Some happenings from a while ago…

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

1) When it’s busy and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker is overworked and talks to me sternly about something I’m doing, I’m like, “It’s okay if you’re angry with me, I understand, it’s what you need in the moment, and I am okay with that,” and when I say all of that all softly in a tone like I’m a hurt but devoted lover, she just gives me this glare.

2) “Caffeine bomb” is my new word for when people order a Thai iced coffee, like, I deliver one to a table, and I’m like, “Now, there’s a caffeine bomb right there, for you.”

3) A (shorter) (dumpy) (white) woman with (dishwater blonde) hair and a smell of liquor on her breath comes in the front door with a cardboard box full of smaller boxes of caramels and says they’re to support chemo for her daughter, could we buy some.

Refrigerator oddity…

…with an opened package of cured sausages with a resealable top that I had brought into work and then brought the rest of home and tucked into the refrigerator, eating some every now and then:

Thin white elongated crystals like miniature porcupine quills begin extending outward from the sausage-casing, and when you try to wipe them away like frost, it feels gritty, leaving the impression of nothing so much as preservatives that have somehow been extruded outwards from the meat by the cold and held in place by miniature crystalline structures.

Container reuse at work.

At work, a big old plastic Folgers coffee tub has been repurposed into a snack jar, with a piece of masking tape taped across it with the word SNACK written on it in big letters, to distinguish it from the actual tub of coffee that sits in an identical tub a bit over on that same shelf.

Inside the tub is small coffee candies and individually-wrapped gummies and whatnot, which gives the inside of the container a sugary smell, but since it also had strong dry coffee grounds sitting in it forever, the smells combine, and together they make something that smells vomit-like, and is nauseating when you first open up the tub-top and all of the fumes escape.

Oops!

After I return from my two week conference/vacation trip, I’m out in the yard by my back-alley cottage in the college town that I now live in, and I see a pair of my khaki workpants hanging off of the fence kind of behind a bush…

I had put them out there to dry a little bit more in the sun when I had done laundry a day or two before I had left, and somehow I had forgotten about them entirely, and had just left them there the entire time that I was gone.

Oops!

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame reflections…

…from my recent trip there:

1) At two points during the tour, I turn and see something in an exhibition case, and I just start automatically crying – one was Michael Jackson’s jacket from Thriller, and the other one was Stevie Nicks’ dress from the cover of Rumours. I never expected to cry during a visit to that museum, but I just did…  Both are just like these massive things that were only ever intended to be seen in image, and yet you turn and practically walk into them and there they are in front of you, as a thing.

And, I’m not even particularly a huge Michael Jackson fan, although me and neighborhood friends loved it during the late 1980s when MTV would play that video.

And, with Fleetwood Mac, I mean, I like their music, but it was just more about how big the album was and is, and suddenly there in front of you is the dress from the cover…

A (Kuwait-raised) (second-generation Indian) friend from grad school says she understands my reaction, since she had something similar happen to her recently on seeing Madonna in concert; Madonna was forbidden to her in her youth as music for bad girls, and back during that time she heard and liked the song “La Isla Bonita” without knowing what it was, and then as an adult she heard the music but only engaged with it as such, and to go to an arena and actually see Madonna was just this huge weird experience for her, to interact with the actual person behind all of these things that were just these big huge parts of her life.

Interestingly, my parents are not music people, but my parents both knew the exact jacket I was talking about, when I told them that I had seen the jacket from Thriller. I mean, that’s how big it is, for it to manage to push itself into their consciousness.

2) Oddly, Bruce Springsteen’s leather jacket from the cover of Born to Run did not elicit a strong crying reaction from me, nor did Clarence Clemon’s saxophone that he played on that album and that is also pictured in the fuller version of the photo that’s the cover for the album. And yet, I have that album and play it a decent bit, and I like it a lot, a heck of a lot more, even, than anything by Michael Jackson.

I wonder if it’s because that album was big but not quite the same mega-legendary status, or if maybe because it’s just a regular leather jacket and not some type of special clothing that you never expect to see in real life.

3) It was wonderful to see Ronnie Spector honored by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame… She was always a great one, and people like the Rolling Stones loved her and really respected her, but she went through some hard times in her life.

