Security incident.

On my last trip back from the city that I used to live in, they had just started to board the train and the line was moving forward, when people in uniforms pulled me aside and said that I had been randomly selected for a security check and took out a small stiff strip of paper and wiped it on my backpack and put it in some machine, and then they had me wait there as the one guy with the machine looked at the reading and perked up and then started excitedly showing it to everyone else, before they told me that I would have to wait there some more, and they began to radio for a dog, only to wait a few minutes and radio for the dog again, since it was at the far other end of the station and it wasn't coming, and they needed the dog there to check something out.

"I'm really sorry," I was like, "But will they hold the train for me?"

And, I explained to them that the last train of the night had been cancelled and I had already moved to this one, and there was no other way I could get home that night, and I was scheduled for work the next morning.

"We'll see," the one said, and the conductor was there, and I kind of looked to him, and he looked sympathetic, and I mentioned that I hoped that I could still get a seat facing forward, since I get carsick easily and it's hard on me if I have one of those train seats facing backward for the entire ride home.

And, the one security guy started asking me if I had cosmetics in there, and I said that yes, I did, I had some face cleanser and face cream in my toiletries, and they said that that was probably what it was, there's chemical overlap with military-grade explosives, and they showed me their machine and the readout said something about detecting military-grade explosives, and then they asked me for permission to search my bag, so I gave it to them, and they looked through it, and everything was fine, and then they asked me for my ticket and a form of identification like a driver's license, which I gave to them, specifying that the ticket printout was for the later cancelled train but the QR code for the conductor would link to the rescheduled ticket for the current train, and they wrote all of that information down with great care, and then they set me off to board the train with only five minutes until it left, and I was good.

And, the next day at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I told my coworkers the story, about how my skincare routine cosmetics made the train station police think that I was a terrorist.

"See how good my skincare routine is," I was like. "It makes me a sex bomb!"

And, they all kind of rolled their eyes at that, and I mentioned something again about me being a sex bomb, it's official, they even have a test for that, and the police test said that I'm dangerous, I'm a sex bomb, that's how good my new skincare routine is.

On buckwheat.

Last month at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I asked the (wife) owner with the tired face if I could buy like 6-8 small mushrooms off them for a one-time recipe that I was making -- I just don't cook with mushrooms, I said, and she said yes, I could buy them for two dollars, as she also said that if I ever bought a lot at the supermarket I could use the leftovers to make an omelette, at which I made a face, since that recipe is just unappealing to me, though I do eat mushrooms in things like pizzas that I don't cook at home -- and, anyways, she asked me what the recipe was for, and I said buckwheat, and she didn't know what that was, so I showed her a picture on my phone and she said that it looked like "comfort food" and that buckwheat looks like a grain, and I explained that it's actually a pseudo-grain like quinoa and it only looks like a grain, but it's actually more of a seed, and then she asked me where you get it, and I said that I got mine at the local co-op grocery store.

And, at that, she paused.

Then, "Sounds healthy," she was like. "We just eat rice."

A dream from a few months ago.

A few months ago I dreamnt --

My mother is speaking of travels when she was young, and her trip to the Galapagos, and there is a large map of Central Asia into India but somehow California is where Africa is, and there's multiple small seas in it, and it turns out that she's been to Iran, and she was doing a trip and in one place the doctors wore two-cornered hats, if you can believe that, two-cornered hats, and it's only the map that is there in my mind as she says this, and some of these travels were with her brother, back then, when she was young, but not all of them, and my eyes wander to the southeast to the areas where she had not been to...

And then I wake up.

. . .

(Her brother is my dead uncle.)

Incident on a trip to the mall a few months ago...

...when I was on the bus going home:

A group of like six or seven (black) kids who are all like eight, ten, twelve years old get on the bus at once at the outskirt of the mall area where it's degenerating into randomly-placed minimalls, and suddenly the (black) bus driver is like, "Hey man, don't you try and go by," and he calls out a (younger) boy who tried to get on the bus for free, and he says something that if he needs to use the bus and doesn't have the money, that's okay, just tell him, but don't try to pull something like that and go by, and then he lets him on the bus for free, and then the kids go and sit down, but they kind of walk around the bus some too, and you can see people quietly arrange their bags so they're safe, and then a (slightly older) girl comes up and asks me if she can use my phone to call someone and I say no, and then she goes to the other side of the bus opposite me to ask the same thing of two (younger) (Asian) women and a(n older) (Asian) woman who's separate from them, and they all pretend like they don't speak (English) and just stare straight ahead with on-guard postures and pretend not to pay attention, and then I can hear from the back that the (slightly older) girl is finally on the phone somehow and she says something about letting someone know something and they'll try to be somewhere by some time, and it's like 7pm at this point and the youngest kid is honestly like eight and there's no adults in sight, and then a bit after that we're back at the main station, and the driver gives all of them free transfers, including the (younger) boy who didn't have enough money for the bus in the first place.

. . .

More restaurant tidbits...

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

1) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker really do wonder what business and tipping was like there before COVID; supposedly, the restaurant used to be pretty packed many nights of the week, but now a lot of people have shifted to take-out, and have just never returned to in-person dining like they used to.

2) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker asks me what my favorite color is, and I'm immediately like, "The color of your eyes."

And, she's like, "Whoooooooooooooaaaa," appreciatively.

3) A (recent immigrant?) (slim) (jittery) (highly black) (African?) app delivery driver without much (English) just kind of hovers weirdly when it's time to pick up his order, and he even sits for a while in the prime window area where the customers sit and not at a table in the back, and then he disappears, and then the next thing you know, a man is waiting outside of the (women's) restroom to go in -- everyone is using the (women's) restroom, since the (men's) restroom is closed for some fixture repairs -- and then another table comes in and sits but they leave right away since a man there needs to use the restroom and goes up and sees the line, and he needs to go so bad that they can't wait, so they leave and we lose three customers, and then like five minutes after that, the first man still isn't in the restroom, he's still waiting, and then suddenly the (African?) app delivery driver comes out and grabs his order and hustles out the door, and water with a mild sewage stench is just streaming out from the bathroom door in a thin sheet over the floor, and it's a fairly busy Sunday lunch shift, and the (male) restaurant owner and a (Guatemalan) kitchen worker have to come out and unclog the toilet and mop up all the sewage-water, since it seems that the (African?) app delivery driver was doing something in there, including putting paper towels down the toilet and flushing.

"What the fuck," I was like, to my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, who was working that shift with me.

And, I pointed out that we had signage about the paper towel thing, and he never asked to use the restroom like a lot of drivers do, and beyond that he took so long in the bathroom that he made us lose that one three-top and about $4 or more in tips each, and then who knows what effect that had on the other tips, to have sewage-water coming out into the center of the restaurant like that, even though we took care of it as quickly as we could and that whole thing maybe only lasted five minutes or so.

And, my coworker reported the driver to the app company, and I said she should block the driver so he never returned, but she wouldn't, she just put the like "Needs improvement" option and marked something about professionalism, which was pretty nice and speaks well of her, I think, though in this rare instance I do think we should have just blocked the guy, you don't need all that stuff like that in your restaurant.

Random restaurant happenings...

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

1) As I finish explaining things table-side one evening on a slow-ish night, a customer just turns to me and looks up at me and states out of nowhere, "You really enjoy your job here."

2) Upon return from the Christmas break when we were closed for a few days, the ornamental gourd that we've had on the front counter since before Thanksgiving has collapsed from internal rot that manifested while we were closed, and the entire ice holder up front under the soda fountain is empty since all of the ice melted away while we were closed, and I'm excited to fill it up and see how many buckets it holds, and it's either five or six, I'm not sure because I lose count as I fill it, I'm so sleepy that morning when I come in after break and am working again and am doing my opening duties again after so many days off.

A new restaurant policy, because of a notorious problem customer.

So, at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, we recently started the policy where if a pick-up order comes in after 9:30pm, we have to take payment over the phone, otherwise we can't accept the order.

