An increasing homelessness problem.

Like a few months ago, I stayed up late reading the new Hunger Games prequel because it was due the next day, and I finished it like just after one-thirty a.m., and since I live like under two blocks from the local library and it was a peaceful night, I decided to walk over and slip it in their bookbox, both so it would be there when they opened up the next day so they could flip the book and get it out to the next person on the waitlist as fast as possible, and because I treasure the freedom to walk around at night like that, since that became dicier and dicier in the city that I used to live in right before I moved, though I always had enjoyed doing that.

(I mean, really, yeah, it's late, but the one local bar that stays open until 2am in the downtown area would have just been closing up then if they hadn't closed early that night, so it's not like my being out then was beyond the utmost range of typical human activity.) 

Though, right before I leave, I not only put my keys in my pocket, but also my pepper spray, since I do always carry that with me now, around here, after my various random run-ins with weird and threatening local homeless people.

And, anyways, it's very calm and peaceful, and I walk up the deserted gravel and step out of the alley where my cottage is and cut across the street towards the intersection, and then what do I see but someone with their back towards me farther up, with a heavy winter coat on like they're carrying their winter-time possession with them, heading down the sidestreet there.

And, that spooks me, because it's almost 2am, and there's *never* homeless people out there like that at that time of night, at least in that part of the college town that I live in.

(So many homeless people go to bed with the sun and rise with the sun, so they're not up at random times like that!) 

But, since they were moving away from my path of movement, I turn up the street towards the library and move on, and then a glint catches my eye like a block-and-a-half up by the hedge of the local library, and I see the shadow of a bulky man turn around with this long thin metal thing like a pole resting up on his shoulder, and he kind of roots at something there with his foot and then swivels around and moves back across the street towards the porch of a local government building there.

And, that kind of spooks me even more, and I test my pepper spray out, and I shoot a stream of it out and it hits the leaves of a tree there, that grows in front of a local church.

And, I move a few more paces, and I consider going to the local bookbox from another direction, but I decide everything is very weird and it's just not worth it, to risk being trapped by someone with a long metal pole, in an area where it's mostly parking lots and just one house right there and one house more distant than that, since no-one would necessarily hear you if you got in trouble and you had to start to scream.

So, I keep my pace the same and I kind of loop around to the other side of the street to begin going home, and what do I see but a bit up that one guy in the winter coat, walking at a diagonal to beyond the library, only, it's not as far as he should be, he either cut through a far alley and then began moseying that way, or he was walking in erratic loops, or he doubled back towards me, then turned around and went in another direction when he saw me changing my movements.

And, I turn around and walk home, and I don't look back where you can see me looking back, but I do kind of move a little diagonal a bit now and then to where I can turn my head just the slightest and see if anyone is following me -- they're not -- and then I walk up a half-block further than I normally do, to turn in and loop around and go to my cottage a different way than the way that I had come, so no-one would be able to easily track my movements and surprise me.

And, although while I'm awake at night I usually leave my front door open with the screen door closed and locked but with its sliding glass window open for air, I make sure to close the front door, that night, in case anyone was around.

For a while, I've had this living nightmare, that when I go to close my bedroom or kitchen window at night -- I keep them open to let the cool night air in -- that I'll walk up to them and find someone just standing there and staring at me.

. . . 

(I've started to change my behavior at night, now, where now I consistently don't leave my front door open and screen door locked like i used to, but instead I close and lock my front door.)

A recent dinner shift...

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

1) A (very fat) (bearded) (late 30s?) (white) man in a dirty heavy green coat and with multiple bags sits at the far end of the patio right after we open up for dinner, probably so he's just out of eyesight as he rests and smokes and drinks his plastic bottle of pink lemonade, and he keeps being there even as a few tables come inside and sit by the bit front window, and I want to go say something to him because it must be really unpleasant to be eating at a restaurant and have a homeless person sitting like six feet away from you on the other side of a glass window where you can see him.

