, so she comes to tell them to come finish their drinks inside since she is doing stuff and they have time, but she needs to lock the front door and close the patio, and the (male) (South Asian) student seems incensed, perhaps because (as she says) she’s a woman, and he says something about there being a customer inside at the bar and they can stay out on the patio if he is in there, and she is like, “Please come inside,” and she’s firm, but they won’t, so she’s like, “Fine,” and locks the door, and then they just sit and sit and sit outside for way too long, even when they’re done with their drinks, and finally when the other customer gets up to leave and goes out, then they finally get up too, because that one (South Asian) (male) student wanted to show her he was going to do what he wanted to do, so when they were finally getting up to leave alongside that other customer who's passing by, she comes outside and is like, “I close the patio for everyone, that is how we operate here,” and he sniped at her about them being out on the patio when it closed and they should have been able to sit there etc. etc. etc., and without him finishing, she was like, “Okay, good night,” and she turned around to go inside.

“He really had a thing with women,” she was like. "He was scary."

Some running jokes about my belly…

…since it has become a prominent and weird-shaped paunch, thanks to my core work, which has built up my abs and pushed out all the fat that's on top of it (“Umm hmmm, umm hmmm,” said my one [older] [Thai] coworker who’s a whiz at the phones very knowingly, since she does Pilates and must have come across this before, perhaps even with herself and her own body) –

[basically, I make various different jokes about me being pregnant] -

Me (holding my belly like a baby): “I need to sit down, I'm so tired, my feet are so sore.”

Me (jerking a stomach muscle and making it leap)” “Here, it’s kicking, feel, feel.”

Me (leaning over on top of the counter doing something when my one [newer] [taller] [Thai] coworker comes by and sees my butt sticking out and slaps it, making me leap up and drive my stomach into the edge of the counter): “Oh my god, you made me lose the baby, you made me lose the baby!”

Me (being asked by my [Guatemalan] coworkers how many months it is, or who’s the papa) (with a bewildered face): “I don’t know, I don’t remember.”

Me (being told by my [Thai] coworkers that I need to do more cardio to get rid of that last belly fat): “Or, I need an abortion.”

Me (being told by my [Thai] coworkers that I need to do more cardio to get rid of that last belly fat): “You know, I took a big shit, and people thought I lost the baby.”

My one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones (after I tell my coworkers that I need to lose a little weight so I can button an old blazer for a wedding, so please punch me in the stomach and help me lose the baby): “You do that, your belly swell up, and you look fatter than before.”

. . .

A very odd happening at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now…

…I think this spring:

Someone calls on the phone and my one (newer) (tall) (Thai) coworker picks up and then looks confused and then hands the phone over to me, and and this (younger) (flat-affected) (male) voice is like, I have an odd request, can you help me, and he then says that he knows his girlfriend is there and he thinks she’s cheating on him, so he wants to know, the girl with the pink hair, is she there, she should be there, and how many men are at the table, and I’m like, uh, uh, and then I say we can’t help him, it’s a customer privacy issue and we can’t give out information like that, and he says some stuff trying to get me to do it, and then I say I'm sorry, and that if there’s nothing else I can help him with, I need to go assist some patrons.

And, of course the girl with the pink hair is there, it’s really more like a dull lavender in her filthy unwashed nerd-hair, and she’s fat, and she’s at a table of five, and she takes a call and goes outside a lot, and while I’m over by there, she had just started eating, and the call happens again, and she takes it and with the phone to her ear asks this (skinny) (ungroomed) (pimply) (scruff-faced) (white) nerd guy for his Venmo, can he pay for her and she’ll pay him back, and then she hurries towards the door with her phone to her ear, and leaves.

And, for like an hour afterwards, all we do at the restaurant is talk about that situation, and tell other workers who hadn’t heard about it yet what had happened.

Like, my take was that she wasn’t cheating, but she has a roving eye, especially because her man is jealous, and that jealousy is actually driving her away, and to look elsewhere.

But, some people just didn’t care about that analysis.

“So how many men *were* at the table,” my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker asked, after I had gone on at length about those clientes locos (“Crazy customers”).

And, the one (Guatemalan) guy who I started the diablo joke with was like, “You should say, Cheat? Him? No, it’s me, I do her.”

