New joke at work.

At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, the (newer) (older) (female) (pretty monolingual) (Thai-Chinese) cook who usually runs the curry station occasionally wears this t-shirt-like shirt that is covered over every inch with repetitions of the word LOVE in a very attractive font.

So, like right away, I began pointing that out to her and my front-of-the-house coworkers, saying stuff like, "Here, we cook with love."

Then, I'd start to make comparisons, like, "Here, we cook with love, though we don't serve with love, we just cook with love, and only sometimes."

Then, I started to do that in (Spanish) with my (Guatemalan) coworkers, pointing at her t-shirt and being like, "Aqui se cocina con MUCHO AMOR" ("Here, we cook with a lot of love"), or putting on an ingenuous and mildly accusatory face and being like, "Porque tu no cocinas con mucho amor? Es posibile, ella cocina con mucho amor" ("Why don't you cook with a lot of love? It's possible, she cooks with a lot of love").

And, I started doing variants of that all day, like going up to the dishwasher and being like, "Senor, estas limpiando los vasos con amor?" ("Mister, are you cleaning the glasses with love?"), or when someone took out the rice from the rice warmer and put in a big fresh new pot of steaming rice, I'd stroll over and contemplate it like I was inspecting it, and then I'd turn to them and be like, "Donde esta el amor? Veo el arroz, pero no veo el amor" ("Where is the love? I see the rice, but I don't see the love").

Like, it got to the point where one of the dishwashers came up to the bussing station to take back a bin of dirty dishes from the dining room, and I heard him saying sing-songily to himself to no-one in particular, "Mucho, mucho amor" ("Lotta lotta love").

My favorite variant was at the end of the night when I was walking through the kitchen to take the trash out to the dumpster in the back alley, and as I did that, I said to one of the dishwashers, "Senor, mira, voy ensenarte, estoy andando afuera con la basura, con mucho, mucho amor" ("Mister, look, I am going to teach you, I am walking outside with the trash, with a lotta lotta love").

I was also asking the one (older) (male) (Chinese-Thai) cook why he wasn't cooking with love, and the one (younger) (Lao) cook said that I needed to buy him a t-shirt.

Alternately, I suggested, I could get him glasses with heart-shaped lenses, much like I think John Lennon used to wear.

At one point, too, the (newer) (older) (female) (pretty monolingual) (Thai-Chinese) cook took the little black serving tongs that we use to put fresh-cut carrots and bean sprouts on the pad thai dishes, or fresh-cut cucumbers and chopped green onions on the fried rice dishes, and she pretended to graciously pick off individual iterations of the word LOVE from her t-shirt-like shirt, and to put them on my shirt, to give me more love for the doing of my job.