A recent day at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, before the 4th of July:

1) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker tells me that she heard that I tipped over a water pitcher by the front host stand, and it turns out that both my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones and my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker both were telling her about it, although they had worked that very shift with me and hadn't said anything to me, then, even as I took time and went about cleaning it up.

2) I bring in some sausage and cheese and kohlrabi and put it out on plates for both the front-of-house workers and the back-of-house workers, and I also bring in samples of my white sangria that I'm making for the 4th and I let people try it with and without soda water, to get their feedback.

"The bosses are out of town, and it's like a party in here," I was like.

I also bring in a block of white cheddar cheese where the plastic had started to blow up, to discuss what I'd learned on Reddit and debate with my coworkers whether it was still possible to eat it.

(It was; the taste was just beginning to turn.)

3) The one (older) (Chinese-Thai) cook isn't working that shift, but he was in a nearby major city with a friend earlier that day, so he drops off some to-go boxes of roast duck and roast pork that he had gotten at a well-known (Chinese) restaurant there.

"Here," my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker is like, divvying up pork and duck into a box for me, along with some little plastic tubs of the sauce. "It is like my mother says, if they give you sauce, you use it.'"

A recent (homeless) person...

...in the one college town that I now live in, who came into the one (Thai) restaurant where I work the other day:

A (very fat) (white) (mid-50s) (white) woman with (dirty blonde) hair and in short shorts over her giant pads of fat, and in a t-shirt that wraps up her girth -- she was on the (short) side, but easily over 300 pounds -- and she's wheeling this giant black metal shopping cart with a few water bottles in the side-holders, and it's full of like four big reusable grocery bags neatly stacked on top of one another so it's all just loaded very tall, and she comes in, and she's like, "I'm hungry, I will trade you anything from my cart for food," and when I'm like, "Sorry, ma'am, we don't do that," she looks crest-fallen, and she asks me if I know of any restaurant nearby that will do that, and I say I don't, and she says what should she do, and I direct her to a "free little food pantry" outside a prominent church on a major city street like two blocks up, only she doesn't know where that is, but goes to go in that direction when I point out where it is to her, vaguely.

. . .

("I've never seen her before," my [one] [chubby] [Thai] coworker is like, when I say that I've never seen her before, and we both wonder where all these new [homeless] people are always coming from, since many seem new in town, and there's always more of them.)

An eventful Fourth of July...

...at the Feijoada that the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) who I know hosted at his rental:

1) When he was grilling and talking to me and this one (white) (married-to-a-Brazilian) (STEM professor) who was standing there, all of a sudden, he was like, "Oh no oh no oh no!", and he lifted the lid of the grill, and a lot of the meats were on fire, as well as some of the hamburger buns that were there toasting, too.

"I know why you did that," I was like, as he started grabbing meats off the grill and trying to extinguish the fire on all of them.

"Why?", he was like.

"Because it's an expression of your culture," I was like, and I put on a voice. "I'm black, and I'm proud, so now, all of your food is black." 

(He's [Afro-Brazilian].)

And, I mimicked little flames rising off the grill by making plucking motions with my fingertips, going pssh, pssh, pssh, with each little flame that I mimicked arising from the food.

"See, I'm black, and I'm proud."

"Why do you have to be such a bitch," he was like.

2) Later, when I was telling him and some (Brazilians) about how my cottage recently suffered a break-in attempt at like 4am and someone was trying to get into my front door and I had to call the police, one of his (Brazilian) colleagues was like, "American houses scare the shit out of me," and he said that in Brazil, you have walls and fences and bars, but here you have nothing, and he always feels so exposed to intruders.

3) Later later, the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) who I know was saying that feijoada is both the name of the pork stew and the name of the party, and that it's a famous party food in (Brazil), because (Brazil) is a poor country, and so you can always add more water to the stew if more people end up coming over.

"Or you can do that if you can afford meat, but someone burns it," I was like.

4) Later later later, after the party, we went out briefly to go hear a band play at a local bar, and when the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) who I know got home, his backdoor was unlocked, and he texted me all in a dither because he was drunk and high and he was scared by my recent break-in, and even though he might have left the door unlocked -- he wasn't sure, because he was drunk and high -- now he was afraid that someone was inside, and no-one else was home at the house that weekend, since everyone else who lived there was out of town.

"Please come and help me," he was like. "I'm scared, and you did it."

So, I came back over, and he held a broom and he gave me a grilling fork, and while he stayed by the back entrance I swept each floor in turn, the ground floor and then the basement and then the second floor.

And, while we were in the last bedroom on the second floor, I was like, "Wouldn't it be scary if a hand reached out from under the bed right now and grabbed my ankle, and I had to start stabbing it with the fork?".

Also, when we were downstairs in the kitchen and he was eating stew and then some Kit Kat ice cream directly out of a big container, and I was eating a little, too, I was like, "I wonder if you'll be somewhere in the house tonight, and someone drops off the ceiling onto you."

A recent day this summer...

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

1) A (young college-age) (long stringy-haired) (white) guy wearing nerd-glasses and a shirt with a stylized cartoon iguana comes in with a (short) (cleancut) (young college-age) (baby-faced) (Indian-American) guy who stands and lustfully clasps his belly as they wait by the host-stand to be seated, although once seated, they no longer display any couple-like behaviors.

After the (white) guy orders his cashew nut stir-fry, too, I'm like, "You know how you could have ordered that?".

"How?", he was like.

"Iguana cashew nut stir-fry!", I was like, and both looked at me confusedly, and somewhat politely.