And, of course that started out a whole row of jokes about how we should have replied to him on the phone –

1) “How many men are with her…? Uhhh [pause], I think ten.”

2) “No, she’s not here, but I think I see someone like that out in front on the street, she’s leaning into a car window and talking to some guy...”

3) “No, she’s not here, but I think I hear some noise back in the alley...”

4) “Eeee, ah!, ella, ella? Si, ella, la puta…”

and – my personal favorite, which I came up with, and which I could not say out loud without cracking up –

5) “Oh, her? Yeah, she’s a freaky one, she asked us to cum in her pad thai.”

. . .

An odd happening in my neighborhood, this spring.

One spring-dusk I’m walking back from over by campus in the one college town that I now live in, and like a block and a half up from me, there’s all these fire department and emergency vehicles and there’s tape cordoning off quite a bit of the street, so I sidle over to two (white) (college-age) students standing and observing things, and I ask them what happened.

“Oh, we were walking home and we were walking by that house and we heard water,” the (trimly mustachioed) (young 20-something) guy was like, explaining that a pipe likely burst while people were away, and when they went to go knock on the door and check, they smelled gas, too, so they got away from there and called emergency services right away, and now they’re all taking care of it.

“That’s good,” I was like.

Then, after a pause, I was like, “But to be honest, I kind of want to see it go up in a big fireball, like in Diehard.”

And, they didn’t disagree.

Places in life:

1) After I gave their family some lemon dessert bread from a local bakery in the one college town that I now live in, my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) said that her kids really enjoyed it, and the next day after they ate it, they wanted more, and she had to be like, “But you ate it all yesterday,” and then her young daughter was like, “Oh, yeah."

2) My one friend who does television work and has for years, even getting into the appropriate trades union there, has told me that he’s now looking to get out of it…  The boom-and-bust cycle of employment when series come into town is getting to him, and he’s not sure how AI will affect the effects industry and reconfigure a need for many positions, and plus their health and pension plan seems like it’s being mismanaged but the union electorate isn’t diligently concerned enough, so who knows what will happen with that. But, he’s looking online, and he says everything is part-time and independent contractor, nowadays, so he can't figure a path out, into something better.

Chit-chat upon my return home…

…with the one (older) (white) couple who grow organic and who have a vaguely Harley-inspired aesthetic, when the woman is like “You’re back” after I double-back to buy some more tomatoes, after I had initially bought some tomatoes from them and then I had moved on to shop other stands only to discover that they were out of my usual kale, and so I needed to improvise and plan other ingredients for different salads for that week:

Me (explaining my situation): “…and so I think I’m going to make a lot of tomato salads this week, since I can’t get the kale.”

Her: “Tomatoes are healthy. Though, they’re a lot of water.”

Me: “And fiber, I mean, you have a big salad of those, and you can get the squirts so bad.”

Her: [laughs]

. . .

Some experiences and perspectives (2 of 2): Chinese-American.

At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, there was this one (local) (female) (Chinese-American) student who briefly worked there – she got hired and worked for some months and expected to work longer, but a post-graduation job offer came in for her much quicker than she thought – and she said she was once a hostess at a steakhouse in town, and once she got this coat and gave it to this (older) (white) (woman) customer, and she was like to her, “Your English is so good.”

She and my one (Chinese-American) (male) coworker were also saying that having different lunchboxes in elementary school was “a thing” – “Uh yeah, you have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I have these yummy dumplings,” he was like – and he also said that growing up students made many race-jokes about (Asians) (e.g. that the easiest way to blind them is with dental-floss).

Some experiences and perspectives (1 of 2): Chinese from China.

At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (Chinese from China) coworker says that 80% of people in (China) hate it there, and if they tell you that they like it, don’t believe them, they're lying, they all want to leave.

He also said that there are very few foreigners in (China) now, since the pandemic, and it gives it a much different and more closed-in feel, and that all of the activity around Taiwan makes him nervous, and he foresees war.

On understanding.

Over the past decade or decade-and-a-half, I notice that some of the most sympathetic people who get where I’m at in life are actually the various artists that I know.

They don’t find it odd that people go around to different things and try different things out, since it’s like they would in a practice, and they don’t find it odd that people don’t get traction for stuff, since that happens in a practice, too.