But, my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones say don't, just let him sit and he'll leave by himself, which I pretty much agree with because he's a bigger guy and doesn't look normal, and while we're discussing this, we see someone outside walk over to him and give a dollar.

And, after a while he leaves, so I go straighten out the chair outside, and I have to pick up the empty pink lemonade bottle that he had just left out on the table as trash, without seeking to dispose of it at all.

But, it's like fifteen or twenty minutes after that, and, what do you know, he's back.

And, just as we're talking about it, one of our customers who had finished up walks outside, and we can see him walking over to him and giving him a dollar.

"Another dollar!", says my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker. "Now he will never leave!".

And, at that, I just grimace and shake my head, and am like, "And he's just sitting there doing nothing, we walk back and forth all night helping tables, and some of them give us less money than that."

Later, too, it begins raining a little, and he actually takes the chair and moves it down the sidewalk further, under the awning of a business next door....  

After that, I especially keep my eye on him -- he was so fat, I didn't think he'd actually steal the chair, especially since he was carrying so many personal belongings with him that he'd also have to carry, but, you never know --  and then, finally finally, he gets up and leaves, and so when I have time after that, I go outside to pick up the chair and put it back.

And, what do you know, but there was another empty lemonade bottle set up on a window-ledge by where he was sitting, he just left that trash out, again, and plus, I go to pick up the chair, and I see the one heavy metal leg of it is actually bent, he was so fat, to the point where I have to pick up the chair and flip it over and put my foot down on the bottom of the seat and throw my weight into bending the leg back into a more-standard chair-leg position.

"He bent the chair leg!", I tell my coworkers, going inside afterwards. "He was that fat!"

2) A (mid- to late 40s) (white) man comes in with a(n 80 year-old?) (dad-looking) (white) man with a cane who looks frail and sprawls out on the chair and seems to have a hard time keeping track of things, when they order.

And, he throws his baseball cap on an adjoining table, and although he seems infirm and perhaps even losing it a little, part of me says that you'd never see that behavior at a (non-Asian) (American) restaurant like a local diner, where someone just takes over an adjoining table...

People really do have this sense of freedom and entitlement in a(n Asian) restaurant, that they wouldn't have in other places. 

3) This (mid-50s) (professional) (Indian) mother and her (Indian-American) daughter are in -- I recognize them, because they add in onions to the pad see you -- and this time they decide to try a mock duck curry.

"What is mock duck?", the mom is like. "Tofu?"

"No," I'm like, "It's gluten."

"So it's tofu?", she's like.

"No," I'm like.' "It's vegetarian, and it's fried and crispy like tofu and it's a major part of the dish like tofu, but it's not from soybeans, it's gluten."

"So it's tofu?", she's like.

"No," I'm like, "It's not soybeans, it's gluten."

"Oh, it's gluten," she is like, surprised and thoughtfully, realizing for the first time that it's gluten.

Later, too, they need chili sauce and then they need salt, and then she calls me over about the curry.

"There is not enough sauce here," she's like, pointing at the normally-portioned curry. "There's too many vegetables, and not enough sauce, it needs this much more sauce," and she cups her hands together to where it's around the size of half of a soup-cup. "Can we have more sauce?".

"I'm very sorry, ma'am," I was like, "But they make the sauce fresh for every order of curry, and it's combined from several different ingredients and cooked together, they can't go and make more sauce now," and, like I always do when I get this request with curries or several stir-fries, I explain that we can make it with more sauce, but the cooks needs to know that ahead of time, so the next time they order curry, they can request that from the beginning, and the cooks can make more sauce then.

And, she just keeps looking at me, and is like, "Can we have more sauce?'.

So, I repeat myself apologetically, and I say that that's the normal portions in the dish in terms of sauce to vegetables, so they'll know that for the future if they ever order curry again and at that point they can ask for more sauce if that's the way that they like it, but it's made from different ingredients, and it's not a sauce that we can go back to the kitchen and get more sauce right away for them.

