More election aftermath.

1) I've been listening to Philip Glass's "Satyagraha" like I have been the past two weeks, only a lot more, and although I knew that it was in Sanskrit, only two days ago did I realize that there was a lyrics insert, and that every single word is actually a close adaptation of the Bhagavad Gita. So, I had actually been immersing myself in the words of the Gita for hours on end each day. And, it turns out that the most moving parts that I had found myself listening to and re-listening to without knowing what they were, were Krishna arriving to teach Arjuna, and Krishna talking about his many incarnations across all time.

2) I've been thinking a lot about people who I know from other countries -- my (Thai) coworkers and the speech restrictions and abolition of political parties there, and an old (Tibetan) coworker whose mother hid food in caves because she knew that the (Chinese) were coming, and then when that began happening, she went away and lived from cave to cave and moved by darkness until she made her way to (India), and an old (German) (Jewish) resident at the resthome where I used to work who saw a synagogue go up in flames as a little girl, and to this day she won't go back to participate in memorialization services put on by (Germans). And a (Sudanese) relative of my (half Sudanese) (half British) friends (the brother-sister pair), he recently fled Khartoum with his young family and had to live in Egypt and find work to support them, and this was in the past several years. Such different lives, and not all under functioning democracies. I think about all of them, and I think that I've been relatively fortunate in my life so far.

Addendum.

Like has so often happened in my life, something unexpected occurs to me very very suddenly and it just feels right and I do it, and only later do I reason through the emotional logic and see why something felt so right in the moment.

With reaching out to try to mend 3 broken relationships in the immediate aftermath of the election, basically I had realized much much earlier in time that stuff was broken, but it was too close in time then, and then later I was in a good place and I had distance and I had some deeper regrets, but since I was in a good place, I also didn't want to open up an emotional can of worms and disturb my hard-won equanimity.

So, with the election results, I made the immediate decision to try to reconnect, and only later did I figure out it was because not only was it something positive that I could do right then that was in my control, but also because I was like, "Well, this is f*cked and I'm emotionally raw, so why not reach out, it's not like I can get any more emotionally raw right now."

Election aftermath:

1) That night, I slept incredibly fitfully despite popping a few Benadryl, and despite a trick I have for overcoming insomnia (masturbation -- they say it releases some sleep hormones after you shoot your wad), I wasn't able to get hard and jack off.

2) In thinking through what's important in my life, I've decided to try to begin the process of repairing 3 broken relationships from different parts of my life, since they're among my regrets. For some reason, it just feels right, now.

A question of mine:

Do dual citizens or like recent citizens who are immigrants from (India) ever vote by mail and then change their minds about who they're voting for and want to go back and change their ballot?

. . .

(It's had to have happened, from everything I've seen at the restaurant... I bet some election authorities somewhere have fielded calls from someone who already sent their ballot in, but now wants to go back and change it...)

A lunch shift at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now.

The other week on a midweek weekday at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says that on the previous night's dinner shift an eight-top of (South Asian) students came in at like 9pm, and she had finished pushing the two tables together and laying out the silverware for them, and then they were like, "Can we sit in the window?", and she had to go prepare that table then, for them, all over again.

"What time did they leave?", I was like.

"Nine-fifty," she was like. "Not too bad."

And, she said it was like four entrees for the eight of them, and it's fine because it's an automatic tip, but she doesn't like it when people are picky like that or want to change things like that.

She then started reminiscing, too, about her last trip through the city that I used to live in, that she was in line at a Starbucks there and five (South Asian) girls were ahead of her, and one got a three dollar coffee and the other four weren't buying anything, but each had a large water bottle and they were each telling the barista that they wanted their water bottles full of "extremely hot" water.

"They have a coffee pot like us," she was like. "How can that be extremely hot?"

She also said that there was a woman standing behind her, and she was just looking with anger up ahead at those girls up ahead of them in line.

"I would have said something," I was like. "Not if I was the barista, but if I was a customer behind them and there was a line, I would have said, 'Excuse me, if you are not a paying customer, please wait and go after us, we're waiting to put our orders in,' and then, if they said that their friend was a customer, i would say that their friend was a customer, not them, four people is a lot of people to do that for."

And, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker said that the barista didn't seem very happy with them, either.

In turn, I observed that on my recent trip into a neighboring state I was walking around a small town with some historic sites and while I was doing that I really needed to go to the bathroom, so I stopped through a pizzeria on the town square and I asked them if I could use their restroom and they let me, and then when I came out I saw they had cans of soda in a cooler for sale, and so I bought a can of Diet Coke and paid with a five and left the change as a tip.

"Yes," my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like, "Exactly."

Besides all that, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was also saying her new novel is coming out in a few months but she needs someone to design the e-book cover, and we chatted about that some and it turns out that it's not just romance she writes, but fan fic romance around K-pop stars.

"And you make money off that, right?", I was like,

"No," she was like, "More passive income," and she said she gets around a hundred dollars a month off of her novel sales.

Later, too, she was doodling, and I went to look, and she was signing her pen-name over and over and over again on this sheet of paper (her pen-name is a flower name, in English).

Some barbershop happenings.

The other week at the one local barbershop in the one (college) town that I now live in, I go in and there's an expensive-looking leather-banded gold watch sitting out on top of a folded chair in the row of folding chairs against the one wall where customers used to sit and wait before the pandemic and everyone started waiting outside, and the one (scraggly-bearded) (white) (townie) barber who runs the place says that a(n Indian) student didn't realize that they don't take credit cards and he wouldn't leave his phone there for some reason, so he accepted the watch, and he was holding it there until he came back with the money.

He also said that he used to accept student IDs as collateral, but a few times people just left them there since they could get them replaced for free or for maybe like three dollars, and he could swear that one guy actually came in twice and did that, like a long time apart, but he actually did that twice, he thinks, and anyways, because of that he stopped doing that, now he needs like a driver's license or your phone or something.

"You should put the IDs people left up on the wall like a Wall of Shame," I was like.

"Eh," he was like, "I would hold them a week and then throw them out, when it was clear they weren't coming back."

Then, he was like, "And that would work for locals, they wouldn't want to see their face up there, but what do students care, they're here for two, three years and then they're gone."

He also said that earlier that day a guy came in and was complaining and complaining and complaining about his haircut and he went back and fixed it like five times, and he got the feeling that the guy was doing it so he could try to get money off the price, but finally after the fifth time he was like, "Okay, that's a free haircut for you," and then he told him never to come back.

"Indian?", I was like.

"Yeah," he was like, and then he said that sometimes people have this trick that they tried somewhere once and it worked out for them then, so they just keep on doing it everywhere they go to try to get stuff for free, and that was probably what that was.

. . .

(If that watch-band was leather, could a[n Indian] wear it? Maybe he was Pakistani or Bangladeshi or something like that, maybe Pakistani, since they seem richer and don't seem to have a thing about cows.)

Another coworker backstory (2 of 2): Shopping local.

A few weeks after that, one day me and my one (newer) (Guatemalan) (indigenous-looking but monolingual Spanish) (female) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now were talking about the local farmer's market, and I said that the quality of the vegetables is better there, but it's also so important to buy locally, because it's better for the farmers and it's better for the local economy and also the money circulates more than if you shop at a supermarket and the money leaves the area.

And, she agreed, and then she told me that back at her home back in Guatemala, she had a garden, and she grew avocados and apples and tomatoes and potatoes and a lot of other stuff like that, and that's where she got all that produce, she never got them from a store, at all.