Valentine's Day at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) I bring some chocolates in for everyone, and when I bring some back to my (Guatemalan) coworkers in the kitchen, I'm like, "Chocolate para mis amores" ("Chocolate for my loves"), and if they refuse it, I'm like, "Porque? Yo no gusto?" ("Why? You don't like me?"), while with the front-of-house staff, I ask everyone first if they will be my Valentine, and only if they say yes, that they will be my Valentine, then do I let them get the chocolate.

Like, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phone said no, so I then showed her the chocolate and was like, "Okay, now you can't eat this chocolate."

And, my one (younger) (taller) (Latino-American) coworker said yes, so I then showed him the chocolate and was like, "Okay, now you can have some chocolate," and then after he takes some, I'm like, "Capitalism has so destroyed my brain, that I can only understand love as exchange, where you say that you're my Valentine, and so I give you chocolate in return."

2) This (older) (South Asian from South Asia) woman gets a glass of water without ice, and then she asks for warm water, and I tell her that we keep water at room temperature with no ice, which is what I brought her, and we can get hotter water like you make tea with, but we have no warm water for customers (what does she expect -- that we go back in the kitchen and microwave her individual water in a mug to get it slightly warm for her?), and when I tell her that, she has a surprised and somewhat nasty look on her face, but she just keeps the water that I brought without really saying anything, and then, after dinner, she requests the hot water. 

(Her and her [husband?] leave a good tip in the 15-20% range.)

3) This (young) (short) (cleancut) (extremely well-built) (dark-haired) (nerdy-cute) (vaguely Jewish) guy walks in while glued to his cell phone, and he asks if we have room for twenty-five people, and I say that we're almost full up for Valentine's Day and we have to keep a few tables open for reservations that are coming in, but we can seat 4 immediately, and so he tells the people on the phone that they'll have to go elsewhere, and he goes and takes the table with a few people who were directly behind him, two (white) girls and this other (white) (extremely thin) and (somewhat unhealthy-looking) (blond) guy.

And, I notice they're all wearing t-shirts from a college in a different state, and I ask, and it turns out that they're all in town for a gymnastics meet that just got over, so now like with all of their team they're let loose to go out afterwards but because of Valentine's Day they're having a hard time finding a restaurant that can take all of them, so they're like all splitting up, all of them in small groups at nearby restaurants, and they'll reconvene afterwards.

And, one of the girls orders an appetizer with an ambiguous name, and when I point out that that's fried, "if that matters," she's like, "Not now," and the (white) (extremely thin) and (somewhat unhealthy-looking) (blonde) guy doesn't order any food at all, saying that he has complicated allergies, though when I go to the table later, I notice that he's using his spoon to furtively eat out of a can of baked beans that he has open with its metal lid cracked up, going to hide it on his lap whenever I approach the table.

And, I double-check with a college table nearby, and yes, a campus club does allow under-21s in, so I suggest that to the table as something fun for their group to check out later that evening, since everyone could go and the club would have capacity for all of them, although there might be a cover or ticket-price, depending on the event, although for that they should just look online at the event listings, to find out how that works.

And, they're interested and take note, so I report back to the college table nearby, that their information was helpful, so I'm also like, "Yeah baby, I just got the [name of the local university's team, also used as a general label for all its students] some gymnast eye candy," to their general amusement.

A running (Spanish) gag at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now...

...with one of my (Guatemalan) coworkers whose name is "Orlando":

Just like I call everyone "Senor/Senora/Senorita + [their first name]," I initially call him Senor Orlando, but then I started calling him Senor Miami, and when he looked confused and finally corrected me to "Orlando" after my doing that several times, I was like. "Oh, no Miami, Orlando, Orlando, claro, si!", to his general amusement.

Then, the next time, I started calling him Senor Tallahassee, but he shook his head no, and was like, Senor West Palm Beach in this heavy (Spanish) accent -- I couldn't even understand that he was saying "West Palm Beach," at first -- and for a while afterwards from then on, too, he would whip out all of these relatively more-obscure names of cities and towns in Florida, like saying that he was Senor Fort Myers and the like.

. . .

(What a great sense of humor...  I also think this gag would work well in a [Spanish]-language sitcom, as like behavior of some doofy recurring [white] character.)

A recurring worry about being "scooped."

With the one ancient language that I've been studying for several years now and have made myself into quite the expert in, I continually worry that I'm going to get "scooped" on project-ideas that I have developed pretty far or am almost on the point of putting out there, but haven't been able to put out there yet.

Like, I have two big ones that are claimed and ready to go and ready to write up, but there's also around six smaller ones that I have a list of.