Like, the kitchen closes at 9:45pm (an hour earlier on Sundays), and sometimes we're open a bit later if there's multiple late pick-ups or some late tables in the restaurant, but most times, we want to close the door right away and be out of there at like 9:45pm straight, it's just not worth it to hang around for one order or for one table, especially with multiple employees sitting there and twiddling their thumbs and just waiting all that time.

So, anyhow, there's this one (late middle-aged) (scrawny) (weird-eyed) (black) woman who pretty much always orders the same (vegan) dish, and is just a source of chaos, and no tips.

Like, I think there was something happening at some point where she got blacklisted from delivery, since she lives way the heck far away -- I think like a twenty minute drive in one direction, to a far side of town? -- but would never tip on a late last-minute delivery, or ever.

So, anyhow, that night that we worked, she called in her (vegan) order at like 9:30pm, and we reminded her that the doors close at 9:45pm and she said she knew, and she was like, "I'm on my way," and then like we often do with late customers whose take-out is ready, we called her at like 9:42pm to tell her that her food was now ready for pick-up and that doors close at 9:45pm, at which she was like, "I said I know, I'm on my way," and then she didn't show up, so like after 9:50pm, I'm like, "I'm clocking out," and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones stayed along with a few other people to stay safe in the restaurant until this customer showed up, and I asked her to note when she finally came because I was curious about that, and then, I left.

And, the next shift I worked, I asked, and it turned out to be like after 10:10pm, a full 40 minutes after she placed the order, and they couldn't even cash out the register all that time, since the order went unpaid until finally that customer showed up.

Hence, the new policy.

When we were all talking about that, too, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was just shaking her head, and she said once during the summer they had already closed up the patio and chained up the patio furniture, and this customer showed up late and wanted to dine in and she wanted to eat outside, so my coworker opened up the patio for her, and, even after doing all that, no tip.

"She is like that," my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like.

She also said that like a month or two previously, this customer had showed up during the day to pick up an order and didn't have enough money -- she was something like twenty cents short -- and so my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker told her to go back to her car and look for change there in the cushions or in the cup-holders or wherever, because she needed to pay the full amount for the order in order to get the food, and if she didn't have the full amount of money, she couldn't get the food

"Another customer, it's okay, I pay, it happens," she was like. "But not her. She is not a good customer." 

As she said that, too, she seemed a little proud of herself, that she had stood her ground and made the customer comply, this customer who so often took advantage and abused the trust of so many people who served her. It was like a mark of pride.

"Yes, I saw that," my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones said, nodding and smiling, when my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker related that story.

Another feat of environmental neuroticism.

Whenever I make sauerkraut, you're supposed to keep a few whole outer leaves to push on top of the shredded cabbage and tuck down around the outer edges, to keep it submerged during the fermentation process, since if any cabbage floats up and breaks the water and stays there, it can allow bad bacteria to thrive and bridge down into all of the underlying cabbage that is only apparently submerged and separated from the ambient air, but is not in actuality.

Only, you have to be careful that there's no dirt on those outer leaves or even like weird slightly-discolored abrasions that might harbor residual dirt, since that can introduce big amounts of bad bacteria into the cabbage at large, and it can then take root in all of it and go on to spoil the whole entire batch.

So, lately, what I've been doing is keeping any of those big outer leaves with slightly weird spots, and carving out the weird spots, and then keeping the remaining cabbage leaves to eat in salads.

I mean, I wouldn't risk it for fermentation, but there's still perfectly good leaf there, that you can use for other things and eat in different ways.

Why waste it?

Mysteries of life.

Whenever I drop off a jigsaw puzzle at the "take one, leave one" honor-system jigsaw puzzle exchange table in the foyer of the local library in the one college town that I now live in, I try to stop by there around the same time that I dropped it off on successive days, to see how long it took for my one newly-introduced jigsaw puzzle to go.

And, a few months ago, I dropped one off on a Saturday morning, and each day it wasn't going, and then on Tuesday I forgot to go back and check, and then when I went there to go check on Wednesday, it was gone.

Now, I'll never know exactly how long it took for it to go, and whether it went from Monday into Tuesday, or from Tuesday into Wednesday.

Colonoscopy!

People say that colonoscopy preparation is a bitch, but the all-liquid diet really doesn't bother me all that much, it's more the not having food or liquid for much of the day of the actual colonoscopy, more than the liquid diet itself on the day preceding it.

In fact, I rarely buy highly-processed foods or even go down those grocery store aisles, so it's something different for me to even stroll down the big grocery aisle of soda-pop, or to look at all of the types of juices that I might buy... It's all like, "'White grape mango cran-apple'? What in heavens is this?!", and I just bask in the array of consumer choices, as I look at all of the labels and I just want to try them all, each and every one of them (which, incidentally, is *exactly* the response that all those companies want you to have, when you walk down that grocery aisle and begin looking at all of those products).

It was also fun to buy the Jellos of all the types that I don't usually buy, since I usually buy off-brand sugarless Jellos that come in just four flavors (strawberry, raspberry, orange and cherry).

"Yes, let me get 'Island Pineapple'!"

The person who accompanied me to the appointment was the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living) client with (disabilities), too, since I've helped her out with a similar type of appointment that she had before, too.

And, since she has a particularly filthy sense of humor, I prepared a joke for when I first came out from under anesthesia and saw her, like I'd pretend to be super groggy, and I'd be like talking to myself and be all like, "I had this dream, that I had the most marvelous husband...", and then I'd pretend to slowly come to and be like, "Hey, [her name], what are you doing here, where am I...?", only, unfortunately, the anesthesia really did a number on me and I can't quite remember if I did that, when I first came to.

Oh well, you have to try.

Some more Luigi happenings.

During the height of the whole Luigi craze that has now died down, it first came out that he went to (Thailand) for a bit on his "trip to the East."

So, I told my one (newer) (tall) (Thai) coworker that it's her fault that he's a criminal, he likes (Asian) women, and that if she was still in (Thailand), she could have met him and saved him.

"You're in your head too much, let's go play basketball and swim," I was like, pretending to be her meeting Luigi.

(She's very athletic.)

"You could have saved him," I was like.

I also asked two (younger) (HAPA) (grad student) (STEM) people who are regular customers what they thought of Luigi, and to rate what they thought about the health insurance CEO assassination on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 was full disapproval, 5 was neutral, and 10 was full approval.

The one immediately said 7 or 8, and then the other was like, "Officially, zero," but I pressed him, and he wouldn't say, but I pressed him some more, and we went back and forth, etc., and finally he gave in and was like, "I feel bad," and then he said it was probably like a 6 -- which fact makes me think that public opinion surveys may be underestimating popular support of Luigi's targeted killing, since social desirability effects will lead at least some portion of people to say that they strongly disapprove of his actions (when actually in fact they mildly approve, or more).

A Luigi joke of several months ago...

...because one of the (presumably independent contractors) who lives nearby and does deliveries during slow periods is this (young) (African) (immigrant) guy named "Luigi," and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones had written the groupchat for the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now this short message for record-keeping, that Luigi had come by and taken X amount of money:

Like, the next time I worked, I was like, "Oh my god oh my god oh my god, Luigi was here? Why didn't you call me?!?! I thought you were my friend! If he needed money, I would have given him money, he didn't need to take it, he could even stay with me if he needs to, I would hide him!"

. . .

(At that, everyone rolled their eyes, but I was like, "I know that they say he's a criminal, but honestly, when you met him, what was he like, did he seem nice? Tell me, I want to know.")

Fleas, not bedbugs.

So, I have been realizing more and more that the bites that I was getting that began this summer probably weren't bedbugs, but were rather fleas (perhaps via a cat that the former upstairs neighbors secretly had before they moved out, the fleas being transferred via the laundry room or when I did a walk-around in their apartment just to see the space, before they moved out).

For one, the bites didn't swell like bedbug bites, and they were towards my legs, and not up towards my buttocks and back and all of the large warm muscles that bedbugs prefer.

For another, whatever it was came back after the cycle for bedbugs should have been broken -- it's usually two months for bedbugs -- and it was beyond that when whatever this was reappeared, and that would have been in the timeframe for a delayed hatch for flea eggs.