Years and years ago I had the chance to see her live, and when I was doing a pre-concert drink across the street, it turned out that 2 guys at the bar next to me were from Minnesota and had gotten to know her during some of her worst days, since they showed up at all her ill-attended casino shows and she started recognizing them and would come to talk with them after her sets, and through that they all got to be friends, and they kept coming to her shows even as she started getting more recognition and traction and she got back on her feet and on her way up again.

And man, she was a performer, just the way she held out notes and would feel them and would sing from her body and even make a little kick with her foot, after a small climax when she held out  "I wish I never saw the sunshine..." 

A number of years after that, too, I found out that my one (art school) colleague who wears (women’s) clothes had been at that same Ronnie Spector show with a friend of his, and we were both there in that same small venue that same night watching her, years before we ever met each other in person and became friends.

In any case, it seems that Ronnie Spector finally achieved some sort of wholeness in her life before she passed, and I’ve always been glad for her for that, that that finally happened for her.

Mormon culture:

When I’m touring a midwestern Mormon history site on my recent trip, the two (white) (female) missionaries start asking where everyone is from, and people start saying random stuff like “St. George” and whanot, and I have to whisper to someone, “Is that like Utah?”.

(It is -- -- -- people from Utah would list off the specific random towns they were from, whereas otherwise people who weren’t from Utah would be like, “I’m from Idaho” or whatever, and that would be enough.)

A Christmas thought:

I pre-load posts for sometimes weeks or months ahead of time, so one day if I die unexpectedly - like, I get hit by a car - my pre-loaded posts will keep going for a while, and then there will be some random one that will be the last one, and then this blog will fall silent.

. . .

(That is, if I don't stop it first for some reason, or if I don't get a lingering disease that will give me foresight into my deteriorating condition and the accordant ability to wrap things up, on my schedule, while I can still control things.)

Conference trip minutiae:

1) I keep my fish-oil pills in a little plastic daily medicine container, but by the end of the trip they’ve started to stick to the sides of the plastic container and you can smell the fish oil on them, even though they’re manufactured with orange essence or what have you, to keep you from tasting the fish oil when you down them.

2) I don’t need as much sleep as when I’m in the college town where I live now – seven hours or so is fine – perhaps because I’m not working at the restaurant a lot and using up all of my energy there, walking back and forth across the restaurant all day.

A visit to New Albany, Ohio…

…which is where Les Wexner lives and Jeffrey Epstein had a house, and which is like this hyper-planned Stepford Wives yuppie community where they have all sorts of uniform requirements for what you can build and where and what it must look like (i.e., sterile brick Georgian, even the CVS):

1) In the far outskirts beyond the planned parts, neither a bartender nor a gas station attendant know anything about how Les Wexner lives around there, even though he’s super famous in all of Ohio.

2) In the hyper-planned Stepford Wives yuppie downtown area, a (mid-20s) (white) woman pushing a stroller turns out to be a(n Italian) nanny there working on some sort of exchange, so I practice my (Italian) with her and am like, “Ho letto, che Jeffrey Epstein viveva qui” (“I read that Jeffrey Epstein lived here”), and she honestly had no idea that that was the case.

3) In the library in the hyper-planned Stepford Wives yuppie downtown area, the librarian on staff at the front desk says that they are forbidden from talking about any specific residents.

4) In the updated Pride flag-brandishing Starbucks in the hyper-planned Stepford Wives yuppie downtown area, the (early 20s) (white) (female) barista who had recently moved there from the Pacific Northwest had no idea about how Epstein had lived around there for a bit, and when I relate one of the more lurid trafficking allegations that was linked to the locale, she’s like, “No way! Now that’s some history.”

5) In the hyper-planned Stepford Wives yuppie downtown area, there’s a dentist’s storefront, with an oddly foreboding name outside: NEW ALBANY SMILES.

The life-approach of a(n early 30s) (Latino-American) customer...

…at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, where he’s picking up takeout and we get to talking and it turns out that it’s his 32^nd birthday that day and I tell him that I hope that he has something special planned:

He says that he’s going to chill and then go to a horror movie later that afternoon and then maybe go drink with friends later on, that’s what he usually does, anyways, since he tries to make sure that he never works on his birthday.

. . .

(Tries to make sure that he never works on his birthday – what a window into his life, and the types of jobs that he must have.)