I've found ways to tentatively claim stuff when I'm sure enough of the overall findings, but it takes time to chase down research around the edges, and although I'm moving forward as quick as I can, threshing out that stuff and consolidating it and putting it out there in my name will still take quite some time, like easily this won't happen for all of that list of six ideas for the next year, at least.

When I first started realizing what big stuff was being missed in the field and how bad the scholarship was, my one linguist friend who works on a better-studied language family made this side-comment during one of our talks, that "at least you don't have to worry about anyone breathing down your neck."

And, that's very true, but still, I worry.

The funny part, too, is that these are all decently major steps of progress where I'm making decisive moves forward, but they're not even book-length, they're all the size of an article or a double-article, only, the content between each project doesn't always overlap all that much, so it takes just a f*ck-ton of time to pull together your thinking and the previous studies into a densely-cited piece of prose like that, for every single project.

If you're the kind of person who has just one project and milks it forever with diminishing marginal returns, you just don't have that kind of problem, though you do likely have tenure (lol -- people who "made it" can be such uninspired and lazy jokes).

Two recent restaurant events:

1) At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, the (wife) owner with the tired face says that she's watching the third season of the White Lotus, since it's set in (Thailand) and Lisa is so famous in (Thailand) and everyone always knows what she's doing, and, after a full morning of them arriving early and getting a big catering order out the door for the local university -- they're already there working so hard, when I come into the restaurant to open it up for lunch shift! -- she says that her husband always gets so stressed out with early catering orders like that, something that I've seen them do a million times before, but somehow never really noticed, probably because I really don't know him all that well and I can't really perceive his situational behavior like that.

2) On my way back from buying a new radio, I just miss the bus and it's over forty-five minutes until the next one, so I walk up the route quite a ways to enjoy the day and the weather, and I end up going into an interesting-looking (Mexican) restaurant that I've seen from the bus before, and I enter inside only for the (female) (Latina) worker there to give me a funny look, since the wind had mussed up my hair and blown it all around until it looked funny, only I didn't know that at all and so I walked inside looking like that, only finally seeing what I looked like when I went to the bathroom and saw my hair in the mirror, at which point I wet my hands and patted it down and fixed it.

And, the receipt there has two prices on the bill, one if you pay with credit card, and a lower PAY IN CASH price.

Three recent events:

1) I finally reach the end of a vitamin bottle of zinc tablets that I've been taking forever -- there's so much above the recommended daily allowance in each one, that I usually break off a bit from each tablet and only eat a third to a half of a one per day -- and, then, what do I find out, but there at the bottom of the bottle, there's a decent amount of zinc powder, from my breaking the tablets so much and putting the tablet remnants back in the bottle. So, I shake some of the dust out of the bottle and onto my palm each of the next four to five days, and I lick that zinc-dust off of my palm as my dietary supplement, instead of taking some tablet from a new bottle.

2) My mother recommends that I look up this song sung by Placido Domingo and John Denver, since "Placido Domingo really nailed it, and it's gorgeous."

3) When I see a poster for a fun kid-centered "Meet a Bug!" event at the local public library, I get a kick out of it and I text my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair), sending her a photo of the poster and saying what a cool event for kids it is, and she isn't sure if her kids would like it that much, so she asks her young son who's there with her, and when she tells him about the event, he's first like, "Like really bugs?", and then he asks if they're nice bugs, and then he says that he wouldn't want to go to an event like that, because he doesn't want to touch a bug.

Some gentle humor with a (South Asian) family.

At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I have been noticing for a while now that gentle humor really works well with tables of (South Asian from South Asia) customers, especially the older ones.

Like, there was this family of two (immigrant) parents and their (college kid) like last month, and when they went to order their entrees -- they were eating individually, not family-style -- each specified that the heat level of their entree should be three.

"Three, three, and three," I was like, after taking the order of the last one. "Three people, and three for everyone."

And, the parents seemed to get a kick out of that observation about threes, especially the dad.

At the end of the meal, too, they were saying how much they enjoyed the meal, and how good the food was.

"Thank you," I was like. "I was afraid that you would say that the food is a three, on a scale of one to ten!"

And, again, they got a kick out of that, especially the dad.

It really is just this gentle and very innocent humor, that seems to play well.

A morning surprise.

Like last month high winds were coming in, and several times when it was getting towards morning, the sound of strong winds blowing around my cottage was enough to wake me up just a little bit and notice them, before falling back to sleep, again.

Then, when I finally did wake up in the morning and was lying in bed just a little bit, the wind blew again, and I noticed that the light on my ceiling was shifting, since the curtain on the main window must have been moving with the wind.

"Wow, what strong wind!", I was thinking, thinking that the wind must have been strong enough to come in through the cracks and shift the curtain.

Then, when I got up, I realized that I had forgotten to close the window overnight, I had only shut the curtains over it, and so the window had been open all that time, letting in the wind and letting in the noise.