Really, it's just very annoying... I have next to no fibers in my apartment, but eggs can lay dormant for a very long time, and you just have to catch the newly hatched eggs or the adults and kill them every time right away, until over time all the eggs are hatched and everything is gone and there's nothing left to lay any new ones.

Right now my strategy is not to worry, and if I get a bite -- something that happens every six to ten weeks -- at that point I do my laundry intensively, spray down my bed and much of my apartment with rubbing alcohol, and lay out diatomaceous earth everywhere, to kill those active adults, which (it seems) usually happens right away, since no bites recur right then like if adults were around and feeding.

At some point if I keep doing that, I'll have worn them down, and they'll be gone and it all will stop.

What a pain.

Some occurrences from several months ago:

1) At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (newer) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker pulls something out of her pocket, and gives me a (round) (gold) coin from (Guatemala), as a gift for me to have. 

2) Later, at a very rare weekday lunch-shift because I just don't work those anymore, I see a(n older) (nerdy) (white) man and his (older) (Asian) wife who are regular lunch customers -- pad thai chicken and beef noodle soup, usually! -- and we haven't seen each other since right before I headed out of town to the city that I used to live in to go see a concert and that was almost a year ago, now, and we talk some, including about my changing shifts because there's new staff with different schedule demands that displaced me from what I used to work, and also about child-appropriate music and role models with pop and rock (like, they don't let their [middle school-age] daughter listen to a lot of music where the singer has highly questionable content and behavior, children are just too suggestible at that age, and I have to agree with them, that that's a good decision).

3) My shit one morning was just one of the widest shits that I simply have ever seen in my life, it was like round and curvy and also just incredibly incredibly wide, like so wide it's amazing that something like that could even come out of your asshole unhindered (perhaps this was related to all the fiber from sweet potato soup that I was eating at the time, and like maybe that gave the shit a certain amount of "give" coming out that got it out of my asshole, but it also kept it together as one piece with a rough shape and let it re-expand and sprawl out a bit, once it came out of my bowels and sat there some in the toilet?).

Computer scare:

One day out of nowhere when I was sitting at my kitchen table in my little cottage, the screen on my laptop suddenly went black, and when I did word-processing, every time that you tapped down, there was like this pause of pixels and no gentle scrolling, and it was just freaky and jenky beyond belief.

Immediately, I got frightened that my computer was breaking down, and I'd maybe lose a recent version of a doc or some recent downloads, and that I'd have to go through the whole rigamarole of buying a computer again, and besides that, Word now has (I think) this price-gouging monthly subscription model that they lock you into, you can't just get it once-and-for-all anymore like you used to, and stuff like that is just very unpleasant to deal with, in life.

Thankfully, though, I saved some files on my thumbdrive and emailed them to myself, and I also was googling on my phone, and it all seemed to *maybe* have been a temporary graphics file overload that was doing that, it probably was nothing fatal with the motherboard or the screen wiring or anything like that.

Phew.

(I think.)

Addendum.

After I had written that last blogpost, I was talking with the one (older) (townie) bartender at the local brewery, and I was saying how this winter is just beating me up, and she said that she's been hearing that from a lot of people, and then we were talking about the dryness in the air, and she said she had pulled out her humidifier and put it in her bedroom to run, and then I mentioned how I was boiling water on the stove, and how for the first time ever in my life, I was keeping a water bottle by the side of my bed, to sip when I woke up with my nose and throat all dried out, and it turns out that she's been waking up the same way and so she's been doing that same thing, too, for the very first time ever in her life, and she's lived here all these years!

Weird.

Another sign of an incredibly dry winter:

For like a week or so like 2 or 3 months ago, my lips were just incredibly dry all the time, to the point where I had to put Vaseline on them at night to make them feel tolerable, which is something that I just never have to do.

Like, what gives with the lack of humidity in my cottage or out-and-about in the world, this winter?

At one point, too, I had bit the inside of my cheek, and my lip was cracked a little bit, and it just made me feel so wrecked, for a hot second.

Another sign of aging parents:

My mom tells me on the phone that she's sending me an article about a local state archaeological dig near them that my dad thought that I might be interested in, and like a week later, an envelope from them with the cut-out newspaper article arrives.

Then, like a week after that, an envelope from them with a photocopy of that same article arrives.

. . .

(??? - maybe they copied the article and couldn't find it, and so they sent the clipping, only to find the photocopy later and then forget that they had already sent the clipping?)

My new workplace habit...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, whenever an app delivery driver comes in and stands there speaking obnoxiously loud on speakerphone, or has some video playing at excessively high volume:

I use the app's "review" option for the delivery person, punch in something like "needs improvement" with "professionalism," and then explain whatever their behavior was.

(And it turns out that my one [chubby] [Thai] coworker has been doing this for a while over different stuff, I just never had realized before, that this was something that we could do!)

They can be standing like ten feet away from dine-in customers talking so loudly at high levels -- sometimes with profanity, if they're talking in (English)! -- and it just brings down the atmosphere in the restaurant, with the customers who you expect tips from being right there for all of it.

I feel slightly bad doing that since these are pretty vulnerable people pretty far down on the economic ladder, but some of them also look slightly off or even crazy and you never know who has guns or can get violent nowadays, so you're just better to resolve this through the app reporting system, especially since you don't want that behavior in your restaurant, killing the atmosphere and bringing down the tips.

You almost wonder, too, if it's behavior like that that's keeping the app delivery drivers from getting real jobs, somewhere.

To self-justify, perhaps them getting that behavior flagged might help them, in the long-run.

Some lines at work (2 of 2): Standard line, at the beginning of dinner shift during a double.

Whenever I work a double at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, when I come back in for the evening shift and see a front-of-house coworker, my standard line is --

"Who worked lunch shift today? This place looks like shit!"

-- to their general non-response.

. . .

(But, at least I am amused.)

Some lines at work (1 of 2): Two different tables, one day.

Some lines with customers at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, from a lunch shift the other week:

1) Me, after apologizing for not checking on their table because I was busy on the phone for a while taking a lengthy take-out order where there was a problem with the credit card, too, and I had to punch it in 3 different times: "And thank you for your patience, I was caught up for while on the phone with a to-go order, not everyone was as fearless as you, to step outside when they saw the weather today!"

2) Me, after a(n older) (white) couple place their order right after they are led to their table, as they stand there and take their coats off: "And my gosh, you two are decisive, even for a decisive table! Even most decisive tables take their coats off and sit down before ordering."

. . .

(At some point in the future with some table when it makes sense and feels right, one of these days I'll have be like, "Aw, shucks," as a natural extension of my wholesome tableside personality.)

Workplace (Spanish) (2 of 2): Bystander reaction.

The other week at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (male) (Guatemalan) coworker hustled out quickly from the kitchen to deliver a rack of freshly-washed glasses and was like, "Hola, Senor!" ("Hello, Mister!"), to which I immediately replied, "Gracias, Senor!" ("Thank you, Mister!") as he was wheeling around to go back into the back into the kitchen, and I don't even think we looked at each other or thought about what we were doing or saying as we said and did that, it was all just so automatic and routine as something that we all just do, and then I noticed that this one (slim) (late 20s) (brownish-white) app delivery driver in a winter cap and coat who was sitting at a table waiting for his order to come up had turned his head and was just looking in our direction, with amusement.

And, I realized that he was probably (Mexican), and had overheard us.

"Aqui nosotros llamamos Senor, siempre," I was like ("Here we call each other 'Mister,' always"), and he just seemed vaguely amused, happy to have anything at all lively happening in his life.

So slowly have we sunk into idiosyncracy, that our behavior has now become peculiar to outsiders. And, I was the instigator.

Workplace (Spanish) (1 of 2): More variants.

During a recent trip to the city that I used to live in, it had started snowing some, so I took pictures right before getting on the train back to the college town that I now live in, and as I rode the train, you could see out the window that it was becoming snowier and snowier and snowier, to the point that it was clear that there was exponentially more snow down where I live, than in the city.

So, the next day at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was showing everyone that picture, to show how little snow there was there, comparatively, just as something to do to pass the time and be sociable, like I often do at work with whatever have you that's happening at the time.