"Can they cook it?", she's like, and I have to say no, but I say that I can go check on the sauce ingredients, and maybe there's something that I can bring them, and so I go back and talk and I get the major portion of the curry sauce, but it's not mixed with the coconut milk and cooked all together or anything like that, and I bring it out to them, and I explain what it is.

"But this won't taste the same," she's like, and I say that that's what's possible now, and in the future, if they want more sauce, they can order that way from the beginning.

(This does come up with customers occasionally, and people always understand... Like, I remember one [early 50s] [white] guy who was done with his stirfry but had a bit of leftovers and wanted more sauce for his mongolian beef to take home, and I had to explain that we could bring out hoisin sauce, but it wouldn't be the same since it was wasn't cooked together with the beef and its juice and some other stuff in the wok, and the guy understood, and then he said it was okay, then, he'd order more sauce next time, and that was that.)

Anyhow, I stayed away from that table the rest of the night and asked my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker to deal with them -- from the corner of my eye, I could see that they hardly touched the small bowl of the major curry sauce ingredient -- and, anyways, they ended up rounding up a $52 and change bill to $55, leaving an overall tip of like two and a half dollars.

"You just never know with tables like that," I was like, shaking my head over how they wanted a small kitchen to stop everything and cook from scratch a very small portion of sauce. "They can be the most demanding in the world, and they leave the least. You wonder if it would be different if you did what they wanted." 

And, right away, my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker broke in and firmly was like, "No. You don't encourage them."

And, I shook my head some more, and said that what they have said in the past is really true, there's a certain type of (South Asian from South Asia) customer where it's like the caste system and they treat you more like a household servant, than a regular restaurant waiter.

It really just did feel throughout this interaction that this woman was the lady of the house, commanding a kitchen and finding fault and having things remade, to swing her dick around for whoever might be watching.

Two recent coworker interactions...

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

1) When I pull my pregnancy schtick with the one (older) (Thai) cook -- it's slow and I'm paused in the long hallway to the kitchen, and he's standing back by the stoves doing nothing, so I pause and wave, and then I puff out my belly and put my hand down by my belly to wave, like my baby is waving at him -- anyhow, when I do that, he pulls out this giant knife and just gives a mock-evil smile, as he holds it out and runs his finger over the blade.

2) After I give a brief lesson in phonetics to my one (Guatemalan) coworker who is studying (English) with Duolingo -- he was asking me to repeat the tap for him (like in the American pronunciation of "latter" and "ladder"), as well as some words like "but" that have a schwa -- both, incidentally, sounds that probably don't really appear in (Spanish) or in his native indigenous language -- anyhow, after that, he out of nowhere says that don't I know, he only went through fourth grade, and he has no more schooling beyond that.

And, it's only a sentence or two, but it's like a confession of something that he's embarrassed about, and he says it sadly and gravely. 

(He is the one who after he started studying [English] and made incredibly rapid progress at first, my one [Chinese from China] coworker commented on how he's really smart.)

Two adventures in (Spanish)...

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

1) I bring in these honey-ham meatsticks to share with everyone -- I chop them up into little bits and put them on two appetizer plates, one which I leave out for the servers, and the other that I take in to the back of the house -- and then I'm trying to explain what they are to my (Guatemalan) coworkers, and I can't remember some words in (Spanish), and so I turn to my one (newer) (Ecuadorian) coworker for help, since she speaks pretty decent (English) and in fact prefers to talk to me in that language. 

"How do you say 'honey' in Spanish?", I'm like.

"Carino," she's like.

2) Father's Day fell amidst this stretch of time where I was making a lot of jokes where I'd point at my paunch and say that I was pregnant -- "Estoy embarasado," I'd be like ("I'm pregnanat") -- and for some reason on that day my one (Guatemalan) coworker chose to respond to that line with something new.