Plans with bad vibes.

When I was getting ready to go to my conference, I was trying to figure out a good gift to bring the conference organizers and then an archivist who I was seeing later on the trip, and I decided to try maybe bringing some heirloom tomatoes and some small soft French-style cheese with a rind from a local specialty cheesemaker.

And, the weekend before my trip, I get to the farmer’s market on the early side, and although I was able to get this one type of heirloom tomato all summerlong, this kind that has a cool dark-and light-green striped appearance and has a wonderful taste and keeps well at room temperature for like a full week, they’re out that day, since someone had bought them out a few hours earlier, like super early in the morning.

So, I have to improvise and I end up getting a thing of organic cherry tomatoes from another vendor, since those will last a while unrefrigerated as well.

And, at the local specialty cheesemaker, I raise my travel plans with the (older) (white) (yuppie) woman and how I was planning to transport the cheeses for like a period of 5-10 days, and I double-check and ask if they’d keep, and she just gives me a bitchy laugh like I’m overthinking it and is like, “They’re soft round cheeses,” which in the context of the previous conversation meant that they’d be fine unrefrigerated as long as you reasonably take care of them.

And, I get a bad feeling from that interaction, but I buy them anyways since my departure date is nearing and I can’t think of anything else special that I could bring, and I try to convince myself that maybe I’m just neurotically over-reacting, and that the cheeses will be fine.

And, as it turns out, at least the 2 cheeses of the archivist had the rinds broken and were spoiled, even though I kept them in a canvas shopping bag that I tote along at my side and never left them in the car when I was traveling, and otherwise I kept them in the refrigerator at my hostel or hotels, even though they technically didn’t need to be refrigerated….

That’s like at least $22 of spoiled cheese right there, and no gift for them to enjoy to boot.

F*ck that vendor and her shitty condescending customer service, I say!

What a bitch.

Coworkers past, present, and future:

1) When I’m at the local barber shop getting a haircut, the one (tall) (young) (pimply) (Thai) cook barges in the door, since it’s evidently his first time there and he doesn’t know that you take a number written on a strip of Post-It note pasted on the door and wait outside until you’re called, if there’s someone in the shop getting their hair cut when you arrive.

And, he takes a number and goes to sit at a picnic table at the far edge of an adjacent parking lot, and he ends up getting his hair cut there next, after I’m done.

“Oh my god, soooo sexy, where did you get your haircut?”, I tell him all night later that night, when we work dinner shift together.

2) My one (tall) (skinny) (techie) (Thai) coworker tells me when he’s at the restaurant one night with a friend that he’s moving back to the area from a town like an hour away where his parents live, and that he might start picking up shifts again since he’s between jobs and doesn’t have anything else to do right now.

A sight this fall near my cottage:

Outside the window by the far end of my dining room table, a gigantic thin spider web is suspended between the eaves and the top branches of an evergreen bush, and it’s so dense that an entire stick is suspended in mid-air in the middle of it, and it twists in the wind.

Three happening this fall at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) On the back kitchen prep counter, there’s a hunk of knobby carrot-bottom set out, and someone had carved a nose and a mouth into it so that the knobs looked eyes and the whole thing looked like a pig-head.

Quien es el artista? (“Who is the artist?”), I was like, and it turned out to be my one (smiley) (Guatemalan) coworker, who gave me a smile and who seemed all happy as he said that it was him.

2) When it’s time to clean the bathrooms at the end of shift and I go to get a sterilizing wipe out of the bottom of the tub where it’s fallen, I wedge my hand in there, and when I pull it up, the edge of the plastic tab that sticks out to hold the wipe in place scrapes against my hand, and it quickly takes off a rather large strip of my flesh.

3) When I go to serve a table and I mix up the curry for one person with the curry for the other person, the one customer notices it and asks if it's his and it is so I swap them both and as I do that he's like, “No worries,” so I’m like, “Yep, thank you very much, no worries, with the curries!”, and they all get a kick out of that.

Justifed hesitation with cheap razors.

So, recently I needed some new razors, since my old ones couldn’t get me that fresh shave look when you did the last pass cutting across the beard-grain.

And, I was going to get my standard Bic ones at the local supermarket, when I noticed that they had a generic supermarket version of the same product, for a lot less money.