And, at that, my one (younger) (male) (Guatemalan) coworker with the (bright) and (open) face who always seems amused by me pulled out his phone, and he showed me a picture of him and our other (male) (Guatemalan) coworker of his (same-aged) uncle standing on that very same bridge with the photo taken at almost exactly the very same angle -- "Yo prefiero el foto sin diablos," I said, to general amusement in the kitchen ('I prefer the picture without devils') -- and then we talked some, and it turns out that they had visited the city for the first time ever over Christmas, when the restaurant was closed for a few days.

And, he then proceeded to show me a series of pictures of them doing various tourist things.

So, for like the next week, I called them "Senor Turista" ("Mr. Tourist") and "el otro Senor Turista" ("the other Mr. Tourist"), to vague amusement from everyone, for a while.

Then, when that stopped being amusing, I stopped that, and instead began calling him  "Senor No Mas Turista" ("Mr. Tourist No More"), which jumpstarted the joke just a little bit for like one or two days more, kind of like those paddles that you apply to someone's chest to shoot out electricity and get their heart started again, but then it ceased being at all amusing.

So, I stopped.

Kale surprise:

Like two or three weeks ago, I was eating through my bundle of kale from the supermarket like I usually do -- I keep it on the top shelf of my fridge, and like every day or two I take out a few leaves and wash them and cut them up and add in raw onion and maybe sauerkraut and then sauerkraut juice or oil and vinegar, to eat as a salad, kale is so wonderful, it just keeps in the fridge forever and it's so firm and flavorful and full of vitamins -- but one leaf I pulled out was broken and a little mashed up towards the center of the stem, with a burr of mold growing around it, which was odd, since kale can get dehydrated and nasty if you keep it a bit too long, it happens from time to time, but that kind of mold was a new one.

So, I cut it out, cutting generously around the mold, and then put the rest of the leaf in my salad.

 But, like for the next few days, I pulled out multiple stems exactly like that, that were broken and a little mashed up towards the center of the stem, with a burr of mold growing around it, which was certainly more than I expected to find, somehow I had thought that that first stem was just a one-time thing.

As best as I can figure, somehow those stems must have been crushed before or during the bundling of the kale for sale, and that compromise of the vegetable's integrity gradually led to mold growing there, in the bundle of kale on the top shelf of my refrigerator.

Brutally dry winter.

This winter is so brutally dry, that I have to keep a pan of water lightly boiling on the stove whenever I'm home, to keep the air in my cottage manageably humidified.

Even then, for like a week or two straight, I've been waking up at night with my sinuses and throat just dried out and parched, to the point where it's so uncomfortable that I can't go back to sleep, which in turn has made me start keeping a water-bottle on the floor by my bedside, so if I wake up like that, I can immediately drink some water and try to get back to sleep right away, before I wake up too much and can't fall asleep again.

I've never honestly had to do that before, even in the present cottage where I live, during equivalently cold winters.

I wonder what gives.

A day in a college town:

1) In yet another sign of increasing local homelessness, a (scrawny) (disheveled) (middle-aged) (black) man at a bus-stop is talking loudly with another (disheveled) (black) man with a fur-lined hood drawn up around his face, and he's saying how he forgot something, and then the other says he might have left it in the restroom, at which point the first man immediately turns on his heels and starts loping towards the nearby public library. 

Then, like ten minutes later, when I'm inside the local library, a heavy smell of marijuana smoke is coming from the men's restroom (the first time that that's ever happened, whenever I've been there).

2) The double-wide egg refrigerator of the local co-op is almost entirely empty, apart from one scattered shelf of half-cartons of eggs, like maybe six or eight or ten in total, and a (younger) (fattish) (bespectacled) (bearded) (vaguely Latino) store worker and a (younger) (taller) (mildly plump) (round-faced) (white) woman with (round-framed glasses) tell me that it's not just one thing happening that's causing the egg shortage, but it's multiple things happening at once.

Like, one farm was struck with bird flu, and, another local farmer sold off all of his chickens, and went to go hike the Appalachian Trail.

Quadrupled addendum.

One of my other pet peeves when I discuss the woes and misfortunes of my professional trajectory is people who focus on the lack of positivity in my thinking.

Like, when I was recently describing how over the past 15 years I'd repeatedly encountered promising professional situations only to have the rug pulled out from under me at late stages, just multiple, multiple times, my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) responded by mildly affirming or at least not disagreeing with what I'd just said, but more importantly by saying that the narrative that you tell yourself is important.

(Uh, yes, it's the narrative that's the problem here...  Conversely when I was having that same conversation with my one [art school] colleague who wears [women's] clothes, he was just like, yep, it's a pattern, since he's known me for a long time and has seen this happen time and time again.)

The same thing happened years ago, too, with this one collegiate scholarship donor in (finance) who I kept in touch with a very little bit by email, when I broached developing systemic economic issues and how ominous they were for class mobility etc., and he more or less was like, "I'm concerned, who are you hanging out with? You need a new set of friends!"

(Yeah, I'm getting fed a bad take on the world from my set of friends -- guess I didn't notice!)

When I encounter stuff like that, I almost want to act like my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair), like he does sometimes with his socratic response.

Like, he told me that once someone in (Britain) mentioned to him that many young people were lazy, so he responded by being nice and being all like, "Hmm, that could be true!", and then he asked how many young people they knew, where they were and what they were doing, what about statistics that he read about about home ownership and income, perhaps all those people were lazy, and then, finally, well, there must be a lot of good jobs around, if all these lazy people aren't going after them.

Essentially, his strategy was to affably work with their premise and draw it out to the point of ridiculousness, and by doing that to show them up. "Really, they think an entire generation is lazy?", he was like, "What nonsense."

Quite a dick-ish move, I do think, but it must have had its own satisfactions.

Addendum addendum addendum.

One of my pet peeves is how where I'm at professionally comes up, people talk about my skills.

I recently caught up with my one (straight) friend who's into (BDSM), and he was saying, "Oh, you're so enthusiastic, you'd be such a great teacher!"\

(Yes -- now show me a job.)

Like, when I was disentangling from the collapsing eldercare sector, another friend commented that I had skills in that area as a "healer."

(Okay, that's one way of putting it -- now show me a healthy part of that sector that's worth getting involved in, now that I spent years in it to establish myself and work my way up, only to see it fall apart around me.)

Or, on a recent visit to my hometown, a librarian that I'm friendly with there was asking me what I was doing, and when I said waiting tables, she was saying something about how I should be doing something better, and she caught herself and was like, "Oh, I mean I'm sure you're a a great waiter, but you're so talented, it just seems like there's something better out there."

(Okay, fine, but don't talk hypothetically, now, instead go and actually show me.)

It's just the same shit over and over and over again, where people focus on the individual in their discussions and can't grapple with systemic economic degradation.

My one lawyer friend from (Missouri) says that people who give comments like that are trying to be helpful, but it's really just tiring.

For a while, my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) would engage people like that socratically in a kind of dick-ish way -- "Oh, interesting, so there are opportunities there? Oh wait, why did you think there are opportunities there? Oh, so you mean that anyone with that skill could get a job like that, how many people do you think have that skill, and how many jobs are there like that? Oh, so this advice on careers really isn't based on anything?" -- which really is dick-ish, but I think that was his way of dealing with that, too.

As he has said, when engaging your personal employment situation, people never make initial stray comments about the system, like, "Oh, isn't it a shame that they don't pay nurses more!"

Instead, it's all about you, and your skills, and what you could be doing.

Addendum addendum.

I would really love to know some of the salaries of the retiring generation of tenured profs at prestige universities, who research and teach the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for a number of years and have made myself into an expert in.

Though they drown it in words and it can be hard to tease out, there are very, very basic intellectual mistakes in a lot of their scholarship, where if you fairly and pithily summarize what they're doing to outsiders, it just makes them look like idiots.

And, I mean, if they're at 6 figures, you're giving them a million dollars each over the course of a decade, for that shit.

"Hashtag cartel."

Just a tremendous waste of resources...  They didn't know how to learn what they needed to learn, at that level, and over the years any nudges in that direction got deflected or dampened and they just stagnated there, in their idiocy.

