Permission to pass by in (Spanish)...

...that I said the other day to my one (shorter) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker, as she was doing stuff at the end of the night at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, as she was standing kind of in the middle of the main but tight kitchen entrance corridor holding a small but deep metal pan full of rice:

"Permiso, la mujer con el riso" ('Excuse me, the lady with the rice')

. . .

(In retrospect, I should have made it rhyme more and given it a little bit more of a beat, and been like, "Permiso permiso, la mujer con el riso.")

Addendum.

I was talking about my new skincare routine with my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker.

She says sunscreen is important.

On health and beauty:

1) Since I had COVID last fall, it's only been the past month that I can do two intensive twelve-minute home workouts on adjacent days, consistently, and it's only been like the past couple of weeks that I've started up a short weekly jog again, like I had started doing towards the end of last summer until I came down with it.

2) Besides my occasional zinc supplement like I've been taking for years, I've started fish oil and calcium multiple times a week, as precautions, and every other day I now do a major skincare thing, like alternating exfoliant or retinol, alternating, in addition to careful facewashing and lotion, daily, plus sunscreen if I'll be out in the sun some, though probably not as much as I should be doing.

3) I special-ordered a 25-pound bag of organic short-grain brown rice from the local hippie co-op, to start using sometimes instead of the standard white rice that I've always eaten at home, to draw down the amount of overall white rice that I'm eating and the effect that that's having on my whatever-the-f*ck-have-you-they-are levels, which I guess are less than ideal.

Another pandemic mental barrier overcome.

I feel like that in the past month people have overcome yet another collective mental barrier, and have put yet more of the pandemic behind us.

It's like people are behaving more normally somehow, yet again, and it's somehow everywhere all at once.

I was mentioning this to the one (white) (short) (round-faced) (college-age) (frizzy-haired) (spiritually wearing a pussy protest hat) bartender at the local brewery, too, and she was saying that she's felt the exact same thing, and that multiple, multiple people have actually been making that same observation, like the past couple weeks.

Another dream.

The other week I dreamnt --

I am in a small industrial kitchen with some of coworkers from the (resthome) where I used to work at, and there's no windows or natural light, and there's like a shiny off-whiteish cinderblock wall on one side, and a metal serving tray industrial cooking contraption on the other, and as we're all in there doing our random work, suddenly my one (skeptical) (Mexican) coworker walks through the middle of us, and she is dressed like the rest of us in simple black pants and non-descript kitchen work tops, and as she passes through us, we all slowly stop, and then I look at one or two of my (Tibetan) coworkers and they are absolutely frozen stock-still and their eyes are just big, and I know what I have to do, and I follow her into the dry storage room, where she is doing something among the shelves.

"What you doing?", I'm like.

"What do you think I'm doing?", she says, not even looking at me, but just continuing to do the tasks that she's doing, "I'm working."

"You are dead now," I'm like, kindly but firmly. "You are dead now. You can move on."

. . .

(. . .)

Bits of three recent broken dreams from different nights:

1) I'm in my bathroom staring at myself in the mirror, and I have (shockingly white) (deeply bleached-blonde) hair; and

2) I'm walking around the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, singing Joni Mitchell's "Carey," and somehow it's a karaoke situation, only somehow it's just me there, with no microphone or anything, and there is no backing track playing; and

3) I am outside my body and looking at myself reading a magazine languidly and flipping pages (and then I jolt out of sleep and I realize that although I was supposed to be reading the magazine in my dream, the me that I was staring at was flipping the pages in the wrong direction than you would in reality).

. . .

My new neighbor:

A small streaked-fur brown-and-light-brown bunny, that is very small, and doesn't know how to behave yet.

I have seen him out by the small woodpile in the backyard outside my cottage, in the middle of the afternoon, just sitting there, munching.

And, one late afternoon I went to close my window that looks out on the alley, and he scampered out from the small patch of grass directly beneath it and ran across the gravel and went and hid underneath a car parked out by the house opposite.

Like, he just doesn't get that you're supposed to take better cover, or only come out at dusk or dawn or whatever.

I hope he survives.