"Como esta tu bebe?", he was like, ("How is your baby doing?").

"Triste," I was like ("Sad").

"Porque?", he was like, mildly surprised ("Why?").

"Porque hoy es el dia de padres y no sabe su padre," I was like ("Because today is Father's Day and it doesn't knows its father"). 

What ruined the Hunger Games series for me:

All the time those kids spend in an arena, just days and days, and none of them ever takes a shit.

I mean, novels never talk about people shitting, probably because it's just subsumed into ordinary life, but being in an arena with no amenities of home while other children try to hunt you down really would be exceptional circumstances that demand you discuss how they handle that.

Like, you'd have to wipe your ass (or not), and you'd have to make sure your hands were clean to eat food.

And, you'd have to hide your shit or bury it so that the others wouldn't see it or smell it and then find out where you are, or so it wouldn't get into water sources.

Any novel and especially science fiction involves a certain amount of suspension of disbelief, but now I just can't take the Hunger Games seriously, anymore...  It just makes it all pure fantasy.

Also, now that I think of it, they make a thing of how some of the "tributes" (gladiatorial contestants) are as old as 18 and the novels make clear that some have already hit puberty -- they "reap" (select) the contestants from the age range of 12-18 -- so you'd think that you'd also get into rape-issues in the arena, too, where an older boy/man would violate a captive prior to dispatching them.

That whole series is just not realistic...  These realizations, especially the shitting one, have kind of made it dead to me.

Two recent dreams of clothing:

1) I am walking and the sandal on my right foot feels increasingly funny, so I pause and I look at it, and the toe-strap of the sandal is coming undone along with the top part of the sandal-sole in a big chunk that lifts up every time that I raise my foot, but, I then pause and put my foot down and carefully reposition my sandal and am careful with the way that I walk, and it doesn't pull up like that again.

2) I am sitting at a long modern-style banquet table and I suddenly notice that everyone is wearing t-shirts advertising a local circus, so I bashfully raise up from the belly my long-sleeved top to show the t-shirt underneath, and there is the logo on my own t-shirt that I have, that advertises the local circus.

A (Brazilian)'s impressions of Milwaukee.

From a weekend that he spent in Milwaukee, the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) who I know from around town was saying that he really liked the city, and that he thinks it's very "cultural."

"Why do you think it's cultural?", I was like.

"Because it has chili," he was like.

(He had gone to a local chili place in downtown Milwaukee and really enjoyed it, and then he went back the next day to try their chili spaghetti that they had, although he was surprised when it came without peanuts, since he had seen it from a distance and thought that the oyster crackers on top were peanuts. "It's really very healthy," he was like, "The noodles, the beans, the meat...", to which I had to disagree, and be like, "But there's also a lot of cheese and sour cream," to which disagreement he did not respond at all, but instead let the subject drift off.)

Anyhow, I asked him what he meant by that, and he said that when he's been to someplace like Chicago, it's a big city and he likes it, but it has a generic cosmopolitan international culture, whereas with Milwaukee, it has the chili, it has the sausage, it has the cheese, and it just has a very unique local culture that you just don't see in other places, because it's small enough to be out of the mainstream and so it can develop and keep that local culture and not have it be wiped out.

And, I told this to two college friends who live there, and they had to agree with him, and they respected his take!

I also mentioned his perspective to my one (former) (assisted living client) with (disabilities), and she said that Chicago has a unique food culture with deep dish pizza and Chicago-style hotdogs.

So, I asked him about that, and he said, yes, that's true, but it's more "industrial," it's like they're trying to sell you the tourism, but Milwaukee, it's more authentic, it's everywhere, it just feels more natural.

He also said that people were very nice there, and he was surprised about that, because he associates warm people with warm climates, and he's been to Connecticut and people there are cold, and Milwaukee has snow like Connecticut, so he thought people there would be cold, too, but no, they were some of the warmest people he's met in the U.S.