That’s all on top of how essentially all the different research and writing and even much activism I do can often be like an intense ongoing practice that occurs on top of any dayjob that I might hold.

There’s also very specific social dynamics and personal experiences that they just instantly get, too.

Like, when I was saying how I was encountering rough patches for not having branding as a person with different parts of the various work I was doing, my one (art school) colleague who wears (women’s) clothes was automatically just like, yeah, the world really doesn’t ever let you really be more than one thing, like it was wisdom he had from seeing career trajectories of different artists, many of whom never even get known for one single thing.

And, when I had that exceptionally crazy intense experience where I was bringing forth my one huge research finding, I saw the one local animator who I vaguely know, and I apologized for being out of it and I said that I might be odd and out-of-it since I was just in the midst of all this stuff and my head was elsewhere and I had actually just realized some more stuff in another major insight on a long late winter walk right before I saw her, and I also said that I was just very afraid of death right then, and she immediately observed that she felt the *exact* same way many years ago when she was deep in the middle of this one big project that she is known for, where she was actually pleading to the universe, please, don’t let me die know, I need to get this THING out of me, and when she said ‘this THING” and she noted how it was just inside of her, it was like she was exactly describing my feelings, with my unbirthed research finding.

All very odd, but very interesting.

Many artists also have a very open and accepting and non-judgmental vibe, too, and are on board with people who do passion projects.

Memories of the recent eclipse.

Somehow, I missed the one specific fact with the last solar eclipse until the very evening before, that the totality is a categorically different phenomenon than even a very high percentage of coverage, and since I don’t own a car, by then it was too late to make plans and get out of town and travel just a little ways and see it.

Like, there were tinted glasses at the local library and I picked them up and people were saying what percentage we’d have and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones was mentioning the date of the eclipse, but somehow no-one was ever talking about the totality thing, and that information just escaped me until it was just past the verge of too late to make plans to go and see it.

Later, I found out that my one (tall) (skinny) (Latino-American) (just-graduated-from-high-school) coworker actually had been planning a camping trip the whole time and was down in some forest for several days with his dog – and yet he never said anything about these plans to me, until afterwards!

I also found out that the one local (gay) (Colombian) graduate student actually planned ahead a ton and figured out a rental car and a great park that he could go see it from – and again, he never told me any of this until after it was over!

The day of, I met some friends in a local park, and it was interesting to see the change in a familiar environment, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones said that only two customers came in the entire lunch shift that day at the restaurant, and she called everyone out onto the street to go see the eclipse.

As my one (former assisted-living client) with (disabilities) said, all of those coincidences with my not getting that information was very freaky, and it must have happened for a reason, and it was simply not my time to see an eclipse.

Somehow, I agreed with her – it was just too liminal and dangerous to be in that place then, and be exposed like that…

That was exactly when I was in the middle of my bringing into written form the outline of my gigantic research breakthrough, and it really was like some weird intense birthing process, and somehow I just feel that I was very extremely vulnerable right then, for the duration of that, until it was complete.

Etc. etc. about the restaurant…

…at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) My one (college-age) (Chinese-American) coworker saw me reading something about trans* politics on my phone and we start talking a little about that, and he is very un-self-consciously like, yeah, I’m not really sure that people who’ve gone through male puberty should be competing in women’s sports, and it doesn’t seem like he’s afraid of being “called out” for that at all, or even aware that such a thing could happen to him for holding that opinion and saying it out loud.

2) It’s very interesting how many (Indian) customers want to keep a menu at the table for the duration of the meal, even though they never touch it again, and how many (Chinese) customers want everything to come out at once, and never take home any leftovers.

3) For a button advertising a local vegetarian cooking competition, I tape onto the back of my advertising button this small felt mushroom like a Super Mario Brothers mushroom that has a string coming out of the top and that someone had left at the restaurant and that was in our Lost-and-Found box for like forever, so that when I wear it, the mushroom hangs down on the string from the button as part of additional “fun and wacky advertising” for the local event, and once when it’s colder out, I take a light jacket into work, and when I’m leaving, I put it on and zip it up, and then my (Thai) coworkers point out how the mushroom makes a small sharp mound underneath my jacket, and they say that it looks like my nipple is hard, and so after that I start this thing where when I’m working I stop, jut my chest out, and shake the little mushroom back and forth, like it’s a stripper’s tassel and I’m just there performing in a show, making my little tassel fly back and forth.