And, I hesitated, because part of me told myself that they just wouldn’t work as well.

And, you know what?

They didn’t.

Never again!

Conversations with two (Brazilians).

At the end of this summer, I went out for ice cream with the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) post-doc who I know from around town, as well as a newly-arrived (nerdy) (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) who’s there on an academic exchange and who he knows from his lab back home.

And, he got to telling him about a recent concert here in the States, where he was in the front row for this famous (Brazilian) drag queen pop singer Pablo Vittar, who kissed him.

“Wow,” the (nerdy) (worked-out) (STEM) (Brazilian) was like.

“And now for the rest of his life when he kisses someone, it will be like Pablo Vittar also kisses him,” I was like.

“Yes,” said the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) post-doc, approvingly, in his cat-like voice that many (Brazilians) have.

“And,” I continued, “Whenever he eats ass, it will be like…”

“Hey!”, he was like, to the laughs of his (nerdy) acquaintance.

Later, too, he was talking about how he met up with someone from Grindr who was into puppy play because he wanted to see what it was like, and it turns out that he was just like a normal guy until they started fucking, at which point the guy squatted down all spindly-like on his legs and started thrusting and whining like a dog would.

Conference shit:

1) On my drive out to my conference this fall, I suddenly really need to go to the bathroom, so I park on the main street off of a courthouse square and duck in the first coffee shop that I see, only to find out that it’s a comic book shop and that the coffee shop sign outside was from the last tenant who is no longer there.

But, the woman at the counter lets me use the bathroom, and so I go duck in it and I take this just massive shit.

“Thank you so much for that,” I’m like, afterwards. “I’m starting out on a big trip, and I’m realizing now that it was a bad idea to make myself eat the last of my barley soup before I left, and then like drink strong coffee all morning long.”

2) At the conference itself, I acutely feel that I have no more fresh professional clothes, no matter how hard I tried to assemble something out of sweaters and long-sleeve shirts that I had tucked away in boxes. 

I just don’t fit in, even beyond the social hour talk of departmental politics and hiring and people's international vacations.

Revisiting old places.

I’ve noticed this past year that I’ve started to get joy from revisiting old places.

Like, on my recent conference trip, I was visiting a city that I had visited many years ago and seen parts of with two friends who had grown up there, and I very much wanted to revisit a decently famous large sculpture park installation that I had seen with one of them.

I really took my time driving in, so I arrived after dark, and I ended up just sitting there alone in light from the street-lamps that lined the streets of an otherwise busy intersection, and I thought of all the things that had happened to me since the last time that I had been there, like all the people I had known who had since passed away, and how unpredictably different my life was, and all of the ways that the world had changed.

I also kept trying to remember what exact year I had visited that park, and it kept eluding me, no matter how hard I tried to reason it out.

I also wondered if I would ever visit there again.

A lost item, re-found.

As I sit on my couch doing a puzzle magazine, I set my pencil down at some point, only for it to fall behind the bottom seat-cushion.

Then, when I lift up the seat cushion and I don’t see it and I run my hand around to see if it fell further into crevices there at the edges where the couch-pieces are joined together, it becomes clear that it fell though this gap in the material on which the cushion rests – there was a clatter, and it fell out the bottom of the couch – but in the crevice by the bottom of the couch-back I find a hot pink pencil that I had lost forever ago, and that I had thought was eternally missing.

Three recent-ish customers (3 of 3): Control.

This late summer/early fall at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, two (white) women walk in, one (thin) one in {her late 60s) or (early 70s) and then one that’s like (early 60s), and the (thin) one is like super thin with poles for arms and no breasts and clothes that just hang off of her, and she practically shuffles across the floor, her feet never leaving or barely leaving the ground like they would in a normal person’s gait.

And, for the little itty-bitty lunch special side-salad that we give out as a perk on weekdays, she asks if we serve half-portions, which we don’t.

“Such big portions!’, she said, too, when her pad thai came out. "Are you sure this is the lunch special size?"

Towards the end of the meal, she also requested a take-out box, and although it was the biggest size, her leftover meal practically filled it.

Addendum -- -- --

(My one [art school] colleague who wears [women's] clothes has observed to me before, that working in higher ed makes you so attuned to legal liability that people in other workplaces can think you're crazy, because that's the first place that your mind goes when certain situations develop...  Other workplaces don't just have these traditions of obscene automatic litigation, he means...)

