Tradeoffs.

Recently I've been thinking that when eldercare collapsed around me in the area that I live in now and I decided to just not try again for anything different, I made a very conscious decision to have time to pursue all the stuff that I want to do, outside of my dayjob.

My thinking was that a job search can be draining and just isn't worth the time and effort, especially if there's no obvious possibilities and no certain payoff on any sort of foreseeable timeline, and I'm already highly qualified for any number of jobs, so why not have the time, and maybe I'd luck into something from tentatively nosing around, and even if I didn't, I'd rather have the time.

And, I've had the time, and I've done great things with it -- even greater than I expected! -- but I guess somehow I had this hope all this while that something else would come my way, when it hasn't.

It really does bother me on some level, that I just don't have a recognizable profession.

It really makes no sense to anyone, and yet no-one can show me a worthwhile and doable direction or opportunity fitting into my fairly broad parameters (fair enough workplace, at least 50% active and interacting with other people, a morally neutral or "does good in the world" industry, something I can get into *now* or with fair enough certitude, without any huge investment of money or time).

Some very unpleasant (South Asian) customers…

…encountered by the one (older) (white) (female) (townie) bartender at the one (local brewery) that I go to, in the one (college) town that I now live in:

Two (South Asian) students – one male and one female – are out on the patio with drinks and it’s closing time, so she comes to tell them to come finish their drinks inside since she is doing stuff and they have time, but she needs to lock the front door and close the patio, and the (male) (South Asian) student seems incensed, perhaps because (as she says) she’s a woman, and he says something about there being a customer inside at the bar and they can stay out on the patio if he is in there, and she is like, “Please come inside,” and she’s firm, but they won’t, so she’s like, “Fine,” and locks the door, and then they just sit and sit and sit outside for way too long, even when they’re done with their drinks, and finally when the other customer gets up to leave and goes out, then they finally get up too, because that one (South Asian) (male) student wanted to show her he was going to do what he wanted to do, so when they were finally getting up to leave alongside that other customer who's passing by, she comes outside and is like, “I close the patio for everyone, that is how we operate here,” and he sniped at her about them being out on the patio when it closed and they should have been able to sit there etc. etc. etc., and without him finishing, she was like, “Okay, good night,” and she turned around to go inside.

“He really had a thing with women,” she was like. "He was scary."

Some running jokes about my belly…

…since it has become a prominent and weird-shaped paunch, thanks to my core work, which has built up my abs and pushed out all the fat that's on top of it (“Umm hmmm, umm hmmm,” said my one [older] [Thai] coworker who’s a whiz at the phones very knowingly, since she does Pilates and must have come across this before, perhaps even with herself and her own body) –

[basically, I make various different jokes about me being pregnant] -

Me (holding my belly like a baby): “I need to sit down, I'm so tired, my feet are so sore.”

Me (jerking a stomach muscle and making it leap)” “Here, it’s kicking, feel, feel.”

Me (leaning over on top of the counter doing something when my one [newer] [taller] [Thai] coworker comes by and sees my butt sticking out and slaps it, making me leap up and drive my stomach into the edge of the counter): “Oh my god, you made me lose the baby, you made me lose the baby!”

Me (being asked by my [Guatemalan] coworkers how many months it is, or who’s the papa) (with a bewildered face): “I don’t know, I don’t remember.”

Me (being told by my [Thai] coworkers that I need to do more cardio to get rid of that last belly fat): “Or, I need an abortion.”

Me (being told by my [Thai] coworkers that I need to do more cardio to get rid of that last belly fat): “You know, I took a big shit, and people thought I lost the baby.”

My one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones (after I tell my coworkers that I need to lose a little weight so I can button an old blazer for a wedding, so please punch me in the stomach and help me lose the baby): “You do that, your belly swell up, and you look fatter than before.”

. . .

A very odd happening at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now…

…I think this spring:

Someone calls on the phone and my one (newer) (tall) (Thai) coworker picks up and then looks confused and then hands the phone over to me, and and this (younger) (flat-affected) (male) voice is like, I have an odd request, can you help me, and he then says that he knows his girlfriend is there and he thinks she’s cheating on him, so he wants to know, the girl with the pink hair, is she there, she should be there, and how many men are at the table, and I’m like, uh, uh, and then I say we can’t help him, it’s a customer privacy issue and we can’t give out information like that, and he says some stuff trying to get me to do it, and then I say I'm sorry, and that if there’s nothing else I can help him with, I need to go assist some patrons.

