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.