Three recent-ish customers (2 of 3): Chaos.

This late summer/early fall at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, this family of like six (South Asian from South Asia) (Pakistani?) customers come in, a married couple and two elderly parents and two kids, one toddler and like one school age daughter.

And, when they walk in for seating, the little girl is pushing the handicapped button on the door and running inside and out and hanging off the wide automatic door-bar, and as the parents decide to sit on the patio, the toddler has meanwhile wandered over to another table and somehow pulled out a chair and is pushing it across the wooden restaurant floor.

And, when they go to sit outside, the mom points to the nearby AI-generated sign and asks what this made-up gross-looking thing on the board is – they were the customers that did that – and amidst delivering water and taking the order and whatnot, at one point the little girl has pushed her metal patio chair out into the sidewalk and is standing on it as it totters – “Stop that,” the mom snaps as she notices, and then does nothing to correct or end the situation – and at yet another point the little girl’s by the big black metal curves of the bike rack that are bolted into the cement right beside the road, and she’s doing flips around on them like they’re jungle gym equipment, even as cars occasionally pass by at a decent speed.

Like, honestly, I was keeping notes in my head the entire time to put down in writing in case a child was injured, to shield the restaurant from liability.

Like, it was that egregious.

Three recent-ish customers (1 of 3): Confusion.

This late summer/early fall at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, a(n older) (curly-haired) (Jewish-looking) woman with a slight foreign accent and dark glasses and a dress of bright patterns was in with two friends, and she kept talking about the menu and (Thai) food and what dishes are good in general and what dishes are good here, etc. etc. etc.

And, after they all order their entrees, I bring over chili flakes and also some chili sauce for one of them, and she immediately takes the chili sauce and starts spooning it out onto the piece of cold rice paper-wrapped vegetarian summer roll that she has in her hand, neglecting entirely the peanut dipping sauce that comes with it.

And, their meals come, and one is upset that we served pad woon sen kee mao instead of pad woon sen, even though I had verbally confirmed the order like I always do with a table after getting everyone’s orders.

And, after they leave, the little ceramic spoon has gone missing from the pot of chili flakes on their table, and finally someone finds it, and they had not only put it in the pot of the chili-sauce, but it was covered in peanut dipping sauce, too, like they had just picked it up and indiscriminately used it with every single sauce that was present on the table, mixing peanut sauce with chili sauce and chili sauce with peanut sauce and vice-versa and whatnot, indiscriminately, not like you're supposed to do at all.

Some plans for Halloween decorations this year.

A good ways before Halloween this past year at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones was showing us all on her smartphone some pictures of a skeleton-fence that she had ordered to put around her garden, for the upcoming holiday.

And, I started joking that she was showing us these pictures, but she actually was a murderer, and she wasn't going to use that fence she was showing us at all, instead she was going to build a fence from the bones of her victims.

And, as soon as I said that, she got this glint in her eye and she started smiling devilishly.

“Like a conspiration,” she was like.

And, I started saying that everyone on her block would have bone decorations for Halloween, but no-one would know that there was a difference, because the bones in her decorations were real.

And, during this entire conversation, she kept smiling devilishly, but my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker started getting really upset.

“Why you talk like this?”, she was like. “Say something positive.”

“Okay, okay!”, I was like. “She only kills people who deserve it!”

And, at that she gave an exasperated sigh and shook her head and left, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker started saying that the key to making these bone decorations was not to kill anyone you know, because then police could easily trace the murders back to you.

Three happenings on a late summer / early fall trip to the local supermarket:

1) A takeout rice box is sitting thrown away near a local free food pantry, with long strands of human hair curling out of it, and a crumpled-up napkin sitting inside its middle.

2) The double-scoop ice cream cone from the ice cream shop on the way home looks good, but the bottom scoop turns out to be mis-scooped, as it is standard chocolate chip, and not the mint-chip that I ordered.

3) A large squirrel is dead in the street with flies around its mouth, which appears to lack teeth, but is rather just this anus-like gush of red as if its palate had extruded outward through its mouth.