. . .

(I usually don't talk like that -- "idiots," "idiocy" -- but the situation in the field that I'm in is really just tremendously egregious...  A colleague who recently gave me some advice on research project design made a side comment that it seems to him like a "backwater," which is a generous way of putting it.)

Addendum.

Part of me wishes a little that I could teach the language that I've been researching intensively now for a number of years and have made myself into a historic top-flight expert in, but as soon as you start filling in details to that daydream, it starts to fall apart...

First, teaching a class is a lot of work.

Second, how would that even work with your dayjob -- they couldn't ask people to pick up your work for an entire semester, while, conversely, does it really make sense to add that teaching into your schedule and displace research hours, all for not that much money and no guarantee that you'll teach the class again, which is the point where you have ready-made lesson plans and it becomes more time-efficient to teach and it increases your effective hourly wage?

Third, who would you even be teaching? Usurious tuition hangs over everything, and the advanced students don't know enough to appreciate you, and even if they would long-term, there's no jobs or decent chances at jobs waiting for them, so it would be cruel to encourage them in that, even if they say they're not hoping in that direction. And, it would be fun for people who just want to learn, but, I mean, if they're just doing it for fun, the undergrads can have fun getting stoned and watching Teletubbies, too.

Fourth, even if this was part of an advanced program, many of them have predatorily-priced master's degrees, which would just pervert the learning experience by compounding you into highly unethical behavior set into stone through the enrollment framework.

If there was a school where tuition was fair or it was advanced degrees for learning's sake, then fine, it might be worthwhile, but why go out of your way, otherwise?

It's like the employment system and profiteering have severely reduced the space where I would want to put myself forward as a teacher. I honestly would rather just put on an informal open class for whoever wants to come for free. I mean, I actually wouldn't do that since it would take away from my research and writing hours, I'd rather not teach at all, but, my not sharing my expertise somehow also seems like a tremendous waste, too -- it just seems somehow like it should be put into practice more, teaching-wise!

A life regret.

A refrain of mine this past year or so has been that if I had known how many academics behave, I simply never would have ever considered getting a Ph.D. and trying to enter that field of employment.

This came up again a few weeks ago, when my mother asked me if I missed not teaching at the one art school that I taught at.

My response: no, because there's no tenured positions, and it's horrible administration, and maybe that could have been something workable and decent if they unionized, but people didn't in a timely manner, and so that effectively was all over when the one department chair saw that I was an effective teacher and a good researcher and decided to go after me, to take out someone who makes him look bad.

(Incidentally, half a year ago I related that story to someone random I met who's in admin and who does STEM, and they just shrugged and were like, "It's all insecurity," and I was like, "Yes," but then I continued on and said something about him ginning up pretenses to remove my classes and seriously mess with my minimal livelihood at a time when I was already very economically insecure, which all in all is just very sick and unwell human-to-human behavior...  It's really just striking how that half of the behavior gets glossed over in professional discussions among people at that level, that's how normalized that bad behavior and abuse of power is, handwave and an "oh that's just that insecurity some people have," like that's just a prerogative of the tenured that some people can choose to employ, to seek out victims for any and all reasons, no matter how atrocious the circumstances.)

So, after summarizing (again) that situation for my mother, I said my refrain about how I never would have gotten a Ph.D., if I had known how people at that level behaved.

"Why would you know that?", she was like.

And, in a way, she's right.

You see glimpses of that behavior in all workplaces, where there's cranks and drama and you have to please people in power, so any random external encounter with that in the academy, you think it's the same, but it's not, and you just don't perceive how much more pervasive and how much more empowered that behavior is there, where it becomes something almost qualitatively different... If you're external or you're just starting out, you're not "in it" and you don't know enough and haven't done enough to be a threat, and it really doesn't become clear until you gradually ascend levels and become more alike in education and professional status with those actors, just how many of them there are that behave that way.

And, their lifetime jobs empower them to undertake anything they like so long as they provide a rationalization, and enough people just go along with those threadbare rationalizations, usually, just to please the other people with the lifetime jobs and "keep the peace," which is the exact opposite of the good-faith critical behavior that supposedly defines the profession.

(As my one art school colleague who wears [women's] clothes has said many times, "We all know that tenure's the problem, but we're not allowed to say it.")

One of the things that I can't quite figure out is why no-one fully clued me in to that world, from all the professionals there who seemed to have some level of positive feelings to me when I was starting out.

One might be a class issue -- people in academic employment tend to come from wealthier backgrounds and specifically academic backgrounds, so they probably just assume as a baseline, that everyone gets that these elites are small self-involved and often ridiculous cartels that you have to coddle and please out of all proportion to normal interaction, and that many of them are incompetent or low-functioning.

One might be a success issue -- even if people don't come from those backgrounds, the people who are in mentor-like positions to you figured it out, so they probably think that you already know it or that you can figure it out, too, so it doesn't need stating any more than it needed stating for them.

Another might be a "high on their own bullshit" issue -- there's this rhetoric of merit that adheres to people who get tenure, and probably a number of people believe that or prioritize that factor over others, not seeing how it's a very arbitrary club because their own membership in that club strokes their egos and causes them to be blind.

All this is on top of how positions have severely dwindled since the 2009 economic crisis, which puts these kind of dynamics into hyperdrive...  The more you have to go through endless cycles of postdocs and insecure positions, the more any such people out there are empowered again and again at every new workplace to weed out competition, more than ever...  In the past, maybe it was one or two people in your department that you had to tiptoe around as you sought to get tenure, now they're more and more shameless at rampaging and disposing their colleagues, especially since their jobs have become degraded and sh*ttier and it makes them feel better (like kicking the dog after a bad day at work, a colleague who studied ethics has observed).

To look at that externally, now, it's like a race to the bottom, where the fewer and fewer tenured people left are creating more and more stultifying environments, all while the rhetoric is getting amplified in the other direction, and they're more and more accomplished and better quality than ever.

Just what a perverse environment... I wish I had never gotten involved. And that's from someone whose recent research findings put them in the highest level of achievement, even if they're not really being recognized yet.

Mourning.

After the recent presidential election, the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living client) with (disabilities) observed that we were in a mourning period, and everyone was having a mourning response, lamenting all the futures that will not be, and sensing the many things that will come to pass.

I've increasingly realized that that's how I've been feeling about eldercare.

I had been discounting the likelihood that that sector would ever get fixed enough for me to return to it in the near- to medium-term, but still, a small part of me had hoped that somehow it would, and some late-stage plan of Harris's did address the wage issues that were going on, at least in part, and that could have been the start of something, maybe just maybe, where somehow something that made sense would have cropped up in a year or two or three and then I could have re-entered it in a worthwhile job that fit, maybe just maybe.

And now, it's like that door is slammed shut, and farewell to those years of my life making inroads into yet another professional future that turned out to be a mirage.

Recently, too, when I was back visiting the city that I used to live in, I stopped by the resthome where I used to work, and staffing problems have apparently begun to hit there, too...  Several people told me that the new people hired in just come and aren't that good and then leave, all very quickly, and no-one is staying.

Basically, I think it's a decently well-run place, and many older workers are there through inertia, but as those numbers have hemorrhaged, you're starting to get the wage compression thing hitting even "the good places," where people aren't just getting paid enough overall there and an entry-level job at Target is paying pretty similarly to those "professional" jobs that require pretty big time investments in certifications etc., so, you just don't have good dependable commonsense people entering the field, because why would they.

Sigh.

Just not good, and again, so many wasted years of my life, chasing something professional that crumbled right when I got there.

Local Wifi.

I'm pretty amused by the names of several local wifi routers where I live.

One is, "NSA Surveillance Van 239."

And, since it's a college town and there's a street called High Street near me, another one is, "High House."

. . .

(. . .)

Revelations about (Guatemalan) family structures.

So, like last year at the (Christmas) party, everyone at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now discovered that like all of our (young) (Guatemalan) coworkers have kids.

This year at the (Christmas) party, then, our one (newer) (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker came, and she brought this cute toddler that looks a lot like her.

