Puzzle drama (1 of 3): Puzzles.

 For a while at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was taking in a puzzle magazine to work, and we’d do puzzles there, like word searches or other stuff, especially stuff where you didn’t have to know English to solve it.

Though, I have to say, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones said that she wasn’t good with English puzzles, and yet she really took to some.

Like, one was arranging different combinations of letters to spell 5-letter body parts, and she kept criticizing my guesses like “WRIST” since she said the puzzle answers we had gotten to that point were all body-internal parts, and that  WRIST isn’t inside your body.

Then, after we did this on and off for like an hour and we weren’t getting anywhere and we had drifted off to mope around and do other stuff, suddenly she was like, “SPINE!”, and yes, she was right, she had gotten another one.

“See, inside,” she was like, to me.

On another occasion she also told me in so many words that my one intricate logic puzzle strategy that I had taught her was off, and it only works under certain conditions.

It had messed her up a bit, and she had to look up the answers and re-enter that part of the puzzle, rather than erase it all and start from the beginning, which would have taken a lot of time.

Insight into a tech career.

 So, with this guy who I know from grad school who got into a hot tech career that was hot not too many years ago, I had been seeing him online quite a bit, and he had bounced around jobs back to a state where he had grown up and looked like where he was aiming to be, and then back to the state where he had gone to grad school, and then he seemed to be online quite a lot, where he was writing long essays on business-think and the roles of his job etc., like one a week, for quite a while.

Then, he announced that he had a new job after 6 months of unemployment, that it was “rough out there,” and that he was happy to help anyone else with a job search.

Honestly, so much time to switch into that career, and then you don’t even have stable employment?

Because, to be quite frank, it’s not even clear how long this current “job” of his lasts.

And, he’s actually the **third** person I know who took on what was essentially long-term, indefinite, unremunerated writing projects, in order to credential up and secure a basic entry-level job.

The first was a friend of a friend years ago who does some basic admin and corporate comms, who back when I was checking out that potential path back in the mid-2010s, told me that the best ticket to a job was to start covering online local events that weren’t ticketed, do that enough to where you could talk your way into tickets, and then after covering those events on your own website that was getting buzz, you’d have enough to set yourself apart and sell yourself to jobs and get your foot in the door.

The second was another guy who I went to grad school with, who stalled out in a low-level consultancy gig, and especially because everything is remote, no-one knows who you are anymore and so there’s no-one to promote you, and so the thing to do now is to start a podcast about intricacies of your job, and that will show your knowledge and get your name out there and get you advanced, which it did, for him, but only now he’s like, “What now?”, since he’s stalled out once again, and he already did the podcast trick.

And of course, this tech guy was doing an essay series on biz-think, where he spouts the platitudes like they’re profound in little LinkedIn McNuggets, and which I doubt that he believes in or has internalized, which almost makes it worse, since it’s like you’re doing extended groveling like “Oh please, Mr. Capitalist, please pick me, look at me, please pick me, please,” just to get a job where you basically eat shit and don’t get anything really there, either. Just what appalling heights of self-abnegation that must entail, to be in that mindset for absolute months… It really must do something to your soul, it's degrading, and to that I say, f*ck that sh*t.

And, what I want to know is, has any baby boomer *ever* done *anything* remotely like that to get a job, let alone an entry-level one? And have they ever known a single person to have done that, let alone two, or three?

The answer is clearly NO, and is yet another reason why they never know what they’re talking about, when they try to tell you about the economy nowadays.

Signs of a degrading polity.

Besides the U.S. having what the Pope calls something like "unfettered internal arms trafficking" that turns public spaces into the Wild West, what's striking to me lately is the decline of postal safety.

Like, people rolling mailboxes and stealing checks to wash them and re-write them has become de rigueur and has even happened in the college town that I now live in, and so if I want to mail my rent check in or something, I have to walk over to the local post office during business hours to mail it, rather than risk dropping it in the public mailbox a half block away from me.

And, it's not just me being paranoid, but there's talk that you should do this in the local paper, and from my local bank, and this type of theft appears intermittently in the local crime blotter in the local paper!

That's a very small thing, but somehow it feels telling, to me.

What country can't guarantee mail safety?

My New Year's Eve levity...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, where I was making a series of feliz nuevo ano jokes with my (Guatemalan) coworkers and my one (Ecuadorian) coworker, based on a purposeful mistake between ano with a tilde ('year') and ano without a tilde ('anus'):

1) I'd ask my various coworkers como se dice "Happy New Year" en espanol ('how do you say "Happy New Year" in Spanish'), and when they'd tell me, I'd purposefully mispronounce ano and say "anus" and they'd very seriously be like "no" and keep repeating "year" to me, and I'd keep saying "anus" at them, and this would go on for like twenty to thirty seconds before they realized what I was doing..

2) A bit later, I started saying, Come muchos jalapenos y chili, necesito un nuevo ano ("I ate a lot of jalapenos and chili, I need a new anus").

3) Much later, I started holding my belly like I was in pain, and I started saying, No puedo cacar, donde esta mi nuevo ano ("I can't shite, where is my new anus"), at which my one (Guatemalan) coworker about whom we started the diablo joke at first told me to drink water, and then later held up a gigantic knife and made a small circular twisting motion with it.

. . .

A (Thai) coworker, on Catherine Deneuve.

Like last month or so at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was telling my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker about the Umbrellas of Cherbourg because I had recently heard a bit of music from it and it made me think about it all over again -- I've seen it twice on the big screen, and would go out right now and see it again this second, if it was playing somewhere -- and then, because it stars a young Catherine Deneuve, I started talking about it with my one (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones, since she likes classic mid-20th c. culture and stars like Audrey Hepburn and stuff like that.

And, she didn't know who Catherine Deneuve was, so I had to pull up pictures on my phone to show her.

"She is very basic," she was like. "She looks like anyone."

. . .

(I asked more, and she just said that she's blond and pretty, but looks like anyone...  You have to wonder, could this be that thing, where [white] people look alike to [Asians], and vice-versa?)

A sight in my yard...

...when I'm walking back to my back cottage on a sunny winter weekday afternoon, after putting out the garbage by curb-side:

Something catches my eye up above me, and it's a large squirrel sitting up on its haunches and facing left like fifteen feet up on a big branch extending out across the yard, and its mouth is just going and going and going although it's otherwise still, and it's munching on what appears to be the end of a hardened bun.

Gossip around town:

A bit ago at the cineplex in the college town that I now live in, you'd be sitting there trying to watch Saw, but you couldn't, since you could hear people singing along to the Taylor Swift concert movie like four theaters down.