Another frustrating gift from my mother.

Back when I made a visit to my parents this summer, my mother said that she had some points accumulated on her L.L. Bean credit card and that she thought this color of polo shirt in the catalog would look good on me.

And, I said that I was fine with polo shirts and didn't need any more right now, really, and plus the color that she said she was looking at had too much yellow for my skintone and it would make me look funny.

Fast-forward several weeks after I get back, and what comes in the mail but a package from L.L. Bean, with the color of polo shirt that she was looking at, and one that was a slightly darker color.

Of course I thanked her over the phone, and I took the tags off of the slightly darker one and ironed it, but when I put it on, their large was much too large for me.

(I go between a large and a medium; sometimes larges are too large, but at other times mediums don’t fit my chest right.)

So, I ended up taking the shirts to the local church-run resale shop, to let it be someone else’s good fortune to get brand new L.L. Bean polo shirts.

I mean, what am I supposed to do, spend time figuring out return policies and then running up to the post office so I can completely return one shirt and get another back in a different size, when it’s not even my account and you’d have to spend time with logistics and ways to get refund money as the non-account holder etc.?

Just a lot of hassle, like probably somewhere around an hour of time in total, and that's a lot of time for something that I don’t even need.

First off, I just don’t get the appeal of shopping by mail. Like, you can't try things on for fit, so WTF?

Second, my mother is turning into the things that she didn’t like about her mom – a little bit worrywart and pushy, and necessitating lies from the child (“Yes, I love the shirts”).

Life is funny that way, including how I'm becoming the "her" role in the relationship with her mom (just accepting the pushiness and lying, to make the pushiness go away).

Some recent kitchen realizations:

1) Some mornings when it sounds like a quick dull rattle of my front screen door or a screen door to the basement of the front house that’s not too far away from my front door, no, it’s not that, it’s actually just the sound of my toast releasing in that one new toaster that I got several months ago.

2) Some dull red ink smears that keep appearing on my (wet) counter one day aren’t from a bright red coupon book sitting nearby, like some water had gotten on it or something and made the ink from there run, no, it’s not that, it’s actually just the price inked on the back of a watermelon that I had bought at the farmers market, and the bright red marker used to do that dissolves in the water on the counter when that section of the melon with the marker on it goes and gets in that water sitting there.

Some recent-ish work occurrences…

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

1) My new recurring schtick when I bring out a small to-go box and people see it and they say they’re not sure if all of their noodles will fit in there, I first of all say that they should try because it will probably work because it has depth, but then I add that if it doesn’t, they should just nibble around the edges, and as I say that, I lift up my hands and mimic cleaning up stray noodles that hang over the side of the to-go box, like you’re an efficient mechanical type writer racing to the end of a line.

2) A (jacked-up) (low-voiced) (macho) (goateed) (white) guy back visiting the area turns out to be my one (young) (tall) (Latino-American) coworker’s fifth grade after-school activity instructor, and the guy recognizes him and they catch up all excitedly since I guess this was a legendary school personage, and as they go to say bye, I ask him if he has any embarrassing fifth grade stories about my coworker, and the guy says no, he was a cool kid, and he actually reminded him a lot of himself at that age.

And then, right after he leaves, my one (young) (tall) (Latino-American) coworker says that he has one, that once they were sitting down in a line like they always did at that part of the day and he asked to go to the bathroom multiple times and they wouldn’t let him since that was the rule for that time of day, and he asked and asked to go to the bathroom, but they wouldn't let him, and he ended up peeing his pants.

“If someone doesn’t tell an embarrassing story about you,” I was like, “Usually people don’t go and then volunteer one of their own.”

3) During a very busy shift when my one (Guatemalan) coworker who sometimes tries to f*ck with me observes hay muchos clientes, senor (“there are a lot of customers, Sir!”), I’m like, Gracias por esta informacion importante (“thanks for that important information”), and he doesn’t know what to say at first, but my one (newer) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker overhears what I said and immediately bursts out laughing, at which he looks at me like I got him and is like, aaaaiiiiii.

Both halves of an entirely forgotten story from when I was in college…

…according to my mother:

Once when I was home on winter break, there was such a bad snowstorm that everything got severely severely messed up at the regional airport, and we spent the night in the city there, and it was still so messed up the next day, that we actually drove 4 hours to the nearest major metropolitan hub, since otherwise it probably would have been days for me to get back out, otherwise.

And, when we were driving out of that town to get to the nearest major metropolitan hub, a bald eagle swooped down in front of us, on that snow-covered arterial road.

. . .

(I don't remember any of this.) 

Some more recent-ish events at work…

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

1) When I come into work on a (Sunday) afternoon and come in through the kitchen and back hallway and clock in and then come out into the restaurant proper, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker is immediately, like “What are you doing here?!”, and when I ask her what she means, it turns out that as she was coming up the street five minutes earlier on her electronic bike, she saw me in my typical work clothes of black t-shirt and khakis going into the alley to get to the back kitchen door, and when she arrived and parked and came inside and clocked in, all that while she assumed that I was somewhere inside the restaurant already, since she had seen me on my way in when she was further away on her way in.

And, she swears that she saw the person, and it was me.

. . .

(It wasn’t.)

. . .

(A doppelganger.)

. . . 

2) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker pulls open the front door and yells at me out on the patio to get inside and help, since I’m standing there talking with a local (foreign) doctor whose country I want to apply for dual citizenship in, and after I muddled through her order in that language, she said that I shouldn’t overthink it or overprepare, and I could do an immigration interview in maybe 6 months, and as we were talking onward from there, that’s when my coworker opened up the door and yelled that to me.

. . .

(She never does that, or gets angry.)

. . . 

Some recent-ish happening at work…

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

1) There’s a small box with some computer cable cord attachment in it lying on the counter by the miso soup warmer, but it looks like a box of Pockys, and it keeps making me hungry whenever I catch sight of it out of the corner of my eye.

2) To set her up, I take a photo of my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker when she’s wearing her hoodie and it pulls back her hair and leaves her with just a circle of a face, and then I print out a picture of a Labubu doll with a happy posture, and I paste her face photo onto it and write underneath it all a combination of her first name + "Labubu."

And, I bring it in on a dinner shift when she’s not working so I can leave it there for her for when she opens up the next day, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones loves it so much that she takes it around to show everyone, and every (Thai) woman who sees it automatically thinks it’s cute, and then the next morning when my (chubby) (Thai) coworker comes in to open up, I walk in a few minutes after her, and right away she points to where I had left it and she's like ,”Who did that?! Who did that?!”, and all the while while she’s pointing to it she just has this big smile on her face, as she looks at me.

A few days later, too, she texts me and our one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker to remind us that she wants a week of vacation on certain dates this fall, and so I text back right away and say okay, and then I send a picture of the modified Labubu doll, and I say something about how Labubu is going back to the forest.

I also hear later that she put it up on her social media, and all her friends were liking it on her Instagram and responding with laugh emojis.

3) My one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker who now lives in another state and I catch up by text, and she says she’s pregnant, and when we’re texting a little back and forth, she spells “her” in (Spanish) as eya (ella).