"Tu hijo?" ('Your son?'), I was like.

"No," ('No'), she was like. "Hermano" ('Brother').

(Oops.)

A few weeks after that, too, I found out that two of our (newer) (male) (Guatemalan) coworkers are actually related... I had no idea!

At first, the one guy who told me this, said that the other one was his cousin.

Then, he clarified that he's actually his uncle, since he's the younger brother of his dad.

I then asked him how old he is -- twenty-four -- and then I asked him how old his uncle is -- twenty-four.

. . .

(. . .)

Response of an old (art school) colleague who does animation...

...when we were recently catching up -- we hadn't gotten together since before the pandemic! -- and I was telling him how I just phone it in at a pleasant dayjob and then I do what I want to do on my time off, with various writing projects of different types:

"So, you're like an artist?"

. . .

(Exactly. He also specified that it was specifically so I could follow up on all of these weird and strange interests of mine, and it was like, exactly. Artists tend to get me, immediately.)

Winter jogging.

I bought like $80 of gear for winter jogging -- new tight underwear to go underneath new tight mesh jogging pants, a new tight top to go underneath a new long-sleeved turtleneck that will cover my neck -- but when it's too snowy, that all goes out the window.

It's just too dangerous to go out when there's slush and packed snow on all of the sidewalks and on many streets.

At most, it's good for low temps but no snow on the ground.

A small side-effect of inflation:

You see a lot more fifty dollar bills floating around now, than you used to even two years ago.

Like, customers at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now pay with them more, and when I was making a deposit of some paychecks and tip-money at the local bank the other week, I was going to deposit both of my fifty dollar bills that I had on hand from tip money, but I decided instead to keep one with me, since I always like to pay in cash, and it's not onerous to use a fifty dollar bill now, like it used to be...

I mean, you go out to eat and get a few beers with the meal, and you're already at $30, paying with a fifty in a situation like that really isn't out-of-the-ordinary now, like it used to be.

Aging parents and awareness of possible scams.

Recently, it was quite something to see my (aging) mother in action, when she said out of the blue that she had mailed me a check for my birthday.

First, I've told her multiple times never to mail me money or checks. Twice at the house now where I live, even though I get my mail everyday, I've had envelopes opened, probably by someone looking for money or a check to cash. Plus, there's a lot of check-washing going around, where there's articles in the local paper and notices at the local bank (which even distributes special pens with ink that's hard to wash off!), and you have to go to the post office to mail checks since the big blue boxy post office mail things aren't always safe anymore, and besides all that, even, once a customer at the restaurant had check-washing happen to her, I overheard her telling her friend at a patio table...  

 And, all of this I've told my mother, and she had promised never to mail me a check, and she had also said that she would never send me more than twenty dollars, since twenty dollars doesn't matter if it gets stolen.

Second, she mailed me this check even though she knew that I was going out of town, and that it's post-holidays and a weekend is involved too. "Oh, it will get there in time," she was like. "I got confused with the day with the holidays, and I wanted you to have it by your birthday."

And, it's like she hasn't been aware of staffing cuts at the post office, or lingering holiday delays with mail, or any of that, even though her and my dad subscribe to a major newspaper, which I assume carries both articles on check-washing *and* the chronic post office woes of the past decade.

Third, she didn't realize that this would dump taking care of this on me, and I'd have to check with the postman if it would arrive (it wouldn't), and then on my neighbors to get my mail, all while I'm working right up to when I leave and I have a lot of different packing things to take care of, all of which makes it less of a sweet and thoughtful birthday gift, and more of a pain in the *ss.

It's like she was just completely out of it, on multiple, multiple levels.

Perhaps worst was one stray comment she made about check-washing, that she'd just lose the money.

Somehow it didn't compute with her, that they not only check-wash the recipient, but change the amount on the check, too!

Having seen all this now, I can see why elderly folks suddenly start becoming targeted for scams. They just can't register information like they used to, and they make repeated lapses in judgment. She's really living in a different world, where it's still cool to send a check by mail and it will get there in a few days, no problem.

Nice coworkers.

This month, my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, told me that she can no longer work weekends...

She's been dating a guy for a bit now and he's from a town that's like 40 minutes away, so she wants to spend weekends with him, and commuting back and forth for work for a weekend shift is too much.

But, she said that if I was going to be gone over a weekend and I needed someone to cover those shifts, just let her know as far in advance as possible, and she would plan to stay at her mom's in town that weekend, and work a lot then.

What a nice coworker!

It's great to have a work environment, where people are relatively normal and everyone pitches in and does the "give and take" thing, to make everything work out for everyone.

I've covered a number of shifts for her when she's needed time off, since my schedule is relatively flexible, including once on shorter notice when one of her daughters got sick and had to stay home from school.

So, it's nice to see that reciprocated.

Another sign of increasing local homelessness:

One night as I was walking home from the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now -- along major well-lit streets, as always, since I carry tips with me -- I am passing by a local church with a (modern architecture) wing where it was dug out around what was the basement story, to create sharp vinca-landscaped slopes that slope downward and have the walls there be glass that let the natural light in, and as I'm walking on the sidewalk by there, out of the darkness I hear a cough.

("Exactly what you want to hear when you're walking home at night," said someone at the local brewery, when I was telling them this story.)

Like several months after then, I've noticed that even during the day there's this (older) (bearded) (white) man with a knit hat pulled down over his ears, and he's just hanging out down there, alongside a tall round dark grey plastic garbage can on a small roller-cart, that appears to be full of (his?) stuff.

I've been varying my routes home at night, now.

My new (Spanish) greeting at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, to greet any (male) (Guatemalan) coworker:

"Hola, Senor Amigo!"

. . .

They seem to be quite amused by that, particularly the (younger) (good-natured) (Guatemalan) coworker, who whenever I'm around seems to perk up in a good-natured way that is completely evident on his face, like he's just waiting there and wondering, "What the f*ck is this guy going to say and do next."

Really, it would be like some (Spanish-speaker) coming up to me and saying in (English), "Hello, Mr. Friend!".

The restaurant seems legit with its hiring and payment practices, but still, you wonder if some of them have used stolen social security numbers to gain employment, and it's like they traveled north by foot and on train and crossed the border with coyotes and got left in the desert, and then they finally get to the area where they have friends and family and connections, and suddenly there's this (middle-aged) (white) guy with (crazy) (non-existent) (Spanish) who always insists on trying to talk to them in his (crazy) (Spanish), and he's always like, "Hello, Mr. Friend!".

That must be crazy as f*ck for them.

Northern lights.

A while ago when the northern lights were visible across much of the country, me and my coworkers at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now were discussing them, and whether and how much they'd be visible from where we live, when we got out of the restaurant that night and tried to look at the night-sky.

And, I told my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones that she should probably run home right away and throw her body over her garden-patch that she started as part of her new gardening hobby, to protect her plants from the solar radiation.

"Sure," she was like.

Though, later she also said that she couldn't throw herself on top of her garden, because of "thorn."

"Yes you could," I was like, "You just don't love your garden enough."

Later, too, I told my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker that a good place to see the northern lights might be from the miniature bluff in the lake park that's a decently short walk away from the restaurant, but as soon as I said that, I corrected myself and said not to go, because recently I've been seeing homeless people hanging out there to like charge their phones at an outlet, and also just hanging out there generally, and who knows what you'd find there if you went deep into the park alone by yourself late at night.

"Homelessness around town seems like it's getting worse again," I then was like, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones agreed with that sentiment, as well as with the recommendation not to go up to the park late at night, now, although she wouldn't have necessarily disagreed with the initial recommendation to try going up there in the past, she said.

Winter workout clothes.

Since my clothes that worked in fall weren't cutting it, I went to the local mall back in December and got a bunch of winter workout clothes, for jogging in the afternoon when the weather is in the 30s.

That was like a white turtleneck t-shirt to keep my throat warm, and tight thermal tights and a looser thermal top, and then like jogging pants, all of which I could combine with my regular socks and sneakers and sweatshirt and cap and thin gloves.

The first time I used them, I was pretty shocked how warm it kept me, all through the jog.

Rather amazing, in fact.