A dream of late this summer:

This summer I dreamnt –

I’m sipping a cup of coffee, and it has a very distinctive sweet flavor sitting above the standard coffee taste, so as I hold my coffee mug, I look around on the nearby counter until I can find the bag, and I pull it out and flip it over and look at it, and it is Skittles-flavored coffee.

. . .

(I had bought some regionally-produced blueberry- and peach- and grog-flavored coffees on sale a long while ago, from the local supermarket, and all had sweet flavors that sat out above the standard coffee taste.)

An extremely minor life decision.

From now on, I’m only ever buying the most expensive bulk popcorn at the local co-op store.

The cheapest one is also from a local farm, and it would be nice if it was good, but it isn’t; all of the kernels are very small, and they just don’t pop.

The same goes for the “white popcorn” that’s the middle-priced of the 3 varieties that they sell…  Its kernels are distinctively white, but just so many of them don’t pop, when you stovetop heat them in oil in a pot and try to pop them all on your stove.

So, the most expensive of the 3 brands it is for me, I guess.

I guess you pay for consistency!

Addendum addendum.

After a few of us went out drinking still more, the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) post-doc who I know from around town turned to me at one point after he had boughten a round, and was like, “Buy, because they are still students.”

At the third bar of the night, this one (biracial) (American) undergraduate began asking me for my professional opinion on American political elites and human sacrifice – he kept saying very intensely that he takes it seriously, because we’re “spiritual beings” – and my one (Brazilian) friend somehow got very mad at me for talking about the logic of animal and human sacrifice, including in relation to Jesus Christ, since he said that his death wasn’t about that, it was about overcoming personal challenges, and I’m making it bloody.

At a pizza place after that, too, he was remarking that (Americans) drink too much, whereas in (Brazil) you “protect yourself” with water throughout the night, as well as by ending with food.

Addendum.

When the one (young) (flighty) (Afro-Brazilian) (female) graduate student was telling me that about Charlie Kirk, it was at this one impromptu late-night drinking party that a lot of local (Brazilians) put on, where they all showed up at a bar with a nice patio to drink, in honor of Jair Bosonaro’s 27-year prison sentence.

And, they all wore red in honor of the major political party opposite Bolsonaro, including the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) post-doc who I know from around town, who had dug out some bright red shirt with a giant stylized face of Paolo Freire (sp.?) and a big cursive (Portuguese) quote about the necessity of human dreaming.

So, I ended up buying them all a round of tequila shots, and after we all finished, I clapped my hands together authoritatively and was like, “Okay, okay, now it’s time for 26 more, we need to do 27!!!!!!”.

The one (young) (flighty) (Afro-Brazilian) (female) graduate student was also saying that a lot of enrollees in her popular music class are like kids who’ve grown up listening to hip-hop, and they decide to take it because they need to fulfill a distribution requirement.

“So, they’re like, ‘I’m intersectional, because I’m engineering, but I also have a chem minor’?”, I was like.

“Yes, pretty much!” she was like, with a small laugh.

Two reactions to the death of Charlie Kirk:

1) A (young) (flighty) (Afro-Brazilian) (female) graduate student who I know socially was saying that she only found out who Charlie Kirk was when he had made an appearance on the local campus a while ago and there were all these security checkpoints set up for him, and she had to ask what was happening.

“I was glad when I didn’t know him,” she was like.

She also teaches a popular music class and has different music cued up when the students walk in, so the very next class after his assassination, she had playing that one song “Protect Ya Neck,” and she said she saw several students covering their mouths gleefully like, “Oh no, oh my god, she didn’t do that,” and like poking each other in disbelief.

2) My one (younger) (skinny) (Latino-American) coworker at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now was saying very clearly that he’s not advocating for violence and doesn’t want anyone killed, and if he had his way, no-one would ever die of gun violence ever again, but there’s also some clip showing Charlie Kirk defending random deaths as the price of the Second Amendment.

“So, on some level, he was okay with his own death,” he was like. “There’s only so sorry you can feel for that.”

A day at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, in early fall…

…when a trip that I was taking to a conference was already in sight, including a bunch of days that I was set to take off:

1) When my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker is super busy and is abruptly handing me bundles of take-out packages to take out from the kitchen and set in the areas where they’re staged for delivery drivers or for distribution to people walking in to pick up their take-out orders, she was always like, “Here, take this,” and “Take this,” over the course of multiple interactions.

