A verboten topic of conversation with me, nowadays, often:

The weather, because it reminds me too much of climate change, even observations about how warm it is so early in the year, etc.

I just don't want to think about it.

I feel like this is my new approach to life, just burying my head in the sand.

Cults, and true crime.

Like a month ago I was checking out a new bar in town towards the end of the night, and I got a drink there at the bar and I was reading a book about cults, and there was this (late 40s) (drunk) (white) woman there with her (fat) (mid 30s) (white) (woman) friend and an (older) (fat) (black) (gay?) (male) friend, and she started talking to me about ten or fifteen minutes in, asking me what I was reading.

"A book about cults," I was like, and we then began talking about that and some recent cult-murders, and then we began talking about true crime, since she loves true crime, as do I, to a certain extent.

"Do you know about Gypsy-Rose Blanchard?", I was like.

"Yes!!!", she was like.

"I still can't believe she lost her virginity to that guy, fucking in the next room over from her mother's corpse, like twenty minutes after they stabbed her!", I was like, and just at that moment, her two friends's conversation quieted down, and they heard what I had said and they just looked over at us with these big WTF eyes.

And, the woman who I was talking with had her back to them and didn't see any of that, so she just continued talking like normal, and she said that she hadn't heard about that, but she was under the impression that she had lost her virginity before the murder, fucking in a movie-theater bathroom through an arranged meeting with that one guy who she had met online and who went on to kill her mother.

She also said that his mental age was fifteen and it would never go any higher, and it was just very, very sad. 

. . .

(Per Wikipedia, that woman was write about her virginity, by the way -- guess I misremembered that bit.)

Two more recent-ish events:

1) One night when I'm at the local brewery, there's two (early 30s-ish) guys -- one (white), one (Latin) -- talking about coding and start-ups, and the (likely neurodivergent) (white) guy asks for samples so he can decide on a beer, somehow asking for and getting a sample of like every single one of the 12+ beers they offer, just blithely doing that, to help him make his decision.

2) One afternoon I go to plug in my radio, and it doesn't work no matter how much I fiddle with it, and then I catch a bus to the nearby "pocket Target" near campus to see if I can get a new one, but they don't carry that, and then when I get home, I plug the radio in to try it again and it's suddenly working, only for it to conk out for good like three or four days later, no matter how much I fiddle with it.

A recent dinner shift at work...

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

1) My one (young) (tall) (Latino-American) coworker calls right after he leaves to go make a delivery, since some animal ran across the street right in front of him and he had to slam on the brakes and when he did that the order shifted and the tom yum gai soup container popped open and spilled all into the bottom of the plastic to-go bag and got onto the styrofoam trays of like pad see you and whatever that were also in there, and now he needs a new soup order made pronto as well as to re-bag the whole order, because he's turning around and coming right back and he wants to get this delivery out again as quickly as possible.

And, when he does get back, I'm like, "You did save that one animal, but now we need to kill another chicken."

2) When I get to work that night I see my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones and my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker, and since we all work together on Mondays I think it's a Monday even though it's a Thursday, and then when I go back into the kitchen and see my (Guatemalan) coworkers I'm like, "Feliz lunes" ("Happy Monday"), which makes them laugh and correct me and say it's Thursday, and then the rest of the night one or two of them start calling me "Senor Lunes" ("Mr. Monday").

. . .

(They kept calling me Senor Lunes on and off for several weeks beyond that, too.)

Addendum.

When I wrote my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair) about how well his niece was reading, and how she could sightread practically a whole book that I gave her, apart from the three words of "color" and "shape" and "birds," he emailed back and was like --

do you think it might have been the american spelling of the word 'colour' that threw [her first name]?

-- in what appears to be another fine example of (cerebral) (British) humor.

A child's developing literacy.

Back after the turn of the year when I visited the city that I used to live in, I visited with my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair), and I brought along a children's book as a gift for her two oldest kids like I sometimes do, when the local public library's sale pile has a cool-looking children's book that I think they would enjoy.

And, believe it or not, her six year-old daughter could read all of the book except for like three words ("color," "shape," and "birds").

(This was a very simple book with nice pictures and captions like "A house in the rain" and "A house at night," but still, impressive!)

And, when she was reading that cold for me and got to the words that she didn't know, I went and began telling her the first one, but then the dad jumped in nicely and reminded her that the rule was that she first had to try to sound out the new word as best she could, and then they would help her, and, with that trick, she got 2 of the 3 words (she was right with "color" and "shape," but she read "birds" as "buildings," somehow).

Anyways, for memory retention, after the book was over, I took her back to the pages with the words that she didn't know and asked her to read them again, and when she got to the new words and couldn't read them, again, rather than sounding them out, she looked over at the illustration page for hints, and you could see her looking and trying to remember what she had said at that page, and then she guessed.

Also a strategy!

A crossed boundary at work...

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

 When I ask my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker how the new season of White Lotus set in Thailand is going, she says that they used Lisa's new song "Born Again" in it, so I immediately start going off about that and saying why did Lisa go and steal the idea for a reincarnation pop song from Katy Perry, and she says she didn't, and I said she did, look at when the songs were released, and then I pause and make a comment like I stepped outside of the conversation, and I'm like, "Isn't this what fans of different popstars are supposed to do? Aren't we supposed to fight? I thought K-Pop fans loved to fight!" -- and, she just looks at me, and she says that yes, many do, but not her, and please stop, because she knows that I'm joking, but people really love to hate Lisa, and it makes her sad to think about it, even when someone is joking about the hating.

. . .