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.