“Who will [her first name] command when I’m gone?”, I then ask aloud in front of her and several other people, when she comes up to me and does that again.

2) When towards the end of shift we reflect that there weren’t very many dine-in tables but we had a lot of calls for take-out from like the minute we opened at 5pm onwards, I’m like, “That’s because [the first name of our one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones] has a sexy voice, and everyone wanted to talk to her today.”

“Sure,” she was like.

On the nature of two coworkers:

1) When I was asking my one (tall) (skinny) (younger) (Latino-American) coworker how his college classes were going, he was telling me about all of these interesting classic social thought texts that he was reading, including Rousseau on how private property originated through social coercion.

“It’s really good stuff,” he was like. “I liked it.”

“Of course you did,” I was like. “You’re Luigi adjacent.”

2) After I worked a lunch shift with my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker group-texted us at dinner-time to remind us that we have to check for unused side-salads at the end of the lunch shift, and take them back into the kitchen.

“It’s okay now, just in the future,” she was like, mentioning that there was only one left anyhow, and she had eaten it.

“[My version of her name combined with a popular cartoon character], this is why the world loves you,” I was like.

Psychology (2 of 2): Recreated memories.

When my last phone had died, I lost all of these photos from a trip from 2 falls ago, including one where I visited this small town in the cornfields that was the historic site of a quite important fringe religious event, and I was so hyped to visit it that I actually pulled off the road to take a picture of the town’s name on a carved wooden board on the way in, since it was just so small town-y and perfect on this slight rise banking in on a curving road between these just huge cornfields, and in front of it was a sign for like an American legion fishfry, too.

When I got back a copy of the picture from a friend who I had texted it to, though, the fishfry sign wasn’t in front of the larger town sign like I had remembered it to be, but rather it was several feet away from it to the side, with a clear separation in between them.

A recreated memory, where I assembled bits of recollections into verisimilitude that was later disproven!

Psychology (1 of 2): On the human ability to see images in random patterns.

This summer when I was catching up with the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living client) with (disabilities), we started talking about miracles and stuff like where people start to see images of the Virgin Mary in various random patterns of things.

And, she said it’s a very real and interesting psychological phenomenon, but these things do also happen in nature and in life, and that once she cut open a bell-pepper and in the center was a small goddess or divinity, just this perfect little figure made up of smaller peppers trapped inside the larger pepper like they sometimes are, and they were quite clearly peppers, but it was quite clearly a woman or some type of goddess manifesting, and with an enormous vulva.

“So what did you do with it?”, I was like.

“What do you think I did?”, she was like. “I ate it.”

Another endearing text from the one (gay) (Colombian) graduate student who I know from around town…

…when I texted him towards the end of summer in (Spanish), to see if he wanted to go out for drinks that night (i.e., vamos a beber esta noche “let’s go drink tonight”):

Mujer is Tuesday!!

. . .

(. . .)

Reappearance of a large group of (younger) (Iranian) customers.

A few times at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, there’s been a huge group of (younger) (like 30s-ish) (Iranian) customers who come in, including one time when they came in in a group of 10-12 on a busy night and expected to be seated right away and were getting upset because we weren’t clearing and assembling some tables fast enough, and we had to tell them that it helps if they call ahead so we can prepare for a table that big.

(Again, people would never do that sort of thing with a [non-Asian] restaurant, but with a[n Asian] restaurant, it’s like anything goes.)

So, like a few months after that, we get a call from them, and they say that like 14 or so of them are coming in in like 20 minutes.

(Better than nothing.)

It was fine, but one (slim) (beautiful) (female) from them looked very prim and mannered and a bit emotionally fragile, and you could just tell she was very particular about everything, and before the meal had even started and anything had arrived and I was running around, she stopped me to request a napkin, and I pointed out that hers was rolled around her silverware, since it was sitting off to her left, unrolled.

And, like ten minutes later, silverware still unrolled, she requested more napkins again (?), which I then dutifully brought out, because okay.

(When we cleaned the table at the end of the night, those two napkins were still sitting there by where had she satten, unused except for a ring of water on one from where she had rested her water-glass upon it.)

