...with my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, when on a slow night at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now I downloaded this one (Thai) language app that I had just learned about, and was snatching minutes here and there to do introductory lessons:
Me: "I wonder if I'll lose my job at a Thai restaurant, because I'm studying too much Thai on my phone."
Her: "Maybe!"
. . .
...like I even explained to my landlord lately, to his genuine amusement:
"Luigi Magione's dream house."
. . .
(Per reporting:
"And in a Reddit group on hiking with a single backpack, he posted about how, when he was little, his friends drew pictures of large dream homes with pools and multi-car garages. But Mangione said he sketched a simple four-room home, writing in the post that 'it was everything I needed. Nothing more, nothing less.'
"'Four identically-sized square rooms: a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen/dining room, and a bathroom/laundry room. A place to sleep, a place to be, a place to eat, and a place to.. uh.. excrete . . . They thought I was weird. I thought their mansions were full of lots of b-------.'"
To be fair, though, the rooms in my cottage aren't identical size, and the dining room and the living room blend into one another, and the laundry isn't in the cottage, but rather in the basement of the front house... Still, though, close enough.)
...at my one little cottage, in the college town that I now live in:
1) A pen drops off of my kitchen table and I hear it hit the tile and skip, but then I can't find it.
(Later, I get down on my hands and knees and look everywhere, and it turns out to have flown some feet over and gone between a radio box and a shopping bag of jigsaw puzzles that I had stashed under one end of the kitchen table, till I could break the one down and put the others away, the next time that I got to cleaning.)
2) A seasonal allergies nasal spray bottle falls off of my small and mounted-high-up-high-above-the-toilet glass medicine shelf in the bathroom and I hear it hit the tile and skip, but then I can't find it.
(Later, I get down on my hands and knees and look everywhere, and it turns out to have flown a couple of feet over and gone between the foot of this tall wooden shelf and some drywall that had been cut away to stick the shelf in, so that my bathroom would have a shelving unit.)
So, the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now celebrated its 21st anniversary pretty recently, and the owners got a couple of fancy cakes from a local bakery saying stuff like "Happy Anniversary [restaurant's name]!".
Then, they brought them out for themselves on that very night of the anniversary and blew the candles out, and they gave away all of the cake to staff.
("You should have bought the restaurant a Singha," I was like.)
And, while that was happening, one (young) (white) (female) local stopped by with her boyfriend to pick up their takeout, and it not only turned out to be her birthday, but she was exactly the same age as the restaurant, too, and so the owners gave her a piece of cake and bundled it up and sent her out with it along with her takeout order.
For a while after that, too, they had an elegant white-covered photo-insert anniversary book out on a side-table when you walked in alongside a waterglass full of multicolored Sharpies, so that customers could sign the book with congratulations and memories and whatnot, the photo insert place on the book-cover being the same collage of the restaurant's name and pictures of (Thai) food like appears on all of the menus that we have.
(I think they just cut that picture out of a spare take-out menu, and slipped it inside the plastic sleeve inside the cover.)
And, anyways, what people did with that book was fairly interesting.
Like, some people drew pictures like of a Thai iced tea, and others shared how much they liked the food, and one woman even wrote down that she found out that she was a grandmother at the restaurant, even writing in the specific date that she got that good news.
(I was there when she signed... She said that she knew her daughter-in-law was pregnant, and she was dining in with her parents when her son called her up to let her know that his wife had given birth. So, she not only found out that she was a grandma at the restaurant, but her parents found out that they were great-grandparents, too... She left that last part out of the book, though.)
Also, given that I recently found out that a cult-leader of a decently well-known cult used to live in the area within the twenty-one year period when the restaurant's been open, that got me wondering if they had ever actually stepped foot inside the restaurant and eaten there.
Like, I mean, once you know those two things, you have to wonder. That too could be a part of the restaurant's history.
So, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones, her garden bloomed late this year compared to everyone else's, maybe since it's new and the bulbs aren't operating at quite full force yet during their first full year underground.
Anyhow, when some flowers finally came up, she showed a picture of them to me, on her phone.
"But what's that?!", I was like, pointing to the bases of the flowers in the picture. "Is that fresh dirt?"
Then, I was like, "Are those your flowers, or did you steal flowers from other people, and now you're saying that they're your flowers?"
And, she did not make much of a response to that.
Like a week afterwards, too, she showed me a picture of some new sunflowers that are growing, that came from the single October-blooming sunflower that our one (tall) (young) (Latino-American) coworker gave her in late summer, as a gift.
"Those are all from the seeds from his one sunflower?", I was like.
"Yes," she was like, and she then called them "[our (tall) (young) (Latino-American) coworker's first name]'s army," later explaining when I asked that that was what he started calling them, and she had picked up that name from him.
A few months ago, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was saying how there's people who like stir fries and there's people who like curries and so on and so forth, but as for her, she's "a noodle girl," since she always wants to eat noodles, and she's always been like that, ever since she was little.
Also, this past month or so, she said she's been burned out, to the point where she wakes up in the morning and doesn't even feel like going in to work. She says that back in (Thailand), she always used to go to the sea, but she can't, here, so she needs to take a trip to a large nearby lake for a few days, to just sit out by the water and stare.
"It's refreshing," she was like.
Like a month ago, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker said that it's very clear that I'm "Gen X," since I don't use GPS when I drive, but instead just depend on looking at a map for general directions before I get going, and then I use signage and sight beyond that.
She also said that it's very clear that I'm "Gen X," since I don't know how to take good photos.
Like, she says that I hold the phone wrong, and I don't know how people should pose... Like, we were out for a day for an event in a neighboring city, and she immediately homed in to this colorful mural and wanted me to take a landscape-oriented photo from a distance, of her leaning against the wall with her leg up, and and another one of her walking down the street by the wall.
Like, totally great photos, and I just had no idea what concretely you should do to get output like that, but, she did!
I was texting my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) about what my coworker had said, and she laughed, and agreed, and she said she also saw herself in those observations, generationally.