Addendum.

At the one wedding I was at, I was catching up with the bride’s one (very nice) (white) aunt who’s recently retired from nursing, and when I mentioned how I was in and out of eldercare since I last saw her, she automatically went into that boomer autopilot pontification mode that people of "that age" often go into and she was all like, “Oh, the most essential positions are always the most low-paid and they’ve never been paid enough,” and I had to be like **coughcoughcough** ummm, I don’t think you quite get how bad payscales have gotten, it’s always been relatively low, but any “step up” paybump has now evaporated in many states as far as I can tell, etc. etc. etc.

It really is something how certain people without direct recent experience really do pretend to know-it-all, even if they’re really nice people.

Like, my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) was recently telling me that I can sometimes be a bit “dire” – that’s her new word – and I kind of had to bite my tongue, since she’s been ensconced in a state job for years, and I don’t think she quite gets how severely eroded a number of interlinked sectors are.

Like, it’s not just me, I know people who are in different sectors and I talk to them, and I come across articles in magazines all the time on just these same topics. Like, I seek out other perspectives, and I do accept correction when I find it, but a lot of what I’m keyed into really does seem to be true.

Odd overheard conversation…

…while in line before a recent train ride, while standing in line during what turns out to be a lengthy delay:

A(n older) (white) woman directly in front of me is talking to two young people – one an (almost college-age) (white) (male) and the other an (almost college-age) (black) (female) – and – of all things! – she turns out to be a healthcare instructor at a regional college who teaches for certain eldercare positions, where she was telling them that you can get a license and move up, pay is $16-17 an hour “to start,” you can get all the hours you want and fill in shifts while you go to college for a better position like nursing, etc. etc. etc.

And, it was exactly the same lines that people were saying like a decade ago.

It brought to mind what a (graduate school) colleague of mine had observed to me a number of years ago, that all of these institutions are just up and humming along and behaving like nothing’s changed.

Like, that pay was all right 6-8 years ago, it was more than you could make off-the-bat at retail or many restaurants or whatnot, but it just doesn’t compare anymore – you can make that much at Target, and probably more at many restaurants, even at the shifts you start out at! – and the “fill-in” thing isn’t like the “fill-in” thing of 6-8 years ago, since you’re basically not supplementing manageable situations, but are more than likely walking into severely short-staffed operations where who knows what the heck is going on.

It really is just incredible, to know these things, and to see that.

A recent conversation…

…with my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair who I’m friends with).

She was telling me that she was recently back in London for a wedding, and when I was asking her what it was like, she was saying that the bride is (British-Turkish), “so there were a lot of kids there.”

“Oh…?”, I was like. “Are you saying that those people have a lot of children..?”

And, she didn’t respond in any way whatsoever, to that comment.

Also, when I was telling her about how there were two obnoxious passengers with loud profanity-filled speakerphone conversations on a recent train ride that I’d had – one man even talking about how he was going to beat someone up -- she said that she’s seen more of that recently on the subway in the city that I used to live in, like she has the kids on there and people are “smoking blunts” and just being all like that, and when I said that those are exactly the type of crazy people where you don’t want to say anything at all, because they’re crazy, she was like, “Exactly.”

Some interactions with a (Guatemalan) coworker…

…at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, who I make the “Sunday” jokes with:

1) I’m in the basement scooping out ice cream on a lunch shift, and he says that he’s never had any from the restaurant, and so I scoop out a little bit and drop it in his hand so he can try some.

2) Later that shift, he says he wants to buy some ice cream for the other two (Guatemalans) working that day so that they can have it with their shift-meals between lunch shift and dinner shift, and it turns out that he wasn’t aware that employees get 50% off on everything that they order when they’re working.