Later, too, when I checked if their entrees were okay, I told the (white) guy that I was relieved that his dish was okay.

"Otherwise," I was like, "You would be like, 'Iguana refund!'"

And, after a very short pause, I repeated myself, "Iguana refund!".

And, that joke landed better, perhaps because of the characterization that I put into the voice.

2) By our back counter on the back of a plastic table stand with a number on it that we use for our organizational system for take-out orders, there was posted a recent receipt where a (young) (South Asian) customer had left no tip, and written something about how tipping does not exist in (Thailand).

3) Towards close, a (young) (South Asian) woman who ordered through Doordash calls and says that she was delivered the wrong thing, and that she got the correct type of fried rice, but it has chicken, not tofu, and she ordered tofu.

"Oooh, that's through a third party vendor, I'm not sure what we do," I was like, and I asked her to wait, and I got my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones.

And, they talked, and in so many words, my one (Thai) coworker told her sorry, too bad, contact Doordash for a refund.

And, after she hung up, I asked her what was up, and it turns out the delivery guy checked that it was fried rice but didn't notice if it was chicken or tofu, so it might have been an honest mistake on our part, but because the customer placed an order through a third party vendor, we don't even have their address on file, and if we sent out a delivery driver with a replacement order, they wouldn't be getting paid at all, since all of the money had been channeled through the middleman of Doordash.

"And that's not fair to him," my one (Thai) coworker said, nodding in the direction of our (Chinese from China) coworker, who was working delivery that night.

And, she specified that if the owner was here, he would write down the address and probably send out a replacement, but he's not because he's on vacation in (Thailand), so she's not sending out a replacement, since that's not fair to our delivery driver.

4) As I go to clock out, it's the last day of the month, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones has already put a stack of new timecards out by the punch machine for when everyone will need them the next day, and I comment to the (newer) (taller) (younger) (pimply-faced) (Thai) that I can't believe tomorrow is already July.

"See you next month!", he then says, cheerfully.

The dangers of dill in your refrigerator...

...as I found out after having a bundle of fresh dill sitting out on the top shelf of my refrigerator for over a week, where I kept it like that to chop it up and add it fresh to salads whenever I made one:

Somehow, the dill gets into the air, and starts invading the flavor of other foods that you have in your refrigerator.

Like, it somehow gets between the corn-kernels of a cob of corn that you've been storing in the produce drawer, and the taste maintains just the littlest bit, through boiling -

And, it gets into the outermost parts of the watermelon that are exposed to the air, when you keep a watermelon in your fridge and chop the top open and scoop cold watermelon out whenever you feel like some, until the watermelon is gone -

And, it even gets into jello a bit, when you make some sugarless raspberry jello and go to refrigerate it on the bottom shelf of your refrigerator, and the plate that you put on top forms condensation from the cooling jello and it falls onto the jello and pools a bit towards the one edge of the bowl due to a slight incline in the refrigerator-shelf, and the jello under that liquid part has a marred surface, and tastes just the slightest bit like dill...

A recent dream...

...from like over a month ago:

I am hopping onto Duolingo and it's right before the weekly leaderboard closes out, and I see that the profile of my one (hippie) friend from (Michigan) has rocketed up and occupied first place since the last time I had logged on earlier that day, and although previously she had been way down on the charts, she's now set to take #1...

And then, I wake up.

(. . .)

. . .

Trans appearances (2 of 2): "MOLESTED."

Back when I taught at the art school, one of the things that I truly treasured was the insightful intuitive leaps that students would make with material, that you just wouldn't get in any other classroom.

It was like some visual - vibe thing that people cued into that was a real part of whatever you were discussing, but they'd see that when others wouldn't, and it would then lead them to some greater valid insight from a really unique angle, that most other people just aren't capable of coming up with.

Anyhow, with that, I feel like a similar thing came up recently in a text conversation that I was having with my one (art school) colleague who wears (women's) clothes.

Basically, we were discussing how many young trans men have a distinctive visual culture with like hair and piercings and tatts and all looking all marked up and unapproachable, but they're also quite out-of-it people, and he said in so many words that yes, they do have that style, and it is like --

                             MOLESTED.

And, as soon as he said that, I knew it was true, although I wasn't sure why, but it did just seem incontrovertibly true, that these trans men were somehow reproducing the vibe of people in their late teens and early 20s who had been severely molested to the point where it just majorly f*cked with their heads.

In his original conversation when I went back, he had texted -

But they are all so proudly "not like the rest of us"

Even if it means being an ugly unidentifiable anime creature

[. . .]

I'm sure they'd frame it as all this gender nonsense

But that's not what it looks like it looks like molested people trying to be repulsive 

- and later when I told him how I couldn't stop thinking about his point he had texted -

I remember once being in the supermarket at [removed] & seeing these young people. They were then on the bus with me after (or train [. . .]) & one was prob "amab" the other "afab" -- both had weird colored hair, both had big noise canceling headphones, & they were like this "neurodivergent" "enby" cliche... & they MADE themselves look bad. Like it was very "stay away from me" coded.

I just thought at that point that it was like girls who hide their molestation shame behind fat.

- and, I mean, what more can you say.

At some point, too, I pointed out how many seem profoundly uncomfortable with themselves and don't appear to possess an integrated adult sexuality, but rather are pushing it down and channeling it in weird ways, and how sometimes on Grindr you see these incredibly fat trans men who are like eighteen or nineteen or twenty and whose profiles are like, lights are off, come use my holes.  

 And, as he responded perceptively, that too comes off as MOLESTED.