Potential St. Patrick's Day celebration...

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

It's St. Patrick's Day and I'm chit-chatting with this (chill) (younger middle-aged) (white) couple who I recognize by face, and the (blonde pulled-back hair) (woman) starts saying that the restaurant should do something to celebrate, and between the two of us, we arrive at the idea of creating a new dish "Paddy Thai," where it's like Pad Thai, only the noodles are dyed green.

"Or the meat, like green eggs and ham," she was like.

Addendum, on declining financial returns for a university education.

My one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) already said a while back now that the educational system in the West will truly fall apart when it's the MBAs and the MDs who can't make any money.

They're like the two last redoubts where the assumption of massive payback is unassailable, and once they're severely eroding or mostly gone and those grads are stuck with the debt, there's nothing left to say or to hope for, and everything will truly be gone.

More signs of major economic problems:

1) When I told my one friend from high school who's run a domestic violence shelter that I crunched the numbers from my W2 and that my server job would be equivalent to a $45K+ a year professional job if I was working full-time, she said that she's seen any number of non-profit jobs that pay less than that for initial low-level positions, and they all require master's degrees.

2) On a recent train trip back to the one college town that I now live in, the person next to me on the sold-out train was a(n undergrad), and he said he's doing food manufacturing science or whatever since he likes to cook and it was something that seems to make sense to get into.

He also said that most of his friends are doing stuff like electrical engineering, but it's hit or miss, and a number of them are getting worried since they aren't getting internships like they're supposed to, and are having trouble finding traction with initial jobs.

"Really?", I was like, and so I mentioned that a friend of my one (Asian-American) coworker had had good luck, and that that person had recently gotten a $90K a year starter engineering job.

"Then maybe that's on them and they're not doing what they're supposed to," he was like.

(But, this is a flagship school with a national profile, and they're supposedly in an area with high demand, it being STEM and all!)

Overall, when I asked him what the take was on school and the economy among him and his peers, he said that school was *way* too expensive, but it still made sense to go since you could make more money that way, even if it wasn't all that like it used to be.

Signs of parental decline:

1) When doing a crossword, my father did not know which state was the "Tarheel State" nor its capital, and when he went to spell "Raleigh," he began spelling it "R - E - L - E - I - G - H," though he did ask if the 2nd letter was "E."

2) Immediately upon returning from a daytrip at like 10pm at night, my mother says how nice it is that my father left lights on for us before he went to bed, only, then she returns from a different part of the house and points out how he did not leave on the light in my childhood bedroom, but rather that in the bedroom of my brother.

3) For like a year-and-a-half now, his standard question on the phone is what the weather is like by me, presumably a coping mechanism since the weather is not indexed to recent or current or ongoing events all of which change and have to be discretely remembered, but rather is something that is always there, and can be asked after unproblematically.

My mother and her smartphone (2 of 2): Photos.

So, on her new smartphone, too, my mother says that after my uncle had died, when she was by his house downstate taking care of things, she was like three days in and driving around on those errands, and at some point she picked up her smartphone, and there on the phone was a picture of her brother.

"But were there pictures of him on the phone and had you been looking at them?", I was like.

Yes, she said, but she didn't have them up right then, but she slid open the phone, and there the picture was, just that one time, and it was just freaky.

My mother and her smartphone (1 of 2): Emojis.

So, my mother was visiting a historic cemetery where there had been buried all these small children and families killed in a historic local disaster, and when she was driving away, she realized that she didn't have her smartphone.

So, she went back to the cemetery and found it, and when she picked it up, there on the phone were two emojis -- one of a tombstone, and the other of a crying smiley face.

"And I don't use those, I don't even know if those are real symbols," she was like.

"So where did they appear?," I was like, "In a texting box? All big across the phone's screen?'

And, she really couldn't tell me, she said she'd have to show me on the phone.

But, she didn't.

A conversation with a high school friend (2 of 2): New house.

So, my one friend from high school who now teaches high school math was telling me about how he had boughten a house after his divorce and was glad to find something at a decent price, but then the realtor kind of laid it out for him and was like "Ummm" and had to fill him in that the last owner had committed suicide in the house, though she assured him that they still had a month and the money was in escrow and he could back out at any time if he wanted.

And, every night, he said, he was so upset, he had just all this anxiety, that he would move in for a better house for his kids, the one he could afford, and they would end up possessed or something.

So, he went to (Catholic) church a lot, and cried sometimes, and once when he was praying, he just mentally saw a statue of Saint Jude.

He also decided to reach out to this reikki practitioner who had channeled his ex-wife's mother after her tragic passing -- "If that helps you with it, fine," he was like, "If it works, it works" -- since he was thinking to himself, "Who would know about stuff like this," and it was then that he remembered the reikki lady.

So, the reikki lady came to do a walk-through, and when they were outside the house as she began it, she was like, "I'm getting the sense that you need to bury a statue here," and he had never told her about what he had seen at all.

Also, in that first part of the walk-through, the neighbor came over and was like, "Whacha doin'," and as soon as they left, the reikki lady was like, "They were involved in his suicide," but she couldn't tell him anything more.

During the walk-through inside, too, she said that it would end up fine as long as he did what she said, the spirit was ready to move on, and then when they were in the basement, there was like a lifesize metallic-looking shield and sword and helmet that the guy had made for Dungeons and Dragons, and the reikki lady was like, "And those, you burn those, don't keep them, don't give them away, you burn those."

So, he felt a lot better after everything happened, though when he went to burn the stuff it was during a forest fire alert and someone noticed and he was only a few minutes in when a fire truck pulled up and went to dowse his small backyard fire with this big hose that they pulled through the sideyard and around the house, and it was from them that he found out that the local fire chief is his neighbor, like four or five houses up.

He also said that the next time he saw his neighbors, the husband was like, "Nice guy, we never had any problems with him," and then he said that a week before the suicide, their dog accidentally got out and ended up chasing the former owner's cat and then he got mad and came over and talked to his wife just when she was getting in the car and she got scared and locked the doors and so he got even madder, and so then when he found out later he had to go over there and tell him never to talk to his wife again, so it was just that one time, but yeah, other than that, he was a nice guy.

. . .