No wonder people buy that sh*t.

Reflections on butternut squash...

...after I bought one to start cooking with, as an experiment in autumnal soups:

1) The name "butternut" is kind of endearing.

2) Everyone says online that it's so hard to cut and peel them, and it is a little harder than normal, but it's not really all that bad, the knife went through no problem, and my standard home potato peeler worked just fine.

3) The smell when you cut it open is a bit like watermelon, and the look and texture is very much like super unripe cantaloupe.

. . .

(You can totally see the genetic relationship, of melons and squashes.)

White Lotus, Season Three.

My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker is very excited for the third season of the White Lotus, because her favorite K-pop star Lisa is going to have her first acting role in it.

She is adamant that Lisa earned it, and even though the person Lisa is dating is somehow related to the show, she said that she had to work for it and go through casting, just like everyone else, and people just don't want to believe in her talent.

After binge-watching the first two seasons, too, she said she's also interested to see what happens with the setting in (Thailand)...  The second season was set in (Italy), she said, and there were a lot of local actors and people speaking (Italian) in the background, and there was even (Italian) music used as part of the show's soundtrack, so she's wondering what equivalent stuff will happen with (Thailand).

COVID booster side effects.

When I got the COVID booster this season, I ended up having some side effects at night, again.

Like, I woke up at 4am and I was chilled to the bone, especially in my hands and feet and extremities, and I couldn't get them warm, even by placing my hands underneath my armpits or anything.

And, it wasn't like the temp had majorly dropped that night or anything; my covers should have been sufficient to keep me warm as I slept.

So, I decided to get up and put on a sweatshirt and shorts and socks to wear underneath the covers, but it took me a minute to be able to decide to finally go and do that, because for one I was groggy, and because for another I kept thinking that I would warm up, so I kept delaying getting up to do that.

Anyhow, when I finally got out of bed and went to walk to get the stuff out of my closet, my entire lower body from the waist down was just crazily intensely sore, like nothing in recent memory, like not even after jogging or a high intensity workout, my muscles were just that achy.

The next day, however, everything was gone, and I was back to normal again, apart from feeling off because of disrupted sleep.

I think I had chills last year, as well, or was that two years ago?

You still want the booster, of course; better those side effects as a consequence of gaining immunity than getting the actual sickness, especially since the sickness can bring on long COVID in some.

Still, though, it's interesting. I wonder if my body is particularly sensitive to this?

Three (younger) (female) (undergraduate-age) (South Asian-American) customers...

...who came into the one (Thai) restaurant where I work at, last year:

1) It's very very busy with an almost-full restaurant and we are running around helping tables in the order seated, and when we get to them, actually relatively quickly, they order one pad kee mao beef, which incidentally reveals them to be (Pakistani-American) or perhaps (Bangladeshi-American), but which they also insist is enough for the three of them, when I ask if perhaps they'd like another dish or two, too, for their meals.

2) Their food gets delivered, and as they're sitting there eating it and talking vivaciously and laughing and I'm still running around helping all the other tables, they energetically call me over as I'm walking by and interrupt what I'm doing, and  they tell me they'd like a second pad kee mao beef, and so I squeeze that in right then and there and go send their order to the kitchen right away.

3) Like twenty minutes later, they call me over and say they changed their minds and don't want it, and I say that that's probably no longer possible, and as I go back in the kitchen to check, there it is coming off the stove, and so I ferry it out and deliver it.

4) Out of the corner of my eye like two minutes later, I see them call over my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and say something to her, and she immediately goes and brings them takeout stuff, presumably for the second pad kee mao beef that they decided they didn't want, since that's like the only food on the table, they hadn't ordered anything else.

5) They then sit there and eat all of the 2nd pad kee mao beef, not even using the takeout containers that they had specifically called someone over for, to have that brought out to them.

. . 

(That's a lot of immediate demands and course-changes -- an urgent second order, then an attempted cancellation, then a demand for takeout boxes, and then not using the takeout boxes and deciding to continue to eat there. That's actually like 4 different demands and course-changes, many of them doubling back on what they just demanded minutes earlier, and that's also a lot of energy for a single table that's buying just 2 dishes for 3 people and doesn't even care about wasting overhead for the restaurant by demanding unnecessary takeout boxes that they don't end up using. When I pointed out the full set of interactions to my one [chubby] [Thai] coworker, she just shook her head, since she had only brought them over the takeout boxes, and wasn't fully aware of what was going on.)

A kitchen-mystery, solved...

...at my one back-alley cottage, in the (college) town that I now live in:

For a bit this summer when I'd open the door to my refrigerator, there'd be this loud THUNK sound that would like go through the wall standing right next to it, that it's tucked up against.

But, this would only happen sometimes.

Finally, I figured out what it was -- since the refrigerator door opened up to the right, right up against the wall and the window there, if I had the Venetian blind there pulled down so that the bar thing at the end of it was just even with the window sill, the outer corner of the refrigerator door as it opened would increasingly press it against the window sill until the plastic in it shifted and it popped up a bit, the resulting compression and decompression making a loud THUNK sound that reverberated through the entire wall.

So, I started making sure that whenever I pulled that Venetian blind thing down, I didn't leave the end of it at the same level as the bottom window-sill.

And, since then, it's never happened again.

Coming and goings:

1) One day in late summer, my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker came up to me, and told me that she was moving in 2 weeks to a different state, to be with family there and to work there, as a house-painter.

Afterwards, for those 2 short weeks, every time I was working with her, I would say something like, "[Her name], sabes que voy llorar tan mucho sin te" ("[Her name], you know that I am going to cry so much without you"), or, "Sin te, voy llorar cado dia" ("Without you, I'm going to cry everyday").

The last day we worked together, she gave me a hug.

2) Around town in the (college) town that I now live in, someone came up to me when I was sitting down at the local brewery and having a beer and doing some research work, and it turned out to be one of my old writing students from years ago, one of the last undergraduate cohorts if not the very last undergraduate cohort that I taught.

As it turns out, she graduated right when the pandemic hit, and was lucky to find work as a nanny for several years to ride it out, and now she's in grad school for an area where she has an in and might have a chance for upward mobility.

Interestingly, although people from her graduation year really struggled with graduating into the pandemic and finding work, she said, she was surprised that her money as a nanny wasn't really that much different from the allegedly more-professional jobs that other people she knew ended up finding (i.e., she observed the same wage compression that I've been noticing in my own life; in so many ways, I professionally pattern like or at least can identify with younger generations, because of my need to start over professionally at several points in my recent life).

Unsuccessful environmental neuroticism.

My attempts to write using the internal cartridge of a pen whose case broke, they have failed.

There was just not enough to hold onto, and you couldn't get enough pressure on the pen to make it work.

I really did try for a while to use it, even just to mark off the past day when I woke up in the morning and went to make coffee and looked at the calendar on my refrigerator.

But, it just wouldn't work.

Spanish numbers.

I kind of love how I vaguely know how higher number are formed in (Spanish), but I don't really know them.

Like twice now when I've been talking to my (Guatemalan) coworkers at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I've had to say the word for "eighty" in (Spanish), and I say something like "ochoranta," only that's not it, and they correct me (I believe to "ochenta," if I remember it, now).

I feel like I'm recapitulating ways that languages were transformed in the past, where people didn't or couldn't study and just haphazardly spoke them as best they could from their intermittent learning environments or their knowledge of their own dialect or related language, and hoped for the best.

Several times now, I've noticed that the pattern of mistake that I discover that I'm making actually corresponds to a way that I've read some language has actually transformed historically.

It's like a deep unity, of present and past.

Memories of a summer patio-table...

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

Three (highly gay) (dance performance-associated) (grad student-types) -- one (white) and two (Asian-American) -- come to dine outside and have drinks, like they have occasionally towards the end of semester at least once before, and for some reason even though they're outside and it's hotter, they decide to order the hot sake that we bring out warmed in a white ceramic bottle along with the little thimble-like cups that you can pour it into and drink it out of.

And then, later, when I'm clearing a dish, the dish-rim accidentally hits the rim of a sake cup and knocks it over and it spills its sake down through the wire-mesh table-top, and pours that sake all over the ground.

