A Relief: BEDBUGS.

So, a few days ago I wake up and have my coffee and whatnot, and late mid-afternoon I go to change clothes, and right then I notice an itch on the side of my body, and what's there but like two smaller bites in a row and then a space and then one larger one, and then like an hour later I feel something on that shoulder on that side of my body, too.

Now, the night before there had been a mosquito in my room that I hadn't been able to kill, and it was around that afternoon, too, but something about the shape and the placement makes me think that these bites are actually from BEDBUGS, where the infestation candidates would be a hotel I stayed in when my parents visited and we did a sidetrip like six weeks earlier, and then like three-to-four weeks earlier when I had one overnight at a hostel on a trip to the city that I used to live in, when I had been there to see a temporary museum exhibit with my one (lawyer) friend who's originally from (Missouri).

On the one hand, it does kind of suck to have to wash bedding and get rubbing alcohol and spray down my room and "be on guard," though I know *exactly* what to do from two different infestations years ago at two different apartments in the city that I used to live in, and what with the way that my cottage is set up where it's just me there, I don't have to worry about any negligent neighbors causing reinfestation. There's not too many places for the bedbugs to hide there what with the minimal woodwork and tightly-grouted tile floor, either, so it should be fairly easy to eradicate them and end the cycle of the bites and the fresh births through the eggs that they leave, even though it's kind of a pain-in-the-ass and a timesuck, overall.

On the other hand, though, I realized, I actually don't mind the bedbugs, this time, since they're not only going to be fairly easy to resolve, if that's what they are, but also this anxiety is much less worse and much more controllable than my anxiety from what's happening with the Supreme Court and in national politics, and actually experiencing it leaves less room in my brain for that other kind of worse anxiety.

So, in its way, my getting bedbugs now has actually been a kind of RELIEF.

I never would have thought!

It's actually kind of crazy, how much it makes you just forget about the larger political instability.

Addendum.

Also, I just saw news a bit ago with the one city that I used to live in, that a smaller neighborhood festival that had been going for years is now going to be discontinued this year, since the cost of maintaining security has gotten too high.

I wonder if that's the real reason or if they're just saying that, and if it's the real reason, I wonder if it has to do with securing public areas against (increasing) gun violence.

A conversational peculiarity I've noticed...

...in customers at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, who turned out to come from this one town elsewhere in the state, which suffered a famous mass shooting a while ago:

When you ask where they're from, they vaguely reference a suburban area like many people do, but then when you ask them again where they're from, they don't say the town name, they just repeat that same general descriptor, and so you have to ask them the question yet again, and then at that point they mention the name of the town that is now instantly identified with being the site of a famous mass shooting.

This has happened twice now with me, with two different sets of customers, and I try not to react and be like, "Oh, you're from that place where that shooting happened!"

With the first set of customers, I mentioned that I had once bicycled through that town on a long bicycle ride years ago, and I think with the second one, I was all innocuous and like, "Oh, I used to pass through there on commuter rail when I was on my way to [another town]."

Anything to give them normalcy, again.

Addendum.

I forgot --

A few weeks ago when I was calling my one (young) (skinny) (Guatemalan) coworker with the silver front teeth "Diablito" ("Little devil"), he started becoming very insistent, and he started saying "No, I'm not a Diablito," so I was like, "Porque no? Eres una diablita?" ("Why not? Are you a little devil-woman?").

And, he didn't know what to do with that one, at first.

Some recent (Spanish) interactions at work...

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

1) My one (young) (skinny) (Guatemalan) coworker with the silver front teeth has been taking again to calling me Diablo lately, and one time he started telling me something like "You're a devil," and he started holding two fingers up to his head like they were horns.

"Si, soy un diablo" ("Yes, I'm a devil"), I was like, and with that I took my hands and extended the middle finger on each and held them up high on my forehead like they were horns, each one facing him.

2) My new morning greeting to all of my (Guatemalan) coworkers is that I stride in the door at like 10:55am when they're all still waking up and drowsily doing the beginning kitchen prep work, and I'm like, "Hola, mis buenos" ("Hello, my hotties"), which always draws a low chuckle from my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker.

A running gag one day at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now...

...when my one (young) (tall) (skinny) (Latino-American) coworker came in with a new shorter haircut, where his Farrah Fawcett locks were hacked off for summer:

[I make varying shades of comments that he's a hippie kid who got into trouble with the law, so now he has a short haircut and is on his way to the military.]

. . .

(One joke where I kept saying he should call us all "Sir!" and click his heels in order to practice for bootcamp was particularly successful; I was kind of a space cadet that day and didn't hear the push-bell from the kitchen ring as the signal for us to come back and ferry out some food, and so he and my one [chubby] [Thai] coworker who were busy doing something at the register turned to me and first she was like "Ding ding" and then he was like, "Ding ding," and to him I was like, "She can say 'Ding ding' to me, but you can't speak that way to us, you have to say, "Ding ding, SIR!".)

Teaching my (Thai) coworkers a new joke.

A few weeks ago, I remembered this stupid joke in (English), where someone says the word "cashew" and you pretend they sneezed.

So, I told all my (Thai) coworkers about it at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, and eventually my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and I settled into a routine to demonstrate the joke to people, where I'd ask her what stirfry she wanted to eat tonight for our staff meal, and she'd say "Cashew," and then I'd say "God bless you."