3) Like a few days later, the shift has ended and he’s coming out to have lunch and I’m pumping out some jumping jacks that I had left from all the customers who had come in that day, and as he walks by, without even looking at me, he’s like, “Gordo” (“Fat”), and he goes to sit down, so afterwards when I’m by there and he’s already started eating, I stand over him and point somewhere and am like Mira, mira (“Look, look”), and when he goes to look away to look and he’s looking in another direction, I start making big play-motions like I’m rapidly scooping all of his food into my mouth, and when he looks back and sees me, I stop and I’m like, “Cuidado, senor, eso gordo va comer toda tu comida” (“Careful, Mister, this fat man is going to eat all of your food”).

Some memories of my father.

When I was back in my hometown, my father was reminiscing about seeing the Statue of Liberty when coming over into New York harbor on the boat as a boy, and about how the five of them in the family slept in 2 cots, him and his younger brother with their mother, and the eldest brother with their dad, my grandfather.

He was also saying that when he got into school and was very very young, somehow he got told that he could never be president since he was foreign-born, and it made him cry.

(He was like five or six.)

He was also saying that five of his classmates ended up dead in Vietnam, and he actually had his toothbrush packed and was fully ready to go when the recruiter stopped by their house and said that there had been a change in draft ages and so he was no longer scheduled to go.

Rental car happenings...

…when I recently rented a car, to go to a wedding:

1) The car rental agency guy has me initial this contract section about not undertaking any illegal activities in the car, so I ask him if that really happens, and he’s like “Oh yeah,” and then when I ask him what do people do, he’s like, “It’s smoking, mostly,” to which I’m like, “And here I was imagining people starting up portable meth labs.”

2) I’m hungry at the one gas station that I stop at, so I ask the (young) (chubby) (white) counter girl what’s better, the "taco puff" or the "roller bites," and she says they’re both good, but the taco puff is spicier and you have to be sure that you want that, and they also sell these gigantic five pound bags of gummy bears up by the counter, and when I say that I’ve never seen anything like that before, she says that they sell more than you’d think, and they often run out.

Three conversations about unpleasant (South Asian) customers.

Lately I’ve been observing to people that I worry I’m becoming racist against (South Asian) customers.

Like, if they behave normally with restaurant behavior and tipping, I find myself thinking stuff like, “Oh, they’re some of the good ones,” like I’m almost beginning to think that that means that they’re not really (South Asian).

Like, I was saying this to my one high school friend who is now a (divorced) (math) teacher, and he just started laughing, because he had asked me what was new, and that was my response, that I fear I’m becoming racist against (South Asians).

Then, he was like, “So what do they do?”, so I gave him a recent example, of the one (South Asian) (princess-girl) who was like, “Now. NOW.” with ice cream that she didn’t even touch for twenty minutes, all for a two-dollar tip, and his immediate response – and I am directly quoting here – was “Oh my God,” and he just didn’t know what to say, and there was a pause in the conversation.

I was also saying this to my one hometown friend who’s a (hairdresser), and she seemed a little disconcerted, but then she told me this story about how once it was a very busy day at the salon where she works and she had one appointment open on her schedule and she looks and suddenly it’s filled with an online booking, and when it gets to be that time, this guy comes in, and he’s (South Asian), and it’s the only (South Asian) customer that she’s ever had, and he was super demanding about what he wanted done where with his hair etc. etc. etc., and then it’s finally done, and, no tip.

So she didn’t say it, and she obviously didn’t want to be racist, but that was also her experience, and it was like she was telling me through that anecdote, implicitly, that she was open to like how there maybe could be some problem there.

I was also saying this to my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, and she was trying to comfort me that no, I’m not racist, and to do this she had this very unusual rationale, since she was like, “But they are like that everywhere in the world,” and to illustrate this, she told me this story she had just come across on Instagram or through someone she knows, where a barista in Australia had this incredibly insistent (South Asian) customer who wanted them to make a latte with no milk.

“You can’t do that!”, she was like. “A latte with no milk is an americano!”

But, the (South Asian) guy was super insistent, and it was just “a thing.”

Some local farmers.

At the one farmer’s market in the one (college town) that I now live in, there’s this (older) (free-spirited) (vaguely biker) couple who sell “organic inspired” produce they grow themselves as a side hustle – she’s otherwise a cashier at a grocery store across town, and I suspect he mainly does something else, too – and I sometimes buy things from them.