And, of course the girl with the pink hair is there, it’s really more like a dull lavender in her filthy unwashed nerd-hair, and she’s fat, and she’s at a table of five, and she takes a call and goes outside a lot, and while I’m over by there, she had just started eating, and the call happens again, and she takes it and with the phone to her ear asks this (skinny) (ungroomed) (pimply) (scruff-faced) (white) nerd guy for his Venmo, can he pay for her and she’ll pay him back, and then she hurries towards the door with her phone to her ear, and leaves.

And, for like an hour afterwards, all we do at the restaurant is talk about that situation, and tell other workers who hadn’t heard about it yet what had happened.

Like, my take was that she wasn’t cheating, but she has a roving eye, especially because her man is jealous, and that jealousy is actually driving her away, and to look elsewhere.

But, some people just didn’t care about that analysis.

“So how many men *were* at the table,” my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker asked, after I had gone on at length about those clientes locos (“Crazy customers”).

And, the one (Guatemalan) guy who I started the diablo joke with was like, “You should say, Cheat? Him? No, it’s me, I do her.”

And, of course that started out a whole row of jokes about how we should have replied to him on the phone –

1) “How many men are with her…? Uhhh [pause], I think ten.”

2) “No, she’s not here, but I think I see someone like that out in front on the street, she’s leaning into a car window and talking to some guy...”

3) “No, she’s not here, but I think I hear some noise back in the alley...”

4) “Eeee, ah!, ella, ella? Si, ella, la puta…”

and – my personal favorite, which I came up with, and which I could not say out loud without cracking up –

5) “Oh, her? Yeah, she’s a freaky one, she asked us to cum in her pad thai.”

. . .

An odd happening in my neighborhood, this spring.

One spring-dusk I’m walking back from over by campus in the one college town that I now live in, and like a block and a half up from me, there’s all these fire department and emergency vehicles and there’s tape cordoning off quite a bit of the street, so I sidle over to two (white) (college-age) students standing and observing things, and I ask them what happened.

“Oh, we were walking home and we were walking by that house and we heard water,” the (trimly mustachioed) (young 20-something) guy was like, explaining that a pipe likely burst while people were away, and when they went to go knock on the door and check, they smelled gas, too, so they got away from there and called emergency services right away, and now they’re all taking care of it.

“That’s good,” I was like.

Then, after a pause, I was like, “But to be honest, I kind of want to see it go up in a big fireball, like in Diehard.”

And, they didn’t disagree.

Places in life:

1) After I gave their family some lemon dessert bread from a local bakery in the one college town that I now live in, my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) said that her kids really enjoyed it, and the next day after they ate it, they wanted more, and she had to be like, “But you ate it all yesterday,” and then her young daughter was like, “Oh, yeah."

2) My one friend who does television work and has for years, even getting into the appropriate trades union there, has told me that he’s now looking to get out of it…  The boom-and-bust cycle of employment when series come into town is getting to him, and he’s not sure how AI will affect the effects industry and reconfigure a need for many positions, and plus their health and pension plan seems like it’s being mismanaged but the union electorate isn’t diligently concerned enough, so who knows what will happen with that. But, he’s looking online, and he says everything is part-time and independent contractor, nowadays, so he can't figure a path out, into something better.

Chit-chat upon my return home…

…with the one (older) (white) couple who grow organic and who have a vaguely Harley-inspired aesthetic, when the woman is like “You’re back” after I double-back to buy some more tomatoes, after I had initially bought some tomatoes from them and then I had moved on to shop other stands only to discover that they were out of my usual kale, and so I needed to improvise and plan other ingredients for different salads for that week:

Me (explaining my situation): “…and so I think I’m going to make a lot of tomato salads this week, since I can’t get the kale.”

Her: “Tomatoes are healthy. Though, they’re a lot of water.”

Me: “And fiber, I mean, you have a big salad of those, and you can get the squirts so bad.”

Her: [laughs]

. . .