Since they had just said that they'd like a second bottle, I first apologized profusely, and then I said that I'd top that second bottle off on the high side, to compensate them for the sake that I had just spilled.

"Or, alternately, you could lick it off the pavement," I was like.

I then changed topics and asked them if they knew who Betty Ford was (they didn't), and so I explained, and then I said that I was recently at the post office to buy stamps, and they had a book of stamps featuring her, and the post-lady said that they weren't selling well, when I bought some.

I also mentioned that when I was growing up, one time a friend of my parents left out a small bowl of sealed-packet individual pad-swabs of rubbing alcohol, alongside a note stating: "Betty Ford after-dinner mints."

 "Sorry," I was like, "I was just thinking about this, because I mentioned licking alcohol off the pavement."

"No problem," the one (super-gay) (Asian-American) guy was like.

Then, he paused, and then he gleefully cried out, "Betty Ford sum-mmer!"

Memory of a summer heat-wave...

...when the A/C system of the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now wasn't working properly, causing temperatures to creep up into the higher 70s even as it was constantly straining at the maximum of its capacity, to bring them down again:

My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker has a migraine, and early in the shift I drop a plasticine egg roll tray onto the floor and it bounces around a bit from the impact, and then still later in the shift when I'm bringing in dishes into the dirty dish bin, one slides off another because I'm holding them together in my hands quite poorly, and that top dish falls onto the floor and shatters.

. . .

(We both agree that we are not ourselves, because of the heat.)

Temporary work-shifting.

So, for a span of spring into summer at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, the one (Guatemalan) guy who we started the diablo joke with disappeared for a while, since he said that he was going to go work construction, since he had a job-lead there.

Then, one weekend lunch he shows up again, looking much thinner and very very tan, and that for someone who's highly indigenous.

"Que moreno" ("What a dark one"), I'm like, when I see him. "?Donde estabas?" ("Where were you?").

"Africa" ("Africa"), he was like, with a glint in his eye and smiling very devilishly.

We then started talking some about his construction job -- he often prefers to speak in (English) with me, I suspect for practice, so we do -- and he was telling me about how he works with the (Amish) in this town like forty-five minutes away and he has to get up early in the morning and drive there to meet them for work and then they drive even further away, but it's good money and a good job, and the (Amish) are such nice people.

And, he genuinely meant that, you could tell that he was impressed, and it was such a pure and still-sustained astonishment from something that he's been thinking for a while, that you could tell that he thought highly of their religion, and it was almost like where a convert would come from.

And, he repeated again, "They are nice people."

"Wow," I was like.

"Not like you," he was like.

Back to work after New Year's...

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

My new schtick for 2025 with all of my (Guatemalan) coworkers is that I go up to them and say, "Un ano nuevo, y yo soy el mismo loco" ("A new year, and I am the same crazy person").

. . .

(They all seemed mildly amused at that.)

Addendum.

I've noticed lately that (younger) customers of all types (Asian- and Caucasian-American, South Asian from Asia) do this thing where they have separate bills, and then someone decides to pay for someone else and takes the check of that person and slips it in behind their bill and their credit card on their black plastic tray, all without telling us, as if we're carefully looking for nestled receipts when we don't expect them, especially after we've just received instructions to subdivide the bill in a different fashion.

I wonder where this goes back to -- perhaps a TV show somewhere, where they've seen someone paying for someone else's bill like that?

Like, I've never seen it from (older) customers, and it spans both (American) and (non-American) (young) customers, so it must be coming from somewhere, and the only thing that I could think of that could link those groups would be mass media.

Some recent (South Asian) customers.

Back in the fall at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, like three (South Asian from South Asia) (like very late undergrad- or very early graduate student-age) students came in, two men and one women.

And, they were odd.

Like, I was up by the table and they just seemed off, and I asked my standard question about any appetizer orders being put in right away -- something that is very rarely taken up by any (South Asian) customer, in fact they tend to dislike the question (because it rushes them, or because it takes control out of their hands?) -- and as I go to step away, the woman starts saying something quietly while still staring at the menu, and it seems like she's talking to her friends, but as I step away, all of their heads turn to look at me, and so I step back and apologize and ask if she had said something and wanted to order, and yes, she wanted some vegetarian egg rolls.

(Oops.)

Anyhow, when they go to order, the one guy wants basil rice with egg only -- something not on the menu -- and so I have to bring his attention to the roughly equivalent menu item, and again he wants egg only (? - there's basil in there, and also an array of vegetables, and plus you have an option of tofu or a larger mixed vegetable mix, so are you just asking for like rice and basil, or what?) -- and so finally I have to point him to the menu and lead him through the listed ingredients, and then his (female) friend explains that you order either tofu or the vegetable mix, and so after those interventions he places something like a recognizable order.

Then, the next guy goes, and he says something that I just can't understand, because he says something about a curry and rice, but neither is a name that is in the menu or is easily recognizable as a name that's in the menu, and it's not clear if he's actually ordering a curry, or the rice that has curry in it, or what, and when I ask him, he just keep repeating the same impenetrable phrase over and over, and it's not even clear if he's looked at the menu or is referring to anything in it. So, it takes some time to straighten that out, and it turns out that he wants to order *both* a full curry and a full fried rice, and so I gather all of their orders, and just as I've finished entering them and am about to push the one final button to send the entire order back to the kitchen, he shows up at my side by the front terminal to cancel one of his orders that he just made two minutes ago, now he just wants the curry, no fried rice, and I ask him if he's changing anything else, he says no, that's the only change, and I say that I should check with the table, and he says no, it's the only change, but I firmly say no, everyone said that the order was final two minutes ago and now there's a change, so I would like to re-confirm with everyone, and so I go back to the table, re-confirm their order with them, and then I ask if it's truly final, and I give my spiel about mistakes can happen, but to change the order after it's placed tableside can cause cascades of errors and mess up their food, etc., and they do *not* seem too happy about that, that I've questioned their behavior and the changes they're making with their order.

Also, at the end of the meal, they say it's separate checks, and I ask if it's individual checks or if there's an internal group of someone with another, and they're like no, it's individual, and so I print out their checks and bring them to them, and suddenly, someone wants to pay for someone else.

Also, they're weirdly specific about what kind of boxes they want for their takeout, above what's normal, and all the while it's like I'm on tenterhooks, and they're just glaring at me, although **they're** the ones with the abnormal behavior.

. . .

(One of them also had a to-go order for takeaway after the meal, and it was $60 worth of food across 3 people, with. all things totaled, a $3 tip. It's always a bad sign when customers are hyper-demanding or don't look at the menu before ordering or try to change their orders, that so strongly correlates with boorish behavior and ultimately a bad tip.)

Some mildly malicious machismo at work.

So, a few months ago at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, the one (older) (Guatemalan) guy who had left just shortly after I had started work there but then had recently come back, he started up this mildly maliciously machismo thing against me at work, for like a week or two.

Like, I always call everybody "Senor" ("Mister"), but he started calling me "Senora" ("Mrs.").

At first, I was like, "?Senora? No Senora," and to that he didn't say anything.

But, he kept it up, and so again I was like, "?Senora? No Senora," and then he said something about how it was to make me laugh, and it made me laugh and smile, so it served its purpose.

(Bullshit.)

So, the next time he did that, I started calling **him** "Senora," and he didn't seem to like that too much.

But, he kept it up, so then I started to be like, "Hola, Senorrrrrrrrrr...", and I would just roll my "r" forever, and keep him in suspense if I would add an "-a" at the end and call him "Senora" or not.

(Some of the other [younger] [Guatemalan] guys thought that this was hilarious, and they started rolling an extended "r" whenever they said the word "Senor" back at me, after they saw me doing that to him once.)

Finally, I thought of a good answer -- the next time that he called me "Senora," I would be like, "?!Senora...?! ?!Senora...?!? Con mi vergon?" ("Mrs. ... ?! Mrs. ... ? With my fat dick?") -- but, as it turns out, that was precisely the moment when he gave up his whole thing entirely, so I was never able to try out that response, boooooooooooooo.