Also, when you have a table that big, they can run you ragged where you bring something out and then someone needs something else and you bring that out and then someone has another request, etc., so, like I always do, I affirm each request, and then I ask loudly to the table at large, “Does anyone have anything else they need right now, while I’m making this trip?”.

And, this one (bespectacled) (bearded) (somewhat frog-faced) (Iranian) guy just kind of looked up at me, and he seemed confused by my asking that and also a little uncomfortable, like somehow it wasn’t appropriate for me to ask something like that of the larger table.

(That didn’t sit well with me, so I kind of avoided the table after that.)

Towards the end of their meal, too, someone wanted more rice, and when I asked them if they wanted a full bowl of it or a bit to finish their meal, they said full, but when I gave them the spiel that we charge for a full bowl but not a bit to finish their meal, they quickly corrected themselves, and they said that they wanted just a bit to finish their meal.

(Okay.)

Accusation, and denouement.

A few months ago I was on the phone with my mother, and she was like, “What is that beeping?”, and I told her that it was probably a problem with the phone company or it was something that she was doing on her end, but she kept insisting that it was something that I was doing.

Then, after the conversation ended and I went to hang up, I looked at the face of my smartphone, and there was a long line of 1s on the screen where you dial, probably since my cheek had been pressing against that button-image there a lot when I was resting my phone on my shoulder and talking with her.

So, she was right. 

A WhatsApp message from the one (gay) (Colombian) grad student who I know…

…about the last of the set of Colombian sudoku puzzles that I had copied for him, to see how far he could get on it (it’s a variant of sudoku invented by a couple of Colombian guys, and it’s started to make regular appearances in a puzzle magazine that I subscribe to):

its impossible I am stucked

. . .

(. . .)

Some events at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now…

…towards end of summer:

1) I turn on the water pitcher-filling slender small moveable faucet, and it’s misdirected and part of it squirts out past the sink and hits my one (chuibby) (Thai) coworker on her pants-leg.

“Why you do that?”, she’s like.

“Because I’m flirting with you,” I’m like.

2) My one (smily) (Guatemalan) coworker who always gets new styles with his haircuts comes in, and he has a fresh fade with this small neat stripe following his hairline in broad curves.

“Ay senor” (“Aiaiai, Mister”), I’m like, when I see that. “Que buena onda” (“What a sexy wave,” but also “What good vibes/fun”).

(Or at least I think that it translates to something like that.)

3) There’s a new sign board advertising a dinner special on slow nights, with pictures of various entrees beneath.

Only, I don’t pay attention too much, and then my one (Chinese from China) coworker points out that they’re all made by AI, and I look and they’re all weird, like what’s a pad thai also morphs into a portion of rice and like red soup on the side of the plate, and shit like that.

And, my one (Chinese from China) coworker keeps harping on it, saying things like he hoped that not that many customer noticed it, “Since if I saw that sign, I wouldn’t go into that restaurant,” and, “I don’t understand why he used AI, we have pictures of all of the food” (i.e. like the pictures they had used earlier in the year for the menu re-design).

(Thankfully, only table ever asks what one of the AI entrees is the entire time the sign is up, although I don’t handle it the best and I say that that picture was taken from online and it’s not something we have… I should have just said we’re out of it, although I suppose that response would have caused trouble if they had come back in the future and tried to order that dish.)

An afternoon at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now…

…in late summer: 

1) My one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker’s younger daughter comes in after school, and part of her hair is now dyed red.

“You have red hair?!”, I was like. “I didn’t know you dyed your hair!”

“Yes I do,” she was like. “Fix your memory!”

2) I have to step outside because I check my email, and this retired priest who’s a world expert on something that I’m researching received my email right away via an academic institution where he had taught a few years ago when I had emailed them the previous day, and within hours he had emailed me back with his phone number and said to call him at like 2pm the very next day, without checking with me at all about my availability.

Thankfully, although I only check my email only once a day if that, I had checked my email at like 1:50pm and I was able to take my waiter-pad and quickly sketch out the most important questions for him, and then take notes there in that as I sat out by the patio and called him and then spoke with him for like fifteen minutes.

Also thankfully, he had specified a time of day that happened to be very slow at the restaurant, where I didn’t cause any problems by dropping out of my workday like that.

Kind of loopy and very endearing, in an old religious.