And, one day we were chatting, and she was telling me how tired she was, and I asked why, and it turns out that they get up at 3am on market days, and because sometimes I stay up too late after my late job, I told her that last night a good novel was actually keeping me up and I stayed up way past my bedtime until like 3:30am, so when I was actually in bed and turning my light out last night, her and her partner were actually already up and getting ready for the day.

And, she thought that was something, as did I.

Another week they had a different kind of radish, these small rubber-banded bundles of what almost looked like little horseradishes.

“What are these?”, I was like.

“Icicle radishes,” she was like.

“So what are they like?”, I was like.

“Actually, we just started growing them, so I don’t know,” she was like.

“Hmmm,” I was like, and then, I added them to my pile of stuff that I was gathering and needed to pay for.

“I guess if you don’t see me next week, you’ll know what happened,” I was like.

And, at that, she just gave out this single smoke-strained laugh and was like, “Ha!”, and then she made a few big scooping play-motions towards the radish-pile, and was like, “Here, have more.”

A new joke…

…at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, that I’ve begun making whenever my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker wears this (tasteful) black t-shirt that has some logo with AMSTERDAM on it:

[I say some variant of how freshmen from the local university are going to come in, see that shirt, and ask her where they can buy pot].

. . .

(The first time I said this, she was like, “My brother bought me this shirt!”, and I was like, “Okay, then the kids will ask you to ask your brother, where they can buy pot.”)

Projection of K-pop fanhood onto me.

It’s interesting how my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker views my occasional interest in this one mainstream pop artist.

Like twice now, it’s come up, and each time she’s discussed it like I’m in some type of K-pop fandom mode about that star.

Like, the first time this came up, she tried to bond with me and she was like, “Did you hear her music the first time, and know?”.

And, the second time, she made some reference to me being that artist’s “biggest fan.”

It’s like there’s this whole self-realization-through-fandom thing that especially happens in K-pop, and she can’t conceive of liking a popstar in a different and lesser way, where it’s less connected to your sense of self.

An occurrence when I return home…

…after being away for a while to go to a wedding:

My little stove-top espresso maker has some mild mold spots growing on the thick caked-on coffee bits lining the inside of its top, in the top chamber where the espresso gathers so you can pour it out, whenever you make some coffee.

. . .

(I guess that use-wise, making coffee everyday does something with the boiling water or the reintroduction of acid or whatever to kill off any mold spores that might grow in there, but leaving it like that unused for almost two weeks somehow gives mold an opportunity to grow in there, unhindered.)

Rural dating.

My one high school friend who is now a (divorced) (high school math) teacher has been doing the online dating thing, he said, and he was saying how weird a lot of the profiles were.

Like, there’s a ton of stuff on there like “If you don’t support the Second Amendment, swipe left.”

“You should put on yours, ‘If you don’t support the Fourteenth Amendment, swipe left,’” I was like.

He agreed, and he also said that the normal people do seem to end up finding each other, after screening everyone else out.

Also, he began dating this one (half Asian) (half white) woman from a few towns to the south, and when his ten year-old son found out, the first thing he said was, “I didn’t know you liked Asians.”

“Like, where did he get that?!”, my friend asked. “Like, what?”

All of this conversation happened at this one brew-pub that he brought me to, too, where he has a special mug that they brought out for him.

“I hope this isn’t like an Amway thing,” I was like, “Like you get a dollar off every beer I order.”

Wedding crack.

Like a month or two ago when I was at that one wedding where my one (childhood) (white) (bisexual?) friend married her long-term (white) girlfriend, the outdoor ceremony had to be moved into the reception space, because of rain coming through.

“Good thing there’s Plan B,” someone commented.

“WHAT?!,” their one cousin said very loudly. “They don’t need Plan B!”

Addendum.

I really do wonder if that lady and maybe that guy are on the sociopath spectrum.

Like, generally her affect can be off, and sociopaths can have addiction problems due to self-destructive prioritization of short-term pleasure, and the whole “lying to get free stuff” thing with small restaurant items and maybe drinks just seems off, like maybe the alcohol loosened her inhibition and led her dark behavior to come out in ways that she tries to keep in check, usually, for the sake of functioning in society.

I really do wonder... Statistically, I’m bound to come across some sociopaths as customers, while I'm waiting tables.